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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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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.

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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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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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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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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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8 Key Stages in the Consumer Research Strategy

July 8 2022

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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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Consumer Research: Get Started

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Consumer Demographics
Consumer Behavior
Consumer Market

Good to Know Before You Start

Consumer Research

Consumer research is the process of gathering data on a individuals and their relations to a market. This includes information on the current and potential customers, as well as the competitive landscape of the market.

Primary Research

This 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

This 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.

About This Guide

This guide focuses on secondary research sources.

Consumer Demographics : This is data on the consumer. Covering topics like age, income, ethnic origin, etc.
Consumer Behavior : This contains more articles with a bit of data focusing on interactions between individuals, businesses and society.

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Consumer Research: Definition, Methods and Benefits (+ Templates)

Nemanja Jovancic

Sep 02 2020

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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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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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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 hand in providing tailored experiences for a variety of personalities, backgrounds, and preferences.

A seamstress cannot tailor a pair of pants or a suit without first taking measurement. In the same way, before data can be used to tailor consumer experiences, you must have a plan of action in place, or your efforts will not reach their full potential. Let’s walk you through several steps that are crucial in creating an effective consumer research strategy.

Quantitative vs Qualitative Market Research

You may wonder, “What is the most important step in the marketing research process?” Don’t worry, we’ll tell you. Understanding the value of quantitative vs. qualitative market research is step one. These are both important because they will help you understand what your priorities are in your quest to acquire actionable insights.

Quantitative research involves statistical data and analysis. Measuring actual behavior.
Qualitative research pulls us away from the strictness of numbers and shows us a deeper view into the thought process of our customers. Qualitative research gathers the emotions and opinions about a specific product or service. Good research process examples involve implementing online surveys or initiating consumer panels.

quantitative vs qualitative market research

What Are the 7 Steps in the Marketing Research Process?

Determine your ask. If you don’t know what you’re looking for then you won’t know what questions to ask. To determine what your initial question is, you may want to look into what consumers are searching for in conjunction with consulting with other colleagues who have their hands in the research project, such as product developers and marketers.
Solidify your objectives. Ensure that your marketing research team has clearly defined objectives that point out the directions in which your team should go. Goals that lack directions are just dream destinations.
Acquire any and all applicable data for your research. This is where quantitative vs qualitative research comes into play. You may want to research the amount of people searching for a specific product or, alternatively, you may consider the emotional indicators of your intended audience to determine whether or not a product or service is effective.
Present a clear example. Once you have your desired demographic, consider compiling consumers into a sample from which you can acquire strong insights. You also want to be sure that your sample size is large enough to accurately collect meaningful and measurable data. Try direct mail surveys or online customer satisfactions surveys to collect adequate insights.
Conduct Fieldwork. Now, put that sample group to use! You may consider conducting field testing in the form of a focus group that spans over multiple weeks or months.
Assess your findings. After you’ve gathered the information you need, assess the data to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Maybe customers preferred one product model over another. Either way, these are new insights that can bring grand success to your company.
Report the outcomes of your research. Present your findings to company executives and other invested stakeholders to put action on the products or services that need the most improvement.

Checklist of the Marketing Research Process

Jumpstart Your Consumer Research Process With DemandJump Today!

We know that gathering research can be time consuming. Consumer insight research must be assessed and updated frequently in order to get accurate results as consumer behavior is constantly changing.

With our platform, you’ll be provided deep consumer research tools and insights that are customized to your business. If you’re ready to get started automating your research, get started today with a free trial of the DemandJump Insights product.

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The past, present, and future of consumer research

Maayan s. malter.

1 Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, NY USA

Morris B. Holbrook

Barbara e. kahn.

2 The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA USA

Jeffrey R. Parker

3 Department of Marketing, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL USA

Donald R. Lehmann

Introduction

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

Key concepts in the late - 1960s

Favored methods in the late-1960s

Aims in the late-1960s

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

Concepts after 1980

Extended ICABS Framework after 1980

Methods after 1980

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.

Aims after 1980

Summary—the three I’s after 1980

The present—the consumer behavior field today

Present concepts.

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 (Table2 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.

ICABS framework in the digital age

Present Methods

Present Aims

The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040 1

Future Concepts

Future Methods

Future Aims

Summary - Future research questions and directions

Future consumer behavior research questions

1 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.

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Apr 3, 2019

What Is Consumer Research and Why Is It Important for Startups?

Updated: Jan 26, 2023

At the heart of your business is your customer, and to grow and scale you’re going to need to get to know them really, really well. Businesses get to know their customers better by conducting consumer research, also known as customer research.

Here we cover everything you need to know about consumer research and the methods to conduct it, and how it all ties together with customer segmentation and buyer personas.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research is the practice of identifying the preferences, attitudes, motivations, and buying behavior of the targeted customer. Using a variety of customer research methods to gather this information, shared traits among the different customer groups are identified and categorized into customer segments and buyer personas, which are then used to create marketing campaigns targeting a specific segment or persona.

Consumer research is the key to improving your product and successfully marketing to customers who want to do business with you. Interviews, surveys, and other customer research methods are some of your best friends when it comes to helping your company consistently increase its revenue year on year.

What is a customer segment?

A customer segment, also called a consumer segment, is a group of individuals who share specific traits relevant to marketing, such as age, location, gender, spending habits, and interests. The purpose of a customer segment is to provide a better understanding of how different groups of customers make purchasing decisions, and to allow marketing efforts to be more targeted and better tailored to those distinct groups.

Different customer segments may require different messaging, different communication channels, or even different pricing options . Additionally, customer segments can help a startup identify the most profitable customers, establish better customer relationships, and improve customer service. Without identifying customer segments through consumer research, your startup may not fully recognize the specific demands of your customers, resulting in missed opportunities and failing to gain a competitive advantage in your market.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona, also called a customer persona, is a research-based profile constructed from the analysis of real customers. A buyer persona is more than just a detailed description of your target customer; it’s build from the words of actual customers and provides in depth insight into who they are, what they value, and what their motivations are.

If you want to know what prospective customers are actually thinking as they weigh out their options on how to address whatever problem your startup aims to solve, you are going to need to create a buyer persona. Buyer personas allow brands to better understand customer segments, and recognize the key traits within them, ensuring activities involved in acquiring and serving your customers are tailored to the targeted buyer’s needs. Unless your target market is extremely limited in scope, it’s very common to have a number of buyer personas within each customer segment.

How to conduct consumer research

Consumer research can take many forms, from notes your team takes on a daily basis (such as sales and customer support calls) to more planned and structured methods of data collection.

Identifying the best consumer research methods for your business may take some trial and error, but the rewards are worth it. Wherever possible, your customers should be grouped into customer segments to help you achieve the goals of your data collection.

Consumer Research Methods

Interviewing customers who are going through different stages of their journey with your product can be time-consuming. Even though interviews may prove to be a significant challenge, they can also be one of the most eye-opening and valuable consumer research methods your startup can undertake.

Interviews offer a high level of insight into the mind of the customer with very specific details on their needs, wants, and motivations as they relate to your product. This information is invaluable for any startup, but it isn’t always easy to obtain. The data collected from interviews can be used across all aspects of your marketing strategy for a 12-month period. After this time, you should begin the process again to account for changes in your business and changes to your customer base.

If you don’t have the resources to carry out interviews (or your customers won’t oblige), there are other ways to gather some solid data.

Surveys might be the most commonly used consumer research method, and for good reason too. Surveys don’t necessarily offer the same level of insight as interviews, but they are much easier to get customers to participate in and provide feedback due to their simple nature.

They are a quick and easy way for customers to provide feedback and feel their needs are valued by a company.

Surveys are conducted in a number of ways with varying degrees of effectiveness, but generally speaking, the response rate for surveys is much higher than interviews. Having a larger sample size makes it easier for a startup to recognize similar characteristics and patterns among consumers.

Some of the most common survey methods include retention email , snail mail, over the phone, face-to-face, in apps or website, and even through text messages on mobile devices.

Surveys can be self-conducted (the person responding will read and answer questions unattended) or they can be conducted by a person who records their answers.

New customer survey

Established customer survey

Past/canceled customer survey

Thank-you page survey

On-page pop-up surveys

On-site polls

User testing

Net Promoter Score

Using analytics as a form of consumer research is very different than interviews and surveys. Rather than focusing on what the customer says they want or need, analytics focuses on what the customer actually does. This is a form of observational research where the purpose is to measure the actual behavior rather than customer-reported behavior. It’s great to know what a customer wants, but sometimes they don’t even know what they really want or why, which is why it’s so important to track their behavior and make changes that get actual results.

Google (e.g. bounce rate, time on page, traffic)

Click tracking

Scroll mapping

User recorded sessions

Review mining

Review mining is an often overlooked consumer research method, but also one of the most valuable methods, especially in SaaS, when it comes to cost and value . Review mining is the process of researching reviews of competitors to gather qualitative data to improve your own product.

Unlike interviews and surveys, review mining doesn’t require that you reach out to your customers to get feedback. Instead, all the feedback is already published and readily available for you to analyze, making it extremely easy to acquire valuable data to help your startup gain a competitive advantage. In fact, it might just be the most effective way to not make the same mistakes your direct competitors have made, and identify specific features that make similar products sell.

Review-based websites (e.g. G2 Crowd and Trust Radius)

Forums and comments (Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Product Hunt, blogs)

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways you can capture your voice of customer data, but it’s a good start if you’re not sure where to begin.

Why is consumer research important?

