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What is Consumer Behaviour? Objectives, Importance, and Models

Jul 25, 2023

In today’s ever-evolving world, it seems as though everyone is undergoing a remarkable transformation – a shapeshifting of sorts. As society progresses, individuals are no longer confined to static roles or predictable patterns. Instead, they are embracing dynamic identities and multifaceted desires, making it a captivating challenge for businesses to understand and cater to their ever-changing needs.

Consumer Buying Behaviour in Marketing:

Consumer buying behaviour is the process and actions individuals undertake when making purchasing decisions. It begins with the recognition of a need or wants, followed by an information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, post-purchase evaluation, and potential repurchase or disposal. It plays a vital role in marketing, allowing businesses to comprehend why and how consumers select specific products or services. By studying consumer behaviour , marketers gain valuable insights into the factors that impact purchase decisions, including personal preferences, needs, motivations, and external influences like social, cultural, and economic factors. Armed with this knowledge, businesses can develop effective marketing strategies, customize offerings to meet consumer needs and create targeted campaigns that resonate with their audience.

Objectives of studying consumer behaviour:

Understanding consumer needs and preferences

Predicting consumer buying behaviour

Exploring decision-making processes

Segmenting and Targeting markets

Assessing customer satisfaction and loyalty

Adapting to changing consumer trends

Strategizing businesses for growth

What is the need/importance of studying consumer behaviour?

Comprehending consumer needs:

Businesses utilize consumer behaviour research to gain valuable insights into the needs, desires, and motivations of their target audience. Consequently, understanding empowers companies to create products and services that successfully cater to consumer demands, resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction.

Fabricating effective marketing strategies:

Leveraging the study, businesses can discern the most efficient marketing techniques and channels to reach their target audience. Furthermore, this knowledge aids in the development of targeted and compelling advertising campaigns, pricing strategies, and promotional activities that connect with consumers and boost sales.

Identifying market opportunities:

By conducting consumer behaviour research, businesses can detect emerging trends, evolving preferences, and untapped market needs. Thereby enabling companies to spot new opportunities for products or services, enhance existing offerings, and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Enhancing customer experience:

Through this study, companies can acquire valuable insights into the complete customer journey, encompassing the stages from pre-purchase to post-purchase. This understanding empowers businesses to enhance the customer experience, personalize interactions, and deliver exceptional service. As a result, this fosters customer loyalty and generates positive word-of-mouth.

Minimizing risks and failures:

Understanding consumer behaviour helps businesses minimize risks associated with product failures or unsuccessful marketing campaigns. Through the analysis of consumer preferences, feedback, and behaviour, companies can make informed decisions concerning product design, features, packaging, and marketing strategies, consequently minimizing the likelihood of failure.

Building strong brand relationships:

The research assists in establishing robust, long-term relationships with customers. Through understanding consumer preferences, values, and purchasing behaviours, companies can customize their brand messaging, communication, and offerings, enabling them to forge a powerful emotional bond with consumers.

Steps to Develop an Effective Customer insight strategy

Define objectives:

Clearly articulate the goals and objectives of the customer insight strategy by identifying the specific insights you aim to gather and how they will bolster your business objectives.

Identify data collection sources:

Identify the sources of customer data that will yield valuable insights like customer surveys, focus groups, interviews, social media listening, website analytics, sales data, customer service interactions, and market research reports.

Gather and analyze data:

Implement strategies to gather pertinent data from the identified sources by employing methods such as deploying surveys, conducting interviews, or analyzing existing data sets. Also, employ suitable data analysis techniques to unveil patterns, trends, and correlations within the data.

Segmentation and profiling:

Segment your customer base according to shared characteristics, such as demographics, psychographics, purchasing behaviour, or preferences. Simultaneously, develop customer profiles or personas to gain a deeper understanding of distinct customer segments.

