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Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is a part of market research in which inclination, motivation and purchase behavior of the targeted customers are identified. Consumer research helps businesses or organizations understand customer psychology and create detailed purchasing behavior profiles.

It uses research techniques to provide systematic information about what customers need. Using this information brands can make changes in their products and services, making them more customer-centric thereby increasing customer satisfaction. This will in turn help to boost business.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

An organization that has an in-depth understanding about the customer decision-making process, is most likely to design a product, put a certain price tag to it, establish distribution centers and promote a product based on consumer research insights such that it produces increased consumer interest and purchases.

For example, A consumer electronics company wants to understand, thought process of a consumer when purchasing an electronic device, which can help a company to launch new products, manage the supply of the stock, etc. Carrying out a Consumer electronics survey can be useful to understand the market demand, understand the flaws in their product and also find out research problems in the various processes that influence the purchase of their goods. A consumer electronics survey can be helpful to gather information about the shopping experiences of consumers when purchasing electronics. which can enable a company to make well-informed and wise decisions regarding their products and services.

LEARN ABOUT: Test Market Demand

Consumer Research Objectives

When a brand is developing a new product, consumer research is conducted to understand what consumers want or need in a product, what attributes are missing and what are they looking for? An efficient survey software really makes it easy for organizations to conduct efficient research.

Consumer research is conducted to improve brand equity. A brand needs to know what consumers think when buying a product or service offered by a brand. Every good business idea needs efficient consumer research for it to be successful. Consumer insights are essential to determine brand positioning among consumers.

Consumer research is conducted to boost sales. The objective of consumer research is to look into various territories of consumer psychology and understand their buying pattern, what kind of packaging they like and other similar attributes that help brands to sell their products and services better.

LEARN ABOUT: Brand health

Consumer Research Model

According to a study conducted, till a decade ago, researchers thought differently about the consumer psychology, where little or no emphasis was put on emotions, mood or the situation that could influence a customer’s buying decision.

Many believed marketing was applied economics. Consumers always took decisions based on statistics and math and evaluated goods and services rationally and then selected items from those brands that gave them the highest customer satisfaction at the lowest cost.

However, this is no longer the situation. Consumers are very well aware of brands and their competitors. A loyal customer is the one who would not only return to repeatedly purchase from a brand but also, recommend his/her family and friends to buy from the same brand even if the prices are slightly higher but provides an exceptional customer service for products purchased or services offered.

Here is where the Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps brands identify brand loyalty and customer satisfaction with their consumers. Net Promoter Score consumer survey uses a single question that is sent to customers to identify their brand loyalty and level of customer satisfaction. Response to this question is measured on a scale between 0-10 and based on this consumers can be identified as:

Detractors: Who have given a score between 0-6.

Passives: Who have given a score between 7-8.

Promoters: Who have given a score between 9-10.

Consumer market research is based on two types of research method:

1. Qualitative Consumer Research

Qualitative research is descriptive in nature, It’s a method that uses open-ended questions , to gain meaningful insights from respondents and heavily relies on the following market research methods:

Focus Groups: Focus groups as the name suggests is a small group of highly validated subject experts who come together to analyze a product or service. Focus group comprises of 6-10 respondents. A moderator is assigned to the focus group, who helps facilitate discussions among the members to draw meaningful insights

One-to-one Interview: This is a more conversational method, where the researcher asks open-ended questions to collect data from the respondents. This method heavily depends on the expertise of the researcher. How much the researcher is able to probe with relevant questions to get maximum insights. This is a time-consuming method and can take more than one attempt to gain the desired insights.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

Content/ Text Analysis: Text analysis is a qualitative research method where researchers analyze social life by decoding words and images from the documents available. Researchers analyze the context in which the images are used and draw conclusions from them. Social media is an example of text analysis. In the last decade or so, inferences are drawn based on consumer behavior on social media.

Learn More: How to conduct Qualitative Research

2.Quantitative Consumer Research

In the age of technology and information, meaningful data is more precious than platinum. Billion dollar companies have risen and fallen on how well they have been able to collect and analyze data, to draw validated insights.

Quantitative research is all about numbers and statistics. An evolved consumer who purchases regularly can vouch for how customer-centric businesses have become today. It’s all about customer satisfaction , to gain loyal customers. With just one questions companies are able to collect data, that has the power to make or break a company. Net Promoter Score question , “On a scale from 0-10 how likely are you to recommend our brand to your family or friends?”

How organic word-of-mouth is influencing consumer behavior and how they need to spend less on advertising and invest their time and resources to make sure they provide exceptional customer service.

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Targeting

Online surveys , questionnaires , and polls are the preferred data collection tools. Data that is obtained from consumers is then statistically, mathematically and numerically evaluated to understand consumer preference.

Learn more: How to carry out Quantitative Research

Consumer Research Process

The process of consumer research started as an extension of the process of market research . As the findings of market research is used to improve the decision-making capacity of an organization or business, similar is with consumer research.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research industry

The consumer research process can be broken down into the following steps:

Develop research objectives: The first step to the consumer research process is to clearly define the research objective, the purpose of research, why is the research being conducted, to understand what? A clear statement of purpose can help emphasize the purpose.
Collect Secondary data: Collect secondary data first, it helps in understanding if research has been conducted earlier and if there are any pieces of evidence related to the subject matter that can be used by an organization to make informed decisions regarding consumers.
Primary Research: In primary research organizations or businesses collect their own data or employ a third party to collect data on their behalf. This research makes use of various data collection methods ( qualitative and quantitative ) that helps researchers collect data first hand.

LEARN ABOUT: Best Data Collection Tools

Collect and analyze data: Data is collected and analyzed and inference is drawn to understand consumer behavior and purchase pattern.
Prepare report: Finally, a report is prepared for all the findings by analyzing data collected so that organizations are able to make informed decisions and think of all probabilities related to consumer behavior. By putting the study into practice, organizations can become customer-centric and manufacture products or render services that will help them achieve excellent customer satisfaction.

LEARN ABOUT: market research trends

After Consumer Research Process

Once you have been able to successfully carry out the consumer research process , investigate and break paradigms. What consumers need should be a part of market research design and should be carried out regularly. Consumer research provides more in-depth information about the needs, wants, expectations and behavior analytics of clients.

By identifying this information successfully, strategies that are used to attract consumers can be made better and businesses can make a profit by knowing what consumers want exactly. It is also important to understand and know thoroughly the buying behavior of consumers to know their attitude towards brands and products.

The identification of consumer needs, as well as their preferences, allows a business to adapt to new business and develop a detailed marketing plan that will surely work. The following pointers can help. Completing this process will help you:

Attract more customers
Set the best price for your products
Create the right marketing message
Increase the quantity that satisfies the demand of its clients
Increase the frequency of visits to their clients
Increase your sales
Reduce costs
Refine your approach to the customer service process .

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Research

Consumer Research Methods

Consumers are the reason for a business to run and flourish. Gathering enough information about consumers is never going to hurt any business, in fact, it will only add up to the information a business would need to associate with its consumers and manufacture products that will help their business refine and grow.

Following are consumer research methods that ensure you are in tandem with the consumers and understand their needs:

The studies of customer satisfaction

One can determine the degree of satisfaction of consumers in relation to the quality of products through:

Informal methods such as conversations with staff about products and services according to the dashboards.
Past and present questionnaires/ surveys that consumers might have filled that identify their needs.

T he investigation of the consumer decision process

It is very interesting to know the consumer’s needs, what motivates them to buy, and how is the decision-making process carried out, though:

Deploying relevant surveys and receiving responses from a target intended audience .

Proof of concept

Businesses can test how well accepted their marketing ideas are by:

The use of surveys to find out if current or potential consumer see your products as a rational and useful benefit.
Conducting personal interviews or focus group sessions with clients to understand how they respond to marketing ideas.

Knowing your market position

You can find out how your current and potential consumers see your products, and how they compare it with your competitors by:

Sales figures talk louder than any other aspect, once you get to know the comparison in the sales figures it is easy to understand your market position within the market segment.
Attitudes of consumers while making a purchase also helps in understanding the market hold.

Branding tests and user experience

You can determine how your customers feel with their brands and product names by:

The use of focus groups and surveys designed to assess emotional responses to your products and brands.
The participation of researchers to study the performance of their brand in the market through existing and available brand measurement research.

Price changes

You can investigate how your customers accept or not the price changes by using formulas that measure the revenue – multiplying the number of items you sold, by the price of each item. These tests allow you to calculate if your total income increases or decreases after making the price changes by:

Calculation of changes in the quantities of products demanded by their customers, together with changes in the price of the product.
Measure the impact of the price on the demand of the product according to the needs of the client.

Social media monitoring

Another way to measure feedback and your customer service is by controlling your commitment to social media and feedback. Social networks (especially Facebook) are becoming a common element of the commercialization of many businesses and are increasingly used by their customers to provide information on customer needs, service experiences, share and file customer complaints . It can also be used to run surveys and test concepts. If handled well, it can be one of the most powerful research tools of the client management . I also recommend reading: How to conduct market research through social networks.

Customer Research Questions

Asking the right question is the most important part of conducting research. Moreover, if it’s consumer research, questions should be asked in a manner to gather maximum insights from consumers. Here are some consumer research questions for your next research:

Who in your household takes purchasing decisions?
Where do you go looking for ______________ (product)?
How long does it take you to make a buying decision?
How far are you willing to travel to buy ___________(product)?
What features do you look for when you purchase ____________ (product)?
What motivates you to buy_____________ (product)?

See more consumer research survey questions:

Customer satisfaction surveys

Voice of customer surveys

Product surveys

Service evaluation surveys

Mortgage Survey Questions

Importance of Consumer Research

Launching a product or offering new services can be quite an exciting time for a brand. However, there are a lot of aspects that need to be taken into consideration while a band has something new to offer to consumers.

LEARN ABOUT: User Experience Research

Here is where consumer research plays a pivotal role. The importance of consumer research cannot be emphasized more. Following points summarizes the importance of consumer research:

To understand market readiness: However good a product or service may be, consumers have to be ready to accept it. Creating a product requires investments which in return expect ROI from product or service purchases. However, if a market is mature enough to accept this utility, it has a low chance of succeeding by tapping into market potential . Therefore, before launching a product or service, organizations need to conduct consumer research, to understand if people are ready to spend on the utility it provides.
Identify target consumers: By conducting consumer research, brands and organizations can understand their target market based on geographic segmentation and know who exactly is interested in buying their products. According to the data or feedback received from the consumer, research brands can even customize their marketing and branding approach to better appeal to the specific consumer segment.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

Product/Service updates through feedback: Conducting consumer research, provides valuable feedback from consumers about the attributes and features of products and services. This feedback enables organizations to understand consumer perception and provide a more suitable solution based on actual market needs which helps them tweak their offering to perfection.

Explore more: 300 + FREE survey templates to use for your research

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How the experts get results: 8 examples of consumer research

What are the goals of consumer research, 8 consumer research examples (and how to get better insights from your research), what are the benefits of conducting consumer research, best practices for seamless consumer research, conduct better consumer research with the right tools.

Ever look at a brilliant move from a brand and think: how did they nail that so seemingly effortlessly?

The answer often involved customer research.

At its core, consumer research is the gathering and analysis of information about target markets, consumers, and potential customers. It’s not just about numbers and graphs—though they have their place—it’s about understanding people. And with understanding people, you’ll get to understand what tactics and campaigns will win for your brand.

Your research can shape products, influence marketing strategies, and even drive innovation. Whether it’s understanding how customers feel, what they think, or how they behave, consumer research offers a blueprint for brands to build deeper, more meaningful connections with their audience.

There are countless tools at your disposal to crush your customer research. From the ever-popular to the more niche, here are some of the key research methods brand like yours use:

Online surveys : Tap into real-time feedback and broad audiences with just a few clicks.
Phone surveys : Engage in deeper, personal conversations and get nuanced insights.
Focus groups : Dive into group dynamics and gain qualitative insights from lively discussions.
Field observations : Observe consumers in their natural habitat to glean non-verbal cues and real-world behaviors.
In-depth interviews : Get detailed, in-depth feedback on specific topics.
Product testing : Put your product in the hands of consumers and see it through their eyes.

Consumer research is used by businesses to understand their audience more deeply, and to adapt their strategies accordingly—minimizing risks and maximizing revenue. It provides valuable data and insights that influence decisions at every level—from product development to marketing strategies. By digging into the why and how of consumer behavior, brands can make informed choices that truly resonate with their audience, without having to fear they’ll completely miss the mark.

When diving into consumer research, a brand might have several goals in mind, such as:

Uncovering consumer needs : What are the unsaid (and said!) desires or pain points of your audience?
Predicting market trends : Where is the market headed? What are significant patterns?
Enhancing product development : How can your product evolve to serve your customers better?
Crafting effective marketing campaigns : What messages will truly resonate with your target audience?
Understanding purchase decisions : Why do consumers choose one brand over another? When and why do people buy?
Measuring brand perception : How do consumers view your brand compared to competitors?
Identifying growth opportunities : Are there untapped markets or segments to explore?

1. Bloom & Wild learned from their target market how to make Valentine’s Day fresh again

Bloom & Wild , a direct-to-door flower company from London, wanted to shake things up—but not without doing their due diligence with market research first. They were over the red roses game on Valentine’s Day and wanted to see if their customers were too. Let’s just say, things got bloomin’ interesting.

Key takeaways:

Challenge assumptions : Just because it’s tradition doesn’t mean it’s right. Bloom & Wild suspected red roses were kinda old news for V-Day. Attest showed a lot of folks felt the same.
Dig for the real story : Thanks to Attest, they found out 79% of people prefer thoughtful gifts over the same-old. And red roses? 58% found them too cliche.
Make waves with your data : Strong data makes strong campaigns. Bloom & Wild said goodbye to red roses and launched the “No Red Roses” campaign. A bold move that gave them loads of press.
The results? Mega blooms : No red roses, no problem. Valentine’s Day sales quadrupled and press coverage went up by 51%.
Feedback = fab conversations : It wasn’t just about sales and press. Their social channels lit up with folks sharing heartwarming love stories. When you listen to your customers and take risks, people notice (and love it).

What’s the best consumer research software

Picking the right consumer insights software for your needs is super important – here’s our list of the top providers so you can see what each has to offer…

2. Little Moons tapped into their true target customers thanks to customer research data

Little Moons , those yummy Japanese mochi ice cream bites, went big on TikTok. But they didn’t just want to be a 15-second sensation; they wanted to scoop up the long game. Let’s unpack how they didn’t just melt away after the TikTok frenzy, thanks to the coolest customer research.

Find out who your customer is : If you think TikTok, you think teens. Customer research surprised them: it’s the 30+ audience that found out they were the ones buying their treats.
Widen the stage : Just being a TikTok sensation isn’t the endgame. Little Moons wanted EVERYONE to know their name. So, they aimed for big newspaper names—think Telegraph, Express, Sun—to make their mochis more mainstream.
Customers build brands : It’s not just brand managers and marketers. Working with consumer research insights meant their brand awareness shot up.

3. Penfold combined conducting customer research with brand tracking — a smart move

Penfold , the fresh face in digital pensions, saw huge growth in a short time. But growth can be a double-edged sword. With all these new customers, they wondered: “Who are we really connecting with?” They didn’t have any past metrics to compare to, and customer research with brand tracking seemed the way to go. They just needed a tool that was both budget-friendly and user-friendly.

The growth conundrum : Penfold’s growth was impressive, tripling pension transfers in just a year. But they were navigating without a map, lacking historical brand metrics. Good news: even when that’s lacking, you can still dig into customer research.
Tracking over time : Brand tracking and market research with Attest delivered some clear messages. Engaging the younger crowd in pensions? Easier said than done. But after a year of tracking and customer research, Penfold is better equipped. They now tailor their messaging to resonate more effectively with their audience.
Customers and competition : Using Attest, Penfold can keep tabs on their competitors, not just their customers. They can gauge who’s getting attention and strategize on distinguishing their brand, to turn the attention back to themselves.

4. psLondon redefined university marketing through Gen Z insights

psLondon, a seasoned creative and brand consultancy, faced a challenge. Many universities seemed to echo similar messages. And they didn’t resonate. They needed fresh insights, especially from the Gen Z perspective, to help each university carve its distinct identity . Their customer research with Attest helped them formulate stellar campaigns.

Ask consumers about core values : psLondon sought to understand the unique values students associated with their universities. Their research led to distinct insights, like a university standing out for its emphasis on “freedom”, which then translated to a compelling tagline: “the freedom to achieve”.
Replicating success : The value-based rebranding approach was not a one-off success. Post its initial triumph, psLondon applied the strategy to four more UK universities, and kept that ball rolling.
Using customer research beyond aesthetics : This method is not just about a fresh coat of paint. It’s about understanding and communicating intrinsic values that resonate deeply with students. Their approach to customer research has not only made them sought-after in university marketing, but has also led them to share their insights at conferences and in white papers.

5. Evive Nutrition’s used customer insights to guide them on their American journey

Evive Nutrition, after having garnered immense success in Canada with its innovative frozen smoothie cubes, took a bold leap into the US market last year . Consumer research played a key role in this expansion journey.

Value of subscriptions : Evive’s unique business model hinges on their subscription-based approach. While they boast a strong presence in physical stores, their customer research revealed the growing trend and value of direct-to-door deliveries, especially amidst the modern consumer’s quest for convenience.
Adapting to America : The significance of customer research can’t be overstated, especially when venturing into unfamiliar territory. Through Attest, Evive was able to gather crucial insights into American consumer preferences, from preferred flavours to feedback on their communication strategies.
Tailored messaging for the US : Armed with these insights, Evive meticulously tailored its content strategy for the American audience and US consumer trends for 2023 . This went beyond mere promotional materials and trickled down to their website, content creation, and even product packaging.

6. Organic Valley’s used customer insights to create breakfast bites nobody can resist

Organic Valley knows a thing or two about great breakfast snacks, but working together with their target audience really elevated their game . Their approach underscores the importance of customer insights not just in product development but even in nuanced elements like naming.

Fueling innovation with feedback : They didn’t just aim to create a new product; they wanted one that was both innovative and well-received. By leveraging consumer research insights via Attest, Organic Valley could accelerate the innovation process, optimize messaging, and refine product iterations.
The name game : It became evident that while flavor was crucial, naming played an equally vital role in the consumers’ perception. A flavor’s name could conjure memories, emotions, and expectations, and Organic Valley was keen on ensuring that these names reflected the product accurately and appetizingly.
Efficiency and cost-savings : One of the standout benefits of this early-stage consumer feedback was the significant cost savings for Organic Valley. Prompt learnings through Attest saved the brand between 10 to 20 times the potential costs they might have incurred from late-stage adjustments or missteps.

7. GoCardless tapped into customer research to make payments painless

Ever faced a hiccup at the online checkout? GoCardless sure noticed. Intent on understanding the very essence of these hiccups, they delved into their customers’ payment woes to make their sales and marketing efforts truly resonate.

Zooming in on payment pain points : Online checkouts can be tricky. Sometimes, they’re even downright frustrating. GoCardless wasn’t content to just acknowledge that—they wanted to know the ins and outs. Their goal was to tailor their offerings in a way that directly addressed these prevalent payment challenges and expressed their brand’s value proposition.
Research-backed solutions : No longer does GoCardless roll out a solution based on mere assumptions. Each of their product launches now stands on a solid foundation of customer research, ensuring it’s not just another feature but a real answer to a genuine customer need.
A value proposition that sticks : By tapping into direct consumer insights, GoCardless sharpened their value proposition, making it more compelling.

8. DRY Soda Co. harnessed consumer research to drive an impressive 170% revenue surge

DRY Soda Co. didn’t let themselves be stopped by restrictions people faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. With their traditional launch methods now inaccessible, they harnessed the power of consumer research through Attest and saw big wins .

The challenge of conventional approaches : With COVID-19 throwing a wrench in the works, DRY’s initial “try and buy” strategy of in-store and bar demos for their DRY Botanical Bitters & Soda was halted.
Pivoting to alternative consumer research methods : Rather than giving in to the setback, DRY channeled their energy into gathering customer research insights. Small focus groups set the initial tone, and these findings were then magnified using Attest.
Tailored design from direct insights : Consumer feedback obtained through Attest played a pivotal role in product branding. The design effectively embodied the sophistication of a zero-proof cocktail. Furthermore, the emphasis on the “zero-sugar” element, a prime attraction for many consumers, stemmed directly from these insights.

Always doing the same in a market where things change rapidly is a recipe for disaster. Consumers drive trends and changes in every industry, and brands should be following them—it’ll rarely work the other way around.

So, gaining insights from consumer research is crucial for brands aiming to understand, adapt, and evolve. Depending on the specific goals and questions a brand has, they may opt for quantitative or qualitative customer research methods, each with its own unique advantages.

The importance of quantitative research

Definition : Quantitative research involves collecting numerical data to understand patterns, frequencies, and trends. Quantitative consumer research often employs structured surveys to gather data from a larger sample size for primary research, but secondary sources can be used too.

Broad insights : Provides a wider view of consumer behaviors and opinions.
Statistical significance : Offers data that can be statistically analyzed for more reliable conclusions.
Clear trends : Easily identify dominant patterns in consumer behaviors or preferences.
Speed and efficiency : Online tools and platforms can quickly reach a large number of respondents.

The importance of qualitative research

Definition : Qualitative market research delves deep into consumer behaviors, emotions and reasons behind certain choices. Qualitative consumer research often involves primary research methods like focus groups or video interviews to gain more detailed insights.

In-depth understanding : Offers deeper insights into the “why” behind consumer decisions.
Flexibility : Allows for adaptive questioning based on responses.
Rich data : Gathers detailed anecdotes, stories, and reasons that can provide context.
Uncovering nuances : Captures the subtleties in consumer emotions and preferences.

By understanding the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative customer research, brands can select the right approach for their specific needs, ensuring they obtain insights that are both broad in scope and deep in understanding.

