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

Jan 19, 2024

Consumer Research Overview:

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

Introduction to Consumer Research

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

Key Methods in Consumer Research

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

Quantitative Research in Consumer Studies

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

Qualitative Approaches in Consumer Research

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

Exploring Types of Consumer Research

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

Demographic Analysis in Consumer Research

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

Psychographic Research Methods

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

Consumer Insight Generation

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

Brand Perception Research

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

Product Testing in Consumer Studies

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

Comparative Consumer Analysis

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

Cross-Cultural Consumer Research

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

The Broad Scope of Consumer Research

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

Technology in Consumer Studies

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

Future Trends in Consumer Research

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

Data-Driven Consumer Insights

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

Consumer Decision-Making Models

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

Real-world Examples of Consumer Research

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

Case Studies in Consumer Research

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

Consumer Satisfaction Measurement

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

Trend Analysis in Consumer Studies

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

Retail Environment Studies

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

Consumer Feedback and Reviews

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

Online Consumer Behavior

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

Social Media Impact on Consumer Research

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

Global Consumer Trends

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

Consumer Preferences and Trends

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

Lifestyle and Consumer Choices

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

Psychological Aspects of Consumer Behavior

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

Cultural Influences in Consumer Research

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

Ethical Considerations in Consumer Research

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

The Evolution of Consumer Research Methods

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

The Impact of Technology on Consumer Research

Technology has revolutionized consumer research in several ways:

Faster Data Collection

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

Enhanced Data Analysis

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

Personalization in Consumer Engagement

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

Data Privacy in Consumer Studies

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

Integrating AI in Consumer Insights

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

Practical Applications: How Businesses Use Consumer Research

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

Product Development

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

Marketing Strategies

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

Customer Experience Enhancement

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

Competitive Advantage

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

Risk Mitigation

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

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

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

At Market Xcel, we offer a suite of research services to our clients, leveraging our expertise in consumer research to provide valuable insights and drive success in today's competitive business environment.

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Consumer Research - Definitions, Examples and Benefits

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

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

In this guide, we’ll discuss:

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

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

What is Consumer Research?

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

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

Definition, Reputation and Importance

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

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

The Power of Consumer Research

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of Consumer Research

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

1. Understanding Customer Behaviour for Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

2. Spotting Trends, Patterns and Needs

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

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

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

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

How to Conduct Consumer Research

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

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

Tools and Types of Consumer Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Practices: Tactics and Techniques

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

1. Recruit and Segment

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

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

2. Participant Engagement

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

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

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

3. Design Human-centric Research

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

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

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

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

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

4. Engage Stakeholders

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

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

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

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

Examples of Consumer Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About FlexMR

We are The Insights Empowerment Company. We help research, product and marketing teams drive informed decisions with efficient, scalable & impactful insight.

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As a professional copywriter, Emily brings our global vision to life through a broad range of industry-leading content.

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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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• 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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How to do market research in 4 steps: a lean approach to marketing research

From pinpointing your target audience and assessing your competitive advantage, to ongoing product development and customer satisfaction efforts, market research is a practice your business can only benefit from.

Learn how to conduct quick and effective market research using a lean approach in this article full of strategies and practical examples. 

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A comprehensive (and successful) business strategy is not complete without some form of market research—you can’t make informed and profitable business decisions without truly understanding your customer base and the current market trends that drive your business.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct quick, effective market research  using an approach called 'lean market research'. It’s easier than you might think, and it can be done at any stage in a product’s lifecycle.

How to conduct lean market research in 4 steps

What is market research, why is market research so valuable, advantages of lean market research, 4 common market research methods, 5 common market research questions, market research faqs.

We’ll jump right into our 4-step approach to lean market research. To show you how it’s done in the real world, each step includes a practical example from Smallpdf , a Swiss company that used lean market research to reduce their tool’s error rate by 75% and boost their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) by 1%.

Research your market the lean way...

From on-page surveys to user interviews, Hotjar has the tools to help you scope out your market and get to know your customers—without breaking the bank.

The following four steps and practical examples will give you a solid market research plan for understanding who your users are and what they want from a company like yours.

1. Create simple user personas

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic data from people who use websites and products similar to your own. Start by defining broad user categories, then elaborate on them later to further segment your customer base and determine your ideal customer profile .

How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand your users and what drives them to your business.

How to do it right: whatever survey or interview questions you ask, they should answer the following questions about the customer:

Who are they?

What is their main goal?

What is their main barrier to achieving this goal?

Pitfalls to avoid:

Don’t ask too many questions! Keep it to five or less, otherwise you’ll inundate them and they’ll stop answering thoughtfully.

Don’t worry too much about typical demographic questions like age or background. Instead, focus on the role these people play (as it relates to your product) and their goals.

How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a couple of weeks and received 1,000 replies. They learned that many of their users were administrative assistants, students, and teachers.

Next, they used the survey results to create simple user personas like this one for admins:

Who are they? Administrative Assistants.

What is their main goal? Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the source file was lost.

What is their main barrier to achieving it? Converting a scanned PDF doc to a Word file.

💡Pro tip: Smallpdf used Hotjar Surveys to run their user persona survey. Our survey tool helped them avoid the pitfalls of guesswork and find out who their users really are, in their own words. 

You can design a survey and start running it in minutes with our easy-to-use drag and drop builder. Customize your survey to fit your needs, from a sleek one-question pop-up survey to a fully branded questionnaire sent via email. 

We've also created 40+ free survey templates that you can start collecting data with, including a user persona survey like the one Smallpdf used.

2. Conduct observational research

Observational research involves taking notes while watching someone use your product (or a similar product).

Overt vs. covert observation

Overt observation involves asking customers if they’ll let you watch them use your product. This method is often used for user testing and it provides a great opportunity for collecting live product or customer feedback .

Covert observation means studying users ‘in the wild’ without them knowing. This method works well if you sell a type of product that people use regularly, and it offers the purest observational data because people often behave differently when they know they’re being watched. 

Tips to do it right:

Record an entry in your field notes, along with a timestamp, each time an action or event occurs.

Make note of the users' workflow, capturing the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘for whom’ of each action.

Don’t record identifiable video or audio data without consent. If recording people using your product is helpful for achieving your research goal, make sure all participants are informed and agree to the terms.

Don’t forget to explain why you’d like to observe them (for overt observation). People are more likely to cooperate if you tell them you want to improve the product.

💡Pro tip: while conducting field research out in the wild can wield rewarding results, you can also conduct observational research remotely. Hotjar Recordings is a tool that lets you capture anonymized user sessions of real people interacting with your website. 

Observe how customers navigate your pages and products to gain an inside look into their user behavior . This method is great for conducting exploratory research with the purpose of identifying more specific issues to investigate further, like pain points along the customer journey and opportunities for optimizing conversion .

With Hotjar Recordings you can observe real people using your site without capturing their sensitive information

How Smallpdf did it: here’s how Smallpdf observed two different user personas both covertly and overtly.

Observing students (covert): Kristina Wagner, Principle Product Manager at Smallpdf, went to cafes and libraries at two local universities and waited until she saw students doing PDF-related activities. Then she watched and took notes from a distance. One thing that struck her was the difference between how students self-reported their activities vs. how they behaved (i.e, the self-reporting bias). Students, she found, spent hours talking, listening to music, or simply staring at a blank screen rather than working. When she did find students who were working, she recorded the task they were performing and the software they were using (if she recognized it).

Observing administrative assistants (overt): Kristina sent emails to admins explaining that she’d like to observe them at work, and she asked those who agreed to try to batch their PDF work for her observation day. While watching admins work, she learned that they frequently needed to scan documents into PDF-format and then convert those PDFs into Word docs. By observing the challenges admins faced, Smallpdf knew which products to target for improvement.

“Data is really good for discovery and validation, but there is a bit in the middle where you have to go and find the human.”

3. Conduct individual interviews

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. They allow you to dig deep and explore their concerns, which can lead to all sorts of revelations.

Listen more, talk less. Be curious.

Act like a journalist, not a salesperson. Rather than trying to talk your company up, ask people about their lives, their needs, their frustrations, and how a product like yours could help.

Ask "why?" so you can dig deeper. Get into the specifics and learn about their past behavior.

Record the conversation. Focus on the conversation and avoid relying solely on notes by recording the interview. There are plenty of services that will transcribe recorded conversations for a good price (including Hotjar!).

Avoid asking leading questions , which reveal bias on your part and pushes respondents to answer in a certain direction (e.g. “Have you taken advantage of the amazing new features we just released?).

Don't ask loaded questions , which sneak in an assumption which, if untrue, would make it impossible to answer honestly. For example, we can’t ask you, “What did you find most useful about this article?” without asking whether you found the article useful in the first place.

Be cautious when asking opinions about the future (or predictions of future behavior). Studies suggest that people aren’t very good at predicting their future behavior. This is due to several cognitive biases, from the misguided exceptionalism bias (we’re good at guessing what others will do, but we somehow think we’re different), to the optimism bias (which makes us see things with rose-colored glasses), to the ‘illusion of control’ (which makes us forget the role of randomness in future events).

