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At its simplest good market research will allow you to make more-informed business decisions.

Rather than relying on gut instinct you can be assured of what your customers think about your product or service, your brand and your company before sinking precious financial resources into that next ‘sure fire’ marketing campaign or product launch. Research will allow you to be more confident in how your customers behave, what motivates them to buy, what they really like about your product and perhaps what limitations they see which could be improved.

Simple market research can add significantly to your revenue while simultaneously allowing you to cut back on unnecessary expenditure. However despite such benefits research can also be significantly misleading when carried out incorrectly. Therefore it is essential to grasp some of the more simple techniques and terminology surrounding the process to assist you in undertaking research or prepare you to understand and work more closely with your market research consultant.

While the subject is wide and varied with significant academic literature around questionnaire design and statistical techniques for analysis, this article aims to inform you of the 5 basic steps in the market research process. Please note that variations in the process do exist and I encourage you to read further into the literature and related articles to gain a more robust understanding of the subject.

1) Decide what problem you wish to solve

You need to be able to articulate what it is you are trying to solve and why you are conducting research. In addition it should be noted what actions will be taken with the results of the research.

Example: I am making sales, the products are relatively popular but what do people think about my brand? What aspects of my advertising are ‘cutting through’? Many research projects will suffer simply because this step is not carried out correctly.

2) Research design

Develop a broad budget in line with how valuable you believe the results from this research may be. This is of course subjective but the research may aid you in increasing your sales significantly or streamlining your marketing potentially saving thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

Decide whether you will use secondary data (that which already exists, through Statistics New Zealand for example) or primary data (data collected for the specific purpose of your project).

Decide whether the research will be quantitative (more statistically driven and used to prove a hypothesis) or qualitative (more focussed on extracting new insightful opinions and theories).

In terms of method, decide whether the research will be suited to a questionnaire, focus group, in-depth interviews or simply observing people using your product. You can then develop a set of questions which all help to solve your research problem. This will form the basis of the questionnaire or interview.

Once you have determined these steps you will be able to determine a sample of people who you will conduct your research with. The sample needs to be of a certain size and makeup to be representative of your customers (the population).

Example: I don’t know what aspects of my advertising are being received by current customers so I am carrying out a primary research project which will involve qualitative interviews with 20 existing clients. The project will have a budget of $600.