Product Management 101: Market Research and Competitive Intelligence

Coming up with an idea, creating prototypes, launching the product is all fine but do all of this matter if your perceived customers don’t borrow any of these? The one thing you obviously don’t want to happen is going all your efforts and money in vain. Zappos, the online shoe distribution company, tested its concept by agreeing with actual shoe stores instead of building a warehouse. First, Zappos tried the idea by posting pictures and prices of shoes online and then executed orders from a physical shoe store. That way, it avoided up-front costs of a warehouse until it has validated its concept. So, a clear suggestion here is before taking any step further, ask and look around yourself. Gain insights and then move forward or maybe take a step back. Therefore, today we will see how market research can be a game-changer for a business.

Market research helps to get out of your cocoon, or we can say the four walls problem by helping the product managers collect information about customer needs and market drivers. It could be qualitative or quantitative, primary or secondary. In terms of market research, talking to your customers is called collecting qualitative data. Once you have gathered qualitative information about your customer’s problem, use quantitative data such as a survey to gather more concrete information. On the other hand, research that you do yourself on the ground or pay for and therefore own is primary research; it is known only to you. The research you don’t do yourself or purchase is called secondary research. It is gathered through secondary sources like government sources, online report, internet searches etc. Now talking about competitive intelligence, it is a sub-area of market research. When researching your competition, use market research techniques and concepts to understand what your competition is working on today and get insight into their plans for tomorrow.

When we make a decision, there’s always an implied hypothesis that needs to be tested. The market research also works in a similar fashion. You discover something new, make a hypothesis around it, go to market for validation, and come back with your learnings. Then again you make more discoveries or amendments, and the loop continues, and this is what an investigative loop is and you keep on doing it until the retirement of the product.

Whenever you have a question and decide to conduct market research, remember to follow an established process to better results:

• Decide on your research objective.
• Determine what questions you need to answer to satisfy your research objective. Not too broad, not too narrow.
• Choose the best research technique(s). The best way to do this is to go in the following sequence: Secondary Research(Qualitative) — Secondary Research (Quantitative) — Primary Research(Qualitative) — Primary Research (Quantitative)
• Design your research study. Be careful with your own biases. Take help if required.
• Conduct research. Market research can be in customer panels, ethnographic, usability testing, in-person interviews, focus group, telephonic interview, and print or web surveys.
• Collect and analyze data.
• Present findings to take advantage of new knowledge.

As a part of your research, one of the major things that you perform is competitive analysis. It’s the intelligence acquired about your competition, which enables you to compete more effectively. Here are some common ways to spot your competition:

1. Reading product reviews and comparisons will give you an idea of who your customers and industry experts believe your competitors are.
2. Your salespeople are an excellent early warning for newcomers or changes in the business industry.
3. Industry analysts produce regular reports that compare your company with others.

Other factors that form part of the competitive analysis are marketing and positioning, distribution channels, and market share. A couple of handy strategies that you can use to evaluate your competitors, and the market overall are — Porter’s Five Forces, PESTEL, SWOT, BCG or Growth-Share Matrix, Ansoff Matrix and many more..

Keep in mind that your competitors are not standing still. To make sure you keep track of things, allocate time to the competitive evaluation regularly. You can follow the stated suggestions:

1. Create a weekly Google Alert whenever the competition is mentioned (Search Google for the term “Google Alert” to learn how to create alerts.).
2. Check your competitor’s website monthly for any announcements or updates about their product.
3. For listed companies, download and read the latest financial report.
4. Call the channel partners monthly or quarterly to discuss business developments whether you have lost or gained ground and, if so, to whom and why.

I can go on and on on this topic as it is too vast to cover in a single article, but I hope you got the gist. Want to read this further? You have an internet connection at your disposal, or maybe we can have a little chit chat about the same. But before that, let me know about your review of this article because this is not less than market research (getting to know my readers). All right then, keep exploring as always and stay connected.