Who Needs a Market Survey for a New Product?
You’re an entrepreneur or a manager. You have a new product, or you’re about to launch a new business. Don’t start before you’ve had a professional market survey carried out. Do you know the general direction of the business? Do you have a rough idea of the numbers? How much will it cost you? Where is your break-even point?
What is the price range of your competitors’ products? What do your competitors look like? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do the competition and the market behave?
This data is essential for developing your sales strategies. The better you know the market, the better you can define and sharpen your competitive advantage, leverage it, and use it with your customers: “I’m different from my competitors, I’m better than them because…, and I’m not afraid of competition – I have no reason to be, because my product is better”!
How Is a Market Survey Conducted?
What do you actually want to know?
Good question. Prepare a list of the questions that matter to you, for example: What is your competitors’ price range? Who are your direct competitors? Who are your indirect competitors? How many customers do your competitors have? Are their customers satisfied? If so – what exactly are they so happy with? If not – why aren’t they satisfied (that’s your opportunity to win them over and make them your customers)? What products do your competitors sell?
Now you need to answer these questions.
You can do it all yourself: pose as an ordinary customer, visit your competitors, ask questions, do some reconnaissance, put together a questionnaire, and organize it in a serious, measurable way so you can draw real conclusions.
Market Survey
Market survey – how does it work? If your time is valuable and you’d rather receive professional service based on extensive experience, advanced technology and personalized consulting tailored precisely to your needs, you’ll turn to companies that conduct market surveys using mystery shoppers.
The mystery shoppers will experience your competitors’ customer experience on your behalf and tell us exactly what they enjoyed and what they didn’t.
You can also check how many customers visited your competitor, or spend an entire day across from the competitor counting the number of customers who walked into the business. What did they buy? How much did they buy?
Market Survey: Summary
If you’re interested in opening a business in a specific neighborhood and want to know how many people pass through it and whether they’ll buy your product, you can set up a small stand on that street with samples of your products and survey passersby – and at the same time, count the foot traffic.
But if you’re serious, you need a market and public opinion survey designed and conducted by professionals.
Why? Because you want an objective picture – one that can be evaluated and measured again and again at later points in time using the same model – so you know the true state of the market for your new product.
