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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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What is Consumer Research? Definition, Methods and Examples

By Nick Jain

Published on: September 8, 2023

Table of Contents

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research methods, consumer research examples.

Consumer research, also known as market research or consumer insights research, is defined as the process of collecting and analyzing information about consumers’ preferences, behaviors, and attitudes toward products, services, brands, or market trends. This type of research is essential for businesses and organizations to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies, product development, and overall business planning. Consumer research helps companies understand their target audience, identify market opportunities, and stay competitive in the marketplace.

Here are some key aspects of consumer research:

• Understanding Consumer Behavior: Consumer researchers aim to uncover how consumers make purchasing decisions, what factors influence their choices, and how they use products or services. This information can be used to predict future behavior and tailor marketing efforts accordingly.
• Market Segmentation: Consumer research often involves segmenting the market into distinct groups based on demographics, psychographics, or other criteria. This allows businesses to target specific customer segments with tailored marketing messages and products.
• Product Development: By conducting consumer research, companies can gather insights into what features or improvements consumers desire in products and services. This helps in designing and developing products that meet customer needs and preferences.
• Competitive Analysis: Consumer research also involves analyzing the competition, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and identifying opportunities to differentiate one’s own products or services in the market.
• Customer Satisfaction: Companies use consumer research to assess customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. This has the potential to result in improved customer experiences and heightened customer loyalty.
• Trend Analysis: Researchers monitor market trends, consumer sentiment, and emerging technologies to help businesses stay ahead of the curve and adapt to changing consumer preferences.

Ultimately, consumer research plays a vital role in helping businesses make informed decisions, enhance their products and services, and build strong relationships with their target audience. It is a dynamic field that evolves as consumer behavior and preferences change over time.

Consumer research methods encompass a variety of techniques and approaches to gather information about consumers’ preferences, behaviors, and attitudes. The choice of method depends on the research objectives, available resources, and the nature of the information being sought. Here are some common consumer research methods:

1. Surveys: Surveys are structured questionnaires administered to a sample of respondents. They can be conducted in person, over the phone, via email, or online. Surveys are versatile and can gather quantitative data on a wide range of topics.

2. Focus Groups: Focus groups involve a small group of participants (typically 6-12) who discuss a specific product, service, or topic under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions provide qualitative research insights into consumer opinions and perceptions.

3. In-Depth Interviews: In-depth interviews encompass individual, one-on-one dialogues between a researcher and a participant. These interviews can be highly structured or more open-ended, allowing for detailed exploration of consumer perspectives.

4. Observational Research: Researchers directly observe consumer behavior in real-life settings. This can involve watching shoppers in stores, tracking website interactions, or recording how consumers use a product in their homes. Observational research is valuable for understanding actual behavior.

5. Online Analytics: Analyzing website and social media metrics can provide insights into consumer behavior online. This includes tracking website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and social media engagement.

6. Online Surveys: Conducting surveys online is cost-effective and can reach a large audience. Online survey platforms make it easy to design, distribute, and analyze surveys, and they often allow for targeting specific demographics.

7. Social Media Listening: Monitoring social media platforms for mentions, comments, and sentiment related to a brand, product, or industry can provide real-time insights into consumer opinions and trends.

8. Ethnographic Studies: Ethnographic research involves immersing researchers in the consumers’ environment to gain a deep understanding of their behaviors, culture, and context. This approach is often used in studying complex consumer behaviors.

9. Secondary Data Analysis: Researchers analyze existing data sources, such as government reports, industry publications, or academic studies, to gather insights about consumer trends, demographics, or market conditions.

10. Experiments: Controlled experiments involve manipulating one or more variables to understand their impact on consumer behavior. This method is commonly used in product testing and pricing research .

11. Mystery Shopping: Mystery shoppers, who are trained to act like regular customers, visit stores or use services and report on their experiences. This method helps assess the quality of customer service and adherence to brand standards.

12. Diaries and Journals: Participants maintain diaries or journals to record their thoughts, experiences, and product usage over a specified period. This provides longitudinal data and a deeper understanding of consumer habits.

13. Neuroscience and Biometric Research: These methods use physiological and neurological measures, such as brain scans, eye tracking, and heart rate monitoring, to gain insights into consumers’ subconscious reactions to stimuli.

Each of these methods has its strengths and limitations, and researchers often use a combination of approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior and preferences. The choice of method should align with the research objectives and budget constraints while ensuring the data collected is relevant and reliable.

Learn more: What is Customer Research?

Consumer research encompasses a wide range of applications across various industries. Here are some examples of consumer research studies and how they can be applied:

1. Product Development and Improvement

A cosmetics company conducts consumer surveys and focus groups to gather feedback on their new skincare line. They use this information to refine product formulations and packaging to better meet consumer preferences.

2. Market Segmentation

An automobile manufacturer conducts market research to identify different customer segments based on factors like age, income, and lifestyle. This helps them tailor marketing campaigns and product features to target specific groups more effectively.

3. Customer Satisfaction

A restaurant chain collects customer feedback through online surveys and comment cards to assess service quality, food quality, and overall dining experience. They use this data to make operational improvements and enhance customer satisfaction.

4. Brand Perception

A tech company monitors social media and conducts sentiment analysis to understand how consumers perceive their brand. This helps them identify areas for brand improvement and address negative sentiment.

5. Pricing Strategy

An e-commerce platform conducts price sensitivity surveys and A/B testing to determine the optimal price points for their products. This data informs pricing strategies to maximize revenue and customer satisfaction.

6. Advertising Effectiveness

A beverage company tests the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns by conducting online surveys before and after the campaigns. They assess changes in brand awareness, purchase intent, and consumer perception.

7. New Market Entry

A fashion retailer considering expansion into a new region conducts market research to understand local consumer preferences, fashion trends, and shopping habits. This informs their decision-making regarding store locations and product offerings.

8. Customer Loyalty Programs

An airline company analyzes customer data to identify frequent flyers and their preferences. They use this information to design loyalty programs that reward and retain their most valuable customers.

9. Online Shopping Behavior

An e-commerce company tracks user behavior on their website, analyzing factors like click-through rates, shopping cart abandonment, and time spent on product pages. This helps optimize the website design and user experience.

10. Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Research

A pharmaceutical company conducts clinical trials and surveys to gather data on patient preferences and experiences with a new medication. This information is crucial for obtaining regulatory approval and improving patient outcomes.

11. Environmental Sustainability

A food manufacturer conducts consumer research to understand attitudes toward sustainable packaging and eco-friendly product choices. This helps them make environmentally responsible decisions in their packaging and production processes.

12. Mobile App User Experience

A mobile app developer collects user feedback and conducts usability tests to identify pain points and areas for improvement in their app’s user interface and functionality.

These examples illustrate the diverse applications of consumer research in business and industry. Consumer insights are invaluable for making data-driven decisions, improving products and services, and building stronger relationships with customers.

Learn more: What is Customer Feedback?

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The past, present, and future of consumer research

• Published: 13 June 2020
• Volume 31 , pages 137–149, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

• Maayan S. Malter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0383-7925 1 ,
• Morris B. Holbrook 1 ,
• Barbara E. Kahn 2 ,
• Jeffrey R. Parker 3 &
• Donald R. Lehmann 1  

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In this article, we document the evolution of research trends (concepts, methods, and aims) within the field of consumer behavior, from the time of its early development to the present day, as a multidisciplinary area of research within marketing. We describe current changes in retailing and real-world consumption and offer suggestions on how to use observations of consumption phenomena to generate new and interesting consumer behavior research questions. Consumption continues to change with technological advancements and shifts in consumers’ values and goals. We cannot know the exact shape of things to come, but we polled a sample of leading scholars and summarize their predictions on where the field may be headed in the next twenty years.

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1 Introduction

Beginning in the late 1950s, business schools shifted from descriptive and practitioner-focused studies to more theoretically driven and academically rigorous research (Dahl et al. 1959 ). As the field expanded from an applied form of economics to embrace theories and methodologies from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and statistics, there was an increased emphasis on understanding the thoughts, desires, and experiences of individual consumers. For academic marketing, this meant that research not only focused on the decisions and strategies of marketing managers but also on the decisions and thought processes on the other side of the market—customers.

Since then, the academic study of consumer behavior has evolved and incorporated concepts and methods, not only from marketing at large but also from related social science disciplines, and from the ever-changing landscape of real-world consumption behavior. Its position as an area of study within a larger discipline that comprises researchers from diverse theoretical backgrounds and methodological training has stirred debates over its identity. One article describes consumer behavior as a multidisciplinary subdiscipline of marketing “characterized by the study of people operating in a consumer role involving acquisition, consumption, and disposition of marketplace products, services, and experiences” (MacInnis and Folkes 2009 , p. 900).

This article reviews the evolution of the field of consumer behavior over the past half century, describes its current status, and predicts how it may evolve over the next twenty years. Our review is by no means a comprehensive history of the field (see Schumann et al. 2008 ; Rapp and Hill 2015 ; Wang et al. 2015 ; Wilkie and Moore 2003 , to name a few) but rather focuses on a few key thematic developments. Though we observe many major shifts during this period, certain questions and debates have persisted: Does consumer behavior research need to be relevant to marketing managers or is there intrinsic value from studying the consumer as a project pursued for its own sake? What counts as consumption: only consumption from traditional marketplace transactions or also consumption in a broader sense of non-marketplace interactions? Which are the most appropriate theoretical traditions and methodological tools for addressing questions in consumer behavior research?

