Rigorous investigation into your industry can uncover valuable information for your company's growth. It can yield insight that provides guidance for expanding existing product lines, launching new products, and understanding your customers' needs. By surveying your market, you can discover new pockets of demand while identifying areas in which your business needs to improve. The challenge is knowing how to conduct market research surveys in a way that gives you access to the information you need while preserving the integrity of the data.

In this article, we'll explore the most common methods of approaching customers in order to research demand. I'll describe the fundamentals of selecting a sample and provide a brief discussion regarding a quantitative approach to designing your surveys.

Methods Of Researching Markets

At its simplest level, investigating your industry will either be based upon quantitative or qualitative responses. To explain, when approaching your sample (which we'll discuss below), you'll ask a series of questions which elicit either a measurement-based response or a "softer" response. I'll use an example to clarify.

Imagine that your company sells tennis racquets and you're considering offering a new brand. In order to investigate the potential demand for the new brand, you decide to create a market research survey. A quantitative approach might include questions like "Would you purchase this new racquet?" or "How many tennis racquests do you own?" The responses can be easily measured.

By contrast, a qualitative approach might include questions such as "What factors are important to you when purchasing a tennis racquet?" or "How would you feel about being offered a new brand?" As you can imagine, these type of questions yield responses that are more difficult to measure (though no less valuable).

What Is A Sample?

Your sample is the group of people who respond to your market research surveys. You may have heard the term "random sample" and not fully appreciated its meaning. Random selection of survey respondents is done in order to preserve the integrity of your questionnaire's data. By randomly selecting your respondents, you can build a participant pool that is (hopefully) representative of your entire customer base. There are challenges to using randomization in sample selection, but we'll explore those in a future segment.

Designing With A Quantitative Approach

One of the keys to designing effective market research surveys is to create questions that are simultaneously simple to understand and easy to respond to. Too often, questionnaires are ambiguous or overly broad. For example, a poorly-designed questionnaire for our hypothetical tennis racquet company might ask "Would you buy this new brand of racquet depending upon your need?" The meaning is unclear and a respondent could hardly be blamed for feeling confused.

In order to eliminate confusion, your survey questions must be designed with a singular, clear purpose. Not only does this encourage your sample's participation, it also makes their responses much easier to analyze. A quantitative approach is especially well-suited for an analysis and application of your sample's responses. Answers to questions such as "Would you buy this new tennis racquet today?" can be measured easily.

Proceed With Caution

Admittedly, this topic is a complicated one and deserves further exploration. The methodologies used in order to investigate product demand, price support, and market behavior are varied. There are several research strategies that are used in quantitative and qualitative market surveys in order to solicit different types of information from prospective buyers. We'll continue the discussion in the near future by digging more deeply into both types of questionnaires.