Listening to what the customer wants is mandatory in any lifestyle business marketing plan. Great ideas and data can merge, offering tactical strategies to succeed. Today we share some tips to conduct effective market research for your brand.
Many lifestyle business owners and fashion designers develop original ideas. However, they get frustrated because when they put the offering out into the market, they discover it was not precisely what the client really wanted.
You may have a lot of ideas about fashion or style, but you must pay attention to what people are looking for, either in a mass or a niche sector to deliver your brand purpose.
Fashion marketing helps you in the cornerstones of your business. It is a process that can help you to focus on your unique value proposition, refine your desired target customer and cover its needs, developing an outstanding product or service for them.
One of the first steps to do it right is to always prepare and execute exhaustive market research. You may have an idea of the product in mind; however, you should never get too excited to prototype until you find data and the motivations from your customers.
Market research according to the Ansoff matrix, can help you to upgrade existing products and develop new products. The market research clarifies and structures all business areas, plus the marketing mix. The matrix also shows evidence of unmet needs from a customer, the possibility to find new markets and territories for developing products or services, and measure customer satisfaction to maintain a competitive edge inside that market segment.
The American Marketing Association considers marketing research as the function that links the consumer to the marketer through information used to identify and define marketing opportunities, implementing the data results into the benefit of our business.
According to the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR), the systematic gathering and interpretation of information about individuals or organizations using statistical and analytical methods, as well as techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight are what constitutes the foundations and practice of market research. This is an essential part of any business or product development plan.
Common Types of Market Research to Develop Your Business Idea
Global Market Data & Competitors Benchmarking
You will have to dig into everything related to your market’s idea. You can find a lot of research for consumer insights online for free, in the news, or in media specialized in consumer trends. You will have to become an expert on that type of market and know the answer to these questions. What are the top brands? What are the most searched products online? Who is your biggest competition? Who is leading the market? Who is being the most innovative player? To name a few.
You can build a map of competitor brands and register everything about them in a comparative matrix. Every fact is crucial, from distribution channels to product development, communication efforts, you must trace everything. This benchmarking will help you to detect successful practices and avoid the worst.
If you need a piece of specific information about market share, growth estimations, and insights on consumer shifts, you will probably need to buy articles and intelligence reports provided by a market research consultancy. Information is power; this is the case when you should invest in it.
Surveys & Interviews: Clients Know Best
Either before, during, or after a product launching, it is strategic to hear out the client’s perspective about it. If we are developing a business idea, a survey directed to our ideal target will give us an advantageous position to gain relevant information on usability, satisfaction, or other aspects you may not even be aware of.
The survey can be created using the qualitative perspective (to let the client speak about the issue freely) and the quantitative perspective (to convert insight into structured data we can analyze). You can create online questionnaires or send them via email, both ways are effective as they are proved to be the most commonly used techniques to receive feedback from the client. You can build open questions, ranges, and scales to discover what your client needs and wants.
You can always do a one-to-one interview session; you will gain deeper insight and read body language. The in-depth interviews, however, are harder to codify and you will have to build empathy first so that the answers are authentic.
Observation: Be There but Do Not Interfere
To observe your client interacting with your prototype or final product perhaps is the most sincere and accurate way of seeing the truth of its performance with your eyes. Take as many notes as you can. You can track the time of interaction, observe body language, and facial expressions. Any single detail may lead us to a piece of useful information.
If you already have a store, the task gets easier. Go as a mystery shopper and start observing all your clients in one place; write down their reactions to inputs you might prepare ahead, such as window displays, retail expositors, product walls, and point-of-purchase communication materials.
Whether you are developing a business idea, upgrading a prototype, testing service, or improving an existing product, you should hear what your clients have to say first. Their insight is extremely valuable to get it right with all data available at your hand.
Do you want to learn more about this topic? Find more in the Master in Fashion Marketing program.