2 A brief history of consumer research over the past sixty years—1960 to 2020

In 1969, the Association for Consumer Research was founded and a yearly conference to share marketing research specifically from the consumer’s perspective was instituted. This event marked the culmination of the growing interest in the topic by formalizing it as an area of research within marketing (consumer psychology had become a formalized branch of psychology within the APA in 1960). So, what was consumer behavior before 1969? Scanning current consumer-behavior doctoral seminar syllabi reveals few works predating 1969, with most of those coming from psychology and economics, namely Herbert Simon’s A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (1955), Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation (1943), and Ernest Dichter’s Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964). In short, research that illuminated and informed our understanding of consumer behavior prior to 1969 rarely focused on marketing-specific topics, much less consumers or consumption (Dichter’s handbook being a notable exception). Yet, these works were crucial to the rise of consumer behavior research because, in the decades after 1969, there was a shift within academic marketing to thinking about research from a behavioral or decision science perspective (Wilkie and Moore 2003 ). The following section details some ways in which this shift occurred. We draw on a framework proposed by the philosopher Larry Laudan ( 1986 ), who distinguished among three inter-related aspects of scientific inquiry—namely, concepts (the relevant ideas, theories, hypotheses, and constructs); methods (the techniques employed to test and validate these concepts); and aims (the purposes or goals that motivate the investigation).

2.1 Key concepts in the late - 1960s

During the late-1960s, we tended to view the buyer as a computer-like machine for processing information according to various formal rules that embody economic rationality to form a preference for one or another option in order to arrive at a purchase decision. This view tended to manifest itself in a couple of conspicuous ways. The first was a model of buyer behavior introduced by John Howard in 1963 in the second edition of his marketing textbook and quickly adopted by virtually every theorist working in our field—including, Howard and Sheth (of course), Engel-Kollat-&-Blackwell, Franco Nicosia, Alan Andreasen, Jim Bettman, and Joel Cohen. Howard’s great innovation—which he based on a scheme that he had found in the work of Plato (namely, the linkages among Cognition, Affect, and Conation)—took the form of a boxes-and-arrows formulation heavily influenced by the approach to organizational behavior theory that Howard (University of Pittsburgh) had picked up from Herbert Simon (Carnegie Melon University). The model represented a chain of events

where I = inputs of information (from advertising, word-of-mouth, brand features, etc.); C = cognitions (beliefs or perceptions about a brand); A = Affect (liking or preference for the brand); B = behavior (purchase of the brand); and S = satisfaction (post-purchase evaluation of the brand that feeds back onto earlier stages of the sequence, according to a learning model in which reinforced behavior tends to be repeated). This formulation lay at the heart of Howard’s work, which he updated, elaborated on, and streamlined over the remainder of his career. Importantly, it informed virtually every buyer-behavior model that blossomed forth during the last half of the twentieth century.

To represent the link between cognitions and affect, buyer-behavior researchers used various forms of the multi-attribute attitude model (MAAM), originally proposed by psychologists such as Fishbein and Rosenberg as part of what Fishbein and Ajzen ( 1975 ) called the theory of reasoned action. Under MAAM, cognitions (beliefs about brand attributes) are weighted by their importance and summed to create an explanation or prediction of affect (liking for a brand or preference for one brand versus another), which in turn determines behavior (choice of a brand or intention to purchase a brand). This took the work of economist Kelvin Lancaster (with whom Howard interacted), which assumed attitude was based on objective attributes, and extended it to include subjective ones (Lancaster 1966 ; Ratchford 1975 ). Overall, the set of concepts that prevailed in the late-1960s assumed the buyer exhibited economic rationality and acted as a computer-like information-processing machine when making purchase decisions.

2.2 Favored methods in the late-1960s

The methods favored during the late-1960s tended to be almost exclusively neo-positivistic in nature. That is, buyer-behavior research adopted the kinds of methodological rigor that we associate with the physical sciences and the hypothetico-deductive approaches advocated by the neo-positivistic philosophers of science.

Thus, the accepted approaches tended to be either experimental or survey based. For example, numerous laboratory studies tested variations of the MAAM and focused on questions about how to measure beliefs, how to weight the beliefs, how to combine the weighted beliefs, and so forth (e.g., Beckwith and Lehmann 1973 ). Here again, these assumed a rational economic decision-maker who processed information something like a computer.

Seeking rigor, buyer-behavior studies tended to be quantitative in their analyses, employing multivariate statistics, structural equation models, multidimensional scaling, conjoint analysis, and other mathematically sophisticated techniques. For example, various attempts to test the ICABS formulation developed simultaneous (now called structural) equation models such as those deployed by Farley and Ring ( 1970 , 1974 ) to test the Howard and Sheth ( 1969 ) model and by Beckwith and Lehmann ( 1973 ) to measure halo effects.

2.3 Aims in the late-1960s

During this time period, buyer-behavior research was still considered a subdivision of marketing research, the purpose of which was to provide insights useful to marketing managers in making strategic decisions. Essentially, every paper concluded with a section on “Implications for Marketing Managers.” Authors who failed to conform to this expectation could generally count on having their work rejected by leading journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research ( JMR ) and the Journal of Marketing ( JM ).

2.4 Summary—the three R’s in the late-1960s

Starting in the late-1960s to the early-1980s, virtually every buyer-behavior researcher followed the traditional approach to concepts, methods, and aims, now encapsulated under what we might call the three R’s —namely, rationality , rigor , and relevance . However, as we transitioned into the 1980s and beyond, that changed as some (though by no means all) consumer researchers began to expand their approaches and to evolve different perspectives.

2.5 Concepts after 1980

In some circles, the traditional emphasis on the buyer’s rationality—that is, a view of the buyer as a rational-economic, decision-oriented, information-processing, computer-like machine for making choices—began to evolve in at least two primary ways.

First, behavioral economics (originally studied in marketing under the label Behavioral Decision Theory)—developed in psychology by Kahneman and Tversky, in economics by Thaler, and applied in marketing by a number of forward-thinking theorists (e.g., Eric Johnson, Jim Bettman, John Payne, Itamar Simonson, Jay Russo, Joel Huber, and more recently, Dan Ariely)—challenged the rationality of consumers as decision-makers. It was shown that numerous commonly used decision heuristics depart from rational choice and are exceptions to the traditional assumptions of economic rationality. This trend shed light on understanding consumer financial decision-making (Prelec and Loewenstein 1998 ; Gourville 1998 ; Lynch Jr 2011 ) and how to develop “nudges” to help consumers make better decisions for their personal finances (summarized in Johnson et al. 2012 ).

Second, the emerging experiential view (anticipated by Alderson, Levy, and others; developed by Holbrook and Hirschman, and embellished by Schmitt, Pine, and Gilmore, and countless followers) regarded consumers as flesh-and-blood human beings (rather than as information-processing computer-like machines), focused on hedonic aspects of consumption, and expanded the concepts embodied by ICABS (Table 1 ).

2.6 Methods after 1980

The two burgeoning areas of research—behavioral economics and experiential theories—differed in their methodological approaches. The former relied on controlled randomized experiments with a focus on decision strategies and behavioral outcomes. For example, experiments tested the process by which consumers evaluate options using information display boards and “Mouselab” matrices of aspects and attributes (Payne et al. 1988 ). This school of thought also focused on behavioral dependent measures, such as choice (Huber et al. 1982 ; Simonson 1989 ; Iyengar and Lepper 2000 ).

The latter was influenced by post-positivistic philosophers of science—such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty—and approaches expanded to include various qualitative techniques (interpretive, ethnographic, humanistic, and even introspective methods) not previously prominent in the field of consumer research. These included:

Interpretive approaches —such as those drawing on semiotics and hermeneutics—in an effort to gain a richer understanding of the symbolic meanings involved in consumption experiences;

Ethnographic approaches — borrowed from cultural anthropology—such as those illustrated by the influential Consumer Behavior Odyssey (Belk et al. 1989 ) and its discoveries about phenomena related to sacred aspects of consumption or the deep meanings of collections and other possessions;

Humanistic approaches —such as those borrowed from cultural studies or from literary criticism and more recently gathered together under the general heading of consumer culture theory ( CCT );

Introspective or autoethnographic approaches —such as those associated with a method called subjective personal introspection ( SPI ) that various consumer researchers like Sidney Levy and Steve Gould have pursued to gain insights based on their own private lives.

These qualitative approaches tended not to appear in the more traditional journals such as the Journal of Marketing , Journal of Marketing Research , or Marketing Science . However, newer journals such as Consumption, Markets, & Culture and Marketing Theory began to publish papers that drew on the various interpretive, ethnographic, humanistic, or introspective methods.

2.7 Aims after 1980

In 1974, consumer research finally got its own journal with the launch of the Journal of Consumer Research ( JCR ). The early editors of JCR —especially Bob Ferber, Hal Kassarjian, and Jim Bettman—held a rather divergent attitude about the importance or even the desirability of managerial relevance as a key goal of consumer studies. Under their influence, some researchers began to believe that consumer behavior is a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right—purely for the purpose of understanding it better. The journal incorporated articles from an array of methodologies: quantitative (both secondary data analysis and experimental techniques) and qualitative. The “right” balance between theoretical insight and substantive relevance—which are not in inherent conflict—is a matter of debate to this day and will likely continue to be debated well into the future.

2.8 Summary—the three I’s after 1980

In sum, beginning in the early-1980s, consumer research branched out. Much of the work in consumer studies remained within the earlier tradition of the three R’s—that is, rationality (an information-processing decision-oriented buyer), rigor (neo-positivistic experimental designs and quantitative techniques), and relevance (usefulness to marketing managers). Nonetheless, many studies embraced enlarged views of the three major aspects that might be called the three I’s —that is, irrationality (broadened perspectives that incorporate illogical, heuristic, experiential, or hedonic aspects of consumption), interpretation (various qualitative or “postmodern” approaches), and intrinsic motivation (the joy of pursuing a managerially irrelevant consumer study purely for the sake of satisfying one’s own curiosity, without concern for whether it does or does not help a marketing practitioner make a bigger profit).

3 The present—the consumer behavior field today

3.1 present concepts.