The voice of the customer (VOC)

The voice of your business should mirror the voice of your customer, and your product should satisfy their needs. How better to attract your ideal audience than by using the language they use, reflecting back the pains they feel, and being there to help them find a solution to their woes. And by solution, I mean your product.

Capturing the exact words and messages of your customers by speaking directly with them is a goldmine for your marketing strategy.

A recent CoSchedule study revealed that:

Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter

56% of the study’s most elite marketers conduct research at least once a month

Buyer personas

Now that you understand what a buyer persona is (see above), it’s important to recognize why they are so valuable and what they actually look like.

An example of a buyer persona might look something like this: Wendy, the 45-year-old single mom with 2 kids who earns a modest income and enjoys tennis.

But what does this actually mean? The reason it is so useful is because it is based on actual research from customer data, rather than being dreamed up in a meeting room by marketers who imagine that this is their target audience.

Conducting in-depth research on your prospects and customers will help to give you a clear snapshot of who your customers really are. This can often be an eye-opener. Some companies sink their precious marketing budget into targeting their ideal customers when their actual audience is quite different – so all the money spent on marketing has little effect.

Say, for example, you own a second-hand shop. All your marketing efforts target the 30-40 age group who you imagine is your ideal audience – they are shopping with an eco-friendly, sustainable mindset. You can’t understand why your targeted marketing is having very little impact on your sales. But after surveying your actual customers, you find the majority of them are thrifty 50-somethings looking for bargains. A completely different audience from the one you’ve been trying to attract.

When you carry out regular consumer research, you’ll have a much more accurate idea of the demographics that matter to your business. Building buyer personas based around this factual data have a far better chance of impacting your growth marketing than using educated guesswork.

Content is one of the reigning champions of marketing for the top of the funnel. But if you’re basing your content creation on what you feel like writing, what competitor sites are doing, or what an influencer website said was hot to write about right now – your content marketing might be in need of some help.

Your customers are exactly that – yours. They found you and subscribed for a reason, so why not find out what that reason was, and ask them what they’d like to read more of?

Simple pop-up Web surveys or a casual email asking readers what they’d like to read more of on your site can provide you with ample content ideas to fill up your quarterly calendar.

Improving conversion rates

Every great conversion expert knows that the best performing copy and design is linked directly to the customer experience.

Copywriters, designers, and optimizers all look to consumer research data in their process – from beginning to end. Long after the main project has finished, A/B testing still relies on customer data to pinpoint the weak areas and make improvements.

Design trends and best practices may change, but the one thing that remains constant is your customer.

Growing your business

Audience research is crucial to your business growth. Keeping in touch with your customer base is one of the best ways to find out what you’re doing right, and how to pinpoint what customers see as flaws in your product or service. Customer satisfaction can be measured with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system , which directly correlates with your business growth.

In conclusion, don’t underestimate the impact that regular consumer research can have on your business, whether you’re at start-up or enterprise level. The data you collect can impact the way you build your product, market your services, and message your audience, all of which are directly tied to healthy and sustainable business growth.

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SaaS Growth

How to Conduct Consumer Research

How well do you know your customers? Do you know what motivates them? What keeps them up at night? What does their dream role look like? What would make their lives easier?

Knowing what makes your customers tick is imperative for any business looking to leave its mark on the world.

When you conduct consumer research, you gain access to a plethora of data and insights you can then use to scale your business. Launching new products, designing your website, writing a newsletter, and fine-tuning your sales pitch are all examples of processes you can optimize with consumer research.

Imagine you’re going to give the speech of your career. You don’t step onto stage, not really knowing what you’ll say, with notes scribbled on your arm.

Instead, you would have rehearsed it, practiced with an audience, and gathered and implemented feedback. Perhaps you would have even put a deck together and refined it with the help of your team; writers, experts, designers, and more.

All of that work that goes into a speech is similar to the amount of consumer research your business should do before taking any action.

In this article, I’ll explain why customer research is so vital, and how to conduct customer research in six different ways.

Why is consumer research so important?

When you conduct consumer research, you gain deep insight into your target customers’ needs, preferences, challenges, and behaviors.

You develop a strong understanding of who they are, what they do, and what they need.

These insights are vital for strengthening the success of your business and maintaining a competitive advantage within your industry .

Here are some of the key reasons why consumer research is so important for your business.

1) It helps you make better decisions

Every decision your business makes needs to be well-informed. When you understand the reason why you do things, you’ll be able to make better, more strategic decisions that have a positive impact on your business.

Using consumer research in your decision-making process will ensure your decisions are based on fact, not assumptions .

Consumer research can guide your business strategy by helping you identify the best next moves on your journey to the top. It also reduces the risks of your decisions . You’ll have concrete evidence for why something should (or shouldn’t) be done.

Consumer research is valuable for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from small, direct-to-consumer brands to multinational business-to-business corporations.

Whether you’re developing a new product , adding a new feature to a tool, or adopting more sustainable practices, consumer research will help you find the best path forward.

2) It prevents avoidable mistakes

Everything you do in business comes with a price tag, whether in the form of opportunity cost or actual financial investment.

That means every action you take for your business must be strategic and thought-out. Instead of relying on luck, you must gather the information you need to refine your decision-making process.

Thankfully, consumer research can prevent updates or changes that fall flat with your customers. It can reveal seemingly good ideas that would harm the business, such as changing one of your buyers’ favorite features, or wasting time adding something no one actually wants.

Use consumer research to determine which projects are worth investing in, which changes will have the most positive impact on your business, and which initiatives will end in disaster.

You’ll learn exactly what your consumers want from you as a brand, so you’ll be less likely to make mistakes by rushing into things based on a gut feeling .

3) It keeps you competitive

Competition is fierce in eCommerce, but consumer research can help you stand out amidst a sea of lookalikes.

Consumer research is time-consuming. It requires several layers of detailed research and analysis. However, the exhaustive nature of consumer research means not many brands or companies do it as well as they should .

That means investing in comprehensive consumer research will give your business a competitive edge. It’s an opportunity to learn about your customers and what makes them tick.

Take the guesswork out of your consumers’ motivations and behaviors by using real data and insights. Rather than basing your business decisions on assumptions, everything you do will be tailored to your buyers. Every decision will have a reason.

You’ll be doing what you know is right for your audience while your competitors are stuck doing what they think is right.

How to conduct consumer research

Before you conduct consumer research, you need to adopt an analytical mindset. Consumer research relies on lots of analytical tools and processes, from reviewing online user behavior to conducting surveys and interviewing consumers.

Once you’ve gathered all of this data, you then need to distill the important information gain actionable insights for your business.

The research process typically involves the following activities:

Trend analysis
Industry surveys
Customer surveys
Customer interviews
Team interviews
Audience behavior analysis

Let’s look at some of the tools and processes you can use to conduct consumer research.

1) Trend analysis

Trend analysis is a core component of effective consumer research. It shows you what’s currently popular within your target market. You can view trend spikes over time and predict upcoming fads before they hit their peak.

Trend analysis is great for discovering evergreen opportunities while still helping you capitalize on short-term trends.

Use consumer trend analysis to forecast future business decisions and identify the topics your consumers are most interested in at the moment.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for spying trends on your own website, making for some excellent customer-first data .

You can use Google Analytics to measure performance across different channels, traffic sources, or web pages over time. You can also look at audience trends and on-site conversion changes.

This data can help you answer questions such as:

Which products, pages, or blogs are visitors most interested in as a first entry point? What about once they are on the website?
Which channels are leading to higher conversions and revenue?
Are we seeing more buy-in when it comes to subscription or auto-replenishment programs?
How has our average order value changed over time? Does it align with any initiatives, such as planting a tree for every sale?
How has our audience changed over the past year? What kind of questions are they asking?

You can use Google Analytics to analyze and interpret historical website data to make informed predictions. Google Analytics has an impressive suite of pre-built reports that can reveal current interests and best performing pages. Or, you can create your own tailored to your business goals and KPIs.

Tip : Performance fluctuates throughout the year, so be sure to analyze data over a long enough period of time.

Make sure you also set a comparison so you can see how the data is currently performing compared to a previous period.

For instance, looking at website visitors over a seven-day period won’t tell you much about your performance. But, if you compare those seven days to the same period last year, you’ll be able to see how things have changed over time.

Besides time periods, you should also compare different metrics as part of your trend analysis.

For example, look at how website revenue has changed over time compared to the number of transactions. Has revenue increased, but total transactions decreased? What does this tell you about how consumers interact with your brand?

Exploding Topics

If you want to discover emerging technology, trending topics, and new market opportunities, I highly recommend Exploding Topics.

Exploding Topics is one of my go-to content creation tools . It analyzes searches, conversations, and mentions across the internet to determine trending topics in different industries.

Exploding Topics’ intuitive algorithm is able to use this data to identify industries, products, and topics long before they take off so you can be at the forefront of the next big trend.

In the free version, you can filter by preset categories to see which topics are currently “exploding” in your chosen niche. You can then use this information to see what your audience is searching for or talking about right now.

From there, you can find ways to address those topics through your marketing and sales activity.

You could tailor your organic social media content to those conversations, write a blog article on that topic, or adapt your sales messaging accordingly when talking directly to your customers.

If you have the Pro version of Exploding Topics, you can see emerging trends at least six months before they reach their peak popularity. The Pro model is ideal for business owners and entrepreneurs who want to stay ahead of the curve.

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that can help you spot trending keywords and competitor analysis to uncover popular topics in your niche.

Their Content Explorer tool lets you research topics, find link opportunities, and tap into social and SEO metrics. The data provided lets you analyze top-performing content and discover new opportunities for your business.