Conduct qualitative study:

Conduct qualitative research methods like focus groups or in-depth interviews to gather deeper insights into customer motivations, needs, and perceptions. This can further provide valuable qualitative insights to complement quantitative analysis.

Customer journey mapping:

Map out the customer journey and identify key touchpoints and interactions where insights can be gathered. This helps in understanding customer behaviour at different stages and identifying areas for improvement.

Collaborate cross-functionally:

Engage cross-functional teams from departments like marketing, product development, sales, and customer service to collaborate and share insights. Align strategies to ensure effective implementation of the customer insight strategy across the organization.

Apply insights:

Utilize the acquired insights to guide decision-making and develop strategies. It’s important to customise product offerings, marketing campaigns, and customer experiences according to identified customer preferences and needs.

Continuously iterate and refine:

Continuously gather data, analyse it, and update your understanding of consumer behaviour. Also, regularly review and refine your customer insight strategy to ensure it remains aligned with changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Ethical considerations:

Ensure data collection and analysis processes adhere to ethical guidelines and privacy regulations. Also, safeguard customer data responsibly to uphold trust and confidentiality.

What is a Buyer persona?

A buyer persona, also known as a customer or marketing persona, is a fictional representation of an ideal customer based on market research . It goes beyond demographics to encompass motivations, needs, preferences, and behaviours. By creating accurate buyer personas, businesses can tailor their strategies, product development, and experiences to connect with customers, deliver personalized solutions, and build stronger relationships. Data for buyer personas can be collected through surveys, interviews, feedback, analytics, and market research.

It’s important to note that buyer personas are not static and should be regularly updated as new insights and data become available. This ultimately ensures that your marketing efforts remain relevant and effective in targeting the evolving needs of your customers.

Consumer Behaviour Models

The Stimulus-Response Model:

This model suggests that consumer behaviour is a response to marketing stimuli. It consists of four stages: environmental stimuli (marketing efforts), buyer’s black box (consumer’s characteristics and decision-making process), buyer’s response (purchase decision), and feedback (post-purchase evaluation).

The Buyer Decision Process Model:

This model, proposed by Kotler, consists of five stages: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behaviour. It emphasizes the consumer’s active involvement and decision-making process in purchasing products or services.

The Howard-Sheth Model:

This model explains consumer behaviour by considering three sets of variables: input, process, and output. The input variables include marketing stimuli and consumer predispositions. The process variables include perception, learning, and attitudes. The output variables include brand choice and post-purchase behaviour.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Maslow’s model suggests that consumers have a hierarchy of needs, including physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. It posits that consumers prioritize fulfilling basic needs before moving on to higher-level needs.

The Fishbein Model:

This model focuses on understanding consumer attitudes and predicts behavioural intentions based on beliefs and evaluations of product attributes. It measures attitudes using the multi-attribute model, which quantifies the importance and evaluation of various attributes.

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Home Market Research

Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is a part of market research in which inclination, motivation and purchase behavior of the targeted customers are identified. Consumer research helps businesses or organizations understand customer psychology and create detailed purchasing behavior profiles.

It uses research techniques to provide systematic information about what customers need. Using this information brands can make changes in their products and services, making them more customer-centric thereby increasing customer satisfaction. This will in turn help to boost business.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

An organization that has an in-depth understanding about the customer decision-making process, is most likely to design a product, put a certain price tag to it, establish distribution centers and promote a product based on consumer research insights such that it produces increased consumer interest and purchases.

For example, A consumer electronics company wants to understand, thought process of a consumer when purchasing an electronic device, which can help a company to launch new products, manage the supply of the stock, etc. Carrying out a Consumer electronics survey can be useful to understand the market demand, understand the flaws in their product and also find out research problems in the various processes that influence the purchase of their goods. A consumer electronics survey can be helpful to gather information about the shopping experiences of consumers when purchasing electronics. which can enable a company to make well-informed and wise decisions regarding their products and services.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

Consumer Research Objectives

When a brand is developing a new product, consumer research is conducted to understand what consumers want or need in a product, what attributes are missing and what are they looking for? An efficient survey software really makes it easy for organizations to conduct efficient research.

