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

Nemanja Jovancic

Sep 02 2020

No comments

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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Apr 3, 2019

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

Updated: Jan 26, 2023

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

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

What is consumer research?

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

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

What is a customer segment?

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

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

What is a buyer persona?

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

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

How to conduct consumer research

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

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

Consumer Research Methods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New customer survey

Established customer survey

Past/canceled customer survey

Thank-you page survey

On-page pop-up surveys

On-site polls

User testing

Net Promoter Score

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

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

Click tracking

Scroll mapping

User recorded sessions

Review mining

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

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

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

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

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

Why is consumer research important?

The voice of the customer (VOC)

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

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

A recent CoSchedule study revealed that:

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

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

Buyer personas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving conversion rates

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

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

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

Growing your business

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

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

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

12 February 2024

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

6 Customer Research Methods
How SurveySparrow Can Help

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

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

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

In this article, we break down:

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

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

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

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

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primary research

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

Secondary research

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

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

Qualitative data

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

Quantitative data

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

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

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

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

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

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus Groups

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

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

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

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

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

Competitive Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

Review Mining

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

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

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

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

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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consumer research noun

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What does the noun consumer research mean?

There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun consumer research . See ‘Meaning & use’ for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.

How common is the noun consumer research ?

Where does the noun consumer research come from.

Earliest known use

The earliest known use of the noun consumer research is in the 1920s.

OED's earliest evidence for consumer research is from 1926, in Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun .

consumer research is formed within English, by compounding.

Etymons: consumer n. , research n. 1

Nearby entries

consumer-driven, adj. 1932–
consumer durable goods, n. 1936–
consumer durables, n. 1938–
consumer economy, n. 1934–
consumer goods, n. 1901–
consumerism, n. 1915–
consumerist, n. & adj. 1944–
consumeristic, adj. 1960–
consumerization, n. 1936–
consumer price index, n. 1945–
consumer research, n. 1926–
consumer resistance, n. 1924–
Consumers' Council, n. 1917–
consumers' credit, n. 1886–
consumers' goods, n. 1889–
consumer society, n. 1920–
consumers' rent, n. 1879–
consumers' surplus, n. 1890–
consumers' wealth, n. 1884–
consumer terrorism, n. 1984–
consumer unit, n. 1933–

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Meaning & use

Entry history for consumer research, n..

Originally published as part of the entry for consumer, n.

consumer, n. was revised in September 2009.

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further revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates;
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Citation details

Factsheet for consumer research, n., browse entry.

The past, present, and future of consumer research

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

Cite this article

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

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37 Citations

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

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1 Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

2.1 Key concepts in the late - 1960s

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

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

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

2.2 Favored methods in the late-1960s

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

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

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

2.3 Aims in the late-1960s

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

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

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

2.5 Concepts after 1980

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

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

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

2.6 Methods after 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.7 Aims after 1980

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

2.8 Summary—the three I’s after 1980

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

3 The present—the consumer behavior field today

3.1 present concepts.

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

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

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

3.2 Present Methods

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

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

3.3 Present Aims

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

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

4 The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040

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

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

4.1 Future Concepts

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

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

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

4.2 Future Methods

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

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

4.3 Future Aims

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

4.4 Summary - Future research questions and directions

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

5 Conclusion

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

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

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Article Contents

Introduction, the pleasure and/or pain of brands, brand attachment and loyalty, consumer relevance and distinctiveness in branding, consumer communications about brands, managerial considerations in branding, other future research directions, conclusions.

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Consumer Research Insights on Brands and Branding: A JCR Curation

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Kevin Lane Keller, Consumer Research Insights on Brands and Branding: A JCR Curation, Journal of Consumer Research , Volume 46, Issue 5, February 2020, Pages 995–1001, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucz058

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Brands are a fact of everyday life and an omnipresent reality for consumers. Understanding how consumers respond to brands—what they think and feel and how they act toward them—is a critical aspect of consumer research. Consumer research in branding is expansive in nature and has investigated a wide range of topics in terms of how different kinds of consumers respond to different types of brands and branding activities in various contexts ( Schmitt 2012 ).

Researchers have explored how consumer responses to brands vary by factors such as knowledge, experience, gender, attitudes, and cultural background. They have studied the effects of brands that vary by product or industry type, personality or other image factors, country of origin, and more. They have explored branding as applied to products or services, people, countries and other geographical locations, and the like. Different forms of marketing activity relating to various aspects of the classic marketing mix (the “4 Ps”: product, price, place, and promotion) have been assessed, and the contexts studied have included a host of situations or settings.

The pleasure and/or pain of brands

Brand attachment and loyalty

Consumer relevance and distinctiveness in branding

Consumer communications about brands

Managerial branding considerations

Despite the relatively short time period involved, these five themes exhibit some of the diversity in subject matter characteristic of branding research. Some of these themes tap into broader interests in consumer research that also can be found in research streams outside of branding. Others capture phenomena wholly unique to the branding area. All themes reflect conceptual rigor and practical relevance. For each theme, we provide some background and highlight the findings of two recent JCR articles, one of which we describe in more detail in the form of its abstract and discussion of its future research implications. We conclude with commentary on other future research directions for brands and branding.

In theory, brands can play many different roles for consumers. In a basic sense, brands can make consumer lives simpler, easier, or more rewarding. Moreover, brands can take on rich meaning and allow consumers to signal to others, or themselves, who they are or who they would like to be and what they value. Yet not all consumers ascribe to the positive qualities of brands, and some consumers actively dislike brands and branding in general. Understanding the basic forces—positive and negative—associated with brands is an enduring consumer research priority.

Recent JCR Research

Reimann, Nuñez, and Castaño (2017) show the remarkable power of brands to insulate consumers from physical pain. Brands allow consumers to cope with pain by offering them a reassuring sense of social connectedness. On the other hand, Brick et al. (2018) show the yin-yang of brands in one of the most important aspects of consumers’ lives: their relationship with close others. They find that brands can also be a source of conflict, as summarized in their abstract below.

Brick et al., “Coke vs. Pepsi: Brand Compatibility, Relationship Power, and Life Satisfaction” (2018) Individuals often evaluate, purchase, and consume brands in the presence of others, including close others. Yet relatively little is known about the role brand preferences play in relationships. In the present research, the authors explore how the novel concept of brand compatibility, defined as the extent to which individuals have similar brand preferences (e.g., both partners prefer the same brand of soda), influences life satisfaction. The authors propose that when brand compatibility is high, life satisfaction will also be high. Conversely, because low brand compatibility may be a source of conflict for the relationship, the authors propose that it will be associated with reduced life satisfaction. Importantly, the authors predict that the effects of brand compatibility on conflict and life satisfaction will depend upon relationship power. Across multiple studies and methodologies, including experimental designs (studies 2, 3, 5) and dyadic data from real-life couples (studies 1, 4, 6), the authors test and find support for their hypotheses. By exploring how a potentially unique form of compatibility influences life satisfaction, including identifying a key moderator and an underlying mechanism, the current research contributes to the literatures on branding, close relationships, consumer well-being, and relationship power.

Several aspects of this research are noteworthy. One crucial consideration, building on past research and worthy of further study, is how brands are embedded in consumer lives and part of their identities in profound ways. Additionally, this research reinforces one of the most central considerations in branding—compatibility, or “fit”—which manifests in different ways with many different branding phenomena (e.g., brand extensions, leveraged secondary associations from cause marketing or sponsorship). Finally, another valuable insight suggested by this research is the polarization that can occur with brands; that is, the same brand can elicit decidedly different responses from different people. Greater attention to the downside of brands and branding and their more detrimental effects with certain consumers is needed.

Not all brands have the same importance to consumers, and understanding why some brands take on special meaning has much theoretical and managerial importance. In a practical sense, in today’s intensely competitive marketplace, firms are going to greater and greater lengths to try to forge strong bonds with consumers and build mutually beneficial relationships. Understanding consumer-brand relationships has been a fertile research topic for years now as the complexity of those relationships continues to spawn intriguing and productive new research directions.

