A usage and attitudes (U&A) study – sometimes also described as an attitudes and usage (or A&U) study – is a popular survey-based study used in market research that will help you to understand your market at a deep level, understand who is buying what, from where and how often, and to explore the relationship between opinions/attitudes and consumption habits. It will help you find the answers to common questions such as:

There are four main types of U&A studies that can be used to answer these questions. The exact approach that you use will depend on your needs. You might take a single approach or a combination of some of the following:

One of the major benefits of a usage and attitudes study is that it’s so versatile and can be used in a variety of different applications. Specifically, you should consider performing a U&A study if you have one of the following needs:

Buyers are constantly changing the way they think about products and services, with implications for their buying behaviour. Their attitudes and usage changes are shaped by not only how you interact with them (for instance, via your marketing campaigns) but also the actions of your competitors and broader shifts in the market environment. The COVID-19 pandemic is a great example: producers of alcoholic drinks found, for instance, that not only did sales of wine and spirits to consume at home increase, but also that the average spend per consumer was also increasing. When consumption patterns shift like this, or the industry suffers some kind of shock or disruption, it’s time to take stock of consumer usage and attitudes to better inform your next steps. 

Once the customer has taken your product home, the sale is over, isn’t it? Well, not quite.

Sometimes, by focusing on the supply side of business – driving the sale – we forget to consider exactly how our products fit into our customers’ daily lives once they have taken it away from the shop. However, understanding customer usage at a deeper level can help you ensure that your product is a great fit for the customer, and that additional needs are met, which in turn, can drive future sales. For instance, let’s suppose that your main product is a home elliptical machine. Taking time to learn about customer interactions with it, such as which room they keep it in, how often they work out on it and how family members take turns to use it, can provide deep insights that can be used to inform future product development and help you focus your marketing campaigns more effectively. You might find, for example, that younger family members want to use the machine but that the size is not child-friendly, prompting the development of training equipment specifically for children. 

Another objective of U&A studies is to measure consumer demand for your products among a target audience, helping you to refine your positioning and product offerings and putting you in the best possible position to drive sales. For instance, let’s suppose that you’re a seller of yoga mats but you want to expand your market to reach beginners. Based on the results of a U&A study that evaluates overall demand for yoga, as well as where yoga mats are used (e.g. in the home or taken to a studio) and how (the types of stretches performed), you might be able to develop an illustrated mat that shows beginners where to place their feet for certain, popular poses. In other words, you could create an innovative product that meets the needs of your customers more effectively and drives interest in your brand.

If you’re preparing for a significant change, such as launching a new product range, investing in a major advertising campaign, extending the brand or entering a new market, a usage and attitudes study is absolutely vital. It’s impossible to feel confident about whether the leap will be a successful one unless you have in-depth, up-to-date knowledge about your customer base, their usage patterns and their attitudes towards your brand and others. By administering a U&A study, you can get clarity regarding these questions, which will help you shape and optimise your strategies.

Overall, conducting a U&A research study can help you identify opportunities to expand and grow your business by implementing an optimised brand and product strategy. Let’s take a look at exactly how to enact one.

There are a few different ways in which a usage and attitudes study can be performed. However, one of the most effective ways follows the traditional sales conversion funnel model, starting with gaining a broader understanding of your market and narrowing to focus your attention on the specific way they interact with, or perceive, your brand. Let’s take a look at each step.

Although the data from U&A studies can be immensely valuable, many firms attempting to use them fall at the first hurdle by failing to obtain an appropriate sample. It is crucial that the sample from which you collect your data is genuinely representative of your customer base. If, for instance, your sample is skewed towards an older audience that prefers high street shopping to online shopping, it’s unlikely that your evaluation of the attitudes and behaviours of your market will be valid. Instead, you’ll need to carefully calibrate your audience so that it reflects your customers in terms of demographics, psychographics and behaviours. If you’re unsure how to find a sample like this, we have a ready-made audience that can be refined according to factors such as gender, income and employment, etc.

Just as a U&A study is often used to establish a baseline to inform future marketing decisions, the first part of a usage and attitudes survey can help you set a reference point for further research. If you ask respondents to name the brands or products that instantly come to mind in a specified category, unprompted, you’ll get a solid idea of their awareness of your brand compared to competitors’, as well as the effectiveness of any recent marketing campaigns.

Next, use the survey to explore customer attitudes towards, and usage of, specific products or brands. Prompted recall is an excellent way to do this. For example, you might list a series of competing brands and then ask respondents to indicate which they are aware of, which they currently use and which they have considered using.

Once you’ve asked about brand knowledge and use, it’s time to delve a little deeper into customers’ perceptions of your brand and possibly even those of your competitors. For example, let’s suppose that you’ve launched a premium online clothing store. Do customers really perceive your brand as premium or are there competing stores which are seen as even more prestigious? By asking about perceptions of your positioning, you can get a sense of how your brand is placed in the existing market as well as its competitive strength.

Whether you’re selling an existing product or service to a known market or developing a new product offering, it’s crucial that you have a profile of your target consumer in mind. Administering a U&A survey to capture customer needs, desires and pain points will help you understand, at a deeper level, who your customer is, what they want and why. You can use either closed-ended or open-ended questions to capture this kind of insight. For example, if you decide to ask open-ended questions, you might ask questions such as:

Alternatively, you might ask closed-ended questions such as:

As the name might suggest, the questions in a U&A research survey should be designed to help you learn more about consumer attitudes and behaviour along the customer journey. That means focusing attention on the perception of the products, how customers feel about your offerings and how they use your products in their day-to-day lives. For example, consider a question as simple as:

The answers to this question alone can help you to segment your market on the basis of consumption behaviour. You might find that you have three markets: those who shop online infrequently; those who never shop online; and those who shop online every day. Analysing the answers in conjunction with the answers to questions about consumer experiences when shopping online, or their attitudes to online shopping in general, will give you deep insight that can help you ensure that the specific needs of each segment are met, new products or services are appropriately targeted to the right segments and your customers are satisfied, time after time.

A U&A study is not just about assessing consumer attitudes to your own brand and product categories. Comparison questions can yield powerful insight into your positioning relative to your competitors. For example, you might present respondents with a list of competing products and brands and then ask them to rank them from their most preferred to their least preferred. Alternatively, you might ask specific questions about the relative attributes of different products in a single category, such as:

Questions that capture shopping and purchasing behaviours are crucial to developing the appropriate promotional, placement and distribution strategies that we know drive sales. The types of questions that will be useful here include:

U&A studies are highly valuable for providing businesses with a foundational understanding of their market and customers. However, a poorly designed U&A survey can undermine the actionability of the results. Use the following tips to make sure your U&A survey provides you with insight that you can act upon:

So, in summary, use a usage and attitudes research study to develop understanding about the appeal of your products and services to your customers and to identify future market opportunities by exploring customers’ purchase, perception and usage patterns. Ready to get going?