Article source: 空手 (ID: firesteal13)
When it comes to market research, many people cite Steve Jobs' famous assertion to deny its value. Jobs said he never did market research. If Henry Ford had done market research before inventing the car, the answer he would have gotten is that consumers wanted a faster horse. This implies that consumers don't know what they want; companies must rely on their intuition to create great products and lead consumer demand.
But hidden in this famous quote are two big pitfalls waiting for you.
The first pitfall is that the consumer's real need is actually "faster," not "horse"; the "horse" is just one solution to the need for speed. You can provide better solutions—whether it's cars, trains, subways, airplanes, or maglev and new energy—solutions can evolve, but consumers' basic needs for faster, more convenient, more comfortable, and safer travel remain unchanged. If you treat "a faster horse" as the consumer need and only improve and optimize the horse, you'll be eliminated by the times, and you can only blame yourself.
The second pitfall is that whether it's the Ford Model T mentioned by Jobs, or the Apple II personal computer, Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone that Jobs himself launched, these are all revolutionary, groundbreaking products. There were no similar competing products on the market at the time, and consumers had never used similar products before, so ready-made market research wasn't possible. Moreover, using focus groups to test innovative products would only yield negative feedback and do nothing to encourage innovation.
But do the products you operate also have no similar or substitute products on the market, and possess disruptive technology that leads the era?
So for many companies, understanding consumer thoughts and market competition through research is still very important. (However, due to rigid research methods, in most cases, the main value of research is to prove that your initial subjective judgment about the market was correct; the conclusions you draw are common sense you already knew.)
Philip Kotler condensed marketing into 10 Ps: Probing, Partitioning, Prioritizing, Positioning, Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Public Relations, and Political Power.
Research is ranked first; without research, you have no right to speak. If you don't understand what consumers need and are unclear about market conditions, what business or marketing can you do?
So this article is about how to do research well. This topic is also one that many friends often ask me about on WeChat and in WeChat groups.
My usual answer to how to do good research is to ask in return—How much budget do you have for research? How many people do you have? How much time do you have?
Because research is truly a systematic project that is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive. That kind of research where one person designs a small questionnaire using online documents and survey tools, sends it out in various WeChat groups, and offers a 2-yuan red packet to ask people to fill it out—forget it.
Not to mention whether the sample size is sufficient, it has other fatal flaws.
First, the WeChat groups you forward the questionnaire to are generally your friend groups, colleague groups, or peer exchange groups. Your friends and colleagues are basically the same type of people as you; your education level, income level, city tier, even family structure, lifestyle, and occupation attributes are the same, meaning you are in the same social class. So your research results will be one-sided because you only survey the thoughts of one type of consumer.
You overlook that the credibility of market research is built on sample size and the participation of various types of consumers.
So no matter what questionnaire design, the first part is used to screen consumers—whether the person filling it out is the target group you want to survey. On this basis, ensure sample size and user diversity.
For example, many user surveys I participated in in the past were street intercepts or random telephone interviews. After identity screening to filter out unsuitable people, we formally entered the research phase. After such user research, you will clearly know who your target group is and how they can be divided into different types of consumer groups.
(Here's a little secret: when I receive interview calls and don't want to answer, I directly tell them I'm from an advertising agency and responsible for market research. Because the standard practice for user research is to avoid industry insiders and advertising/marketing professionals, as their thoughts differ from ordinary consumers, and surveying them would interfere with the results. When professional researchers hear you say you're in advertising, they will politely hang up and stop the survey. If the interviewer ignores your identity and continues to ask, then that interviewer is unprofessional.)
The second fatal flaw is that online questionnaires are hard to go deep into because if you ask too many questions and take up too much of their time, many people won't fill it out; most consumers lack patience online. Thus, you can't design too many open-ended questions; you can only use multiple-choice questions. So it's hard to deeply understand consumer thoughts.
Of course, most consumers won't tell you their true inner thoughts during a survey. This isn't intentional concealment; subconsciously, people involuntarily hide their true intentions. For example, if you directly ask a consumer why they don't buy a certain brand, the real reason might be poverty, but the reason they tell you might be that the aesthetic style doesn't match or they support domestic products.