Khamitov, Wang, and Thomson (2019) offer a comprehensive meta-analysis of factors affecting when and how different types of brand relationships increase loyalty. The authors find that various brand, loyalty, time, and consumer characteristics all can affect brand relationship elasticity. They specifically reinforce the power of the intangible and emotional qualities of brands. Huang, Huang, and Wyer (2018) home in on a very specific consideration—how consumers connect with brands in crowded social settings, as summarized in their abstract.

Huang et al., “The Influence of Social Crowding on Brand Attachment” (2018) Feeling crowded in a shopping environment can decrease consumers’ evaluations of a product or service and lower customer satisfaction. However, the present research suggests that a crowded environment can sometimes have a positive impact on consumer behavior. Although feeling crowded motivates consumers to avoid interacting with others, it leads them to become more attached to brands as an alternative way of maintaining their basic need for belongingness. The effect does not occur (a) when the crowding environment is composed of familiar people (and, therefore, is not considered aversive); (b) when individuals have an interdependent self-construal (and consequently, high tolerance for crowdedness); (c) when people are accompanied by friends in the crowded environment; (d) when the social function of the brands is made salient; (e) when people have never used the brand before; or (f) when the brand is referred to as a general product rather than a specific brand.

Understanding situational and contextual influences on consumer behavior with respect to brands offers much practical value to marketing managers who must make many different types of decisions based on assumptions about how consumers will behave in particular places or at particular times. Identifying boundary conditions in these and other ways is important to provide a more nuanced depiction of how consumers actually think, feel, and act toward brands under certain circumstances or in specific settings. Finally, more generally, this research underscores the contingent nature of consumer processing of brands and the need to thoroughly investigate moderator variables that can impact the direction and strength of branding effects in meaningful ways.

Distinctiveness is at the core of branding and a key element in virtually any definition of brands. Branding success is all about differentiation and offering consumers unique value. Unique value requires relevance, too; accordingly, another core branding concept is brand relevance and how meaningful a brand is to consumers. Ensuring that brands are relevant and differentiated, however, is a challenging managerial priority in today’s fluid and fast-changing marketplace. Consumers are also seeking relevance and differentiation and consequently demanding personalized, customized brand offerings that suit their individual preferences and distinguish them from others. In part because of these new dynamics, many important consumer research opportunities are emerging in how consumers and brands fit into their respective landscapes.

Torelli et al. (2017) show how consumer feelings of cultural distinctiveness in foreign locations can lead to consumer preferences for more culturally aligned brands, even if those brands may be deficient in other ways. In a desire to connect with home and not feel as distinctive, consumers broaden how they actually think of “home.” By expanding their in-group boundaries in that way, they exhibit preferences to include culturally related brands that are merely similar in geographic proximity or sociohistorical or cultural roots. Puzakova and Aggarwal (2018) show how a consumer desire for distinctiveness can actually result in less preference for an anthropomorphized brand, as summarized in their abstract.

Puzakova and Aggarwal, “Brands as Rivals: Consumer Pursuit of Distinctiveness and the Role of Brand Anthropomorphism” (2018) Although past research has shown that anthropomorphism enhances consumers’ attraction to a brand when social-connectedness or effectance motives are active, the current research demonstrates that anthropomorphizing a brand becomes a detrimental marketing strategy when consumers’ distinctiveness motives are salient. Four studies show that anthropomorphizing a brand positioned to be distinctive diminishes consumers’ sense of agency in identity expression. As a result, when distinctiveness goals are salient, consumers are less likely to evaluate anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) brands favorably and are less likely to choose them to express distinctiveness. This negative effect of brand anthropomorphism, however, is contingent on the brand’s positioning strategy—brand-as-supporter (supporting consumers’ desires to be different) versus brand-as-agent (communicating unique brand features instead of focusing on consumers’ needs) versus brand-as-controller (limiting consumers’ freedom in expressing distinctiveness). Our results demonstrate that an anthropomorphized brand-as-supporter enhances consumers’ sense of agency in identity expression, compared to both an anthropomorphized brand-as-agent and an anthropomorphized brand-as-controller. In turn, enhancing or thwarting consumers’ sense of agency in expressing their differences from others drives the differential impact of anthropomorphizing a brand positioned to be distinctive.

Two aspects of this research are especially noteworthy in terms of future research. Given how many marketers are trying to bring their brands to life—literally and figuratively—in today’s digital world, anthropomorphism is likely to continue to be an important consumer research topic. In particular, AI and robotic advances in service settings and elsewhere will raise a number of similar issues in terms of how consumers interact with more human-like marketing devices. These are complex phenomena that will require new theoretical development as well as the careful adaption of concepts from consumer psychology originally developed with humans. Secondly, understanding how consumers and brands are—or want to be—distinctive is a fundamental element of branding that can yield interesting insights with a variety of branding phenomena.

Communications are the lifeblood of any brand. In a “paid-earned-owned-shared” media world, consumer-to-consumer communications are taking on increased importance. Different communication channels have different properties, however, that require careful analysis and planning. Understanding what, when, where, how, and why consumers decide to share information or opinions about brands is a research priority that will likely continue to drive research activity for many years to come.

Through an extensive text mining study of social media, Villarroel Ordenes et al. (2019) use speech act theory to identify distinct elements—rhetorical styles such as alliteration and repetition, cross-message compositions, and certain visual images—that lead to greater consumer sharing of messages posted by brands. They reinforce the power of informational and emotional content in online brand messages and find some important distinctions in message sharing across Facebook and Twitter social media platforms. Moving to also include the offline world, Shen and Sengupta (2018) found that when consumers communicate about brands to others by speaking versus writing, they develop deeper self-brand connections, as summarized in this abstract.

Shen and Sengupta, “Word of Mouth versus Word of Mouse: Speaking about a Brand Connects You to It More than Writing Does” (2018) This research merges insights from the communications literature with that on the self-brand connection to examine a novel question: how does speaking versus writing about a liked brand influence the communicator’s own later reactions to that brand? Our conceptualization argues that because oral communication involves a greater focus on social interaction with the communication recipient than does written communication, oral communicators are more likely to express self-related thoughts than are writers, thereby increasing their self-brand connection (SBC). We also assess the implications of this conceptualization, including the identification of theoretically derived boundary conditions for the speech/writing difference, and the downstream effects of heightened SBC. Results from five studies provide support for our predictions, informing both the basic literature on communications, and the body of work on consumer word of mouth.

Word of mouth has been a critical aspect of marketing since the origin of commerce. In today’s digital world, word of mouth can take many different forms (structured vs. unstructured, public vs. private, and so on). Understanding the full consumer psychology implications of reviews, in particular, is a top research priority given their increasingly important role in consumer decision-making. Contrasting oral and written speech, as in the referenced article, will have important implications for social media usage and marketing communications more generally. Lastly, the crucial mediating role of self-brand connections reinforces the need to consider the relevance of brands and when and how they are drawn into consumers’ identities and lives.

There is a managerial side to branding that can benefit from principles and insights gleaned from more practically minded consumer research. Managers make numerous decisions on a daily basis related to building, measuring, managing, and protecting their brands with significant short- and long-term consequences. A thorough understanding of applicable consumer behavior theory is extremely valuable to guide that decision-making. The research opportunities here are vast, as a wide gap still exists in many areas between academic research and industry practice.

Studying the James Bond film franchise, Preece, Kerrigan, and O'Reilly (2019) take an evolutionary approach to study brand longevity. Applying assemblage theory, they show how brands can optimally balance continuity and change at different levels over time. van Horen and Pieters (2017) show how copycat brands—that is, those that imitate brand elements of another brand—meet with more success when the imitated product is in a product category distinct from that of the imitated brand, as summarized in their abstract.

van Horen and Pieters, “Redefining Home: How Cultural Distinctiveness Affects the Malleability of In-Group Boundaries and Brand Preferences” (2017) Copycat brands imitate the trade dress of other brands, such as their brand name, logo, and packaging design. Copycats typically operate in the core product category of the imitated brand under the assumption that such “in-category imitation” is most effective. In contrast, four experiments demonstrate the benefits of “out-of-category imitation” for copycats, and the harmful effect on the imitated brand. Copycats are evaluated more positively in a related category, because consumers appraise the similarity between copycat and imitated brand more positively than in the core category, independent of the perceived similarity itself. This is due to a reduced salience of norms regarding imitation in the related category. Moreover, the results show a damaging backlash effect of out-of-category imitation on the general evaluation of the imitated brand and on its key perceived product attributes. The findings replicate across student, MTurk [Amazon Mechanical Turk], and representative consumer samples; multiple product categories; and forms of brand imitation. This research demonstrates that out-of-category brand imitation helps copycat brands and hurts national leading brands much more than has so far been considered, which has managerial and public policy implications.