Enter your chosen topic check out their “pages over time” chart and table. This is helpful for seeing the general trend for the topic, so you can see whether it’s an up-and-coming craze that you need to address, or if it’s already in or past its peak popularity.

You can also combine advanced search operators to refine your search and easily uncover new content creation opportunities based on what’s taking off right now. Narrowing your results with advanced search operators reveals the trending topics that align best with your goals.

Industry blogs and newsletters

Finally, you’ll want to stay up to date on the latest industry updates with blogs and newsletters in your niche.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of resources out there offering indispensable market information tailored specifically to your niche. Subscribe to industry blogs and newsletters to soak up their insights and stay at the forefront of your niche.

For eCommerce owners and business leaders, continuous education is mission critical. Deepening and expanding your knowledge is the best way to sharpen your skills, stay ahead of the curve, and adapt your strategies as needed.

2) Industry surveys

Industry surveys gather consumer data by polling your audience. Surveys tend to be performed online and can be an easy, cost-effective way to conduct consumer research.

Surveys allow you to reach out to your target audience and ask them specific questions to guide your business forward. Some industry surveys you could perform include competitor analysis, consumer profiling, and new product development inquiries.

A few tools you can use to survey your audience include…

Attest is a survey tool that lets you easily create and distribute surveys to a carefully defined target audience.

You can craft a wide variety of surveys, including consumer profiling, creative testing, market analysis, concept testing, and more. These surveys allow you to dig deep into the topics that matter most to your consumers and your brand.

Attest has access to more than 110 million survey respondents across 49 countries. You can use demographic filters and qualifiers to ensure your survey is sent to the people who are most representative of your target consumers.

This ensures you only reach respondents with the consumer habits, lifestyle, or traits that matter to you.

One of my favorite features within Attest is the interactive dashboard, which transforms your survey results into easy-to-digest insights. You can also send surveys multiple times to the same audience to see how answers change over time, or you can compare two groups to see if there’s a significant difference in responses between audience types.

With Attest, your first survey is free. After that, you’ll pay per response with various tiers based on the number of responses you want to receive.

Forrester Research

Forrester pioneered the concept of customer obsession. As such, they’re committed to helping brands fully understand their buyers so they can create customer-centric business decisions that move the needle.

Businesses can achieve this using a number of Forrester’s tools. First, you can access published industry surveys and reports by Forrester. These help you discover emerging trends and user behaviors for specific industries.

Alternatively, you can work directly with Forrester to produce your own surveys and reports or to research your company positioning. Forrester can provide research-based insights, models, and frameworks for your business to use to implement the actions that deliver the right results.

Forrester’s FeedbackNow tool is great for capturing real-time customer feedback. With it, you can pinpoint emerging issues, discover customer preferences, and transform your customer experiences. The FeedbackNow tool can be integrated digitally into your website or app, or can be installed as a physical product in brick-and-mortar stores.

AYTM is short for Ask Your Target Market. As the name suggests, the purpose of this online market research tool is to help brands gain insights from their target audience.

More than just another survey tool, AYTM utilized “DIY market research” when they first launched in 2009. Since then, they’ve continued to set the pace for sophisticated industry research.

With AYTM, you can send surveys to your own list, or you can develop panel surveys to be sent to AYTM’s survey respondent database. You can also craft these surveys yourself or enlist the help of AYTM experts to prepare and launch them for you.

AYTM focuses on serving small businesses and start-ups. Their pay-per-use model helps even the smallest of players go up against industry leaders by only paying for survey responses when they need them.

Pollfish is another survey tool that’s easy to use with simple pricing. They provide access to more than 250 million survey respondents, so you can gain fast insights into potential consumers.

Pollfish has an advanced audience targeting model that lets you ask an initial screening question to reach the target audience that best meets your required criteria. This helps ensure you only pay for responses from people who represent your target customers.

Tip : They can also partner directly with apps to survey their direct audience in exchange for a customer-relevant benefit. Instead of offering cash or universally-desired rewards, which may attract survey-takers who will skew the results, Pollfish can provide a brand-specific benefit like a discount to your store, or freebie with next purchase.

Qualtrics comes with both a survey platform as well as a market research arm to increase your consumer insights. According to their website, they have access to more than 40 million panel respondents , and leverage AI to get the best response, insights, and statistical analyses.

I’ve seen the Qualtrics brand come up multiple times while reading eCommerce industry studies, but most recently saw their name in Klaviyo’s 2023 Consumer Spending Report .

Incite Fusion

Incite Fusion offers research into user experience, customer segmentation, price elasticity, and more.

I learned of this firm from Tracey Wallace, who ran a survey that found B2B buyers rely on search for research, but don’t trust search results from businesses .

Ipsos executes research, panels, and more to help companies understand their market, plan their strategy, measure channel performance, improve user experience, and much more.

I discovered them from the 2023 Shopify Commerce Trends Report , which used Ipsos to explore the state of the eCommerce industry. They surveyed 900 business owners and commerce decision makers worldwide.

On-site surveys

You can set up on-site surveys to serve your website visitors. These will help you gather important data around leads, what stage of the buyer journey they’re at by the time they discover your website, and give you an idea of your competition.

Below are some survey questions you can include. Unless noted otherwise (questions 1, 2, 4) the answer fields should be open-ended.

1) Which best describes you?

List your different audience buckets (ICPs, buyer personas) with an “Other” option.

For example:

I am an…

Amazon seller (upon click, have them select their sales volume, ie. 25,000-100,000 orders per month)
Amazon aggregator (upon click, have them select funding, ie. $50M+ in funding)
Direct-to-consumer merchant (upon click, have them select order volume, ie. 100 average daily orders)
Other (click to type details)

2) What problem are you looking to solve today?

List your product or service’s use cases.

3) How do you currently manage [problem stated above]? (This should be open-ended, because you may discover competitors and alternatives you weren’t even aware of.)

4) Is there anything you dislike about your current solution?

Yes (click to type details)

5) What are your top requirements for a [product or service use cases they selected above]?

6) How did you find us?

3) Customer surveys

Industry surveys are invaluable for gaining a wide-lens perspective of sector activity and your target audience’s needs, motivations, and behaviors.

Meanwhile, customer surveys offer a focused, zoomed-in look at your business and your own customers.

It’s important to collect both industry and customer surveys, as they can show how customers respond to your brand as well as judge your brand positioning in the wider market.

From digging into their product preferences to gauging buyer satisfaction, customer surveys are a popular consumer research tool because you can verify statements and insights directly from consumers who have proven to be a good fit for your brand.

Here are a few tools that help me run and analyze customer surveys.

If you lead a team, you may already be familiar with Airtable — a collaborative app designed to propel workflows and teams. But did you know it also has a surveys feature?

You can use Airtable to create customer satisfaction and analysis forms. The app also has a template you can copy and tailor to your brand. Then you can send this form to your customers asking them to evaluate their experience with your brand.

From here, you can use the Promoter/Detractor status to dig into survey responses and drive actions based on what they say.

Tip : Include a closing question asking if they would be willing to chat further with you about their experience. This is a great way to find customers willing to do interviews so you can dig deeper.

Google Forms

You don’t always need fancy tools to learn what your customers have to say. Google Forms are a simple and elegant way to speak to your customers and gather insights.

Use Google Forms to create customer feedback surveys for free. It’s an easy, no-nonsense way to ask your customers the questions that matter most to your business.

Once you’ve built your Google Form, you can distribute it through your email list, in a website pop-up, on social media, or by directly reaching out to customers and asking them to complete the form.

You’re able to view real-time survey responses by navigating to the “Responses” tab, or you can export them to Google Sheets for a more granular insight.

If you’re looking to create customer survey forms that are engaging and integrate seamlessly into your website, turn to Typeform.

You can craft innovative forms, surveys, and quizzes with Typeform that’ll keep users motivated to complete them.

Unlike the usual format of reams of questions, Typeform displays one at a time. You can add your own branding and make the questions conversational to encourage respondents to give more thoughtful responses and easily move from question to question.

Typeform offers a limited free plan or various paid tiers, allowing you to choose a package that best suits your customer survey needs.

HotJar surveys

HotJar is traditionally recognized as a heat-mapping and user-tracking tool, but they also offer surveys that allow users to ask site visitors an unlimited number of questions.

Their surveys can take numerous formats, from popover widgets to fullscreen surveys and even external standalone pages. This allows you to capture customers while they’re on your website or via email.

You can use HotJar to customize surveys specifically for your website visitors. You can also create a Net Promoter Score survey to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction.

By combining surveys with other HotJar features such as Heatmaps or Recordings, you can gain a thorough understanding of how people engage with your website. This information can then guide strategic changes that improve the online customer experience and uplift conversions.

For example, you might want to serve a post-purchase survey that appears once someone has completed a purchase to learn how they found the process. Or, you could have a pop-up appear on your “Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter” page that asks the main reason they signed up.

Customer survey question bank

You can use the questions below to build out your own customer survey. Unless noted otherwise (questions 2, 10) the responses should be open-ended.

1) How did you discover [company]?

2) What’s your main use case for [company]?

List your different use cases with an “Other” option.

What’s your main use case for MyFBAPrep?

Carton forwarding
Item-level prep
FBM fulfillment
DTC fulfillment
Retail replenishment

3) Before [your company], how were you handling [what your customer uses you for]?

4) What was the trigger that made you switch from your old method? (Responses to this question are useful for describing your audience’s pain points in their own voice.)

5) What other alternatives were you looking at alongside us?

6) What features, services, or experience made you choose us over your other options?

7) What did your other options lack that made you cross them off your list?

8) What is your favorite thing about [company]?