In recent years, technological changes have significantly influenced the nature of consumption as the customer journey has transitioned to include more interaction on digital platforms that complements interaction in physical stores. This shift poses a major conceptual challenge in understanding if and how these technological changes affect consumption. Does the medium through which consumption occurs fundamentally alter the psychological and social processes identified in earlier research? In addition, this shift allows us to collect more data at different stages of the customer journey, which further allows us to analyze behavior in ways that were not previously available.

Revisiting the ICABS framework, many of the previous concepts are still present, but we are now addressing them through a lens of technological change (Table 2 )

. In recent years, a number of concepts (e.g., identity, beliefs/lay theories, affect as information, self-control, time, psychological ownership, search for meaning and happiness, social belonging, creativity, and status) have emerged as integral factors that influence and are influenced by consumption. To better understand these concepts, a number of influential theories from social psychology have been adopted into consumer behavior research. Self-construal (Markus and Kitayama 1991 ), regulatory focus (Higgins 1998 ), construal level (Trope and Liberman 2010 ), and goal systems (Kruglanski et al. 2002 ) all provide social-cognition frameworks through which consumer behavior researchers study the psychological processes behind consumer behavior. This “adoption” of social psychological theories into consumer behavior is a symbiotic relationship that further enhances the theories. Tory Higgins happily stated that he learned more about his own theories from the work of marketing academics (he cited Angela Lee and Michel Pham) in further testing and extending them.

3.2 Present Methods

Not only have technological advancements changed the nature of consumption but they have also significantly influenced the methods used in consumer research by adding both new sources of data and improved analytical tools (Ding et al. 2020 ). Researchers continue to use traditional methods from psychology in empirical research (scale development, laboratory experiments, quantitative analyses, etc.) and interpretive approaches in qualitative research. Additionally, online experiments using participants from panels such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific have become commonplace in the last decade. While they raise concerns about the quality of the data and about the external validity of the results, these online experiments have greatly increased the speed and decreased the cost of collecting data, so researchers continue to use them, albeit with some caution. Reminiscent of the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s about the use of student subjects, the projectability of the online responses and of an increasingly conditioned “professional” group of online respondents (MTurkers) is a major concern.

Technology has also changed research methodology. Currently, there is a large increase in the use of secondary data thanks to the availability of Big Data about online and offline behavior. Methods in computer science have advanced our ability to analyze large corpuses of unstructured data (text, voice, visual images) in an efficient and rigorous way and, thus, to tap into a wealth of nuanced thoughts, feelings, and behaviors heretofore only accessible to qualitative researchers through laboriously conducted content analyses. There are also new neuro-marketing techniques like eye-tracking, fMRI’s, body arousal measures (e.g., heart rate, sweat), and emotion detectors that allow us to measure automatic responses. Lastly, there has been an increase in large-scale field experiments that can be run in online B2C marketplaces.

3.3 Present Aims

Along with a focus on real-world observations and data, there is a renewed emphasis on managerial relevance. Countless conference addresses and editorials in JCR , JCP , and other journals have emphasized the importance of making consumer research useful outside of academia—that is, to help companies, policy makers, and consumers. For instance, understanding how the “new” consumer interacts over time with other consumers and companies in the current marketplace is a key area for future research. As global and social concerns become more salient in all aspects of life, issues of long-term sustainability, social equality, and ethical business practices have also become more central research topics. Fortunately, despite this emphasis on relevance, theoretical contributions and novel ideas are still highly valued. An appropriate balance of theory and practice has become the holy grail of consumer research.

The effects of the current trends in real-world consumption will increase in magnitude with time as more consumers are digitally native. Therefore, a better understanding of current consumer behavior can give us insights and help predict how it will continue to evolve in the years to come.

4 The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040

The other papers use 2030 as a target year but we asked our survey respondents to make predictions for 2040 and thus we have a different future target year.

Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand for a single person to hazard a guess about the state of the consumer behavior field twenty years from now. Therefore, predictions from 34 active consumer researchers were collected to address this task. Here, we briefly summarize those predictions.

4.1 Future Concepts

While few respondents proffered guesses regarding specific concepts that would be of interest twenty years from now, many suggested broad topics and trends they expected to see in the field. Expectations for topics could largely be grouped into three main areas. Many suspected that we will be examining essentially the same core topics, perhaps at a finer-grained level, from different perspectives or in ways that we currently cannot utilize due to methodological limitations (more on methods below). A second contingent predicted that much research would center on the impending crises the world faces today, most mentioning environmental and social issues (the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet begun when these predictions were collected and, unsurprisingly, was not anticipated by any of our respondents). The last group, citing the widely expected profound impact of AI on consumers’ lives, argued that AI and other technology-related topics will be dominant subjects in consumer research circa 2040.

While the topic of technology is likely to be focal in the field, our current expectations for the impact of technology on consumers’ lives are narrower than it should be. Rather than merely offering innumerable conveniences and experiences, it seems likely that technology will begin to be integrated into consumers’ thoughts, identities, and personal relationships—probably sooner than we collectively expect. The integration of machines into humans’ bodies and lives will present the field with an expanding list of research questions that do not exist today. For example, how will the concepts of the self, identity, privacy, and goal pursuit change when web-connected technology seamlessly integrates with human consciousness and cognition? Major questions will also need to be answered regarding philosophy of mind, ethics, and social inequality. We suspect that the impact of technology on consumers and consumer research will be far broader than most consumer-behavior researchers anticipate.

As for broader trends within consumer research, there were two camps: (1) those who expect (or hope) that dominant theories (both current and yet to be developed) will become more integrated and comprehensive and (2) those who expect theoretical contributions to become smaller and smaller, to the point of becoming trivial. Both groups felt that current researchers are filling smaller cracks than before, but disagreed on how this would ultimately be resolved.

4.2 Future Methods

As was the case with concepts, respondents’ expectations regarding consumer-research methodologies in 2030 can also be divided into three broad baskets. Unsurprisingly, many indicated that we would be using many technologies not currently available or in wide use. Perhaps more surprising was that most cited the use of technology such as AI, machine-learning algorithms, and robots in designing—as opposed to executing or analyzing—experiments. (Some did point to the use of technologies such as virtual reality in the actual execution of experiments.) The second camp indicated that a focus on reliable and replicable results (discussed further below) will encourage a greater tendency for pre-registering studies, more use of “Big Data,” and a demand for more studies per paper (versus more papers per topic, which some believe is a more fruitful direction). Finally, the third lot indicated that “real data” would be in high demand, thereby necessitating the use of incentive-compatible, consequential dependent variables and a greater prevalence of field studies in consumer research.

As a result, young scholars would benefit from developing a “toolkit” of methodologies for collecting and analyzing the abundant new data of interest to the field. This includes (but is not limited to) a deep understanding of designing and implementing field studies (Gerber and Green 2012 ), data analysis software (R, Python, etc.), text mining and analysis (Humphreys and Wang 2018 ), and analytical tools for other unstructured forms of data such as image and sound. The replication crisis in experimental research means that future scholars will also need to take a more critical approach to validity (internal, external, construct), statistical power, and significance in their work.

4.3 Future Aims

While there was an air of existential concern about the future of the field, most agreed that the trend will be toward increasing the relevance and reliability of consumer research. Specifically, echoing calls from journals and thought leaders, the respondents felt that papers will need to offer more actionable implications for consumers, managers, or policy makers. However, few thought that this increased focus would come at the expense of theoretical insights, suggesting a more demanding overall standard for consumer research in 2040. Likewise, most felt that methodological transparency, open access to data and materials, and study pre-registration will become the norm as the field seeks to allay concerns about the reliability and meaningfulness of its research findings.

4.4 Summary - Future research questions and directions

Despite some well-justified pessimism, the future of consumer research is as bright as ever. As we revised this paper amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that many aspects of marketplace behavior, consumption, and life in general will change as a result of this unprecedented global crisis. Given this, and the radical technological, social, and environmental changes that loom on the horizon, consumer researchers will have a treasure trove of topics to tackle in the next ten years, many of which will carry profound substantive importance. While research approaches will evolve, the core goals will remain consistent—namely, to generate theoretically insightful, empirically supported, and substantively impactful research (Table 3 ).

5 Conclusion

At any given moment in time, the focal concepts, methods, and aims of consumer-behavior scholarship reflect both the prior development of the field and trends in the larger scientific community. However, despite shifting trends, the core of the field has remained constant—namely, to understand the motivations, thought processes, and experiences of individuals as they consume goods, services, information, and other offerings, and to use these insights to develop interventions to improve both marketing strategy for firms and consumer welfare for individuals and groups. Amidst the excitement of new technologies, social trends, and consumption experiences, it is important to look back and remind ourselves of the insights the field has already generated. Effectively integrating these past findings with new observations and fresh research will help the field advance our understanding of consumer behavior.

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Malter, M.S., Holbrook, M.B., Kahn, B.E. et al. The past, present, and future of consumer research. Mark Lett 31 , 137–149 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-020-09526-8

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Consumer Behavior Research

Exploring the Depths of Consumer Insights for Strategic Business Growth

In an era where understanding consumer behavior is more than a competitive edge, it’s a survival imperative, NielsenIQ (NIQ) and GfK emerge as pivotal allies. This expertise is essential for businesses in B2C commerce, retail, and beyond, aiming to navigate the complex consumer landscape for informed, strategic decision-making.

Definition and Importance of Consumer Behavior Research

Consumer behavior research is the study of how individuals make decisions to spend their resources on consumption-related items. It involves understanding the what, why, when, and how of consumer purchases. This field is crucial for businesses as it sheds light on consumer preferences, buying patterns, and decision-making processes. By understanding these aspects, companies can tailor their products and marketing strategies effectively, ensuring alignment with consumer needs and market trends, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Overview of the Impact of Consumer Behavior Research on Marketing Strategies

The insights from consumer behavior research are instrumental in shaping targeted marketing strategies. By understanding consumer motivations and behaviors, businesses can create more relevant and engaging marketing messages, leading to improved customer engagement and retention. This research helps in segmenting the market, identifying potential customers, and understanding the factors that drive consumer decisions. It also aids in predicting future trends, enabling companies to stay ahead of the curve. Effective use of consumer behavior research can lead to the development of products and services that meet the evolving needs of consumers, thereby enhancing brand loyalty and market share.

