Product research is a critical element in the world of business, serving as a pivotal guide in the product development process. Establishing a long-term vision for a product and developing offerings that customers will purchase and appreciate necessitates a deep understanding of the target market. Product research fulfills this need by delivering data-driven insights and facilitating informed, customer-centric product decisions, thereby ensuring business success.
What is Product Research?
Product research provides information on the specific and required characteristics of a service or a product that a business is seeking to launch or even improve. It helps companies to understand the needs of the customers in a much better way so that the required product can be tailored appropriately. Product research can also help in filtering new ideas for products. It is of immense help in screening and testing new ideas and helps reduce costs by avoiding investments in unfeasible ideas. This form of research basically answers the following questions:
- Whether the offered service or product will be successful in the market?
- What are some of the similar products or services present in the market?
- What are the best ways to start, develop, and sell your own products or services?
Product research is conducted by surveying and studying target customers to identify their needs and understand what they demand from your product or service, and usually happens at these stages in the product lifecycle:
Before launch
Testing and feedback
Soft launch
Post-launch
- Before launch: Before you launch new products, you must develop a market fit-product, which requires you to have an understanding of which initiatives you should include and prioritize based on customer needs.
- Testing and feedback: This enables you to have a proper understanding of how the customer perceives new iterations, learn what they like or don’t like, and how you can improve the product.
- Soft launch: This allows you to analyze the usefulness and effectiveness of your minimum viable product among target customers and identify areas where changes can be made before releasing it in the market.
- Post-launch: Allows you to study customers’ reactions and behavior after launch to enable you to analyze customer satisfaction, and identify potential bugs or improvement areas.
Understanding the Importance of Product Research for Business Growth
In today’s fast-paced product landscape, it is necessary to understand your customers’ preferences, needs, and challenges, whether you are launching a new product or improving on an existing one. That’s where product research comes in; successful product research will give you a 360-degree view of both the market and user landscape, allowing you to make better and more informed decisions across the product lifecycle.
Product Research Methods
While the types of research provide the ‘what,’ the methods of product research provide the ‘how.’ Product research methods are the techniques that businesses use to collect and analyze data about their product, their potential customers, and the market.
Surveys
Survey questions are an effective way to collect data from a large group of people. They can be conducted online, over the phone, or in person. Surveys are particularly effective when businesses need quantitative data to help make informed decisions about their product.
Interviews
One-on-one or face-to-face interviews provide in-depth qualitative data. They are an excellent way to delve deeper into individual experiences, preferences, and needs. While they are time-consuming, the richness of the data gathered often justifies the substantial effort involved.
Focus Groups
Focus groups involve a moderated discussion among a small group of individuals. They can provide insights into how a group reacts to a product or an idea, and the discussions can reveal the reasons behind certain consumer behaviors.
Online Research
In the digital age, online research is becoming increasingly popular. It includes analyzing online reviews, social media conversations, and search engine data. It can help businesses understand the public sentiment around their product or similar products.
Product Testing
Product testing involves providing potential customers with a version of the product and gathering feedback on its performance, usability, and appeal. This is a crucial step in identifying and correcting issues before the product hits the market.
These methods can be used individually or in combination, depending on the nature of the product, the information needed, and the resources available.
Role of Product Research in Different Stages of Product Development
Product development research is the process of crafting, developing, and selling a product. It includes the crucial steps of market research, user research, and also coming up with a marketing plan to market the product to prospective customers. It also involves tracking the progress of a product you are currently working on, its appeal to the target audience, and identifying potential changes you need to make to make the product more attractive.
Product development cannot take place in isolation from product research. It is a crucial process that directs the development of a product. It helps you identify, understand, and analyze consumer needs so that you can cater to them accordingly and increase your desirability in the market. It includes the processes of concept testing, loyalty testing, and many other tests that validate the product.
There are primarily 3 broad stages in the product development research process:
Exploratory Research
Evaluative Research
Iterative Research
1. Exploratory Research
At the first stage of product development, you have no idea about what your product will look like, what features it will have, or its pricing. Therefore, you will have to explore ideas and conduct exploratory research on customers to understand their pain points and needs. Exploratory research includes the following steps:
Idea generation
At this stage, research will help you generate an idea or service that you want to launch and how to work around it. This process should focus on answering these vital questions.
- What type of product do you want to build?
- Who is the target audience?
- What do they really need?
- How can you address their need with your product?
- What segment of the market would you like to target?