This is also an inherent flaw of questionnaire surveys. So besides online questionnaires and telephone interviews, we also need face-to-face communication with consumers, such as home visits, street intercepts, street fixed-point interviews, and focus group discussions.
For focus groups, you find a meeting room, set up a large round table, invite 8-12 consumers in advance, and the moderator conducts interviews based on a pre-designed questionnaire, with both individual questioning and free discussion among participants. In this relaxed chat atmosphere, consumers will reveal some true purchasing thoughts.
During the interview, the company's marketing staff and the agency's strategy and research personnel sit in the next meeting room, separated by one-way glass. If you think there's a question you want to explore further, you write a note and send it to the moderator to ask.
So this kind of consumer research involves designing a questionnaire dozens of pages long with nearly a hundred questions, then conducting user interviews with hundreds of samples for quantitative research. It also involves conducting multiple consumer discussion groups city by city for qualitative research. This is truly a massive project.
So to produce accurate and credible consumer research reports, companies should hire professional research firms. Research is truly a professional task that requires professional questionnaire and process design, sufficient sample size and execution staff, one to two months of time, and a considerable budget. Hundreds of thousands is not much; one or two million is not too much.
However, consumer research is not the entirety of market research. A complete market research generally includes these major parts—
Consumer Research
This is the most core and basic market research, aimed at studying consumer needs, the decision-making process and information touchpoints when purchasing products, and views and evaluations of different brands and products in the industry.
Dealer Interviews
Mainly to understand the company's business model and market promotion, and dealers' views on the company's products, pricing, channels, etc.
Internal Company Interviews
Includes interviews with different subjects: first, interviews with the company's boss and senior management, mainly to understand corporate strategy and development direction, corporate culture such as mission, vision, values, and management's views and trend judgments on their industry.
Second, interviews with product R&D and technical departments, mainly to study product strength, functional selling points, and technology; and interviews with marketing, sales, and frontline sales staff, mainly to understand market conditions and sales situations.
Market Visits
Going to the terminal sales market in person to see for yourself gives you an intuitive understanding of the actual market conditions. The purpose is to understand the distribution of different brands, terminal displays, shelf placement, and main promoted products, and to observe consumers' purchasing methods and consumption habits.
Next, I will discuss these different market research methods one by one.
Consumer Research
In the past, before every big project, I would spend two to three months or half a year doing three reports: product strength report, consumer report, and competition report. With these three reports, you can find key insights and core strategies for your plan.
Without this basic research, making a plan is really just guessing at strategy, then patting your chest to guarantee to the client, and finally, when nothing works out, you have to pat your butt and leave.
So consumer research is very necessary. If a company thinks spending money on research isn't worth it, think about this: you invest millions in product development and tens of millions in media placement without knowing anything about the market and consumers—aren't you afraid of wasting money? As mentioned earlier, research methods include online questionnaires, telephone interviews, street intercepts, street fixed-point interviews, home interviews, focus group discussions, etc. Here, I'll talk about questionnaire design, which many people care about.
Simply put, how to design a questionnaire depends on what questions you want to understand. There are four main directions: understanding consumer needs, studying purchase decisions, evaluating brand equity, and analyzing competition and product strength.
1. Understanding Consumer Needs
Your question design should focus on understanding consumer pain points, product usage experience, usage scenarios (time, place, etc.), usage methods (frequency, actions, etc.), and usage purposes (self-use, gifts, or for family).
2. Studying Purchase Decisions
You need to clearly know the entire process of how they buy a product. Question design mainly targets three parts:
First, decision factors: what value elements consumers mainly value when buying a product; in the questionnaire, you can have consumers rank a series of value elements in priority order. Second, information touchpoints: what media consumers see daily, through what channels they learn about brands and products, etc. Third, purchase behavior trajectory: where consumers buy, when they buy, and purchase frequency.
3. Evaluating Brand Equity
First, evaluate brand awareness and influence in the industry, especially unaided first mention rate and aided first mention rate.
Second, evaluate brand cognition, such as performance on dimensions like quality, popularity, fashion, and technology. Third, evaluate brand associations: what image consumers think you have, what words they use to describe you. Finally, evaluate brand loyalty: their purchase frequency, intention to recommend to friends and family, and degree of brand attachment.