Consumer research is conducted to improve brand equity. A brand needs to know what consumers think when buying a product or service offered by a brand. Every good business idea needs efficient consumer research for it to be successful. Consumer insights are essential to determine brand positioning among consumers.

Consumer research is conducted to boost sales. The objective of consumer research is to look into various territories of consumer psychology and understand their buying pattern, what kind of packaging they like and other similar attributes that help brands to sell their products and services better.

LEARN ABOUT: Brand health

Consumer Research Model

According to a study conducted, till a decade ago, researchers thought differently about the consumer psychology, where little or no emphasis was put on emotions, mood or the situation that could influence a customer’s buying decision.

Many believed marketing was applied economics. Consumers always took decisions based on statistics and math and evaluated goods and services rationally and then selected items from those brands that gave them the highest customer satisfaction at the lowest cost.

However, this is no longer the situation. Consumers are very well aware of brands and their competitors. A loyal customer is the one who would not only return to repeatedly purchase from a brand but also, recommend his/her family and friends to buy from the same brand even if the prices are slightly higher but provides an exceptional customer service for products purchased or services offered.

Here is where the Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps brands identify brand loyalty and customer satisfaction with their consumers. Net Promoter Score consumer survey uses a single question that is sent to customers to identify their brand loyalty and level of customer satisfaction. Response to this question is measured on a scale between 0-10 and based on this consumers can be identified as:

Detractors: Who have given a score between 0-6.

Passives: Who have given a score between 7-8.

Promoters: Who have given a score between 9-10.

Consumer market research is based on two types of research method:

1. Qualitative Consumer Research

Qualitative research  is descriptive in nature, It’s a method that uses open-ended questions , to gain meaningful insights from respondents and heavily relies on the following market research methods:

Focus Groups: Focus groups as the name suggests is a small group of highly validated subject experts who come together to analyze a product or service. Focus group comprises of 6-10 respondents. A moderator is assigned to the focus group, who helps facilitate discussions among the members to draw meaningful insights

One-to-one Interview: This is a more conversational method, where the researcher asks open-ended questions to collect data from the respondents. This method heavily depends on the expertise of the researcher. How much the researcher is able to probe with relevant questions to get maximum insights. This is a time-consuming method and can take more than one attempt to gain the desired insights.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

Content/ Text Analysis: Text analysis is a qualitative research method where researchers analyze social life by decoding words and images from the documents available. Researchers analyze the context in which the images are used and draw conclusions from them. Social media is an example of text analysis. In the last decade or so, inferences are drawn based on consumer behavior on social media.

Learn More: How to conduct Qualitative Research  

2.Quantitative Consumer Research

In the age of technology and information, meaningful data is more precious than platinum. Billion dollar companies have risen and fallen on how well they have been able to collect and analyze data, to draw validated insights.

Quantitative research is all about numbers and statistics. An evolved consumer who purchases regularly can vouch for how customer-centric businesses have become today. It’s all about customer satisfaction , to gain loyal customers. With just one questions companies are able to collect data, that has the power to make or break a company. Net Promoter Score question , “On a scale from 0-10 how likely are you to recommend our brand to your family or friends?”

How organic word-of-mouth is influencing consumer behavior and how they need to spend less on advertising and invest their time and resources to make sure they provide exceptional customer service.

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Targeting

Online surveys , questionnaires , and polls are the preferred data collection tools. Data that is obtained from consumers is then statistically, mathematically and numerically evaluated to understand consumer preference.