How Smallpdf did it: Kristina explored her teacher user persona by speaking with university professors at a local graduate school. She learned that the school was mostly paperless and rarely used PDFs, so for the sake of time, she moved on to the admins.

A bit of a letdown? Sure. But this story highlights an important lesson: sometimes you follow a lead and come up short, so you have to make adjustments on the fly. Lean market research is about getting solid, actionable insights quickly so you can tweak things and see what works.

💡Pro tip: to save even more time, conduct remote interviews using an online user research service like Hotjar Engage , which automates the entire interview process, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording.

You can interview your own customers or connect with people from our diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries. And no need to fret about taking meticulous notes—Engage will automatically transcribe the interview for you.

4. Analyze the data (without drowning in it)

The following techniques will help you wrap your head around the market data you collect without losing yourself in it. Remember, the point of lean market research is to find quick, actionable insights.

A flow model is a diagram that tracks the flow of information within a system. By creating a simple visual representation of how users interact with your product and each other, you can better assess their needs.

You’ll notice that admins are at the center of Smallpdf’s flow model, which represents the flow of PDF-related documents throughout a school. This flow model shows the challenges that admins face as they work to satisfy their own internal and external customers.

Affinity diagram

An affinity diagram is a way of sorting large amounts of data into groups to better understand the big picture. For example, if you ask your users about their profession, you’ll notice some general themes start to form, even though the individual responses differ. Depending on your needs, you could group them by profession, or more generally by industry.

We wrote a guide about how to analyze open-ended questions to help you sort through and categorize large volumes of response data. You can also do this by hand by clipping up survey responses or interview notes and grouping them (which is what Kristina does).

“For an interview, you will have somewhere between 30 and 60 notes, and those notes are usually direct phrases. And when you literally cut them up into separate pieces of paper and group them, they should make sense by themselves.”

Pro tip: if you’re conducting an online survey with Hotjar, keep your team in the loop by sharing survey responses automatically via our Slack and Microsoft Team integrations. Reading answers as they come in lets you digest the data in pieces and can help prepare you for identifying common themes when it comes time for analysis.

Hotjar lets you easily share survey responses with your team

Customer journey map

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the way a typical prospect becomes a paying customer. It outlines their first interaction with your brand and every step in the sales cycle, from awareness to repurchase (and hopefully advocacy).

The above  customer journey map , created by our team at Hotjar, shows many ways a customer might engage with our tool. Your map will be based on your own data and business model.

📚 Read more: if you’re new to customer journey maps, we wrote this step-by-step guide to creating your first customer journey map in 2 and 1/2 days with free templates you can download and start using immediately.

Next steps: from research to results

So, how do you turn market research insights into tangible business results? Let’s look at the actions Smallpdf took after conducting their lean market research: first they implemented changes, then measured the impact.

Implement changes

Based on what Smallpdf learned about the challenges that one key user segment (admins) face when trying to convert PDFs into Word files, they improved their ‘PDF to Word’ conversion tool.

We won’t go into the details here because it involves a lot of technical jargon, but they made the entire process simpler and more straightforward for users. Plus, they made it so that their system recognized when you drop a PDF file into their ‘Word to PDF’ converter instead of the ‘PDF to Word’ converter, so users wouldn’t have to redo the task when they made that mistake. 

In other words: simple market segmentation for admins showed a business need that had to be accounted for, and customers are happier overall after Smallpdf implemented an informed change to their product.

Measure results

According to the Lean UX model, product and UX changes aren’t retained unless they achieve results.

Smallpdf’s changes produced:

A 75% reduction in error rate for the ‘PDF to Word’ converter

A 1% increase in NPS

Greater confidence in the team’s marketing efforts

"With all the changes said and done, we've cut our original error rate in four, which is huge. We increased our NPS by +1%, which isn't huge, but it means that of the users who received a file, they were still slightly happier than before, even if they didn't notice that anything special happened at all.”

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Market research (or marketing research) is any set of techniques used to gather information and better understand a company’s target market. This might include primary research on brand awareness and customer satisfaction or secondary market research on market size and competitive analysis. Businesses use this information to design better products, improve user experience, and craft a marketing strategy that attracts quality leads and improves conversion rates.

David Darmanin, one of Hotjar’s founders, launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

With Hotjar, they did things differently . Long story short, they conducted market research in the early stages to figure out what consumers really wanted, and the team made (and continues to make) constant improvements based on market and user research.

Without market research, it’s impossible to understand your users. Sure, you might have a general idea of who they are and what they need, but you have to dig deep if you want to win their loyalty.

Here’s why research matters:

Obsessing over your users is the only way to win. If you don’t care deeply about them, you’ll lose potential customers to someone who does.

Analytics gives you the ‘what’, while research gives you the ‘why’. Big data, user analytics , and dashboards can tell you what people do at scale, but only research can tell you what they’re thinking and why they do what they do. For example, analytics can tell you that customers leave when they reach your pricing page, but only research can explain why.

Research beats assumptions, trends, and so-called best practices. Have you ever watched your colleagues rally behind a terrible decision? Bad ideas are often the result of guesswork, emotional reasoning, death by best practices , and defaulting to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO). By listening to your users and focusing on their customer experience , you’re less likely to get pulled in the wrong direction.

Research keeps you from planning in a vacuum. Your team might be amazing, but you and your colleagues simply can’t experience your product the way your customers do. Customers might use your product in a way that surprises you, and product features that seem obvious to you might confuse them. Over-planning and refusing to test your assumptions is a waste of time, money, and effort because you’ll likely need to make changes once your untested business plan gets put into practice.

Lean User Experience (UX) design is a model for continuous improvement that relies on quick, efficient research to understand customer needs and test new product features.

Lean market research can help you become more...

Efficient: it gets you closer to your customers, faster.

Cost-effective: no need to hire an expensive marketing firm to get things started.

Competitive: quick, powerful insights can place your products on the cutting edge.

As a small business or sole proprietor, conducting lean market research is an attractive option when investing in a full-blown research project might seem out of scope or budget.

There are lots of different ways you could conduct market research and collect customer data, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just one research method. Four common types of market research techniques include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer observation.

Which method you use may vary based on your business type: ecommerce business owners have different goals from SaaS businesses, so it’s typically prudent to mix and match these methods based on your particular goals and what you need to know.

1. Surveys: the most commonly used

Surveys are a form of qualitative research that ask respondents a short series of open- or closed-ended questions, which can be delivered as an on-screen questionnaire or via email. When we asked 2,000 Customer Experience (CX) professionals about their company’s approach to research , surveys proved to be the most commonly used market research technique.

What makes online surveys so popular?  

They’re easy and inexpensive to conduct, and you can do a lot of data collection quickly. Plus, the data is pretty straightforward to analyze, even when you have to analyze open-ended questions whose answers might initially appear difficult to categorize.

We've built a number of survey templates ready and waiting for you. Grab a template and share with your customers in just a few clicks.

💡 Pro tip: you can also get started with Hotjar AI for Surveys to create a survey in mere seconds . Just enter your market research goal and watch as the AI generates a survey and populates it with relevant questions. 

Once you’re ready for data analysis, the AI will prepare an automated research report that succinctly summarizes key findings, quotes, and suggested next steps.

An example research report generated by Hotjar AI for Surveys

2. Interviews: the most insightful

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. Nothing beats a face-to-face interview for diving deep (and reading non-verbal cues), but if an in-person meeting isn’t possible, video conferencing is a solid second choice.

Regardless of how you conduct it, any type of in-depth interview will produce big benefits in understanding your target customers.

What makes interviews so insightful?

By speaking directly with an ideal customer, you’ll gain greater empathy for their experience , and you can follow insightful threads that can produce plenty of 'Aha!' moments.

3. Focus groups: the most unreliable

Focus groups bring together a carefully selected group of people who fit a company’s target market. A trained moderator leads a conversation surrounding the product, user experience, or marketing message to gain deeper insights.

What makes focus groups so unreliable?

If you’re new to market research, we wouldn’t recommend starting with focus groups. Doing it right is expensive , and if you cut corners, your research could fall victim to all kinds of errors. Dominance bias (when a forceful participant influences the group) and moderator style bias (when different moderator personalities bring about different results in the same study) are two of the many ways your focus group data could get skewed.

4. Observation: the most powerful

During a customer observation session, someone from the company takes notes while they watch an ideal user engage with their product (or a similar product from a competitor).

What makes observation so clever and powerful?

‘Fly-on-the-wall’ observation is a great alternative to focus groups. It’s not only less expensive, but you’ll see people interact with your product in a natural setting without influencing each other. The only downside is that you can’t get inside their heads, so observation still isn't a recommended replacement for customer surveys and interviews.

The following questions will help you get to know your users on a deeper level when you interview them. They’re general questions, of course, so don’t be afraid to make them your own.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

How you ask this question, and what you want to know, will vary depending on your business model (e.g. business-to-business marketing is usually more focused on someone’s profession than business-to-consumer marketing).

It’s a great question to start with, and it’ll help you understand what’s relevant about your user demographics (age, race, gender, profession, education, etc.), but it’s not the be-all-end-all of market research. The more specific questions come later.

2. What does your day look like?

This question helps you understand your users’ day-to-day life and the challenges they face. It will help you gain empathy for them, and you may stumble across something relevant to their buying habits.

