A lean approach to marketing research
Clarke Ricks
School of Business, Liberty University
BUSI 690: Policy and Strategy in Global Competition
Dr. Hicks
April 6, 2021
A lean approach to marketing research
Advantages of lean market research
Lean User Experience (UX) design is a model for continuous improvement that relies on
quick, efficient research to understand customer needs and test new features.
Lean market research can help you become more...
Efficient : it gets you closer to your customers, faster.
Cost-effective : no need to hire an expensive marketing firm to get things started.
Competitive : quick, powerful insights can place your products on the cutting edge.
4 common market research methods
There are lots of different ways you could conduct market research and collect
customer data, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just one research method. Four
common types of market research techniques include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and
customer observation.
Which method you use may vary based on your business type: ecommerce business
owners have different goals from SaaS businesses, so it’s typically prudent to mix and match
these methods based on your particular goals and what you need to know.
Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. Nothing
beats a face-to-face interview for diving deep (and reading non-verbal cues), but if an in-
person meeting isn’t possible, video conferencing is a solid second choice.
Regardless of how you conduct it, any type of in-depth interview will produce big
benefits in understanding your target customers.
What makes interviews so insightful?
By speaking directly with an ideal customer, you’ll gain greater empathy for their
experience, and you can follow insightful threads that can produce plenty of 'Aha!'
moments.
3. Focus groups: the most dangerous
Focus groups bring together a carefully selected group of people who fit a company’s
target market. A trained moderator leads a conversation surrounding the product, user
experience, and/or marketing message to gain deeper insights.
What makes focus groups so dangerous?
If you’re new to market research, I wouldn’t recommend starting with focus groups.
Doing it right is expensive, and if you cut corners, your research could fall victim to all kinds
of errors. Dominance bias (when a forceful participant influences the group) and moderator
style bias (when different moderator personalities bring about different results in the same
study) are two of the many ways your focus group data could get skewed.
During a customer observation session, someone from the company takes notes while
they watch an ideal user engage with their product (or a similar product from a competitor).
What makes observation so clever and powerful?
‘Fly-on-the-wall’ observation is a great alternative to focus groups. It’s not only less
expensive, but you’ll see people interact with your product in a natural setting without
influencing each other. The only downside is that you can’t get inside their heads, so
observation is no replacement for customer surveys and interviews.
How to conduct market research (in a lean way)
The following four steps will give you a solid understanding of who your users are and
what they want from a company like yours.
1. Create simple user personas
A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic
data from people who use websites and products similar to your own.
How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand
your users.
How to do it right: whatever survey/interview questions you ask, they should answer
the following questions about the customer:
Who are they?
What is their main goal?
What is their main barrier to achieving this goal?
Pitfalls to avoid:
Don’t ask too many questions!
Keep it to five or less (preferably three), otherwise, you’ll inundate them, and they’ll
stop answering.
Don’t worry too much about typical demographic questions
like age or background. Instead, focus on the role these people play (as it relates to
your product) and their goals.
How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a week or two and received
1,000 replies, which revealed that many of their users were administrative assistants,
students, and teachers. Then they created simple user personas like this one for admins:
Who are they?
Administrative Assistants.
What is their main goal?
Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the
source file was lost.
What is their main barrier to achieving it?
Converting a scanned PDF doc to a Word file.
2. Conduct observational research
Observational research involves taking notes while watching someone use your product
(or a similar product).
Overt vs. covert observation
Overt observation involves asking customers if they’ll let you watch them
use your product. (Smallpdf did this with administrative assistants.)
Covert observation means studying users ‘in the wild’ without them knowing.
This only works if you sell a type of product that people use regularly, but it offers the
purest observational data because people often behave differently when they know they’re
being watched. (Smallpdf did this with university students.)