Consumer research can be a game-changer for brands, but to truly harness its power, it’s crucial to approach it with the right strategies. Here are some expert-recommended best practices to ensure you get the most out of your research efforts:

Use consumer research tools to conduct customer research

Conducting market research at scale and with depth is best done using consumer research tools . They can significantly streamline the process and provide more accurate results. These tools offer a structured way to gather, analyze, and interpret data, making the entire process more efficient and effective.

Prioritize clear objectives

Before you conduct market research of any type, it’s essential to define clear objectives. What are you trying to achieve with this research? Whether it’s understanding consumer preferences, identifying market gaps, or measuring brand perception, having a clear goal ensures your efforts are directed effectively.

Be open to unexpected insights

While it’s essential to have clear objectives, it’s equally important to be open to unexpected insights. Sometimes, the most valuable information comes from unplanned findings. By being receptive to these, you can uncover new opportunities or areas of improvement.

Ensure diversity in your sample

It’s crucial to ensure that your sample represents a diverse set of consumers. This helps in capturing a wider range of perspectives, leading to richer insights. Make sure that your participants vary in age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and other demographic factors relevant to your study. The right consumer insights software helps you diversify your samples, but makes sure to check.

Validate and re-test

Once you’ve gathered your initial insights, it’s always a good practice to validate them with your entire consumer insight team . This could mean conducting a follow-up study, re-testing your hypotheses, or analyzing the data through another lens, making sure all teams are aligned. This ensures that the insights are robust and not just a one-off anomaly.

If you’re looking to conduct customer research and really want to dig deep—and not just scratch the surface of customer satisfaction numbers or basic personas—try Attest.

Our research platform help you get a deeper understanding of what moves your target consumers, leaving you with all the data you need to inform your strategies. You’ll get a dedicated research expert to support you along the way, and it’s an easy start from our templates .

Ready to get to know your customers?

Consumer research is the process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a company’s target audience. This research helps brands understand consumer needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations, allowing them to make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and other business areas.

It’s always customer research ‘o clock somewhere. Consumer research should be conducted at various stages of a product or service lifecycle. This includes before a product launch (to understand market needs), post-launch (to gather feedback and refine), and periodically thereafter (to stay updated with changing consumer behaviors). It’s also crucial during brand repositioning, entering new markets, or when addressing specific challenges in the market.

It does depend on your specific goals and the tools you will use, but there is a general framework that you can draw inspiration from. Different consumer insight companies will follow slightly different processes, but the best consumer research process involves a series of structured steps: 1. Defining clear research objectives. 2. Selecting the appropriate research method (quantitative, qualitative, or a mix). 3. Designing the research tool (e.g., survey or focus group). 4. Collecting data from a representative sample (both qualitative data and quantitative data) 5. Analyzing and interpreting the data. 6. Presenting the findings in a comprehensible manner to stakeholders.

The specific questions in consumer research will vary based on objectives. However, some common questions include: – What factors influence your purchase decision? – How satisfied are you with our product? – What improvements would you like to see? – How does our brand compare to competitors? It’s essential to ask open-ended questions to capture comprehensive insights and ensure questions are unbiased to get genuine response

Consumer research provides brands with insights into their target audience’s needs, behaviors, and preferences, which is the guiding light for any successful brand. It enables them to create products and services that resonate with their audience, craft effective marketing strategies, identify market opportunities, and address challenges proactively.

Elliot Barnard

Customer Research Lead

Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

12 February 2024

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

6 Customer Research Methods
How SurveySparrow Can Help

Do you want to improve your marketing or product? Then, customer research can help.

Your customer is at the heart of all your business decisions. In fact, everything revolves around a customer. A business is about having a paying customer, and it wouldn’t exist without one.

The effectiveness of your product or marketing depends on how well you know your customers. When you know your customers better, you can make better product or marketing decisions.

In this article, we break down:

What customer research is
Why it’s valuable for your business
Different types of customer research
Six customer research methods you can use to refine and grow your business

Customer research (or consumer research ) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.

Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.

Businesses typically conduct customer research to uncover new insights on their customers. They then use these newly uncovered insights to improve their product, craft an effective marketing strategy, and more.

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

Who are my ideal customers? Who is the best fit (or worst fit) for our product?
What channels can I use to find and communicate with my ideal customers?

Online survey tools like SurveySparrow can help you answer these questions. With omnichannel survey distribution, snazzy data visualization, and 1,500+ integrations with your favorite tools, SurveySparrow simplifies customer research for your GTM and product teams.

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A. How well do you know your customers? Not knowing enough about your customers can cost you time and money.

For example, a recent survey revealed that 46% of customers broke up with a brand because they received irrelevant content pushes.

Successful marketers realize that research is necessary to understand and cater to the ever-changing needs of today’s customers. According to a study by Coschedule:

Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter.
56% of the study’s most elite marketers research at least once a month.

B. You shouldn’t make assumptions about your customers’ preferences or needs. You have to go out there and get opinions from real customers.

C. You need to go beyond your general idea about your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to serve them with your product or service.

D. If you want to make your product the best in the market, you need to identify any unmet needs and learn how well your product serves the needs of your current customers.

E. Customer research helps you learn more about your customers, both the potential and existing ones. Serving your customers better than the alternatives starts with understanding them better and more deeply.

F. Here are other key reasons why you should research customers:

Know the Why : Your analytics dashboard merely tells you what your customers do. Only research can help you understand why they do that.
Validate Assumptions and Best Practices : In most cases, guesswork leads to terrible decisions. Your customers might not need what you think they need. And what works for most businesses might not work for you. The only real way to know is to talk to your customers.

Customer research can be done in two distinct ways: primary and secondary.

Primary research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. In other words, in primary research, you collect the data yourself. Some examples of primary research are face-to-face interviews, surveys, and social media interactions.

Secondary research

Secondary research (or desk research ) is done by someone else. In secondary research, you make use of data that’s been collected by other people. A few examples of secondary research are forums or communities, industry reports, and online databases.

Primary and secondary research can be further broken down into two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is descriptive and conceptual. And the nature of the data makes it subjective and interpretive. Examples of qualitative data include descriptions of certain attributes, such as blue eyes or chocolate-flavored ice cream .

Quantitative data

Quantitative data can be expressed using numbers, which means it can be counted or measured. As opposed to qualitative data, it’s objective and conclusive. Examples of quantitative data include numerical values such as measurements , length , cost , or weight .

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

Now that you know what customer research is and why it’s important, read on to learn the different consumer research methods you can use to make the most of it.

In a survey, you ask a series of questions to your customers regarding a subject or concept.

You can conduct a survey in person, over the phone, through emails, or online forms.

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

Quickly collect a ton of insightful data without the high costs.
The data you collect using surveys is simple to analyze.
You can ask various questions since you get a wide range of question formats.

When it comes to surveys, it’s all about how you ask. Clear and concise questions can help you get reliable information.

An online survey tool is your best bet for quickly gathering customer information. All you need to do is create a survey with a ready-to-use template and send your customers a link to take it.

If you’re in need of a cost-free and easy-to-use solution for conducting customer research surveys and beyond, consider exploring SurveySparrow . This tool aids in gathering essential data by enabling you to conduct thorough data analysis via its user-friendly and conversational survey format.

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In an interview, you speak directly to your customers and ask them open-ended questions.

Interviews allow you to have deep, one-on-one conversations with your customers and explore a topic in-depth.
You can go into the details, obtain data beyond surface-level information, and gather deeper insights.

While interviews allow you to probe deeper into a subject, success depends on the expertise and skills of the researcher (or interviewer) conducting the interviews.

Conducting interviews isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and costly. However, the information you collect can be invaluable for your company’s growth.

You can meet your customers in person to conduct your interviews. Or you can use video conferencing tools such as Google Meet or Zoom to converse with your customers online.

Your analytics dashboard lets you in on your customers’ actions within your product.

Just a glance at it and you’ll know what your customers do and how they engage with your product.

The irony is that customers don’t know what they want or why. They might think they need something but that might not be the case.

What they say they need doesn’t equate to what they do.

The point is that customer-reported behavior is different from actual behavior. That’s why it pays to track and observe your customers’ behavior.

You can use heatmaps, click tracking, scroll mapping, and user-recorded sessions to gain insights into your users’ actions and behavior.

Focus Groups

In this method, you combine a small group based on certain criteria such as demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

And you ask this group about whatever topic or concept. It could be about your product, marketing message, or something else that’s related to your customers or business.

The idea is to get them to talk to each other and have meaningful conversations.

A moderator helps facilitate the conversations between the individuals in this group. The moderator will try to draw meaningful insights from these conversations and discussions.

You mainly use this technique to understand a certain topic or subject better.

Competitive Analysis

Studying your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to learn more about the target market and the existing solutions.

You can analyze both your direct and indirect competitors depending on the needs you address and the customers you cater to.

You can conduct a competitive analysis from a marketing or product perspective.

If you conduct your analysis from a marketing perspective, you study your competition’s SEO strategy , landing page copy, blog content, PR coverage, social media presence, etc.

You can also conduct your competitive analysis from a product perspective and analyze your competitors’ user experience, features, pricing structure, etc.

Review Mining

The reviews of you and your competitors are another great way to get inside your customer’s head. This method can be especially valuable if you are a SAAS company.

It helps you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. This understanding helps you improve your own products and better address the needs of your ideal customers.

This kind of data is easy to acquire as it’s publicly available, and you can get them on:

Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra.
Forums and niche communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, Quora, etc.

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

SurveySparrow facilitates comprehensive customer research by enabling businesses to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback, leading to better informed and customer-centric decisions.

Collect Feedback Easily : Create simple surveys to find out what customers think about your products or services.
Understand Satisfaction : Use surveys to figure out how happy customers are with what you offer.
Learn Buying Habits : Find out why customers buy certain products, which helps in planning what to sell.
Get Product Opinions : Ask customers what they like or don’t like about your products to make improvements.
See How People View Your Brand : Understand how customers see your brand, which is important for your marketing.
Keep Up with Trends : Regular surveys help you stay updated on what your customers want or need.
Group Customers : Identify different types of customers to target them more effectively with your marketing.
Improve Customer Experience : Learn where you can make the buying process better for your customers.
Test New Ideas : Before launching new products, check if your customers would be interested.
Check Customer Loyalty : Find out if customers would keep using your products or recommend them to others.

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Businesses that deeply understand their customers have a huge advantage over the ones that don’t. Period.

Whatever you’re looking to learn or achieve, it becomes a lot clearer with a little research.

When done right, customer research can be your competitive advantage.

Be sure to pick a method that’s right for your situation. What are you looking to learn and achieve? Think through each research method carefully and pick the one that works best for you.

Have you conducted customer research? What did you learn? And how did it go? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

And if you’re looking to conduct customer research through surveys, feel free to check out SurveySparrow .

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What Is Consumer Research: Methods, Types, Scope & Examples

Jan 19, 2024

Consumer Research Overview:

Consumer research is an essential aspect of any successful business strategy. Understanding your target audience, their preferences, and behaviours is crucial for making informed decisions, developing effective marketing campaigns, and staying ahead in a competitive marketplace. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the world of consumer research, covering key methods, types, and scope, and providing real-world examples of its practical applications.

Introduction to Consumer Research

Consumer research, also known as market research, is the systematic process of gathering and analyzing data about consumers' attitudes, preferences, and behaviours. It is a vital component of strategic planning for businesses and organizations across various industries. The primary goal of consumer research is to gain insights into consumer needs and desires, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and create products and services that meet those needs effectively.

Key Methods in Consumer Research

To conduct effective consumer research, various methods and techniques are employed. These methods can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative Research in Consumer Studies

Quantitative research focuses on gathering numerical data and statistical analysis. It often involves surveys, questionnaires, and structured interviews with a large sample of participants. This method provides numerical insights into consumer behaviors , preferences, and trends. Data collected through quantitative research can be analyzed to identify patterns, correlations, and statistical significance. This approach is particularly useful when a business needs to measure consumer satisfaction, evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, or conduct large-scale market studies.

Qualitative Approaches in Consumer Research

Qualitative research, on the other hand, emphasizes understanding the underlying motivations and emotions behind consumer behaviors. It involves methods like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observational studies. Qualitative research allows researchers to delve deeper into consumers' thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It helps businesses gain a more nuanced understanding of their target audience, enabling them to develop products and marketing strategies that resonate on a deeper level.

Exploring Types of Consumer Research

Consumer research is a multifaceted field with various types, each serving specific purposes:

Demographic Analysis in Consumer Research

Demographic research involves analyzing data related to consumers' age, gender, income, education, and other demographic factors. This type of research helps businesses identify and target specific consumer groups based on their characteristics and preferences.

Psychographic Research Methods

Psychographic research focuses on consumers' lifestyles, values, interests, and personality traits. By understanding the psychological factors that influence consumer behavior, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to align with consumers' beliefs and aspirations.

Consumer Insight Generation

Consumer insight research aims to uncover unique and valuable insights about consumer behaviors and preferences. It often involves innovative data collection techniques and advanced analytics to discover hidden trends and opportunities.

Brand Perception Research

Brand perception research assesses how consumers perceive a brand and its products or services. It helps businesses understand the strengths and weaknesses of their brand image and make necessary improvements.

Product Testing in Consumer Studies

Product testing involves gathering consumer feedback on new products or prototypes. This research type helps businesses refine their products based on real-world consumer input, ensuring they meet market demands.

Comparative Consumer Analysis

Comparative research involves evaluating a business's performance relative to its competitors. It helps identify areas where a business can gain a competitive edge and better serve its target audience.

Cross-Cultural Consumer Research

Cross-cultural research examines consumer behaviours and preferences across different cultures and regions. It helps businesses adapt their marketing strategies to diverse consumer demographics.

The Broad Scope of Consumer Research

Consumer research is not limited to the products and services themselves; it encompasses various aspects of consumer behaviour and market dynamics. The scope of consumer research includes:

Technology in Consumer Studies

As technology continues to advance, consumer research methods have also evolved. Businesses now have access to big data analytics, AI-driven insights, and social media sentiment analysis, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour in the digital age.

Future Trends in Consumer Research

Consumer research is a dynamic field, constantly evolving to keep up with changing consumer preferences and market dynamics. Staying updated with emerging trends in consumer research is essential for businesses to remain competitive.

Data-Driven Consumer Insights

The advent of big data has revolutionized consumer research. Businesses can now harness vast amounts of data to gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, helping them make data-driven decisions and improve their strategies.

Consumer Decision-Making Models

Understanding how consumers make decisions is crucial for businesses. Consumer research explores the decision-making process, including factors like perception, motivation, and cognitive biases, to help businesses influence consumer choices effectively.

Real-world Examples of Consumer Research

Let's look at some practical applications of consumer research in real-world scenarios:

Case Studies in Consumer Research

A leading smartphone manufacturer conducts consumer research to understand what features and specifications consumers prioritize in their smartphones. Based on the findings, the company designs and markets its products accordingly, staying ahead of competitors.

Consumer Satisfaction Measurement

A restaurant chain regularly collects feedback from its customers through surveys and online reviews. By analyzing this data, they identify areas for improvement, make necessary changes to their menu and service, and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

Trend Analysis in Consumer Studies

A fashion retailer closely monitors consumer trends and preferences in clothing. They use this information to adapt their inventory, marketing campaigns, and store layouts to align with current fashion trends and consumer preferences.

Retail Environment Studies

A retail giant conducts in-store consumer research to optimize its store layout, product placement, and signage. By creating a more pleasant and efficient shopping experience, they aim to increase customer satisfaction and sales.

Consumer Feedback and Reviews

An e-commerce platform analyzes customer feedback and reviews to identify product issues, improve product descriptions, and enhance customer trust. This research helps them provide a better shopping experience.

Online Consumer Behavior

An online marketplace tracks user behaviour on its website to improve user experience, optimize search algorithms, and personalize product recommendations, ultimately increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Social Media Impact on Consumer Research

A cosmetics brand monitors social media channels to gauge customer sentiment and feedback. They use this data to adjust marketing strategies and product offerings in real-time, staying responsive to consumer preferences.

Global Consumer Trends

A multinational corporation conducts cross-cultural consumer research to adapt its products and marketing strategies to different regions and cultures, ensuring they resonate with local consumers.

Consumer Preferences and Trends

A food and beverage company studies consumer preferences for healthier options. This research informs their product development and marketing efforts to align with the growing trend of health-conscious consumers.

Lifestyle and Consumer Choices

A fitness equipment manufacturer conducts consumer research to understand how consumers' lifestyles and preferences influence their purchasing decisions. This helps them develop products tailored to specific consumer segments.

Psychological Aspects of Consumer Behavior

A marketing agency delves into the psychological factors that influence consumer decisions. They use this knowledge to create compelling advertisements and marketing campaigns that resonate with consumers on a deeper level.

Cultural Influences in Consumer Research

An international travel agency studies how cultural differences impact travel preferences. They tailor their vacation packages and marketing materials to appeal to diverse cultural groups.

Ethical Considerations in Consumer Research

While consumer research provides valuable insights, it is essential to conduct it ethically and responsibly. Respecting consumers' privacy and ensuring the security of their data should be paramount. Businesses should obtain informed consent, anonymize data when necessary, and adhere to applicable regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA, to protect consumers' rights.

The Evolution of Consumer Research Methods

Consumer research methods have evolved significantly over the years. From traditional face-to-face interviews and paper surveys to online surveys, big data analytics, and AI-driven insights, technology has played a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of consumer research. Businesses must stay current with the latest research tools and techniques to remain competitive in today's fast-paced market.

The Impact of Technology on Consumer Research

Technology has revolutionized consumer research in several ways:

Faster Data Collection

Online surveys and digital data collection methods allow businesses to gather consumer insights more quickly, enabling faster decision-making.

Enhanced Data Analysis

Advanced analytics tools enable businesses to process and analyze vast amounts of data, uncovering hidden trends and patterns that were previously difficult to identify.

Personalization in Consumer Engagement

Technology allows businesses to personalize their interactions with consumers, offering tailored recommendations and experiences based on individual preferences and behaviors.

Data Privacy in Consumer Studies

As technology has evolved, concerns about data privacy have grown. Ethical consumer research practices involve protecting consumers' personal information and respecting their privacy rights.

Integrating AI in Consumer Insights

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can analyze consumer data more efficiently, providing businesses with valuable insights and predictive analytics.

Practical Applications: How Businesses Use Consumer Research

Consumer research is not just an academic exercise; it has practical applications that directly impact a business's success. Here are some ways businesses use consumer research to their advantage:

Product Development

Consumer research helps businesses identify gaps in the market and develop products that align with consumer needs and preferences.

Marketing Strategies

By understanding consumer behaviors and preferences, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to effectively reach and engage their target audience.

Customer Experience Enhancement

Consumer research helps businesses improve customer service, streamline processes, and create a positive and memorable customer experience.

Competitive Advantage

By staying updated with consumer trends and preferences, businesses can gain a competitive edge in the market and position themselves as industry leaders.

Risk Mitigation

Consumer research can help identify potential risks and challenges in the market, allowing businesses to proactively address them.

Innovative businesses use consumer research to identify emerging trends and opportunities, leading to the development of groundbreaking products and services.

In conclusion, consumer research is an indispensable tool for businesses seeking to understand their target audience, make informed decisions, and stay competitive in the ever-evolving marketplace. By employing various research methods, understanding different types of consumer research, and respecting ethical considerations, businesses can harness the power of consumer insights to drive growth, innovation, and success. As technology continues to shape the field of consumer research, businesses that embrace data-driven decision-making and prioritize consumer satisfaction will thrive in the dynamic business landscape of the future.

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Guide to consumer research

An Introductory Guide to Consumer Research And How to Conduct One

Consumer research is used across industries in order to gain key insights into consumer behavior and needs. In this article, we will explore the key aspects of consumer research, namely what it is and how to do it.

What Is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is research undertaken to gain an idea of customers' preferences, attitudes, motivations, and buying behaviors. This information can enable you to categorize customers into groups or segments, and tailor marketing efforts (or other aspects of the business, such as product development) to those who are most likely to spend their money on your product or service.

Research can take many different forms - such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. All of which enable you to gain answers to questions that your business is struggling to find through other means.

For example, most businesses have some kind of customer service department. Through consumer research, you can find out what methods of customer service are most preferred by your customers and invest more in these methods resulting in greater customer satisfaction.

Consumer research enables you to group customers into customer segments. A customer segment is simply a collection of individuals with similar consumer data - possibly in terms of the personal demographics such as age, gender, or location, or it could be that their spending habits, AOV , and preferences are similar.

These customer segments can be targeted in different ways, enabling you to maximize revenue from each individual.

2 Types of Consumer Research

There are two basic types of research, both of which apply to consumer research.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research produces quantifiable data. This means that it can be considered directly in numbers and percentages and, as a result, is usually easier to analyze.

For example, perhaps you want to evaluate your quality assurance strategies . In order to gain quantitative data for this, you might ask yes/no questions or ask customers to rank statements on a scale from 1 to 10, such as “I frequently come across bugs in X software”. 10 would indicate all the time, and 1 would be never. The responses can then be added together to create a percentage.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is often more in-depth, and questions enable responders to explore their answers in full detail. In 2021, 67% of researchers agreed that online or virtual qualitative research is helpful to consumer research. Qualitative research enables a much deeper understanding of the customer experience and opinion but is harder to analyze.

For example, returning to our example of experiencing bugs in software, a qualitative researcher may approach this question as follows:

Q: How often do you experience bugs when using our software? Explain in detail when and where this occurs.

A: I only experience bugs when using the accounting tool of the application. Whenever I try to export a report of my accounts, the app glitches and deletes my data.

This answer provides specific examples to the researcher and would make solving the problem much simpler. This is reflected in how business practices and software development intersect, as business needs are shaping new technology, a response that is driven through research.

However, if you are dealing with hundreds of responses, getting through them all can be challenging.

3 Benefits of Consumer Research

1. provides valuable market insight.

Consumer research provides insights that you cannot get from analytics alone, as it gives you insight into the thoughts and feelings of the consumers. These insights are extremely valuable, as if you know how to use customer analytics , you can apply these skills to implementing the data gathered from your consumer research.

2. Improve Marketing and Business Decisions

Once you have gained these insights, consumer research can actually be used to inform your marketing and business decisions and can even help the creation of brand marketing reports . For example, your research could suggest that your business lacks organization across its teams. This could lead to your business investing in WFM tools and ultimately revolutionizing its reputation.