3. Do you ever purchase [product/service type]?

This is a ‘yes or no’ question. A ‘yes’ will lead you to the next question.

4. What problem were you trying to solve or what goal were you trying to achieve?

This question strikes to the core of what someone’s trying to accomplish and why they might be willing to pay for your solution.

5. Take me back to the day when you first decided you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this goal.

This is the golden question, and it comes from Adele Revella, Founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute . It helps you get in the heads of your users and figure out what they were thinking the day they decided to spend money to solve a problem.

If you take your time with this question, digging deeper where it makes sense, you should be able to answer all the relevant information you need to understand their perspective.

“The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this one: take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of a goal. Not to buy my product, that’s not the day. We want to go back to the day that when you thought it was urgent and compelling to go spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal. Just tell me what happened.”

— Adele Revella , Founder/CEO at Buyer Persona Institute

Bonus question: is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

This question isn’t just a nice way to wrap it up—it might just give participants the opportunity they need to tell you something you really need to know.

That’s why Sarah Doody, author of UX Notebook , adds it to the end of her written surveys.

“I always have a last question, which is just open-ended: “Is there anything else you would like to tell me?” And sometimes, that’s where you get four paragraphs of amazing content that you would never have gotten if it was just a Net Promoter Score [survey] or something like that.”

What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?

Qualitative research asks questions that can’t be reduced to a number, such as, “What is your job title?” or “What did you like most about your customer service experience?” 

Quantitative research asks questions that can be answered with a numeric value, such as, “What is your annual salary?” or “How was your customer service experience on a scale of 1-5?”

 → Read more about the differences between qualitative and quantitative user research .

How do I do my own market research?

You can do your own quick and effective market research by 

Surveying your customers

Building user personas

Studying your users through interviews and observation

Wrapping your head around your data with tools like flow models, affinity diagrams, and customer journey maps

What is the difference between market research and user research?

Market research takes a broad look at potential customers—what problems they’re trying to solve, their buying experience, and overall demand. User research, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on the use (and usability ) of specific products.

What are the main criticisms of market research?

Many marketing professionals are critical of market research because it can be expensive and time-consuming. It’s often easier to convince your CEO or CMO to let you do lean market research rather than something more extensive because you can do it yourself. It also gives you quick answers so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Do I need a market research firm to get reliable data?

Absolutely not! In fact, we recommend that you start small and do it yourself in the beginning. By following a lean market research strategy, you can uncover some solid insights about your clients. Then you can make changes, test them out, and see whether the results are positive. This is an excellent strategy for making quick changes and remaining competitive.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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If you want to understand what makes your target audience tick, consumer research is a must. But how do you go about gathering insights about consumer behaviour, preferences, and values? In this article, we discuss just that, exploring strategies and best practices for effectively collecting and interpreting consumer data in a digital landscape.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research, also known as market research, is the process of aggregating information about consumers and their behaviours. The insights gleaned from this process allow you to better understand consumer preferences, needs, and expectations. As a result, your brand can make data-driven decisions about everything from product development to marketing strategies.

The exact means of conducting consumer research vary from company to company. However, this research is typically conducted through methods like surveys, focus groups, and data analytics. These tools garner various types of information, including:

Demographic data

Demographic data encompasses information such as age, gender, income, education level, marital status, and location. Demographics help your brand identify its target audience and develop products and services that appeal to that respective group of individuals.

Psychographic data

Psychographic data refers to any information about consumers’ attitudes, values, interests, and lifestyle. This helps companies understand the emotional and psychological aspects that affect purchasing decisions.

Attitudinal data

Similarly, market researchers may attempt to collect information about consumers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards specific products, brands, or industries. A cleaning product brand may, for instance, measure consumers’ loyalty to a competing brand.

Behavioural data

Behavioural data refers to consumer actions, such as purchase history, product usage, and shopping habits. The more you know about how consumers have acted in the past, the more accurately you can predict future behaviour.

Purchase intent data

Purchase intent data allows you to understand consumers’ purchase intentions and the factors affecting whether or not they buy a product or service. This information is key to product development as well as marketing.

Product and service feedback

Collecting feedback from consumers about their experiences with products or services—from complaints to overall satisfaction—can drive product improvements. This type of information can also enhance customer service.

Consumer research methods

To yield meaningful insights, your brand must adopt a systematic approach to consumer research. It should begin with a clear definition of research objectives, including what specific questions need to be answered and what outcomes are desired. From there, you should determine the most appropriate research tool.

A consumer research survey  is a structured data collection method that gathers information from a sample of respondents. This information may be related to the respondents’ behaviours, opinions, attitudes, or preferences. Surveys may be conducted online, via telephone, or in-person.

• Efficiency: A well-designed survey can collect a large volume of data quickly, making this tool a cost-effective choice.
• Standardisation: Surveys offer consistency in question structure and response options, reducing potential bias and ensuring that all respondents receive the same set of questions.
• Quantifiable data: Surveys generate quantitative data, allowing market researchers to garner insights through statistical analysis. Even open-ended survey questions can be quantified using text analysis tools.

Collect online survey data more efficiently and effectively with Kantar

When you partner with Kantar to conduct consumer research, you benefit from our agile data collection approach. This includes longitudinal studies with bespoke methodologies, quick-turn tests, and other ad hoc projects. We also provide clients with easy-to-use dashboards for in-house analytics and insights.

Focus groups

A focus group is a qualitative research method  in which a small group of selected participants engage in a structured, facilitated discussion about a specific product, service, brand, or other related topic. The goal of a focus group is to gather deeper, more nuanced insights regarding consumer attitudes and perceptions.

• Richer data: Focus groups allow for a deeper understanding of participants’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences. This helps market researchers understand the “why” behind consumer behaviours.
• Real-time clarification: When survey takers are completing an online questionnaire, they may provide misleading information if they don’t quite understand a question. But in a real-life scenario, moderators can provide clarification.
• Group dynamics: Interaction among participants can generate additional insights that might not emerge in one-on-one interviews or surveys. This group setting also allows market researchers to obtain more information faster compared to interviewing individuals one by one.

Syndicated research

Syndicated research refers to data that is aggregated by market research companies, consulting firms, or other organisations. This data is then sold to multiple clients or subscribers who are interested in understanding the dynamics of a specific industry.

• Cost-effectiveness: Purchasing syndicated research can be cheaper than generating first-party data. This makes consumer research available to companies with limited marketing resources.
• Efficiency: Conducting extensive consumer research studies can take time. But with syndicated research, market researchers can access the information they need when they need it.
• Benchmarking: Brands can use syndicated research to benchmark their performance against industry standards and competitors.

Purchase behaviour

At Kantar, we believe the best way to understand consumer behaviour  is to witness it firsthand. That is why we aggregate high-quality consumer data through tracking the buying behaviour of 750,000 consenting consumers. This allows our clients to understand the values and beliefs of real shoppers.

• Deeper insights: By analysing consumer purchase behaviour, companies can identify trends, preferences, and patterns and distil meaningful insights that inform everything from marketing campaigns to product development.
• Competitive advantage: Understanding consumer behaviour can provide a competitive advantage, allowing brands to stay ahead of market trends and pivot in the face of shifting consumer preferences.
• Market segmentation: Tracking purchase behaviour helps companies segment consumers based on preferences, frequency of purchases, and spending habits. In return, brands can tailor messaging in ways that appeal to each respective market segment.

Ensuring your consumer research data is high quality

In today’s competitive marketplace, consumer research data collected from real people who are who they say they are is essential. Without it, your data may not match reality and you risk making misinformed business decisions. In return, you may waste resources and even risk damaging brand reputation.

At Kantar, we understand the value of data quality . We meticulously follow best practices and set the industry standard for fraud-secured, quality data collection. When you partner with us for your custom research, or use our syndicated research, you can rest easy knowing that our survey respondent panels are:

Fraud-secured

Unfortunately, survey fraud can taint entire datasets. The good news is that Kantar has developed an advanced anti-fraud solution called Qubed . Using cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence, this state-of-the-art software detects fraudulent activities where humans or other standard measures cannot.

Diverse and representative

Through the Kantar Profiles Audience Network , we connect you with more than 170 million global panellists and 2 billion data points around habits, characteristics, and behaviours. This ensures that the resulting data is diverse and representative of your target audience.

Highly-engaged respondents

Survey fatigue can have grave consequences, from incomplete responses to survey dropout. Fortunately, our proprietary survey programming tools are best-in-class. They're designed and tested to deliver the engaged answers from respondents on any device. In addition, our experts in survey design can help you craft questionnaires that evoke thoughtful responses and authentic insights.

Learn more about how Kantar can increase the accuracy and reliability of your consumer research data

Consumer research can be a helpful tool for understanding the preferences, values, and behaviours of your target audience. However, only high-quality consumer research data can help your organisation make well-informed decisions that truly satisfy consumer wants and needs. Learn more about the survey fraud the industry is seeing today and how Kantar can boost the quality of your consumer data quality in the State of Online Research Panels . 

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Read: 11 survey design best practices to increase effectiveness  

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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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• 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.

If you found this useful, we think you'll look forward to Lighter Capital's thoughtfully curated monthly e-newsletter.

