Lean Market Research: How to Use Lean Research to Understand the Customer
Marketers spend $33B a year on market research. It’s a huge number that’s driven by marketing’s never-ending quest to understand what the customer really wants. It goes without saying that companies that understand and deliver exactly what the customer wants across product development, marketing, sales, and customer service have a distinct advantage. Marketers have always understood this. So why is that so few marketers are able gather customer insights that truly impact the business?
The short answer is that traditional market research is broken. The long answer is that traditional market research makes gathering high quality customer insights really hard. Legacy research techniques are expensive and time consuming and make it difficult to have meaningful conversations with prospects and customers. When forced to make the seemingly inevitable tradeoff between quality and cost, many marketers have opted for the low cost, low quality option. In this world, market research becomes a perfunctory exercise – something that simply doesn’t impact the company’s performance. In fact, many marketing organizations just get out of the research game all together, choosing instead to treat the market research function as something that’s meant to keep third party analysts and thought leaders happy.