3. Assists in Determining Market Position

Another benefit of consumer research is that it can provide insights into where your business sits within the market. You can find out whether you are preferred to your competition or vice versa, and why. It helps your business define its market position and make adjustments to improve this or solidify its brand identity.

5 Methods of Consumer Research

There are many different methods of conducting customer research. In this section, we will go through some of the key options available.

Interviews are a great way to conduct consumer research. The nature of spoken conversation often enables previously unconsidered ideas to come up naturally and opens up opportunities for discussions that reveal deeper insights. Furthermore, if you have access to software offering a free video call online , these interviews no longer need to be done in person.

Focus Groups

Interviews can be conducted in focus groups where a select group of individuals discuss and offer their opinions on a matter together. These individuals might be from the same customer sectors or may represent different perspectives. How you choose to structure these is up to you.

One-on-one Interviews

Alternatively, you may prefer to approach these with one-on-one interviews. This form of interview can often lead to a more in-depth conversation but, for logical reasons, are less time-efficient and can miss out on the group dynamic spurring new ideas.

Surveys are a written alternative to interviews and do not require a researcher to be present at the time of research. They can also be sent to a much larger group of respondents (meaning a more detailed set of data) and can be a combination of quantitative and qualitative responses.

Analytics is nothing new to anyone working in marketing, and it can be an excellent tool for conducting consumer research. Analytics will provide quantitative insights into consumer behavior, such as conversion rates and average sale values, and can contribute to consumer research.

Review Mining

Review mining can be a great way to gain consumer insights, and it doesn’t involve actively pursuing new research.

Previous reviews can often provide a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research through written descriptions and “star” system reviews. However, this method limits you to what is already available, and these reviews may not specifically target areas you are keen to research.

Secondary Research

Secondary research refers to looking at previously created research in your industry. Lots of this can be accessed online, and even if this isn’t the method you primarily choose to use, it can be a great starting point to guide your own research.

5 Steps to Conduct Consumer Research

1. set smart research goals and objectives.

SMART goals should be set before any business pursuit. Standing for specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, and time-bounded, these goals can help guide your research and avoid going off topic.

2. Determine the Research Methodology and Audience

As previously mentioned, there are several different methods of conducting consumer research. Choosing from the list above (and you are not limited to only one method), you should cover both quantitative and qualitative data for the best insight.

Develop a Buyer Persona

Develop a buyer persona in order to determine who your audience will be for the research. Buyer personas can be seen somewhat like “characters” in a story. They have certain wants, motivations, and behavior patterns. They make up your customer segments and who the research will target.

3. Conduct Research and Compile Data Findings

Put the research into action: send out surveys, schedule interviews, review your google analytics. Put all your findings into a spreadsheet, and begin to group responses logically. With qualitative data, it may be useful to identify “themes” in responses and categorize them according to these.

Once data is compiled, it is recommended to present it in a visually effective report , including charts or graphs depending on the content.

4. Analyze and Interpret Data Results

Take your data and consider what the information is telling you. Are you seeing frequent negative responses in one area? Do customers feel like you are overpricing your service? Interpret the data and come to conclusions as to what your business may need to do.

5. Take Action in Response to the Findings

Put your findings into action! If you are seeing consistent weaknesses in one area, this is a great time to bring the team together and brainstorm ideas to work around this and improve your business. When you implement changes that benefit the customers, you will see results coming back around to you in the form of increased engagement.

Key Takeaway

Consumer research is a brilliant way to ensure the success of any business. Enabling you to see how your customers view your company and gain key insights into how your business can improve. Provided your research has clear goals and gathers in-depth data, there is no reason your research shouldn’t be a raging success!

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad , an AI-powered cloud communication platform that fosters better team collaboration and boosts lead generation strategies . She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn .

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The past, present, and future of consumer research

Published: 13 June 2020
Volume 31 , pages 137–149, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

Maayan S. Malter ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0383-7925 1 ,
Morris B. Holbrook 1 ,
Barbara E. Kahn 2 ,
Jeffrey R. Parker 3 &
Donald R. Lehmann 1

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In this article, we document the evolution of research trends (concepts, methods, and aims) within the field of consumer behavior, from the time of its early development to the present day, as a multidisciplinary area of research within marketing. We describe current changes in retailing and real-world consumption and offer suggestions on how to use observations of consumption phenomena to generate new and interesting consumer behavior research questions. Consumption continues to change with technological advancements and shifts in consumers’ values and goals. We cannot know the exact shape of things to come, but we polled a sample of leading scholars and summarize their predictions on where the field may be headed in the next twenty years.

Consumer Behavior Research Methods

Consumer dynamics: theories, methods, and emerging directions

Understanding effect sizes in consumer psychology

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Beginning in the late 1950s, business schools shifted from descriptive and practitioner-focused studies to more theoretically driven and academically rigorous research (Dahl et al. 1959 ). As the field expanded from an applied form of economics to embrace theories and methodologies from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and statistics, there was an increased emphasis on understanding the thoughts, desires, and experiences of individual consumers. For academic marketing, this meant that research not only focused on the decisions and strategies of marketing managers but also on the decisions and thought processes on the other side of the market—customers.

Since then, the academic study of consumer behavior has evolved and incorporated concepts and methods, not only from marketing at large but also from related social science disciplines, and from the ever-changing landscape of real-world consumption behavior. Its position as an area of study within a larger discipline that comprises researchers from diverse theoretical backgrounds and methodological training has stirred debates over its identity. One article describes consumer behavior as a multidisciplinary subdiscipline of marketing “characterized by the study of people operating in a consumer role involving acquisition, consumption, and disposition of marketplace products, services, and experiences” (MacInnis and Folkes 2009 , p. 900).

This article reviews the evolution of the field of consumer behavior over the past half century, describes its current status, and predicts how it may evolve over the next twenty years. Our review is by no means a comprehensive history of the field (see Schumann et al. 2008 ; Rapp and Hill 2015 ; Wang et al. 2015 ; Wilkie and Moore 2003 , to name a few) but rather focuses on a few key thematic developments. Though we observe many major shifts during this period, certain questions and debates have persisted: Does consumer behavior research need to be relevant to marketing managers or is there intrinsic value from studying the consumer as a project pursued for its own sake? What counts as consumption: only consumption from traditional marketplace transactions or also consumption in a broader sense of non-marketplace interactions? Which are the most appropriate theoretical traditions and methodological tools for addressing questions in consumer behavior research?

2 A brief history of consumer research over the past sixty years—1960 to 2020

In 1969, the Association for Consumer Research was founded and a yearly conference to share marketing research specifically from the consumer’s perspective was instituted. This event marked the culmination of the growing interest in the topic by formalizing it as an area of research within marketing (consumer psychology had become a formalized branch of psychology within the APA in 1960). So, what was consumer behavior before 1969? Scanning current consumer-behavior doctoral seminar syllabi reveals few works predating 1969, with most of those coming from psychology and economics, namely Herbert Simon’s A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (1955), Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation (1943), and Ernest Dichter’s Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964). In short, research that illuminated and informed our understanding of consumer behavior prior to 1969 rarely focused on marketing-specific topics, much less consumers or consumption (Dichter’s handbook being a notable exception). Yet, these works were crucial to the rise of consumer behavior research because, in the decades after 1969, there was a shift within academic marketing to thinking about research from a behavioral or decision science perspective (Wilkie and Moore 2003 ). The following section details some ways in which this shift occurred. We draw on a framework proposed by the philosopher Larry Laudan ( 1986 ), who distinguished among three inter-related aspects of scientific inquiry—namely, concepts (the relevant ideas, theories, hypotheses, and constructs); methods (the techniques employed to test and validate these concepts); and aims (the purposes or goals that motivate the investigation).

2.1 Key concepts in the late - 1960s

During the late-1960s, we tended to view the buyer as a computer-like machine for processing information according to various formal rules that embody economic rationality to form a preference for one or another option in order to arrive at a purchase decision. This view tended to manifest itself in a couple of conspicuous ways. The first was a model of buyer behavior introduced by John Howard in 1963 in the second edition of his marketing textbook and quickly adopted by virtually every theorist working in our field—including, Howard and Sheth (of course), Engel-Kollat-&-Blackwell, Franco Nicosia, Alan Andreasen, Jim Bettman, and Joel Cohen. Howard’s great innovation—which he based on a scheme that he had found in the work of Plato (namely, the linkages among Cognition, Affect, and Conation)—took the form of a boxes-and-arrows formulation heavily influenced by the approach to organizational behavior theory that Howard (University of Pittsburgh) had picked up from Herbert Simon (Carnegie Melon University). The model represented a chain of events

where I = inputs of information (from advertising, word-of-mouth, brand features, etc.); C = cognitions (beliefs or perceptions about a brand); A = Affect (liking or preference for the brand); B = behavior (purchase of the brand); and S = satisfaction (post-purchase evaluation of the brand that feeds back onto earlier stages of the sequence, according to a learning model in which reinforced behavior tends to be repeated). This formulation lay at the heart of Howard’s work, which he updated, elaborated on, and streamlined over the remainder of his career. Importantly, it informed virtually every buyer-behavior model that blossomed forth during the last half of the twentieth century.

To represent the link between cognitions and affect, buyer-behavior researchers used various forms of the multi-attribute attitude model (MAAM), originally proposed by psychologists such as Fishbein and Rosenberg as part of what Fishbein and Ajzen ( 1975 ) called the theory of reasoned action. Under MAAM, cognitions (beliefs about brand attributes) are weighted by their importance and summed to create an explanation or prediction of affect (liking for a brand or preference for one brand versus another), which in turn determines behavior (choice of a brand or intention to purchase a brand). This took the work of economist Kelvin Lancaster (with whom Howard interacted), which assumed attitude was based on objective attributes, and extended it to include subjective ones (Lancaster 1966 ; Ratchford 1975 ). Overall, the set of concepts that prevailed in the late-1960s assumed the buyer exhibited economic rationality and acted as a computer-like information-processing machine when making purchase decisions.

2.2 Favored methods in the late-1960s

The methods favored during the late-1960s tended to be almost exclusively neo-positivistic in nature. That is, buyer-behavior research adopted the kinds of methodological rigor that we associate with the physical sciences and the hypothetico-deductive approaches advocated by the neo-positivistic philosophers of science.

Thus, the accepted approaches tended to be either experimental or survey based. For example, numerous laboratory studies tested variations of the MAAM and focused on questions about how to measure beliefs, how to weight the beliefs, how to combine the weighted beliefs, and so forth (e.g., Beckwith and Lehmann 1973 ). Here again, these assumed a rational economic decision-maker who processed information something like a computer.

Seeking rigor, buyer-behavior studies tended to be quantitative in their analyses, employing multivariate statistics, structural equation models, multidimensional scaling, conjoint analysis, and other mathematically sophisticated techniques. For example, various attempts to test the ICABS formulation developed simultaneous (now called structural) equation models such as those deployed by Farley and Ring ( 1970 , 1974 ) to test the Howard and Sheth ( 1969 ) model and by Beckwith and Lehmann ( 1973 ) to measure halo effects.

2.3 Aims in the late-1960s

During this time period, buyer-behavior research was still considered a subdivision of marketing research, the purpose of which was to provide insights useful to marketing managers in making strategic decisions. Essentially, every paper concluded with a section on “Implications for Marketing Managers.” Authors who failed to conform to this expectation could generally count on having their work rejected by leading journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research ( JMR ) and the Journal of Marketing ( JM ).

2.4 Summary—the three R’s in the late-1960s

Starting in the late-1960s to the early-1980s, virtually every buyer-behavior researcher followed the traditional approach to concepts, methods, and aims, now encapsulated under what we might call the three R’s —namely, rationality , rigor , and relevance . However, as we transitioned into the 1980s and beyond, that changed as some (though by no means all) consumer researchers began to expand their approaches and to evolve different perspectives.

2.5 Concepts after 1980

In some circles, the traditional emphasis on the buyer’s rationality—that is, a view of the buyer as a rational-economic, decision-oriented, information-processing, computer-like machine for making choices—began to evolve in at least two primary ways.

First, behavioral economics (originally studied in marketing under the label Behavioral Decision Theory)—developed in psychology by Kahneman and Tversky, in economics by Thaler, and applied in marketing by a number of forward-thinking theorists (e.g., Eric Johnson, Jim Bettman, John Payne, Itamar Simonson, Jay Russo, Joel Huber, and more recently, Dan Ariely)—challenged the rationality of consumers as decision-makers. It was shown that numerous commonly used decision heuristics depart from rational choice and are exceptions to the traditional assumptions of economic rationality. This trend shed light on understanding consumer financial decision-making (Prelec and Loewenstein 1998 ; Gourville 1998 ; Lynch Jr 2011 ) and how to develop “nudges” to help consumers make better decisions for their personal finances (summarized in Johnson et al. 2012 ).

Second, the emerging experiential view (anticipated by Alderson, Levy, and others; developed by Holbrook and Hirschman, and embellished by Schmitt, Pine, and Gilmore, and countless followers) regarded consumers as flesh-and-blood human beings (rather than as information-processing computer-like machines), focused on hedonic aspects of consumption, and expanded the concepts embodied by ICABS (Table 1 ).

2.6 Methods after 1980

The two burgeoning areas of research—behavioral economics and experiential theories—differed in their methodological approaches. The former relied on controlled randomized experiments with a focus on decision strategies and behavioral outcomes. For example, experiments tested the process by which consumers evaluate options using information display boards and “Mouselab” matrices of aspects and attributes (Payne et al. 1988 ). This school of thought also focused on behavioral dependent measures, such as choice (Huber et al. 1982 ; Simonson 1989 ; Iyengar and Lepper 2000 ).

The latter was influenced by post-positivistic philosophers of science—such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty—and approaches expanded to include various qualitative techniques (interpretive, ethnographic, humanistic, and even introspective methods) not previously prominent in the field of consumer research. These included:

Interpretive approaches —such as those drawing on semiotics and hermeneutics—in an effort to gain a richer understanding of the symbolic meanings involved in consumption experiences;

Ethnographic approaches — borrowed from cultural anthropology—such as those illustrated by the influential Consumer Behavior Odyssey (Belk et al. 1989 ) and its discoveries about phenomena related to sacred aspects of consumption or the deep meanings of collections and other possessions;

Humanistic approaches —such as those borrowed from cultural studies or from literary criticism and more recently gathered together under the general heading of consumer culture theory ( CCT );

Introspective or autoethnographic approaches —such as those associated with a method called subjective personal introspection ( SPI ) that various consumer researchers like Sidney Levy and Steve Gould have pursued to gain insights based on their own private lives.

These qualitative approaches tended not to appear in the more traditional journals such as the Journal of Marketing , Journal of Marketing Research , or Marketing Science . However, newer journals such as Consumption, Markets, & Culture and Marketing Theory began to publish papers that drew on the various interpretive, ethnographic, humanistic, or introspective methods.

2.7 Aims after 1980

In 1974, consumer research finally got its own journal with the launch of the Journal of Consumer Research ( JCR ). The early editors of JCR —especially Bob Ferber, Hal Kassarjian, and Jim Bettman—held a rather divergent attitude about the importance or even the desirability of managerial relevance as a key goal of consumer studies. Under their influence, some researchers began to believe that consumer behavior is a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right—purely for the purpose of understanding it better. The journal incorporated articles from an array of methodologies: quantitative (both secondary data analysis and experimental techniques) and qualitative. The “right” balance between theoretical insight and substantive relevance—which are not in inherent conflict—is a matter of debate to this day and will likely continue to be debated well into the future.

2.8 Summary—the three I’s after 1980

In sum, beginning in the early-1980s, consumer research branched out. Much of the work in consumer studies remained within the earlier tradition of the three R’s—that is, rationality (an information-processing decision-oriented buyer), rigor (neo-positivistic experimental designs and quantitative techniques), and relevance (usefulness to marketing managers). Nonetheless, many studies embraced enlarged views of the three major aspects that might be called the three I’s —that is, irrationality (broadened perspectives that incorporate illogical, heuristic, experiential, or hedonic aspects of consumption), interpretation (various qualitative or “postmodern” approaches), and intrinsic motivation (the joy of pursuing a managerially irrelevant consumer study purely for the sake of satisfying one’s own curiosity, without concern for whether it does or does not help a marketing practitioner make a bigger profit).

3 The present—the consumer behavior field today

3.1 present concepts.

In recent years, technological changes have significantly influenced the nature of consumption as the customer journey has transitioned to include more interaction on digital platforms that complements interaction in physical stores. This shift poses a major conceptual challenge in understanding if and how these technological changes affect consumption. Does the medium through which consumption occurs fundamentally alter the psychological and social processes identified in earlier research? In addition, this shift allows us to collect more data at different stages of the customer journey, which further allows us to analyze behavior in ways that were not previously available.

Revisiting the ICABS framework, many of the previous concepts are still present, but we are now addressing them through a lens of technological change (Table 2 )

. In recent years, a number of concepts (e.g., identity, beliefs/lay theories, affect as information, self-control, time, psychological ownership, search for meaning and happiness, social belonging, creativity, and status) have emerged as integral factors that influence and are influenced by consumption. To better understand these concepts, a number of influential theories from social psychology have been adopted into consumer behavior research. Self-construal (Markus and Kitayama 1991 ), regulatory focus (Higgins 1998 ), construal level (Trope and Liberman 2010 ), and goal systems (Kruglanski et al. 2002 ) all provide social-cognition frameworks through which consumer behavior researchers study the psychological processes behind consumer behavior. This “adoption” of social psychological theories into consumer behavior is a symbiotic relationship that further enhances the theories. Tory Higgins happily stated that he learned more about his own theories from the work of marketing academics (he cited Angela Lee and Michel Pham) in further testing and extending them.

3.2 Present Methods

Not only have technological advancements changed the nature of consumption but they have also significantly influenced the methods used in consumer research by adding both new sources of data and improved analytical tools (Ding et al. 2020 ). Researchers continue to use traditional methods from psychology in empirical research (scale development, laboratory experiments, quantitative analyses, etc.) and interpretive approaches in qualitative research. Additionally, online experiments using participants from panels such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific have become commonplace in the last decade. While they raise concerns about the quality of the data and about the external validity of the results, these online experiments have greatly increased the speed and decreased the cost of collecting data, so researchers continue to use them, albeit with some caution. Reminiscent of the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s about the use of student subjects, the projectability of the online responses and of an increasingly conditioned “professional” group of online respondents (MTurkers) is a major concern.

Technology has also changed research methodology. Currently, there is a large increase in the use of secondary data thanks to the availability of Big Data about online and offline behavior. Methods in computer science have advanced our ability to analyze large corpuses of unstructured data (text, voice, visual images) in an efficient and rigorous way and, thus, to tap into a wealth of nuanced thoughts, feelings, and behaviors heretofore only accessible to qualitative researchers through laboriously conducted content analyses. There are also new neuro-marketing techniques like eye-tracking, fMRI’s, body arousal measures (e.g., heart rate, sweat), and emotion detectors that allow us to measure automatic responses. Lastly, there has been an increase in large-scale field experiments that can be run in online B2C marketplaces.

3.3 Present Aims

Along with a focus on real-world observations and data, there is a renewed emphasis on managerial relevance. Countless conference addresses and editorials in JCR , JCP , and other journals have emphasized the importance of making consumer research useful outside of academia—that is, to help companies, policy makers, and consumers. For instance, understanding how the “new” consumer interacts over time with other consumers and companies in the current marketplace is a key area for future research. As global and social concerns become more salient in all aspects of life, issues of long-term sustainability, social equality, and ethical business practices have also become more central research topics. Fortunately, despite this emphasis on relevance, theoretical contributions and novel ideas are still highly valued. An appropriate balance of theory and practice has become the holy grail of consumer research.

The effects of the current trends in real-world consumption will increase in magnitude with time as more consumers are digitally native. Therefore, a better understanding of current consumer behavior can give us insights and help predict how it will continue to evolve in the years to come.

4 The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040

The other papers use 2030 as a target year but we asked our survey respondents to make predictions for 2040 and thus we have a different future target year.

Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand for a single person to hazard a guess about the state of the consumer behavior field twenty years from now. Therefore, predictions from 34 active consumer researchers were collected to address this task. Here, we briefly summarize those predictions.

4.1 Future Concepts

While few respondents proffered guesses regarding specific concepts that would be of interest twenty years from now, many suggested broad topics and trends they expected to see in the field. Expectations for topics could largely be grouped into three main areas. Many suspected that we will be examining essentially the same core topics, perhaps at a finer-grained level, from different perspectives or in ways that we currently cannot utilize due to methodological limitations (more on methods below). A second contingent predicted that much research would center on the impending crises the world faces today, most mentioning environmental and social issues (the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet begun when these predictions were collected and, unsurprisingly, was not anticipated by any of our respondents). The last group, citing the widely expected profound impact of AI on consumers’ lives, argued that AI and other technology-related topics will be dominant subjects in consumer research circa 2040.

While the topic of technology is likely to be focal in the field, our current expectations for the impact of technology on consumers’ lives are narrower than it should be. Rather than merely offering innumerable conveniences and experiences, it seems likely that technology will begin to be integrated into consumers’ thoughts, identities, and personal relationships—probably sooner than we collectively expect. The integration of machines into humans’ bodies and lives will present the field with an expanding list of research questions that do not exist today. For example, how will the concepts of the self, identity, privacy, and goal pursuit change when web-connected technology seamlessly integrates with human consciousness and cognition? Major questions will also need to be answered regarding philosophy of mind, ethics, and social inequality. We suspect that the impact of technology on consumers and consumer research will be far broader than most consumer-behavior researchers anticipate.

As for broader trends within consumer research, there were two camps: (1) those who expect (or hope) that dominant theories (both current and yet to be developed) will become more integrated and comprehensive and (2) those who expect theoretical contributions to become smaller and smaller, to the point of becoming trivial. Both groups felt that current researchers are filling smaller cracks than before, but disagreed on how this would ultimately be resolved.