Consumer and shopper insights

Understand consumer and shopper behavior, demographics, and loyalty with modern, representative consumer panels and customer survey capabilities.

Understanding Consumer Behavior

These diverse influences combine to form unique consumer profiles, which businesses must understand to effectively target their marketing efforts..

Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is influenced by a complex interplay of psychological, social, cultural, and personal factors. Psychological factors include perceptions, attitudes, and motivation, which guide consumers’ emotional and cognitive responses. Social factors encompass family, friends, and societal norms that shape buying habits through peer influence and social trends. Cultural factors involve the broader societal beliefs, values, and customs that dictate consumer behavior in a particular region. Personal factors such as age, occupation, lifestyle, and economic status also significantly impact consumer choices. These diverse influences combine to form unique consumer profiles, which businesses must understand to effectively target their marketing efforts.

The Role of Consumer Behavior in Decision Making

Consumer behavior plays a critical role in the decision-making process. It involves understanding how consumers decide upon their needs and wants, choose among products and brands, and determine their purchase methods. This knowledge is vital for businesses to design and position their offerings in a way that resonates with the target audience. Understanding consumer behavior helps in predicting how consumers will respond to marketing messages and product features, enabling businesses to tailor their strategies to meet consumer needs effectively. It also assists in identifying opportunities for new product development and market expansion.

Consumer Behavior Theories and Models

Consumer behavior theories and models provide frameworks for understanding and predicting consumer actions. The Stimulus-Response Model, for instance, illustrates how marketing stimuli and environmental factors influence consumer responses. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs explains consumer motivation in terms of fulfilling basic to complex needs. The Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior focus on the relationship between attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. The Consumer Decision Model outlines the cognitive process involving need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. These models help businesses in developing strategies that align with consumer psychology and behavioral patterns. They also assist in segmenting the market and targeting consumers with personalized marketing approaches, enhancing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and product offerings.

Research Methods in Consumer Behavior Research

Customer analytics is vital for businesses across various sectors, including FMCG, sales, and e-commerce. It enables companies to create personalized experiences, improve customer engagement, and boost retention, ultimately leading to increased revenue. By understanding consumer behavior through data analysis, businesses can make informed decisions that resonate with their target audience.

Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research methods in consumer behavior research involve structured techniques like surveys and questionnaires to collect numerical data. These methods are useful for gauging consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors across larger populations. Statistical analysis of this data helps in identifying trends, testing hypotheses, and making generalizations about consumer behavior. Quantitative research is valuable for businesses as it provides measurable and comparable insights that can guide strategic decision-making. It helps in understanding the magnitude of consumer responses to various marketing stimuli and in assessing the potential market size for new products or services.

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research methods in consumer behavior focus on understanding the deeper motivations, thoughts, and feelings of consumers. Techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups, and observational studies provide rich, detailed insights that are not typically captured through quantitative methods. This approach is crucial for exploring the underlying reasons behind consumer choices, preferences, and attitudes. Qualitative research helps businesses in gaining a deeper understanding of consumer experiences, emotions, and perceptions, which can be invaluable in developing more effective marketing strategies, product designs, and customer service approaches. It allows companies to explore new ideas and concepts with consumers, gaining insights that can lead to innovation and differentiation in the market.

Experimental Research in Consumer Behavior

Experimental research in consumer behavior involves manipulating one or more variables to observe the effect on another variable, typically consumer behavior or attitudes. This method is used to establish cause-and-effect relationships, providing insights into how changes in product features, pricing, or marketing strategies might influence consumer behavior. Controlled experiments, often conducted in laboratory settings or as field experiments, allow researchers to isolate the effects of specific variables. This type of research is particularly valuable for testing new products, pricing strategies, and marketing messages before full-scale implementation. It helps businesses in making informed decisions based on empirical evidence, reducing the risks associated with new initiatives.

Factors Affecting Consumer Behavior

Psychological factors.

Psychological factors play a significant role in shaping consumer behavior. These include individual motivations, perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. Motivation drives consumers to fulfill their needs and desires, influencing their buying decisions. Perception, how consumers interpret information, can significantly impact their choices, as it shapes their understanding of products and brands. Attitudes and beliefs, formed through experiences and social influences, guide consumer preferences and loyalty. Understanding these psychological factors is crucial for businesses as they influence how consumers view and interact with products and services. By aligning marketing strategies with consumer psychology, businesses can more effectively influence purchasing decisions and build stronger customer relationships.

Social Factors

Social factors significantly influence consumer behavior, encompassing the impact of society, family, and peer groups. Family members and friends can influence buying decisions through recommendations or shared experiences. Social groups, including social networks and communities, also play a role in shaping consumer preferences and behaviors. The influence of social media has become particularly significant, as it not only connects consumers but also serves as a platform for sharing opinions and experiences about products and services. Understanding these social dynamics is important for businesses as they can leverage social influences through targeted marketing strategies, influencer partnerships, and social media campaigns. Recognizing the power of social factors can help businesses in building brand awareness and loyalty among consumer groups.

Cultural Factors

Cultural factors are deeply ingrained elements that influence consumer behavior, including values, beliefs, customs, and traditions. These factors vary across different regions and societies, affecting how consumers perceive and interact with products and services. Cultural influences can determine consumer preferences, buying habits, and brand perceptions. For instance, color symbolism, dietary preferences, and language can all vary significantly between cultures, impacting marketing strategies and product development. Businesses must understand and respect these cultural nuances to effectively cater to diverse consumer markets. Adapting products and marketing messages to align with cultural values and norms can significantly enhance a brand’s appeal and acceptance in different markets.

Personal Factors

Personal factors, including age, gender, occupation, lifestyle, and economic status, also significantly influence consumer behavior. These factors determine individual needs, preferences, and purchasing power. For example, younger consumers may prioritize trendy and innovative products, while older consumers might value functionality and durability. Lifestyle choices, such as health consciousness or environmental awareness, can also drive consumer preferences and choices. Economic factors, such as income and economic conditions, influence consumers’ ability to purchase and their sensitivity to price changes. Understanding these personal factors is crucial for businesses to segment their market effectively and tailor their products and marketing strategies to meet the specific needs of different consumer groups.

Consumer Purchase Decision Making

Stages of the consumer purchase decision-making process.

The consumer purchase decision-making process typically involves several key stages: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior.

In the problem recognition stage, consumers identify a need or desire.

During the information search, they seek out information about products or services that can fulfill their need. In the evaluation stage, consumers compare different options based on attributes such as price, quality, and brand reputation.

The purchase decision involves choosing a product and making the purchase. Finally, in the post-purchase stage, consumers evaluate their satisfaction with the purchase, which can influence future buying decisions and brand loyalty.

Understanding these stages is essential for businesses to effectively influence consumers at each step, from raising awareness to ensuring post-purchase satisfaction.

Influences on Consumer Purchase Decisions

Consumer purchase decisions are influenced by a multitude of factors, including product attributes, brand reputation, marketing messages, social influences, and personal preferences. Product features such as quality, price, and usability are key determinants of consumer choices. Brand reputation, built over time through consistent quality and marketing efforts, also significantly impacts purchase decisions. Marketing messages and advertising play a crucial role in shaping consumer perceptions and driving demand. Social influences, including recommendations from family and friends, as well as online reviews and influencer endorsements, can sway consumer decisions. Personal factors such as individual needs, preferences, and financial constraints also play a critical role. Businesses must consider these diverse influences when developing products and crafting marketing strategies to effectively appeal to their target audience.

Impulse Buying Behavior

Impulse buying behavior refers to unplanned purchases made by consumers, often driven by emotional factors rather than rational decision-making. This type of behavior is typically triggered by external stimuli such as attractive product displays, promotional offers, or persuasive sales tactics. Emotional responses, such as excitement or the desire for instant gratification, also play a significant role in impulse buying. Retailers often leverage this behavior by strategically placing impulse items near checkout areas or using limited-time offers to create a sense of urgency. Understanding the triggers of impulse buying can help businesses in designing marketing strategies and store layouts that encourage such purchases, potentially increasing sales and customer engagement.

Online Shopping and Consumer Behavior

Impact of online shopping on consumer behavior.

The rise of online shopping has significantly impacted consumer behavior, offering convenience, a wider selection of products, and often competitive pricing. Online shopping has changed the way consumers research products, compare prices, and make purchasing decisions. The ease of access to a vast array of products and the ability to shop at any time have increased the frequency and diversity of purchases. Online reviews and ratings have also become important factors in the decision-making process, as consumers increasingly rely on the opinions of others. Additionally, the personalized shopping experiences offered by many online retailers, through targeted recommendations and tailored marketing messages, have further influenced consumer buying habits. Understanding these shifts in consumer behavior is crucial for businesses to adapt their strategies for the digital marketplace, ensuring they meet the evolving needs and expectations of online shoppers.

Factors Influencing Online Buying Behavior

Several factors influence online buying behavior, including website usability, product variety, pricing, customer reviews, and the overall shopping experience. A user-friendly website with easy navigation and a seamless checkout process is crucial for attracting and retaining online shoppers. A diverse product range and competitive pricing are also key factors in attracting consumers. Customer reviews and ratings significantly impact purchase decisions, as they provide social proof and reduce perceived risk. The overall shopping experience, including customer service, delivery options, and return policies, also plays a vital role in influencing online buying behavior. Security and privacy concerns are additional considerations, as consumers are increasingly aware of data protection and online fraud. Businesses must address these factors to create a compelling online shopping experience that meets consumer expectations and drives online sales.

Comparison of Online and Offline Consumer Behavior

Online and offline consumer behaviors exhibit distinct differences, influenced by the unique aspects of each shopping environment. Online shopping offers convenience, a broader selection, and often more competitive pricing, leading to different purchasing patterns compared to offline shopping. Consumers tend to spend more time researching and comparing products online, while offline shopping is often driven by immediate needs and sensory experiences. The tactile experience and instant gratification of offline shopping are not replicable online, but the online environment offers personalized recommendations and a wealth of product information. Offline shopping also provides opportunities for personal interaction and immediate problem resolution, which can enhance customer satisfaction. Understanding these differences is crucial for businesses to tailor their strategies for each channel, ensuring a cohesive and complementary shopping experience that meets the needs and preferences of consumers in both online and offline environments.

Consumer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Importance of customer satisfaction in consumer behavior research.

Customer satisfaction is a critical component of consumer behavior research, as it directly impacts repeat purchases and brand loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, recommend the brand to others, and provide positive reviews. Customer satisfaction is influenced by various factors, including product quality, customer service, and overall shopping experience. Understanding and measuring customer satisfaction helps businesses identify areas for improvement, enhance customer experiences, and build long-term relationships with consumers. High levels of customer satisfaction lead to increased customer loyalty, which is essential for business growth and sustainability.

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is influenced by a range of factors, including product quality, price, service quality, brand image, and customer expectations. Product quality is a primary determinant of satisfaction, as consumers expect products to perform as advertised. Price also plays a role, as consumers evaluate the value they receive relative to the cost. Service quality, encompassing customer service interactions and the overall shopping experience, significantly impacts satisfaction levels. A positive, helpful, and efficient service experience can enhance satisfaction, while negative experiences can lead to dissatisfaction. Brand image, shaped by marketing communications and past experiences, influences consumer expectations and perceptions. Meeting or exceeding these expectations is key to achieving high levels of customer satisfaction. Additionally, personal factors such as individual needs, preferences, and past experiences also influence satisfaction. Businesses must consider these diverse factors to effectively meet consumer needs and enhance satisfaction levels.

Relationship Between Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

The relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty is strong and direct. Satisfied customers are more likely to develop a sense of loyalty to a brand, leading to repeat purchases and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Loyalty is not just about repeat buying; it also involves an emotional connection and a preference for the brand over competitors. Satisfied customers are also more likely to be forgiving of minor issues and are less sensitive to price changes. Conversely, dissatisfied customers are more likely to switch to competitors and share negative experiences with others. Building customer loyalty requires consistently meeting or exceeding customer expectations, providing high-quality products and services, and maintaining positive customer relationships. Loyal customers are valuable assets to businesses, as they tend to have a higher lifetime value, lower acquisition costs, and can become brand advocates, promoting the brand through their networks.

Consumer Research and Marketing Strategies

Utilizing consumer research to develop effective marketing programs.

Consumer research is a vital tool for developing effective marketing programs. By understanding consumer needs, preferences, and behaviors, businesses can create targeted marketing strategies that resonate with their audience. Consumer research helps in identifying market segments, understanding consumer pain points, and uncovering opportunities for product development or enhancement. It also provides insights into the most effective channels and messages for reaching the target audience. Utilizing consumer research in marketing program development ensures that strategies are data-driven and customer-centric, increasing the likelihood of success. It enables businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to the specific needs and preferences of different consumer segments, improving engagement and response rates. Additionally, ongoing consumer research allows businesses to adapt their marketing strategies in response to changing consumer trends and market conditions, ensuring continued relevance and effectiveness.

Targeting Specific Consumer Segments Based on Research Findings

Targeting specific consumer segments based on research findings is a key strategy for effective marketing. Consumer research provides detailed insights into different consumer groups, including their demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and preferences. By analyzing this data, businesses can identify distinct segments within their target market, each with unique needs and characteristics. Targeting these segments with tailored marketing messages and product offerings increases the relevance and appeal of the brand to each group. For example, a segment characterized by health-conscious consumers would respond more positively to marketing messages emphasizing the health benefits of a product. Segment-specific targeting allows businesses to allocate marketing resources more efficiently, focusing on the most promising segments with the highest potential for conversion and loyalty. It also enhances the customer experience by providing consumers with products and marketing messages that are more closely aligned with their individual needs and preferences.

Adapting Marketing Strategies to Consumer Behavior Trends

Adapting marketing strategies to consumer behavior trends is essential for businesses to stay relevant and competitive. Consumer behavior is constantly evolving, influenced by factors such as technological advancements, cultural shifts, and economic changes. By staying attuned to these trends, businesses can anticipate changes in consumer needs and preferences, and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. This may involve adopting new marketing channels, such as social media or influencer marketing, to reach consumers where they are most active. It could also mean developing new products or services that align with emerging consumer trends, such as sustainability or personalization. Adapting marketing strategies to consumer behavior trends requires a proactive approach, with ongoing research and analysis to identify emerging patterns. Businesses that successfully adapt to these trends can capture new market opportunities, enhance customer engagement, and maintain a competitive edge.

Case Studies in Consumer Behavior Research

Analysis of real-life examples and their implications.

Real-life case studies in consumer behavior research provide valuable insights into the practical application of theoretical concepts and the effectiveness of different marketing strategies. For example, a case study in the automotive industry might analyze how consumer preferences for eco-friendly vehicles have influenced car manufacturers’ product development and marketing strategies. In the retail sector, a case study could examine the impact of online shopping on brick-and-mortar stores and how these businesses have adapted to the digital era. These case studies offer concrete examples of how businesses have successfully navigated changes in consumer behavior, providing lessons and strategies that can be applied in other contexts. They also highlight the importance of consumer research in identifying market trends, understanding consumer needs, and developing effective marketing strategies. By analyzing real-life examples, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior, learn from the successes and challenges of others, and apply these insights to their own strategies.

Examination of Successful Marketing Campaigns Based on Consumer Behavior Research

Examining successful marketing campaigns that are based on consumer behavior research can provide valuable insights into effective marketing practices. These case studies demonstrate how a deep understanding of consumer needs, preferences, and behaviors can be leveraged to create impactful marketing campaigns. For instance, a campaign that effectively uses consumer data to personalize messages and offers can result in higher engagement and conversion rates. Another example might be a campaign that taps into current consumer trends, such as sustainability or wellness, to resonate with the target audience. Analyzing these successful campaigns can reveal key strategies and tactics that businesses can adopt, such as the use of specific channels, messaging techniques, or promotional offers. These case studies also highlight the importance of data-driven decision-making in marketing, showing how consumer research can inform and guide successful marketing initiatives.

Motivating Consumers and New Product Adoption

Strategies to motivate consumers to adopt new products.

Motivating consumers to adopt new products is a critical challenge for businesses. Effective strategies for encouraging new product adoption include leveraging social proof, offering free trials or samples, and creating educational content. Social proof, such as customer testimonials or influencer endorsements, can reduce perceived risk and increase consumer confidence in trying a new product. Free trials or samples allow consumers to experience the product firsthand, reducing barriers to adoption. Educational content, such as how-to guides or product demonstrations, can help consumers understand the value and benefits of the new product. Additionally, businesses can use targeted marketing campaigns to reach early adopters and innovators who are more likely to try new products and spread the word to others. Creating a sense of urgency or exclusivity around the new product, through limited-time offers or exclusive access, can also motivate consumers to adopt the product more quickly.

Innovations in Consumer Behavior Research for New Product Development

Innovations in consumer behavior research are playing a crucial role in new product development. Advanced analytics and data mining techniques allow businesses to analyze large datasets and uncover deep insights into consumer needs and preferences. Social listening tools enable companies to monitor social media and online conversations, gaining real-time insights into consumer opinions and trends. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies are being used to test consumer reactions to new products in simulated environments, providing valuable feedback before market launch. Behavioral economics principles, such as understanding cognitive biases and decision-making processes, are also being applied to better predict consumer responses to new products. These innovations in consumer behavior research provide businesses with more accurate and comprehensive data, enabling them to develop products that are closely aligned with consumer needs and preferences, increasing the likelihood of market success.

Social Media and Consumer Behavior

Influence of social media on consumer behavior.

Social media has a profound influence on consumer behavior, shaping how consumers discover, research, and share information about products and services. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter serve as important channels for brand communication and engagement. Consumers use social media to seek recommendations, read reviews, and gather opinions from their networks, which significantly influences their purchasing decisions. Brands leverage social media for targeted advertising, influencer partnerships, and content marketing, creating opportunities for direct interaction and engagement with consumers. Social media also facilitates the spread of trends and viral content, quickly influencing consumer preferences and behaviors. The interactive and dynamic nature of social media means that consumer opinions and trends can rapidly change, requiring businesses to be agile and responsive in their social media strategies. Understanding the influence of social media on consumer behavior is essential for businesses to effectively engage with their audience and influence purchasing decisions.

Role of Social Media in Shaping Consumer Perceptions and Purchase Decisions

Recap of the importance of consumer behavior research.

Consumer behavior research is essential for businesses seeking to understand and effectively respond to the evolving needs and preferences of their target audience. It provides valuable insights into why consumers make certain choices, what influences their purchasing decisions, and how they interact with brands. This research is crucial for developing effective marketing strategies, creating products that meet consumer needs, and enhancing the overall customer experience. By staying informed about consumer behavior trends and applying these insights, businesses can improve customer engagement, increase brand loyalty, and drive growth. In today’s competitive marketplace, a deep understanding of consumer behavior is a key differentiator, enabling businesses to create more personalized, relevant, and impactful marketing initiatives.