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July 8 2022

• Table of content

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

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

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

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

Customer research can provide you with the missing information.

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

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

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

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

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

Read also: Differences Between Market Research and Consumer Insights Research

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

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

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

The main purposes of consumer research are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow

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

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

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

1. Develop research goals

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

2. Define your research personas

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

3. Select your research methods and tools

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

Consumer data comes in two structures:

Quantitative - data, in the form of numbers

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

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

Qualitative - non-numerical data that describe and characterize

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

Also read: Seven Consumer Research Methods; 2022 Version

4. Collect secondary data

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

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

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

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

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

• Competition market positioning
• Brand differentiators
• Macro market trends
• Niche market trends

5. Primary research

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

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

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

6. Collect and analyze information

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

7. Prepare a report

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

8. Put consumer research to action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recruitment Efficiency 

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

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

Panel Relevancy Map

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

Statistically Accurate Panel

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

Engagement Efficiency 

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

Research that creates impact

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

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

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

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

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The importance of consumer research

04/04/19 13:12

Posted by Verena Fiebelmann

A key service we offer at Consumer Intelligence involves delivering exciting insight through consumer research. We ask our Senior Research Executive, Emma, what ‘consumer research’ really means and what benefits it can bring to brands. 

  Through the power of consumer research, we help brands gain a deeper understanding of what drives customer behaviour to support the development of business strategies that deliver results.

Whilst this sounds like a no-brainer, quite often the term ‘consumer research’ acts as a barrier, with its true meaning being misconstrued. As a result, the opportunity to really listen to and understand customers through qualitative and qualitative fieldwork goes untapped, by even the brands that need it most.

Emma joined Consumer Intelligence in 2017 as a Senior Research Executive, having previously worked in a global research agency. She works closely with clients in the insurance, banking and finance sector to manage end-to-end consumer research projects — from scoping out new projects and turning the client’s research objectives into a workable study design, to analysing the data and presenting the results back to the client.

We asked Emma to explain what consumer research is really about and why businesses should be using it to put customers at the heart of their strategies.

Q. We hear the term a lot, but what exactly is consumer research?

Consumer research is a broad term that covers the collection and analysis of data about and from consumers. In its simplest form, it is talking to ‘real people’ and getting to know the customer to understand their opinions, attitudes, behaviours, and needs. It can range from large scale online studies which provide robust, statistically valid data-based insights, through to face-to-face interviews, workshops and focus groups, which allow for in-depth exploration of themes which are more abstract or complex.

Consumer research can help inform the development of customer strategies, marketing activity, products and propositions, branding, advertising and communications — anything which constitutes a ‘touchpoint’ with your consumers, including the service offering itself. Projects can be ad-hoc to answer a specific question or need, or bespoke programmes of research which track trends and changes over the longer term.

“ Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why. ” - Bernard Baruch

Q. Why do businesses need consumer research?

In order to succeed, businesses need to continue to meet the needs of and nurture loyalty from their current customers, while finding ways to attract new ones. Sales figures alone only give you half the picture — they tell you the ‘what’ and ‘how many’, but not the ‘why’, and focus too much on what has already happened. It is vital that businesses are able to see and understand how their brand and service or product offer are seen and received through the eyes of their customers.

Q. Why is consumer research so important to businesses, particularly in today’s age?

It is all too easy to become biased or over-informed working within an industry, and without stepping back and checking in with real-world consumers, businesses may put their focus or get carried away on strategies or developments which don’t necessarily always meet the demands of the customer. For example, looking at the (almost) official Amazon move into the UK insurance market, having filed for an insurance licence back in September — research suggests that from a consumer perspective, it seems a welcomed move indicating they may even make it despite a number of big brands attempting and failing in the past.

Taking the time to understand your consumers can avoid costly mistakes further down the line which are driven by ignorance or misplaced assumptions, by ensuring you hear their voice throughout, and we see businesses increasingly realising the importance of a customer-centric ethos. It also allows you to gain a more comprehensive view of the market in which you operate, by exploring how consumers see your business in relation to your competitors, which helps to strengthen and develop a brand’s sense of identity and positioning in the marketplace.

Q. When it comes to our consumer research offering, what is the biggest thing we help our clients with?

At Consumer Intelligence, we often support our clients with research which focuses on understanding how consumers relate to products which are often perceived as ‘grudge’ or practical purchases, on a deeper and more implicit level. We explore themes such as peace of mind, the home, security, and the freedom that these kinds of products protect. By researching what these services mean to consumers, alongside the customer experience, we gain insight into how people approach choosing their providers and what drives them to buy (or not) from them, which can inform customer profiling, targeting, and sales and marketing strategies.

At the moment, there is a big focus on digital development (think the future of insurance : blockchain, AI, autonomous vehicles as well as open banking and a cashless society). As organisations are developing and launching new products at a rapid pace, we’re seeing an increased need for research which seeks customer input throughout the product development journey — from concept and proposition testing through to market-sizing and post-launch evaluation.

Q. Why is consumer research vital to business survival?

With imminent unknowns becoming a reality and changing the way we live, move, buy and own, digital and the impact of tech innovation is both a huge threat and a huge opportunity for the financial services sector in particular. Challenger brands, FinTechs, InsurTechs, and non-traditional business models and product offerings are disrupting what have historically been stable, traditional industries, and in order to adapt, survive, and grow, it is more important than ever that businesses are self-aware and acknowledge their customers and their attitudes, concerns and needs before they become out of touch.

Q. How do you expect the way consumer research is used by businesses to change in the future?

At the heart of every business are its customers. What we do at Consumer Intelligence is provide a full, 360-view of the market — whether that’s in the UK or in other markets around the world. Increasingly we are seeing integrated research approaches — so rather than examining data from different sources in isolation, implementing programmes of blended research methodologies which utilise specialisms such as pricing, consumer research, and strategy, to paint a three-dimensional, holistic picture of all the elements which determine business success and create really meaningful insights and direction. For example, at Consumer Intelligence, we can blend unique insurance pricing data with consumer behavioural research to show what people are selling, what people are buying and why. Additionally, our Advisory consultancy services helps to identify and forecast new strategic opportunities to help businesses grow, improve performance and drive high retention.

Why do you need consumer research?

Download our guide to 'Understanding Consumer Attitudes' to learn how our output goes beyond research and data to uncover genuinely exciting insights – invaluable insights that can help transform your business and your bottom line.

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What is Consumer Research? Developing, Collecting, Designing

• Post last modified: 9 June 2023
• Reading time: 32 mins read
• Post category: Marketing Essentials / Business Statistics / Consumer Behaviour / Marketing Management

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer Research is the process and tools used to study consumer behavior. Marketers carry out consumer research regularly to know what benefits consumer seek by using a product or service.

The various forms of consumer research include an in-depth interview, focus group, or the survey of the consumer base.

Table of Content

• 1 What is Consumer Research?
• 2 Developing Research Objectives
• 3.1 Internal secondary data
• 3.2.1 Government Secondary data
• 3.2.2 Periodicals and articles available
• 3.2.3 Syndicated commercial research services
• 4.1.1 Depth interviews
• 4.1.2 Focus group
• 4.2.1 Observational research
• 4.2.2 Experimentation
• 4.2.3 Survey research
• 4.2.4 Quantitative research data collection instruments
• 5.1 Sampling
• 5.2 Data collection
• 5.3 Data analysis and research report findings
• 6 Marketing Management Topics

Primary research is defined as new research especially designed and collected for the purpose of a current research problem.

There are two types of primary research:

Qualitative research

• Quantitative research.

Qualitative research includes focus group, in-depth interview and projective methods. Whereas quantitative research includes observational research, experimentation and survey research.

Developing Research Objectives

One of the most difficult stages of consumer research is to define the research problem and objectives of the research to be carried out.

For example: for mobile handset consumers, a marketer may look for following questions:

• How many segments are there for the market under consideration and how it can be segmented?
• How many consumer love to purchase mobile handset using online platforms?
• Consumer attitude and experience towards the product of company.
• What is the satisfaction level of consumers of competitors?
• What consumer is looking for in a mobile handset which is not available in the market?

These are the few set of questions marketers wants the answers for. Whatever the question/s, researcher should come to a point of agreement to decide the specific purpose and objective of the research to be carried out.

A clearly stated objective of research helps researchers to avoid the costly error and helps to collect the required information only.

Collecting Secondary Data

The second step of consumer research is to look for the secondary data. Secondary data is defined as the information already existing, collected for some other research purpose in the past.

Looking for secondary data helps researchers to check whether the research questions in hand could be answered partially or fully with the existing information. It helps researchers to avoid pursue any research objectives those could be achieved by using secondary data.

There are many sources of secondary data. Those sources can be categorized into two:

Internal secondary data

External secondary data.

It is the information available within the company. For example information collected during sales audit, past customer service calls, letter of enquiry from the customers, and so on. Internal secondary dataIt is the information available within the company.

For example information collected during sales audit, past customer service calls, letter of enquiry from the customers, and so on.

For instance companies use internal secondary data to calculate customer lifetime value for different segments. Customer life time value includes: customer acquisition cost, profit generated, handling cost of customer, and expected time period of the relationship.