4.2 Future Methods

As was the case with concepts, respondents’ expectations regarding consumer-research methodologies in 2030 can also be divided into three broad baskets. Unsurprisingly, many indicated that we would be using many technologies not currently available or in wide use. Perhaps more surprising was that most cited the use of technology such as AI, machine-learning algorithms, and robots in designing—as opposed to executing or analyzing—experiments. (Some did point to the use of technologies such as virtual reality in the actual execution of experiments.) The second camp indicated that a focus on reliable and replicable results (discussed further below) will encourage a greater tendency for pre-registering studies, more use of “Big Data,” and a demand for more studies per paper (versus more papers per topic, which some believe is a more fruitful direction). Finally, the third lot indicated that “real data” would be in high demand, thereby necessitating the use of incentive-compatible, consequential dependent variables and a greater prevalence of field studies in consumer research.

As a result, young scholars would benefit from developing a “toolkit” of methodologies for collecting and analyzing the abundant new data of interest to the field. This includes (but is not limited to) a deep understanding of designing and implementing field studies (Gerber and Green 2012 ), data analysis software (R, Python, etc.), text mining and analysis (Humphreys and Wang 2018 ), and analytical tools for other unstructured forms of data such as image and sound. The replication crisis in experimental research means that future scholars will also need to take a more critical approach to validity (internal, external, construct), statistical power, and significance in their work.

4.3 Future Aims

While there was an air of existential concern about the future of the field, most agreed that the trend will be toward increasing the relevance and reliability of consumer research. Specifically, echoing calls from journals and thought leaders, the respondents felt that papers will need to offer more actionable implications for consumers, managers, or policy makers. However, few thought that this increased focus would come at the expense of theoretical insights, suggesting a more demanding overall standard for consumer research in 2040. Likewise, most felt that methodological transparency, open access to data and materials, and study pre-registration will become the norm as the field seeks to allay concerns about the reliability and meaningfulness of its research findings.

4.4 Summary - Future research questions and directions

Despite some well-justified pessimism, the future of consumer research is as bright as ever. As we revised this paper amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that many aspects of marketplace behavior, consumption, and life in general will change as a result of this unprecedented global crisis. Given this, and the radical technological, social, and environmental changes that loom on the horizon, consumer researchers will have a treasure trove of topics to tackle in the next ten years, many of which will carry profound substantive importance. While research approaches will evolve, the core goals will remain consistent—namely, to generate theoretically insightful, empirically supported, and substantively impactful research (Table 3 ).

5 Conclusion

At any given moment in time, the focal concepts, methods, and aims of consumer-behavior scholarship reflect both the prior development of the field and trends in the larger scientific community. However, despite shifting trends, the core of the field has remained constant—namely, to understand the motivations, thought processes, and experiences of individuals as they consume goods, services, information, and other offerings, and to use these insights to develop interventions to improve both marketing strategy for firms and consumer welfare for individuals and groups. Amidst the excitement of new technologies, social trends, and consumption experiences, it is important to look back and remind ourselves of the insights the field has already generated. Effectively integrating these past findings with new observations and fresh research will help the field advance our understanding of consumer behavior.

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Malter, M.S., Holbrook, M.B., Kahn, B.E. et al. The past, present, and future of consumer research. Mark Lett 31 , 137–149 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-020-09526-8

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A complete guide to customer research — with templates

What makes your product great? What problems does it solve? People will look to you — the product manager — as the expert on these questions. But you know that the answers are not based solely on your own opinions and experience. The most important input often comes from somewhere else: customers.

Understanding customers is integral to developing a lovable product . As a product manager, you will want to explore everything from your users' demographics to their inner motivations and struggles. This process of sussing out their needs and challenges is called customer research.

Conducting customer research is complex and dynamic work, where your curiosity is a tremendous asset. To plan, gather, and analyze feedback, product managers use a wide variety of methods — qualitative, quantitative, and a mix of both. You can take a highly sophisticated approach to this, but many times effective customer research entails talking to customers and using simple tools or templates to analyze their feedback.

In this guide, you will learn the fundamentals of conducting primary research so you can better understand the folks you are trying to help. You can try seven customer research templates to help you experiment with different methods and save time in the research process.

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Customer research is an essential component of product strategy — alongside competitor analysis , market research, and overall business needs. The insights you glean from meeting and surveying customers help to shape your strategic initiatives , ensuring that your team is poised to deliver what people really want from your product.

A key reason to perform customer research is to gain new perspectives on your product. Your customers may tell you things you never realized — hidden problems, unique ways of completing tasks, and even alternate use cases. What you believe matters most about your product may not even be on your customers' radar.

Let's say your product has a reporting feature with low usage . Your team decides to give the reporting interface a major upgrade. You spend the time and resources to build these updates — only to scratch your head when there is no uptick in usage. What went wrong?

If you breezed past talking to your customers, it is possible that the interface was not the factor keeping them from engaging. Maybe they prefer to use a separate reporting tool — in which case, an integration capability would have been a much more valuable feature to build.

Customer research helps you avoid spending time solving proble ms that do not exist — and highlights the ones that are real and deserving of your attention. This way, you know where to focus your efforts for the best chance of making your customers happy and meeting business goals.

How much customer feedback is the right amount?

The short answer? It depends. Your specific goals, the scope of your research, and the stage of your product's development all play a role. Here are some things to keep in mind when determining the right amount of customer feedback to collect:

Understand your goals Are you looking to validate a new product idea or improve an existing product? Do you need to better understand customer pain points or gather usability insights? These answers will shape your product development goals and dictate the depth and breadth of feedback required.

Define your sample size Consider the size of your target audience and customer base. In some cases, a smaller sample size can provide valuable insights, especially if you are conducting in-depth qualitative research . For quantitative research, a larger sample size might be necessary to ensure statistical relevancy.

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Include a mix of feedback channels Analyzing feedback from different channels can provide unique perspectives and insights. Experiment with a variety of feedback methods and channels — such as releasing surveys, conducting interviews , and reviewing your social media and customer support interactions.

Consider resource constraints Think about the time, budget, and staff you have available for collecting and analyzing feedback. Balance the scope of your research with what you can realistically manage.

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Primary vs. secondary customer research

Product managers will use both primary and secondary customer research to gather information. Briefly, the difference is:

Primary customer research refers to gathering your own data and feedback firsthand via interviews, focus groups, surveys, and other methods.

Secondary customer research refers to findings gleaned from external sources like analyst reports and third-party surveys.

Both types can be valuable, but when it comes to your goals as a product manager, primary research is superior. While secondary research will help you understand demographics and broader trends, primary research allows you to drill down into the details of your specific product and target audience.

Your customers' own experiences are invaluable and one of the surest signals to creating a lovable product. For this guide, we will focus on the fundamentals of conducting primary research.

How do product managers gather customer feedback?

How do product managers come up with new ideas for a product?

How to conduct customer research

On a basic level, customer research entails reaching out to current or potential customers and gathering feedback from them via direct conversations or more indirect methods (like online surveys). Advanced tools such as product analytics and idea management software can certainly augment your approach — but are not necessary to get started.

Follow these steps to conduct your own primary customer research:

1. Define your objective Outline your research goals and determine what it is you really want to learn. For example, your objective could be to learn broadly about your customers' business goals or gain a deeper understanding of their experience with a specific feature set.

2. Decide which customers to contact Your objectives will help you decide who to speak with — especially if your product caters to a diverse group of customers. Think about current and potential customers and form a list of people to reach out to.

3. Prepare If you are leading an interview or focus group, meet with your product teammates to prepare your questions. Keep in mind you may need to coordinate with other team members who want to sit in on discussions. If you are conducting a survey, build it — then decide how and when to distribute it.

4. Start your research Conduct your interviews or hit "send" on your survey When talking directly with customers, remember to listen more than you speak. Ask meaningful follow-up questions to encourage deeper thinking and discussion.

5. Analyze, summarize, and share your findings Look for trends in the feedback you received. What did customers agree on? What were the most popular ideas or recurring pain points? Find common threads and share the findings with your team. Together, you can discuss and prioritize the customer ideas that support your overall goals — and promote those ideas to your product roadmap .

6. Repeat Customer research is an ongoing part of product management. You will need to collect feedback from many customers to make informed product decisions. And with every new product launch or major release, you may need to start fresh with a new objective and customer set.

Because it is ongoing, it helps to keep all of your customer research organized. You want to be clear on how your findings will inform the features you develop. For example, the Research tab in Aha! helps you collect whiteboards, interview notes, and ideas right on feature cards.

Editor's note: Although the video below still shows core functionality within Aha! software, some of the interface might be out of date. View our knowledge base for the most updated insights into Aha! software.

Related: 35+ customer questions for product innovation

Get started with customer research templates

Customer research templates offer a simple way to start discovering who your audience really is and what matters to them. Using templates helps you add much-needed structure to your customer research process. Below, you will find an assortment of templates to try — from planning to interviews, surveys, and summarizing your findings.

Aha! software customer interview template

Customer research planning template, customer interview notes template.

Customer survey template

Customer feedback poll template

Customer focus group discussion template, customer research presentation template.

This customer interview template is a great one to start with. It is a guided template with helpful prompts and instructions in each section. This makes it simple to plan your conversations with customers so you can get the most out of each interview. It is available in Aha! software — which gives you a central place to document and organize your findings.

Start using this template now

This planning template helps you define your objectives, identify which customers to talk to, and prepare for your research session. It includes sections for customer profiles (personas, segments, and companies) to add context to your research group.

Customer research planning template / Image

An interview template will keep your notes organized during conversations with customers. It will also help you guide the flow of the interview and note any takeaways or action items to proceed with after the session ends. Feel free to customize the discussion questions to match your objective.

Customer interview notes template / Image

Customer research survey template

Customer surveys allow you to gather insights from more people in less time — with the added benefit of built-in reporting via online survey tools. This template will help you learn how to design an effective customer research survey and plan the demographic, use case, and customer satisfaction questions that you want to ask. It includes a blend of question types for both fixed and open-ended responses.

Polls offer a simple way to incorporate a quantitative component into your qualitative research. For example, you can quickly gauge the group's opinion on an idea by inserting a poll in an online focus group or empathy session . This template will help you jot down ideas for future polls.

Similar to the customer interview template, this focus group template will help you structure your session. It emphasizes a well-planned agenda over note-taking — encouraging you to be present in the discussion when you are facilitating a focus group. You can always record the focus group session to revisit later and take detailed notes.

Customer focus group discussion template / Imagae

After you have conducted your research, showcase your findings. Sharing results with your team makes customer research even more impactful — customer opinions matter at every level of the business and every stage of the product development process . This template will help you convey your top takeaways in a presentation.

Customer research presentation template / Image

Customer research has long been a core tenet of product management — and will continue to be. Templates like these will help you streamline your research process so you can focus on interacting with your audience and distilling insights from what they share.

When you are ready for a more comprehensive solution beyond simple templates, give idea management software like Aha! Ideas a try. With Aha! Ideas, you can crowdsource feedback via ideas portals, engage your community with empathy sessions, and analyze trends at the individual, organization, and segment levels. This helps you prioritize customer feedback with ease and promote the ideas that support your business goals directly to your product roadmap. (Note that you can use Aha! Ideas as a standalone tool, but many of its features are also available on Aha! Roadmaps . This makes it a great choice for teams seeking an all-encompassing product development solution.)

Discover exactly what your customers want. Start a free Aha! Ideas trial today.

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Consumer Research - Definitions, Examples and Benefits

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When it comes to how market research is perceived by those outside of the insights industry, most stakeholders see market research as simply a way to create the best products and services for their own customers. And while that is a part of it, there is a lot more to market and consumer research than that.

Consumer research is the path to take when businesses wish to better themselves and direct their endeavours towards success. Whether that is creating new or refining current business strategies, finding the pain points in their customer experience, or even creating new internal policies and processes to become more efficient than ever before. All of these use cases contribute to building the best version of the brand and business as long as stakeholders are relying on quality insights.

In this guide, we’ll discuss:

1. The definition of consumer research 2. The power of consumer research 3. The benefits of consumer research 4. How behaviour influences innovation 5. How to spot behavioural trends and patterns 6. How to conduct consumer research 7. The tools and types of consumer research 8. Best practices for consumer research 9. Examples of good consumer research

This is one of our longer articles, so if you’re looking for something specific then you can use the quick navigation links above to jump to each section of the guide.

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research has cultivated a very unique reputation for being the way to gain information about a brand’s consumers. With dedicated consumer insights, brands and stakeholders can make sure that they are creating not only the right products but also the right business strategies and communicating in the right way to immerse consumers in their brand experience. And because of this success, the term consumer research has become synonymous with market research. Consumer research is the first thing that typically comes to mind when stakeholders are asked to think about market research and its popular use cases.

The phrase ‘consumer research’ is typically used interchangeably with ‘customer research’ across all industries, with the term ‘consumer’ here taken to mean ‘those who consume the brand’s experience, product and services'. So in this context, consumers and customers are one and the same.

Definition, Reputation and Importance

Based on the above concept, consumer research is market research that is specifically focussed on exploring the attitudes, opinions and experiences of a business’ current customers and/or potential future customers.

This reputation has come around for a reason, because market researchers are very good at what they do. We have made sure that we can recruit and engage participants with the best of them, with our efforts leading to unique research experiences that generate high-quality insights that influence key decisions across entire industries.

The Power of Consumer Research

Consumer research is incredibly powerful. Conducting consumer research in the right way can save struggling businesses from abject failure, and drive moderately successful businesses into the history books under the definition of ‘success’.

Consumer research was one of the first use cases of early market research. In a review of early consumer research, Helgeson et al. states that, “In 1950, seven percent of the articles reviewed were consumer research articles. By 1981, 34 percent of the articles were consumer research articles.” This accelerated growth of articles and information gathering about the topic of consumer behaviour so early on in the evolution of consumer and market research can be attributed to the creation of the journals of Consumer Research and Advances in Consumer Research in the 1970s.

The increase in interest and development in consumer behaviour indicates that many businesses started feeling the power of consumer research from the very beginning. For example, in the 1950s, Ford Motor Company conducted a ten-year-long consumer research project that resulted in the ‘Edsel’, a completely customisable car that truly served the customers’ needs and was supposed to revolutionise the industry. Ford used focus groups, in-depth interviews and ‘motivational research’ to help design the perfect car for the consumer, and with his results it’s fair to assume that at some point in that 10 year-long project, Ford and his insight team cam not the revelation that he could not satisfy every consumer’s need in one single car, which is how the ‘customisable’ option came into being.

While this car never ended up coming to market (due to cost and an underperformance issue), Ford still learnt about a concept that most businesses still struggle with now - the power of consumer insights can transform a business when given the chance, but insights are nothing without the ability and resources to act on them.

Since then, consumer research has undergone significant evolution since Ford attempted to use it to revolutionise the automotive industry, with technological advancements especially in the past decade allowing insight experts to innovate creatively and come up with ways to overcome traditional challenges and reap many of the benefits in one fell swoop.

Benefits of Consumer Research

With the power, importance and reputation of consumer research outlined for all to see, it’s time to explore the impacts and benefits. The power of consumer research impacts two very specific areas and audiences:

1. Understanding Customer Behaviour for Innovation

Now that businesses are in the practice of discovering the next new thing and understand the evolution they will have to undertake in order to stay relevant to their target audience, they are on the right track to truly understand the power of consumer research and insights. Innovation happens every day, but successful innovation happens only when fuelled with the right insights at the right time.

Those insights are gathered directly from the mouths of consumers. Conducting consumer research to gain insights directly from the source allows for no mistakes and helps insight teams to form a complete picture of the brand’s consumers - their likes, dislikes, their demographic information, their common experiences and most obnoxious pain points, all at the very least.

Each insight gained is like a puzzle piece that, when all put together in the right way, paints the picture of the consumer’s experience, opinions and needs, and how the brand is working to serve those needs.

There are numerous ways to act on the insights gathered. Some brand stakeholders take these consumer insights and use them to create customer personas - a character that represents a segment of their consumer base - which can then be used in storytelling efforts as return characters. The more these personas are used, the more they’re recognised by stakeholders across the business and kept in mind when key decisions arise. This is one example of how relevant innovation can occur organically on a daily basis. However, it’s important that when using these personas that the persona itself is kept up to date and accurate when representing their particular segment . Use continuous insight generation to help the persona evolve as the segment does. Ultimately, as long as the method used helps the insights reach more stakeholders across the business efficiently, and influences those daily decision-making processes, insight teams and board members can use any tactic to communicate insights.

‘‘With our customer panel, we are able to amplify the voice of our customers across the organisation to make sure all teams are staying customer-focused.” - Lisa Hulme-Vickerstaff, Head of Insight at Lowell

2. Spotting Trends, Patterns and Needs

Understanding present and past consumer backgrounds, needs, experiences and opinions are one thing, but their behavioural patterns and what incites their actions is typically quite another.

Conducting consumer research to monitor and track consumer behaviour is crucial to stakeholders who need authentic insights to use in their decision-making processes both present and future. Since the very beginning, insight teams have relied on traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups to generate the right data and hunt the ‘why’ behind consumer actions and perceptions, but there is one fundamental issue that most insight experts struggle to overcome - the common gap present between what consumers say they do and what they would actually do in any given scenario.

Consumers typically think they would act in a logical way when imagining a scenario, but when placed in that scenario itself, faced with the real pressures, they would act more emotionally and instinctually, which is hard to communicate in a written or spoken response based in theory.

Tracking to understand a consumer’s actual behaviour will bolster the business’ insight generation efforts, almost eradicating that gap altogether and helping them track those behaviours more effectively. If it doesn’t eradicate the gap, then those insights will at least provide some insight into why that gap is there so insight experts can account for it in the future. This type of research is typically conducted in a long-term research experience that insight teams take on can use to generate continuous insights and observations on consumers’ actions over their words. Using documentary qualitative data, stakeholders have access to a previously under-utilised resource that better informs key decisions.

How to Conduct Consumer Research

When thinking about the best way to conduct consumer research, the eternal dilemma of the consumer perception-action gap mentioned before is one that will plague all insight experts until we discover a way to account for that gap.

This is something that insight professionals have wrestled with for decades after the initial discovery, and while there have been advancements (such as the development of system 1 and system 2 behavioural theories), there has never been a definite answer or path to follow in order to navigate this particular challenge. However, there is a multitude of tools and methods at insight teams’ disposal, and picking the right one for their research experience will determine their success.

Tools and Types of Consumer Research

Qualitative and Quantitative Research is the first obvious answer to how to conduct consumer research. Since the inception of data and insights, market research professionals have created a myriad of tools, methods and tactics to help create the insights industry, home to the insight experts who are here to help businesses and stakeholders understand themselves, their consumers and their future. Through this, we have developed numerous research methods, from the humble survey and in-depth interview to the more modern online methods such as mobile ethnography that help deeply connect consumers, researchers and stakeholders from around the world in mere seconds.

There are numerous market research methods that fall into the category of quantitative or qualitative research, and many more insight platforms on the market dedicated to hosting more traditional research experiences for stakeholders who want to use this traditional line of research to better understand their customers in a formal research setting.

Motivational research is the second consumer research technique to mention, mainly because it was one of the first dedicated market research techniques developed that incorporated psychoanalytical tactics to help insight teams better understand consumer behaviour. Developed by Ernest Dichter in the 1940s, this method was designed with the core belief that individuals don’t always behave in a way that reflects their views, so researchers could use this method to expose their true, unconscious beliefs. The tools used to conduct this research initially were in-depth interviews, but now we can expand this to include other tools such as video focus groups (with break out options for individual questioning), question boards, and more creative qualitative tools that allow insight teams to connect with participants on both an individual and a group level for comparison.

One of the ways that insight experts can conduct motivational research or more traditional research experiences in a formal, structured environment is to create an online dedicated customer community. These are crucial to the success of businesses, whether they are looking to create a positively impactful customer experience, future-proof their primary products and services, benchmark themselves against their direct competitors, or even innovate processes and policies internally to help them become a more efficient and reliable version of themselves. Online customer communities have been called a brand’s secret weapon when building up brand loyalty and skyrocketing themselves to the forefront of their industry.

Market research has taken a lot of tactics and advice from the field of behaviour , whether that’s from behavioural science , behavioural economics , psychology, sociology, or anthropology. These studies of human behaviour in many aspects of life can be directly implemented into market research studies. With insight professionals struggling to understand the unconscious biases impacting consumers’ everyday lives, it’s no wonder that we have turned to these traditionally academic pursuits to help light the way. Insight teams are now using actions to de-bias research data or mitigate the presence of bias during data collection whether that’s from the consumers or researchers.

Behavioural science methods have stretched into most modern forms of market research, including social media intelligence and passive data collection methods such as geolocation and biometric wearable research, with this data being sent to insight teams to analyse and better understand consumer actions over perceptions.

Social media intelligence allows stakeholders to understand how consumers behave in a more informal setting than online customer communities, where consumers can communicate with each other on topics of their own devising without the sense of being observed by insight professionals. Social media platforms can be used similar to dedicated online customer research communities, with insight experts using the brand’s channel to spark topics if they do desire and to communicate with consumers through their comments section and direct messaging, but these platforms are already recruited with a significant amount of consumers that have already started sharing their opinions and experiences with the brand. Social media teams will be able to work well with research teams on this as they will have been dealing with both complaints and recommendations from consumers across the globe.

But, however comfortable digital natives find themselves discussing and connecting with each other online, this is a far from a natural setting. The anonymity or customisability provided by this online setting means that consumers can pretend to be who they’re not. While most of them will have a profile on one website that is completely authentic, they can also create alter egos or different personas to help fulfil or explore a different aspect of themselves or who they want to be. So with this danger outlined from the beginning, insight teams can still take good advantage of this platform of already recruited consumers to understand more about their behaviour, needs opinions and experiences with the brand.

Passive data collection methods are worth considering when it comes to consumer research, geolocation and biometric data as stated before are easily available now with the commercialisation of smartphones and smart watches. Geolocation data can be obtained through brand apps on smartphones, and then used to understand when a consumer interacts with a brand, how frequently they interact, and what they are focussed on when interacting with the brand (e.g. the products/services they buy can be gained from the receipts or documented on the consumer’s profile in their order history).

