Master class: Primary Market Research

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This master class is based on workshops we teach at the Trust Center on this important topic, as well as two earlier blog posts published by Elaine Chen on Huffington Post.

Why do primary market research

When you are just getting started, the first thing to do is to admit that you don’t know what you don’t know. You have hypotheses about your target market and end users, but you don’t know if your intuition is right.

What you need to do at this stage is “problem research.” This is the phase in primary market research where you try to understand the problem.

Three go-to techniques for problem research

Problem research is best done using qualitative research techniques which companies that value consumer insights, such as Procter and Gamble, has been doing for decades.

There are three go-to techniques that are particularly helpful in quickly and efficiently gathering insights to help you build knowledge early on:

Detailed interviews ― the researcher interviews subjects to understand their needs, wants and expectations.
Observation ― the researcher observes and sometimes shadows the subject to understand their behaviors.
Immersion ― the researcher keeps notes as he or she navigates a particular situation or uses a product or service.

One technique to rule them all: The detailed interview

Of these, the detailed interview is by far the most important technique to master. This is the best technique for problem research: You are not trying to get feedback on your solution, nor are you selling them anything. There is no ask. You are just trying to understand what they are doing right now in the area of interest, and look for any problems and needs.

Detailed interviews: The foundation of primary market research

The classic format for a detailed interview involves sitting down with an interviewee who meets your recruitment criteria. The key to a productive interview is to take a learning stance, and let your interview subject teach you about their world. Some Pro-tips:

Establish rapport before you begin, so the subject will be comfortable talking with you.
Ask short, open ended questions, like, “Tell me about the last time…”
Let the subject lead. Don’t ask leading questions: “Don’t you think this situation is very frustrating for you?”
Use active listening techniques: “You mentioned such-and-such. Can you tell me more about why you said that?” Also ask “Why?” and “Why not?” to follow up on insights.
Talk less, listen more. This cannot be over-emphasized!
Pay attention to body language. This is why interviews are best done face-to-face. If somebody says: “Sure, I like your idea very much,” but their non-verbal cues exude discomfort… they are probably just being polite.

Remember at all times that you are there to discover, learn and empathize – not to sell. Do not talk about your solution at all. Let the customer tell you about the problems they face, then you can see if you have a solution that fits.

Balancing sample size and interview duration for early stage ventures

A typical research program involves 20-30 interviews. Each interview takes 45-60 minutes. These are best done contextually – i.e in the location where your interviewee would be experiencing the problem. For example, a research project about people with sleep problems are best done in the homes of the interviewees. Between schedule negotiations, travel time, the actual interview, the team debrief afterwards and the development of notes and/or transcripts, each subject could end up taking 4-8 hours of 1-2 team members’ time. This quickly adds up and can become untenable.

For an early venture, this is almost always too much, too early. When a company like P&G commissions a research project on, say, how people clean their hardwood floors, they already know there is a problem to be solved, as well as a good idea of what product category they will tap into in order to solve this problem. When an early stage venture does primary market research, they are doing so on a hypothesis that there exists a problem – and the goal of the research is to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

In this case, it makes much more sense to underinvest in the first round of interviews. Rather than talking to a small number of carefully selected people for an extended period of time, we recommend you start with talking to a large number of people for a small amount of time. This will help you quickly prune off areas of interest and accelerate the process of finding a problem that is worth solving that resonates with the people you speak with.

Here are some quick steps for setting up a “boil the ocean” round.

Articulate 3-5 hypotheses to be tested
Define characteristics of research subjects
Make a list of 10 people to call
Ask for 10-15 minutes of their time
Face to face if possible, video chat/phone if not
Interpret results, adjust hypotheses
Rinse and repeat until you accumulate 30-50 conversations

Once you have had 30-50 conversations, you will know what areas look promising. Now you can do the careful recruitment in the P&G style, and schedule longer interviews, shadowing, diary studies and more in order to build knowledge about your persona.

Going from qualitative insights to statistically meaningful data

Thus far we have been talking about qualitative research techniques like detailed interviews and observation, which involve deep interactions with a few individuals. You always run the risk of talking to the wrong people about the wrong problems. What’s more, your funders will often require you to validate your hypotheses with a large sample size that can yield statistically meaningful data.

What we recommend under most circumstances is for new venture groups to start with qualitative research, then end with quantitative techniques. That way you can have the best of both worlds: The rapid learning from open ended conversations with people can help shape your thinking, and help you figure out what are the right questions to ask. Then you can pose those questions to a larger audience for a statistically meaningful outcome.

Here are two quick examples of how this can work.

From interviews to an on-line survey for problem research
- Start with 20 interviews to validate hypotheses
- Develop a solid persona for these target customers
- Come up with 5-10 questions you want a larger group to answer
- Run an on-line survey with 500 people and chart the results
From in-person testing to crowdsourced testing for solution research
- Start with 5 in-person product testing sessions
- Fix glaring problems
- Check your homework with another 5 in-person sessions
- Now engage a crowdsourced testing service like User Testing, User Think, or run your own DIY testing using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’s on-demand workforce.

Conducting crowdsourced testing for solution research

There is a reason why crowdsourced testing is so attractive. For a very reasonable cost (under $100 per test in some cases), these platforms connect teams with large panels of on-demand testers, solving the subject recruitment problem and saving time and money.

There is one thing that new product teams need to keep in mind. Crowdsourced testing platforms are designed for solution research. You have to have a product for them to test first. You still have to lead with problem research the old fashioned way. You have to do both – or fall into what Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, calls “our dangerous obsession with the MVP”.

Another thing you get from doing in-person qualitative research, versus crowdsourcing the testing, is that the latter is one-way: The tester provides you with their feedback, but you don’t get to debrief them and learn more with the back and forth.

Let’s say you are testing your product with a user and she gets stuck. You can help her move past this task to complete the rest on the list. Later on, you can probe deep into what happened during the debrief. None of this happens in a crowdsourced test – if the user gets stuck, she stays stuck. Crowdsourced feedback is still valuable – just not as a first line of defense.

When to go face to face, and when to crowdsource

There is a time and place for every research technique. In-person sessions are the best way when the uncertainly is high. Crowdsourced research is best for testing well understood things. They both have a place in a robust, ongoing research program.

To recap: Lead with in-person sessions, and then transition to a scalable research technique that yields data from a larger sample size.

Additional resources

Check out the Orbit Knowledgebase’s section on Primary Market Research.

Read Giff Constable’s “Talking to Humans” and “Testing with Humans“.

Read Laura Klein’s book “UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design”