It is defined as the information available outside from the organization. These sources of secondary information may be free or paid.

For example Census data from the government can be accessed by the firms at free of cost and help in understanding the demographics of the consumer in a given territory. There are various forms of external secondary data.

Government Secondary data

Periodicals and articles available, syndicated commercial research services.

Government of every country collects lots of data to understand the growth rate of population, citizen’s income, and industry wise growth and to seek other information to project the expected growth of economy, planning the various social programs.

Generally government secondary data is available either free or at a very nominal cost. Hence companies can use that information for understanding the select consumer behavior topics.

Periodicals and articles contain lots of business related data. Those can be accessed by using internet.

Some of the example these types of data bases are: ProQuest, Ebscohost, and LexisNexis. These data bases provide access to many news paper articles and business journals. This material is available in public as well as in private libraries.

There are many research agencies those collects information about the consumers and sale it at a price.

For example : Neilsen’s MyBest Segments provides useful information related to the consumer segments.

Designing Primary Research

After considering the secondary data, the research process can go in two directions:

Quantitative research

The direction of research is well directed by the objectives of the research. For example : if company wants to know the best form of positioning to target segment, a qualitative study is undertaken. Alternatively, if researcher wants to get some quantitative data from the consumer base, quantitative research can be done.

The merits and demerits of using qualitative and quantitative research are discussed in following sections.

It is assumed that consumers do not make decision rationally always for evaluating the goods and services and select the best that provide highest utility at lowest cost. Central idea of qualitative consumer research is that consumer is not always aware about the choices they made and even if they know, they don’t want to share.

Dr. Ernest Dichter first started uncovering the buying motivation of consumers by using Freudian psychoanalytic theory. With the time many qualitative research approaches were used by the marketers to understand consumer behaviour.

Most of the qualitative research method does have roots in psychology and clinical research. In a qualitative study, usually, sample size is small and findings cannot be generalized on the larger population. Nevertheless, this form of consumer research contributes extensively to understand the initial direction of further quantitative research.

In designing and implementing an appropriate qualitative research strategy, A researcher must consider the following points

• Purpose of the study
• Types of interview to suit the purpose of study
• Types of data instruments for securing the needed information

The key methods used in the qualitative studies are: Depth interviews and/or Focus group .

Depth interviews

A depth interview is generally refereed as one to one interview between a single respondent and highly trained researcher. These types of interview take place in a professionally set up interviewing room. Depth interview provide useful insights about the new product development, positioning and re-positioning of the brands.

Focus group

A focus group or discussion group consists of 8 to 10 participants gathered to focus or explore a particular product or product category under the observation of a moderator/researcher/analyst.

During a focus group generally participants are encouraged to express their feeling about and service concepts, or new marketing and advertising campaigns. Analysis of the responses collected during a focus group is a big task and require specific skills.

Researchers use quantitative research to know the acceptance of a product, as well as to know the impact of recent marketing campaign. In other case, objectives are to equip researchers in identifying consumer’s level of satisfaction with a product, service, distributors, and retailer.

It is also used to know the unmet need of consumers or look for the betterment of the existing product. The broad categories of quantitative research are experimentation, survey techniques, and observation.

The finding of quantitative research is descriptive and empirical. The sample size of quantitative research larger in comparison to qualitative research. If a sample is selected wisely and appropriately, the finding can be generalized to the larger population under consideration. But it requires high statistical skills in a researcher to appropriately analyze the data collected.

Observational research

Observational research is an important research tool because marketer recognize that often the best way to gain an in depth understanding of the relationship between people and product by watching them in the process of buying or using the product. Companies require observers to track the behavior of consumers.

For this purpose, companies use trained observers or mechanical or electronic devices. Usage of electronic financial transaction and retailing has enabled the firms to track and observe the consumers buying behaviour.

Experimentation

Experimental research generally known as causal research are carried out to know the cause and effect relationship among the various factors under consideration. It is possible to check the change in the sale of product at various point of the pricing.

A simple example of causal research is when we change on variable and keep others at constant. A controlled experiment ensures that any difference in the outcome is due to the independent variables under consideration not due to the external ones.

A major application of causal research is test marketing. Sometimes marketers feel after conducting a focus group and in-depth interview, and survey research, companies first want to test the product/ service and marketing communication program from the target customers.

Survey research

When researcher wants to know about purchase preferences and consumption experiences of consumer, they can do it by email, in person, by telephone or by online. Each method of contact has certain merits and demerits; hence researcher must select wisely the method of contact.

Following are the ways of contacting respondents in quantitative survey research:

• Personal interview surveys: Face to face with respondent
• Telephonic interview surveys: One to one telephone contact
• Mail/ email surveys: Sending questionnaire directly to respondent’s home or email inbox.
• online survey: Contacting respondent using company website or link

Quantitative research data collection instruments

Research instruments are prepared to systemize that similar questions are asked to every respondents in similar order. Data collection instruments include questionnaires, personal inventories, and attitude scale. Mostly each research instrument is pre tested for its reliability and validity before conducting a full scale survey.

Questionnaire includes the questions asked related to the research objectives.

There are two types of questions asked in a questionnaire:

• Open-ended question
• Close-ended question.

Open-ended questions require answer in the respondent’s own words, for example: essay type questions.

Close-ended questions require respondent to check appropriate answer from the list of options. Similarly, researchers uses attitude scales in the quantitative study. The most frequently used attitude scale is likert scale, semantic scale, behavior intention scale, and rank order.

Customer Satisfaction Measurement

Customer satisfaction measurement is a type of consumer research to measure the satisfaction with relevant attributes of the product or service, and relative importance of each attribute by using qualitative and quantitative measures and verities of contact method.

Usually, researchers uses five point semantic differential scale, ranging from “very dissatisfied to very satisfied.

Customer satisfaction is a function of the gap between what customer expected from the product before purchase and what customer actually getting.

It is not economical and possible to obtain information from each and every people of the population or universe under consideration, marketers use sampling of the population.

A sample is a subset of the population that is used to analyze the characteristics of the population. Therefore a sample should represent the entire population. A sample not representing the entire population may give results those are not of any use.

Hence researchers need to develop a proper sampling plan. A sampling plan should address three questions:

• Whom to survey (Sampling unit)?
• How many to survey (Sample size)?
• How to select respondents (Sampling procedure)?

Deciding the sampling unit require the proper definition of the population. For example: company want to analyze customer satisfaction of online banking of any bank, then online banking user of the bank will be its population. Size of sample is directly related to the budget of the research and confidence that marketer want have in the finding of research.

Larger the sample, more the chances that sample size would represent the entire population.

Sampling procedure has two type of sampling:

• Probability sampling
• Non probability sampling.

In probability sampling each member of the universe has equal chance of being selected whereas in non probability sampling, the population under study the number of respondents are selected based on the researchers judgment.

Types of probability sampling:

• Simple random sampling: Every person in the population has an equal chance of being selected.
• Systematic random sampling: A member of the population is selected at random and then every nth person is selected.
• Stratified random sampling: The population is divided into mutually exclusive groups (age), and random samples are drawn.
• Cluster sampling: Population is divided into mutually exclusive groups (such as blocks), and then the sample is taken.

Types of non probability sampling:

• Convenience sampling: Most accessible members of population are selected.
• Judgment sampling: Researcher uses his/her judgment to select the members from population those can provide the accurate information.
• Quota sampling: The researcher interview a prescribed number of people in each of several categories (100 men and 100 women).

Data collection

After successful sampling, the next step is data collection. In a qualitative survey, there is a requirement of the highly trained social scientist to collect data. In a quantitative study, field staff is recruited that specializes in conducting field based data collection.

Data is collected by using research instruments which are reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that research responses are clear, complete and legible.

Data analysis and research report findings

Responses are analyzed by the moderator/ researchers in the qualitative study. In quantitative study, researcher supervise the analysis; open ended questions are coded and quantified, then all the responses are tabulated and analyzed using sophisticated analytical software.

In both type of study, research report include executive summary of findings and recommendations for marketing actions.

The body of research report include introduction of the research problem, full description of methodology used, findings, and managerial implications of the findings. Research report also includes the recommendation to the reader based on the findings and current position of the company.