4. Analyzing Competition and Product Strength
Ask consumers which brands they consider and compare when making purchase decisions, and what the advantages and disadvantages of your product are compared to competitors. Ask consumers who bought your product about the winning factors (why they bought yours over competitors), and ask consumers who bought competitors' products about the losing factors (why they bought competitors' over yours), and their brand impressions and product evaluations of competitors.
That's about all for consumer research. Besides questionnaire surveys, there are some useful methods: first, look at consumer reviews, especially buyer comments on major e-commerce platforms, and consumer experiences and evaluations of products/brands on Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Zhihu. Second, go undercover in consumer groups to observe their words and actions, or deliberately ask questions in the group to guide understanding, or even privately chat with specific consumers.
The famous advertising agency BBDO received a brief from the UK National Health Service to launch a large-scale anti-smoking campaign targeting young people, especially teenage girls.
After getting the brief, BBDO's advertisers found a café in the city center, sat in the middle seat every day, eavesdropped on the conversations of young women at surrounding tables, and recorded them one by one. During listening, they found that the topics girls talked about most were about buying clothes, doing hair, makeup, weight loss, plastic surgery, lipstick, foundation, eyeliner, face cream, eye cream, nail polish... These advertisers suddenly realized that for these young girls, nothing was more important than their appearance—how they look.
So BBDO launched a campaign—smoking damages your appearance. Smoking makes your skin dull, teeth yellow, eyes wrinkled, breath smelly... This series of ads achieved remarkable results. This entire communication plan and its user insight came from very direct consumer research.
Dealer Interviews
Actually, I really don't like doing dealer interviews. No matter the industry, when you interview dealers, they only tell you one thing—that they think the company's market investment is too little. The marketing expenses and support from the company are insufficient, and the company's advertising is too little, making their business difficult and sales hard. They hope you'll pass this information to the manufacturer.
Many people are like this. When I encounter such people, I usually close my notebook, patiently wait for them to finish, casually respond, and then continue with my questions. And if you meet a frank dealer willing to share some real business information, cherish them.
Dealers are willing to act as agents for a company's products because they believe the product can help them make money. So dealer interviews should focus on understanding their views on the product and company from the perspective of interests and business. Interview questions mainly revolve around the classic 4Ps:
1. Product
Dealers think about whether the product sells well, what advantages and disadvantages it has in product development, what value points consumers care about, and how it compares to competitors.
2. Price
You need to understand the prices at various stages from factory to consumer purchase, such as ex-factory price, wholesale price, second-tier wholesale price, as well as supermarket supply price, group purchase price, retail price, etc. In addition, when doing market research, you should have a basic understanding of retail market concepts like entry fees, display fees, and promotion fees. These different prices determine the profit margins at different stages and whether dealers and sales terminals have the motivation to promote your product.
3. Place
Understand the different sales channels for the product, such as supermarkets and convenience stores. For different industries and categories, there are also special channels, like liquor stores and restaurants for the baijiu industry, and 4S stores for the automotive industry. Understanding channels should be combined with actual market visits for a more intuitive understanding.
4. Promotion
Mainly to understand the promotion methods and costs of different competitors at the terminal, their main promoted products, product line combinations, and pricing, so you can make more targeted and actionable market plans.
Internal Company Interviews
Internal company interviews depend on the different subjects.
Interviews with the company boss and senior management are mainly for strategy research. First, views and plans on corporate development strategy and brand management; second, judgments on industry development trends and competitive landscape.
This kind of dialogue and exchange is also what I think is truly valuable and charming about the advertising industry. Because you can listen to these corporate bigwigs and industry experts share their insights and judgments on the entire industry and even social development, their wisdom in business battles and strategic vision. Doing more high-level exchanges is very helpful for personal thinking improvement and broadening horizons.
When interviewing employees, you often encounter two types: one is the praise faction, who no matter what you ask, tell you the company's decisions are right, management is good, products are top-notch, and it's unreasonable for consumers not to buy. The other is the complaint faction, who say everything is wrong. Actually, these don't matter; the key is not to be disturbed by these external emotions but to focus on your questions and what you want to learn from the interview.
