Getting Started with DIY Market Research

No matter the size or stage of your organization, brand awareness is essential. 

Whether you're a retail behemoth or a smaller brand making its first foray into the retail landscape, understanding your target market is crucial for success. 

What influences customers to buy your products? How can you drive higher rates of customer loyalty? And what will attract new customers? 

Generative AI is experiencing a boom. 

Picture this: shoppers readily reaching into their wallets to pay premium prices for beef and dairy products that fight climate change.

If we've learned anything in the last decade, it's that the market is unpredictable and always subject to change. 

Have you ever wondered how companies determine the price of their products or services? 

Pricing is a crucial factor that often determines the success (or failure) of an offering. But without solid data on what consumers are willing to pay, businesses are left with best guesses and gut feelings. 

Agile market research is synonymous with flexibility, collaboration, and iterative learning. 

Building and maintaining a healthy brand is easier said than done. 

In its traditional form, market research takes time. It takes time to build studies. It takes time to collect responses. And it takes time to thoroughly analyze the results. 

If you want the best data from your surveys, you have to know how to write effective questions. 

It can be tempting to try and give your customers every single product, feature, or service they ask for. But no matter how ambitious your brand is, the fact remains; you can’t do it all. 

From differences across platforms, formats, and audiences- creating ads that deliver ROI is no easy feat. 

If you want your business to thrive, you've got to understand the competitive landscape. But if you're on the outside looking in, it might be difficult to tell what's working for your competitors and where they fall short. 

We live in a noisy world, constantly bombarded by advertising and branded content. This makes finding a way to cut through the noise and effectively communicate with your target market harder than ever before. 

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Concept testing is one of the most versatile tools in your insights toolbox.

2022 dealt some turbulent economic circumstances for US consumers. 

Branding is more than just color schemes and logos. 

As any branding expert knows- your logo says a lot about you.

Brand Twitter. Also known as the wild west of social media. A place where brands are known to get a little (or very) rowdy, firing off Tweets that would make any legal department blush.

If you work in the market research and insights space, you've likely come across the terms "significantly different", "confidence level", or "margin of error"  used to describe and compare data sets. 

Coming up with a new business idea is often the start of a great adventure. But much like any significant journey, a little prep work goes a long way.

As both research departments and budgets shrink, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the same level of insights with far fewer resources. 

Customer experience (CX) is everything. 

Inflation has hit U.S. consumers hard, forcing many to change their spending habits drastically. This has caused major turbulence for brands in nearly every industry.

Long days, warm nights, and making plans to use up all that PTO you’ve stored. It can only mean one thing; summer is here!

If you've worked in the insights space for long, you’re likely familiar with both conjoint and maxdiff analysis. They are widely used across market research, most often for product and message testing. 

Conjoint analysis is a well-known technique in market research used to better understand how people make decisions. 

Advertising can be a costly-if not risky- business. While great ads can skyrocket a brand to success, bad advertisements can similarly define a company-just, not in the ways they’d like. 

Like so many generations before them, Gen Z is having a moment in the spotlight. And as they share their voice and preferences with the market, brands across nearly every industry are paying top-dollar just for a chance to win their business.

If you want the highest quality data from your research, you'll need to give respondents a clear path through your survey.

For over a decade, the Net Promoter Score has been one of the most widely used metrics in market research. And for good reason, as it allows companies to more tangibly measure their customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Content marketing is nothing new, but as many marketers already know- the rules just keep on changing. 

While it’s no secret that entertainment has been trending towards streaming for the last decade, the recent COVID-19 pandemic seems to have solidified these changes. 

Avoiding transgressors is hardwired into the human brain. Since early groups of people began to form communities, turning away from those who caused harm has been used as an effective form of societal punishment. 

Have you considered that your customers are more diverse than your messaging, branding, or outreach strategies? 

After a long wait, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have (finally) arrived! 

As we round the corner on the pandemic and take tangible steps towards normalcy, only one thing is certain: empathy will be key.

Diving into the world of consumer and market research can be a challenge. To help, we’ve put together a glossary of some of the most common terms you will come across. 

Finding the perfect pricing for your product is no easy feat. 

A cookie-less future is coming. And before you panic, no- not that kind of cookie. 

DIY market research isn’t what it used to be. 

Anytime you feel physically or mentally unwell you seek out the expertise of a trusted practitioner. But what happens when your brand's vitals start to flatline? 

Do our self-identified labels polarize us more than our actual policy opinions? 

It’s a well-known fact that around 95% of all new ideas fail.

Today our lives are more complex than ever before—but our physical lives are being crammed into a digital life oversimplified by algorithms.

