How (and why) market research methodologies can transform your marketing

Imagine this, it’s 4 p.m. on a Thursday and your boss wants research on new product ideas for your Friday meeting. You feel deflated because you don’t have a reliable way to gather market research or feel confident knowing what your customers want. 

Worse, according to Salesforce research, “73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.”

So where do you start with your research? 

How can you use it to learn about your customers’ wants and needs? To remain competitive?

There are specific types of market research methodologies you can use to gather and collect data and turn into useful insights. Market research helps you never feel like you’re put on the spot again….at least not when it comes to customer insights. 

In this post, I’ll outline eight types of market research methodologies, show you how you can use them and the best tools for the job. 

According to Investopedia, “Market research examines consumer behavior and trends in the economy to help a business develop and fine-tune its business idea and strategy. It helps a business understand its target market by gathering and analyzing data.”

True market research is a structured approach to learning more about your customer. What motivates them to buy? What are their preferences? How can you retain them as a customer? 

Market research attempts to answer these questions so you can make better business decisions and never be at a loss for informed ideas.

For example, when you know your audience enjoys exploring new flavors, you can create flavor concepts and test them with modern AI-market research tools from the initial idea to creation. 

The result is an environment of iteration based on customer input for connected insights instead of creating concepts in a vacuum and hoping for the best. 

So market research is like GPS for your brand. And the methodology you choose is your route guidance, helping you get to where you’re looking to go in the best way.

“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”

- David Ogilvy

There are eight types of market research. But don’t worry, you don’t have to use all eight to learn more about your customers. Incorporating the one or two that solve for your business needs can help you make a bigger impact (and help you gain more respect at work when you connect the dots for your colleagues). 

One thing to consider: There are two primary “buckets” of market research: qualitative (opinions and perception) and quantitative (numbers-driven.) Both are useful for learning more about your customers, especially when you blend them. For the purposes of this article, I’ve included them as separate methodologies in the list below, but they are overarching categories. 

Let’s look at each type, as well as the benefits and challenges of each market research methodology. 

1. Primary research

When you talk to your customers directly, you have a direct source. This is known as primary research and is invaluable in understanding your customer’s motivations and language. 

Primary research methodologies include:

• Surveys

• Interviews

• Focus groups

Primary research methodology lets you tailor questions and gather relevant insights for your product, service or brand. 

Challenges: Insightful primary research requires question design skills and a non-biased approach to surveys and interviews. Other challenges include finding the right participants and gathering data easily. 

2. Secondary research 

If primary research delivers first-hand experience, secondary research puts it into context. Competitor analysis and industry reports are types of secondary research that deliver trends and useful examples. 

You can weave these examples into your next presentation and impress your team with your data-backed research made memorable with a specific story. 

Challenges: Secondary research may not always align with your questions or be up-to-date. Additionally, some secondary research is more reliable than others. You want to choose reputable sources with good data quality. 

3. Qualitative research 

Depending on the questions you ask, surveys and customer interviews can deliver all kinds of feelings. This is the territory of opinions and emotions, which are hard to quantify but important. 

For example, if your customer tells you the new drinks are too sweet, you can use that data point to see if the numbers show slower sales than predicted. A customer quote can give nuance to the numbers. 

Challenges: Typically, this data can be subjective and require skilled interviewers or focus group moderators to guide balanced questions and participation. Another challenge is the small sample sizes. It’s tough to scale something as time-intensive as a focus group. 

4. Quantitative research

When you combine the numbers with the opinions, you build a more well-rounded view of your customers. You can use polls, surveys and other forms of structured research to uncover useful data. 

Interestingly, surveys are considered either quantitative or qualitative, depending on the survey design. Surveys are scalable and frequently used in retail or CPG categories. 

Online surveys rank as the most used quantitative method among market research professionals with 85% of respondents who say they use this method regularly.

For example, if your customers told you they have no interest in durian, why would you want to spend resources creating durian-based milkshakes? 

Other quantitative methods include A/B testing, customer segmentation and sales data analysis. 

Challenges: These methods focus on numbers, which is helpful. It’s easier to get buy-in from your boss when you have the numbers to back up your recommendations. However, numbers without context don’t give the full story. For example, you might see that 65% of customers choose one product over another, but you don’t know why. That’s why it’s helpful to combine the two types of research if you can. 

5. Customer research 

There is no such thing as a customer monolith. Even international brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola keep conducting research, long after consumers become customers. 

PepsiCo, one of the largest food and beverage companies with consumers in almost every home, recognizes that understanding and anticipating consumer shifts is more challenging than ever.

Market research methodologies allow brands to gather customer research to lead the trends and not just follow them. For example, you use surveys to understand customer satisfaction or loyalty for primary, qualitative research. If you can access purchase data, you can see buying patterns and connect them to customer segmentation for more context. 

Challenges: Customer segmentation and engaging the right participants are key challenges in customer research. It’s important to ask the right questions. It can be difficult to go deep too or interpret the data accurately. 

6. Competitive research 

95% of new products fail each year. Yet, better market research can help your brand create more winners. One way to stay competitive is to understand your position in the market. Do your customers think you’re a market leader? What’s their perception of your brand compared to your competitors? 

Ongoing market research can help prevent nasty surprises. 

“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Customers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.”

- Ian Schafer

Challenges: Key challenges include access to target customers and understanding the right customers to ask. You also need to ask useful, non-biased questions such as, “How did you discover our product?” or “Are there similar products you use?”

7. Brand research 

Retail history is scattered with brands that didn’t stay current and are no longer in business. Remember Blockbuster?

Keep tabs on your brand health to stay strong. “An Edelman study found that 81% of people buy from trusted brands.”