9) What can we do better?

10) Are you willing to chat more with our customer research team?

Yes, via email (click to enter best contact email)
Yes, via voice call (click to enter best contact email for meeting invite)
Not right now

4) Customer interviews

While surveys tend to be completed virtually and are constrained by predetermined questions, customer interviews allow for face-to-face discussions and collect more qualitative data. Interviews are invaluable for “going down the rabbit hole” conversations that unveil things you wouldn’t even have thought to ask about.

Customer interviews can be either structured or unstructured. Structured interviews are led by detailed, predetermined questions. Meanwhile, unstructured ones are free-flowing, allowing the conversation to carve its own path and ask new questions as it evolves.

Tip : Consider a hybrid of both, with set questions to keep the conversation flowing, but don’t be afraid to veer off course if there’s an interesting tangent to follow.

Interviews can also be one-to-ones or in focus groups with multiple customers.

Customer interviews are vital for gaining deep insights into customer behaviors, motivations, and needs. Whichever interview type you choose, it’s important to remain unbiased.

You can use a number of tools to conduct customer interviews. Some of the tools you’ll need to consider are which platform you’ll use to host the meeting, recording equipment, and transcribing tools.

These days, there are a lot of virtual meeting platforms to choose from. Two of the biggest competitors in this space are Google Meet and Zoom, both of which offer free and paid versions, depending on your needs.

Google Meet

Google Meet is Google’s native video conferencing tool. Much like the rest of Google’s tools, it’s easy and free to use.

Google Workspace users can unlock Premium Meet features such as breakout rooms, polls, Q&As, and attendance tracking.

If you plan to host a focus group with multiple customers, or if you want to gain interactive data during the interview, you may want to consider using the Premium version of Google Meet.

While these Premium features aren’t necessary, they can add another layer to your customer interviews, allowing you to dig deeper into the answers and topics that arise and capture even more data for analysis.

On the free version of Google Meet, you can host one-to-one meetings for up to 24 hours, or you can have calls with three or more participants for up to 60 minutes.

The other video conferencing giant you can use to conduct customer interviews is Zoom.

Similar to Google Meet, Zoom also offers a free plan. You can host up to 100 participants, have group meetings for up to 40 minutes, or hold one-to-one meetings for up to 30 hours.

Along with their standard video conferencing tools, Zoom also offers an omnichannel contact center solution. This solution can simplify business operations and elevate customer experiences by providing video-based customer support. You can then measure the data from these interactions to figure out how to improve your customer interactions in the future.

The differences between Zoom and Google Meet are minor, so which one you choose tends to come down to personal preference. I lean toward Google Meet, as I’ve already built my call toolstack around it.

You should record customer interviews (with permission) so you can play them back, share them with your team, pull quotes to settle debates, revisit and analyze what was said, and use the findings to make informed business decisions.

Many conferencing tools already come with built-in recording features. I like to use dedicated call recording software for customer interviews, as it makes hosting, recording, and analyzing customer interviews much easier.

Gong is an intuitive video recording tool that integrates seamlessly with both Google Meet and Zoom so you can record customer conversations and capture interesting insights.

It analyzes customer interactions to show you what topics people respond most favorably to or which parts of the conversation didn’t resonate as expected. The software’s AI will dissect your customer’s voice to provide highlights, action items, and a searchable database of customer voice.

Gong prompts participant consent prior to recording. Once the recording begins, Gong will redact any sensitive information, such as customer credit card details.

Your calls are automatically logged on your CRM for future access and analysis. Gong does all the heavy-lifting so you can seamlessly host customer interviews knowing the conversation is being recorded and analyzed in the background.

Vidyard works as a call recorder, regardless of the meeting software you choose. You can install a Chrome extension to begin recording during your video calls, and choose whether you want it to record your screen as well as camera, or just one or the other.

Vidyard also has a great Zoom integration, as it makes sure your Zoom meetings are always recorded and uploaded to an accessible location, regardless of who on your team was in the meeting.

Paid plans on Zoom allow you to automatically upload Zoom recordings into Vidyard. You can then use Vidyard to generate automatic captions for your recording and upload it to a video hub where you can bookmark and highlight different sections as you view your recording.

Additionally, if you plan to create async customer support videos, Vidyard can be especially powerful for providing elevated customer service.

Transcription

Transcribing consumer interviews makes it easier for you to analyze the data. Manually transcribing video or audio content, though, can take a long time. So, I recommend enlisting the help of automatic transcription tools.

These tools will collect audio data and convert it into text so you can dive straight into the analysis stage of your interviews.

Descript is an all-in-one audio and video editing software. You can record, transcribe, edit, mix, collaborate, and master audio and video content all within this transcription tool.

Descript features industry-leading accuracy thanks to its extensive development, testing, and refinement.

It also boasts lightning fast turnaround for transcriptions.

Upload your video to Descript and it will immediately start transcribing your interview for you. While doing so, Descript will prompt you to add Speaker labels for different voices.

This automated speaker detection tool means you only need to identify speakers once. Descript will then remember who’s who and apply Speaker labels throughout the written transcription.

If you have a complex interview that needs input from professional transcriptionists, Descript also offers a White Glove service that claims to deliver 99% accuracy in an average of 24 hours.

Overall, it’s a great tool for transcribing interviews quickly and easily.

Avoma’s tagline is an “AI Meeting Assistant with Conversation Intelligence.” Integrating at every stage of the meeting process, Avoma helps you before, during, and after interviews.

During the meeting, it handles automatic recording and transcription. Avoma collects consent and transcribes your interviews in real time so you can instantly access interview transcripts.

It also transforms your video or audio meetings into a searchable knowledge base. You can then add comments to saved transcripts and collaborate across teams if you have more than one person working on consumer research.

When using Avoma, you’ll also get automatic speaker identification, a topic breakdown of the conversation, and insights into metrics like speaker talk time, talk-to-listen ratio, and more. The topic detection and breakdown tools are great for gaining a top-level overview of the key points of the interview.

This transcription tool can seamlessly integrate with your CRM, ensuring all of your transcripts are saved in one easy-to-access location.

While Descript is great for obtaining highly accurate transcripts with ease, Avoma is my preferred transcription tool if you want a set of action items to take away, and smart assistance analyzing customer interviews.

Customer interview question bank

Below are some questions you can use to interview your customers to uncover insights.

To put these questions into context, I’ve framed them from the POV of a B2B eCommerce fulfillment solution.

Who handles inventory, fulfillment, and logistics at your company?
What are your main responsibilities and KPIs?
What does the typical day or week look like in your role?
What do you use us for mainly? (Could be DTC fulfillment, marketplace fulfillment, FBA prep, etc.)
How did you manage order fulfillment before us?
How long did it take to [fulfill orders, prep items, audit inventory, etc.] before us?
How long does it take to [fulfill orders, prep items, audit inventory, etc.] today?
What made you seek an external fulfillment partner out?
Who else were you considering?
Why did you choose us?
What were you skeptical or unsure of when you first discovered us?
How were your sales or conversions affected after you started using us?
What has faster and more hands-off fulfillment unlocked for yourself and your team? What about for the company?
What aspects of our service could you not live without?
How has using us changed how your team works?

Customer surveys and interviews: How to get to know your customers better

5) Team interviews

Your leads and customers aren’t the only source of consumer information you have. All of the departments that regularly interact with your leads and customers have a wealth of knowledge and context, whether they realize it or not. This is one of the reasons it’s so important to build good internal feedback loops to strengthen your overall growth initiatives.

For example, your sales team knows:

Common hesitations that potential buyers bring up
Most frequently asked questions and confusion points
The features or benefits that resonate
Most effective ways to frame different offerings
Other solutions leads compare you to
Main competitors you’ve lost deals to
What problems your leads are trying to solve ( JTBD )

Interview individuals from different departments like sales and customer service to learn some of their gathered knowledge about your consumers. You can interview your audience-facing team members using many of the same tools as you would use for customer interviews.

Use some of the interview questions below to get started.

How would you group the different types of leads/customers we have, if you had to put them into different buckets?
What are their usual job titles?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What are their KPIs and metrics for success?
What other tools or solutions are they using?
What tools or solutions did they switch over from?
How do they use us in their day-to-day?
Are there any key indicators a lead is likely to convert?
What competitors or alternatives have you heard of the most?
What do leads/customers say we do better than them? What do we do worse?
What are the most important features or services our leads/customers care about?
What are the biggest typical blockers to a sale?
Have you noticed anything many leads are hesitant about regarding our company/product/service?
What’s some of your favorite feedback from leads/customers?
What should we do better to close deals/keep customers happy/set expectations?

6) Audience behavior

As our access to third-party data becomes more and more restricted, you need to turn to collecting first-party data . Instead of relying on information derived from external sources through cookies and other third-party aggregators, you need to have your own methods of collecting and analyzing audience behavior .

Tap into your audience data collected on your store or glean audience behavior insights from trusted industry tools.

On your store

Leverage first-party data by analyzing audience behavior from data collected on your store. This could be data from behaviors, actions, or interests taken across your website, eCommerce store, or related apps.

This kind of data is key to understanding your customers’ needs because it’s based on actual audience interactions with your brand.

A few tools that can help you observe how customers interact with your website include…

FullStory is a Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platform that captures quantitative and qualitative data to help you enhance your online store performance. This tool focuses on each user’s “story” — it allows you to see every step they take to reveal invaluable insights into audience behavior in real time.

You can use FullStory to identify points of frustration and drop-off, understand typical user journeys, or see where the most conversions occur. From there, you can leverage this knowledge of user behavior to increase conversions and decrease cart abandonment.

