Research is crucial to understanding customers’ values and how to connect with them. This guide will help brand and marketing managers conduct research projects for brands and campaigns.
It’s important to start with understanding the ultimate goal of a research project and why it’s important to the brand.
The ultimate goal of a research project is to find valuable insights or “golden nuggets”. We use these to create meaningful connections with customers, build brand loyalty, and drive business success. Research can help businesses understand their customers, identify market opportunities, and develop effective strategies and campaigns to connect with their target audience.
Research is important because it helps you understand how customers think and what they care about. And this can be crucial for realizing the dream of your business and brand. By conducting research, brands can gain insights into the needs, wants, and behaviours of their target audience. Therefore allowing them to tailor their messaging and strategies to better resonate with consumers. And, in turn, can lead to increased brand awareness, loyalty, and sales. Ultimately, research is essential for creating successful and impactful branding and marketing campaigns.
Read more on this here: Research for brands: why it’s important.
Speak with key stakeholders within the business, such as founders, heads of departments, and shareholders, to understand the culture of the business and the customers they want to target. Conduct interviews with them to understand their internal perspectives on aspects of the business. Things like how they see their market, their relationship with their customers, what makes them different, and what they care about.
Wrap up all of the insights you have gathered from the clients and stakeholders and write a research script. This script will be taken to the brand’s customers to validate or in some cases disprove the things that the brand has said.
Conduct qualitative research with customers by having real conversations with 15-20 customers. Qualitative research allows for empathy and meaningful connections with the customer, which in turn provides valuable insights to drive messaging. Schedule conversations with customers with enough time to get to know the customer, their lifestyle, likes, dislikes, and the things that matter to them.
Look at the market and the segment that the brand is operating in. Find opportunities within that market, to stand out, to stand for something different. And use this to communicate in a way that isn’t the same old, same old that everyone else is doing.
Gather all of the information and create a thing called a caremap. The purpose of the caremap is to show all of the areas in which the brands, the customers, and the market overlap so that you can find opportunities to communicate in a positive and emotive way that will connect all of those aspects together.
Use the caremap to identify key insights and common themes for the project’s next phase, which is usually the creative phase of developing the brand or campaign itself.
After completing all of your research, consolidate it into an insights report. This report will be shared with all key stakeholders to ensure that everyone understands the market, the customers, the brand, and the opportunities to start a conversation within that.
By following these steps, you can conduct a research project for your brand that will help understand your customers’ needs, values, and preferences, and use that knowledge to create effective campaigns and brands that customers care about and connect with.