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Last updated August 21, 2024
If you are involved in market research and are interested in qualitative research methods, you might be interested in the different types of market research that you can choose from. There are various types of market research but here are 21 of the main types.
Types of Market Research
1. Focus Groups
Using focus groups can be a fairly simple yet highly effective method for learning about a product or service that you plan to push into the marketplace.
Inviting a small number of people as a group to come and try out your product and discuss their thoughts can be invaluable. You can observe the discussion, questions, ideas, complaints, etc about your product or service.
This is a fairly inexpensive but powerful way to get feedback on your product that you might otherwise miss.
The focus group generally will be made up of a wide range of people who reflect your typical audience or customer and are people whose opinions you can normally trust, because you have chosen them specifically for this task.
2. Observation
Observation can be used in focus groups (as discussed above) and it is an incredibly powerful way to begin to understand how people react, interact, and use products and services in real-world everyday situations.
You can also use observation to watch users in a real-world environment interact with your product or service.
If you want to understand why people never seem to enter your store even though it is on the main route to other stores, for, example, observation might provide you with the answer.
- Is there something that distracts them as they approach your storefront?
- Do they think about entering and then seem to choose not to enter?
- Is there perhaps a person selling something directly outside that people seem to try and avoid and affects your business?
Observation alone can sometimes provide you with a lot of the information you need and is sometimes the only type of research needed.
3. Pricing
Using pricing is another great way to gather data and do market research.
You might, for example, want to do A and B pricing, meaning two different prices presented under similar market conditions, and then compare the results.
Does lowering the price point result in far higher sales? Or vice versa?
Also, recording and documenting all of your main competitors’ prices and then analyzing these against your prices can provide insight into the market conditions and expectations.
Your prices might be higher as you try and provide a higher quality offering. This is something you can factor in as you undertake pricing market research.
4. Brand Sentiment
Brand Sentiment is something that we can more easily study and do market research on these days, given that so many companies are on social media.
Brand sentiment is about the impression, feeling, and general thoughts a person (and people in general) have about a brand.
What words, emotions, and feelings do people associate with a given brand? With your brand?
One way to analyze brand sentiment is by doing market research on a company’s social media sites.
What terms, words, and tags do customers and anyone who comments on the brand use in hashtags, in any social media comments, and in discussions?
>> Qualitative Market Research Teaching Materials
5. Analyse Sales Data
Perhaps one of the more obvious and easiest (easiest in that you will already have access to the data) research tools is to analyze the historical sales data.
What is the most popular product in terms of sales and are there extra products you can attach to this to boost further sales, i.e. are there any follow-up products you can release?
Are you spending too much on marketing products that simply never sell? Could that budget be refocused on the better-selling items?
How do the products/services sell in relation to the marketing budget each receives, as a percentage?
There are numerous questions and ways to analyze sales data and it certainly is a key option in terms of market research.
6. Interviews
Market research interviews can come in a variety of ways including through:
- Interviews as part of a focus group
- Semi-structured of structured one-on-one interviews
If you want to try and get as much information as possible about a new product, for example, then a small focus group can work well.
With the focus group, you might leave them in the room for an hour to discuss your product and they talk about whatever they want in relation to the product and get to try it (as mentioned earlier).
You might want to find out specific information, so you might use more structured interviews where you ask more specific questions to the group or to individuals one-on-one.
Interviews can also come in the form of general questionnaires that you have trained interviewers/market researchers use to approach the general public to ask about a given product or service.
7. Mystery Shopper
Some people are hired in market research to act as mystery shoppers, whereby they act as a customer in order to experience the full customer journey, be it in person or online, to provide feedback on the whole experience.
This is a common approach for in-person market research and can work really well for services related to retail and similar service-related businesses.
You can have the mystery shopper also though, not only shop in your own business but also act to research your competitors and to then provide information on:
- Prices differences
- Customer service experience comparison
- Anything else at all they noted about the overall customer experience (i.e. perhaps the wayfinding experience was easier in a certain store)
8. Competitor Analysis
When we look at the different types of market research, in addition to the mystery shopper idea above, in terms of competitor analysis, we can also do a far more in-depth piece of research and ask ourselves:
- What direction are our competitors taking in terms of new products and services?
- What size are they in terms of employees, budgets and how can we compete (and win)?
- What is the brand sentiment for our competitors’ products?
- What are they doing well that we are failing to do well?
- What do we do better and what do we need to continue improving on?
The Internet, of course, can provide many of the answers through market research online.
9. Polls
Polls are relatively easy to run and they can provide some quick and handy information.
There are numerous ways to run a poll and one easy way is through your social media site, i.e. you can run a poll on Facebook if you have a company Facebook page. Likewise, you can also use a service such as ‘Polls Everywhere‘.
A poll can be useful for trying to understand one issue at a time such as:
- How much are people willing to pay for a product?
- What is the key reason for buying a product?