Marketing Management Topics

• Market Segmentation
• Marketing Mix
• Marketing Concept
• Marketing Management Process
• Marketing Environment

Consumer Behaviour

• Business Buyer Behaviour
• Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

Marketing Management

• Advertising
• Marketing Planning
• Public Relations
• Sales Promotion
• Types of Sales Promotion
• Techniques of Sales Promotion
• New Product Development Process
• What is Pricing
• Methods of Pricing & Strategies
• Market Entry Strategy
• Demand Forecasting
• Brand Building Process
• Agricultural Cooperative Marketing
• Classification of Products
• Types of Logistics
• Marketing Control
• Models of Communication
• Consumer Research

DAGMAR Approach

• Consumer Behaviour Models
• Personal Selling
• Green Marketing
• Customer Relationship Management
• Electronic commerce
• Kotler Product Level
• Marketing Communication

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( Click on Topic to Read )

• What Is Market Segmentation?
• What Is Marketing Mix?
• What Is Marketing Environment?
• What Is Consumer Behaviour?
• 7 Stages Of New Product Development
• Methods Of Pricing
• What Is Public Relations?
• What Is Marketing Management?
• What Is Sales Promotion?
• Types Of Sales Promotion
• Techniques Of Sales Promotion
• What Is Personal Selling?
• What Is Advertising?
• What Is Marketing Planning?
• Segmentation Targeting And Positioning
• Kotler Five Product Level Model
• Classification Of Products
• Types Of Logistics
• What Is Consumer Research?
• What Is DAGMAR?
• What Is Green Marketing?
• What Is Electronic Commerce?
• What Is Marketing Control?
• What Is Marketing Communication?
• What Is Pricing?
• Models Of Communication

Sales Management

• What is Sales Management?
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Marketing Essentials

• What i s Marketing?
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• What is Database Marketing?
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• What is Market Intelligence?
• What is Industrial Marketing?
• What is Customer Value
• What is Consumer Behaviour?
• What Is Personality?
• What Is Perception?
• What Is Learning?
• What Is Attitude?
• What Is Motivation?
• Consumer Imagery
• Consumer Attitude Formation
• What Is Culture?

Consumer Decision Making Process

• Applications of Consumer Behaviour in Marketing
• Motivational Research
• Theoretical Approaches to Study of Consumer Behaviour
• Consumer Involvement
• Consumer Lifestyle
• Theories of Personality
• Outlet Selection
• Organizational Buying Behaviour
• Reference Groups
• Consumer Protection Act, 1986
• Diffusion of Innovation
• Opinion Leaders

Business Communication

• What is Business Communication?
• What is Communication?
• Types of Communication
• 7 C of Communication
• Barriers To Business Communication
• Oral Communication
• Types Of Non Verbal Communication
• What is Written Communication?
• What are Soft Skills?
• Interpersonal vs Intrapersonal communication
• Barriers to Communication
• Importance of Communication Skills
• Listening in Communication
• Causes of Miscommunication
• What is Johari Window?
• What is Presentation?
• Communication Styles
• Channels of Communication
• Hofstede’s Dimensions of Cultural Differences and Benett’s Stages of Intercultural Sensitivity
• Organisational Communication
• Horizontal C ommunication
• Grapevine Communication
• Downward Communication
• Verbal Communication Skills
• Upward Communication
• Flow of Communication
• What is Emotional Intelligence?
• What is Public Speaking?
• Upward vs Downward Communication
• Internal vs External Communication
• What is Group Discussion?
• What is Interview?
• What is Negotiation?
• What is Digital Communication?
• What is Letter Writing?
• Resume and Covering Letter
• What is Report Writing?
• What is Business Meeting?
• What is Public Relations?

Business Law

• What is Business Law?
• Indian Contract Act 1872
• Essential Elements of a Valid Contract
• Types of Contract
• What is Discharge of Contract?
• Performance of Contract
• Sales of Goods Act 1930
• Goods & Price: Contract of Sale
• Conditions and Warranties
• Doctrine of Caveat Emptor
• Transfer of Property
• Rights of Unpaid Seller
• Negotiable Instruments Act 1881
• Types of Negotiable Instruments
• Types of Endorsement
• What is Promissory Note?
• What is Cheque?
• What is Crossing of Cheque?
• What is Bill of Exchange?
• What is Offer?
• Limited Liability Partnership Act 2008
• Memorandum of Association
• Articles of Association
• What is Director?
• Trade Unions Act, 1926
• Industrial Disputes Act 1947
• Employee State Insurance Act 1948
• Payment of Wages Act 1936
• Payment of Bonus Act 1965
• Labour Law in India

Brand Management

• What is Brand Management?
• 4 Steps of Strategic Brand Management Process
• Customer Based Brand Equity
• What is Brand Equity?

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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

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

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 ​ (Table1 1 ).

Extended ICABS Framework after 1980

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.

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.

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).

The present—the consumer behavior field today

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 ​ (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

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.

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.

The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040 1

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ​ (Table3 3 ).

Future consumer behavior research questions

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.

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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Research Project – Definition, Writing Guide and Ideas

Table of Contents

Research Project

Definition :

Research Project is a planned and systematic investigation into a specific area of interest or problem, with the goal of generating new knowledge, insights, or solutions. It typically involves identifying a research question or hypothesis, designing a study to test it, collecting and analyzing data, and drawing conclusions based on the findings.

Types of Research Project

Types of Research Projects are as follows:

Basic Research

This type of research focuses on advancing knowledge and understanding of a subject area or phenomenon, without any specific application or practical use in mind. The primary goal is to expand scientific or theoretical knowledge in a particular field.

Applied Research

Applied research is aimed at solving practical problems or addressing specific issues. This type of research seeks to develop solutions or improve existing products, services or processes.

Action Research

Action research is conducted by practitioners and aimed at solving specific problems or improving practices in a particular context. It involves collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and often involves iterative cycles of data collection and analysis, with the goal of improving practices.

Quantitative Research

This type of research uses numerical data to investigate relationships between variables or to test hypotheses. It typically involves large-scale data collection through surveys, experiments, or secondary data analysis.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding and interpreting phenomena from the perspective of the people involved. It involves collecting and analyzing data in the form of text, images, or other non-numerical forms.

Mixed Methods Research

Mixed methods research combines elements of both quantitative and qualitative research, using multiple data sources and methods to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon.

Longitudinal Research

This type of research involves studying a group of individuals or phenomena over an extended period of time, often years or decades. It is useful for understanding changes and developments over time.

Case Study Research

Case study research involves in-depth investigation of a particular case or phenomenon, often within a specific context. It is useful for understanding complex phenomena in their real-life settings.

Participatory Research

Participatory research involves active involvement of the people or communities being studied in the research process. It emphasizes collaboration, empowerment, and the co-production of knowledge.

Research Project Methodology

Research Project Methodology refers to the process of conducting research in an organized and systematic manner to answer a specific research question or to test a hypothesis. A well-designed research project methodology ensures that the research is rigorous, valid, and reliable, and that the findings are meaningful and can be used to inform decision-making.

There are several steps involved in research project methodology, which are described below:

Define the Research Question

The first step in any research project is to clearly define the research question or problem. This involves identifying the purpose of the research, the scope of the research, and the key variables that will be studied.

Develop a Research Plan

Once the research question has been defined, the next step is to develop a research plan. This plan outlines the methodology that will be used to collect and analyze data, including the research design, sampling strategy, data collection methods, and data analysis techniques.

Collect Data

The data collection phase involves gathering information through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, observations, experiments, or secondary data analysis. The data collected should be relevant to the research question and should be of sufficient quantity and quality to enable meaningful analysis.

Analyze Data

Once the data has been collected, it is analyzed using appropriate statistical techniques or other methods. The analysis should be guided by the research question and should aim to identify patterns, trends, relationships, or other insights that can inform the research findings.

Interpret and Report Findings

The final step in the research project methodology is to interpret the findings and report them in a clear and concise manner. This involves summarizing the results, discussing their implications, and drawing conclusions that can be used to inform decision-making.

Research Project Writing Guide

Here are some guidelines to help you in writing a successful research project:

• Choose a topic: Choose a topic that you are interested in and that is relevant to your field of study. It is important to choose a topic that is specific and focused enough to allow for in-depth research and analysis.
• Conduct a literature review : Conduct a thorough review of the existing research on your topic. This will help you to identify gaps in the literature and to develop a research question or hypothesis.
• Develop a research question or hypothesis : Based on your literature review, develop a clear research question or hypothesis that you will investigate in your study.
• Design your study: Choose an appropriate research design and methodology to answer your research question or test your hypothesis. This may include choosing a sample, selecting measures or instruments, and determining data collection methods.
• Collect data: Collect data using your chosen methods and instruments. Be sure to follow ethical guidelines and obtain informed consent from participants if necessary.
• Analyze data: Analyze your data using appropriate statistical or qualitative methods. Be sure to clearly report your findings and provide interpretations based on your research question or hypothesis.
• Discuss your findings : Discuss your findings in the context of the existing literature and your research question or hypothesis. Identify any limitations or implications of your study and suggest directions for future research.
• Write your project: Write your research project in a clear and organized manner, following the appropriate format and style guidelines for your field of study. Be sure to include an introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion.
• Revise and edit: Revise and edit your project for clarity, coherence, and accuracy. Be sure to proofread for spelling, grammar, and formatting errors.
• Cite your sources: Cite your sources accurately and appropriately using the appropriate citation style for your field of study.

Examples of Research Projects

Some Examples of Research Projects are as follows:

• Investigating the effects of a new medication on patients with a particular disease or condition.
• Exploring the impact of exercise on mental health and well-being.
• Studying the effectiveness of a new teaching method in improving student learning outcomes.
• Examining the impact of social media on political participation and engagement.
• Investigating the efficacy of a new therapy for a specific mental health disorder.
• Exploring the use of renewable energy sources in reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change.
• Studying the effects of a new agricultural technique on crop yields and environmental sustainability.
• Investigating the effectiveness of a new technology in improving business productivity and efficiency.
• Examining the impact of a new public policy on social inequality and access to resources.
• Exploring the factors that influence consumer behavior in a specific market.