Biometric data has been historically a little difficult to gain access to since it's been categorised as more personal data than consumer data. But now with smart watches acting as trackers for fitness apps and recording data such as pulse rate, certain insight professionals who have access to that data can cross-examine the geolocation data from the tracker with the pulse rate data to understand how their consumers feel when they come across their store, their products, etc. and this unconscious reaction could help them build better customer experiences that get their heart rate pumping.

Best Practices: Tactics and Techniques

So, once the tools and types of consumer research have been picked, it’s time to look at the best practices that help steer insight experts and stakeholders towards success. There are a number of tactics and techniques needed to help conduct quality consumer research:

1. Recruit and Segment

Should insight teams recruit their participants and then segment them? Or segment to understand their target audience better and then recruit the right people into their research project? Both can be done and lead to success, but when it comes to consumer research, insight teams should segment their consumer base first to make sure they only recruit the right people for their research project.

Consumer segmentation is the first step to understanding your customer base and identifying the right research participants. The research conducted off the back of this sequence will help insight teams improve the research relevance and focus, create research tasks that better engage the research participants based on their segmented characteristics, and build deeper connections between customers and stakeholders, all of which provide a better foundation to build on and engage those research respondents and stakeholders in the research experience. It will also lead to better quality and truly relevant consumer insights.

2. Participant Engagement

After the foundation has been laid, there are ways to capitalise on it and create more ways for participants to engage with the research.

One way we can encourage participant engagement is through the building of trust. Participants won’t want to hand over their personal data or opinions on a platform or to researchers and stakeholders that they don’t trust. This can manifest in two different ways: firstly, on a fundamental level, participants need to trust the technology and the researchers that brands are using to generate these insights. With many issues nowadays with sensitive data being leaked or used against them to extort something out of them, consumers are becoming very careful with the websites that they’re inputting personal data into. Secondly, if they don’t trust the researchers gathering that data, consumers won’t want to hand over their data to people who they believe might misuse it or misplace it. Being transparent with data handling and privacy, or partnering with a research agency that is transparent with data handling and privacy is critical for a successful consumer research experience.

Another way to engage participants once they’ve been mollified in their data security concerns is through moderation and communication throughout the research project. Skilled researchers can get a lot out of even the most stingy of participants. There are a number of communication tools such as emails for task and incentive reminders, comments on research tasks, and then newsletters at the end to provide updates on how the insights have been used or feedback on what strategies have been impacted by the data consumers share. Closing the feedback loop in this way doesn’t just directly impact the growth and evolution of the brand, it also positively impacts the level of consumer trust in the brand, the relationship between brand and consumer, the marketing and sales processes and the research success rates at the very least.

3. Design Human-centric Research

Whether insight teams subscribe to the ‘human experience’ or ‘participant experience’ research concepts, there’s no getting away from the fact that designing research projects with your participants in mind will increase the number of engagement researchers get out of their consumers.

“Creating research experiences for real people is integral to enhancing the value of research for businesses.” - Maria Twigge, Research Director at FlexMR

Designing research experiences takes a lot of work, but it’s worth it for the benefits insight teams can reap - such as an expanded understanding of what questions stakeholders actually need to ask consumers, accounting for the context in which they are posed, and a building a way to bridge the gap to full consumer behaviour understanding. Consumer segmentation at the start of the research experience to help identify the research sample is one of the best ways to understand which consumers will be populating the project, and then insight teams can think about which tools and platforms to use to make sure those consumers are able to navigate through to the end the experience.

Choosing the right tools will also help to encourage and stimulate the right conversations and insight generation opportunities outside of scheduled tasks, which is extremely useful in dedicated customer communities that have areas on the platform where consumers can converse with each other about the brand, the tasks, the questions posed, etc. in downtimes whenever they feel they have the time and inclination.

Understanding the right tools to use also means knowing which secondary methods to employ. While research panels and communities are great platforms for primary research, researchers can also use data mining techniques for social media to gain secondary data, or even gain access to similar research studies so they have data to use in hypotheses that primary data could confirm or deny.

4. Engage Stakeholders

Motivate stakeholders to engage and closely connect brand and customer - that’s the aim of most consumer research attempts, but it can be tricky when stakeholders have numerous other priorities and responsibilities to attend to.

Engaging stakeholders in the research experience has been proven to aid the chances of insights activation both during and at the end of the research project, but getting stakeholders to do more than observe the research report has been a core challenge that we have yet to overcome. Each stakeholder is unique, and as such requires different motivations to engage in the research experience. But educating them on market research, the techniques being used, the consumers being surveyed, etc. and building up their knowledge of the project does help our chances of capturing and keeping their attention.

Stakeholders hold valuable contextual information about the business and the research objectives, which can help insight experts maintain the research project’s relevance throughout any evolution or obstacles that may occur. Allowing them to divulge and see exactly how they can shape a research experience encourages an attachment to the project, questions about how it’s going and maybe even an appearance in an observational sense as research tasks take place.

Connecting stakeholders to the project itself motivate them to better understand the insights that are the result of the project and connect it easier to the business objectives, strategies and other contexts that might be influenced by the insights. This then sparks valuable change that consumers actually want and need, and this, in turn, fuels a connection and closeness between the brand (stakeholders) and consumers that might not have previously been possible. All because of properly conducted and immersive consumer research experiences.

Examples of Consumer Research

The following examples are applications of consumer research taken from FlexMR's library of case studies. In each example, we detail the role that data played in informing key business decisions and the relationship between commercial results & consumer understanding.

Isagenix is a great example of consumer research done well. Founded in 2002, Isagenix is a multinational direct sales company that manufactures and distributes a range of science-based health and wellbeing products. The company seeks to inspire and empower their customers to live their best life through a journey of nutrition, health, and overall wellness.

They created their IsaInsights panel on FlexMR’s InsightHub to achieve a rather ambitious goal: to evolve into the largest health and wellness company in the world. This panel, populated with customers and advocates, was well-used by their in-house insights team, who conducted a rather demanding research schedule that generated continuous insights to inform key decisions about their products, customer experience strategies and future opportunities.

These future opportunities were gathered by continuously recording customer habits, their likes and dislikes and which products they used, how and when. One particular success from this panel was the creation of their popular essential oils range, which was developed step by step in close accordance to the customer insights provided from a number of successive research projects.

To find out more about Isagenix’s research experience read our case study here .

Specsavers adverts are considered by some a national treasure, with their “Should’ve Gone to Specsavers” tagline one of the most recognisable and easily identifiable of most businesses in the United Kingdom. But Specsavers have a difficult job and balancing act when it comes to their carefully-cultivated reputation of being both a commercial brand AND a prominent healthcare professional.

Because of this, Specsavers need to make sure they’re hitting the right tone with every piece of communication and branding they create, and this can’t be achieved without some input from their customers. So Specsavers created a central hub of insights through their panel on the InsightHub so they could run their marketing campaigns, branded communications, product and service concept testing, etc. passed a sample of customers who provided their insights that would influence the final result.

“This [customer research] panel has been essential in balancing creative with clinical messaging in our Glaucoma marketing campaign. We are continuously getting clear answers to take to senior stakeholders and inform final decisions.” - Sarah Marquis, Customer Insights Manager at Specsavers

One memorable campaign that was created in accordance to customer insights was their “Don’t Lose the Picture” Glaucoma awareness campaign. To balance clinical and creative in a way that captured the audience’s attention as well as delivering vital public health information was crucial to getting the word out about the previously relatively unknown eye health disease, but thought thorough concept testing and retesting, Specsavers managed to create a well-received advert that rivalled the original “Should’ve Gone to Specsavers” campaign.

Find out more about Specsavers and their fantastic use of consumer research in our case study here .

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Consumer Behavior Research

Exploring the Depths of Consumer Insights for Strategic Business Growth

In an era where understanding consumer behavior is more than a competitive edge, it’s a survival imperative, NielsenIQ (NIQ) and GfK emerge as pivotal allies. This expertise is essential for businesses in B2C commerce, retail, and beyond, aiming to navigate the complex consumer landscape for informed, strategic decision-making.

Definition and Importance of Consumer Behavior Research

Consumer behavior research is the study of how individuals make decisions to spend their resources on consumption-related items. It involves understanding the what, why, when, and how of consumer purchases. This field is crucial for businesses as it sheds light on consumer preferences, buying patterns, and decision-making processes. By understanding these aspects, companies can tailor their products and marketing strategies effectively, ensuring alignment with consumer needs and market trends, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Overview of the Impact of Consumer Behavior Research on Marketing Strategies

The insights from consumer behavior research are instrumental in shaping targeted marketing strategies. By understanding consumer motivations and behaviors, businesses can create more relevant and engaging marketing messages, leading to improved customer engagement and retention. This research helps in segmenting the market, identifying potential customers, and understanding the factors that drive consumer decisions. It also aids in predicting future trends, enabling companies to stay ahead of the curve. Effective use of consumer behavior research can lead to the development of products and services that meet the evolving needs of consumers, thereby enhancing brand loyalty and market share.

Consumer and shopper insights

Understand consumer and shopper behavior, demographics, and loyalty with modern, representative consumer panels and customer survey capabilities.

Understanding Consumer Behavior

These diverse influences combine to form unique consumer profiles, which businesses must understand to effectively target their marketing efforts..

Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is influenced by a complex interplay of psychological, social, cultural, and personal factors. Psychological factors include perceptions, attitudes, and motivation, which guide consumers’ emotional and cognitive responses. Social factors encompass family, friends, and societal norms that shape buying habits through peer influence and social trends. Cultural factors involve the broader societal beliefs, values, and customs that dictate consumer behavior in a particular region. Personal factors such as age, occupation, lifestyle, and economic status also significantly impact consumer choices. These diverse influences combine to form unique consumer profiles, which businesses must understand to effectively target their marketing efforts.

The Role of Consumer Behavior in Decision Making

Consumer behavior plays a critical role in the decision-making process. It involves understanding how consumers decide upon their needs and wants, choose among products and brands, and determine their purchase methods. This knowledge is vital for businesses to design and position their offerings in a way that resonates with the target audience. Understanding consumer behavior helps in predicting how consumers will respond to marketing messages and product features, enabling businesses to tailor their strategies to meet consumer needs effectively. It also assists in identifying opportunities for new product development and market expansion.

Consumer Behavior Theories and Models

Consumer behavior theories and models provide frameworks for understanding and predicting consumer actions. The Stimulus-Response Model, for instance, illustrates how marketing stimuli and environmental factors influence consumer responses. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs explains consumer motivation in terms of fulfilling basic to complex needs. The Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior focus on the relationship between attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. The Consumer Decision Model outlines the cognitive process involving need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. These models help businesses in developing strategies that align with consumer psychology and behavioral patterns. They also assist in segmenting the market and targeting consumers with personalized marketing approaches, enhancing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and product offerings.

Research Methods in Consumer Behavior Research

Customer analytics is vital for businesses across various sectors, including FMCG, sales, and e-commerce. It enables companies to create personalized experiences, improve customer engagement, and boost retention, ultimately leading to increased revenue. By understanding consumer behavior through data analysis, businesses can make informed decisions that resonate with their target audience.

Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research methods in consumer behavior research involve structured techniques like surveys and questionnaires to collect numerical data. These methods are useful for gauging consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors across larger populations. Statistical analysis of this data helps in identifying trends, testing hypotheses, and making generalizations about consumer behavior. Quantitative research is valuable for businesses as it provides measurable and comparable insights that can guide strategic decision-making. It helps in understanding the magnitude of consumer responses to various marketing stimuli and in assessing the potential market size for new products or services.

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research methods in consumer behavior focus on understanding the deeper motivations, thoughts, and feelings of consumers. Techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups, and observational studies provide rich, detailed insights that are not typically captured through quantitative methods. This approach is crucial for exploring the underlying reasons behind consumer choices, preferences, and attitudes. Qualitative research helps businesses in gaining a deeper understanding of consumer experiences, emotions, and perceptions, which can be invaluable in developing more effective marketing strategies, product designs, and customer service approaches. It allows companies to explore new ideas and concepts with consumers, gaining insights that can lead to innovation and differentiation in the market.

Experimental Research in Consumer Behavior

Experimental research in consumer behavior involves manipulating one or more variables to observe the effect on another variable, typically consumer behavior or attitudes. This method is used to establish cause-and-effect relationships, providing insights into how changes in product features, pricing, or marketing strategies might influence consumer behavior. Controlled experiments, often conducted in laboratory settings or as field experiments, allow researchers to isolate the effects of specific variables. This type of research is particularly valuable for testing new products, pricing strategies, and marketing messages before full-scale implementation. It helps businesses in making informed decisions based on empirical evidence, reducing the risks associated with new initiatives.

Factors Affecting Consumer Behavior

Psychological factors.

Psychological factors play a significant role in shaping consumer behavior. These include individual motivations, perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. Motivation drives consumers to fulfill their needs and desires, influencing their buying decisions. Perception, how consumers interpret information, can significantly impact their choices, as it shapes their understanding of products and brands. Attitudes and beliefs, formed through experiences and social influences, guide consumer preferences and loyalty. Understanding these psychological factors is crucial for businesses as they influence how consumers view and interact with products and services. By aligning marketing strategies with consumer psychology, businesses can more effectively influence purchasing decisions and build stronger customer relationships.

Social Factors

Social factors significantly influence consumer behavior, encompassing the impact of society, family, and peer groups. Family members and friends can influence buying decisions through recommendations or shared experiences. Social groups, including social networks and communities, also play a role in shaping consumer preferences and behaviors. The influence of social media has become particularly significant, as it not only connects consumers but also serves as a platform for sharing opinions and experiences about products and services. Understanding these social dynamics is important for businesses as they can leverage social influences through targeted marketing strategies, influencer partnerships, and social media campaigns. Recognizing the power of social factors can help businesses in building brand awareness and loyalty among consumer groups.

Cultural Factors

Cultural factors are deeply ingrained elements that influence consumer behavior, including values, beliefs, customs, and traditions. These factors vary across different regions and societies, affecting how consumers perceive and interact with products and services. Cultural influences can determine consumer preferences, buying habits, and brand perceptions. For instance, color symbolism, dietary preferences, and language can all vary significantly between cultures, impacting marketing strategies and product development. Businesses must understand and respect these cultural nuances to effectively cater to diverse consumer markets. Adapting products and marketing messages to align with cultural values and norms can significantly enhance a brand’s appeal and acceptance in different markets.

Personal Factors

Personal factors, including age, gender, occupation, lifestyle, and economic status, also significantly influence consumer behavior. These factors determine individual needs, preferences, and purchasing power. For example, younger consumers may prioritize trendy and innovative products, while older consumers might value functionality and durability. Lifestyle choices, such as health consciousness or environmental awareness, can also drive consumer preferences and choices. Economic factors, such as income and economic conditions, influence consumers’ ability to purchase and their sensitivity to price changes. Understanding these personal factors is crucial for businesses to segment their market effectively and tailor their products and marketing strategies to meet the specific needs of different consumer groups.

Consumer Purchase Decision Making

Stages of the consumer purchase decision-making process.

The consumer purchase decision-making process typically involves several key stages: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior.

In the problem recognition stage, consumers identify a need or desire.

During the information search, they seek out information about products or services that can fulfill their need. In the evaluation stage, consumers compare different options based on attributes such as price, quality, and brand reputation.

The purchase decision involves choosing a product and making the purchase. Finally, in the post-purchase stage, consumers evaluate their satisfaction with the purchase, which can influence future buying decisions and brand loyalty.

Understanding these stages is essential for businesses to effectively influence consumers at each step, from raising awareness to ensuring post-purchase satisfaction.

Influences on Consumer Purchase Decisions

Consumer purchase decisions are influenced by a multitude of factors, including product attributes, brand reputation, marketing messages, social influences, and personal preferences. Product features such as quality, price, and usability are key determinants of consumer choices. Brand reputation, built over time through consistent quality and marketing efforts, also significantly impacts purchase decisions. Marketing messages and advertising play a crucial role in shaping consumer perceptions and driving demand. Social influences, including recommendations from family and friends, as well as online reviews and influencer endorsements, can sway consumer decisions. Personal factors such as individual needs, preferences, and financial constraints also play a critical role. Businesses must consider these diverse influences when developing products and crafting marketing strategies to effectively appeal to their target audience.

Impulse Buying Behavior

Impulse buying behavior refers to unplanned purchases made by consumers, often driven by emotional factors rather than rational decision-making. This type of behavior is typically triggered by external stimuli such as attractive product displays, promotional offers, or persuasive sales tactics. Emotional responses, such as excitement or the desire for instant gratification, also play a significant role in impulse buying. Retailers often leverage this behavior by strategically placing impulse items near checkout areas or using limited-time offers to create a sense of urgency. Understanding the triggers of impulse buying can help businesses in designing marketing strategies and store layouts that encourage such purchases, potentially increasing sales and customer engagement.

Online Shopping and Consumer Behavior

Impact of online shopping on consumer behavior.

The rise of online shopping has significantly impacted consumer behavior, offering convenience, a wider selection of products, and often competitive pricing. Online shopping has changed the way consumers research products, compare prices, and make purchasing decisions. The ease of access to a vast array of products and the ability to shop at any time have increased the frequency and diversity of purchases. Online reviews and ratings have also become important factors in the decision-making process, as consumers increasingly rely on the opinions of others. Additionally, the personalized shopping experiences offered by many online retailers, through targeted recommendations and tailored marketing messages, have further influenced consumer buying habits. Understanding these shifts in consumer behavior is crucial for businesses to adapt their strategies for the digital marketplace, ensuring they meet the evolving needs and expectations of online shoppers.

Factors Influencing Online Buying Behavior

Several factors influence online buying behavior, including website usability, product variety, pricing, customer reviews, and the overall shopping experience. A user-friendly website with easy navigation and a seamless checkout process is crucial for attracting and retaining online shoppers. A diverse product range and competitive pricing are also key factors in attracting consumers. Customer reviews and ratings significantly impact purchase decisions, as they provide social proof and reduce perceived risk. The overall shopping experience, including customer service, delivery options, and return policies, also plays a vital role in influencing online buying behavior. Security and privacy concerns are additional considerations, as consumers are increasingly aware of data protection and online fraud. Businesses must address these factors to create a compelling online shopping experience that meets consumer expectations and drives online sales.

Comparison of Online and Offline Consumer Behavior

Online and offline consumer behaviors exhibit distinct differences, influenced by the unique aspects of each shopping environment. Online shopping offers convenience, a broader selection, and often more competitive pricing, leading to different purchasing patterns compared to offline shopping. Consumers tend to spend more time researching and comparing products online, while offline shopping is often driven by immediate needs and sensory experiences. The tactile experience and instant gratification of offline shopping are not replicable online, but the online environment offers personalized recommendations and a wealth of product information. Offline shopping also provides opportunities for personal interaction and immediate problem resolution, which can enhance customer satisfaction. Understanding these differences is crucial for businesses to tailor their strategies for each channel, ensuring a cohesive and complementary shopping experience that meets the needs and preferences of consumers in both online and offline environments.

Consumer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Importance of customer satisfaction in consumer behavior research.

Customer satisfaction is a critical component of consumer behavior research, as it directly impacts repeat purchases and brand loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, recommend the brand to others, and provide positive reviews. Customer satisfaction is influenced by various factors, including product quality, customer service, and overall shopping experience. Understanding and measuring customer satisfaction helps businesses identify areas for improvement, enhance customer experiences, and build long-term relationships with consumers. High levels of customer satisfaction lead to increased customer loyalty, which is essential for business growth and sustainability.

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is influenced by a range of factors, including product quality, price, service quality, brand image, and customer expectations. Product quality is a primary determinant of satisfaction, as consumers expect products to perform as advertised. Price also plays a role, as consumers evaluate the value they receive relative to the cost. Service quality, encompassing customer service interactions and the overall shopping experience, significantly impacts satisfaction levels. A positive, helpful, and efficient service experience can enhance satisfaction, while negative experiences can lead to dissatisfaction. Brand image, shaped by marketing communications and past experiences, influences consumer expectations and perceptions. Meeting or exceeding these expectations is key to achieving high levels of customer satisfaction. Additionally, personal factors such as individual needs, preferences, and past experiences also influence satisfaction. Businesses must consider these diverse factors to effectively meet consumer needs and enhance satisfaction levels.

Relationship Between Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

The relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty is strong and direct. Satisfied customers are more likely to develop a sense of loyalty to a brand, leading to repeat purchases and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Loyalty is not just about repeat buying; it also involves an emotional connection and a preference for the brand over competitors. Satisfied customers are also more likely to be forgiving of minor issues and are less sensitive to price changes. Conversely, dissatisfied customers are more likely to switch to competitors and share negative experiences with others. Building customer loyalty requires consistently meeting or exceeding customer expectations, providing high-quality products and services, and maintaining positive customer relationships. Loyal customers are valuable assets to businesses, as they tend to have a higher lifetime value, lower acquisition costs, and can become brand advocates, promoting the brand through their networks.

Consumer Research and Marketing Strategies

Utilizing consumer research to develop effective marketing programs.

Consumer research is a vital tool for developing effective marketing programs. By understanding consumer needs, preferences, and behaviors, businesses can create targeted marketing strategies that resonate with their audience. Consumer research helps in identifying market segments, understanding consumer pain points, and uncovering opportunities for product development or enhancement. It also provides insights into the most effective channels and messages for reaching the target audience. Utilizing consumer research in marketing program development ensures that strategies are data-driven and customer-centric, increasing the likelihood of success. It enables businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to the specific needs and preferences of different consumer segments, improving engagement and response rates. Additionally, ongoing consumer research allows businesses to adapt their marketing strategies in response to changing consumer trends and market conditions, ensuring continued relevance and effectiveness.