Learn more: How to carry out Quantitative Research

Consumer Research Process

The process of consumer research started as an extension of the process of market research . As the findings of market research is used to improve the decision-making capacity of an organization or business, similar is with consumer research.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

The consumer research process can be broken down into the following steps:

• Develop research objectives: The first step to the consumer research process is to clearly define the research objective, the purpose of research, why is the research being conducted, to understand what? A clear statement of purpose can help emphasize the purpose.
• Collect Secondary data: Collect secondary data first, it helps in understanding if research has been conducted earlier and if there are any pieces of evidence related to the subject matter that can be used by an organization to make informed decisions regarding consumers.
• Primary Research: In primary research organizations or businesses collect their own data or employ a third party to collect data on their behalf. This research makes use of various data collection methods ( qualitative and quantitative ) that helps researchers collect data first hand.

LEARN ABOUT: Best Data Collection Tools

• Collect and analyze data: Data is collected and analyzed and inference is drawn to understand consumer behavior and purchase pattern.
• Prepare report: Finally, a report is prepared for all the findings by analyzing data collected so that organizations are able to make informed decisions and think of all probabilities related to consumer behavior. By putting the study into practice, organizations can become customer-centric and manufacture products or render services that will help them achieve excellent customer satisfaction.

LEARN ABOUT: market research trends

After Consumer Research Process

Once you have been able to successfully carry out the consumer research process , investigate and break paradigms. What consumers need should be a part of market research design and should be carried out regularly. Consumer research provides more in-depth information about the needs, wants, expectations and behavior analytics of clients.  

By identifying this information successfully, strategies that are used to attract consumers can be made better and businesses can make a profit by knowing what consumers want exactly. It is also important to understand and know thoroughly the buying behavior of consumers to know their attitude towards brands and products.

The identification of consumer needs, as well as their preferences, allows a business to adapt to new business and develop a detailed marketing plan that will surely work. The following pointers can help. Completing this process will help you:

• Attract more customers  
• Set the best price for your products  
• Create the right marketing message  
• Increase the quantity that satisfies the demand of its clients  
• Increase the frequency of visits to their clients  
• Increase your sales  
• Reduce costs  
• Refine your approach to the customer service process .

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Research

Consumer Research Methods

Consumers are the reason for a business to run and flourish. Gathering enough information about consumers is never going to hurt any business, in fact, it will only add up to the information a business would need to associate with its consumers and manufacture products that will help their business refine and grow.

Following are consumer research methods that ensure you are in tandem with the consumers and understand their needs:

The studies of customer satisfaction

One can determine the degree of satisfaction of consumers in relation to the quality of products through:

• Informal methods such as conversations with staff about products and services according to the dashboards.   
• Past and present questionnaires/ surveys that consumers might have filled that identify their needs.   

T he investigation of the consumer decision process

It is very interesting to know the consumer’s needs, what motivates them to buy, and how is the decision-making process carried out, though:

• Deploying relevant surveys and receiving responses from a target intended audience .

Proof of concept

Businesses can test how well accepted their marketing ideas are by:

• The use of surveys to find out if current or potential consumer see your products as a rational and useful benefit.  
• Conducting personal interviews or focus group sessions with clients to understand how they respond to marketing ideas.

Knowing your market position

You can find out how your current and potential consumers see your products, and how they compare it with your competitors by:

• Sales figures talk louder than any other aspect, once you get to know the comparison in the sales figures it is easy to understand your market position within the market segment.
• Attitudes of consumers while making a purchase also helps in understanding the market hold.      

Branding tests and user experience

You can determine how your customers feel with their brands and product names by:

• The use of focus groups and surveys designed to assess emotional responses to your products and brands.  
• The participation of researchers to study the performance of their brand in the market through existing and available brand measurement research.   

Price changes

You can investigate how your customers accept or not the price changes by using formulas that measure the revenue – multiplying the number of items you sold, by the price of each item. These tests allow you to calculate if your total income increases or decreases after making the price changes by:

• Calculation of changes in the quantities of products demanded by their customers, together with changes in the price of the product.   
• Measure the impact of the price on the demand of the product according to the needs of the client.   

