Innovate with insight: navigating the research landscape

Marketers often draw on creativity and intuition to craft strategies that help their businesses move forward. But to champion innovation, it’s best to not rely on your gut feeling alone. Incorporating research into your marketing approach is a surefire way to make data-driven decisions that propel results. Be it to successfully launch a product or service, enhance communication, target your ideal audience or set the right price. 

The importance of research in marketing

Research empowers marketers to innovate by providing deep insights into consumer preferences, behaviors and trends. It can uncover the most cost-effective and smart next steps to take, while validating that your current actions are, in fact, the right ones (or not). 

Leveraging real-life research results, you’ll be better equipped to, for example: 

• stay ahead of your competitors by quickly identifying new market opportunities and trends, 

• truly understand customer motivations, preferences, needs and obstacles – and respond to these with marketing efforts that resonate better with your audience,  

• identify the best channels and triggers to reach and convince your audience across the buyer journey, 

• make informed decisions about product or service design and its pricing, 

• mitigate risks, as evolving market conditions, consumer patterns, potential challenges etc. are already baked in into your marketing strategies. 

How do you know which type of research you need?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward fit-for-all answer to that question. Sometimes you get all the insights you need from, say, quantitative research, other times you would want to follow up with behavioral research to get a comprehensive view. 

It really depends on your goal and specific insights you hope to obtain. That’s why, when we start a research project here at The House of Marketing, we don’t just jump head-first into one method. It’s very important to us that we collaborate closely with our customers to understand their business context, and identify the most suitable (combination of) research type(s) going from there. 

Need an example?  

Imagine: you’re planning your next product launch

You have your prototype ready and you’re really excited to get it on the market. But first, you want to gather user feedback to find possible areas for improvement, understand which features are valued most and why, which price consumers are willing to pay, and so on.  

Here’s how we would tackle this together:  

1 | Kick-off and scope 

During a project kick-off, we sit down to define the objectives, parameters, key questions, target audience and expected outcome of the research project. A vital step to ensure a focused and efficient approach that’s aligned with your needs. If you have market research available, we’ll go ahead and organize intake interviews to verify or challenge any insights and assumptions you might have made. 

2 | Validate the problem 

Before going into solution mode, it’s important to validate if the problem you are solving with your product or service is actually relevant. Depending on the context, depth of existing research, amount of open questions and assumptions, we advise the right methodology to identify main customer pain points, desires and triggers for a solution. This can be done through open qualitative interviews, a closed quantitative survey or both. 

3 | Draw up the value proposition 

When we know your target audience inside out, we’ll set up a joined brainstorm in which we craft or rework the value proposition of the new product or service based on the insights gathered. This enables us to match product features with customer benefits and allows us to cluster, prioritize and make well-thought decisions.   

4 | Validate the solution 

Now it’s time to validate the actual solution: the reworked value proposition. Depending on the context, we develop prototypes for validation. There are multiple options here, but to give you an idea, we could do:   

• Behavioral validation with ‘smoke testing’: to assess consumer interest, we could, for example, create a dummy landing page that describes the product and its benefits where people can sign up for updates or pre-order.
   

• Real-life user tests: to uncover friction and gather intel about the user experience, we can create a setting in which we observe people as they interact with your prototype.  

With all that information at hand, you can make adaptations to ensure your final product meets consumers’ needs and expectations before launching it. Nailing the product-market fit beforehand will save you tons of time and money – and your brand’s reputation! – compared to finding out you’ve missed the mark after the launch. 

So, leverage research results wherever you can. Your customers, and your bottom line, will thank you for it. Need a hand with all of this?