Idea screening
This will help you evaluate potential ideas based on the information that you have gained through market research. For example, if you have a new idea, then screening will help you test the feasibility by evaluating your budget requirements, relevance, constraints, risks, and challenges. Once you have the idea, you have to evaluate it against special parameters like benefits/value, target audience, complexity, profitability, market situation, and market opportunities. If the idea shows potential even after weighing against each criterion, you need to gather evidence-based resources to support that idea. You can start doing qualitative and quantitative research to understand prospects’ points of view. After compiling all the important research data, you can now start refining your ideas into actual product concepts.
2. Evaluative research
This stage of product development research involves the evaluation of the ideas that emerged in the previous stage to see how feasible they are. This will help you identify which ideas are worth moving forward with and which ones can be discarded. Data collection through surveys can be one of the methods used in this stage to gather details about your product concept.
Concept development and testing
This process involves gathering information and insights about your product concept from the target audience. It helps you adjust your vision and ideas based on the results of the research.
Market research
In this step, research helps you study the different forces of the market that not only pertain to customers but also competitors, economic stability, government policies, and all other factors that can influence the lifecycle of the product.
3. Iterative Research
This stage of product development research is aimed at analyzing and refining your product so that it appeals to customers. Iterative research is detailed and in-depth and focuses on developing the critical features of the product. It can start from testing the different versions of the product to finalizing the packaging. The different steps in reiterative research include:
Development
The development of a product starts at this stage. Product development teams brainstorm and pool in ideas, and start developing the product once it has been approved in concept.
Testing
Before launching new products or services in the market, research is conducted to test the performance of the product. This may include evaluating the product’s performance, safety, quality, and compliance with standards.
Commercialization
This is the final step when the product is introduced in the market. Before launching the product into the market, all the important factors like pricing, packing labels, marketing, and sales channels are decided.
Product Monitoring and Evaluation
In this step, the newly launched product is monitored and evaluated based on its acceptance among target consumers, and involves steps like defining and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs), which are quantifiable metrics that reflect how well your products and services are achieving your desired outcomes and objectives; establishing and following quality standards and processes; collecting and analyzing customer feedback; gauging user engagement and retention: and assessing the return on investment.
Overcoming Challenges in Product Research
Product research challenges are especially tough when you are launching an entirely new product. As there is no historical information about consumer response or feedback to your product, it makes it necessary for you to perform in-depth research. Challenges in product research can be overcome by taking into consideration the following:
1. Choosing the right product research tools
When you’re deciding how to do product research, you will need to consider your budget and company size to pick out your tool stack. Manual research techniques like user interviews can be time-consuming and cost-intensive, but useful to forge a personal connection with users and ask improvised questions based on their responses.
2. Understanding your target customers
Engage in user discovery – identify and understand your customer – as early as possible, even before you have definite product or feature ideas. Open-ended user research is a key source of product inspiration and innovation and is an essential step in determining product-market fit.
User research is all about interacting with your current or potential users and learning what they want and need. Developing a user-centric culture of ongoing research will help you gauge the market demand, position your product against the competition, and generate positive customer feedback.
3. Studying existing products in the market
Analyzing available products and alternatives can give you a good idea of who you are competing against. It might seem like your product is perfect, but are there better alternatives available?
After you have identified your competitors’ products, you need to gather some competitive intelligence so that you can benchmark them against yours.
4. Getting to know industry trends
Next, combine your understanding of your users and the market with research on technology trends that may affect user expectations of your product or its long-term viability.
5. Processing customer feedback quickly
In the age of speed and time-to-market, companies cannot afford to spend months doing research. In addition, any insights derived from delayed research can be too stale or outdated for stakeholders to act on.
The use of automated, online, and self-serve systems allows product research teams to obtain consumer feedback faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.
6. Combining analytics with qualitative and quantitative research
Applying analytics can answer questions about how users are using your product from the data trails they leave. Analytics can also inform questions for further product research and relies on behavioral evidence to understand the user.
Benefits of Product Research
Product research is essential for businesses aiming to thrive in competitive markets, offering numerous benefits that drive growth and innovation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, product research is a critical component of business growth, enabling organizations to develop products that meet genuine customer needs, optimize development efforts, create effective marketing strategies, and gain a competitive edge in the market. By continuously gathering insights into customer preferences, market trends, and competitor offerings, companies can ensure their products remain relevant, innovative, and aligned with evolving expectations. Investing in product research not only reduces the risk of failure but also fosters strong customer relationships, brand loyalty, and long-term business success. As such, integrating product research into the core of business strategy is essential for driving sustainable growth in today’s dynamic and competitive landscape.