Social media monitoring

Another way to measure feedback and your customer service is by controlling your commitment to social media and feedback. Social networks (especially Facebook) are becoming a common element of the commercialization of many businesses and are increasingly used by their customers to provide information on customer needs, service experiences, share and file customer complaints . It can also be used to run surveys and test concepts. If handled well, it can be one of the most powerful research tools of the client management . I also recommend reading: How to conduct market research through social networks.

Customer Research Questions

Asking the right question is the most important part of conducting research. Moreover, if it’s consumer research, questions should be asked in a manner to gather maximum insights from consumers. Here are some consumer research questions for your next research:

• Who in your household takes purchasing decisions?
• Where do you go looking for ______________ (product)?
• How long does it take you to make a buying decision?
• How far are you willing to travel to buy ___________(product)?
• What features do you look for when you purchase ____________ (product)?
• What motivates you to buy_____________ (product)?

See more consumer research survey questions:

Customer satisfaction surveys

Voice of customer surveys

Product surveys

Service evaluation surveys

Mortgage Survey Questions

Importance of Consumer Research

Launching a product or offering new services can be quite an exciting time for a brand. However, there are a lot of aspects that need to be taken into consideration while a band has something new to offer to consumers.

LEARN ABOUT: User Experience Research

Here is where consumer research plays a pivotal role. The importance of consumer research cannot be emphasized more. Following points summarizes the importance of consumer research:

• To understand market readiness: However good a product or service may be, consumers have to be ready to accept it. Creating a product requires investments which in return expect ROI from product or service purchases. However, if a market is mature enough to accept this utility, it has a low chance of succeeding by tapping into market potential . Therefore, before launching a product or service, organizations need to conduct consumer research, to understand if people are ready to spend on the utility it provides.
• Identify target consumers: By conducting consumer research, brands and organizations can understand their target market based on geographic segmentation and know who exactly is interested in buying their products. According to the data or feedback received from the consumer, research brands can even customize their marketing and branding approach to better appeal to the specific consumer segment.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

• Product/Service updates through feedback: Conducting consumer research, provides valuable feedback from consumers about the attributes and features of products and services. This feedback enables organizations to understand consumer perception and provide a more suitable solution based on actual market needs which helps them tweak their offering to perfection.

Explore more: 300 + FREE survey templates to use for your research

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4 Vital Objectives to Guide Your Consumer Research

April 27 2022

Table of content

What is consumer research?

What are the objectives of consumer research, consumer insights research by product sampling, how to use consumer research insights.

To support the development and expansion of the business, you must know your consumers well. Like Market Research, Consumer Research follows a series of steps to empower the marketing decision-making process.

Another way to look at it is that consumer insights expand the scope of the decision-making process during the market research phase to make relevant, explicit, and actionable conclusions and predict client reactions to a business's brand, product, or service.

Using consumer research insights , businesses can make proper changes in their products and services, making them customer-centric and increasing customer satisfaction.

There are generally 4 objectives you should set for your consumer research process to improve your products or marketing process:

• Understanding new inclinations and behaviors of consumers
• Find out new concerns of customers
• Identify neglected needs of consumers that have arisen
• Find out where your business stands in your current market

In this article, we'll explore what consumer research is, what are its objectives, and we'll focus on using consumer research insights.

Read more: Differences Between Market Research and Consumer Insights Research

• What is consumer insights research?
• Consumer research objectives.

Consumer research is the part of market research that concentrates on recognizing the inspiration, inclinations, and behavior of (potential) consumers .

Businesses depend on consumer research to analyze and understand customer psychology to work on their products or services, making them more customer-oriented and finally increasing consumer satisfaction and the number of sales.

Having a profound understanding of consumer decision-making processes and their purchase behavior allows businesses to make products that will find their buyers more easily, set an optimal price for them, and establish the right distribution and advertising channels.

