When was the last time you, as a founder, cared to know what is happening in the market? If patterns and trends of consumer behavior are changing and evolving, who is going to keep a check on that? Who is going to track the shift? And most importantly, you have to make sure that your product aligns with your target audience and its needs. If this does not happen, then you are just selling a product or offering a service that is not parallel to the needs and wants of your target audience; no wonder they are going to bounce off and switch to another product.
Most early-stage founders either skip market research or think they know the market and so do not need market research at all. With the right market research you can redefine personal branding but some believe they know their customers intimately. Others think research is expensive or only relevant to large companies. Both are false assumptions. On the contrary, when done right, market research helps you understand your ideal customer’s needs, uncover language that resonates, spot gaps your brand can own, and benchmark your competitors. Market research bridges that gap. It helps you move from assumptions to brand clarity. And for startups especially, clarity is everything.
Why Startups Can’t Afford to Skip Market Research
According to McKinsey, companies that leverage customer insights outperform competitors by 85% in sales growth. This shows the significance of market research and using the insights of customer behavior for proper growth. We can talk for hours about how the right market research can provide information that is something you will not find in books.
What does market research do?
- Startup brand market research is one of the smartest investments you can make early on.
- Market research validates key brand decisions before launch.
- With the right market research, the brand reduces risk, sharpens the positioning, and ensures brand messaging speaks to the right people in the right way.
- Help brands learn what their competitors are doing in the market.
- Keep the management team informed about the dynamics, patterns, and trends that are prevailing in the market.
How to perform market research?
Well, the easiest way is to conduct a survey among local people and customers in the market. Try to talk to them and assess what their initial thoughts are about the brand. How do they perceive the product? Do they compare it with others? What are the features that are missing, and how can the brand deliver more trust, satisfaction, and credibility to its audience?
This also helps in asking critical questions about the internal structure and elements, such as what you actually need to learn. Who exactly is the brand’s ideal customer? What problems is the brand actively trying to solve? Does the brand care about its customers? Which competitors in the market already have the ideal audiences’ trust? Once you start asking questions outside, you start fixing what is inside.
A simple tip would be to start with qualitative interviews. Speak to 5 to 15 customers or prospects. In the survey, try to dig deep into their past experiences. Run a short quantitative survey. This helps validate broader patterns. Conduct it using rating scales, multiple choice, and one or two open-text responses. As a founder, make sure you filter for the right respondents using screener questions. Let me again tell you astonishing statistics: 75% of marketers say surveys are the one of the most effective brand strategy tools for customer understanding.
Once you are done with surveys, opt for competitor analysis. No, you don’t have to compare yourself with everyone in your niche or industry. Just pick three to five competitors and study them inside out regarding their positioning, tone, customer reviews, messaging, and so on.
Most people think that when they are done with the surveys and competitor analysis, their job is done. But it is not right. In fact, just by doing these two things, the business is actually leaving the job half done. Once you’ve gathered your research, it’s time to turn raw data into insights. This is where the real decision-making occurs, and founders make the wise and concrete decisions of changing and evolving for the better. This is the gap that you need to fill between research and strategy. Remember, the goal isn’t to get lost in charts. It’s to extract what actually matters for your brand.
Pay good attention to customer reviews and ratings. Today, in this modern world, nobody is free to explain to the other person what they liked and what they hated in a product or service. They just rate you. Offer a great customer experience, and I can promise you that good and positive reviews will start coming your way organically.
In the end, when you have everything from customer reviews, survey data, and analysis information, feed them into your brand strategy to make it more effective and surreal. This way your brand strategy will now be addressing all the issues that were pointed out in the market research, fixing one element at a time.
My key takeaways from this blog for you will be to always pay attention to the market and do timely research and assessment so that you never fall back from your competitors.
Conclusion
The conclusion remains the same. No business, however big or small, can move forward and prosper without conducting market research from time to time. But as we discussed, the idea is not to just do market research but to make sure that the information offered by the research should be taken into account and addressed by feeding those insights into the brand strategy. If a founder or an SME fails to do so. Then there is basically no point in performing market research. Use the research to craft a clear positioning statement.
Lastly, I will only tell you to not treat market research as a one-time task. Markets evolve from time to time. The customer needs a shift. Competitors reposition. Make research a continuous routine of your business operations. Conduct quarterly surveys. Talk to at least one customer each month. Monitor reviews and brand mentions. Revisit the ideas you just assumed without any proof and eliminate them. Strong brands listen, learn, and adapt.