Research on trade dress goes to the very heart of brands and branding: the brand elements themselves. Because of how they shape awareness and image with consumers, brand elements are often invaluable assets to brand marketers. A deeper understanding of their intrinsic properties, as well as their interface with various marketing activities, would be very helpful for managers. More generally, adopting a legal perspective to branding research, as with this article, should be encouraged given its increasingly significant role in managerial decision-making. In a related sense, given that most brands span multiple categories, ensuring that a broader multicategory perspective is recognized in branding research is also essential.

The five themes reviewed above each suggested a number of important future research directions. Nevertheless, an abundance of other research opportunities also exist in other areas with brands and branding, five of which are highlighted here (for further discussion, see Keller 2016 ; Keller et al. 2020 ).

Brand Emotions and Feelings

What are the most important types of brand feelings and emotions? What is a useful taxonomy of brand feelings and emotions?

What are the most effective ways for marketers to elicit brand feelings and emotions? How do different marketing activities create brand feelings and emotions?

Can affective information be shared by consumers as effectively as more cognitive information? What is the role of word of mouth and social media for spreading feelings and emotional qualities of brands across consumers?

How easily can feelings and emotions be linked to a brand? In what ways are they stored and later activated?

In what ways do feelings and emotions affect consumer decision-making? When can positive brand feelings overcome product deficiencies? When can negative feelings undermine product advantages?

Brand Intangibles

As noted above, successful branding is about differentiation. Increasingly, brand intangibles are playing a bigger role in creating, or at least strengthening, differentiation. Brand intangibles are those associations to a brand that are not directly related to the product or service and its function and performance. In a broad sense, the increased emphasis on brand intangibles reflects the fact that consumers have become more interested in learning about the people and companies behind products and brands, posing questions such as: Who are they? What values do they hold? What do they stand for? How do they make the product or service?

How do consumers form opinions about authenticity ( Newman and Dhar 2014 ; Spiggle, Nguyen, and Caravella 2012 )? How important is it for a brand to be seen as authentic or genuine?

How does history or heritage define a brand ( Paharia et al. 2011 )? In what ways can it help or hurt? How flexible are consumers in updating their perceptions and beliefs about brands? What is the proper balance of continuity and change for brands over time?

How do consumers view political stances by brands ( Horst 2018 )? How do they respond to brands taking positions on important political issues that support or contradict the positions they hold?

What are consumer expectations for corporate social responsibility for brands ( Bhattacharya and Sen 2003 ; Chernev and Blair 2015 ; Kotler and Lee 2005 ; Torelli, Monga, and Kaikati 2012 )? What are the accepted standards for sustainability, community involvement, and social impact? How do consumers make those judgments? How do they influence brand attitudes and behavior?

Given the subjective nature of brand intangibles, how do marketers reconcile the potentially varying or even contradictory opinions held by different consumers about any particular brand intangible? How much consensus can reasonably be expected?

Brand Positioning

One well-established strategic tool for branding is the concept of positioning —how consumers think or feel about a brand versus a defined set of competitor brands ( Keller, Sternthal, and Tybout 2002 ). Although historically significant, some marketers have questioned the value of traditional positioning in developing modern marketing strategies. One fundamental question is the role of consumers in setting strategies for brands. Some marketing pundits proclaim that “customers are now in charge of marketing,” maintaining that consumers now set the strategic directions of brands. Such statements, however, presume that consumers are empowered, enlightened, and engaged with respect to brands and branding. In other words, consumers have the motivation (engagement), ability (enlightenment), and opportunity (empowerment) to actually impact brand strategies.

In what ways do consumers think they can influence brand strategy? How much input do consumers think they should have about what a brand does?

How much do consumers know about brands and branding? How deep and broad is consumer brand knowledge? How do they define the “rules of the game” for branding?

How actively invested are consumers with a brand’s fortunes? How much do consumers care about how other consumers view a brand or how it is performing in the marketplace as a whole?

How much do consumers want to engage with brands and in what ways? What is a useful taxonomy of brand engagement?

Developing a more complete understanding of the consumer-brand terrain along these lines will be invaluable in understanding how different types of relationships are formed between consumers and brands ( Fournier 1998 ).

Brand Purpose, Storytelling, and Narratives

How well do these alternative brand strategy concepts tap into our understanding of consumer behavior? What assumptions do they make about consumer behavior? When are they most valid or useful? Are they ever unhelpful or even counterproductive?

What types of brand purposes are most meaningful to consumers? How should brand purposes be crafted internally and expressed externally? How should brand purpose relate or be aligned with other aspects of the brand positioning and strategy? For example, how closely tied should brand purposes be to the products or services for the brand?

What makes brand stories or narratives compelling ( Escalas 2004 )? Are there any disadvantages to their use? Can brand stories or narratives distract marketers or consumers from a focus on potentially more important product or service performance considerations?

Brand Measurement

Lastly, for both academics and managers to fully understand the effects of brands and branding, there needs to be a deep, rich understanding of how consumers think, feel, and act toward brands. Although one common industry research technique has been consumer surveys, as consumers have become more difficult to contact and less willing to participate, the viability of surveys has diminished in recent years. Yet marketers today arguably need to stay closer than ever to consumers, underscoring the need to develop new methods and evolve existing ones to gain critical insights into consumers and brands.

Fortunately, as much as any area, branding research has benefited from a full range of quantitative and qualitative methods that go beyond surveys and other traditional data collection methods (e.g., focus groups). For example, researchers are continuing to refine neural techniques (Chang, Boksem, and Smidts 2018; Yoon et al. 2006 ) and ethnographic methods ( Belk 2006 ; Chang Coupland 2005 ). One particularly promising tack involves digital methods and measures that can be used at the individual or market level to monitor online behavior ( Berger et al. 2020 ; Moe and Schweidel 2014 ; Yadav and Pavlou 2014 ). Although full of potential, the methodological properties of these digital approaches need to be validated carefully, and boundaries need to be established as to their comparative advantages and disadvantages.

More broadly, for all traditional or emerging research methods, strengths and weaknesses must be identified and contrasted in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency in gaining consumer and brand insights. In many ways, brand-building can be thought of in terms of painting a picture of a brand in consumers’ minds and hearts. Extending that metaphor, it is important that marketers skillfully combine a full range of research methods to be able to appreciate the colors, vividness, and texture of the mental images and structures they are creating.

Perhaps not surprisingly, research on branding mirrors many of the broad themes found in consumer research more generally. Consumer researchers of all kinds are interested in achieving a better understanding of consumer motivations and desires and how consumers choose to interact with the world around them, especially in digital terms. Researchers studying branding have certainly homed in on these and other topics and also have focused on more managerial considerations, all of which help marketers achieve a deeper understanding of consumers to help them build, measure, manage, and protect brand equity.

The reality is that brands and consumers are inextricably linked. Brands exist for consumers, and consumers generally value brands. Yet, in today’s data-rich world, both brands and consumers can be too easily reduced to online and offline statistical footprints. It is incumbent upon consumer researchers to breathe life into branding to ensure that consumer psychology as applied to branding is undeniable in its importance and essential to marketers everywhere.

This curation was invited by editors J. Jeffrey Inman, Margaret C. Campbell, Amna Kirmani, and Linda L. Price .

The author thanks the editors for the opportunity to write this research curation and for their helpful feedback.

Belk Russell W. (2006), Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing , Cheltenham, UK : Edward Elgar Publishing Limited , 2006 .

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Behind the Boom in Celebrity Brands

Lessons from Kim Kardashian, Ryan Reynolds and more on a major consumer goods trend.