Future Directions and Emerging Trends in Consumer Behavior Research

The future of consumer behavior research is marked by rapid advancements in technology and data analytics, leading to more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of consumer preferences and behaviors. Emerging trends include the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze consumer data, providing deeper and more predictive insights. The integration of biometric data, such as eye tracking and facial recognition, offers new ways to understand consumer responses to marketing stimuli. The growing importance of sustainability and ethical considerations is also influencing consumer behavior, leading to increased demand for eco-friendly and socially responsible products. Additionally, the rise of the experience economy is shifting focus from product features to customer experiences, requiring businesses to create more immersive and engaging customer interactions. Staying abreast of these trends and continuously innovating in consumer behavior research will be crucial for businesses to remain relevant and competitive in the changing market landscape.

How NIQ and GfK Can Help

In the complex world of consumer behavior, NIQ and GfK offer the expertise and tools necessary to navigate this landscape effectively. With comprehensive solutions like:

• NielsenIQ’s Homescan : Track, diagnose, and analyze consumer behavior from more than 250,000 households across 25 countries.
• Consumer analytics : Go deeper and create more clarity around shopper behavior with custom surveys and segmentation.
• Consumption moments : Reveal the true motivations behind customer consumption behavior and usage to guide product innovation and marketing strategy .
• gfknewron marke t : Create the right opportunities with gfknewron market
• gfknewron predict : Plan your future using the world’s most comprehensive sales tracking data for Tech & Durables.
• gfknewron Consumer : Understand your consumers’ behavior to redefine your success

By leveraging these tools, businesses can gain a competitive edge, adapting to market changes and consumer trends with agility and precision.

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Association for Consumer Research

Join us for an unforgettable weekend, celebrating the best and brightest in Consumer Research

Join us in paradise for AP-ACR 2024, as the best and brightest in Consumer Research travel to Bali.

Global Thought Leaders in Consumer Research

The Association for Consumer Research is a collection of academics, practitioners, and government leaders devoted to the study of consumer behavior. Together, ACR members use a variety of cutting-edge research methods to uncover consumer insights and disperse this knowledge to improve consumer, business, and social outcomes.

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Championing research that deepens our understanding of consumer behavior from every angle.

Research Journal (JACR)

The Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (JACR) is a collection of the latest research findings from the world’s leading consumer research and marketing scholars.

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ACR is a community of thought leaders representing academia, industry, and government who share a passion for understanding consumer behavior.

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Acr sheth foundation conference scholarship.

To assist PhD students with limited resources to attend the 2024 Paris ACR conference, the Association for Consumer Research in

Early Career Award: Call for Nominations

ACR members are invited to help identify potential candidates for the ACR Early Career Award for Contributions to Consumer Research.

Simonson Mentorship Award: Call for Nominations

ACR members are invited to nominate potential candidates for the Simonson Mentorship Award. The award, launched in 2023, is given

Fellows Award: Call for Nominations

ACR members are invited to submit nominations for the Fellow in Consumer Behavior Award to the Fellows Nominating Committee. The

JACR Webinar: Children and Adolescent Consumer Behavior

CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENT CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: FOUNDATIONS AND NEW RESEARCH DIRECTIONS May 24, 202411:30 am -1:00 pm EST Hosted by Deborah

JACR Pre-Submission Webinar: Issue on Language Research in Marketing

PRE-SUBMISSION WEBINAR: JACR ISSUE ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH IN MARKETING May 23, 202412:00 – 1:30 pm EST9:00 – 10:30 am PST19:00-20:30

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Consumer Insights Podcast

The world’s best marketing professors share their latest research insights and share tips and tricks for marketers, entrepreneurs, and business executives hoping to be at the cutting edge of marketing innovation.

The Ivory Tower can be a lonely place sometimes, but as academic journals place a premium on field studies and engagement with real consumers in actual business contexts, partnering with friendly practitioners has never been more attractive.  In this episode, our very own Kelley Cours Anderson, Ph.D., is joined by Laura Eddy , the Vice President of Research and Insights at Realtor.com.  With over 25 years of consumer insights experience with some of the world’s biggest brands – like Amazon and Walmart – Laura makes the case for the relevance of marketing research and consumer insights in a compelling way. Hear how academic research informs the work of a seasoned practitioner, and how those working in the industry can inspire our research and liven up our ivory tower in this episode of Consumer Insights 101.

For more information, please visit www.acrwebsite.org Follow us on Twitter at @JofACR and @aconsres This episode was hosted by Kelley Cours Anderson Consumer Insights 101 is a production of the Association for Consumer Research

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Joining ACR unlocks resources, opportunities, and access to the latest insights in consumer behavior. Membership includes access to the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (JACR), an expert-curated collection of the most pressing topics in marketing and consumer contexts. 

Members also enjoy access to decades of conference proceedings and research findings, as well as invitations to attend conferences and events with fellow ACR members around the world. Membership opens up a network of the world’s leading consumer research experts, collaboration opportunities, and access to grants/awards to fund research. 

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Joining ACR offers exceptional value whether you are an academic , a recent marketing graduate starting your career, a seasoned consumer expert in industry , or a government leader. ACR provides a wealth of resources, opportunities, and support to help you achieve your goals in the field of consumer research.

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What Is Consumer Research: Methods, Types, Scope & Examples

Jan 19, 2024

Consumer Research Overview:

Consumer research is an essential aspect of any successful business strategy. Understanding your target audience, their preferences, and behaviours is crucial for making informed decisions, developing effective marketing campaigns, and staying ahead in a competitive marketplace. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the world of consumer research, covering key methods, types, and scope, and providing real-world examples of its practical applications.

Introduction to Consumer Research

Consumer research, also known as market research, is the systematic process of gathering and analyzing data about consumers' attitudes, preferences, and behaviours. It is a vital component of strategic planning for businesses and organizations across various industries. The primary goal of consumer research is to gain insights into consumer needs and desires, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and create products and services that meet those needs effectively.

Key Methods in Consumer Research

To conduct effective consumer research, various methods and techniques are employed. These methods can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative Research in Consumer Studies

Quantitative research focuses on gathering numerical data and statistical analysis. It often involves surveys, questionnaires, and structured interviews with a large sample of participants. This method provides numerical insights into consumer behaviors , preferences, and trends. Data collected through quantitative research can be analyzed to identify patterns, correlations, and statistical significance. This approach is particularly useful when a business needs to measure consumer satisfaction, evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, or conduct large-scale market studies.

Qualitative Approaches in Consumer Research

Qualitative research, on the other hand, emphasizes understanding the underlying motivations and emotions behind consumer behaviors. It involves methods like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observational studies. Qualitative research allows researchers to delve deeper into consumers' thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It helps businesses gain a more nuanced understanding of their target audience, enabling them to develop products and marketing strategies that resonate on a deeper level.

Exploring Types of Consumer Research

Consumer research is a multifaceted field with various types, each serving specific purposes:

Demographic Analysis in Consumer Research

Demographic research involves analyzing data related to consumers' age, gender, income, education, and other demographic factors. This type of research helps businesses identify and target specific consumer groups based on their characteristics and preferences.

Psychographic Research Methods

Psychographic research focuses on consumers' lifestyles, values, interests, and personality traits. By understanding the psychological factors that influence consumer behavior, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to align with consumers' beliefs and aspirations.

Consumer Insight Generation

Consumer insight research aims to uncover unique and valuable insights about consumer behaviors and preferences. It often involves innovative data collection techniques and advanced analytics to discover hidden trends and opportunities.

Brand Perception Research

Brand perception research assesses how consumers perceive a brand and its products or services. It helps businesses understand the strengths and weaknesses of their brand image and make necessary improvements.

Product Testing in Consumer Studies

Product testing involves gathering consumer feedback on new products or prototypes. This research type helps businesses refine their products based on real-world consumer input, ensuring they meet market demands.

Comparative Consumer Analysis

Comparative research involves evaluating a business's performance relative to its competitors. It helps identify areas where a business can gain a competitive edge and better serve its target audience.

Cross-Cultural Consumer Research

Cross-cultural research examines consumer behaviours and preferences across different cultures and regions. It helps businesses adapt their marketing strategies to diverse consumer demographics.

The Broad Scope of Consumer Research

Consumer research is not limited to the products and services themselves; it encompasses various aspects of consumer behaviour and market dynamics. The scope of consumer research includes:

Technology in Consumer Studies

As technology continues to advance, consumer research methods have also evolved. Businesses now have access to big data analytics, AI-driven insights, and social media sentiment analysis, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour in the digital age.

Future Trends in Consumer Research

Consumer research is a dynamic field, constantly evolving to keep up with changing consumer preferences and market dynamics. Staying updated with emerging trends in consumer research is essential for businesses to remain competitive.

Data-Driven Consumer Insights

The advent of big data has revolutionized consumer research. Businesses can now harness vast amounts of data to gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, helping them make data-driven decisions and improve their strategies.

Consumer Decision-Making Models

Understanding how consumers make decisions is crucial for businesses. Consumer research explores the decision-making process, including factors like perception, motivation, and cognitive biases, to help businesses influence consumer choices effectively.

Real-world Examples of Consumer Research

Let's look at some practical applications of consumer research in real-world scenarios:

Case Studies in Consumer Research

A leading smartphone manufacturer conducts consumer research to understand what features and specifications consumers prioritize in their smartphones. Based on the findings, the company designs and markets its products accordingly, staying ahead of competitors.

Consumer Satisfaction Measurement

A restaurant chain regularly collects feedback from its customers through surveys and online reviews. By analyzing this data, they identify areas for improvement, make necessary changes to their menu and service, and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

Trend Analysis in Consumer Studies

A fashion retailer closely monitors consumer trends and preferences in clothing. They use this information to adapt their inventory, marketing campaigns, and store layouts to align with current fashion trends and consumer preferences.