Targeting Specific Consumer Segments Based on Research Findings

Targeting specific consumer segments based on research findings is a key strategy for effective marketing. Consumer research provides detailed insights into different consumer groups, including their demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and preferences. By analyzing this data, businesses can identify distinct segments within their target market, each with unique needs and characteristics. Targeting these segments with tailored marketing messages and product offerings increases the relevance and appeal of the brand to each group. For example, a segment characterized by health-conscious consumers would respond more positively to marketing messages emphasizing the health benefits of a product. Segment-specific targeting allows businesses to allocate marketing resources more efficiently, focusing on the most promising segments with the highest potential for conversion and loyalty. It also enhances the customer experience by providing consumers with products and marketing messages that are more closely aligned with their individual needs and preferences.

Adapting Marketing Strategies to Consumer Behavior Trends

Adapting marketing strategies to consumer behavior trends is essential for businesses to stay relevant and competitive. Consumer behavior is constantly evolving, influenced by factors such as technological advancements, cultural shifts, and economic changes. By staying attuned to these trends, businesses can anticipate changes in consumer needs and preferences, and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. This may involve adopting new marketing channels, such as social media or influencer marketing, to reach consumers where they are most active. It could also mean developing new products or services that align with emerging consumer trends, such as sustainability or personalization. Adapting marketing strategies to consumer behavior trends requires a proactive approach, with ongoing research and analysis to identify emerging patterns. Businesses that successfully adapt to these trends can capture new market opportunities, enhance customer engagement, and maintain a competitive edge.

Case Studies in Consumer Behavior Research

Analysis of real-life examples and their implications.

Real-life case studies in consumer behavior research provide valuable insights into the practical application of theoretical concepts and the effectiveness of different marketing strategies. For example, a case study in the automotive industry might analyze how consumer preferences for eco-friendly vehicles have influenced car manufacturers’ product development and marketing strategies. In the retail sector, a case study could examine the impact of online shopping on brick-and-mortar stores and how these businesses have adapted to the digital era. These case studies offer concrete examples of how businesses have successfully navigated changes in consumer behavior, providing lessons and strategies that can be applied in other contexts. They also highlight the importance of consumer research in identifying market trends, understanding consumer needs, and developing effective marketing strategies. By analyzing real-life examples, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior, learn from the successes and challenges of others, and apply these insights to their own strategies.

Examination of Successful Marketing Campaigns Based on Consumer Behavior Research

Examining successful marketing campaigns that are based on consumer behavior research can provide valuable insights into effective marketing practices. These case studies demonstrate how a deep understanding of consumer needs, preferences, and behaviors can be leveraged to create impactful marketing campaigns. For instance, a campaign that effectively uses consumer data to personalize messages and offers can result in higher engagement and conversion rates. Another example might be a campaign that taps into current consumer trends, such as sustainability or wellness, to resonate with the target audience. Analyzing these successful campaigns can reveal key strategies and tactics that businesses can adopt, such as the use of specific channels, messaging techniques, or promotional offers. These case studies also highlight the importance of data-driven decision-making in marketing, showing how consumer research can inform and guide successful marketing initiatives.

Motivating Consumers and New Product Adoption

Strategies to motivate consumers to adopt new products.

Motivating consumers to adopt new products is a critical challenge for businesses. Effective strategies for encouraging new product adoption include leveraging social proof, offering free trials or samples, and creating educational content. Social proof, such as customer testimonials or influencer endorsements, can reduce perceived risk and increase consumer confidence in trying a new product. Free trials or samples allow consumers to experience the product firsthand, reducing barriers to adoption. Educational content, such as how-to guides or product demonstrations, can help consumers understand the value and benefits of the new product. Additionally, businesses can use targeted marketing campaigns to reach early adopters and innovators who are more likely to try new products and spread the word to others. Creating a sense of urgency or exclusivity around the new product, through limited-time offers or exclusive access, can also motivate consumers to adopt the product more quickly.

Innovations in Consumer Behavior Research for New Product Development

Innovations in consumer behavior research are playing a crucial role in new product development. Advanced analytics and data mining techniques allow businesses to analyze large datasets and uncover deep insights into consumer needs and preferences. Social listening tools enable companies to monitor social media and online conversations, gaining real-time insights into consumer opinions and trends. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies are being used to test consumer reactions to new products in simulated environments, providing valuable feedback before market launch. Behavioral economics principles, such as understanding cognitive biases and decision-making processes, are also being applied to better predict consumer responses to new products. These innovations in consumer behavior research provide businesses with more accurate and comprehensive data, enabling them to develop products that are closely aligned with consumer needs and preferences, increasing the likelihood of market success.

Social Media and Consumer Behavior

Influence of social media on consumer behavior.

Social media has a profound influence on consumer behavior, shaping how consumers discover, research, and share information about products and services. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter serve as important channels for brand communication and engagement. Consumers use social media to seek recommendations, read reviews, and gather opinions from their networks, which significantly influences their purchasing decisions. Brands leverage social media for targeted advertising, influencer partnerships, and content marketing, creating opportunities for direct interaction and engagement with consumers. Social media also facilitates the spread of trends and viral content, quickly influencing consumer preferences and behaviors. The interactive and dynamic nature of social media means that consumer opinions and trends can rapidly change, requiring businesses to be agile and responsive in their social media strategies. Understanding the influence of social media on consumer behavior is essential for businesses to effectively engage with their audience and influence purchasing decisions.

Role of Social Media in Shaping Consumer Perceptions and Purchase Decisions

Recap of the importance of consumer behavior research.

Consumer behavior research is essential for businesses seeking to understand and effectively respond to the evolving needs and preferences of their target audience. It provides valuable insights into why consumers make certain choices, what influences their purchasing decisions, and how they interact with brands. This research is crucial for developing effective marketing strategies, creating products that meet consumer needs, and enhancing the overall customer experience. By staying informed about consumer behavior trends and applying these insights, businesses can improve customer engagement, increase brand loyalty, and drive growth. In today’s competitive marketplace, a deep understanding of consumer behavior is a key differentiator, enabling businesses to create more personalized, relevant, and impactful marketing initiatives.

Future Directions and Emerging Trends in Consumer Behavior Research

The future of consumer behavior research is marked by rapid advancements in technology and data analytics, leading to more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of consumer preferences and behaviors. Emerging trends include the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze consumer data, providing deeper and more predictive insights. The integration of biometric data, such as eye tracking and facial recognition, offers new ways to understand consumer responses to marketing stimuli. The growing importance of sustainability and ethical considerations is also influencing consumer behavior, leading to increased demand for eco-friendly and socially responsible products. Additionally, the rise of the experience economy is shifting focus from product features to customer experiences, requiring businesses to create more immersive and engaging customer interactions. Staying abreast of these trends and continuously innovating in consumer behavior research will be crucial for businesses to remain relevant and competitive in the changing market landscape.

How NIQ and GfK Can Help

In the complex world of consumer behavior, NIQ and GfK offer the expertise and tools necessary to navigate this landscape effectively. With comprehensive solutions like:

NielsenIQ’s Homescan : Track, diagnose, and analyze consumer behavior from more than 250,000 households across 25 countries.
Consumer analytics : Go deeper and create more clarity around shopper behavior with custom surveys and segmentation.
Consumption moments : Reveal the true motivations behind customer consumption behavior and usage to guide product innovation and marketing strategy.
gfknewron marke t : Create the right opportunities with gfknewron market
gfknewron predict : Plan your future using the world’s most comprehensive sales tracking data for Tech & Durables.
gfknewron Consumer : Understand your consumers’ behavior to redefine your success

By leveraging these tools, businesses can gain a competitive edge, adapting to market changes and consumer trends with agility and precision.

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Have you ever wondered what goes into making a really successful product or campaign? The answer is consumer research.

Consumer research is a technique used by marketers and product developers to understand the needs, wants and behaviour of their target audiences. It involves collecting data about customers, analyzing it and using it to create strategies that will yield the most successful results.

Whether you are a marketer planning an advertising campaign or a product developer creating a new product, understanding your customers is essential for success. Consumer research can give you detailed insights into your customers’ behavior, preferences and motivations, which can be used to make better decisions about how to serve them in the most effective way possible.

In this article, we will provide an overview of what consumer research is and how it works. We will also discuss how businesses can benefit from using consumer research in their marketing and product development efforts.

What Is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is a process used to understand the behavior of consumers and their preferences. It helps businesses get an accurate understanding of their target audience. This research focuses on understanding why people choose certain products and services, what drives their decisions and how they feel about different aspects of a product or service.

The research process includes analyzing customer data, conducting interviews, collecting survey responses and observing consumer behaviour. This allows businesses to identify issues in their target markets, uncover new opportunities and measure customer satisfaction with products or services.

Overall, consumer research is an essential tool for gaining insights into the market trends, customer needs and preferences that allow businesses to understand their existing customers better while identifying new customers they can acquire. By conducting this type of research, they can ensure that they are providing the right solutions to meet the demands of their target audience.

Types of Consumer Research

Consumer research is a broad term encompassing a variety of techniques used to glean information about buyers and the marketplace. Depending on the data being sought, there are several different types of consumer research that can be employed.

Surveys: Surveys are one of the most popular methods for gathering consumer data. Surveys typically consist of a series of questions posed to participants, which can be administered online, in person or by phone. The responses from these surveys can provide valuable insights into consumer attitudes, preferences and behaviours.

Focus Groups: Focus groups typically feature moderated discussions with a small number of participants about a particular product or service. This type of research allows organizations to gain feedback on products or services before they reach the market and get a better understanding of how users perceive and interact with their offerings.

Observation Studies: Observation studies involve watching participants use products or services in real-world environments and recording their activities. This allows researchers to observe how people use products in different contexts and gain insights into user experience.

Overall, consumer research is an important tool for understanding buying behaviour and driving successful marketing initiatives. By using the right techniques for gathering data, companies can gain valuable insight into their target audience’s needs and preferences, helping them make informed decisions about their product offerings and marketing strategies.

The Consumer Research Process

Consumer research is the process of gathering, analyzing and using consumer data to make decisions about how to best serve the needs and interests of customers.

The consumer research process typically involves five steps:

Defining the research objectives
Developing a research plan
Collecting data
Analyzing the data
Developing conclusions and recommendations

At each step, specialists in consumer research methods use quantitative and qualitative methodologies to gain insights into consumer behaviours, attitudes, needs and preferences. This data can be used to develop strategies for marketing campaigns, product development initiatives and other activities that help companies meet their goals of providing products and services that resonate with their customers.

Benefits of Consumer Research

Consumer research is an invaluable tool for organizations striving to gain insights into the opinions and behaviours of their target audience. By using consumer research, businesses can discover what their customers want, how they make decisions, and how they view the organization’s products or services.

The benefits of opting to conduct consumer research are numerous. Here are just a few:

Improved Product Development

Conducting consumer research enables organizations to find out what their customers desire in a product or service, enabling them to create offerings that meet these exact needs. This helps to reduce the risk involved with launching new products by ensuring they are tailored to meet customer demands.

Enhanced Marketing Efforts

By learning more about target audiences, marketers can use this information to devise more effective marketing strategies. This could include developing more personalized messaging that resonates with customers and attracts them to your business.

Increased Customer Retention Rates

Insights gleaned from consumer research can help organizations identify any customer pain points and work towards creating better experiences for their clients. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty rates, resulting in increased customer retention rates over time.

Challenges With Conducting Consumer Research

Conducting consumer research can be a tricky business. Despite its fundamental importance in improving the customer experience, there are many common challenges that make it more difficult for organizations to get the data they need.

Among the most typical challenges with consumer research are:

Data collection – Gathering data from consumers can be time-consuming and expensive, especially in a global context. It involves designing surveys, questionnaires or other research tools, managing sample selection, and conducting field research.

Data accuracy – It’s difficult to ensure the accuracy of data collected through consumer research, as responses may be affected by various external factors such as moods or personal opinions.

Data analysis – Analyzing large amounts of data collected through consumer research takes specialized skills and knowledge in order to draw meaningful insights from it.

Data implementation – Once the data has been collected and analyzed, it is necessary to implement the insights across all departments within an organization in order to make strategic changes based on customer feedback. This requires close collaboration between departments and a clear understanding of how different teams can leverage the information for their benefit.

These challenges demonstrate why consumer research is not only necessary but also complex; without it, organizations will struggle to understand their customers’ needs and develop effective strategies for growth and success.

Best Practices for Effective Consumer Research

Consumer research is an invaluable tool for any business looking to stay competitive and grow. There are strategies you can use to ensure that your consumer research is effective:

Choose Your Methodology Carefully

When conducting consumer research, it’s important to choose the correct methodology for your project. Different methods may be more effective in different situations and industries, so take the time to plan and select the most appropriate one for your goals.

Gather Data From Multiple Sources

To gain a complete picture of how consumers think and feel about your product or service, you need to collect data from multiple sources. This includes online surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observation.

Keep Up With Emerging Trends

Technology is constantly evolving, so it’s important to keep up with emerging trends in consumer research. Utilizing new tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help you gain insight into customer behaviour faster than ever before.

Analyze The Data Accurately

Once you have gathered all the data, it’s essential that you analyze it accurately. Use data visualization software or statistical analysis tools to quickly spot patterns or trends in the data that could be useful for your business decision-making process.

In summary, consumer research is a critical part of any business strategy. It can help companies identify and target the right consumers, understand their behaviour, and develop effective marketing campaigns. From identifying the needs and wants of customers to determining the best ways to communicate with them, consumer research is an essential component for any business that wants to remain competitive and successful. Additionally, companies can use consumer research to assess their current strategies, as well as to acquire their customers’ overall level of satisfaction. Through these insights, businesses are able to provide a better overall customer experience and drive profitable growth.

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How to: Research Consumer Markets: Getting Started

Getting Started
Demographics
New Products
Market / Industry
Other resources

What is consumer market research?

Consumer market research is the process of gathering data on a consumer goods market (personal-use goods and services such as toothpaste or retail sales). This includes information on the current and potential customers, as well as the competitive landscape of the market.

Primary research involves collecting data from the source (i.e. consumers) such as conducting surveys or focus groups. It can be very targeted, useful, time consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive.

Secondary research involves using data that has already been collected (e.g. statistics or market research reports). Because you do not control how or what data is collected, there may be times where you cannot find the exact type of information you want from secondary sources.

You can kind of think of it as primary research is watching a movie whereas secondary research is reading a review of the movie.

This guide will show you some sources for consumer market research.

Who Collects This Data?

Cost of data Who collects it? How do they get it? Examples Free or $ Government, NGOs Surveys, legal requirements

Census, UN, International Trade Administration

Free or $ Regulatory agencies Reporting requirements >National Credit Union Administration Trade associations Member surveys, government data, news Telecommunications Industry Association Private market research firms Government data, surveys of customers and manufacturers, news BCC Research, Frost & Sullivan, Mintel, Nielsen, Gartner

Note that there may be additional information resources depending upon the market or industry you are targeting. Feel free to email us to find out more.

Market Research Reports

If you have spent some time searching on the internet for market data, you may have come across some market research reports that will seemingly address all your research needs; however, they tend to cost thousands of dollars. These reports are costly because market research can be very labor intensive work. Cornell is fortunate enough to have access to some market research reports via the following databases:

These reports are only to be used for academic purposes.

Mintel Academic Mintel covers consumer markets in the UK, US, and many countries in western Europe. Reports contain information on market segmentation, new products, market drivers.... Registration with your Cornell email address is required.
Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan reports cover emerging trends in 10 industries including aerospace, automotive, chemicals, clectronics, energy, environment, healthcare, communication, and more.
Technavio Technavio provides market research reports for a variety of global industries, including technology, healthcare, retail, energy, aerospace, consumer goods and automotive. Unlimited report viewing is available, but each Cornell email address is limited to 20 downloads per month.
Passport Excellent resource for international industries, countries, markets, and products. Market research reports, statistics, and analyst reports cover consumer market sizes, country market data, forecasts, consumer lifestyles, companies and brands, and many product & location specific reports.
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Last Updated: Apr 23, 2024 12:58 PM
URL: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/cmr

8 Key Stages in the Consumer Research Strategy

July 8 2022

Table of content

What Is Consumer Insights Research And Why It's Important For Any Brand?

Consumer research process and steps, how does peekage run market research, how to optimize the process of conducting consumer research.

If you want to catch and keep your consumer's attention , you really need to peruse the options available on your menu and give them something smart based on their preferences.

Your marketing strategy should not be based on your hunch but solid verifiable facts. In order to grow as a business, you need to know how your products & services are performing with your target audiences, how those consumers are responding to your campaigns, and how these customers feel about your brand.

Customer research can provide you with the missing information.

In today's consumer-centric world, research is key to personalization of products & services, and consistently delivering an excellent experience to your customers comes with a number of benefits, such as:

Increased purchase frequency
Higher average order values
Better referrals and cheaper acquisitions

Additionally, acquiring insights on consumer needs gives you a strategic position over the race on delivering customers what they want -more personalized products and experiences. This way you stay ahead of your competitors and remain in line with consumers' needs.

At its core, consumer research focuses on understanding your consumers by exploring their attitudes, needs, motivations, and behavior as they relate to your brand & products. This helps you to better identify, understand, investigate and hold your customers.

It's nothing unexpected that the majority of professional advertisers make their strategic decisions after a phase of extensive consumer research process.

Read also: Differences Between Market Research and Consumer Insights Research

Consumer insights research is the process of recognizing the inclinations, attitudes, inspirations, and purchasing behavior of the targeted consumers. Utilizing consumer research strategies on this data, shared characteristics among consumer groups are distinguished and classified into client segments and buyer personas. This information then used to make promoting campaigns focusing on a particular fragment or persona.

Consumer research is the key to enhancing your products & services and effectively advertising to clients who want to do commercial enterprise with you. Interviews, surveys, and other consumer research techniques are your dearest companions with regards to aiding your organization reliably to increment its income year on year.

Consumer research strategy is the procedure of gathering facts to first identify the target audiences and afterward focus on their inclinations, insights, attitudes, and shopping drivers for an item, service, or brand.

The main purposes of consumer research are:

Formalize the ideal customer personas
Upgrade brand positioning
Discover new or similar consumers
Get feedback on current products & services
Mapping the customer decision-making procedure

Customer research is a part of market research that uses research techniques to provide actionable information about what clients need. Utilizing this data businesses can make changes in their items and services, making them more client-centric thereby expanding consumer loyalty.

Consumer research helps brands understand consumer psychology and create purchasing behavior profiles for them.

A business that has an in-depth comprehension of the client decision-making process is most likely to design an item, decide on a certain price for it, establish a distribution path and promote a product based on customer research insights such that it produces increased consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

The ultimate goal of consumer research is to make a more profound understanding of your target client. You need to know what they care about and what impacts them to make purchasing decisions. This helps you to target them with more customized and significant brand experiences.

Consumers are now inundated with various options & choices and they have boundless data about these products readily available. In fact, they have power over their choices and want only the best.

So how do you make an unforgettable customer experience? By research!

By identifying the needs and inclinations of your clients, you can develop effective methods and strategies to use in your marketing plan. This will help you:

Leverage your brand positioning compared to the competitors
Help empower your marketing and product strategy
Exclude weak points and lessen redundancies
Remain in line with client opinion ahead of new product launches
Draw in more clients
Set the optimized price for your products
Produce the proper marketing message
Increase how much your clients spend
Increase how frequently your clients spend
Increase your sales
Decrease your costs
Refine your approach to customer support.

Now that you know what consumer research is and you understand its importance in developing your business, let's take a closer look at how it's done; the process & steps of conducting consumer insight research.

Also read: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow

The consumer research process began as an extension of the market research process. Just as the results of market research are used to further develop the decision-making potential of a brand or business, so is consumer research.

Consumer research is a sequential procedure. It must be well organized, tied together by the proper method, and upheld by supporting facilities and tools. Without these considerations, you may get into research chaos.

Therefore, you need a framework for conducting consumer research. The consumer research process can be divided into the following steps:

1. Develop research goals

Developing research goals is actually answering the question; "why is the research being conducted? to find out what?" A statement of consumer research objectives can help emphasize the purpose.

2. Define your research personas

A target consumer addresses the specific client segments and ideal buyer personas you wish to analyze.

3. Select your research methods and tools

Before you jump into the research phase, you should create a supporting "foundation". That is to distinguish your key method for gathering information and data.

Consumer data comes in two structures:

Quantitative - data, in the form of numbers

Quantitative consumer research includes extracting facts and statistics from customer opinions. By posing questions like, "how many", "how often", or "how likely", you can record customer needs and inclinations as specific numbers.

Utilizing a qualitative research method, you can gather information around measures such as duration, price, amount, length, etc. You can then utilize this information to shape your product's marketing.

Qualitative - non-numerical data that describe and characterize

A qualitative consumer research strategy gathers the conversational voice of customers (VOC), making sense of the inspirations behind customer behaviors. Open-ended questions, conversations, and observations can help us answer the whats, whys, and hows of consumers' decisions. Furthermore, develop a better comprehension of the consumers' attitudes, beliefs, and values.

Also read: Seven Consumer Research Methods; 2022 Version

4. Collect secondary data

Secondary research tries to interpret your audience's behaviors by utilizing internal and external data. CRM or social media analytics, and different kinds of BI tools come to use here. Utilizing external information such as trend reports, market statistics, and public polls can also help obtain a more accurate image of your target clients.

Secondary research is a strong method to analyze the competition, understand your actual position in the market, and discover new secondary consumers.

Collect secondary data as the earliest stage of your research, it helps finding out if the research has been conducted before and if there is any information that can be used by your business to make informed decisions regarding customers.

Secondary research adds additional background information to your brand strategy. By discovering what your competitors do and finding out what other factors and variables affect the demand on the market, you can refine your brand differentiation on the market.

Thus, as part of customer research, you need to assess the competition. Specifically, collect data about:

Competition market positioning
Brand differentiators
Macro market trends
Niche market trends

5. Primary research

Primary research can be an exploratory and explicit phase of your consumer research. In the principal case, you are projecting a wider net to comprehend the general customer opinion and market trends. Exploratory research is helpful for consumer segmentation and buyer persona development.

Explicit consumer research plans put the magnifying lens on distinguished areas of interest like brand preference or product usability. For this situation, it's a good idea to work with a specific consumer segment and ask questions related to a specific issue.

In primary research brands or businesses collect their own information or employ a third party to gather information for them. This kind of research utilizes different data collection methods (qualitative and quantitative).

