Market Research Tucao Daquan (not)

When it comes to market research, many people will refer to the famous assertion of Steve Jobs to deny the value of research.

Jobs said he never did market research. If Henry Ford had done market research before inventing the automobile, he would have gotten the answer that consumers wanted a faster wagon. This means that consumers don't know what they want, and companies rely on their own intuition to create great products and lead consumers' needs.

But in this famous quote there are two big pits waiting for you to jump.

The first pit is that the real demand of consumers is actually "faster" rather than "carriage", and "carriage" is just a solution to meet the demand for faster.

You can provide better solutions, whether it is cars, trains, subways, planes, or new magnetic levitation energy. Solutions can continue to evolve, but consumers’ basic needs for faster, more convenient, more comfortable, and safer travel remain unchanged. . If you regard the "faster carriage" as a consumer demand, you will only improve and optimize the carriage, and finally be eliminated by the times, then you can only blame yourself.

The second pit is whether the Ford Model T mentioned by Jobs or the Apple II personal computer, Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone launched by Jobs himself are actually revolutionary and groundbreaking products.

There are no competing products of the same type on the market for a while, and consumers have not used similar products before, so it is impossible to do ready-made market research. Moreover, using focus groups to test user feedback on innovative products will only result in negative reviews and will not help encourage innovation.

However, do the products you operate by yourself are also pioneering products that have no similar products or substitutes on the market, and do they have disruptive technologies that are ahead of an era?

Therefore, for many companies, it is still very important to understand consumers' thoughts and market competition through research (but then again, due to the rigidity of research methods, in most cases, the main value of research is to prove that you There is nothing wrong with the subjective judgment of the market at the beginning, and the conclusions drawn from the research are common sense that you have already known).

Mr. Philip Kotler condensed marketing into 10 Ps: Probing, Partitioning, Prioritizing, Positioning, Product, Price, and Place. , Promotion, Public Relations, Political Power.

Research comes first. Without research, there is no right to speak. I don't know what consumers need, I don't know the market situation, what business do you do, and what marketing do you do.

So today's article will talk about how to do research. And the topic of research is also a topic that many children's shoes often ask me in WeChat and WeChat groups.

As for how to do research, my usual answer is to ask each other - how much do you pay for research? How many people do research? How much time do you have for research?

Because research is really a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive systematic project. The kind of person who designs a small questionnaire using online documents and research tools, sends it to each WeChat group, and then sends a red envelope of 2 yuan to ask someone to help fill out the questionnaire. That's the way of research.

Not to mention the question of whether the sample size of this research method is sufficient, it also has other fatal flaws.

The first is the WeChat group that you forward to ask people to fill in the questionnaire. Generally speaking, it is your friend group, colleague group, or peer communication group. And your friends and colleagues are basically the same type of people as you. Your education level, income level, city level, and even family structure, lifestyle, and occupational attributes are all the same, that is to say, you are in the same social class. . Then the results of your research are very one-sided, because you only research the thoughts of a certain type of consumers.

You ignore that the credibility of market research telemarketing list telemarketing list is based on sample size, based on the participation of all kinds of different types of consumers.

So no matter the design of any survey questionnaire, the first part is used to identify consumers - whether the person filling out the questionnaire is the target group I want to investigate. On this basis, we will ensure the sample size and user diversity.

For example, many of the user surveys I have participated in in the past were interviews on the street, or random interviews by phone. After identification and screening of inappropriate people, the survey was officially launched. After such user research is completed, you will have a clear idea of ​​who your target group is and what different types of consumer groups they can be divided into.

(I will reveal a little secret. Generally, I don’t want to answer an interview call, and I will directly tell the other party that I am an