FullStory’s session replay feature lets you follow user interaction on your store by watching session recordings and seeing exactly how they engage with your site.

Meanwhile, the FullStory dashboard offers the most important insights at a glance. You can filter users and sessions by any path or action they could possibly take to gain a deeper understanding of on-site behavior.

FullStory provides full visibility of the ways customers interact with your eCommerce store. This information can then help you make business decisions that drive results.

Heap focuses on user journeys. This intuitive tool analyzes on-site visitor behavior so you can pinpoint the exact events and actions that have the biggest impact on your store’s performance.

Much like FullStory, Heap also provides user recordings so you can see how people interact with your store. Their analysis reports make it easy to pinpoint where users are struggling so you can amend your store or products accordingly to minimize dropoff and boost user retention.

Journey Maps in Heap Illuminate lets you compare visitor paths and measure the impact of steps within the user journey. You can take a deep-dive into these journeys to uncover what on-site touchpoints are most likely to drive conversions and which ones are pushing customers away.

Heaps’ integration capabilities let you take audience analysis one step further. Combine Heap with Optimizely to run A/B tests and evaluate their effect. Heap can also be used alongside Appcues to identify friction points, increase adoption, and accelerate product activation.

A/B testing your eCommerce store is an important step in optimizing your buyer journey . VWO is an A/B testing tool that helps you improve online experiences for your customers.

It lets you test different visitor experiences, gain insights into existing user behavior, engage with customers, and devise new growth and optimization plans.

Use VWO to delve into user behavior on your eCommerce store with funnels, heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and more.

Heatmaps are great for seeing which on-page elements capture users’ attention, and which ones distract them. You can then analyze these heatmaps to make informed changes to your online store — namely, removing confusing or distracting elements and improving those that encourage users to take the right action.

Running on-site experiments can aid consumer research by allowing you to see which changes your customers enjoy. These experiments are powerful when launching new features because you can run tests prior to launch, then analyze user responses to the changes and implement the features that worked best.

In the industry

Reviewing audience behavior on your eCommerce store offers limited insight into user preferences.

While on-store analysis is great for learning how your current users behave, it doesn’t tell you how this compares to the wider industry. That’s why it’s important to analyze user behavior on a wider level, too.

Industry-wide analysis lets you see how your ideal target audience interacts with other products and brands, and reveals their behaviors, motivations, and challenges.

You can then use this information to improve your product offerings and enhance the user experience for your customers.

Here are a few tools I like to use for industry audience insights.

SparkToro is an Audience Intelligence platform that’s revolutionized audience research. If you’ve ever wondered what social media accounts your audience follows or which websites they visit, SparkToro is the tool for you.

This tool pinpoints where your audience spends most of their time so you can understand what they’re looking for and how you can meet their needs.

You can identify sources of influence, gain insight into the type of words or hashtags people use the most, gather publicly available contact information, and analyze different demographics.

SparkToro lets you identify audience affinities and build products your customers will love. If you’re still crafting your ideal customer personas, SparkToro can help you define your audience and deepen your knowledge of their online habits.

Search by topic, popular account, websites, or hashtag to see:

Demographic data including employment, skills & interests, gender & age, and more
Text insights such as words in bio and hashtags used
Social insights into the most-followed social accounts and hidden gems
Website data detailing which websites this audience tends to share, link to, and engage with
Podcast insights showcasing which shows they commonly listen to and engage with
YouTube data to determine which channels this audience frequently watches, subscribes to and engages with

You can then analyze this data to further your audience understanding and make informed decisions within your business.

Audiense aims to help brands put consumer segmentation and understanding at the heart of their business strategy.

With Audiense’s Insights suite, you can identify and understand any audience. Input specific audience details to uncover your ideal target audience and gain insights into their online habits, purchase behaviors, and more.

The complexity of Audiense’s audience identification guarantees you’ll analyze the right data for your brand. This tool goes beyond traditional segmentation and expands your knowledge of your target market.

You can use Audiense to hone in on target audiences and run competitor analysis. The data can reveal how to strategically launch new products, target new markets, tailor services to audience segments, and make improvements based on competitor and audience understanding.

One of my favorite aspects of Audiense’s Insights suite is the ability to combine Audiense data with your own customer information. This helps to ensure unique insights exclusive to your customers and exclusively available to your brand.

Wrapping up — Improve audience acquisition, activation, and retention with consumer research

Conducting consumer research can be the difference between getting ahead of the competition and falling behind.

Make consumer research an integral part of your strategy to improve acquisition, activation, and retention at every stage of your business.

There’s a wide variety of tools available to optimize consumer research, some of which I’ve highlighted in this article.

Whichever tools you opt for, remember to use a mix of owned first-party data and external third-party data to gain a broader understanding of your audience.

Speaking directly with customers is invaluable for learning your customers’ needs and interests, so leverage the power of customer interviews and surveys.

When you invest in consumer research, you invest in the growth of your store.

Published: March 21, 2022 Updated: October 16, 2023

Get in Touch

Want to collaborate? Find me at Rachel[at]rachelandreago.com.

Consumer Research – Introduction, Steps, Process

Consumer research just like market research follows a series of steps for better decision making. Consumer research is carried out to understand how customers respond to various sales offers and advertising appeals , changes in consumer perceptions and attitude and forecasting future needs, taste & preferences of a consumer.

Consumer research helps a marketer to frame appropriate strategies, face thriving competition and select the most suitable target market for the product. Marketers aim to understand the underlying motives, satisfaction and changing needs of the consumers through consumer research, as consumers have become more intelligent and aware in evaluating and purchasing products/services.

Steps in Conducting a Consumer Research:

Defining the problem and formulating research objectives –

A consumer research may be conducted to determine the following:

Attitude of people towards a product/service
Change in taste & preferences, likes and dislikes
Market share and market demand of a product
Buyers characteristics and influences
Profitable Promotional campaigns and techniques
Reasons for poor performance or decline in sales of a product etc.

The first step in conducting a consumer research involves: identifying the research problem , setting the objectives of research and formulating a working hypothesis. It is important to clearly define the problem and set specific objectives according to which an appropriate research design (exploratory, descriptive or experimental) is selected and adhered with. The research may be qualitative or quantitative in nature.

Collecting and evaluating secondary data –

The second step in consumer research involves looking for appropriate information related to the research through secondary sources like internal data of the company e.g. sales reports, financial statements, performance reports etc. or external data like government and industrial publications, commercial sources, past books, case studies, journals etc.

The secondary data is evaluated for its reliability, adequacy and suitability before it is used. If the secondary data is not sufficient for the research a primary data is collected through questionnaires , interviews, experiments, observation etc.

Collecting Primary Data –

The researcher collects the primary data through various methods when secondary data is insufficient. Primary research helps a researcher to know:

Consumer`s awareness about a product
Intentions of consumers
Needs and motives of consumers
Purchase Behaviour of consumers

Methods of collecting primary data – Questionnaire , Observation, Survey, Interview, Experimentation

Analyzing the data –

When all the data has been properly collected, compiled and tabulated, the researcher analyses the data through various statistical tools like:

Percentages
Measures of Central Tendencies – Mean, Median, Mode
Measures of Dispersion – Mean deviation, Standard Deviation
Chi-square Test
Regression Analysis
Multivariate Analysis

Preparing a report – When all the conclusions have been drawn and all inferences have been made, a research report is prepared and presented. The report consists of:

The summary of findings
Research Methodology
Sampling Techniques used
Primary and Secondary data
List of Tables
Recommendations and Suggestions
Appendices and Bibliography

hi sir i am try to download the consumer research process but some problem is it can you define how to copy paste these matter

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SIX STEPS CONSUMER RESEARCH PROCESS

Marketers require information about the characteristic, needs, wants and desires of their target markets. To undertake marketing effectively, businesses need information. Consumer research helps in collecting and analysing information about customer wants, market demand, competitors, distribution channels etc.

Consumer research is often needed to ensure that the companies produce what customers want and not what the companies think. Consumer research is that part of market research where the preferences, perception, habits, motivations, and buying behavior of the targeted customer are identified. It may identify through direct observation, mail surveys, telephone or face to face interviews, and from published sources. Consumer research is the activities performed to gathering the information about consumers’ needs and preferences, especially in relation to a particular product or service. It is based on consumer habits and uses, attitudes, retention, and new product acceptance which help the marketer to understand the consumer and to improve marketing strategies.

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. General measures of a consumer retention survey include trust, loyalty, and retention measures.

Consumer research analysis helps marketing research professionals determine the wants and needs of their consumers. Once these desires are known, companies can develop marketing strategies to meet the consumer’s wants and needs. Companies that meet the needs of their consumers can usually expect greater sales and profits.

Consumer research is an important part of any company. Large corporations know how valuable information is gained and how that can be utilized so it allocates large budgets to consumer research. Even a small corporation location business could benefit tremendously by asking feedback of its customers. Consumer research helps companies improve their products and generate new ideas based on consumer demand.

MARKETING RESEARCH VS. MARKET RESEARCH

These terms often are used interchangeably, but to be precise there is a difference. Market research deals specifically with the gathering of information about a market’s size and trends. Marketing research covers a wider range of activities. While it may involve market research, marketing research is a more general systematic process that can be applied to a variety of marketing problems.

Table of Contents

We are depicting the consumer research process in six steps:

Problem identification, and formulation;
Create the research design;
Selecting the sample;
Data collection and analysis;
Preparation of the report;

PROBLEM OR OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION

The research process initiates with the recognition of a business problem or opportunity. Problem/opportunity emerges when environment changes. Example, new legal policy. The decision problem faced by management must be transformed into a market research problem in the form of questions that define the information that is required to take the decision and how this information can be obtained. For example, a decision problem may be whether to launch a new product. The corresponding research problem might be to assess whether the market accept the new product.