Characteristics of Research Project

Here are some of the characteristics that are often associated with research projects:

• Clear objective: A research project is designed to answer a specific question or solve a particular problem. The objective of the research should be clearly defined from the outset.
• Systematic approach: A research project is typically carried out using a structured and systematic approach that involves careful planning, data collection, analysis, and interpretation.
• Rigorous methodology: A research project should employ a rigorous methodology that is appropriate for the research question being investigated. This may involve the use of statistical analysis, surveys, experiments, or other methods.
• Data collection : A research project involves collecting data from a variety of sources, including primary sources (such as surveys or experiments) and secondary sources (such as published literature or databases).
• Analysis and interpretation : Once the data has been collected, it needs to be analyzed and interpreted. This involves using statistical techniques or other methods to identify patterns or relationships in the data.
• Conclusion and implications : A research project should lead to a clear conclusion that answers the research question. It should also identify the implications of the findings for future research or practice.
• Communication: The results of the research project should be communicated clearly and effectively, using appropriate language and visual aids, to a range of audiences, including peers, stakeholders, and the wider public.

Importance of Research Project

Research projects are an essential part of the process of generating new knowledge and advancing our understanding of various fields of study. Here are some of the key reasons why research projects are important:

• Advancing knowledge : Research projects are designed to generate new knowledge and insights into particular topics or questions. This knowledge can be used to inform policies, practices, and decision-making processes across a range of fields.
• Solving problems: Research projects can help to identify solutions to real-world problems by providing a better understanding of the causes and effects of particular issues.
• Developing new technologies: Research projects can lead to the development of new technologies or products that can improve people’s lives or address societal challenges.
• Improving health outcomes: Research projects can contribute to improving health outcomes by identifying new treatments, diagnostic tools, or preventive strategies.
• Enhancing education: Research projects can enhance education by providing new insights into teaching and learning methods, curriculum development, and student learning outcomes.
• Informing public policy : Research projects can inform public policy by providing evidence-based recommendations and guidance on issues related to health, education, environment, social justice, and other areas.
• Enhancing professional development : Research projects can enhance the professional development of researchers by providing opportunities to develop new skills, collaborate with colleagues, and share knowledge with others.

Research Project Ideas

Following are some Research Project Ideas:

Field: Psychology

• Investigating the impact of social support on coping strategies among individuals with chronic illnesses.
• Exploring the relationship between childhood trauma and adult attachment styles.
• Examining the effects of exercise on cognitive function and brain health in older adults.
• Investigating the impact of sleep deprivation on decision making and risk-taking behavior.
• Exploring the relationship between personality traits and leadership styles in the workplace.
• Examining the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for treating anxiety disorders.
• Investigating the relationship between social comparison and body dissatisfaction in young women.
• Exploring the impact of parenting styles on children’s emotional regulation and behavior.
• Investigating the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for treating depression.
• Examining the relationship between childhood adversity and later-life health outcomes.

Field: Economics

• Analyzing the impact of trade agreements on economic growth in developing countries.
• Examining the effects of tax policy on income distribution and poverty reduction.
• Investigating the relationship between foreign aid and economic development in low-income countries.
• Exploring the impact of globalization on labor markets and job displacement.
• Analyzing the impact of minimum wage laws on employment and income levels.
• Investigating the effectiveness of monetary policy in managing inflation and unemployment.
• Examining the relationship between economic freedom and entrepreneurship.
• Analyzing the impact of income inequality on social mobility and economic opportunity.
• Investigating the role of education in economic development.
• Examining the effectiveness of different healthcare financing systems in promoting health equity.

Field: Sociology

• Investigating the impact of social media on political polarization and civic engagement.
• Examining the effects of neighborhood characteristics on health outcomes.
• Analyzing the impact of immigration policies on social integration and cultural diversity.
• Investigating the relationship between social support and mental health outcomes in older adults.
• Exploring the impact of income inequality on social cohesion and trust.
• Analyzing the effects of gender and race discrimination on career advancement and pay equity.
• Investigating the relationship between social networks and health behaviors.
• Examining the effectiveness of community-based interventions for reducing crime and violence.
• Analyzing the impact of social class on cultural consumption and taste.
• Investigating the relationship between religious affiliation and social attitudes.

Field: Computer Science

• Developing an algorithm for detecting fake news on social media.
• Investigating the effectiveness of different machine learning algorithms for image recognition.
• Developing a natural language processing tool for sentiment analysis of customer reviews.
• Analyzing the security implications of blockchain technology for online transactions.
• Investigating the effectiveness of different recommendation algorithms for personalized advertising.
• Developing an artificial intelligence chatbot for mental health counseling.
• Investigating the effectiveness of different algorithms for optimizing online advertising campaigns.
• Developing a machine learning model for predicting consumer behavior in online marketplaces.
• Analyzing the privacy implications of different data sharing policies for online platforms.
• Investigating the effectiveness of different algorithms for predicting stock market trends.

Field: Education

• Investigating the impact of teacher-student relationships on academic achievement.
• Analyzing the effectiveness of different pedagogical approaches for promoting student engagement and motivation.
• Examining the effects of school choice policies on academic achievement and social mobility.
• Investigating the impact of technology on learning outcomes and academic achievement.
• Analyzing the effects of school funding disparities on educational equity and achievement gaps.
• Investigating the relationship between school climate and student mental health outcomes.
• Examining the effectiveness of different teaching strategies for promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Investigating the impact of social-emotional learning programs on student behavior and academic achievement.
• Analyzing the effects of standardized testing on student motivation and academic achievement.

Field: Environmental Science

• Investigating the impact of climate change on species distribution and biodiversity.
• Analyzing the effectiveness of different renewable energy technologies in reducing carbon emissions.
• Examining the impact of air pollution on human health outcomes.
• Investigating the relationship between urbanization and deforestation in developing countries.
• Analyzing the effects of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and biodiversity.
• Investigating the impact of land use change on soil fertility and ecosystem services.
• Analyzing the effectiveness of different conservation policies and programs for protecting endangered species and habitats.
• Investigating the relationship between climate change and water resources in arid regions.
• Examining the impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems and biodiversity.
• Investigating the effects of different agricultural practices on soil health and nutrient cycling.

Field: Linguistics

• Analyzing the impact of language diversity on social integration and cultural identity.
• Investigating the relationship between language and cognition in bilingual individuals.
• Examining the effects of language contact and language change on linguistic diversity.
• Investigating the role of language in shaping cultural norms and values.
• Analyzing the effectiveness of different language teaching methodologies for second language acquisition.
• Investigating the relationship between language proficiency and academic achievement.
• Examining the impact of language policy on language use and language attitudes.
• Investigating the role of language in shaping gender and social identities.
• Analyzing the effects of dialect contact on language variation and change.
• Investigating the relationship between language and emotion expression.

Field: Political Science

• Analyzing the impact of electoral systems on women’s political representation.
• Investigating the relationship between political ideology and attitudes towards immigration.
• Examining the effects of political polarization on democratic institutions and political stability.
• Investigating the impact of social media on political participation and civic engagement.
• Analyzing the effects of authoritarianism on human rights and civil liberties.
• Investigating the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy decisions.
• Examining the impact of international organizations on global governance and cooperation.
• Investigating the effectiveness of different conflict resolution strategies in resolving ethnic and religious conflicts.
• Analyzing the effects of corruption on economic development and political stability.
• Investigating the role of international law in regulating global governance and human rights.

Field: Medicine

• Investigating the impact of lifestyle factors on chronic disease risk and prevention.
• Examining the effectiveness of different treatment approaches for mental health disorders.
• Investigating the relationship between genetics and disease susceptibility.
• Analyzing the effects of social determinants of health on health outcomes and health disparities.
• Investigating the impact of different healthcare delivery models on patient outcomes and cost effectiveness.
• Examining the effectiveness of different prevention and treatment strategies for infectious diseases.
• Investigating the relationship between healthcare provider communication skills and patient satisfaction and outcomes.
• Analyzing the effects of medical error and patient safety on healthcare quality and outcomes.
• Investigating the impact of different pharmaceutical pricing policies on access to essential medicines.
• Examining the effectiveness of different rehabilitation approaches for improving function and quality of life in individuals with disabilities.

Field: Anthropology

• Analyzing the impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures and identities.
• Investigating the relationship between cultural practices and health outcomes in different populations.
• Examining the effects of globalization on cultural diversity and cultural exchange.
• Investigating the role of language in cultural transmission and preservation.
• Analyzing the effects of cultural contact on cultural change and adaptation.
• Investigating the impact of different migration policies on immigrant integration and acculturation.
• Examining the role of gender and sexuality in cultural norms and values.
• Investigating the impact of cultural heritage preservation on tourism and economic development.
• Analyzing the effects of cultural revitalization movements on indigenous communities.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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The Pursuit of Meaning

Nicole Mead and Lawrence Williams recently published a JCR article on consumers’ search for meaning. “ The Pursuit of Meaning and the Preference for Less Expensive Options”  can be found  here . June Cotte recently chatted with the authors about their article, and how they search for meaning in their own lives.

A Conversation with the Authors

June : How did this co-author collaboration happen?