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There was a time when consumer goods companies paid musicians, athletes, and actors for endorsements, or to license their name and likeness. But in recent years, there’s been an explosion of celebrities getting into business directly, selling everything from shapewear to tequila. Ayelet Israeli, professor at Harvard Business School, says the growth of social media and online, direct-to-consumer retail accelerated this trend, but notes that not all celebrity brands are a success. She explains what works and doesn’t, and outlines lessons for non-famous entrepreneurs and established companies. Israeli is coauthor of the HBR article “What Makes a Successful Celebrity Brand?”

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

So you might not suspect this about me, but I am an avid reader of Us Weekly, the celebrity magazine. Amid all the business reading I do, it’s a true guilty pleasure. But over the past several years, I’ve noticed these two worlds converging somewhat. Musicians, athletes, actors, reality stars – I’m talking about Rihanna Ryan Reynolds, LeBron, the Kardashians – they’re all becoming serious business people and they’re making a whole lot more money from the products they sell, whether it’s makeup, gin, sports drinks, or shapewear than from the songs, games, shows, or films that made them famous.

When did this shift happen and why? And what does it mean for existing consumer goods companies and regular entrepreneurs?

Today’s guest is here to explain how social media and online retail have boosted celebrity brands, what makes a good or bad one, and the impact this trend is having on the broader economy. Ayelet Israeli is a professor at Harvard Business School.

She’s the co-author along with Jill Avery, Leonard Schlesinger, and Matt Higgins of the HBR article, What Makes a Successful Celebrity Brand? And she joins me now. Ayelet, welcome.

AYELET ISRAELI: Thank you so much for having me.

ALISON BEARD: So celebrity endorsements have been around for decades. Nike’s built a business around it. Why have celebrity-owned brands become so much more prevalent nowadays?

AYELET ISRAELI: We think that essentially several factors brought us here. Number one, the rise of what we call the creator economy or influencer marketing, where there are so many social media influencers and consumers have gotten used to engaging with them and seeking their authenticity and input around a lot of different topics. One of them is recommending products or services, and actually today’s consumers feel that this channel is more authentic. They believe it more than the traditional endorsements. So that’s kind of one factor, just the growth of what we call influencer marketing.

I think the second factor is that it used to be that in order to learn anything about a celebrity, you would need to follow Us Weekly or many other magazines, TMZ, all of that. And now with the rise of social media and the ability of everyone to connect and share every piece of their life, it feels like you’re more connected to these people who decide to share their life with you. So there is more of a direct line of communication than ever before.

Third, we know now that in this day and age, it’s just so much easier to launch brands because of the growth of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer branding. It’s easier to procure, to launch, to develop brands. So that kind of ability to do that makes it easier also for celebrities to do.

And I think the last piece of that is that what we typically see regular brands do or typical brands do, is actually use endorsements or influencers as part of their media strategy and as part of their paid marketing. Whereas celebrities, given the fact that they have this followership and this connection with consumers and followers, they can actually leverage these social media channels that are kind of free for them and thereby reduce the cost of getting to consumers, communicating with consumers, and having a huge advantage over existing brands.

ALISON BEARD: So that direct connection with consumers seems critical. You can market directly to them, you can sell directly to them rather than going through traditional retail channels. How has that sort of disrupted the broader advertising and consumer goods industries?

AYELET ISRAELI: We see more and more spend on influencer marketing, on TikTok. Things that didn’t exist a few years ago are now important channels and traditional brands are also figuring out how to use all of these different channels and social media strategies in order to develop their own ability to communicate with consumers. Always there is this challenge of how do I pick influencers? How do I attract influencers that are consistent with my brand, that deliver the message of my brand, that their listeners or their followers would actually be willing to accept or believe the message that they provide and actually turn that into sales?

ALISON BEARD: We have seen really successful celebrity brands in the past. I’m thinking as far back as the George Foreman Grill or Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop or Dr. Dre and Beats, are there any lessons that today’s celebrities have taken away from those earlier entrants in the category?

AYELET ISRAELI: One thing that these brands have in common was the true kind of fit between the celebrity and the product category of their brand. So if you think about Dr. Dre, it’s obvious connection to music, to the ability to listen to the tunes in a certain way, and that strong connection makes it really believable. Like, “Yeah, I can see Dr. Dre using this, I believe their endorsement of this.” It’s the same logic of the Michael Jordan Jordans with Nike where it allows consumers to have this special relationship with the product through their relationship with the celebrity almost.

ALISON BEARD: At the same time, I feel like there are reasons to be wary of a celebrity brand. Like why would Ryan Reynolds know more about making gin through his brand, Aviation Gin, than a beverage company like Diageo? Or why would Rihanna know more about lipstick to make Fenty Beauty than L’Oreal would? So how did these brands overcome that skepticism to be perceived as very high quality, very valuable, rather than gimmicky?

AYELET ISRAELI: So we definitely see a pattern that the product actually has to be very, very good. And it’s either that it was actually developed by people with expertise in this domain, or the celebrity actually has domain knowledge to be able to produce this product. But if the product is not actually superior, consumers are no fools. Consumers might buy the first one, but then word of mouth is going to essentially kill the product if it’s not good. So that has to be there, but often it has to come through trial, which is a benefit of these celebrity brands relative to regular brands where we might expect that trial for them is actually cheaper because I have some affinity to this celebrity. So you might have more sales than a product that is the same quality, but from someone unknown because of the initial hype, because of the initial excitement by the celebrity. But then you will also lose sales very quickly once the word is out that the product is not good.

ALISON BEARD: So how do these celebrities go about developing the expertise they need or hiring the expertise they need to develop that kind of superior product that can beat those being offered by multinational companies?

AYELET ISRAELI: In our article, we basically looked more deeply into two main case studies: Kim Kardashian’s Skims product that started out as shapewear and is now kind of activewear, loungewear, bras. They even have men’s products. And the second one is Dave Chang’s Momofuku. Dave Chang is a well-known celebrity chef that started creating also CPG products that consumers can make at home like chili crunch or noodles or things like that.

He was known as a chef. He was known as particular tastes, flavors, things you would expect. And then he could lend this expertise very easily for people to believe that, “Okay, this is actually a good product, or he has credence there, or this is something that should be high quality.” And people tasted it and it was actually good.

And then with Kim Kardashian, the story is a little bit different, but what is interesting about the initial Skims product, the shapewear product, is this idea that it is actually a solution-based product, a need-based product. She and her friends had a real issue with the existing shapewear. One was the typical colors of the shapewear. So typically what is skin color is not necessarily skin color for many people. And she used to color it by herself with tea bags or with coffee. And then that was one challenge. And the other challenge was the particular cuts and shapes of the clothes that she likes to wear that perhaps show more or reveal more than typical clothing. The existing shapewear wouldn’t fit that either.

So there was a real need for a solution. And through that need, she developed a product. And of course then she had to work with experts to develop something that will actually work, but it came from something real that she needed and something real that she saw that there is a market for, and then collaborated with people that have the expertise to take it to the next level.

And I think with both of these cases, I believe also with the cases, the examples you mentioned, we have examples of people, of celebrities that are deeply involved with the product and deeply care about the quality of the product in a way that actually assures that it will be a better product.

ALISON BEARD: And how do they find the time? I feel like that’s what I’m always wondering. It’s like how do they do it when they’re also shooting films, but then they’re incredibly hands-on managers of these brands.

AYELET ISRAELI: So I think some people are incredibly hands-on and some people are not. But I think really the answer is that it’s not just them alone. They have staff, they find the right co-founders, collaborators. Dave Chang has a fantastic CEO that leads a lot of aspects of the business. Kim Kardashian has two co-founders, Jens and Emma Grede that actually have a lot of expertise in this field. So it’s not just them, but they are involved as much as possible to ensure the aspects of the product they care about. We know that up until this day, Kim Kardashian tries out all the different products that Skims create. And Dave Chang is incredibly involved in developing the products as well. Perhaps not in necessarily developing the whole go-to-market strategy, but yes, in the aspects that are critical to him, which is the flavor of the product and ensuring that the product is good.

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So you’ve talked about the celebrity product fit, strong social media following, developing a superior product, listening to consumers. I want to dig into a couple of those things more deeply. So on the social media issue, the person has to start with a very big following and an almost intimate relationship with those followers.

AYELET ISRAELI: So I would actually emphasize the second part of what you said more, the intimate relationship. So you can have a lot of followers, but they are not necessarily a followership and this kind of real connection, real engagement with the celebrity or with the social media influencer. I believe a lot of these principles can apply to celebrities that grew from being influencers. It’s not just the number of the followers, but it’s really this followership relationship. It’s really that a follower feels a true connection. Like they have a conversation like they know this person and they act upon what they see this person advertises on social media or see this person says on social media for this to actually work out. So you might have the exact number of followers of someone else, but that person, celebrity, or that influencer doesn’t create as engaging a relationship or their followers don’t feel as engaged, in which case it’s not going to work very well.

ALISON BEARD: But you do offer cases where celebrities who don’t have big social media followings and don’t post a lot have been successful. I’m thinking about Scarlett Johansson with her beauty brand Outset or George Clooney with Casamigos tequila. So it doesn’t seem like social media is a totally necessary ingredient?

AYELET ISRAELI: I think then some of the advantages that we see social media providing such as this direct relationship with consumer and reducing the cost of customer acquisition are just not going to be there as much as when you have this direct relationship with consumers and you might need more support on other aspects of the brand. You don’t have as much brand awareness or as much demand generation through consumers talking about the brand as you would when you have this direct influencer relationship. And then you would have to figure out other ways to do this. So you might have to go directly to retail faster or have to spend more money on advertising campaigns compared to situation where there is this strong social media following.

ALISON BEARD: And we’ve talked a lot about good celebrity product fits. What is an example of a bad one?

AYELET ISRAELI: So one example was Hulk Hogan who was a-

ALISON BEARD: 1980s wrestling star?

AYELET ISRAELI: Yes. We have seen that some of his early forays into business or into celebrity brands were around food. So he had, for example, Pastamania, which was a fast food restaurant that closed very quickly. He had these cheeseburgers, a lot of foods like that that we have just not seen a lot of traction with. And there are probably many reasons it could have failed, but we believe that one strong reason is this real lack of connection. What is the expertise of Hulk Hogan with pasta or burgers other than he’s a person that eats them. And I think also in the time when he was active, there was a different relationship with celebrities than there is now. You didn’t have this direct channel and consumers were looking for other things than they are looking for now.

ALISON BEARD: At the same time, I feel like there are a couple examples now where the fit doesn’t necessarily seem obvious. I think of George Clooney and his tequila brand. Ryan Reynolds and his gin brand. How did they make that leap that I’m not an expert in this, but I’m still making it something you want to buy?

AYELET ISRAELI: George Clooney is more of a mystery to me because he also shies away from social media and does not play this game. Whereas Ryan Reynolds is really a marketing expert and he really, for all the brands he’s been involved with, he has so much to say. He connects with consumers, he advertises them on social media. He has always clever ways to bring it on. So I think that is more aligned with the other examples we’ve seen. Whereas George Clooney’s example is just completely different.

ALISON BEARD: It’s just the cool of Clooney rubs off on a tequila.

AYELET ISRAELI: And his charm. It’s the Clooney charm.

ALISON BEARD: What are some ways that you see celebrities really interacting with their followers to improve the products, to get from sort of that minimum viable one that they’re able to launch really successfully to one that really is superior and beats the competition?

AYELET ISRAELI: So one thing we’ve seen is influencers and also celebrities, but influencers actually talking to their followers and asking them about the product and seeking their feedback before they even use the brand. So even giving them access to beta products, asking them what are they interested in, what type of designs, what type of fabric. So really engaging the community almost to co-create something the community is interested in.

ALISON BEARD: Speaking of co-creation, are we in a world now where companies or even entrepreneurs are now thinking, “I need to move beyond trying to get a celebrity or influencer to endorse my product. I actually need to, from the beginning, partner with this person to make it and launch it”?

AYELET ISRAELI: Not all brands need a celebrity, but a celebrity is definitely an unlock into this idea of how can I reduce my customer acquisition cost? So one thing we’ve seen starting around 2010, there was an era of direct to consumer brands and their whole kind of philosophy was we can cut out the middlemen. So we’re not going to sell through retail, we’re going to sell direct to consumers. We can do that thanks to e-commerce, thanks social media. It’s really easy to procure product, to create brands, and to sell online. So why not do that? But then when you cut out the middlemen, you actually have these activities that retailers use to do for you, like generating demand and generating awareness that you suddenly have to do. So in the early days of direct to consumer, we’ve seen brands doing this really successfully on Facebook and other websites where it was relatively cheap for them to advertise and to find consumers and to get these consumers to buy their products.

But quickly, many other brands, both incumbent brands and new brands started also advertising. And all of these costs increased so much that they’re out of control these days and it’s just not very sustainable to continue advertising for the current customer acquisition costs. And that’s a true concern for businesses of how am I going to acquire customers? How am I going to incur all these costs? And a celebrity could give you this ability to reduce these costs significantly if they are willing to work at selling your product through their channels that are not paid, for instance, their social media channels.

ALISON BEARD: But then you’re giving them a big cut of the profits.

AYELET ISRAELI: You would have to give them a cut of the profits, for sure. Not all celebrities are willing to work at selling. There is a shift. You said initially we’ve seen celebrity endorsement in many years, but that would just mean I’m wearing the product, which is a different activity than engaging in selling a product.

ALISON BEARD: So what advice do you give companies and startups that are interested in partnering with celebrities? Does it start with an endorsement or influencer relationship and then build from there?

AYELET ISRAELI: One thing to look at that we talked about is this idea that it’s not just a number of followers. You actually need to see how much engagement they have. And there are currently tools to look into that. But you see there are average metrics of engagement such as comments, likes, reposting for different channels that you see kind of the convergence of number of followers, how many people actually engage with a posting. And that helps you understand is there a true followership or are there just a lot of followers for a particular celebrity? So that’s one that is important. Two, of course, what we talked about is this idea of fit. Is this celebrity credibly selling this product? People are looking for some kind of authenticity. Are we going to believe this or is this going to seem a very hard sell for consumers?

And then I think there has to be an element where the celebrity is willing to be involved in the product in some way. So if we’re talking about a situation where a brand already has a product, so it’s not necessarily involvement in development like we talked about in the Kim Kardashian or the David Chang case, but it has to be involvement in selling, involvement in talking to consumer, involvement in something that makes the connection seem more real, more organic, more believable to consumers.

ALISON BEARD: And I imagine that it’s also really important to think about the risks of a particular personality.

AYELET ISRAELI: Certainly.

ALISON BEARD: Adidas and Kanye West come to mind.

AYELET ISRAELI: Certainly. So of course celebrities can go out of fashion. There are lots of PR crises that are possible with celebrities. And of course you need to take that into account as you think about your own brand health of who might be a good fit, and also if there is going to be a scandal, how am I going to get out of this? And we’ve seen historically that if the brand in relationship of endorsements, the brand can easily cut off ties with that person. But if you are developing kind of a celebrity brand where the brand is so centered around this one persona, then this is going to be a little bit harder.

ALISON BEARD: I truly think that I hear or read about a new celebrity brand almost every day. Is the market getting too crowded?

AYELET ISRAELI: So I think we hear about a lot of celebrity brands, but I don’t know that we’ve seen so many successful celebrity brands. It goes back to this quote by the CEO of Warby Parker, and of course I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something like, it’s never been easier to launch a brand, but it’s also never been harder to actually sustainably grow that brand. So sure, you can create new products very easily, especially if you have access to capital, which a lot of these celebrities do. But then it’s not necessarily going to gain any traction. And surprisingly, one of the first issues is perhaps more obvious one, which is the product is oftentimes not that good and consumers are going to sense that very quickly.

ALISON BEARD: This is really my big question because I feel like this trend is happening in other areas too, like celebrity podcasting and celebrity children’s books. So what about businesses, entrepreneurs with no celebrity association? You have a great product, but you’re not a big name with a massive social media falling and millions of dollars already, and ways to get meetings with venture capitalists or other investments. How do you compete?

AYELET ISRAELI: One of the things that is helpful is brand storytelling. So you might not have the story of a celebrity, but you might have an interesting and compelling story for your own brand that you can leverage. And of course, these brands, I mean they’ve always had to work on PR and how do I get people excited and things like that. It is true that it will be harder for them to get attention, but oftentimes once they do, it seems more credible to some people. Again, I know it sounds obvious, but really start with a good product. I think oftentimes we forget that. If you don’t have a good product to begin with, then what are you doing?