CREATING THE RESEARCH DESIGN

Research design is a plan that researchers follow to answer the research objectives and/or test the hypotheses. There are three main categories of conducting marketing research, viz.

Exploratory research
Descriptive research
Causal research

These classifications are made according to the objective of the research. Exploratory research has the goal of formulating problems more precisely, clarifying concepts, gathering explanations, gaining insight, eliminating impractical ideas, and forming hypotheses.

The design may be descriptive and/or causal. Descriptive design seeks to describe users of a product, determine the proportion of the population that uses a product, or predict future demand for a product. It answers the questions who, what, when, and how. For example, 35% of the respondents said they like classical music. Causal design examines whether one variable causes or determine the value of another variable (two variables at least). It seeks to find cause and affect relationships between variables. It accomplishes this goal through laboratory and field experiments.

SELECTING THE SAMPLE

Sample is a division of the whole population. Sampling may be opted usually when population is too big, population unknown or there are insufficient resources to conduct a census. However, the sample should be representative and should help the researchers to draw conclusions about the population,

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

The questionnaire is an important tool for data collection.

Only a well-constructed questionnaire can collect the relevant data. Poorly constructed questions can result in large errors and invalidate the research data, so significant effort should be put into the questionnaire design. The questionnaire should be tested thoroughly prior to conducting the survey. Data analysis is a process that interprets the observed data into meaningful information. Before analysis can be performed, raw data must be transformed into an appropriate format.

First, it must be edited so that errors be corrected or omitted. The data must then be coded; this procedure converts the raw data into numbers or symbols. Finally, the data is tabulated to count the lumber of samples falling into various categories. Simple tabulations and Cross tabulations, are used for the purpose.

PREPARATION OF THE REPORT

Researcher should communicate their findings to the managers. Oral presentation and written report should both be made. Recommendations should be suggested to the managers. For example: If our shop will target on younger consumers, we should sell more pop music, and the interior design should be more fashionable to fit their lifestyles. The format of the marketing research report varies with the needs of the organization.

As huge resources have been spent in conducting the research; it should be ensured that the managers would use the findings to bring the required changes. Sometimes, additional research should be conducted to supplement the research findings.

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What is consumer research process in consumer behaviour ( 7 steps ).

Consumer Research Process is the type of basic research conducted to know the tastes and preferences of the customers so that the company can market the products according to their changing tastes and preferences. So, The Consumer Research Process Notes includes various Steps like:-

Identification or Formulation of problems or opportunities,
Establishing the Design for Market Research,
Choosing a Basic Techniques of Research,
Select the Best Sampling Procedure,
Collection of Data,
Analysis of Data,
Preparing the Report.

Table of Contents

1. Identification Or Formulation of Problems or Opportunities-

This is the first consumer research process and it means to do research for analyzing and formulating the problems and opportunities of consumer behavior. This step will help to identify the causes, benefits, objectives, and remedial measures to solve the problem. Consumer Research Process Example – Technological Advancement , Tastes, and Preferences, and high unemployment rate.

2. Establishing the Design for Market Research-

Image Source : Pixabay.com

This is the secondary consumer research process and it means,

(a) It is a planned theme made by the researchers to follow to answer the research objectives,

(b) It is an approach technique to identify the solution of a particular problem,

(i) Descriptive Design-

In descriptive design, the researchers find the answers to related questions. It is calculated by Mean, Median , and, Mode of the data collected. For eg – 30% of the persons said they like Virat Kohli.

(ii) Casual Design-

In casual design, we will examine the one variable with another and second variable. It can be calculated by regression analysis to formulate the combination of two or more variables. For eg – the older the respondent, the more he/she likes Virat Kohli.

However, the casual design approach is based on the cause and effect relationship.

3 . Choosing a Basic Techniques of Research-

This is the third c onsumer research process and it means choosing a word determines the targeting. It includes various techniques for solving the problems:

(i) Market Survey-

The survey is an essential part of the research and by which the researchers can acquire the market data, trends, and changing factors. Thus, the survey also helps to define the structure of market challenges and opportunities.

(ii) Observations-

Observation includes cellular data by which the researchers observe the source of data’s and factors which are collected through the market surveys. They observe the collected forms of data and then placed a design format for our research.

4 . Select the Best Sampling Procedures-

This is the fourth consumer research proces s and it means the sample is a subset or sub-part of the individual term. In this, there are two types of sampling will be used, first is probability and second is non-probability .

We can give the information related to the population and number of respondents which constitutes sample size.

5. Collection of Data-

This is the fifth consumer research process and it means data collection is proper of systematic order to gather the necessary information collected by the various sources. The researchers will collect data from various sources:

(i) Creating surveys in a particular target market for acquiring the necessary information related to their problems.

(ii) Through direct marketing (from website surveys, email marketing surveys, creating ads for surveys and so on.

(iii) Through market mediators and government reports,

(iv) Through personal interaction of public.

6. Analysis of Data-

This is the sixth consumer research process and it means observation of data, it consists or analyzes the particular data and transform into meaningful or objective information.

The collected data is analyzed using statistical tools such as Standard deviation, correlation, regression, Keyes square test, e-test, f-test, and ANOVA (Analysis of Variants).

7 . Preparing the Report-

This is the seventh consumer research process and it means in this last process step, the researchers should communicate their reports to the team and managers (in the form of oral or written).

And, in this, the researchers made the report of market research for solving the queries and find the answers to a particular problem. The reports also contain various points like:

Approval Letter,
Table of Contents,
List of Examples,
Methodology research,
Research Goal,
Techniques,
Hypothesis ,
Conclusions.

I hope you learned the concept of Consumer Research Process in Consumer Behaviour…

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interesting. yes we have to the audience research before producing the review articles. how users will research before buying the product. helpful article.

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4 proven strategies to shape how consumers see your brand, manufacturing.

In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, shaping how consumers perceive your brand is more crucial than ever. Every interaction, from your marketing campaigns to your customer service, plays a pivotal role in crafting the image and reputation of your brand. But, this can be difficult, particularly for emerging FMCG Brands.

Fortunately, there are proven strategies that brands can employ to influence and mold these perceptions positively. From highlighting unique value propositions to leveraging pricing and promotion strategies, these approaches can help your brand not only stand out in a crowded market but also resonate deeply with your target audience, ultimately driving loyalty and advocacy.

Read on to learn more about the factors shaping consumer perception and explore how you can harness key strategies to leave a lasting and favorable impression on consumers.

Understanding Consumer Perception

Understanding consumer perception is paramount for any brand aiming to establish a strong foothold in the market. However, there are many factors that affect demand and contribute to how consumers perceive a brand, shaping their attitudes and behaviors toward it. Of course, product quality and features play a significant role in shaping consumer perception. A product that consistently delivers on its promises and exceeds expectations is more likely to garner positive reviews and recommendations, fostering trust and loyalty among consumers.

Moreover, brand image and values deeply influence consumer perception. Consumers are increasingly drawn to brands that align with their own values and beliefs. For example, 59% of U.S. consumers say they are willing to choose a product that is better for their health, and 38% will choose one that is sustainable. 1 A brand that communicates authenticity, integrity, and a commitment to social responsibility resonates strongly with today’s conscious consumers . Therefore, brands must ensure that their messaging and actions reflect these values consistently, reinforcing a positive brand image in the minds of consumers.

Strategies to Shift Consumer Perceptions

In the ever-evolving landscape of consumer behavior, brands must continually adapt and innovate to shape how consumers perceive them positively. As consumer preferences and expectations evolve, businesses must also employ strategies to influence and shift perceptions effectively.

With that in mind, here are 4 key strategies to shift consumer perceptions:

1. Highlighting the Value Proposition

Highlighting the value proposition is paramount in shifting consumer perceptions positively. One effective approach is to communicate the unique benefits that your product or service offers. Whether it’s saving time, enhancing convenience, or improving quality, clearly articulating these benefits helps consumers understand how your brand can address their needs and desires. Moreover, focusing on solving customer pain points and exceeding expectations can significantly impact how consumers perceive your brand.

By identifying and addressing common challenges faced by your target audience, you demonstrate empathy and understanding, fostering trust and loyalty in the process. With today’s consumers facing financial pressure from all sides, focusing on value is a strong plan. In fact, 82% of U.S. consumers say they are actively seeking lower prices, and 67% are reducing their overall spending. 1 Focus on communicating the key benefits and features in a straightforward manner that is easy to understand. By doing so, you make it easier for consumers to grasp the value your brand provides, ultimately shaping their perception in a positive direction.

2. Building Brand Trust and Credibility

Building brand trust and credibility is foundational in shaping consumer perceptions in a favorable light. This means the promises you make in your marketing materials and product attributes matter to your consumers. If shoppers lose trust in your brand, they will seek out alternatives from brands that will uphold their promises. For example, NIQ data shows that 77% of consumers will quit brands that are found guilty of greenwashing. 2 Being transparent is more important than ever, and brands that can connect and build trust are much better positioned to weather shifts in demand.

Additionally, partnering with influencers or industry experts can bolster brand trust and credibility. Collaborating with individuals who have established credibility and authority in your industry allows you to tap into their existing fan base and leverage their endorsement to enhance your brand’s reputation. Whether through sponsored content, product reviews, or collaborative campaigns, influencer partnerships provide a valuable opportunity to reach new audiences and build trust with consumers who value the opinions of trusted personalities.

