You are not your customer.

It can be hard to understand and hear, but once you become the business owner, or an employee of a company, you immediately stop being the target client.

If you think about it, you now have a conflict of interest. You are your business, you represent your business, you want to generate money for your business. All of which would naturally cloud your judgement as a potential purchaser or user of your service.

That’s not to say you can’t understand and get to know your customer base. But you are not one of them.  

A sales orientated approach is often a default position of many a business: Believing all customers are good for business; you don’t really need to understand them as long as you can sell to them.

An alternative market orientated approach however puts the focus on the consumer: What do they want and need, and how can you best serve them; looking at every aspect of the business from the customer’s perspective.  

Having a market orientated culture within the business naturally leads on to market research and being committed to understanding, monitoring and potentially forecasting your customer’s needs and wants.  So how do you do that?

What research methods are there?

• Qualitative

Qualitative research involves taking a sample of your target market and asking them questions to gain an understanding of their thoughts and feelings towards your product/service, their lifestyle and even the competition. A focus group is a prime example of this. By getting a small number of people in a room, with a moderator you can ask insightful questions, for which their answers can prove excellent for target profiling and positioning.

Qualitative research doesn’t have to be too time consuming and the results are great for initial learning. However, the sample is never going to be representative and poor questions and moderators can unfortunately lead to pretty useless research.  

• Ethnographic

Ethnographic research is a qualitative method that involves spending time where your product is purchased, consumed and discussed. By conducting in-situ interviews, listening, making notes, you avoid jumping to conclusions and really get under the skin of your client base. This method isn’t without its flaws. It is time consuming and does only involve a small sample, but it can offer invaluable insight into your market.

• Quantitative

Quantitative data on the other hand looks at facts and figures. Through surveys you can plot and assess the results of a representative sample of your market. By splitting your survey into three parts: Demographic data, Attitudes/thoughts marked on a 5 or 7-point Licket scale (Strongly Agree-Strongly Disagree), and behavioural data you can create segments, extrapolate surveys and proportions and magnitudes with a 95-98% confidence level.  

To find your representative sample of your market, you do a quick search on Google for a ‘sample size calculator’ to work out the figures. It will ask you the total of the market population you are interested in, what confidence level you are after (no less than 95%) and margin of error (usually about 10%).

A panel company can be employed to source the people for a cost, but it does mean you can avoid fakes and mis-representation.

Having a good survey, of no more than 30 questions and tracked over time will prove an incredibly useful tool, not least in later developing your marketing strategy and looking at the relevant tactics to employ.

• Secondary

Secondary research can also prove incredibly useful, especially when you are just starting out your marketing research journey. From what you can find on Google, social media or third party reports you can compile an initial overview and gain a good understanding of your market.

Secondary research is usually free, immediate and great for scoping, but it can be outdated, not specifically focused on your requirements, and the information can be unreliable and unrepresentative. In a world of digital dominance, it is worth remembering it has a greater strength when combined with other functions and assets, such as the other research methods discussed.  

Going Forward   

To have a strong understanding of your customer base, ideally involves a mix of the research tools and methods mentioned. Starting with some qualitative research to understand your market and then moving to quantitative to give you a measure of the market. This would be repeated annually at the very least to continually monitor customer needs, perceptions, competition and become a relevant benchmark for your business.

Before you undertake any research project however, be clear on what you want to find out, what you want to gain from the research and importantly, what will you do with the findings as a market orientated business.

Market research is often thought of as something only large organisations can afford or resource. But this isn’t the case. If you can involve a market research partner, great. Make sure you do involve one that does fit with your business and can positively demonstrate their effectiveness and techniques. But if you can’t employ a third party, there are various tools and ways of finding out and learning from your target market from online surveys, 1-2-1 conversations with both loyalists and critics and social media. They don’t have to cost the earth and even a bit of research, is better than no research.

Building your business based on just assumptions and what you think the customer wants is going to cost you more in the long run and from then on, can be very difficult to become a market orientated business and more successful business at that.

As marketing guru, John Narver said: “Research has shown what intuition suggests – that those businesses that are the most market orientated enjoy higher profitability as well as superior sales growth, customer retention and new product success.”

You’ll never regret being market orientated or undertaking some market research, but you may regret not.

Further reading on why ignoring strategy over tactics can be found in our blog here.

Research, research, research