Market research is an extremely important piece of understanding the products that you are working on. Naturally, as with most things in product management, there are multiple ways of conducting market research. Some people do SWOT analysis, some people use porter's five forces, and others use their own method.
The definition from wikipedia is "Market research is any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy." Shocking, this is fairly vague.
This article from pragmatic marketing provides a good overview of some of the ways that you can do market research. I'll be applying pieces of this to my market research for the industry I'm in.
A few graphics help to move this along... what do you all think about this? Is there a standard way to start market research? How helpful is it when releasing new products?
Thanks so much! I took your advice and implemented a few of these in the last few weeks (Google alerts, following others, reading various publications and reports). I'm looking forward to reading the books you suggested (Market Validation Toolbox, Customer Visits)!
ReplyDeleteImmersion is a big one - and I certainly agree that complete immersion would be ideal. Over the next few weeks I'm going to focus on going to customers to see what they're doing and how they're doing it. I'll keep you posted!
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ReplyDeleteMarketing Research Companies