Cracking the Market Research Secrets through Lean
Starting a business is hard. If you do not make money, you are not starting your business. If you want to strengthen your business, you need to make sure you are targeting the right market. Market research is a way to understand customers who want and expect you.
Market research is critical to the success of any organization. Most companies fail because they offer products the market doesn’t want or because they are slow to adapt. With so many market research tools available, it can be difficult to streamline the market research process and increase productivity. In short, conducting market research takes time, money and resources; therefore, strategy optimization is essential to get the most out of your investment [1]. Fortunately, there are plenty of strategies and resources you can incorporate into your workflow to get research done quickly.
By keeping your market research methods as simple as possible, you can achieve well-defined goals more efficiently and save time and money.
This Simplicity is defined as lean market research. The basic idea of lean market research is that companies should not waste time and resources to create “perfect” products that may or may not be successful in the market. Instead, companies must quickly bring a “minimum viable product” (MVP) to market, assess customer feedback, and then decide whether to change direction or continue to expand along the same path [2].
Lean market research can help businesses to be more:
✔ Efficient: More efficient business operations are one of the biggest benefits of lean market research. Balancing the marketing team’s planned project work and unplanned work can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a framework in place. It helps to reach customers faster and get closer to them.
✔ Cost-effective: Lean market research reduces the need to hire expensive marketing firms to launch projects. Consider incurring some expenses in the process and determining the financial value of market research. In this case, the budget is more likely to be seen as a source of funding and cost reduction ideas rather than a cost center. You can ensure your focus is aligned with business needs by offering initiatives that facilitate market research to increase efficiency and save costs.
✔ Competitive: Many long-time business owners conduct ongoing market research to better understand their target market, identify consumer concerns, and identify real competition. Competitiveness is determined through lean market research. With fast and efficient results, this research can make your product a market leader. Whatever strategy the team chooses to launch the product, it must ensure that the new product has a viable market and that the company gains a competitive advantage in a changing market.
Elements of a Lean market research
Lean marketing is about the use of feedback cycles, data, repetition and verification to quickly establish success through marketing work.
Lean marketers study the results of small test activities and learn the elements of movement from the results.
Lean marketing is all about visual inspection and is the opposite of the fire-and-forget model that many companies and businesses unknowingly use. Based on above sentences the elements of lean market research can be divided as below:
- Build
Before creating anything, even the smallest viable product, a company needs a vision and a plan. They are at the heart of lean methods, as they are used to determine the scope of product offerings and the priorities of experiments. Regardless of what technology team uses to launch a product, it’s important to know that there is a long-term, sustainable market for new products and that the company can remain competitive in a changing environment. Before you build anything, it’s important to understand the size of your market, your customers’ needs, your competitors, and the gap between your customers’ needs and your competitors’ products. Once you have completed these procedures, you can begin a quick proof of concept.
- Measure
Many companies get distracted by vanity metrics like hitting a sales quota or garnering media attention, and they use these so-called triumphs to bolster their trajectory. To truly learn and improve, startups and developers need to focus on metrics that allow them to gain insights and take action to improve the product and message. A strict market research approach focused on quick results can ensure the focus stays in the right place and the results are objective [3].
The following criteria are essential in determining your performance in the market, whether you are an established business looking to grow or a business without a large customer base: A/B (or multivariate) testing, funnel analysis, brand and customer engagement /satisfaction studies.
- Learn
The most important part of lean is learning. In reality, the purpose of business is to learn how to build a long-lasting, successful business, not to make money or launch a revolutionary product. It is not enough to be able to measure performance with targets and indicators; you also need to understand what these results mean and adjust your expansion plans and messages accordingly [4].
With the help of lean marketing, we can identify and solve problems and thus improve business performance. A lean marketing strategy increases customer value using as few resources as possible, anticipates and tries to meet customer expectations in terms of price and quality, increases sales and, above all, puts the individual at the center of the task. Lean marketing has the advantage of being totally adaptable to any situation, whether it is a private company or a public institution.
References:
[1] McFadden, D. (1986). The choice theory approach to market research. Marketing science, 5(4), 275–297.
[2] Smith, R., & Hawkins, B. (2004). Lean maintenance: reduce costs, improve quality, and increase market share. Elsevier.
[3] Researchguides.journalism.cuny.edu. 2022. LibGuides: Market Research Guide for Entrepreneurial Journalists: Seven Tips for Lean Market Research. Available at: <https://researchguides.journalism.cuny.edu/c.php?g=554769&p=3812326> [Accessed 2 September 2022].
[4] Sielski, K., & Seckler, C. (2021). Theorizing Lean Startup Principles: An Action Regulation Theory Perspective. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2021, №1, p. 15695). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