Consider a beauty products company that is going to launch a new skincare product. To lower the risk of their production and product placement, they can launch a skincare quiz to find out what their customers actually need.

And afterward, they could do some extra consumer research to find out more about their ideal consumer's demographics and purchase behaviors. Doing this kind of consumer research is supposed to facilitate a successful launch for the new product and guarantee that there's actual demand for such a product.

Now, let's take a closer look at consumer research objectives you should set to improve your overall marketing and branding process.

Also read: Seven consumer research methods; 2022 version

Consumer research is conducted to improve sales. Consumer research objectives are to examine and analyze various territories of consumer psychology and comprehend their shopping pattern , what sort of packaging they prefer, and other similar information that help businesses to sell their products and services better.

Consumer research objectives vary, but there are some common scenarios when consumer research may be used:

1. Understanding new inclinations and behaviors of consumers 

Noticed something unusual in the behaviors of customers regarding your brand? Or have their needs and inclinations changed? With the Covid-19 keeping outdoor activities to a minimum level, consumers have adjusted to new social norms, prioritized spending on home accessories and electronics, and are increasingly looking for home entertainment .

Just like when TV advertisements became an inseparable part of prime time programming, social media nowadays is full of sponsored content and offers with every swipe and click. In 2020 during the pandemic, while more and more customers are shopping online than ever in history, businesses are incentivized to leverage social intelligence to collect information on new customer behaviors and act on emerging opportunities by monitoring and analyzing key trends in the market.

It's critical to utilize consumers' data while developing buyer personas to help you toward developing customer experiences and marketing strategies that engage and resonate. You can utilize social data to analyze the following elements:

• Key subjects of interest
• Opinions and emotions
• Buying intentions and barriers to sell 
• Product feedback
• Complaints and suggestions for each specific product 

At this point, you should match data assembled from social listening tools with other sets of data, such as socio-demographic data, with the intent of personalizing approaches to best serve and engage your consumers.

Also read: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow

2. Find out new concerns of customers

While advertisers and consumer insights teams tend to associate " social media listening " and checking clients' conversations on social media networks, don't forget that there are certain tools that are capable of monitoring mentions on public forums too! And that's a good place to start analyzing the consumer discussions.

As most forums involve members from a specific sub-group or community, you can concentrate your monitoring efforts on gathering concerns, behaviors, and inclinations of specific groups toward your business. For example, a beauty product company would turn to online beauty forums and even groups about makeup in general.

When paying special attention to customers' new concerns, behaviors, and preferences that have emerged, make sure to look for these signals on your social listening platform:

• What topics did consumers previously not talk about, and are now trending on social media?
• What new factors have arisen to change or impede the customer's journey?

Focusing on these questions will be critical to driving customer loyalty and satisfaction. This brings us to the next point.

Also read: Consumer Research Explained; Marketers' Edition

3. Identify neglected needs of consumers that have arisen

Along these lines, identifying neglected client needs is also among consumer research objectives that are Important for your marketing research process. As pandemic has shown us, it's not a matter of if, but when consumer behaviors will change. Also, these newly found behaviors and needs will likely stick around for quite a while.

Meeting these neglected needs will help you to improve your customers' journey as you eliminate blocks and points of friction that otherwise prevent your clients from making that purchase. 

For example, when consumers are worried about the increasing waste of single-use food packaging with more food delivery demand arising during pandemic? On social media, growing public sentiment about how brands can accomplish certain things to diminish plastic expendables, brought new attention to incorporate this as a corporate social responsibility of the brands. 

To be truly effective, consumer insights gathered should be disseminated to relevant teams, so they can begin to improve your products and services. This is much more significant in the 'Age of the Customer', when customers are faced with tons of choices, and can easily take their dollar to a competitor.

Consumer research can help to detect new changes that are on a deeper level, develop strategies from crucial talking points, and improve product and service innovations ahead of your competitors. All the more significantly, it can empower brands to deliver personalized user experiences designed to meet their needs.

