Market Research: Advanced Techniques

Sep 10, 2023

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1. What is Market Research?

Market research is collecting and synthesizing information about a market and competitive landscape, including:

Its goal is to help you make better decisions about how the company should invest its time and resources, such as:

Market research techniques come in different shapes and forms:

Traditionally, market research techniques are divided into two main categories:

Primary market research techniques - data you collect yourself. It can be considered Your Own Data (YODA), as proposed by Alberto Savoia.
Secondary market research techniques - based on data collected by others. It can be considered Others People Data (ODP), as proposed by Alberto Savoia.

On top of that, you can split each of those categories into:

💖 Qualitative techniques - This research focuses on non-numerical data (symbol, word, behavior) that need to be observed and interpreted by the researcher. It’s more difficult to aggregate but better explains people’s motivations (“Why”) and specific actions (“What”). For example, an interview or user session recording.
📈 Quantitative techniques - This research focuses on numbers that can be easily aggregated and analyzed. It answers “How many” and “How much” but doesn’t explain people’s behavior. For example, a multiple-choice survey.

We are always interested more in what people do (behavioral) than what they say (attitudinal).

Analyze how this is emphasized in 3.1.1 Customer interviews below to shift the research from attitudinal to behavioral.

Finally, we can split market research techniques based on their goal:

Exploring problems - techniques to collect and aggregate information about the industry, competitors, and customers.
Validating ideas - techniques to validate your ideas related to value proposition, positioning, pricing, or value and usability of product features (aka experiments).

The only thing two sets of techniques have in common is that they can be performed by the same people.

On top of that, when validating your ideas:

You must use primary market research - Your Own Data (YODA).
You need a hypothesis expressed with numbers and a specific metric to measure. Therefore, you need quantitative data.
Attitudinal data is not enough. You need behavioral data.

For those reasons, in this issue, I’ll skip methods related to validating ideas. We have covered them previously in:

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