You can buy a car without understanding how powerful the engine is. Indeed, you can buy a television screen without checking the measurements to see if it fits in your living room. You might get away with it, but chances are, we’ve all made an expensive mistake because we have failed to do our research.
This shouldn’t be the case for your business. While market research is a time consuming process, it enables you to build a strategy and develop a detailed understanding of how your product or service fits into the market, why it is important in the market, and who is going to buy it. Too many businesses come up just short because they act on misguided instinct, gut feeling, or a hunch.
That is not to say these perceptions aren’t important, but rather than basing your product launch on them, you should be using them to build a hypothesis to guide your research.
Before launching your product, you need:
- A detailed understanding of market trends, local legislation, cultural and socio-political factors
- A knowledge of who you’re talking to and what makes them tick
- A thorough overview of who you are competing with and what they are doing
- An understanding of the customer journey to set the guardrails for your marketing
- Guidance on how to shape your products or your services with the relevant attributes
- Clearly defined price points which guarantee highest purchase interests, revenue and margin
Market research is your detective work that enables you to solve any problem; your intel that enables you to deploy anywhere, quickly, and with ease; it is your granite foundation on which a strategy can be built. The right type of market research is therefore fundamental in limiting uncertainty and risk.
Do you need help with market research? Let us help you. Read more about market research on our website or contact us for a free scoping session.
George Penn is a Research Analyst of MasonBower, working closely on customer projects of all sorts.