4. Find out where your business stands in your current market

Ultimately, it's important to find out your brand positioning on the market to gauge the effectiveness of your brand campaigns when coordinated with the overall market visibility and receptivity. Using a comparison chart helps you to create social figures for benchmarking, which lets you put into perspective the success of your advertising efforts.

Notice where your brand stands among key players in the market by utilizing key statistics in terms of share of voice, sentiment, and reach. 

As a market chief in your industry, focusing on a larger share of voice can get you nearer to accomplishing adequate brand exposure with minimal brand-awareness campaigns. While newly established businesses should ideally look at achieving a majority of positive feelings and sentiments about their business or try to cement their social reputation.

You must use insights gathered from brand positioning to easily identify public perception of your brand. For example, a 70% positive sentiment could look pretty normal on its own. But if you compare this with your competitors who are only achieving about 30 - 45% positive sentiment, that lets you see that your business has set the bar in achieving consumer satisfaction in the market.

The above list ideally shows the different consumer research objectives, when seeking to understand client behavior, habits, demographic differences, and their perceptions of your brand.

Obviously, this isn't a comprehensive list of all the consumer research objectives. It would take a book larger than the Holy Book to list them all. But fortunately, this article gives you a good picture of how consumer research insights can be used in developing marketing strategies and designing more consumer-oriented products.

However, what should we do when these consumer research objectives are met? The answer to this question brings us to the next section.

Also read: Ultimate Guide to Consumer Research Types

Peekage , which is a digital product sampling platform, conducts consumer insight research campaigns by product sampling method. 

Using our consumer mobile application, We target the right group of participants and give them your product samples. Then, the consumers receive a survey to answer questions about your product and their experience with your products.

You will receive a detailed, data-driven report that is personalized to your product. What separates this method from other methods, is the targeted group of users in the research campaign. This way, you will gain deeper and more real insights because they come from the right source.

If you're trying to get actionable insights on your product, contact us for a demo session .

Also read: Definitive Guide About Product Sampling

So, you've been running surveys across your digital platforms and your consumers have been eagerly sharing their comments and thoughts. Now it's the right time to combine these valuable insights with analytics and make some changes accordingly.

Consumer research insights can showcase potential issues and problems, feature necessary changes, develop new products and services, and determine advertising strategies for your brand. On some occasions, the results of the customer research process can be vague, and you may need extra targeted research.

In fact, the final step of the consumer research process is to take all of the data, whether from surveys, questionnaires, or from interviews and try to make sense of it.

In this stage, a qualified statistician is necessary when dealing with survey question-style data. However, if your survey is somehow short and the sample size is relatively small, you can use online analysis, or data visualization tools to help you make sense of the responses.

Researchers generally record interviews, ethnographies, and focus groups with both video and audio, and then turn the recordings into transcripts. An analyst then goes through the transcripts and qualitatively codes them, trying to find out common themes, directional cues, and patterns along them.

Also read: Benefits of Using Consumer Insights for Brands

Coding can be accomplished manually or through software. However, even with all of the advancements in programming, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, professional researchers still prefer to code manually, as they're better able to recognize themes and overarching stories without assistance from AI.

When the process of analyzing the data is finished, the research organization (or if done by your own team) will then compile the discoveries and findings into a report, showing the key responses and themes, as well as actionable insights to work accordingly.

Read more: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow

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Consumer Behavior Research

• First Online: 04 January 2023

Cite this chapter

• Stefan Hoffmann 3 &
• Payam Akbar 3  

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In this chapter, you will learn what consumer behavior research explores, what research approaches are used, when researchers collect their own data and when they use existing data, and how to obtain empirical data. You will learn the following paradigms: qualitative and quantitative approaches, primary and secondary research, and classical test theory.

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Hoffmann, S., Akbar, P. (2023). Consumer Behavior Research. In: Consumer Behavior. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39476-9_2

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