Week 11 - Market Research
You will be working towards achieving the following learning outcomes detailed in Brief 3:
LO1: Research – select and deploy appropriate research methodologies to inform the needs within a project.
LO4: Distil – position a creative strategic insight that has been distilled and refined through an informed investigation
LO5: Imagine – deliver appropriate and innovative ideas that embrace risk, have contemporary relevance and question the boundaries of the discipline.
LO8: Design – realise a final solution that evidences its strategic journey and clear relationship between form and function.
LO9: Communicate – communicate effectively in a range of contexts and situations to specialist and non-specialist audiences.
Introduction - Susanna Edwards
The introduction to week 11 discusses what we have explored so far. From the foundations of entrepreneurial thinking, with case studies of designer makers linked to subject or craft, and opportunity where there is a need or gap in the market. This week will look at other options explored in Week 10, but also investigates the constructs of market research, and identifying a need for a new product or service idea. and the fundamentals of marketing and bringing a product to market from background information and proper market research which ensures you fully understand the opportunity and need and can help provide insight into achieving this.
Lecture podcast by Dan Parry, digital strategist at Metier Digital
Market Research - Revealing Gaps, Targets and Audiences for a New Product or Service Idea
Dan talks about how important it is when trying to build or launch anything, about how important it is to understand your audience.
This recaps back to Week 8, and some of the question which are key to ask as to establish who are your customers.
You need to research…
Who is your audience?
What are they trying to do?
Why are they trying to do what they’re trying to do?
What problems do they have?
What do the first 100 of your customers look like? Where are they?
By writing down all of your assumptions, it allows you to understand your target market a bit better and how you should group these assumptions into themes. This will help you build you markets and discover what your audience wants
Qualitative and Quantitative questions
One of the easiest and cheapest ways of being able to validate or invalidate your assumptions is to ask questions. and the best two key ways that we do this is through qualitative and quantitative questions.
Qualitative questions help you understand the human part of your audience. This can be done by doing face-to-face interviews and asking direct questions, and being there in person helps you see how they react and their body language which you can do more in person than with surveys.
Quantitative questions, is more about having information and data n front of you. This can help guide you, but you’ll need a larger percent of people to be answering the surveys to make sure that you get the right answers. But, overall this will help you get more targeted answers and maximise the potential of building your business or creative idea.
Creating a survey
There are some great tools for building questionnaires such as Typeform, SurveyMonkey. With a lot of online modern questionnaire, they are able to segment the data so this makes it easier to analyse your conclusions.
Working out who you should be talking to and targeting the right people is key to finding valuable information.
It is essential to speak to your potential customers and audience, as when things can inevitably go wrong if you haven’t done the research you won’t understand why. By speaking to a varied group of people, you may find out new or varied information.
SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This is a ‘project management’ way of looking at things.
We analyse…
Strengths - What advantages do you have? What do you do better? What do people in the market, or your audience, or your customers see as your strengths? How are you different to anyone else?
Weaknesses - What could you improve on? This could be personal within the business. What should you be avoiding? What do your competitors see as your weaknesses?
Opportunities - What’s the opportunity in the space? Any interesting trends are you aware of that other people haven’t noticed? This could be in technology or social trends. All of these things could benefit your product/service launching effectively.
Threats - Are you facing any obstacles? What are your other competitors doing? Is the changing of technology actually threatening your position?
By looking at all this information I should be able to see what opportunities lie in getting my product/service launched.
Dan discusses similarweb.com which is a great online tool for understanding the marketplace and landscape. You can look and see if there are similar products on the market and who your competitors are. It also reveals the data on tells you how long visitors have been on the sites for, and where is the traffic coming from by country. You can also see how long they are being searched for and it’s a really good mechanism to be able to share where your product is. From this research, you will be uniquely placed to be able to create a unique product that is different enough from what is currently available on the market.
Social Media
Dan talks about how social media is a great tool for being able to scope people’s opinions in real time from their feedback and comments. Facebook groups are really key for being specific and entering the market you are in. He gives a tip that one of the best things to do is to join the group and just start talking to people, building up connections, and adding value and then inevitably people will come to value you as a good contributor. he also mentions Instagram and using hashtags as a really quick way to search for things and find new audiences and find new sub-genres using hashtags to start growing your presence.
Twitter (or X) is also really good for sharing ideas and to start talking and engaging to people, engaging with people and sharing valuable ideas.
Hotjar - Tracks customers on a website
This is a really great tool that you can use to do a screen recording. It lets you build up screen records of people interacting with your website and heat maps of where people are going to. So, for example, people may click on and land on your product or your service and they may stay for a while but they may not purchase. This can help you do an analysis of the screen recording to try and why and make changes to make it more effective.
Reflection
There are definitely some tools here to use for my project that will help with my research. I decided to check out https://www.hotjar.com to see if there were any competitors out there offering a similar product that I was hoping to provide as a product/service.