Retail Environment Studies

A retail giant conducts in-store consumer research to optimize its store layout, product placement, and signage. By creating a more pleasant and efficient shopping experience, they aim to increase customer satisfaction and sales.

Consumer Feedback and Reviews

An e-commerce platform analyzes customer feedback and reviews to identify product issues, improve product descriptions, and enhance customer trust. This research helps them provide a better shopping experience.

Online Consumer Behavior

An online marketplace tracks user behaviour on its website to improve user experience, optimize search algorithms, and personalize product recommendations, ultimately increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Social Media Impact on Consumer Research

A cosmetics brand monitors social media channels to gauge customer sentiment and feedback. They use this data to adjust marketing strategies and product offerings in real-time, staying responsive to consumer preferences.

Global Consumer Trends

A multinational corporation conducts cross-cultural consumer research to adapt its products and marketing strategies to different regions and cultures, ensuring they resonate with local consumers.

Consumer Preferences and Trends

A food and beverage company studies consumer preferences for healthier options. This research informs their product development and marketing efforts to align with the growing trend of health-conscious consumers.

Lifestyle and Consumer Choices

A fitness equipment manufacturer conducts consumer research to understand how consumers' lifestyles and preferences influence their purchasing decisions. This helps them develop products tailored to specific consumer segments.

Psychological Aspects of Consumer Behavior

A marketing agency delves into the psychological factors that influence consumer decisions. They use this knowledge to create compelling advertisements and marketing campaigns that resonate with consumers on a deeper level.

Cultural Influences in Consumer Research

An international travel agency studies how cultural differences impact travel preferences. They tailor their vacation packages and marketing materials to appeal to diverse cultural groups.

Ethical Considerations in Consumer Research

While consumer research provides valuable insights, it is essential to conduct it ethically and responsibly. Respecting consumers' privacy and ensuring the security of their data should be paramount. Businesses should obtain informed consent, anonymize data when necessary, and adhere to applicable regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA, to protect consumers' rights.

The Evolution of Consumer Research Methods

Consumer research methods have evolved significantly over the years. From traditional face-to-face interviews and paper surveys to online surveys, big data analytics, and AI-driven insights, technology has played a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of consumer research. Businesses must stay current with the latest research tools and techniques to remain competitive in today's fast-paced market.

The Impact of Technology on Consumer Research

Technology has revolutionized consumer research in several ways:

Faster Data Collection

Online surveys and digital data collection methods allow businesses to gather consumer insights more quickly, enabling faster decision-making.

Enhanced Data Analysis

Advanced analytics tools enable businesses to process and analyze vast amounts of data, uncovering hidden trends and patterns that were previously difficult to identify.

Personalization in Consumer Engagement

Technology allows businesses to personalize their interactions with consumers, offering tailored recommendations and experiences based on individual preferences and behaviors.

Data Privacy in Consumer Studies

As technology has evolved, concerns about data privacy have grown. Ethical consumer research practices involve protecting consumers' personal information and respecting their privacy rights.

Integrating AI in Consumer Insights

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can analyze consumer data more efficiently, providing businesses with valuable insights and predictive analytics.

Practical Applications: How Businesses Use Consumer Research

Consumer research is not just an academic exercise; it has practical applications that directly impact a business's success. Here are some ways businesses use consumer research to their advantage:

Product Development

Consumer research helps businesses identify gaps in the market and develop products that align with consumer needs and preferences.

Marketing Strategies

By understanding consumer behaviors and preferences, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to effectively reach and engage their target audience.

Customer Experience Enhancement

Consumer research helps businesses improve customer service, streamline processes, and create a positive and memorable customer experience.

Competitive Advantage

By staying updated with consumer trends and preferences, businesses can gain a competitive edge in the market and position themselves as industry leaders.

Risk Mitigation

Consumer research can help identify potential risks and challenges in the market, allowing businesses to proactively address them.

Innovative businesses use consumer research to identify emerging trends and opportunities, leading to the development of groundbreaking products and services.

In conclusion, consumer research is an indispensable tool for businesses seeking to understand their target audience, make informed decisions, and stay competitive in the ever-evolving marketplace. By employing various research methods, understanding different types of consumer research, and respecting ethical considerations, businesses can harness the power of consumer insights to drive growth, innovation, and success. As technology continues to shape the field of consumer research, businesses that embrace data-driven decision-making and prioritize consumer satisfaction will thrive in the dynamic business landscape of the future.

At Market Xcel, we offer a suite of research services to our clients, leveraging our expertise in consumer research to provide valuable insights and drive success in today's competitive business environment.

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How the experts get results: 8 examples of consumer research

What are the goals of consumer research, 8 consumer research examples (and how to get better insights from your research), what are the benefits of conducting consumer research, best practices for seamless consumer research, conduct better consumer research with the right tools.

Ever look at a brilliant move from a brand and think: how did they nail that so seemingly effortlessly?

The answer often involved customer research.

At its core, consumer research is the gathering and analysis of information about target markets, consumers, and potential customers. It’s not just about numbers and graphs—though they have their place—it’s about understanding people. And with understanding people, you’ll get to understand what tactics and campaigns will win for your brand.

Your research can shape products, influence marketing strategies, and even drive innovation. Whether it’s understanding how customers feel, what they think, or how they behave, consumer research offers a blueprint for brands to build deeper, more meaningful connections with their audience.

There are countless tools at your disposal to crush your customer research. From the ever-popular to the more niche, here are some of the key research methods brand like yours use:

• Online surveys : Tap into real-time feedback and broad audiences with just a few clicks.
• Phone surveys : Engage in deeper, personal conversations and get nuanced insights.
• Focus groups : Dive into group dynamics and gain qualitative insights from lively discussions.
• Field observations : Observe consumers in their natural habitat to glean non-verbal cues and real-world behaviors.
• In-depth interviews : Get detailed, in-depth feedback on specific topics.
• Product testing : Put your product in the hands of consumers and see it through their eyes.

Consumer research is used by businesses to understand their audience more deeply, and to adapt their strategies accordingly—minimizing risks and maximizing revenue. It provides valuable data and insights that influence decisions at every level—from product development to marketing strategies. By digging into the why and how of consumer behavior, brands can make informed choices that truly resonate with their audience, without having to fear they’ll completely miss the mark.

When diving into consumer research, a brand might have several goals in mind, such as:

• Uncovering consumer needs : What are the unsaid (and said!) desires or pain points of your audience?
• Predicting market trends : Where is the market headed? What are significant patterns?
• Enhancing product development : How can your product evolve to serve your customers better?
• Crafting effective marketing campaigns : What messages will truly resonate with your target audience?
• Understanding purchase decisions : Why do consumers choose one brand over another? When and why do people buy?
• Measuring brand perception : How do consumers view your brand compared to competitors?
• Identifying growth opportunities : Are there untapped markets or segments to explore?

1. Bloom & Wild learned from their target market how to make Valentine’s Day fresh again

Bloom & Wild , a direct-to-door flower company from London, wanted to shake things up—but not without doing their due diligence with market research first. They were over the red roses game on Valentine’s Day and wanted to see if their customers were too. Let’s just say, things got bloomin’ interesting.

Key takeaways:

• Challenge assumptions : Just because it’s tradition doesn’t mean it’s right. Bloom & Wild suspected red roses were kinda old news for V-Day. Attest showed a lot of folks felt the same.
• Dig for the real story : Thanks to Attest, they found out 79% of people prefer thoughtful gifts over the same-old. And red roses? 58% found them too cliche.
• Make waves with your data : Strong data makes strong campaigns. Bloom & Wild said goodbye to red roses and launched the “No Red Roses” campaign. A bold move that gave them loads of press.
• The results? Mega blooms : No red roses, no problem. Valentine’s Day sales quadrupled and press coverage went up by 51%.
• Feedback = fab conversations : It wasn’t just about sales and press. Their social channels lit up with folks sharing heartwarming love stories. When you listen to your customers and take risks, people notice (and love it).

What’s the best consumer research software

Picking the right consumer insights software for your needs is super important – here’s our list of the top providers so you can see what each has to offer…

2. Little Moons tapped into their true target customers thanks to customer research data

Little Moons , those yummy Japanese mochi ice cream bites, went big on TikTok. But they didn’t just want to be a 15-second sensation; they wanted to scoop up the long game. Let’s unpack how they didn’t just melt away after the TikTok frenzy, thanks to the coolest customer research.

• Find out who your customer is : If you think TikTok, you think teens. Customer research surprised them: it’s the 30+ audience that found out they were the ones buying their treats.
• Widen the stage : Just being a TikTok sensation isn’t the endgame. Little Moons wanted EVERYONE to know their name. So, they aimed for big newspaper names—think Telegraph, Express, Sun—to make their mochis more mainstream.
• Customers build brands : It’s not just brand managers and marketers. Working with consumer research insights meant their brand awareness shot up.

3. Penfold combined conducting customer research with brand tracking — a smart move

Penfold , the fresh face in digital pensions, saw huge growth in a short time. But growth can be a double-edged sword. With all these new customers, they wondered: “Who are we really connecting with?” They didn’t have any past metrics to compare to, and customer research with brand tracking seemed the way to go. They just needed a tool that was both budget-friendly and user-friendly.

• The growth conundrum : Penfold’s growth was impressive, tripling pension transfers in just a year. But they were navigating without a map, lacking historical brand metrics. Good news: even when that’s lacking, you can still dig into customer research.
• Tracking over time : Brand tracking and market research with Attest delivered some clear messages. Engaging the younger crowd in pensions? Easier said than done. But after a year of tracking and customer research, Penfold is better equipped. They now tailor their messaging to resonate more effectively with their audience.
• Customers and competition : Using Attest, Penfold can keep tabs on their competitors, not just their customers. They can gauge who’s getting attention and strategize on distinguishing their brand, to turn the attention back to themselves.