6. Collect and analyze information

Data is gathered and analyzed and inference is drawn to comprehend client behavior and purchase pattern.

7. Prepare a report

At the final stages of your consumer research process, a report is prepared based on all the findings by analyzing information collected so that businesses are able to make informed decisions and think of all probabilities related to customer behavior. By incorporating the study, businesses can become more customer-centric and provide products or services that will help them achieve customer satisfaction.

8. Put consumer research to action

The ultimate objective of consumer research is to illuminate your actions. There are numerous excellent ways of utilizing customer research information:

Refine your brand positioning and brand statement
Develop strategies for engaging with secondary clients
Foster new creative and collateral for advertisement campaigns
Refine your advertisement targeting to lessen promotion waste
Expand into new markets with more confidence

Utilizing its app-based platform, Peekage conducts market research by product sampling .

Clients share their information through the application and then the Peekage team discovers the right users to test your product or services and provide you feedback. This strategy is the most efficient way to invest the market research budget and gain actionable insights from your target market.

Read Also: Ultimate guide: product sampling strategies, methods & techniques

By providing proper consumer research insight, strategies that are utilized to draw in customers can be improved and brands can make a profit by knowing what customers need exactly. It is also important to understand the buying behavior of customers to know their attitude towards businesses and products.

Artificial intelligence helped advertisers & marketers with accomplishing precise targeting, effective optimizations, better analysis, and so much more. However, before these items come into play, understanding the customer is on top of any advertiser's list.

Optimizing consumer research can really make the entire procedure more effective, saving businesses tons of time assembling and analyzing data that is of little worth.

There are 4 different ways AI can optimize the consumer research process.

Recruitment Efficiency

Your customer base is expanded. Panel recruitment parameters that expanded properly in one place may not function admirably in an alternate situation. And with steadily developing markets, checking only a couple of fundamental parameters like age, ethnicity, and education is hard enough for a team of staff to work on for weeks or even months.

businesses need niche parameters. For example, interests, work profiles, income level, language proficiency, and more to draw significant insights that give them an upper hand in the market. This kind of information uncovers sweet spots in the target clients that have a high chance of a conversion.

Panel Relevancy Map

Words usually can't do a picture justice. In advertising, this image is worth thousands of hours of man work. In fact, we are discussing the times when advertisers analyze various segments and try to find similar client bases that can be clustered together. AI can do this in a matter of seconds, if not real-time. It analyzes millions of psychographic and demographic elements alongside other incidental factors and makes a relevancy map. This helps the advertiser with building panels of relevant clients based on the targeting variables that the research requests.

Statistically Accurate Panel

You can simply not include all of your clients for research purposes. Yes, you can do it by taking a representative sample of your consumer's society. This means your panel will contain at least one or more clients from each segment of your overall target client. This way you have a panel that is statistically the most accurate representation of your clients.

Engagement Efficiency

While a statistically accurate panel is of importance, the research can only be called effective and successful if the optimal number of consumers take part in the research. Here, the AI helps the advertiser get the maximum number of research respondents at the minimum cost. Engagement patterns help the AI to rank the quality of client segments. The higher the engagement with the research, the higher the quality of the client.

Research that creates impact

In fact, finding out what the client is thinking is technically impossible. businesses can still be very accurate by using the agility and scalability of AI. Making accurate and reliable client panels, running AI-led agile research, and developing strategies based on them is the guaranteed plan for successful consumer research.

Consumer research is a significant endeavor; however, the payoffs are extravagant too. Learning who your consumers are, how they think, and what prompts them to buy your products or services is essential to improving your market presence, growing brand value, and of course income numbers.

Utilizing the above eight steps, you can figure out how to coax clarity out of the tumultuous pile of analytics data and spoken customer insights. Keep in mind: a clear and optimal research method, succinct hypothesis, and supporting tools are the frameworks you need to run effective consumer research.

What customers need should be a part of market research and ought to be carried out routinely. Consumer research provides you with in-depth data about the needs, wants, expectations, and behavior of consumers.

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Launching a new product? Considering whether you should offer new services or tweak the current ones? Such moments can be challenging both for established brands and those just trying to break into the market.

Whenever you have something new to offer to your customers, there are numerous factors to be taken into account if you want to make well-informed decisions that would increase the chances of a successful launch, instead of stumbling in the dark and hoping for the best.

This is where consumer research kicks in.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research is the aspect of market research that focuses on identifying the motivation, preferences, and purchase behavior of (potential) consumers.

Companies rely on consumer research to analyze and better understand consumer psychology so as to improve their products or services, making them more customer-oriented, and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and the number of sales.

Having a deep understanding of consumer decision-making and purchase behavior allows brands to build products that will find their market fit more easily, put the optimal price tag onto them, and establish the right distribution and promotion channels.

Let’s say a beauty industry company wants to launch a new skincare product. In order to de-risk their production and product placement, they could launch a skincare quiz to find out what it is that their consumers actually need:

And then they could do additional market research to find out more about their ideal customer’s demographics and purchase habits. Conducting this kind of consumer research is expected to facilitate a successful launch for the new product and ensure that there’s actual demand for such a product on the market.

Before we dig any deeper into consumer research, here’s a survey template you could easily use to do your own market research.

Consumer research survey template

Just here for an easy way to conduct your own consumer research? No worries, we’ve got you covered – grab this market research template and learn more about your consumers right now.

If you would like to learn more about how and why you should conduct the research using the template above, keep on reading.

Why you should conduct consumer research

Often, people do research just because they’ve been told to do so. But if you’re looking to better understand your consumers and their needs, you need to know why you should be conducting consumer research in the first place. Even though there are plenty of benefits, here are the top three I’d like to point out:

Understand market readiness

No matter how good you think your products or services are, there’s a fair chance you’re not completely objective nor representative of your ideal target consumer.

When launching a new product, there’s a lot of investments going around and, naturally, you’d expect adequate ROI. However, if there’s not enough market potential, your investment might fail. This is where consumer research kicks in.

Identify target consumers

Another important benefit of conducting consumer research is the ability to identify and analyze your target customers. In other words, this allows you to determine who might be interested in buying your products or using your services.

For example, you can use a demographic survey to obtain various information on your customers such as age, gender, geographic location, employment, marital status, and more. Or you can rely on different types of market segmentation to reach your ideal customer. This would allow you to customize your marketing efforts to better appeal to particular customer sets.

Get feedback on existing products or services

Finally, consumer research can help you obtain valuable feedback on your current business offer. Such feedback can help you update or improve your current products based on the valuable information from the actual consumers.

Getting feedback is important because it helps brands and businesses better understand the consumers’ standing point and come up with an improved product that would help address the challenges they’ve been having and fully meet the actual market needs and requirements.

Main consumer research methods

There are two main types of consumer research – quantitative and qualitative . Both types rely on different research techniques that we’ll explore in more detail down below.

Quantitative consumer research

By 2025, the global data pool is expected to rise up to 175 zettabytes . That’s why meaningful data has become more valuable than ever and the way companies collect data can either make or break their business success.

Quantitative research is a data collection method that revolves around numbers and stats. It’s an essential part of consumer research that can provide businesses with measurable data on their customers. Such data can be mathematically and statistically analyzed in order to gain more insight into consumer behavior.

The most effective and most popular techniques for obtaining quantitative data are different types of online questionnaires such as surveys and polls.

Surveys and polls

Nowadays, the easiest way to obtain consumer data is through online surveys, questionnaires, and polls. Thanks to highly-advanced and intuitive survey tools , it’s now easier than ever to create your own data collectors, either from scratch or using professionally written templates.

All the LeadQuizzes users, for example, gain free access to 78 professionally written and beautifully designed survey, quiz, and form templates. This includes market and consumer research survey templates such as the ones shown in the image below:

To access the LeadQuizzes templates, just log in to your account (or sign up for a free trial if you don’t have an account yet) and select your preferred template from the selection of pre-made templates . You can use the templates as they are or easily customize them to meet your specific needs.

One of the easiest ways to obtain quantitative customer data is by using an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey . This customer research technique allows you to easily evaluate the satisfaction of your current users and express it through numbers for easy analysis. With just one single question – “How likely are you to refer our business?” – you can easily measure consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

To preview (or use) an NPS survey template, just click on the image below:

Qualitative consumer research

Unlike quantitative research, which relies on numbers, qualitative consumer research is descriptive in nature. To obtain qualitative data, you need to be using open-ended questions with no predefined answer options. While this means that you can still be using online surveys to obtain qualitative data as well, there are a few more options to choose from.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small group of people who are experts on a particular subject matter and whose job is to analyze a particular aspect of consumer research – e.g. a new update, feature, product, and so on.

Ideally, focus groups contain somewhere between 3-10 people, including an obligatory moderator. Depending on the research topic and goal, the members of a focus group should be brought together around certain common denominators.

For example, if you’re doing research on the use of birth control pills, all the members of your focus group need to be sexually active females. The remaining parameters like age, education, employment, and so on, may or may not be relevant here.

1-to-1 interviews

In most cases, this is a conversational method that presupposes an interviewer and an interviewee. During this type of consumer research, the researcher (the interviewer) asks questions (that are equivalent to the open-ended survey questions) related to products and services.

There are two main limitations to this method. Firstly, it’s very time consuming and might become overwhelming if you have to interview an excessively large number of consumers. And secondly, it very much relies on the researcher’s expertise and ability to extract the relevant information from interviewees.

Social media monitoring

This type of consumer research could also be described as content or text analysis but, in recent years, it primarily refers to the analysis of consumer behavior on social media. Here, the researchers analyze consumers’ social life by decoding their social media posts and interactions to draw inferences related to their consumer behavior and habits.

After the research

Above, we’ve introduced you to consumer research – what it is, why you need to conduct it, and what are some of the best ways to do so. Once you’ve managed to conduct your research, gather the necessary data, analyze it, and come to certain conclusions, you should have a better insight into the exact needs and pain points of your customers.

This will allow you to adapt your business, update, tweak or completely revamp your products and services, and develop a better marketing plan that would allow you to attract more consumers, determine the optimal price, increase the number of sales, and reduce costs.

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Market Research

9 Key stages in your marketing research process

You can conduct your own marketing research. Follow these steps, add your own flair, knowledge and creativity, and you’ll have bespoke research to be proud of.

Marketing research is the term used to cover the concept, development, placement and evolution of your product or service, its growing customer base and its branding – starting with brand awareness , and progressing to (everyone hopes) brand equity . Like any research, it needs a robust process to be credible and useful.

Marketing research uses four essential key factors known as the ‘marketing mix’ , or the Four Ps of Marketing :

Product (goods or service)
Price ( how much the customer pays )
Place (where the product is marketed)
Promotion (such as advertising and PR)

These four factors need to work in harmony for a product or service to be successful in its marketplace.

The marketing research process – an overview

A typical marketing research process is as follows:

Identify an issue, discuss alternatives and set out research objectives
Develop a research program
Choose a sample
Gather information
Gather data
Organize and analyze information and data
Present findings
Make research-based decisions
Take action based on insights

Step 1: Defining the marketing research problem

Defining a problem is the first step in the research process. In many ways, research starts with a problem facing management. This problem needs to be understood, the cause diagnosed, and solutions developed.

However, most management problems are not always easy to research, so they must first be translated into research problems. Once you approach the problem from a research angle, you can find a solution. For example, “sales are not growing” is a management problem, but translated into a research problem, it becomes “ why are sales not growing?” We can look at the expectations and experiences of several groups : potential customers, first-time buyers, and repeat purchasers. We can question whether the lack of sales is due to:

Poor expectations that lead to a general lack of desire to buy, or
Poor performance experience and a lack of desire to repurchase.

This, then, is the difference between a management problem and a research problem. Solving management problems focuses on actions: Do we advertise more? Do we change our advertising message? Do we change an under-performing product configuration? And if so, how?

Defining research problems, on the other hand, focus on the whys and hows, providing the insights you need to solve your management problem.

Step 2: Developing a research program: method of inquiry

The scientific method is the standard for investigation. It provides an opportunity for you to use existing knowledge as a starting point, and proceed impartially.

The scientific method includes the following steps:

Define a problem
Develop a hypothesis
Make predictions based on the hypothesis
Devise a test of the hypothesis
Conduct the test
Analyze the results

This terminology is similar to the stages in the research process. However, there are subtle differences in the way the steps are performed:

the scientific research method is objective and fact-based, using quantitative research and impartial analysis
the marketing research process can be subjective, using opinion and qualitative research, as well as personal judgment as you collect and analyze data

Step 3: Developing a research program: research method

As well as selecting a method of inquiry (objective or subjective), you must select a research method . There are two primary methodologies that can be used to answer any research question:

Experimental research : gives you the advantage of controlling extraneous variables and manipulating one or more variables that influence the process being implemented.
Non-experimental research : allows observation but not intervention – all you do is observe and report on your findings.

Step 4: Developing a research program: research design

Research design is a plan or framework for conducting marketing research and collecting data. It is defined as the specific methods and procedures you use to get the information you need.

There are three core types of marketing research designs: exploratory, descriptive, and causal . A thorough marketing research process incorporates elements of all of them.

Exploratory marketing research

This is a starting point for research. It’s used to reveal facts and opinions about a particular topic, and gain insight into the main points of an issue. Exploratory research is too much of a blunt instrument to base conclusive business decisions on, but it gives the foundation for more targeted study. You can use secondary research materials such as trade publications, books, journals and magazines and primary research using qualitative metrics, that can include open text surveys, interviews and focus groups.

Descriptive marketing research

This helps define the business problem or issue so that companies can make decisions, take action and monitor progress. Descriptive research is naturally quantitative – it needs to be measured and analyzed statistically , using more targeted surveys and questionnaires. You can use it to capture demographic information , evaluate a product or service for market, and monitor a target audience’s opinion and behaviors. Insights from descriptive research can inform conclusions about the market landscape and the product’s place in it.

Causal marketing research

This is useful to explore the cause and effect relationship between two or more variables. Like descriptive research , it uses quantitative methods, but it doesn’t merely report findings; it uses experiments to predict and test theories about a product or market. For example, researchers may change product packaging design or material, and measure what happens to sales as a result.

Step 5: Choose your sample

Your marketing research project will rarely examine an entire population. It’s more practical to use a sample - a smaller but accurate representation of the greater population. To design your sample, you’ll need to answer these questions:

Which base population is the sample to be selected from? Once you’ve established who your relevant population is (your research design process will have revealed this), you have a base for your sample. This will allow you to make inferences about a larger population.
What is the method (process) for sample selection? There are two methods of selecting a sample from a population:

1. Probability sampling : This relies on a random sampling of everyone within the larger population.

2. Non-probability sampling : This is based in part on the investigator’s judgment, and often uses convenience samples, or by other sampling methods that do not rely on probability.

What is your sample size? This important step involves cost and accuracy decisions. Larger samples generally reduce sampling error and increase accuracy, but also increase costs. Find out your perfect sample size with our calculator .

Step 6: Gather data

Your research design will develop as you select techniques to use. There are many channels for collecting data, and it’s helpful to differentiate it into O-data (Operational) and X-data (Experience):

O-data is your business’s hard numbers like costs, accounting, and sales. It tells you what has happened, but not why.
X-data gives you insights into the thoughts and emotions of the people involved: employees, customers, brand advocates.

When you combine O-data with X-data, you’ll be able to build a more complete picture about success and failure - you’ll know why. Maybe you’ve seen a drop in sales (O-data) for a particular product. Maybe customer service was lacking, the product was out of stock, or advertisements weren’t impactful or different enough: X-data will reveal the reason why those sales dropped. So, while differentiating these two data sets is important, when they are combined, and work with each other, the insights become powerful.

With mobile technology, it has become easier than ever to collect data. Survey research has come a long way since market researchers conducted face-to-face, postal, or telephone surveys. You can run research through:

Social media ( polls and listening )

Another way to collect data is by observation. Observing a customer’s or company’s past or present behavior can predict future purchasing decisions. Data collection techniques for predicting past behavior can include market segmentation , customer journey mapping and brand tracking .

Regardless of how you collect data, the process introduces another essential element to your research project: the importance of clear and constant communication .

And of course, to analyze information from survey or observation techniques, you must record your results . Gone are the days of spreadsheets. Feedback from surveys and listening channels can automatically feed into AI-powered analytics engines and produce results, in real-time, on dashboards.

Step 7: Analysis and interpretation

The words ‘ statistical analysis methods ’ aren’t usually guaranteed to set a room alight with excitement, but when you understand what they can do, the problems they can solve and the insights they can uncover, they seem a whole lot more compelling.

Statistical tests and data processing tools can reveal:

Whether data trends you see are meaningful or are just chance results
Your results in the context of other information you have
Whether one thing affecting your business is more significant than others
What your next research area should be
Insights that lead to meaningful changes

There are several types of statistical analysis tools used for surveys. You should make sure that the ones you choose:

Work on any platform - mobile, desktop, tablet etc.
Integrate with your existing systems
Are easy to use with user-friendly interfaces, straightforward menus, and automated data analysis
Incorporate statistical analysis so you don’t just process and present your data, but refine it, and generate insights and predictions.

Here are some of the most common tools:

Benchmarking : a way of taking outside factors into account so that you can adjust the parameters of your research. It ‘levels the playing field’ – so that your data and results are more meaningful in context. And gives you a more precise understanding of what’s happening.
Regression analysis : this is used for working out the relationship between two (or more) variables. It is useful for identifying the precise impact of a change in an independent variable.
T-test is used for comparing two data groups which have different mean values. For example, do women and men have different mean heights?
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) Similar to the T-test, ANOVA is a way of testing the differences between three or more independent groups to see if they’re statistically significant.
Cluster analysis : This organizes items into groups, or clusters, based on how closely associated they are.
Factor analysis: This is a way of condensing many variables into just a few, so that your research data is less unwieldy to work with.
Conjoint analysis : this will help you understand and predict why people make the choices they do. It asks people to make trade-offs when making decisions, just as they do in the real world, then analyzes the results to give the most popular outcome.
Crosstab analysis : this is a quantitative market research tool used to analyze ‘categorical data’ - variables that are different and mutually exclusive, such as: ‘men’ and ‘women’, or ‘under 30’ and ‘over 30’.
Text analysis and sentiment analysis : Analyzing human language and emotions is a rapidly-developing form of data processing, assigning positive, negative or neutral sentiment to customer messages and feedback.

Stats IQ can perform the most complicated statistical tests at the touch of a button using our online survey software , or data from other sources. Learn more about Stats iQ now .

Step 8: The marketing research results

Your marketing research process culminates in the research results. These should provide all the information the stakeholders and decision-makers need to understand the project.

The results will include:

all your information
a description of your research process
the results
conclusions
recommended courses of action

They should also be presented in a form, language and graphics that are easy to understand, with a balance between completeness and conciseness, neither leaving important information out or allowing it to get so technical that it overwhelms the readers.

Traditionally, you would prepare two written reports:

a technical report , discussing the methods, underlying assumptions and the detailed findings of the research project
a summary report , that summarizes the research process and presents the findings and conclusions simply.

There are now more engaging ways to present your findings than the traditional PowerPoint presentations, graphs, and face-to-face reports:

Live, interactive dashboards for sharing the most important information, as well as tracking a project in real time.
Results-reports visualizations – tables or graphs with data visuals on a shareable slide deck
Online presentation technology, such as Prezi
Visual storytelling with infographics
A single-page executive summary with key insights
A single-page stat sheet with the top-line stats

You can also make these results shareable so that decision-makers have all the information at their fingertips.

Step 9 Turn your insights into action

Insights are one thing, but they’re worth very little unless they inform immediate, positive action. Here are a few examples of how you can do this:

Stop customers leaving – negative sentiment among VIP customers gets picked up; the customer service team contacts the customers, resolves their issues, and avoids churn .
Act on important employee concerns – you can set certain topics, such as safety, or diversity and inclusion to trigger an automated notification or Slack message to HR. They can rapidly act to rectify the issue.
Address product issues – maybe deliveries are late, maybe too many products are faulty. When product feedback gets picked up through Smart Conversations, messages can be triggered to the delivery or product teams to jump on the problems immediately.
Improve your marketing effectiveness - Understand how your marketing is being received by potential customers, so you can find ways to better meet their needs
Grow your brand - Understand exactly what consumers are looking for, so you can make sure that you’re meeting their expectations

Download now: 8 Innovations to Modernize Market Research

Scott Smith

Scott Smith, Ph.D. is a contributor to the Qualtrics blog.

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Consumer Research: Unlocking Customer Insights

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is the process of determining the inclinations, motivations, as well as buying behavior of the targeted customers. By helping businesses delve deeper into customer psychology, consumer research empowers them to build effective purchasing behavior profiles. On the basis of identified and segmented buyer personas, it becomes easy to create targeted marketing campaigns.

It leverages research techniques for understanding what customers actually need. This helps brands to seamlessly improve their products & services and make them more customer-centric. By focusing on surveys, interviews, questionnaires, etc., companies can gain consumer research insights that can boost their revenue.

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What are the objectives of Consumer Research?

Every time a brand plans to build a new product, it becomes important to conduct consumer research to discover the consumers’ needs, the missing attributes in a product, and what they aim to have? To simplify the process of conducting consumer research, organizations should use efficient survey software .

Intended to elevate brand equity, consumer research helps brands uncover customers’ perceptions while buying a product or service. In order to ensure a successful business idea, it’s important to focus on consumer research. Also, consumer insights play an essential role in identifying brand positioning among the intended audience. By unveiling the levels of consumer psychology and keeping an eye on their shopping patterns, consumer research can help to improve sales to a great extent.

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Uncovering the model of Consumer Research

In earlier times, consumer psychology used to be treated in a different way by researchers as there was no emphasis on the emotions, mood, or situations that directly impact the customers’ buying decisions. Most of them believed that customers evaluate products rationally and prefer buying items from brands that deliver the highest level of satisfaction at the minimum cost possible.

However, the situation has completely changed now. As customers are more aware of brands and their existing competitors, the loyal customers keep returning to a brand for repeat purchases. They even recommend their friends or colleagues to purchase from the same brand irrespective of the prices offered.

