What is Market Research?

I often think that it is fascinating how we really don’t know what other people do at their job. Like, not even partners, parents, or best friend really know what each other does day to day. That is one of the reasons I love sharing people’s days in the ‘day in the life ofday in the life of’ segment on this blog, and I am going to share one of my own again soon. But before that, I wanted to write a post about what market research is (for me anyway).

I work for a small team of six people and our company works on various projects, some really small, some longitudinal projects that go for years. We do market research for all kinds of brands, social research, government research, and food and beverage research- so very broad.

In essence, a company or government agency approaches us with a brief, which is typically a question they want answered. The question could be ‘which advertising campaign is more effective?’ or ‘can this product be more appealing?’ or ‘what are peoples’ experiences living in a particular area?’.

We then write a proposal of what we can do, how we can do it, how long it will take, and how much it will cost.

If successful, we start the project and we are typically involved in every aspect of the research. This means we run project meetings, develop surveys and interview guides, manage the recruitment (typically we outsource this but still project manage), conduct focus groups or workshops or interviews, analyses the data, write a report, and present the data to the clients. It is true end-to-end research.

We have multiple projects running simultaneously and multiple team members working on different aspects. It is face paced, dynamic, and interesting. Truly none of my days so far have been the same.