And I also think there is this question of hype or fad versus longevity and brands that actually create value. And a lot of these things are sometimes just hype, just fad. Like, “Okay, I will buy a book that a celebrity wrote, even if it’s not a very good book, but am I going to buy another copy of that book?” And what we see with the examples I mentioned is that retention rates are really high. People are willing to buy multiple products from the Skims brand and from the Momofuku brand and from other brands. So there is this question of do people just buy one to feel connection with the celebrity or because they’re interested in a celebrity and they’re interested in listening to one episode or something like that, or is there a real ongoing relationship?

And really what we care about as marketers and business people is this relationship with consumers. We want them to come back, we want them to bring their friends. All of these aspects of that.

ALISON BEARD: Well, Ayelet, thank you so much for talking to us about celebrity brands. I will keep reading about it in Us Weekly and HBR.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Ayelet Israeli, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and co-author of the HBR article, What Makes a Successful Celebrity Brand?

And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast . We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.

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Patients love telehealth—physicians are not so sure

IRL or URL? Many physicians and patients used to see medical care as something best done in-person (in real life, or IRL). But the pandemic has spurred a massive transition to virtual (or URL) care. According to our recent surveys of consumers and physicians, opinions are split on what happens next (see sidebar, “Our methodology”). As the pandemic evolves, consumers still prefer the convenience of digital engagement and virtual-care options, according to our recent McKinsey Consumer Health Insights Survey. This preference could help more patients access care, while also helping providers to grow.

Our methodology

To help our clients understand responses to COVID-19, McKinsey launched a research effort to gather insights from physicians into how the pandemic is affecting their ability to provide care, their financial situation, and their level of stress, as well as what kind of support would interest them. Nationwide surveys were conducted online in 2020 from April 27–May 5 (538 respondents), July 22–27 (150 respondents), and September 22–27 (303 respondents), as well as from March 25–April 5, 2021 (379 respondents).

The participants were US physicians in a variety of practice types and sizes, and a range of employment types. The specialties included general practice and family practice; cardiology; orthopedics, sports medicine and musculoskeletal; dermatology; general surgery; obstetrics and gynecology; oncology; ophthalmology; otorhinolaryngology and ENT; pediatrics; plastic surgery; physical medicine and rehabilitation; psychiatry and behavioral health; emergency medicine; and urology. These surveys built on a prior one of 1,008 primary-care, cardiology, and orthopedic-surgery physicians in April 2019.

To provide timely insights on the reported behaviors, concerns, and desired support of adult consumers (18 years and older) in response to COVID-19, McKinsey launched consumer surveys in 2020 (March 16–17, March 27–29, April 11–13, April 25–27, May 15–18, June 4–8, July 11–14, September 5–7, October 22–26, and November 20–December 6) and 2021 (January 4–11, February 8–12, March 15–22, April 24–May 2, June 4–13, and August 13–23). These surveys represent the stated perspectives of consumers and are not meant to indicate or predict their actual future behavior. (In these surveys, we asked consumers about “Coronavirus/COVID-19,” given the general public’s colloquial use of coronavirus to refer to COVID-19.)

Many digital start-ups and tech and retail giants are rising to the occasion, but our most recent (2021) McKinsey Physician Survey indicates that physicians may prefer a return to pre-COVID-19 norms. In this article, we explore the trends creating disconnects between consumers and physicians and share ideas on how providers could offer digital services that work not only for them but also for patients. Bottom line: a seamless IRL/URL offering could retain patients while delivering high-quality care. Everybody benefits.

The rise of telehealth

These materials reflect general insight based on currently available information, which has not been independently verified and is inherently uncertain. Future results may differ materially from any statements of expectation, forecasts, or projections. These materials are not a guarantee of results and cannot be relied upon. These materials do not constitute legal, medical, policy, or other regulated advice and do not contain all the information needed to determine a future course of action.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, both physicians and patients embraced telehealth: in April 2020, the number of virtual visits was a stunning 78 times higher than it had been two months earlier, accounting for nearly one-third of outpatient visits. In May 2021, 88 percent of consumers said that they had used telehealth services at some point since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Physicians also felt dramatically more comfortable with virtual care. Eighty-three percent of those surveyed in the 2021 McKinsey Physician Survey offered virtual services, compared with only 13 percent in 2019. 1 See sidebar on methodology; McKinsey Physician Surveys conducted nationally in five waves between May 2019 and April 2021; May 1, 2019, n = 1,008; May 5, 2020, n = 500; July 2, 2020, n = 150; September 27, 2020, n = 500; April 5, 2021, n = 379.

However, as of mid-2021, consumers’ embrace of telehealth appeared to have dimmed a bit from its early COVID-19 peak: utilization was down to 38 times pre-COVID-19 levels. Also, more physicians were offering telehealth but recommending in-person care when possible in 2021, which could suggest that physicians are gravitating away from URL and would prefer a return to IRL care delivery (Exhibit 1).

Three trends from the late-stage pandemic

As COVID-19 continues, three emerging trends could set the stage for the next few years.

The number of virtual-first players keeps growing, and physicians struggle to keep up

The growth (and valuations) of virtual-first care providers suggest that demand by patients is persistent and growing. Teladoc increased the number of its visits by 156 percent in 2020, and its revenues jumped by 107 percent year over year. Amwell increased its supply of providers by 950 percent in 2020. 2 “Teladoc Health reports fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 results,” Teledoc Health, February 24, 2021; “Amwell announces results for the fourth quarter and full year 2020,” Amwell, March 24, 2021. By contrast, only 45 percent of physicians have been able to invest in telehealth during the pandemic, and only 16 percent have invested in other digital tools. Just 41 percent believe that they have the technology to deliver telehealth seamlessly. 3 McKinsey Physician Survey, April 5, 2021.

Some workflows, for example, require physicians to log into disparate systems that do not integrate seamlessly with an electronic health record (EHR). Audiovisual failures during virtual appointments continue to occur. To make these models work, providers may need to determine how to design operational workflows to make IRL/URL care as seamless as possible for both providers and patients. The workflows and care team models may need to vary, depending on the physician’s specialty and the amount of time they plan to devote to URL versus IRL care.

Patient–physician relationships are shifting

In McKinsey’s April 2021 Physician Survey, 58 percent of the respondents reported that they had lost patients to other physicians or to other health systems since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Corroborating those findings, our August 2021 survey of consumers showed that of those who had a primary-care physician (PCP), 15 percent had switched in the past year. Thirty-five percent of all consumers reported seeing a new healthcare provider who was not their regular PCP or specialist in the past year. Among consumers who had switched PCPs, 35 percent cited one or more reasons related to the patient experience—the desire for a PCP who better understood their needs (15 percent of respondents), a better experience (10 percent), or more convenient appointments (6 percent). Just half (50 percent) of consumers with a PCP say they are very satisfied. What’s more, Medicare regulations now give patients more ownership over their health data, and that could make it easier for them to switch physicians. 4 “Policies and technology for interoperability and burden reduction,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, December 9, 2021.

Physicians and patients see telehealth differently

Our surveys show that doctors and patients have starkly different opinions about telehealth and broader digital engagement (Exhibit 2). Take convenience: while two-thirds of physicians and 60 percent of patients said they agreed that virtual health is more convenient than in-person care for patients, only 36 percent of physicians find it more convenient for themselves.

This perception may be leading physicians to rethink telehealth. Most said they expect to return to a primarily in-person delivery model over the next year. Sixty-two percent said they recommend in-person over virtual care to patients. Physicians also expect telehealth to account for one-third less of their visits a year from now than it does today.

These physicians may be underestimating patient demand. Forty percent of patients in May 2021 said they believe they will continue to use telehealth in the pandemic’s aftermath. 5 McKinsey Consumer Health Insights Survey , May 7, 2021.

In November 2021, 55 percent of patients said they were more satisfied with telehealth/virtual care visits than with in-person appointments. 6 McKinsey Consumer Health Insights Survey , November 19, 2021. Thirty-five percent of consumers are currently using other digital services, such as ordering prescriptions online and home delivery. Of these, 42 percent started using these services during the pandemic and plan to keep using them, and an additional 15 percent are interested in starting digital services. 7 McKinsey Consumer Health Insights Survey , June 24, 2021.