Consumer Outlook 2024

6 consumer sentiment-driven strategies to power growth and capture spending, consumers have been tested in more ways than one over the past year—and beyond. pockets of growth have emerged as consumers pivot spending behaviors to survive and thrive. dive into a high-level view of this year’s global report..

Select the resources you would like to download.

2 024 Consumer Outlook

3. Leveraging Emotional Connection

Leveraging emotional connection is a powerful strategy to shape consumer perceptions and foster brand loyalty. One effective approach is to tell compelling brand stories that evoke positive emotions . NIQ poll data shows that 56% of global respondents say they like knowing the story behind brands. 3 By sharing narratives that resonate with your audience on a personal level, you create a deeper connection that goes beyond the transactional aspect of business. These stories can highlight your brand’s values, mission, and the impact it has on people’s lives, eliciting emotions such as joy, inspiration, or nostalgia that leave a lasting impression on consumers.

Moreover, creating a sense of community around your brand can further strengthen emotional ties with your audience. By fostering a supportive community where members feel heard, valued, and understood, you cultivate a sense of belonging that extends beyond the products or services you offer. This sense of community not only enhances brand loyalty but also reinforces positive perceptions of your brand as one that cares about its customers’ well-being.

4. Pricing Strategies

Implementing effective pricing strategies is essential in shaping consumer perceptions and driving purchasing decisions, especially when the economy is uncertain. As it turns out, belt-tightening consumers aren’t just looking for the cheapest products. When it’s time to save, they seek value — and value is a complex concept that blends brand, quality, price, and promotion. Further, consumers don’t always react strongly in their purchasing behavior when their net income changes.

In today’s marketplace, many consumers are being drawn to value-based pricing. This may include adjusting prices up or down based on demand, changing product quality to fit your pricing, or offering different sizes at lower prices/usage. In fact, 38% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer brands offer economy sizes to help them offset rising costs elsewhere. 1 Understanding the pressures and demands of your consumers is key to crafting an effective pricing strategy.

Measuring the Impact

Measuring the impact of your efforts in shaping consumer perceptions is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of your strategies and making informed decisions moving forward. One effective method is to focus on using retail data analytics to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluate the effectiveness of your initiatives. By analyzing metrics such as sales trends, customer engagement, and conversion rates, you gain valuable insights into the impact of your branding efforts on consumer behavior and purchasing decisions. This data-driven approach enables you to identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, allowing you to make informed decisions to better align your strategies with consumer preferences and market trends.

This requires accurate, up-to-date data. The true value of high-quality data and insights can be seen in your ability to identify emerging issues and trends and act on them. For example, nearly 50% of all promotional sales are sales that would have occurred regardless of the promotion. Without data showing you this gap, you’d be leaving money on the table with every promotion. You need to use data as the foundation for your planning and act intelligently to align your brand with consumer perceptions without sacrificing quality, brand, or market share.

Meet Shifting Consumer Needs With Data

To reach today’s consumers, you need to know where they’re choosing to shop, how, and why. But, that’s only possible if you have access to reliable, up-to-date data.

Emerging brands can start their journey with a free Byzzer™ subscription, NIQ’s platform built for emerging brands and their budgets. Free access gets you 3 free reports and a weekly alert to get you started with data. Byzzer™ provides breakdowns of a wide range of attributes and markets in easy-to-digest reports. Best of all, we’ll show you how to leverage this information for your action plan. It’s never too early to start acting on data.

Interested in more valuable insights like these?

1 NIQ 2024 Consumer Outlook, U.S.

2 NIQ Report – The Green Divide

3 NIQ Report – The Brand Balancing Act

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Discover On Premise Insights in Japan

Italy On Premise Consumer Pulse Report: February 2024

Germany On Premise Consumer Pulse Report: February 2024

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Public Health Buckeyes: Angela Falconi

BSPH student combines passions for health care, policy

Angela Falconi poses with Cunz Hall in the background

Falconi has been involved in CPH research and is an active member of Ohio State's Pilipino Student Association.

Meet Angela Falconi, a fourth-year student specializing in environmental public health who aspires to advocate for others through public health policy.

What inspired you to pursue a public health education?

Growing up, I was surrounded by both medicine and public policy because of my parents. Since I was six, my father, a politician and elected official, had me act as his unofficial campaign staff—knocking on doors with him to speak to voters, sitting in on city council meetings and accompanying him to various events. My mother, a pediatric physician, inspired me to pursue a career in medicine by showing me the impact that she’s made on her patients and always encouraging me to learn more about the health care field. When choosing my major, it felt natural to me to combine policy and health into public health.

What public health topics are you passionate about?

“Your zip code determines your health.”

This is one of the most important phrases I have learned in my public health courses, and as a volunteer at Helping Hands Health and Wellness Center, a free clinic which provides health care services for the uninsured and underinsured. I see the realities of this phrase in the patients who I work with.

As an aspiring elected official, I want to create health care reform which helps individuals the health care system has failed to provide with affordable service.

You spent last summer in Washington, D.C. interning in the U.S. Senate. What was that experience like?

I worked (there) through the IMPACT program, created by the US-Asia Institute in coordination with the Embassy for the Philippines for Filipino students interested in public policy. Working and living in D.C. was one of the best experiences I have had in my undergraduate career because I was able to learn about and research health care policy on the national stage, which is exactly what I hope to do in my future career.

What have you enjoyed most about being involved in research as a student?

I am a research assistant for the Consumer Access Project which utilizes a secret shopper survey of Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance marketplace plan networks to study these barriers and inequities, including disparities related to race. I have loved getting to work with Wendy Xu as she has helped me learn more about the research process as well as how everyday Americans experience the health care system.

What kind of extracurricular activities are you involved in?

The Pilipino Student Association (PSA) has been my home away from home since the start of my time at Ohio State. It has not only allowed me to learn more about my Filipino culture, but I met my best friend through this organization. I have been involved in PSA in numerous roles: culture night coordinator, vice-president internal, president and now dance leader.

As dance leader, I lead PSA’s tinikling team. Tinikling is a dance which involves two people beating, sliding, and tapping two bamboo poles on the ground while two people dance above the sticks, trying not to get caught in between them. Our latest performance from PSA’s culture show “Barrio” was in October. I choreographed, taught and performed the modern part of this dance!

What are your goals for the future?

I hope to not only assist individual patients as a physician, but I also hope to help others on the national scale by being an advocate as an elected official. I hope to apply the experiences and lessons that I have learned from my time at Ohio State into my future career in the field of health policy.

Public Health Buckeyes: Olivia Nathan

Public Health Buckeyes: Tierra Hummons

*****

About The Ohio State University College of Public Health

The Ohio State University College of Public Health is a leader in educating students, creating new knowledge through research, and improving the livelihoods and well-being of people in Ohio and beyond. The College's divisions include biostatistics, environmental health sciences, epidemiology, health behavior and health promotion, and health services management and policy. It is ranked 29 th among all colleges and programs of public health in the nation, and first in Ohio, by U.S. News and World Report. Its specialty programs are also considered among the best in the country. The MHA program is ranked 8 th , the biostatistics specialty is ranked 22 nd , the epidemiology specialty is ranked 25 th and the health policy and management specialty is ranked 17 th .

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DOT Teams Up With State Attorney Generals to Investigate Airline Consumer Violations

Meghna Maharishi , Skift

April 16th, 2024 at 1:01 PM EDT

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the partnership would fast-track the process for resolving passenger complaints.

Meghna Maharishi

The Department of Transportation announced Tuesday it would partner with 18 state attorney generals to investigate airline consumer violations.

The program, called the “Airline Passenger Protection Partnership,” would expand the DOT’s oversight, since it would create a new system that fast-tracks airline misconduct cases.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said currently only the federal government could handle passenger complaints and enforce passenger protections.

“This is a partnership that will greatly improve the DOT’s capacity to hold airlines accountable and to protect passengers,” Buttigieg said in a call with reporters.

Attorney generals from states like California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island are a part of this partnership. Other states like Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota and Washington have also expressed interest in joining the partnership, the DOT said.

A Fast-Tracked Process

Buttigieg said attorney generals will play a more direct role in resolving passenger issues. When an office receives a complaint, it will investigate. And if the attorney general determines that an airline is not cooperating with a state investigation or that it violated the law, the complaint will then be referred to the DOT.

The Transportation Secretary said the program would allow the department to resolve passenger issues more quickly, since the state offices would have done “much of the legwork.”

“Whenever something does go wrong, there has to be accountability,” Buttigieg said. “And we know that with that accountability comes better practices on the part of airlines that have the right incentive to do the right thing and prevent these problems from happening in the first place.”

A Bullish DOT on Consumer Protections

This initiative is the latest in the Biden administration’s attempt to bolster consumer protections in the airline industry. The DOT launched a dashboard that highlights which airlines offer accommodations when airline issues cause a flight to be significantly delayed or canceled.

Another major issue for the Biden administration has been “junk fees.” The DOT proposed a rule that would mandate airlines to disclose ancillary, change and cancellation fees. The DOT previously told Skift it would issue a final rulemaking on the matter in April, but did not offer a clear timeline.

The DOT also submitted a proposal to Congress on no-fee family seating, but it’s unclear when or if Congress will pass the bill.

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What am I looking at? The performance of airline sector stocks within the ST200 . The index includes companies publicly traded across global markets including network carriers, low-cost carriers, and other related companies.

The Skift Travel 200 (ST200) combines the financial performance of nearly 200 travel companies worth more than a trillion dollars into a single number. See more airlines sector financial performance .

