Conducting Market Research

A guide to using market research to understand who your customers are and what they want.

If you don’t know your customer, then you don’t know your business. You won’t know how to respond if you see changes in your sales patterns. And because it’s so hard to hang on to customers you don’t know intimately, you will forever be chasing new ones. Unfortunately, though most business owners like to think they know their customers, many are really only guessing.

Professional market researchers generally divide their work into qualitative studies (interviews and focus groups, with free-flowing and open-ended discussions) and quantitative studies (usually surveys). In a perfect world, you would probably do both, using qualitative research to create a survey, the results of which might in turn be interpreted using another focus group. Given limited resources, though, it generally makes sense to go quantitative.