Convenience is not the only concern. Physicians also worry about reimbursement. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and several other payers switched to at-parity (equal) reimbursement for virtual and in-person visits. More than half of physician respondents said that if virtual rates were 15 percent lower than in-person rates, they would be less likely to offer telehealth. Telehealth takes investment: traditional providers may need time to transition their capital and operating expenses to deliver virtual care at a cost lower than that of IRL.

Four critical actions for providers to consider

Providers may want to define their IRL/URL care strategy to identify the appropriate places for various types of care—balancing clinical appropriateness with the preferences of physicians and patients.

Determine the most clinically appropriate setting

Clinical appropriateness may be the most crucial variable for deciding how and where to increase the utilization of telehealth. Almost half of physicians said they regard telehealth as appropriate for treatment of ongoing chronic conditions, and 38 percent said they believe it is appropriate when patients have an acute change in health—increases of 26 and 17 percentage points, respectively, since May 2019.

However, physicians remain conservative in their view of telehealth’s effectiveness compared with in-person care. Their opinions vary by visit type (Exhibit 3). Health systems may consider asking their frontline clinical-care delivery teams to determine the clinically appropriate setting for each type of care, taking into account whether physicians are confident that they can deliver equally high-quality care for both IRL and URL appointments.

Assess patient wants and needs in relevant markets and segments

Patient demand for telehealth remains high, but expectations appear to vary by age and income group, payer status, and type of care. Our survey shows that younger people (under the age of 55 ), people in higher income brackets (annual household income of $100,000 or more), and people with individual or employer-sponsored group insurance are more likely to use telehealth (Exhibit 4). Patient demand also is higher for virtual mental and behavioral health. Sixty-two percent of mental-health patients completed their most recent appointments virtually, but only 20 percent of patients logged in to see their primary-care provider, gynecologist, or pediatrician.

To meet market demand effectively, it may be crucial to base care delivery models on a deep understanding of the market, with a range of both IRL and URL options to meet the needs of multiple patient segments.

Partner with physicians to define a new operating model

Many physicians are turning away from the virtual operating model: 62 percent recommended in-person care in April 2021, up five percentage points since September 2020. As physicians evaluate their processes for 2022, 46 percent said they prefer to offer, at most, a couple of hours of virtual care each day. Twenty-nine percent would like to offer none at all—up ten percentage points from September 2020. Just 11 percent would dedicate one full day a week to telehealth, and almost none would want to offer virtual care full time (Exhibit 5).

To adapt to these views, care providers can try to meet the needs and the expectations of physicians. They could offer highly virtualized schedules to physicians who prefer telehealth, while allowing other physicians to remain in-person only. Matching the preferences of physicians may create the best experience both for them and for patients. Greater flexibility and greater control over decisions about when and how much virtual care to offer may also help address chronic physician burnout issues (Exhibit 6). Digital-first solutions (for example, online scheduling, digital registration, and virtual communications with providers) could also increase the reach of in-person-only care providers to the 60 percent of consumers interested in using these digital solutions after the pandemic abates.

Communicate clearly to patients and others

Physicians consistently emerge as the most trusted source of clinical information by patients: 90 percent consider providers trustworthy for healthcare-related issues. 8 McKinsey Consumer Survey, May 2020. Providers could play a pivotal role in counseling patients on the importance of continuity of care, as well as what can be done safely and effectively by IRL and URL, respectively. The goal is to help patients receive the care that they need in a timely manner and in the most clinically appropriate setting.

Potential benefits to providers

The strategic, purposeful design of a hybrid IRL/URL healthcare delivery model that respects the preferences of patients and physicians and offers virtual care when it is appropriate clinically may allow healthcare providers to participate in the near term, retain clinical talent, offer better value-based care, and differentiate themselves strategically for the future.

Telehealth and broader digital engagement tools have enjoyed persistent patient demand throughout the pandemic. That demand may persist well after it. Investment in digital health companies has grown rapidly—reaching $21.6 billion in 2020, a 103 percent year-over-year increase—which also suggests that this approach to medicine has staying power. 9 Q4 and annual 2020 digital health (healthcare IT) funding and M&A report , Executive Summary, Digital Health Funding and M&A, Mercom Capital Group.

That level of demand offers the potential for growth when physicians can meet it. If only new entrants fully meet consumer demand, traditional providers who do not offer URL options may risk losing market share over time as a result of patients’ initial visit and downstream care decisions. What’s more, as healthcare reimbursement continues to move toward value, virtual-delivery options could become a strategic differentiator that helps providers better manage costs. 10 Brian W. Powers, MD, et al., “Association between primary care payment model and telemedicine use for Medicare Advantage enrollees during the COVID-19 pandemic,” JAMA Network , July 16, 2021.

In all likelihood, one of the critical steps in the process will be engaging physicians in the design of new virtual-care models—for example, determining clinical appropriateness, how and where physicians prefer to deliver care, and the workflows that will maximize their productivity. This has the added benefit of potentially also addressing the problem of physician burnout by offering a range of options for how and where clinicians practice.

Most important, virtual care can offer an opportunity to improve outcomes for patients meaningfully by delivering timely care to those who might otherwise delay it or who live in areas with provider shortages. In addition, patients’ most trusted advisers on care decisions are physicians, so virtual care gives them a meaningful opportunity to help patients access the care they need in a way that both parties may find convenient and appropriate. 11 “Public & physician trust in the U.S. healthcare system,” ABIM Foundation, surveys conducted on December 29, 2020 and February 5, 2021.

Physicians are evaluating a variety of factors for delivering care to patients during and, eventually, after the COVID-19 pandemic. The strategic, purposeful design of a hybrid IRL/URL healthcare delivery model offers a triple unlock: improving the value of healthcare while better meeting consumer demand and improving physicians’ engagement. The full unlock is not easy—it requires deep engagement and cooperation between administrators, clinicians, and frontline staff, as well as focused investment. But it will yield dividends for patients and providers alike in the long run.

Jenny Cordina is a partner in McKinsey’s Detroit office, Jennifer Fowkes is a partner in the Washington, DC, office, Rupal Malani, MD , is a partner in the Cleveland office, and Laura Medford-Davis, MD , is an associate partner in the Houston office.

The article was edited by Elizabeth Newman, an executive editor in the Chicago office.

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The Research Error That Gave Us the Phrase ‘Missionary Position’

By ellen gutoskey | may 4, 2024.

A pixelated version of an illustration by Édouard-Henri Avril from the 1824 book ‘De figuris Veneris.’

In his 1972 sex manual The Joy of Sex , author Alex Comfort described “matrimonial” sex, in which a man is on top of a supine woman, as “the good old Adam and Eve missionary position.”

Though missionary is by no means exclusive to that gender pairing, the fact that some people just recently learned so while watching 2023’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves that Comfort’s representation from over half a century ago still has some gas in the cultural relevance tank.

Missionary position, if in stereotype only, is the kind of vanilla sex favored by husbands and wives either too in love to unlock eyes or too lazy to try something else. It’s chaste enough to have made the final cut of a Marvel movie and so strongly associated with baby-making ( sans scientific evidence , mind you) that even the medieval Catholic Church gave it a gold stamp .

rock carving showing a man on top of a woman

With that perception in mind, you can see how the position, in all its Adam-and-Eve glory, ended up with a religious nickname.

But that’s not how it happened. In fact, missionaries were mostly involved in this christening by mistake.

“The Way Squares Peg Round Holes”

Many a modern reader could glance at some datasets from Alfred Kinsey ’s 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male or its 1953 follow-up, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , and spot flaws in the research (e.g. nearly all the survey participants were white). But for an American society starved for candid discussions about sex , the Kinsey reports were easy to take at face value when they first hit shelves. Both volumes achieved something not many statistical studies ever aspire to, let alone accomplish: They became bestsellers.

Alfred Kinsey smiling in a polka-dotted bow tie as he points to a passage in a book

Even as researchers turned a critic’s eye on Kinsey’s work during the back half of the 20th century, certain details escaped further interrogation. One of them was the origin of the phrase missionary position .