Read the full methodology behind the Skift Travel 200.

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Tags: airline consumer protections , Department of Transportation , dot , junk fees , pete buttigieg

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[News] Apple Skips TSMC 2nm for iPhone 17? A19 Pro Chip Rumored to Use N3P Process

Apple currently uses TSMC’s 3-nanometer process for multiple chipsets. According to a report from wccftech , the iPhone 17 chipset will not adopt the 2-nanometer process. Instead, the A19 Pro chip, expected in 2025, is reportedly maintaining the 3-nanometer technology.

The same report suggests that the Apple A19 Pro chip is considering TSMC’s N3P process and may be featured in the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. TSMC aims to ramp up its 3-nanometer wafer capacity to 100,000 units by the end of 2024.

TSMC began trial production of 2-nanometer chips as early as June 2023. However, Apple’s A18 Pro chip for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max might use the N3E process. As for next year’s iPhone 17, its A19 Pro chip is likely to adopt TSMC’s N3P technology.

As per MoneyDJ’s report , it is currently expected that Apple’s iPhone 18 series, slated for release in 2026, will feature the first-ever 2-nanometer chip. Besides Apple, other 2-nanometer customers include Intel, with interest also anticipated from AMD, NVIDIA, and MediaTek. Looking at the process roadmap, this year’s iPhone 16 will use N3E, while next year’s model will adopt N3P. Thus, the first consumer product leveraging TSMC’s 2nm process is anticipated to launch in 2026.

Meanwhile, Apple is said to be striving to stay ahead of competitors and exploring alternative packaging technologies like 3DFabric with its foundry partner. A rumor from the account Yeux1122 has suggested that Apple is already delving into SoIC (Small Outline Integrated Circuit) packaging.

The rumor suggests that TSMC is actively boosting its CoWoS packaging capacity and seeking next-generation SoIC solutions. Apple is reportedly highly interested in utilizing SoIC packaging for mass-producing next-generation AP chips, potentially using hybrid molding (thermoplastic carbon fiber board composite molding technology) for SoIC.

The rumor also indicate that SoIC chips will undergo small-scale trial production, with full-scale production expected as early as 2025-2026.

[News] TSMC Reportedly Accelerates 2nm Progress, with Kaohsiung Plant Rumored to Commence First Tool-in by Year-end
[News] TSMC Reportedly Secures 4 Major Clients for SoIC, Including Apple, NVIDIA and Broadcom

Please note that this article cites information from wccftech , MoneyDJ and account Yeux1122 .

[News] Marvell's AI Business Reportedly Accelerates, Potentially Benefiting TSMC

[News] Memory Manufacturers' Price Hikes Prompt Backlash, Module Suppliers Hesitate to Follow

[News] PSMC's Q1 Loss Narrows, while Q2 Shipments Impacted by Earthquake, Down 5%-8%

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Rare Earth Elements Prices 101 (Updated 2024)

April 16, 2024 — 04:40 pm EDT

Written by Melissa Pistilli for Investing News Network ->

From electric vehicles and wind turbines to water treatment and nuclear power, rare earth elements (REE) are critical for many of the technologies necessary for a cleaner, greener economy and world. However, understanding pricing for these commodities can be tricky.

There are 17 rare earth minerals in all , and each is classified under different groups — typically light rare earths and heavy rare earths . Prices are available for multiple individual and mixed products, including for the rare earths used in permanent rare earth magnets, so it can all seem a bit overwhelming.

“The supply chain for rare earth materials and permanent magnets is complex, regionally concentrated and marked by a lack of transparent pricing,” according to international price reporting agency Fastmarkets . “This can lead to unpredictable costs, budgeting difficulties and supply insecurity. Geopolitical tensions further add to this uncertainty.”

Read on for a short introduction to the rare earth elements market and prices.

What is China's role in rare earths pricing?

First and foremost, it’s important to know that China is the main driver when it comes to REE prices and the rare earths market as a whole. The country is the world’s leading rare earths producer by a wide margin, and despite efforts elsewhere also controls about 87 percent of global rare earths refining capacity.

China has such a monopoly on the sector that REE prices spiked in 2010 and 2011 when the country cut exports. That sparked a boom for rare earths companies and mining projects around the world, as they sought to create reliable sources of rare earths supply outside of China. However, many failed to thrive when REE prices fell again.

In 2014, the World Trade Organization ruled against Chinese export quotas for rare earths , and China removed its industry caps in January 2015 . The country also eliminated its export tariffs for rare earths in May 2015, leading to a further fall in REE prices. More recently, it banned the export of technology to make rare earth magnets.

The ongoing trade war between the US and China adds a layer of complication to the rare earth metals sector. Recognizing China's key place in the market, the US is undertaking various efforts to build its own supply.

In February 2021, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at reviewing shortcomings in the nation's domestic supply chains for rare earths, medical devices, computer chips and other critical resources. The next month, the US Department of Energy announced a US$30 million initiative to research and secure domestic supply chains for rare earths, along with battery metals such as cobalt and lithium.

In June 2022, Biden went even further, invoking the Defense Product Act to increase the domestic production of critical minerals such as rare earths, as well as to fund feasibility studies and expand existing resources. Furthermore, in September 2022, the Biden government announced US$156 million in funding to support the creation of "first-of-a-kind facility to extract and separate REEs and critical minerals from unconventional sources like mining waste."

Later, in July 2023, the Department of Energy put up US$32 million to build facilities for the production of REEs and other critical minerals from domestic coal-based resources.

Even with these efforts, China remains the heavyweight for now, so it’s important that investors interested in the rare earths space keep track of what the country is up to in terms of production.

Where to find rare earths prices?

Unlike prices for gold and silver, rare earth elements prices are hard to come by, as there is no widely used public exchange for rare earths. Firms such as Fastmarkets put out regular price assessments based on surveys of traders, consumers and other market participants; this information is available for a fee.

Price forecasts and other information can also be found via analyst firms and pricing forums such as Adamas Intelligence, Argus Media, Technology Metals Research and Asian Metal.

Which rare earths are the most important?

Rare earths are used in a range of different technologies, and demand is higher for some than others. They can be divided into “heavy” and “light” categories based on atomic weight, with heavy often being more sought after.

That said, light rare earths can be important too. Neodymium and praseodymium, used in rare earth magnets, fall into the light category. These and other elements used in rare earth permanent magnets, such as dysprosium , can be quite expensive. Neodymium and praseodymium have also been in the spotlight due to electric vehicles .

The concentration of different rare earths varies within each given deposit, but usually a deposit is dominated by either heavy or light rare earths, with some elements being much more abundant. Cerium, for example, is the most abundant rare earth, and is more plentiful in the Earth’s crust than copper.

Both cerium and lanthanum, used in things such as alloys in steelmaking and industrial catalysts, are oversupplied. As a result, they are priced quite a bit lower than most rare earth magnet materials.

Another group of rare earths to consider is those used in phosphors, or phosphorescent materials, which are the active component that adds color in fluorescent light bulbs and other lighting applications. Yttrium is fairly inexpensive when compared to more rare and therefore more expensive metals such as europium and terbium.

Rare earth concentrates and pricing

Think rare earths are easy to separate? Think again.

As mentioned, rare earths deposits contain various types of rare earths, not to mention a range of other impurities such as uranium and thorium , which can be troublesome to dispose of. The separation process can be difficult and lengthy, and so far separators outside of China have not managed to undercut producers within the country.

The best-known producer of separated rare earths outside of China is Lynas Rare Earths (ASX: LYC ,OTC Pink:LYSCF), which owns and operates the Mount Weld mine in Western Australia and a separation facility in Malaysia. In 2023, Lynas received a US$258 million contract from the US Department of Defense to build a rare earths separation facility in Texas.

At the moment, California's Mountain Pass operation, owned by MP Materials (NYSE: MP ), is the only working US rare earths mine and processing facility. The facility, which has a storied history, produces high-purity separated rare earth oxides, including lanthanum, cerium and neodymium-praseodymium oxide.

Other big companies developing REE separation operations include Energy Fuels (TSX:EFR,NYSEAMERICAN:UUUU) . In Utah, the firm is completing Phase 1 REE separation infrastructure at its White Mesa mill, which will result in separated neodymium-praseodymium capacity of 800 to 1,000 metric tons per year.

According to Adamas Intelligence , "Elsewhere, projects across Sweden, South Africa, Australia and other countries aim to extract rare earths from mine waste and byproducts that could supply 8% of global demand successful."

It’s important to keep in mind that rare earths within a mixed concentrate won’t fetch as high a price as those that are already separated. When looking at technical reports from junior miners, be sure to check that companies have accounted for this discount when calculating their rare earths basket price, which is the price for all the rare earths bundled into a single number based on the distribution of different rare earths within the deposit.

This is an updated version of an article originally published by the Investing News Network in 2015.

Don’t forget to follow us @INN_Resource for real-time updates!

Securities Disclosure: I, Melissa Pistilli, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.

Editorial Disclosure: Energy Fuels is a client of the Investing News Network. This article is not paid-for content.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope

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Research in marketing strategy

1 Introduction

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

2.1 Key concepts in the late - 1960s

2.2 Favored methods in the late-1960s

2.3 Aims in the late-1960s

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

2.5 Concepts after 1980

2.6 Methods after 1980

2.7 Aims after 1980

2.8 Summary—the three I’s after 1980

3 The present—the consumer behavior field today

3.2 Present Methods

3.3 Present Aims

4 The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040

4.1 Future Concepts

4.2 Future Methods

4.3 Future Aims

4.4 Summary - Future research questions and directions

5 Conclusion

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