Market Research Survey in 2024: Benefits, 3 Use Cases & Tips

It is estimated that the market research services industry will exceed $90 billion in 2025. Understanding the market is not only required in the establishment phase of a company or while you are launching a new product or a service but also crucial to understand the existing trends to stand out in the market. That’s why B2B and B2C companies regularly conduct market research surveys. 

 In this article, we aim to: 

• Highlight the benefits of conducting market research surveys,
• Provide some suggestions before investigating the market through surveys,
• Review some applications of market research in different industries,
• And give some general tips to improve your market research

Why should you conduct market research surveys?

• To position your brand in the market.
• To get customer insights and improve customer experience
• To determine the optimum pricing for your products or services
• To measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies
• To get a grasp of the opinions and preferences of the public

Here are some suggestions to consider before investing your resources and money into new survey research:

• Conduct web and social media research to learn about the market to build your research upon the existing knowledge.
• Determine your scope if you aim to focus on a specific target. Otherwise, you can randomly select the participants.
• Decide when you plan to finalize the study so you can have a systematic process and know when you will be done.
• List all expected outcomes, what you want to learn most, and what you expect from the study.

Three real-world use cases of market research in different industries

1. Energy Industry – Shell

Shell, one of the largest energy companies in the world, conducted market research and segmented customers based on their pain points by recording more than 500 videos of customers from the US and China. 

They have analyzed the customer’s voices and opinions to grasp their emotions, thoughts, etc. Thus, they could understand the challenges customers face through real-world examples. 

2. Food Industry – Endangered Species Chocolate (ESC)

Endangered Species Chocolate (ESC) is not a regular company that sells chocolates. Their products’ organic ingredients and efforts to protect wildlife make them stand out in the market. They donated more than $2.6 million to the farmers in Africa through fair trade sourcing.

To understand their customers better, they conducted a market research survey and asked their customers about their preferences, demographics, lifestyles, consumptions, etc. With the insights they gathered from the research, they have started to work on producing new flavors and products, positioning their brand in the market, developing new multimedia strategies, and reaching new targets. 

3. Car Industry – Mercedes Benz

Mercedes Benz is a German luxury car brand ranked 38th in Fortune 500. The company’s success mainly depends on understanding its customers well. 

The company makes a segmentation analysis based on geographic, demographic, and behavioral data of the public to understand what percentage of the population can afford to buy the cheapest and most basic vehicle of Mercedes Benz. As they can determine their target through their comprehensive market research surveys, they can identify customer groups better and develop different strategies for each group. 

Here are some general tips and best practices for your market research survey.

1. Use focus groups if the existing knowledge of the market is limited.

There are some industries newly emerging or gained popularity over the last years, such as commercial space travel or lab-grown meat. If the existing knowledge does not provide enough insights, you can start with a focus group and learn how they approach the emerging industry. Focus groups usually consist of ten people, and you ask them questions about the market, product, or service.

2. The number of respondents does not necessarily mean high-quality responses. 

You may intuitively think that the more respondents you have, the more accurate results will be gathered. However, studies show that this is not the case. Even though 150 responses would provide you with more precise results than just 30 people, as the number of respondents grows, variability in the responses decreases.

Figure 1. The graph shows how the variability of the responses changes with the sample size.

3. Apply different sampling methods depending on market types

If you are interested in the B2C market, try to be as inclusive as possible and survey a representative group of customers or potential ones. However, if you want to focus on the B2B market, then make sure you balance the number of vertical markets and include businesses of different sizes. 

You can find more tips that increase the number of responses in our recent article on online survey research. 

If interested, here is our data-driven list of survey participant recruitment services and survey tools.

Here is also our data driven list of market research tools.

Reach us if you have any questions about conducting research surveys: