Using Market Research To Nail Product & Business Positioning — Laura Troyani // PlanBeyond

Quotes

• “Doing market research for the sake of doing it is just a waste of time. So I say, if you are doing some market research, you have to know the goal, a tangible one that you want to run to.” -Laura “I like how you are positioning market research as an investment that saves you capital over the long run.” -Ben “Once you know the objective that you are looking to solve for, you can say there are lots of different ways to get there, let’s talk about the methodologies. Without that crystal clear path of what you are looking to answer, there is not going to be a clear way of doing it and a disappointment of what you got.” -Laura“A lot of it comes back to the nature of the research itself. If you are an existing company with an existing customer base and you really want to know what they look like, awesome. You have a fantastic source of people that you can reach out to, to populate your survey.” Laura“Conversely, if you are perhaps entering a new category or you don’t have a distinct customer base for whatever reason, there are a variety of third-party groups where you can find people that meetthe profile you want.” -Laura “If the question is about wondering what people think about a category, about a packaging or something like that. That is a deeper conversation and inherent to that is a more qualitative interview-based approach to have you run that research.” -Laura “When you really are, in the very early, nascent stages of product development, qualitative can be a much richer approach to get to an end result.” -Laura“One of my favorite approaches is doing customer segmentation. It is the practice of dividing a larger customer group into smaller, distinct groups usually based on how they vary across demographic and other components.” -Laura “We have some very clear, distilled groups that we could potentially go after within an existing market. Where that becomesreally valuable is we can understand market share scopes, things like their individual wants, needs, and pain points which become really valuable, that when we are thinking about a new product or service, we can say when it is really going after group A, B or C.” -Laura“Where I have seen gut or intuition work best is when the founders of that company come from that industry specifically and they’ve been there for years. This is a fair and reasonable place to use intuition. Where that begins to fail iswhen you create a distance between who you are as a business and a product and who your customer is.” -Laura “At the end of the day, you need to figure out both. Is there a market and does the product you have solves the problem for your market.” -Ben