Market research: What it is, how to do it and examples

Market research gives businesses a comprehensive, data-driven insight into customers, trends and competitors. By conducting market research, businesses can obtain the precise data that they need to enter new markets, satisfy their customers and confidently launch new products.

This is especially critical given that more than 70% of all newly launched products for daily life fail after their introduction. Early market research reduces this risk significantly and maximises success by aligning your business strategy with customer needs.

Successful business operations start with effective market research.

Market research is the process of collecting information about consumer behaviours, preferences, category trends and competitive intelligence.

Organisations typically conduct market research to inform product development and go-to-market strategy, ultimately driving business growth. Market research findings provide a clear pathway towards satisfying customer demands, enhancing profits and launching products.

Related: What is marketing research and how you can use it to win

It’s remiss to perceive market research as a monolith. In fact, market research is a broad term encompassing several types of research, so you can gain a multitude of data and supporting evidence to confidently make business decisions.

Understanding both types of market research, research methods and their respective use cases can help you create a market research design that effectively addresses your business question.

Primary research is useful when a business is unlikely to find public data about its research question. This is especially true when a business is evaluating its own products and services. 

The following are a few methods that market researchers employ:

Businesses find secondary market research useful when they aim to conduct high-level research on a topic that has already undergone investigation. Wider research questions typically already have published answers.

Secondary market research methods include the following:

Market research is a nuanced process that requires foresight and some advanced planning. Mapping the research will equip you to successfully launch an initiative, gather insights and convert data into actionable steps for enhancing your organisation.

Here are the steps that you should follow when conducting market research.

The research question and subsequent objective focus your research and define everything from data collection to the analysis method.

The business question is a concise summary of the problem that you’re solving and how it specifically relates to your business. It covers high-level goals or challenges that are linked directly to business objectives. For example, “Why are sales declining?”

The research goal outlines the specific facts or metrics that you hope to learn by conducting your research. For example, a research goal might be to measure brand awareness in order to understand its impact on sales.

Writing strong, relevant research goals is important because they will translate to specific survey questions later. Here are some hypothetical business questions and research goals.

Identifying your target audience before conducting market research ensures that you can gather relevant and accurate data, tailor your approach, optimise resources and develop effective strategies.

To achieve this, you need to understand your target audience, including their demographics, employment status, firmographics, shopping habits and behavioural attributes.

In addition to identifying your target audience, you may also want to identify the scope. Sometimes, you will want to target a broad audience in order to conduct exploratory research for potential markets. At other times, you may want to target a narrower group of people to understand their consumer preferences.

These goals will also affect how you reach your target audience. Two solid options include:

Choosing a suitable research method is crucial to designing and launching your market research effort. The type of research that you choose – qualitative, quantitative or a combination of both – directly influences the depth, reliability and applicability of your results, making this decision key to your project’s success.

The right method depends on your research objectives.

Although one or two primary methods will often best align with your goals, it’s important to remember that research isn’t always best suited to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Combining multiple methods, such as following up a survey with in-depth interviews, can provide a more nuanced and well-rounded view of your market. Each method offers distinct strengths, and using them together allows you to validate findings, uncover actionable insights and build a stronger, evidence-based strategy.

Market research does not stop at data collection. Data analysis involves systematically examining and interpreting data to uncover patterns, trends and insights that inform decision-making.

Before analysing the results, ensure that your dataset is clean; remove low-quality responses and wait for all responses to come in to avoid skewed results (e.g. due to time zone or demographic differences). Ensure that your sample accurately represents your target population. If it doesn’t, apply survey weights to your results to correct imbalances.

When comparing results across demographic groups or survey waves, you should ensure that differences are statistically significant before you draw any conclusions. 

Statistical significance indicates whether one group’s answers differ substantially from those of another group through statistical testing. When a difference between sample groups is statistically significant, you can be confident that your results represent a real population characteristic instead of random variation in your sample. 

A practical rule of thumb is to check whether the confidence intervals for two estimates overlap. If the confidence intervals do not overlap, it’s likely to be a statistically significant change. 

