"Thank you VERY much for pulling together the summary for my new Home Décor business. The information provided was very detailed and insightful. Your efforts on our behalf will certainly help us as we enter a new business category.”
When discussing research projects, one of the first questions we ask clients is who is your consumer? It is important to understand that you are not your company’s consumer. Neither is your design department or your marketing team. They are all highly involved with the product category and probably better off financially than your typical consumer. (Neither is your customer service department or your mother-in-law.)
Knowing your consumer is fundamental to knowing your business. Most companies do not have a formalized mechanism for understanding who is buying their products. That’s not hard to understand because it is difficult to create mechanisms to that end. Warranty registration cards are returned at very low rates. Sampling consumers who contact customer service produces biased samples, as does sampling consumers who visit websites. We have methodologies that can deliver unbiased samples of your consumers.
A typical consumer profile study includes extensive demographic data. We also ask lifestyle and psychographics in order to deliver an overall sense of your consumers, not as single individuals but as groups with similar attributes. We also tend to include a lot of information about the products they own in your category in order to see if they are exclusively your consumers or if there is overlap with other brands and products as well. We also examine customer loyalty, a key component of brand equity.
We recommend updating this information every few years to keep track of your consumer base as well.
Typical project timing: 3-6 weeks