Using a Net Promoter Score ® (NPS ® ) survey empowers brands to determine brand loyalty as well as customer satisfaction. This survey asks customers a single question to identify their level of satisfaction. It comes with a scale ranging between 0-10 and depending on the responses of the customers, they can be categorized as:

Promoters: Customers that give a score between 9-10. Passives: Customers that give a score between 7-8. Detractors: Customers that give a score between 0-6.

Consumer research has been divided into two types namely:

Qualitative Consumer Research

Being known as descriptive in nature, qualitative research is a method that includes open-ended questions for gaining insightful feedback from respondents. It relies on the following methods of research:

Focus Groups: A focus group is defined as a small group of subject experts who sit together to effectively analyze a specific product or service. There are typically 6-10 members in a focus group.

One-to-one Interview: It is a conversational method where the data is collected by asking open-ended questions to the respondents. This method consumes a lot of time and requires more than a single attempt for gathering insightful data.

Text Analysis: A popular qualitative research method, text analysis is a process in which researchers decode words & images from the available documents for analysis. In this method, researchers draw conclusions from the used images. The right example for text analysis is social media.

Quantitative Consumer Research

In today’s digitally driven world, there’s nothing more crucial than data. Every leading company strives to collect and analyze actionable data that yields validated insights.

Quantitative consumer research is mainly focused on numbers and statistics. It prioritizes customer satisfaction in order to get loyal customers for the brand. This research is comparatively easy to perform & analyze and includes questions that can make or break a business. For instance, the question used for determining Net Promoter Score ® . The data collection tools for quantitative consumer research involve online surveys, polls, and questionnaires. This type of data is numerically evaluated for uncovering the preferences of consumers.

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How does consumer research work?

Consumer research is used to expand a marketer’s knowledge about the target customers. There are many ways a brand can gather customer insight. However, there is a way-of-things for every research. We will outline the basic process of conducting Consumer Research.

Define Research Objectives

Having a clear objective can keep the focus of consumer research from being distracted by the side element. The research objective consists of the question/ issue for which you are seeking customer feedback.

Your research objective could be to understand:

Customer experience and attitude about a product offered by your company
Customer’s satisfaction level with the services
Change in customer’s preference and interests
Impact of marketing campaign
Reason for a product’s poor performance in the market

You must clearly identify and establish the objective to have a clear picture of the goal you are trying to achieve at the end of the consumer research. A well-defined objective can help design the research process and prevent any costly mistakes during the process.

Gather secondary data

Secondary data indicates the information that is readily available for you to explore. These data exist in the form of journals, case studies, research papers, etc published in the past.

In this step, you look through the secondary data to make sure that you avoid conducting research on an object for which you can gather all required data from the available data. This also helps you gain foundational knowledge on your topic or any related topic.

Looking through the existing data, you can decide if you want to make any changes in your objectives or approach it differently.

There are two sources of Secondary Data – Internal and External Data.

Internal Secondary Data refers to the information that you can find from your company. For example, customer service interaction from the past, customer’s inquiry, sales audit, and so on.
External Secondary Data is the information that you need to collect from other organizations. Your company does not hold records of this information. Secondary data can be obtained either for free or you may have to pay.

Sources of external data involve – Government data, Periodicals, and articles. The government collects data on its citizen’s income, population growth, and other societal factors. Periodicals can give you information related to business.

Perform Primary research

After collecting secondary data you now need to gather your own data for Consumer Research. The primary research can be conducted in two ways – Qualitative and Quantitative Research .

Qualitative Research:

When your purpose is to gather subjective information from your customers, Qualitative Research is the better option. Customers are asked to answer the research questions in their own words. This gives you the chance to peek into the psychology of your customers.

However, it is better to remember that qualitative research is conducted in a smaller sample size. The data gathered from this research therefore cannot be used to generalize against the entire target population. Nonetheless, it helps gather extensive insights from the audience and opens up the possibility of further research.

There are two most common methods of conducting Qualitative Research: Interviews and Focus Groups

Interviews can be conducted in person or via phone . A highly trained interviewer is put in charge of the respondent. The research engages the respondent in a conversation and asks the questions created for the research.
Focus Group involves a group of people who share similar characteristics and they engage in a discussion about the topic of the researcher in the presence of a moderator . The participants are encouraged to share their thoughts freely and discuss it with other participants. The entire session is recorded for data analysis.

Quantitative Research:

Quantitative research will bring you numerical data that can be easily analyzed. This type of research is conducted on a larger sample size which makes it possible to generalize the findings to the target population.

There are three ways you can gather Quantitative data: Observation, Experimental Research, and Surveys.

In an Observation , marketers try to understand the relationship between the consumers and the company’s product by watching them interact with the product. The research is conducted in public. The marketer observes a customer’s behavior in the physical store of the brand or a shop that sells the brand’s product.
Experimental Research is used to establish the cause-effect relationship between variables . In consumer research, it can be used to see the effect of pricing on the sale of a product. In experimental research, the independent variable is changed to observe its effect on the dependent variable.
Survey research can help gather data from a large number of consumers. It can be deployed via email, website, social media, or SMS. This allows the marketer to conduct various types of research and also reach a wide audience for insight.

There are various surveys that you can conduct such as,

Brand awareness
Customer satisfaction
Demographic
Exit surveys
Likert Scale survey
NPS ® surveys

Establish your Sample Size

It is not possible for any company to gather customer insight from all of their customers, even by using online surveys. There is always a limit to how many people you can reach. For this reason, marketers use sampling to narrow down their target population.

Sample of a population refers to a number of selected respondents who share similar characteristics as the target population. A sample, thus represents the entire population.

To establish a sample size there are three steps you should follow, these steps will make it easier to define your sample size:

Who do you want to sample?
How many people do you need to survey?
Which sampling procedure should you use?

There are primarily two types of sampling procedure – Probability and Non-probability Sampling.

Probability sampling gives every member of the population an equal chance of being selected. This procedure is further classified into:

Simple random sampling
Systematic random sampling
Stratified random sampling
Cluster sampling

Non-probability sampling involves the researcher selecting the participants based on their judgment. This sampling procedure is classified into

Convenience sampling
Judgment sampling
Quota sampling

Collect and Analyze the Research Data

Now that you have decided on the sample size as well as on the research method, it is time you collect the data. The collected data requires analysis to draw actionable insights from it. The analysis of the research data will help draw conclusions and give answers to the research objective.

In the case of qualitative research, the data is gathered and codified based on the recurring themes. These repeating themes are then later analyzed to gain in-depth understanding.

In the case of quantitative research, the responses are translated into numerical data. For data analysis software is used to identify patterns in customer response.

Create Report from your Consumer Research

At the end of the research process you need to create a report that defines the research findings. The report should be made in a way that it is easy for the reader to understand the objective and the meaning of the end result.

Your research report must also describe the entire research process. It should explain the objective, the purpose of research, the methods used for data collection and data analysis.

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What questions should you include in consumer research?

While conducting research, nothing is more important than asking the right set of questions. So, every time you perform consumer research, you need to frame questions in a way that could fetch maximum insights from your audience. Here are some questions that you could include in your consumer research:

Who makes purchasing decisions in your household?
Which platforms do you use for buying a product?
How long do you take for making a purchase decision?
What features do you consider important before making a purchase?
What motivates you for buying a product?

You can consider using these surveys for conducting consumer research:

Voice of the Customer Survey

Customer Insights Survey

Customer Buying Habits Survey

Product Feedback Survey

Consumer Finance Survey

What is the significance of Consumer Research?

To recognize the market well.

No matter how efficient your product or service is, your consumers should be ready to spend on it. There are investments involved in building a product that demands ROI from its purchase. By conducting consumer research before a product or service launch, you can develop a better understanding of the market potential, i.e. if individuals can spend on your offering or not.

To determine target consumers

With effective consumer research, it becomes easy for brands to segment their customers on the basis of geographic, demographic, and behavioral factors. Thus, it can help you to identify the customers who want to buy your products or services. Using that information, you can accordingly craft marketing strategies for your specific consumer segment.

To gather product/service updates

With the help of consumer research, you can collect valuable information about your products or services through consumer feedback. This helps you uncover their perceptions and needs so you can update your offerings accordingly!

How Voxco can help you with Consumer Research?

Omnichannel capabilities.

Voxco’s exceptional platform offers omnichannel capabilities that are dedicatedly tailored for performing consumer research. Reach out to your intended audience through surveys conducted online , by phone , or face-to-face .

Powerpacked Analytics

Conducting consumer research has never been so easy! Voxco’s powerful analytics software can help you uncover intelligent and actionable insights from the consumer feedback that you gather.

Premium Support

Voxco’s robust and innovative platform is known for delivering round-the-clock service and support so that our clients can truly make the most of their consumer research.

Flexible hosting

Voxco comes equipped with flexible hosting options that can streamline your consumer research. Now you can store your data either in the cloud securely or on your premises, compliant with your security protocols.

What is the significance of Consumer Research on Business?

You learn what your customers have to say.

Voice of Customers is the answer to the biggest question “What do consumers want?” To satisfy the needs of your customers you need to listen to them. What better way to show that you care, than by helping them find solutions to their problems, responding to their pain points. It can help a brand understand the customer’s point of view from where they stand.

Soliciting customers’ feedback and capturing their message directly from them can be the simplest yet most effective marketing strategy.

Identify your Target consumers

Conducting research on your customers and prospects can help you create a profile that defines who your customers are. Instead of imagining that “this is my target audience”, consumer research gives you data to ensure you are actually targeting your real customers.

For example, you own an auto repair shop. You imagine that your target audiences are between the ages of 20 to 35. SO, you create marketing campaigns targeting this group. However, you cannot understand why your targeted marketing has little impact on your business.

You decide to conduct consumer research and after surveying, you find that people between the age of 35 and 50 are looking for your service more.

Based on your research you can identify consumers who are more willing to use your services and buy your products. This makes it easier for marketers to customize marketing strategies that better appeal to the targeted audience.

Feedback on company offerings

The feedback you receive from your customers is valuable to improve the services and products you offer. You may think that your products and services are helping your target customers and fulfilling their needs. However, there is a slim chance that your company offerings are not completely representing your target consumers.

Customer feedback before and after the launch of a product offers the opportunity to improve. For any product, there are quite a number of investments going around. The brand is also naturally expecting ROI. However, your product will fail if it does not appeal to the consumer.

Consumer research can help you understand customers’ opinions and come up with ways to improve the product that represents the need and meets the expectation.

After you have conducted your consumer research you should have gained a better understanding of your customers. You should be able to rationalize with their expectations and needs and sympathize with their pain points.

The insight will enable you to develop strategies and update your business, products and services to appeal to your existing customers as well as prospects. The outcome of gaining customer insight will help you to create targeted messages, increase sales, refine customer services, meet customer demand and expectation.

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Household Debt Rose by $184 Billion in Q1 2024; Delinquency Transition Rates Increased Across All Debt Types

NEW YORK — The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data today issued its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit . The report shows total household debt increased by $184 billion (1.1%) in the first quarter of 2024, to $17.69 trillion. The report is based on data from the New York Fed’s nationally representative Consumer Credit Panel .

The New York Fed also issued an accompanying Liberty Street Economics blog post examining credit card utilization and its relationship with delinquency. The Quarterly Report also includes a one-page summary of key takeaways and their supporting data points.

“In the first quarter of 2024, credit card and auto loan transition rates into serious delinquency continued to rise across all age groups,” said Joelle Scally, Regional Economic Principal within the Household and Public Policy Research Division at the New York Fed. “An increasing number of borrowers missed credit card payments, revealing worsening financial distress among some households.”

Mortgage balances rose by $190 billion from the previous quarter and was $12.44 trillion at the end of March. Balances on home equity lines of credit (HELOC) increased by $16 billion, representing the eighth consecutive quarterly increase since Q1 2022, and now stand at $376 billion. Credit card balances decreased by $14 billion to $1.12 trillion. Other balances, which include retail cards and consumer loans, also decreased by $11 billion. Auto loan balances increased by $9 billion, continuing the upward trajectory seen since 2020, and now stand at $1.62 trillion.

Mortgage originations continued increasing at the same pace seen in the previous three quarters, and now stand at $403 billion. Aggregate limits on credit card accounts increased modestly by $63 billion, representing a 1.3% increase from the previous quarter. Limits on HELOC grew by $30 billion and have grown by 14% over the past two years, after 10 years of observed declines.

Aggregate delinquency rates increased in Q1 2024, with 3.2% of outstanding debt in some stage of delinquency at the end of March. Delinquency transition rates increased for all debt types. Annualized, approximately 8.9% of credit card balances and 7.9% of auto loans transitioned into delinquency. Delinquency transition rates for mortgages increased by 0.3 percentage points yet remain low by historic standards.

Household Debt and Credit Developments as of Q1 2024

*Change from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024 ** Change from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024

Flow into Serious Delinquency (90 days or more delinquent)

About the Report

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Household Debt and Credit Report provides unique data and insight into the credit conditions and activity of U.S. consumers. Based on data from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel , a nationally representative sample drawn from anonymized Equifax credit data, the report provides a quarterly snapshot of household trends in borrowing and indebtedness, including data about mortgages, student loans, credit cards, auto loans and delinquencies. The report aims to help community groups, small businesses, state and local governments and the public to better understand, monitor, and respond to trends in borrowing and indebtedness at the household level. Sections of the report are presented as interactive graphs on the New York Fed’s Household Debt and Credit Report web page and the full report is available for download.

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Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope
Consumer research is a part of market research in which inclination, motivation and purchase behavior of the targeted customers are identified. Customer research helps businesses or organizations understand customer psychology. Learn about consumer research model, process of consumer research with examples and questions.
What is Consumer Research? Definition, Methods and Examples
Consumer research, also known as market research or consumer insights research, is defined as the process of collecting and analyzing information about consumers' preferences, behaviors, and attitudes toward products, services, brands, or market trends. Learn more about consumer research methods and examples.
What is Customer Research? Definition, Types, Examples and Best
1. Define Research Objectives: Clearly define the specific objectives of your customer research. Determine what information or insights you seek to gather and how you plan to use the research findings. This will guide the entire research process and ensure that it remains focused and aligned with your goals. 2.
8 Consumer Research Examples (With Expert Tips)
What is the best consumer research process? It does depend on your specific goals and the tools you will use, but there is a general framework that you can draw inspiration from. Different consumer insight companies will follow slightly different processes, but the best consumer research process involves a series of structured steps: 1.
Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods
Customer research (or consumer research) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers. Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.
What Is Consumer Research: Methods, Types, Scope & Examples
Introduction to Consumer Research. Consumer research, also known as market research, is the systematic process of gathering and analyzing data about consumers' attitudes, preferences, and behaviours. It is a vital component of strategic planning for businesses and organizations across various industries.
An Introductory Guide to Consumer Research And How to ...
For example, most businesses have some kind of customer service department. Through consumer research, you can find out what methods of customer service are most preferred by your customers and invest more in these methods resulting in greater customer satisfaction. Consumer research enables you to group customers into customer segments.
The past, present, and future of consumer research
In this article, we document the evolution of research trends (concepts, methods, and aims) within the field of consumer behavior, from the time of its early development to the present day, as a multidisciplinary area of research within marketing. We describe current changes in retailing and real-world consumption and offer suggestions on how to use observations of consumption phenomena to ...
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Customer research templates offer a simple way to start discovering who your audience really is and what matters to them. Using templates helps you add much-needed structure to your customer research process. Below, you will find an assortment of templates to try — from planning to interviews, surveys, and summarizing your findings.
Introduction
This guide specifically focuses on resources useful for the business to consumer (B2C) industry, where individuals are the end users of a product or service. While this guide does not cover every resource, it does highlight commonly used sources and publishers of population and consumer data. "There is only one winning strategy.
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Consumer evaluation, also called consumer testing or consumer research, is the process of assessing the properties or performance of existing or new products or services as perceived by the consumers. Many methods have been developed over the past decades with the growth of the consumer goods' industry.
Consumer research: Understand your target market
A consumer research survey includes psychographics such as interests, attitudes, behaviors, and values so you can target the right market. Your research data will reveal new insights into your target market. For example, you know your target audience for your new accounting software is for companies of 50+ employees, but you want to be sure you ...
Consumer Research
Isagenix is a great example of consumer research done well. Founded in 2002, Isagenix is a multinational direct sales company that manufactures and distributes a range of science-based health and wellbeing products. The company seeks to inspire and empower their customers to live their best life through a journey of nutrition, health, and ...
Consumer Behavior Research: Unlocking Market Insights
Consumer behavior research is the study of how individuals make decisions to spend their resources on consumption-related items. It involves understanding the what, why, when, and how of consumer purchases. This field is crucial for businesses as it sheds light on consumer preferences, buying patterns, and decision-making processes.
Consumer Research
The consumer research process typically involves five steps: Defining the research objectives. Developing a research plan. Collecting data. Analyzing the data. Developing conclusions and recommendations. At each step, specialists in consumer research methods use quantitative and qualitative methodologies to gain insights into consumer ...
How to: Research Consumer Markets: Getting Started
Consumer market research is the process of gathering data on a consumer goods market (personal-use goods and services such as toothpaste or retail sales). This includes information on the current and potential customers, as well as the competitive landscape of the market. Primary research involves collecting data from the source (i.e. consumers) such as conducting surveys or focus groups.
8 Key Stages in the Consumer Research Strategy
The consumer research process began as an extension of the market research process. Just as the results of market research are used to further develop the decision-making potential of a brand or business, so is consumer research. ... For example, interests, work profiles, income level, language proficiency, and more to draw significant insights ...
Consumer Research: Definition, Methods and Benefits (+ Templates)
1-to-1 interviews. In most cases, this is a conversational method that presupposes an interviewer and an interviewee. During this type of consumer research, the researcher (the interviewer) asks questions (that are equivalent to the open-ended survey questions) related to products and services. There are two main limitations to this method.
The Consumer Research Process 101
The Consumer Research Process 101. February 12, 2021 • DJ Team. Consumer research is the process by which businesses track and analyze patterns of consumer behavior from the first clickthrough to the initial purchase. By assessing the data extracted from reports, SEO results, and direct communications with consumers, businesses have the upper ...
9 Key Stages in the Marketing Research Process
The marketing research process - an overview. A typical marketing research process is as follows: Identify an issue, discuss alternatives and set out research objectives. Develop a research program. Choose a sample. Gather information. Gather data. Organize and analyze information and data. Present findings.
Explore the Dynamics of Consumer Research
Consumer research is the process of determining the inclinations, motivations, as well as buying behavior of the targeted customers. By helping businesses delve deeper into customer psychology, consumer research empowers them to build effective purchasing behavior profiles. On the basis of identified and segmented buyer personas, it becomes ...
A Guide to Consumer Research (Plus Tips for Conducting It)
Definition of consumer research Consumer research, or customer research, is a component of market research that helps businesses explore the preferences of their customers and learn more about what they expect from a business and its products or services. Consumer research is important to the overall function of a business because a company that understands its customers can innovate its ...
6 Six Steps Consumer Research Process
General consumer research survey measures the frequency of product use, situation use, experiential use, and use satisfaction. New product market acceptance analysis measures include product specification, elimination of unacceptable features and levels, evaluation of feature level acceptability, and feature importance and validation with full profile choice sets.
Consumer Information Processing and Decision-Making: Origins, Findings
Abstract. This article chronicles the evolution of the two main paradigms within the Journal of Consumer Research: consumer information processing and behavioral decision-making.The work synthesizes interviews with preeminent scholars who have shaped these paradigms, featuring theoretical developments, key findings, and methodological innovations.
Journal of Consumer Research
Your institution could be eligible to free or deeply discounted online access to Journal of Consumer Research through the Oxford Developing Countries Initiative. Find out more. Publishes interdisciplinary scholarly research that describes and explains consumer behavior. Empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles span.
Marketing Research Process: Complete Guide
Integrate with 100+ apps and plug-ins to get more done. SurveyMonkey Forms. Build and customize online forms to collect info and payments. SurveyMonkey Genius. Create better surveys and spot insights quickly with built-in AI. Market Research Solutions. Purpose-built solutions for all of your market research needs. INDUSTRIES.
The past, present, and future of consumer research
For example, experiments tested the process by which consumers evaluate options using information display boards and "Mouselab" matrices of aspects and attributes ... Journal of Consumer Research, 16(2), 158-174. Trope Y, Liberman N. Construal-level theory of psychological distance.
Dreams Might Help You Process Bad Experiences
US News is a recognized leader in college, grad school, hospital, mutual fund, and car rankings. Track elected officials, research health conditions, and find news you can use in politics ...
Household Debt Rose by $184 Billion in Q1 2024; Delinquency Transition
Based on data from the New York Fed's Consumer Credit Panel, a nationally representative sample drawn from anonymized Equifax credit data, the report provides a quarterly snapshot of household trends in borrowing and indebtedness, including data about mortgages, student loans, credit cards, auto loans and delinquencies. The report aims to ...
Here are the ultraprocessed foods you most need to avoid ...
Song wouldn't necessarily advise a complete rejection of all ultraprocessed foods because it is a diverse category, he said. "Cereals, whole grain breads, for example, they are also considered ...

Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer Research Objectives

Consumer Research Model

Consumer Research Process

After Consumer Research Process

Consumer Research Methods

Customer Research Questions

Importance of Consumer Research

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How the experts get results: 8 examples of consumer research

1. Bloom & Wild learned from their target market how to make Valentine’s Day fresh again

2. Little Moons tapped into their true target customers thanks to customer research data

3. Penfold combined conducting customer research with brand tracking — a smart move

4. psLondon redefined university marketing through Gen Z insights

5. Evive Nutrition’s used customer insights to guide them on their American journey

6. Organic Valley’s used customer insights to create breakfast bites nobody can resist

7. GoCardless tapped into customer research to make payments painless

8. DRY Soda Co. harnessed consumer research to drive an impressive 170% revenue surge

The importance of quantitative research

The importance of qualitative research

Use consumer research tools to conduct customer research

Prioritize clear objectives

Be open to unexpected insights

Ensure diversity in your sample

Validate and re-test

Elliot Barnard

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