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , to illustrate that the missionary position—or “the English-American position”—was far from global, Kinsey referenced anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s 1929 text about the Indigenous communities of Papua New Guinea’s Trobriand Islands. Malinowski, Kinsey wrote , “notes that caricatures of the English-American position are performed around the communal campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the ‘missionary position.’” The implication was that the Indigenous islanders had learned this ridiculous copulation formation from Christian missionaries.

By the time English speakers embraced the term missionary position in full force during the sexual revolution, some had also begun to scorn the thing itself. Plenty of sexually liberated women continued to favor the bottom spot, but reactionaries tended to fixate on the notion that all this experimentation made missionary seem stuffy and uncool. One 1970 piece in The Guardian called it “the tatty old missionary position,” while a 1973 one in The Montreal Star described it as “the way squares peg round holes.”

black and white photo of a scarf-wearing woman dancing, arms tossed up in ecstasy, as people in the background look on

It wasn’t just the phrase that got picked up from the Kinsey reports. Its origin story did, too, repeated (and often embellished) in everything from academic articles to newspaper advice columns. In a 1976 edition of The Ottawa Citizen , for example, advisor Dr. Aaron Rutledge asserted that missionary “was taught to Pacific Islanders and African tribespeople as the one religiously approved approach to husband-wife sexuality.”

But even if the good doctor hadn’t botched Kinsey’s account, he still would have accidentally been spreading misinformation —because Kinsey’s account wasn’t accurate in the first place.

“Sketchy and Flabby Movements”

Around the early 2000s, anthropologist and missiologist Robert J. Priest did something that countless scholars before him apparently hadn’t troubled to do: He read Malinowski’s 1929 book to locate the original reference to missionary position .

Curiously, not once does that exact term appear in the text. What Priest did find, which he laid out in a 2001 paper published in Current Anthropology , were other elements of Kinsey’s anecdote.

At one point, Malinowski chronicled the Trobriand people convening under a full moon (not around campfires, as Kinsey said) to play games and sing songs that sometimes involved sexual jokes . At another point, while outlining the islanders’ customary sex positions, Malinowski mentioned that they “despise the European position and consider it unpractical and improper.” He wasn’t talking about all arrangements wherein a woman is lying on her back—many of which were popular in the community—but specifically the one where the man subjects her to his whole body weight. In their words, per Malinowski, “he presses her heavily downwards, she cannot respond.”

about ten Trobriand Island dancers dressed in red bottoms, black arm bands, jewelry, and headgear

“Altogether the natives are certain that white men do not know how to carry out intercourse effectively,” he wrote. They did, as Kinsey alluded to, enjoy caricaturing what Malinowski described as “the sketchy and flabby movements” and “the brevity and lack of vigour of the European performance.”

Though they reportedly learned those ways from “white traders, planters, or officials,” Malinowski did mention missionaries in a later section about public displays of affection like “holding hands, leaning against each other, [and] embracing.” A man named Tokolibeba told him that this frowned-upon behavior, which some Trobriander couples had adopted from missionaries, was called “ misinari si bubunela ,” or “missionary fashion.”

In short, it seems that Kinsey may have conflated several true stories into one succinct and specious one. As Priest put it, “Kinsey apparently invented a legend while believing himself to be reporting historical fact and coined a new expression while thinking he was reporting an old one.”

It’s a mark of Kinsey’s influence that the expression’s origin went more or less unquestioned for so long. And also an indicator that most people thinking about sex probably aren’t too hung up on how any given position got its name.

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Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope
Consumer research is a part of market research in which inclination, motivation and purchase behavior of the targeted customers are identified. Consumer research helps businesses or organizations understand customer psychology and create detailed purchasing behavior profiles. It uses research techniques to provide systematic information about ...
CONSUMER RESEARCH definition
CONSUMER RESEARCH meaning: the study of people's opinions about products or services, and about what products or services they…. Learn more.
CONSUMER RESEARCH
CONSUMER RESEARCH definition: the study of people's opinions about products or services, and about what products or services they…. Learn more.
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Research objectives help guide the research process and ensure that the collected data is relevant and aligned with the organization's needs. Target Audience Definition: Identifying the target audience or customer segment is essential. This involves determining the specific group of customers or potential customers that the research will ...
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Definition of consumer research Consumer research, or customer research, is a component of market research that helps businesses explore the preferences of their customers and learn more about what they expect from a business and its products or services. Consumer research is important to the overall function of a business because a company that understands its customers can innovate its ...
Consumer Research: Definition, Methods and Benefits (+ Templates)
1-to-1 interviews. In most cases, this is a conversational method that presupposes an interviewer and an interviewee. During this type of consumer research, the researcher (the interviewer) asks questions (that are equivalent to the open-ended survey questions) related to products and services. There are two main limitations to this method.
The past, present, and future of consumer research
Abstract. 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 ...
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mal definition of consumer research may be of little value, since consumer research will ultimately be de-fined by what researchers achieve, there is a need for direction. We begin with the premise that consumer research, whatever form it might take, seeks to produce knowledge about consumer behavior. Although simple,
What is Consumer Research?
a definition intended to provide a core meaning for our field of inquiry. Specifically, I propose that we use the tierm consumer research to refer to the study of consummation in all its many aspects. Consummation thereby designates the core of the concept of consumer research. From this perspective, consumer research stands on its own as a
What Is Consumer Research and Why Is It Important for Startups?
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 ...
Consumer research
consumer research: 1 n marketing research that yields information about the motives and needs of different classes of consumers Type of: market research , marketing research research that gathers and analyzes information about the moving of good or services from producer to consumer
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Customer research (or consumer research) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers. Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.
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consumer research noun
What does the noun consumer research mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun consumer research. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence. See meaning & use. How common is the noun consumer research? About 0.1 occurrences per million words in modern written English . 1920: 0.029: 1930: 0.04: 1940:
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Consumer research in branding is expansive in nature and has investigated a wide range of topics in terms of how different kinds of consumers respond to ... Moreover, brands can take on rich meaning and allow consumers to signal to others, or themselves, who they are or who they would like to be and what they value. Yet not all consumers ...
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Synonyms for Consumer Research (other words and phrases for Consumer Research). Synonyms for Consumer research. 122 other terms for consumer research- words and phrases with similar meaning. Lists. synonyms. antonyms. definitions. sentences. thesaurus. words. phrases. Parts of speech. nouns. Tags. poll. suggest new. market research. n.
CONSUMER RESEARCH in Thesaurus: 100+ Synonyms & Antonyms for CONSUMER
Most related words/phrases with sentence examples define Consumer research meaning and usage. ... Related terms for consumer research- synonyms, antonyms and sentences with consumer research. Lists. synonyms. antonyms. definitions. sentences. thesaurus. Parts of speech. nouns. Synonyms Similar meaning. View all. market research. inquiry.
Meaning of consumer market research in English
consumer market research meaning: → consumer research. Learn more.
X4 2024 Strategy & Research: The Future of Insights Generation- Qualtrics
X4 2024 Strategy & Research Showcase: Introducing the future of insights generation. At X4® 2024, we showcased how Qualtrics AI® enables teams to quickly summarize, analyze, and elevate qualitative and quantitative data, transforming the way research is done and amplifying business outcomes at scale. Customers tell us they've been flooded ...
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To help our clients understand responses to COVID-19, McKinsey launched a research effort to gather insights from physicians into how the pandemic is affecting their ability to provide care, their financial situation, and their level of stress, as well as what kind of support would interest them. Nationwide surveys were conducted online in 2020 from April 27-May 5 (538 respondents), July 22 ...
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It's a mark of Kinsey's influence that the expression's origin went more or less unquestioned for so long. And also an indicator that most people thinking about sex probably aren't too ...
Meaning of consumer market research in English
consumer market research definition: → consumer research. Learn more.
Fleet Services Newsletter, May 2024
Late last week Governor Kim Reynolds signed a new law that changes the meaning of a pedestrian. The new definition adds some language and now includes " a person using a pedestrian conveyance" in addition to a pedestrian on foot. A pedestrian conveyance is any human-powered device a pedestrian may use to move or move another person.

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