4 Steps to Creating and Executing a Successful Agile Research Strategy

No matter the industry, markets, and consumer behaviors are constantly evolving. We live in a startlingly unpredictable world, yet a brand’s success relies on their ability to glean insights from their target market and convert them into products they want and campaigns that stand out. Essentially, brands must be agile in their market research approach, while still providing deep insights about consumers and their evolving behaviors. 

 

To do that, brands should adopt a four-step agile market research strategy that leverages modern, on-demand technology. This strategy provides brands with the crucial insights they need while saving them time and money.

Let’s examine each of these four steps one-by-one, what to do during each, and how each part of the approach leads to superior and trustworthy results. 

 

Step One: Foundational Learning

The first stage in this four-step process is foundational learning. It’s right in the name, this is where brands build a strong foundation for the rest of the process. In this case, that foundation is built upon a comprehensive understanding of consumer demographics, what they want, and what they need.

For this, brands must go directly to the consumers themselves and run surveys and conduct one-on-one interviews. Brands should build a consumer panel that is tailored to their business category and easily accessible at each stage of the process. This is not a simple task for most brands—it can take months to get responses from traditional market research methods, too slow for today’s consumer. Even many online research tools require brands to buy new samples every single time they need to talk to a consumer, which isn’t cost-effective or efficient when it comes time to retarget or ask follow-up questions. 

Consistent feedback relies on consistent consumer samples. That’s why preferred research vendors have access to on-demand samples that are tailored to a brand’s business category and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Taking this burden off the individual brand frees their team up to focus on their core competencies and gives them a reliable consumer set to interact with as needed. 

However a brand chooses to construct a panel for market research, they must ask targeted questions to gain practical insights. Here you want to focus on areas that provide you with the most valuable insights into your consumers and their behavior. Things like demographics, brand share, brand awareness, brand consideration, brand usage, and retail channel interaction. 

Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, brands can directly tie consumer impressions to their ideas, concepts, and products. This allows them to continue iterating and testing until they’re confident they have something that’s compelling to their target consumers.

 

Step Two: Innovation Pipeline

This research from the foundational learning stage must now be practically applied to business strategy in the innovation pipeline stage. Different business areas benefit from the same research. Marketing teams can use it to develop customer profiles and fine-tune messaging and branding, whereas product and innovation teams might use it to tailor products and services directly to consumer needs. 

Brands should seek to identify a range of behaviors that define category opportunities and their consumers’ unmet needs. Once the jobs to be done are understood, you should develop a concept evaluation survey from which to iteratively test and refine. This should go deeper than purchase interest and relevance and include diagnostic questions about category opportunities and drivers. Then, use qualitative focus groups or IDIs to dive deeper into the diagnostics driving performance.

Product testing opportunities are crucial to this stage. The most important iterations take place as a result of survey responses determining which early-stage product ideas and features have the most market potential. Brands that continue surveying their consumers as they generate and iterate products are able to go to market with more confidence that their products meet the needs of consumers. Validating iterations against control and competitors’ products should also be done at this stage to bolster competitive advantage. 

Once you have achieved parity or superiority to your benchmarks, and consumers are able to articulate the benefits you were designing around, the brand has hit the “sweet spot” and can move on to developing campaigns. 

 

Step Three: Campaign Development

Great products only get brands so far. Developing marketing campaigns backed by strategic research are crucial components of ensuring brand equity among consumers, creating awareness, and driving demand.

Developing strong campaigns is a lot like creating innovative products. In fact, the same approach, things like user panels, foundational learning, and iterative tactics, can be used. Blending qualitative and quantitative research while conducting messaging and ad testing allows brands to build campaigns that speak to consumers and motivate purchasing behaviors.

Once brands develop a few campaign ideas based on their understanding of their target market,  they can test those ads with their consumer panels. That feedback is used to iterate and return to testing. Fine-tuning campaigns, messaging, and branding, testing copy, running brand recall and diagnostics—all of this work continues until benchmarks are outperformed and campaigns are ready for market.

 

Step Four: Shopper/Tracking Support

The work doesn’t stop when a brand’s products are tested, iterated, and launched along with effective marketing campaigns. Markets and consumers are constantly evolving and brands must remain agile and vigilant to maintain competitive advantage. 

Consumer feedback allows brands to gauge the effectiveness of things like the in-store experience and retail assets. As products are further innovated and campaigns continue, their effectiveness may vary. It’s important for brands to continue measuring the changes in their brand equity and brand perception, to make sure they’re continually executing against product goals and campaign objectives. 

While perfectly predicting modern markets is impossible, brands can still be extremely accurate if they follow this four-step approach and take advantage of the myriad tools provided by modern technology. Building strong consumer panels, conducting agile research, and constantly iterating is a recipe for going to market with excellent products and effective campaigns.

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash