Best Practices in Innovating within Market Research to Reach Consumers: How New Tools, Technologies and Approaches Improve Understanding and Communicating with Consumers

Tools in both qualitative and quantitative fields are expanding to capture a consumer decision, and this has prompted companies to upgrade their research capabilities. In line with this, researchers across industries are attempting to adopt innovative approaches to identify winning tools and techniques for understanding consumers’ decisions.

Best Practices, LLC conducted this cross-industry benchmarking study to identify current and evolving approaches for qualitative and quantitative consumer marketing research techniques and tools. This research examines the changing landscape for qualitative and quantitative research. It also reviews which quantitative research approaches market research leaders are currently utilizing most and why.

This study includes data on two segments: non-pharmaceutical companies and the Total Benchmark Class.

Study Snapshot

Fifty-nine benchmark survey respondents from 58 companies participated in this study. In addition, research analysts conducted executive interviews with eight selected respondents to collect qualitative data and insights.

Key topics include:

• Innovativeness of MR Tools for:
  • Forecasting
  • Patient Flow Mapping
  • Positioning
  • Segmentation
  • Brand Research
  • Concept Testing
  • Brand Awareness
  • Customer Insights
  • Direct-to-Consumer
  • Tactic Testing
  • Target Product Profile Testing
• Utilization of Emerging MR Tools
• Effectiveness of Consumer Marketing Tools
• Best Practices, Pitfalls & Lessons Learned

• Innovation Not Widespread in Evaluation of Consumer Marketing Research Tools: While participants reported limited innovation across these key consumer market research tools, some of innovations cited were:

• Brand Research
  • Incorporating quantitative and qualitative research to ascertain the concepts that resonate best with customers
  • Using social media tools to “bake in” brand research insights into deliverables
• Concept Testing
  • Utilizing more group concept testing to force participants to defend their preferred concepts to get more insight into their decision-making.
  • Using interactive dials during in-person portion of study
• Brand Awareness
  • Incorporating mobile research
  • Combining demographic factors to create customized categories that contain more insights than traditional demographics
• Customer Insights
  • Using more mixed methodology approaches to conduct research
  • Utilizing more emotional insight mining to highlight true drivers, barriers
  • Conducting mobile research for fast turnaround projects

• Research Overview  pp. 4
• Universe of Learning  pp. 5
• Innovation Widely Dispersed but Thinly Seeded    pp. 6 
• Key Findings  pp. 7-20

• Using Innovation to Update the Use of Analysis Tools for Key Market Research Activities