If you’re entering a new business area or territory, launching a new product or service, refreshing your brand portfolio, or exploring a new target audience, you’ll need to gain a deeper understanding of audience needs, behaviours and attitudes.
The approaches we use most often with clients to understand category trends and behaviours are:
Drawing on customer and business performance data, competitor analysis and category reports to provide broader context and in-depth understanding of category behaviours and trends. This may give the answers you need or identify gaps or areas of interest to focus on in further research.
Often conducted online, these quantitative surveys give robust data on who is buying your product / competitor products, how often, and why, as well as how consumers feel about your brand and the category. This can be used to provide deep understanding of category behaviours, measure the size of the market, or identity the key motivations and barriers to purchase.
This ethnographic technique involves asking pre-recruited consumers to visit a store and browse the aisle in the way they normally would. A trained researcher observes their behaviour in detail, keeping interaction to a minimum to ensure behaviour is as natural as possible. This is followed by a post-shop interview to provide further detail on reasons for behaviours. This technique provides deep, in-the-moment insights into how consumers navigate the category and make purchase decisions.
We recently used a combination of these techniques to support a manufacturer of gardening products in refreshing its brand portfolio. Our holistic approach included a review of existing category insight and sales data; an online survey to understand attitudes and purchase behaviours; and in-store accompanied shops to view behaviours in-the-moment. This combination provided deep insight upon which to make decisions about which brands to prioritise to meet the future needs of gardeners.
We took this insight into a strategic workshop with the client team, where we identified which brands to prioritise going forward. We supported the client in producing updated pack designs for a rebranded product range, which were tested in further research prior to launch.
This insight-led approach to brand rationalisation gave the client the confidence in making portfolio decisions and having discussions with retail partners.
Having a clear and up-to-date understanding of how your brand is perceived, what consumers need and expect, and how they feel about your competitors, will enable you to make informed decisions about how to prioritise investment.
There are several common approaches to brand and customer research:
Conducting regular quantitative surveys among a representative sample of your target audience provides an ongoing view of the health of your brand. Using a set of repeatable questions to measure brand awareness, consideration and attitudes, this approach provides robust data on the impact of any changes (e.g. new product or campaign launches, or negative news stories). Your brand is benchmarked against key competitors to identify key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Using a similar approach to the above, but focusing on your current customers, can provide clear insight on how they are experiencing your brand, whether you’re delivering on expectations, and what steps you should take to increase loyalty and purchase frequency. Surveys should be repeated regularly to monitor the ongoing impact of any changes you make.
Segmentation involves dividing your target audience or customer base into distinctive groups, based on differing behaviours, needs and experiences. Segments can be developed using existing information from your customer database, or quantitative research – ideally combining the two to gain in-depth data on attitudes as well as purchase behaviours. This insight can be used to deliver more relevant products, services and marketing campaigns, increasing ROI.
As the long-term brand partner to a regional building society, we draw on a range of techniques to ensure that consumer needs and expectations are central to their business decisions.
Using a combination of existing customer data and ad hoc quantitative research, we developed segments to enable the client to understand and meet the differing needs of their customers. This enables them to target products and campaign messaging more effectively.
We also conduct regular pulse surveys to measure brand awareness and associations among the target audience. This provides an ongoing view of the impact of marketing activity, identifying any changes required.
Putting consumers at the heart of the creative development process ensures that campaigns are relevant, salient and engaging for the intended audience, and deliver the intended messages and actions.
Further research following a campaign launch will establish whether the campaign worked as expected and provide learnings for future campaigns.
Insight-led campaign development and evaluation can increase ROI and effectiveness.
The main research techniques to support creative development and evaluation are:
Using qualitative techniques and conducted by an experienced moderator, small groups of consumers are involved in the creative process. This can include generating insights on which to base the campaign (for example, identifying key purchase barriers and addressing them in the campaign messaging), or directly involving consumers in developing and responding to early creative ideas and stimuli.
This can be useful at two stages: testing of early-stage ideas, messages and visuals prior to further development, to guide decisions around which routes to take forward; or testing of near final campaign stimulus prior to launch, to check it’s working as intended and identify any final areas of optimisation. Creative testing can be done either qualitatively (e.g. through a consumer workshop) or quantitatively (e.g. through an online survey), depending on the specific questions to answer.
We have worked directly with the LGBTIQ+ community on several healthcare campaigns, knowing that the community has previously rejected mainstream healthcare campaigns as not reflecting their lived experience. Using qualitative co-creation sessions, we brought the voice of the community directly into the creative process. Their views and experiences were used to develop the messages, images and creative style of the campaigns, culminating in members of the community featuring in the final creative.
This collaborative approach ensured that we delivered a campaign which was engaging and relevant to the target audience. A recent campaign using paid and organic channels resulted in strong engagement levels, in spite of a modest budget.
Here are some tips for how to get started with your research:
Provide a clear brief: this does not have to be prescriptive (e.g. a particular sample size or methodology), but should clearly set out your priorities for the research. What are the key business questions you wish to answer? Which audiences do you wish to involve? How will the findings of the research be used? It’s also useful to give an idea of budget and timescale available for the research since this may impact the recommended approach.
Choose a research partner with relevant expertise and a strong track record: it’s important to ensure that you work with a partner who has experience in your particular audience, sector or research methodology, and works to a high-quality standard. They should also have knowledge of relevant legislation and best practice around data protection. Mobas has experience across a wide range of sectors, regularly conducting research with consumers and business leaders. Mobas is a Market Research Society Company Partner. This means that we’ve been through a robust accreditation process, and that all our team members follow a Code of Conduct when conducting research. This means our clients can rest assured that our research is conducted to the highest-quality standards.
Have an informal chat: as well as credentials, it’s important to ensure that you have good ‘chemistry’ with your insight partner, and that they fully understand your business and what matters most to you. The Mobas team would be delighted to chat with you about how we can work together.
We hope this guide has been informative and inspired you to start your insight journey. We would love to offer you a complimentary session with one of our insight experts. This is an opportunity to ask us for advice on how to use insight to answer any specific business questions that you may have.
If you’d like to book a free, no obligation session, please fill in the form below and a member of our team will get back to you.