Insightful Market Research

Market research is the field in which the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” has the most application. Programming and deploying online surveys is easier and cheaper than ever, however the online tools that facilitate this don’t provide the content of the actual survey. You still need expertise in questionnaire design, research methodology, sampling and data analysis to be able to extract useful insights from the survey data.

Customers’ feedback often provides invaluable insights given the relationship they already have with a company. What’s more, a customer database is the cheapest source of sample for research purposes, since it is already in-house. However, be aware of its potential limitations given the profile of your customers and the type of data you have gathered about them. Know how the database was sourced. For example, if most of your customers are small businesses or females younger than age 25 and you are interested in understanding how your products will perform in other market segments, then your customer database is not the right sample source for a market segmentation study.