10. Secondary Research
As the term suggests, secondary research is about taking and using data from secondary resources.
So, for example, statistics that you take from a government website or from the media. Or the data might be from statistics companies such as Gartner or Statista.
Secondary data can be extremely useful because it tends to be data that we otherwise could never realistically have the money or time to collect ourselves.
11. Feasibility Studies
Feasibility studies are another type of market research and are an option that many large companies often undertake when the intended project involves a large amount of money.
A feasibility study will normally be about trying to evaluate, percentage-wise, the chance of a project succeeding or not succeeding in the future.
The idea is to invest early on in the market research to work out if it is worth the costs involved with proceeding further with the project.
12. Field Trials
A field trial is an interesting form of market research in that it is a testing stage where the product becomes available only to a small number of people so that it can be tested before fully being launched.
So, it might be available for your very best customers to have a peak preview of an upcoming product such as a new game you are releasing.
In return for their feedback, they get to see the game first and perhaps get a sizable discount when the final product is released market-wide.
13. Advertising Testing
There are a few types of market research related to direct advertising and one such method is advertising testing.
The concept is fairly straightforward in that this is about organizing small advertising campaigns as premises for doing much larger campaigns later on.
The test will help you evaluate the market so that you can better understand how best to run a larger campaign most effectively.
The options for online advertising are endless and herein lies the reason for testing as it is incredibly easy these days to spend on advertising budgets, and it’s getting harder to get a ROI (Return On Investment) for the advertising spend.
14. Customer Research
Before even building a product or service, you might want to consider customer research as a form of market research to really drill down to who your ideal customer is.
What you might want to do is plan a customer avatar.
This means working out who your ideal customer would be. This will be a fictional character and you will research and then detail what age they would be, their types of interests and hobbies, and as much information as you can about their character, background, and skills.
This is your ideal target customer and this can greatly help you in understanding then how to market your product to the intended customer avatar.
15. Descriptive Research
Descriptive research is a little more complex than some of the other methods discussed in this list, but it is important to also mention.
Typically, this type of research answers questions that start with “What…” and it often combines both qualitative and quantitative data to answer the research question.
16. Primary Research
We have already mentioned secondary research so it might be no surprise to you that there is also primary research.
There are different types of primary market research and these include some of the items we have already mentioned, but they come under this umbrella as ‘Primary Research’ and can include:
- Polls
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
- Focus groups
Primary research as the term perhaps suggests, is research where you directly gather the data yourself in-house, rather than, for example, using secondary data that someone else has collected.
17. Concept Testing
Concept testing can be used in connection to product development and might incorporate focus groups that we talked about earlier.
As you develop a product and prepare it for release, it can be extremely useful to better understand:
- What features people might want included
- What price people are likely to be willing to pay
It can be worth providing a focus group or focus individuals with a prototype at a few different stages as it can be extremely useful to get key feedback and ideas early on and at every stage possible.
Concept testing can literally save you thousands in income when a focus group member points out an obvious design flaw or obvious error, but one that those closely aligned with the design have overlooked.
18. Online Surveys
You might also choose to do an online survey (different from polls) to gather more information about the needs, wants, and thoughts of your target customers.
An online survey is different from an online poll in that a poll tends to ask one specific question and typically there will be 4 or 5 options to choose from.
Surveys tend to be much more open and allow for open questions to be included so that participants are not limited in the feedback that they can give you.
Just be aware though that the survey design is a skill unto itself in that you need to ensure that you:
- Ask the right questions
- Ask open-ended questions
- and that the questions do not guide the participants to answer in a specific way
19. Quantitative Data
When talking about market research, even though many of the options already discussed include quantitative data or qualitative data, it is worth explaining the two as unique entities.
Quantitative data is about taking what is considered a scientific approach based on numbers.
For sales figures, for example, this is quantitative data as the data is based on exact sales.
In market research though, we can only learn a certain amount through analyzing quantitative data, hence why qualitative data can be so useful.
20. Qualitative data
Qualitative data is data that does not rely on numbers but instead more so on feelings, thoughts, perceptions, etc.
This type of data is extremely useful in market research because we are looking at the unknowns and things that cannot yet be measured.
21. Social Media
In addition to being able to analyze brand sentiment through companies’ social media sites, we can also use social media for researching the overall market conditions including:
- Trends
- Competitors
- Pricing
- Opportunities
- Gaps in the market
Given the options for market research through social media, I have placed this as its own point in the types of market research, as social media is a great opportunity to learn about the marketplace, before making key decisions.
Market Research Further Resources
I hope you have found this post on all types of market research useful. There are a few other resources though that might also be of interest below:
Owner at Symonds Research Training Materials
Valeria has a PhD in Sociology, has 25 years+ working in education, has taught at the University of Bath &Cardiff Metropolitan University, & Hankuk University (Korea) & worked as a researcher for Exeter University, & has many years of industry experience including with Cardiff University in management roles. She now creates training course materials courseware.
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