Nicole and Lawrence : We’ve been friends since grad school, and we’ve always batted around research ideas. Nothing ever took off, in part because the timing was never right. One ACR, while sharing a meal, we discovered our mutual fascination with the pursuit of meaning. Each of us had separate but complementary projects in the initial stages. We decided to join forces and the project took off from there.

June : What made you both interested in this topic in the first place?

Nicole and Lawrence : We both study fundamental motivations, with an eye toward understanding how we can optimize those for consumer well-being. In the Aristotelian tradition, meaning and pleasure are essential for living the good life so from that perspective it’s a natural motivation for us to think about and study.

In addition, we are both curious about how to encourage consumers to buy fewer, nicer things over more, inferior things. We think this is important for consumer well-being since nicer things last longer and can deliver more benefits over time, whereas cheaper things break down sooner and can fail to deliver on expected benefits. Understanding this trade off also has important implications for the health of our planet since cheap things are more resource intensive because they are disposed of more quickly and replaced more rapidly. We noticed high-end brands using meaningful language in their advertisements and wondered whether the pursuit of meaning fosters a tendency to “splash out.”

  June: Was there anything you found really surprising as you went through this research project?

Nicole and Lawrence : We went into this project sharing what seems to be a common intuition that money shouldn’t be an object when it comes to symbolically meaningful purchases. In fact, Lawrence had an ongoing project about lay intuitions of meaningful consumption, and those studies suggested that people prioritizing meaningful consumption should buy more (vs. less) expensive products. However, from the very beginning, we found the opposite pattern: the pursuit of meaning (vs. pleasure) caused people to cheap out. We were surprised by this finding, so we created variations on our design (different products, services, and experiences; different IVs) and repeatedly found the same basic pattern in our confirmatory (pre-registered) studies.

Another surprise came when we tried to understand why meaning-seekers “cheap out.” We thought we’d find evidence of moral convictions– the feeling that it’s wrong to use money to buy meaning. We found a bit of that, but overwhelmingly the data pointed to a very rational thought process: people who were pursuing meaning (vs. pleasure) thought about what else they could do with their money (i.e., opportunity costs). We found this surprising because people think about opportunity costs a lot less than academics expect. In addition, the precursors to opportunity cost consideration are not very well known. It was an important discovery for us because turning off opportunity cost consideration – either by asking people to focus narrowly on their current purchase or by reminding them that durable products last longer – reoriented meaning seekers to more expensive and hence higher-quality products.

June: What do each of you do to pursue meaning?

Nicole : I recently had a baby. My experience comports well with the current scholarly conclusion that raising a child is highly meaningful but not always very pleasurable! Aside from this daily source of meaning, I seek to create meaning by mentoring students, doing research that I hope will have a positive impact on the world, and pushing myself to grow through multi-day hikes in beautiful places with my husband.

Lawrence :  I look to make meaning primarily through connecting with loved ones, building community, and self-growth. Accordingly, the most meaningful parts of my week involve having increasingly philosophical and totally ridiculous conversations with my kids, supporting causes I believe in, and stretching myself to find new challenges (which lately include roller-skating and comedy writing).

A Short Summary of the Research

While of course we want you to read the article in full (again, it’s right  here ), here’s a non-technical summary Nicole and Lawrence wrote to whet your appetite!

People often use the marketplace to pursue important goals, such as to have fun, relax, and engage in self-care. Indeed, a great deal of previous consumer research has examined how pursing pleasure, good feelings, or happiness in general influences the choices people make. But we know that life is not all about happiness and sunshine. Across history and spanning many cultures, people around the world commonly endorse the idea that a life truly well lived is one that is rich in meaning.

In this research, we start with the idea that people use the marketplace to add meaning to their lives, since we often buy things to express our identity, show how we matter, find our purpose, and connect with close ones. We then ask: when people are seeking to add meaning to their lives and think about buying things, how much are they willing to spend? Consumers might want to know the answer to this question, especially if their spending tendencies make it harder for them to find the meaning they seek. Companies might want to know the answer to this question, especially if they are searching for ways to be more purposefully aligned with their customers. Our main finding is that when people are pursuing meaning (compared to pursuing pleasure or being prompted with no specific goal at all), they gravitate towards less expensive products and services.

For example, in one study we asked participants to make choices with the goal of finding meaning (versus pleasure). We then presented them with sets of products that varied on price (e.g., an expensive coffeemaker paired with a less expensive one; a luxury car paired with an economy one). Across multiple categories, we found that people pursuing meaning tended to “cheap out,” preferring the options with a lower price tag.

In a follow-up study, we gave participants seeking meaning an opportunity to “shop” on Amazon, selecting any product of their liking within a £75 budget. To make the study as realistic as possible, participants were told that there was a chance that they could win the product they selected plus any money left over. Even when they could choose almost anything on this major shopping platform, people pursuing meaning selected less expensive products compared to a matched group of participants not given any particular goal.

We discovered that a key reason why people pursuing meaning tend to cheap out is because when they are making choices, they tend to think about all of the other things they might do with the money to help them find meaning. But in our final study, when we instructed meaning-seeking participants to focus their attention squarely on the benefits of the product at hand (a premium handmade photo album), they expressed a greater willingness to pay for it compared to meaning-seeking participants told to focus on alternative uses for their money or those given no particular instructions. This finding provides guidance for both customers and companies interested in making the most of meaningful purchases: a narrow focus on the options at hand can increase the likelihood that a focal product would be chosen, even if it is more expensive.

These results are important for helping consumers make spending decisions in line with their goals. For example, a more expensive coffeemaker often will be more durable and reliable than a less expensive one. As a result, it will be replaced less often, providing more opportunity for it to become a meaningful object in the buyer’s life. For a person pursuing meaning in the marketplace, choosing less expensive options in the short run may end up being more expensive and less eco-conscious in the long run. These results are also important for managers, as they provide guidance on how to be better partners with their meaning-seeking customers. Instead of providing meaning-oriented products (often at a premium), firms might do better by showing how their products and services can help customers save money that can be used for their meaningful pursuits.

You can also read more about this project  here .

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How Inclusive Brands Fuel Growth

• Omar Rodríguez-Vilá,
• Dionne Nickerson,
• Sundar Bharadwaj

Years before the Barbie movie phenomenon, leaders at Mattel became concerned that consumer perceptions of the famous doll were out of sync with demographic trends. The company conducted in-depth research to understand how customers felt about Barbie and to determine whether more-inclusive versions presented a strong market opportunity. The findings led to a new inclusion strategy that affected all areas of the brand—product design, distribution, and commercial activities—and coincided with a period of significant growth. Barbie revenues increased 63% from 2015 to 2022—before the boost from the film.

Research shows that in most industries the perception of inclusion can materially change customers’ likelihood to purchase and willingness to recommend products and services.

This article presents a framework for increasing marketplace inclusion in three areas: seeing the market, which is about market definition, market intelligence, and strategies for growth; serving the market, which involves developing products, packaging, and other commercial practices; and being in the market, which looks at advocacy and the customer experience.

They unlock new sources of value by meeting the needs of underrecognized customers.

Idea in Brief

The opportunity.

Research shows that the perception of inclusion can materially change customers’ likelihood to purchase and willingness to recommend products and services.

The Problem

Despite the many business and societal benefits of marketplace inclusion, there is a systematic lack of it across industries.

The Approach

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie grossed more than $1 billion at the box office in about two weeks. Only 53 films have ever hit that mark (adjusted for inflation). The 2023 movie, which features themes of women’s empowerment, multiculturalism, and inclusiveness, was a divergence from the narrow social and demographic representation of the original tall, thin, white doll that Mattel introduced in 1959.

• OR Omar Rodríguez-Vilá is a professor of marketing practice at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University and the academic director of education at its Business & Society Institute.
• DN Dionne Nickerson is an assistant professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School.
• SB Sundar Bharadwaj is the Coca-Cola Company Chair of Marketing at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. LinkedIn: Sundar Bharadwaj

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April 15, 2024

Defense award launches Purdue project to strengthen cyber-physical systems

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Hiccups and failures of consumer cyber-physical systems like smart gadgets and appliances are inconvenient and annoying. But in mission-critical applications for the Department of Defense, any system weakness or flaw could have serious consequences, such as disruption, damage or even loss of life.

To help mitigate the problem, a group of Purdue University researchers has launched a multidisciplinary project to model, simulate and analyze cyber-physical systems (CPS), with the goal of rendering such systems more robust and making analysis of the systems more scalable and effective. Code named FIREFLY, the multiphase $6.5 million project is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under its FIRE program (Faithful Integrated Reverse-engineering and Exploitation). 

A technically intriguing aspect of the research is that, for a CPS with multiple cyber and physical components, the individual components may not appear faulty or vulnerable. But when the components start to interact, weaknesses or vulnerabilities may occur in unexpected ways: “When it comes to the security of system components and of the overall system, one-plus-one may be less than two. And we are particularly interested in exposing and analyzing such system-of-systems weaknesses,” says Dongyan Xu, the Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science and the principal investigator of the FIREFLY project. 

Read more about the research at the Purdue Office of Research website.  

Media are encouraged to share, post and publish this content.  

Media contact: Amy Raley, [email protected]  

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