Track customer perceptions, identify any competitor overlaps and track your brand's evolution over time. If Blockbuster had been conducting brand research in the aughts, they would have realized their brand was slipping. 

Challenges: Gauging brand perception can be tricky. It can produce a lot of data and require a lengthy timeline. The key is to make ongoing brand research part of your market research so you can spot market changes early and make necessary changes to stay relevant. 

8. Product research 

How do your customers perceive your packaging? Your logo? Your future product ideas? How do you approach new product concepts? Do you look at your competitors and try to come up with something similar, or do you have the research to back true innovations? 

Brands that have the data and ability to innovate will stay relevant with their customers.

Challenges: Predicting market demand and testing real-world applications can be difficult. 

You might notice a lot of overlap in these market research methodologies. That’s because, at their heart, all market research methodologies require understanding your customer. Gather and analyze data and use it to make informed decisions. 

Now let’s get into some ways to conduct your market research.

“Good decision-making is based on access to the correct information at the right time.” ― Pooja Agnihotri, Market Research Like a Pro  

Planning market research is similar to creating a marketing campaign. You want to get specific, 

Identify metrics for success, test, iterate and test again. 

Tip 1: Define your objectives 

It’s easy to say your objective should be specific and measurable. It’s harder to define what that means within your organization. It’s helpful to start with questions. 

• Do you want to discover a winning new flavor profile? 

• Do you want to increase mid-afternoon sales? 

• Do you want to measure the success of your in-flight ad campaign? 

Once you define your objective, you can identify your target audience. 

Tip 2: Who is your target audience? 

If you’re like a lot of brands, you have a variety of customer types. You can segment them by features like age, geography, interests, buying habits or viewing habits. 

Netflix constantly refines its recommendations based on viewing habits, and the data reflects the types of future shows. 

Your objective helps narrow your target audience. If you’re looking to measure the success of ads on a subway line, then you want to target your customers who ride that subway line. 

Tip 3: Assess your objectives and resources 

Everyone has constraints in some form or another, and they guide your methodology. Whether it’s a directive to gather direct customer feedback as soon as possible or to provide an informed viewpoint within a few hours, such constraints offer a direction for your next steps. 

Specifically, if you’ve identified the question you want to address and you know the audience, then you need to choose a market research methodology that fits the time, budget and constraints. 

For example, if your question is, “Why do our customers choose us?” You might start with a survey with a mix of open-ended and closed questions. “How did you discover our brand? And “What keeps you coming back?” “On a scale of 1-5, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?”

Once you design your survey, roll it out to a small segment of your audience. Assess the results and adjust as needed. 

Tip 4: Design unbiased data collection methods 

There’s a science to developing survey and interview questions that help you get the most helpful responses. For example, you want to use neutral language for the most honest responses. “How would you rate your experience with our product?” is more neutral than “How much do you love our product?” 

You also want to diversify your sample groups as much as possible because this protects against unconscious bias that can sway results. 

Tip 5: Test pilot 

Test a small scale before you roll out the full launch. PepsiCo uses the Zappi Amplify Ad System to identify winning ad concepts before investing millions of dollars in their Super Bowl spots. 

You can do the same. When you run research earlier in the process, you can clarify your questions, assess any drop-offs and ask for feedback to optimize your campaign to the fullest. 

Tip 6: Use available market research tools 

There are many tools available for market research. 

• Survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform collect survey data.

• SEO tools like SEMrush and AHREFs are useful for competitive analysis. 

• Social media analytics can guide your understanding of social sentiment.

• Visualization tools like Tableau can help you create visualizations to put context to the data. 

• Zappi automates many aspects of market research and provides fast insights for ad and innovation iteration and optimization. 

Tip 7: Market research is never done

Markets never sleep. Ongoing market research helps you spot trends early and give you a greater understanding of your consumer, so you can create products to be ahead of the game rather than playing catch up.  

Now that you know impactful ways to gather data, what do you do with it? Data only provides value if you can use your human insight to guide it to smart decisions. 

Use case 1

Primary research can help you go deep into your customer’s motivations. If you are interviewing customers 1:1, ask open-ended questions. For example, if you sell toothpaste or a similar daily hygiene product, you can ask customers why they chose your product the first time and how it fits into their daily routine.

Their answers may provide insights, such as whether your customers appreciate the eco-friendly packaging or the fact that the ingredients are clean with no sulfates. 

Use case 2 

Secondary research, like industry reports and competitive research, can help you better understand market trends. 

For example, Starbucks found Gen Z are big consumers of iced drinks AND energy drinks, so they combined the two. They continued to test and refine their flavors with market research tools that led to the final products.

Use case 3 

Ongoing customer research can help you develop more successful products and ad campaigns. 

Zappi’s Chief Innovation Officer,  Steve Phillips, shared a great example of this:

"For example, Gong used us to pre-test their Superbowl advertising and told us that it was their most successful campaign ever! Similarly, McDonald’s implemented early-stage testing to spot the McFlurry flavors that would appeal to consumers."

AI-driven market research tools simplify the complexity of your research process by quickly gathering and analyzing large amounts of data. 

Some popular tools include: 

Zappi

Uses AI-driven tools to adapt, scale and iterate qualitative and quantitative consumer data faster — from initial ad storyboards to new product concepts, all the way to final stages.

SurveyMonkey

This popular tool creates and sends surveys to your audience with a few mouse clicks.

SEMrush 

This SEO industry standard gives insight into your prospect’s search terms and provides benchmarking info for your competition. How do you compare in terms of visitation? What are their backlink sources? Where’s the gap in your content? 

Brands know they can’t ignore market research and remain competitive. The brands that combine market research methodologies to listen and adapt to their customer’s preferences are the ones that thrive.