We’ve said it before- and we'll most likely say it again: consumers are changing.

We’ve all heard of emotional buying. Most of the time, the phrase refers to consumers who purchase something without rational decision making- instead basing their decision on some affection towards a product. 

"If any of us believes we are not addicted to our devices and digital media experiences, we are kidding ourselves" - Edwin Wong, Vox Media’s SVP of Insights & Innovation.

If you work in or around market research, you have most likely used or (at the very least) heard of conjoint techniques.  

We will be the first to admit that literature on the topic is often intensive and can feel overwhelming for those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of conjoint analysis.

But, this doesn’t have to be the case.

While the SightX platform can automate your curiosity and research projects, it's still crucial to understand the methodologies you use. 

To save you from sinking into a technical white paper, we’ve compiled some of the most common questions we get about conjoint analysis.

Consumer experience and green consumption are not topics typically discussed together. In fact, most research you can find on green consumption has mainly focused on the intention-behavior gap ( the failure to translate intentions into actions). 

United Talent Agency (UTA), one of Hollywood's top major talent agencies conducted a consumer study on "Media and Entertainment in the Time of Coronavirus" that found, among other things...

And Their Implications for Consumer Insights Leaders

Four weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic and much has already been said about consumer behavior. However, not much has been reported about the psychology of people- their fears, hopes, stress management skills, and maybe, most importantly, the way they view the road ahead.

Key Highlights as of March 20th

• Overwhelming majority of respondents, 76%, think the U.S. is headed towards a recession
• Those who “trust that the government will take care of” them are up to 38% more likely to increase spending across all consumer categories
• 34% (+6%) of consumers expect business conditions to improve in 6 months, but 42% (+10%) expect employment conditions to worsen in 6 months with fewer jobs

SightX, the leader in the future of automated market research, has announced the release of significant additional automated capabilities.

The future of our industry is agile research technology that provides automated insights.

For many years, quantitative research technology solutions have focused on automating the data collection and reporting process. But what about the analytics process, which is often tedious and time consuming?

Less than a week out from the Corporate Researchers Conference (CRC) in Orlando and our team is still processing all we learned and all we were inspired by.

“Curiosity is the most superficial of all of the affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety”

Nike, Hasbro, Unilever, and Patagonia are all very different types of companies with varying missions and products. However, one thing they have in common as of late, is their recognized need for a more sustainable way of doing business. 

Have you ever wanted to know which attributes of your product, service, or brand your customers prefer?

Out of the Weeds, Part III

In this series of articles, our goal has been to demystify some of the common buzzwords being used in our industry and show how they are relevant and practical to consumer insights.

New brand reflects the Company’s mission to enable agile data driven decision making, by creating an end to end platform that is intelligent, elegant, and easy to use

Maloney McCall’s prior start-up success provides perfect template for SightX expansion

Out of the Weeds, Part I

“Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”

It’s always good to get a pulse of the market, the trends, the expectations, both the good and the bad. 

Have you ever considered that your customers may be more diverse than your marketing?

One big lesson and what it means for our future. 

Every other week I come across yet another article purporting new ways to garner “insights” about consumers, markets, employees, or any other segment companies care about.

“Is customer loyalty dead?”- we get this question a lot. And due to changing dynamics in the retail industry, it’s being asked more frequently than ever before. 

In the last half-century, social psychologists have demonstrated time and time again that contextual factors are stronger predictors of human behavior than personality variables. 

With consumers providing so many data points through any number of information gathering techniques, it is imperative that companies take a strategic approach to analysis, especially that demographics no longer suffice. 

Millennials are likely one of the most studied generations to date. 

If you’ve ever worked in the military, cybersecurity, or even corporate compliance- you have most likely heard a debate about the differences between information and intelligence. 

Suppose you are asked to assess the impact of a brand's messaging, an educational program sponsored by the government, or perhaps even a leadership development course for corporate America.

If we are really able to predict, how is it that we repeatedly fail?

Nobody likes to be fooled. The majority of us want to know that they are being presented with accurate information about their topic of interest, be it market research, polling results, health related issues, financial trends, or anything else that is data related.

Have you ever wondered how statisticians are able to make predictions about the future?

In the book “Team of Rivals”, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the political brilliance of Abraham Lincoln. Determined to hold his party together, Lincoln had appointed three men to his Cabinet who had previously run against him in the 1860 Presidential election.

“You won’t give me the money to pay for a scientific poll” declared Roger Stone as he separated from the Donald Trump campaign as a senior advisor. What did he mean by that and why is it so important for the voter to know something about it?