For example, when interviewing technical personnel and engineers, they will definitely use a lot of technical concepts and jargon when talking about products. But your purpose is not to understand these technical principles, but to extract product selling points and brand stories, and to judge industry technology trends and product R&D directions. So you need to keep asking your questions.
Interviews with marketing personnel are to understand the company's market sales situation. Besides asking about the main characteristics of consumer groups, which competitors they compare, and what product elements they focus on, it's more important to understand the distribution of key sales markets and channels, why sales are good in some cities and bad in others, and the execution ability of marketing personnel and sales regions—what promotions they can do and what they can't. Interviews combined with market visits are more effective.
Market Visits
Market visits are a very intuitive way to understand the industry, competition, and consumers. Just staying in the office looking at industry data and reports, in most cases, you won't have a deep or intuitive understanding of an industry, or even have a concept of it. Your judgments and views on the market can't be verified. So you must go to the actual sales venues to see for yourself and get first-hand information.
The core of looking at the market is to see what products are actually on sale, what each brand is mainly promoting, how competitors do terminal displays, what promotional activities they run, what terminal communication they use, and what salespeople's scripts say.
After a round of such visits, you'll have a basic understanding of the entire market.
A few years ago, I served a cold drink company, and every summer I accompanied clients on market visits. We walked into small shops, convenience stores, community supermarkets, and large shopping malls along the street, looking at their freezer displays.
In the freezers, which ice cream brands were there? What products was each store mainly promoting? Were they bagged, cone, cup, or boxed? Were they popsicles, red bean, fruit ice, cream ice cream, yogurt ice cream, sundaes, chocolate-coated, or something else? Whose display area was the largest, with the most product variety, and had promotional materials like posters and display racks in the store?
If a brand launched a new product, we'd buy it and taste it. After half a day, we'd have a big plastic bag with a dozen or twenty ice creams. Then we'd find a place to sit, open the bag, and taste them one by one.
At first, I followed the spirit of thrift and finished each ice cream, but after two, I was numb (mainly my tongue). For the rest, I only took one bite, tasted it, looked at the ingredient list, and threw it away.
After such a round of market visits, not only did I gain a full understanding of the cold drink market, but I also had a rough judgment on the industry's product R&D direction and consumption trends. Even the actual scenes of store sales could inspire creative ideas on the spot, making it clear how to make creative posters, materials, and terminal activities practical and effective.
So in my view, a good advertiser must understand the market and look at data. If you only lock yourself in a CBD office to think of ideas, the ideas you come up with are likely to be unrealistic and unexecutable "airplane drafts" that don't meet the company's actual needs. When the client rejects them, you blame the client for being stupid. I think we should have fewer such advertisers.
The second major part of market visits is understanding consumer purchasing habits. Books like "The Original Mind" (or similar consumer research books) record various methods of observing consumer behavior in supermarkets, such as notes or video analysis.
Observing consumers helps you understand their purchasing habits and decisions. For example, does a consumer wander around the supermarket, picking up interesting items and throwing them into the cart, or do they head straight to the target shelf? When buying, do they grab without looking, or do they compare similar products on the shelf, study ingredient lists, and then choose one? These observations can help you discover the truth of purchasing.
Of course, when observing consumers, be careful not to be mistaken for a stalker. I remember years ago, my roommate and college classmate, who was serving a sanitary napkin brand at an ad agency, asked me to accompany him to the supermarket to look at the shelves. So we stood in front of the sanitary napkin shelf, examining the packaging designs and selling copy, holding products and discussing. I noticed a girl came to the shelf to buy sanitary napkins, saw two big men standing there doing research, and was scared away...
Even now, I find it a bit funny, and I wonder what that girl thought of us. There's also a classic story in advertising history of a male advertiser serving a sanitary napkin brand: he used the product for a week and then wrote vivid copy. So even if you can't go as far as trying the product, I think it's very necessary to study the shelves in the supermarket.
These are my views on market research. There are many types and methods of research, so research is not something a small online questionnaire can cover, nor can one person handle it.
So this article may disappoint some friends who asked me how to do research. Because I not only didn't solve the problem of how one person can do good research, but I raised a bigger issue.
So quickly forward this article to your boss to make him understand that research isn't that simple. If the research conclusions are wrong, the money spent on product development and brand communication may all be wasted.
Are you "watching" me?