The confidence interval is calculated by adding and subtracting the margin of error from an estimate. You can check your margin of error using a margin of error calculator or use the table below as a guide. As a general rule, the margin of error gets smaller as the sample gets bigger.

For example, let’s suppose you survey 400 people and estimate that brand awareness among men is 45% and awareness among women is 60%. Given a margin of error of ±5 percentage points, the confidence interval for men is 40% to 50% and the confidence interval for women is 55% to 65%. Because those confidence intervals do not overlap, it’s likely that the difference is statistically significant. 

Running surveys over time – monthly, quarterly or on an ongoing basis – helps you to benchmark and monitor shifts in customer behaviour, brand perception and market dynamics. You just need to ensure that you keep your targeting criteria and methodology consistent across waves. Only the timing should change.

Analysing trends over time, combined with statistical rigour, will give you reliable insights that drive smarter, evidence-based decisions.

When you get your market research results, you’ll need to look at aggregated answers for the entire sample that you collected. Looking at how individual segments of your population respond to your market research is one way to uncover insights that could be critical to your analysis.

Here are a few market segments of your sample that you could look into: 

Furthermore, there are two key ways to segment your results for deeper insights:

For example, in a sparkling water brand awareness survey, women consistently showed higher brand awareness than men. This gender gap was especially pronounced for brands like Harrogate Spring and Buxton, whereas brands like Evian showed smaller differences.

When segmenting your data, always consider the resulting base sizes. For example, if your total sample is 300 respondents, breaking it down by English county may leave only a handful of responses per county, which is insufficient for drawing any meaningful or reliable conclusions.

Finding a clear, logical story within your data is the most effective way to make a lasting impression and capture the attention of your stakeholders.

You should set up the story to ensure that stakeholders understand the context before you present your findings and recommendations. Storytelling frameworks, such as SCQA, can help you to develop an outline for your presentation.

SCQA stands for situation, complication, question and answer:

In addition to the story, numerical data supports your business case, giving stakeholders tangible data to hold onto.

The powerful stats are the ones that support your claim with large numbers. This is because once you exceed the 50% mark, you’re talking about the majority. 

If the data that supports your story isn’t a captivating statistic, try reframing it. 

Instead of “10% of people in the UK would feel safe as a passenger in a self-driving car”, try “90% of people in the UK would not feel safe.” Note that in cases where you’re conducting a structured analysis (e.g. building a scorecard), reframing stats won’t work.

To further support claims, you may also visualise your data.

SurveyMonkey research suggests that 42% of people find data visualised with charts, graphs or infographics more enjoyable than data presented in a sentence or a table.

Here are the most common chart types and when to use them:

Once you’ve collected your data, crunched the numbers and drawn up an actionable plan, you’ll be ready to present your findings to stakeholders. Gaining buy-in for your recommendations and motivating others to take action can be a challenge. 

To win over your stakeholders, you must make your recommendations realistic and aligned with the overall business strategy. You may adapt your business recommendations to the SMART framework.

Across the board, market research can help your business to push towards a data-driven future. A great example of this in action is Sakura of America.

Sakura utilised SurveyMonkey market research solutions to conduct an investigation into how the North American market approaches product development and design. Based in Japan, the majority of Sakura’s original research focused on the Japanese market.

SurveyMonkey provided a detailed insight into the target market, revealing valuable information about market size, competitive landscape, product positioning and direct feedback from direct customers via SurveyMonkey.

Sakura identified new research and development initiatives with the potential to succeed in the North American market.

Market research eliminates the guesswork. Everyone, from customer experience executives to marketers, can use market research to make confident, data-backed decisions that get the business where it needs to be.

You don’t need to be a market researcher to use SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey offers extensive support and fully managed market research initiatives, including market research survey templates. Whether you’re sending out consumer behaviour surveys, testing a business naming convention or accessing SurveyMonkey Audience (our global survey panel), we have a solution for you.