4. psLondon redefined university marketing through Gen Z insights

psLondon, a seasoned creative and brand consultancy, faced a challenge. Many universities seemed to echo similar messages. And they didn’t resonate. They needed fresh insights, especially from the Gen Z perspective, to help each university carve its distinct identity . Their customer research with Attest helped them formulate stellar campaigns.

• Ask consumers about core values : psLondon sought to understand the unique values students associated with their universities. Their research led to distinct insights, like a university standing out for its emphasis on “freedom”, which then translated to a compelling tagline: “the freedom to achieve”.
• Replicating success : The value-based rebranding approach was not a one-off success. Post its initial triumph, psLondon applied the strategy to four more UK universities, and kept that ball rolling.
• Using customer research beyond aesthetics : This method is not just about a fresh coat of paint. It’s about understanding and communicating intrinsic values that resonate deeply with students. Their approach to customer research has not only made them sought-after in university marketing, but has also led them to share their insights at conferences and in white papers.

5. Evive Nutrition’s used customer insights to guide them on their American journey

Evive Nutrition, after having garnered immense success in Canada with its innovative frozen smoothie cubes, took a bold leap into the US market last year . Consumer research played a key role in this expansion journey.

• Value of subscriptions : Evive’s unique business model hinges on their subscription-based approach. While they boast a strong presence in physical stores, their customer research revealed the growing trend and value of direct-to-door deliveries, especially amidst the modern consumer’s quest for convenience.
• Adapting to America : The significance of customer research can’t be overstated, especially when venturing into unfamiliar territory. Through Attest, Evive was able to gather crucial insights into American consumer preferences, from preferred flavours to feedback on their communication strategies.
• Tailored messaging for the US : Armed with these insights, Evive meticulously tailored its content strategy for the American audience and US consumer trends for 2023 . This went beyond mere promotional materials and trickled down to their website, content creation, and even product packaging.

6. Organic Valley’s used customer insights to create breakfast bites nobody can resist

Organic Valley knows a thing or two about great breakfast snacks, but working together with their target audience really elevated their game . Their approach underscores the importance of customer insights not just in product development but even in nuanced elements like naming.

• Fueling innovation with feedback : They didn’t just aim to create a new product; they wanted one that was both innovative and well-received. By leveraging consumer research insights via Attest, Organic Valley could accelerate the innovation process, optimize messaging, and refine product iterations.
• The name game : It became evident that while flavor was crucial, naming played an equally vital role in the consumers’ perception. A flavor’s name could conjure memories, emotions, and expectations, and Organic Valley was keen on ensuring that these names reflected the product accurately and appetizingly.
• Efficiency and cost-savings : One of the standout benefits of this early-stage consumer feedback was the significant cost savings for Organic Valley. Prompt learnings through Attest saved the brand between 10 to 20 times the potential costs they might have incurred from late-stage adjustments or missteps.

7. GoCardless tapped into customer research to make payments painless

Ever faced a hiccup at the online checkout? GoCardless sure noticed. Intent on understanding the very essence of these hiccups, they delved into their customers’ payment woes to make their sales and marketing efforts truly resonate.

• Zooming in on payment pain points : Online checkouts can be tricky. Sometimes, they’re even downright frustrating. GoCardless wasn’t content to just acknowledge that—they wanted to know the ins and outs. Their goal was to tailor their offerings in a way that directly addressed these prevalent payment challenges and expressed their brand’s value proposition.
• Research-backed solutions : No longer does GoCardless roll out a solution based on mere assumptions. Each of their product launches now stands on a solid foundation of customer research, ensuring it’s not just another feature but a real answer to a genuine customer need.
• A value proposition that sticks : By tapping into direct consumer insights, GoCardless sharpened their value proposition, making it more compelling.

8. DRY Soda Co. harnessed consumer research to drive an impressive 170% revenue surge

DRY Soda Co. didn’t let themselves be stopped by restrictions people faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. With their traditional launch methods now inaccessible, they harnessed the power of consumer research through Attest and saw big wins .

• The challenge of conventional approaches : With COVID-19 throwing a wrench in the works, DRY’s initial “try and buy” strategy of in-store and bar demos for their DRY Botanical Bitters & Soda was halted.
• Pivoting to alternative consumer research methods : Rather than giving in to the setback, DRY channeled their energy into gathering customer research insights. Small focus groups set the initial tone, and these findings were then magnified using Attest.
• Tailored design from direct insights : Consumer feedback obtained through Attest played a pivotal role in product branding. The design effectively embodied the sophistication of a zero-proof cocktail. Furthermore, the emphasis on the “zero-sugar” element, a prime attraction for many consumers, stemmed directly from these insights.

Always doing the same in a market where things change rapidly is a recipe for disaster. Consumers drive trends and changes in every industry, and brands should be following them—it’ll rarely work the other way around.

So, gaining insights from consumer research is crucial for brands aiming to understand, adapt, and evolve. Depending on the specific goals and questions a brand has, they may opt for quantitative or qualitative customer research methods, each with its own unique advantages.

The importance of quantitative research

Definition : Quantitative research involves collecting numerical data to understand patterns, frequencies, and trends. Quantitative consumer research often employs structured surveys to gather data from a larger sample size for primary research, but secondary sources can be used too.

• Broad insights : Provides a wider view of consumer behaviors and opinions.
• Statistical significance : Offers data that can be statistically analyzed for more reliable conclusions.
• Clear trends : Easily identify dominant patterns in consumer behaviors or preferences.
• Speed and efficiency : Online tools and platforms can quickly reach a large number of respondents.

The importance of qualitative research

Definition : Qualitative market research delves deep into consumer behaviors, emotions and reasons behind certain choices. Qualitative consumer research often involves primary research methods like focus groups or video interviews to gain more detailed insights.

• In-depth understanding : Offers deeper insights into the “why” behind consumer decisions.
• Flexibility : Allows for adaptive questioning based on responses.
• Rich data : Gathers detailed anecdotes, stories, and reasons that can provide context.
• Uncovering nuances : Captures the subtleties in consumer emotions and preferences.

By understanding the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative customer research, brands can select the right approach for their specific needs, ensuring they obtain insights that are both broad in scope and deep in understanding.

Consumer research can be a game-changer for brands, but to truly harness its power, it’s crucial to approach it with the right strategies. Here are some expert-recommended best practices to ensure you get the most out of your research efforts:

Use consumer research tools to conduct customer research

Conducting market research at scale and with depth is best done using consumer research tools . They can significantly streamline the process and provide more accurate results. These tools offer a structured way to gather, analyze, and interpret data, making the entire process more efficient and effective.

Prioritize clear objectives

Before you conduct market research of any type, it’s essential to define clear objectives. What are you trying to achieve with this research? Whether it’s understanding consumer preferences, identifying market gaps, or measuring brand perception, having a clear goal ensures your efforts are directed effectively.

Be open to unexpected insights

While it’s essential to have clear objectives, it’s equally important to be open to unexpected insights. Sometimes, the most valuable information comes from unplanned findings. By being receptive to these, you can uncover new opportunities or areas of improvement.

Ensure diversity in your sample

It’s crucial to ensure that your sample represents a diverse set of consumers. This helps in capturing a wider range of perspectives, leading to richer insights. Make sure that your participants vary in age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and other demographic factors relevant to your study. The right consumer insights software helps you diversify your samples, but makes sure to check.

Validate and re-test

Once you’ve gathered your initial insights, it’s always a good practice to validate them with your entire consumer insight team . This could mean conducting a follow-up study, re-testing your hypotheses, or analyzing the data through another lens, making sure all teams are aligned. This ensures that the insights are robust and not just a one-off anomaly.

If you’re looking to conduct customer research and really want to dig deep—and not just scratch the surface of customer satisfaction numbers or basic personas—try Attest.

Our research platform help you get a deeper understanding of what moves your target consumers, leaving you with all the data you need to inform your strategies. You’ll get a dedicated research expert to support you along the way, and it’s an easy start from our templates .

Ready to get to know your customers?

Consumer research is the process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a company’s target audience. This research helps brands understand consumer needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations, allowing them to make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and other business areas.

It’s always customer research ‘o clock somewhere. Consumer research should be conducted at various stages of a product or service lifecycle. This includes before a product launch (to understand market needs), post-launch (to gather feedback and refine), and periodically thereafter (to stay updated with changing consumer behaviors). It’s also crucial during brand repositioning, entering new markets, or when addressing specific challenges in the market.

It does depend on your specific goals and the tools you will use, but there is a general framework that you can draw inspiration from. Different consumer insight companies will follow slightly different processes, but the best consumer research process involves a series of structured steps: 1. Defining clear research objectives. 2. Selecting the appropriate research method (quantitative, qualitative, or a mix). 3. Designing the research tool (e.g., survey or focus group). 4. Collecting data from a representative sample (both qualitative data and quantitative data) 5. Analyzing and interpreting the data. 6. Presenting the findings in a comprehensible manner to stakeholders.

The specific questions in consumer research will vary based on objectives. However, some common questions include: – What factors influence your purchase decision? – How satisfied are you with our product? – What improvements would you like to see? – How does our brand compare to competitors? It’s essential to ask open-ended questions to capture comprehensive insights and ensure questions are unbiased to get genuine response

Consumer research provides brands with insights into their target audience’s needs, behaviors, and preferences, which is the guiding light for any successful brand. It enables them to create products and services that resonate with their audience, craft effective marketing strategies, identify market opportunities, and address challenges proactively.

Elliot Barnard

Customer Research Lead 

Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

Pragadeesh Natarajan

Last Updated: 30 May 2024

12 min read

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

• 6 Customer Research Methods
• How SurveySparrow Can Help

Do you want to improve your marketing or product? Then, customer research can help.

Your customer is at the heart of all your business decisions. In fact, everything revolves around a customer. A business is about having a paying customer, and it wouldn’t exist without one.

The effectiveness of your product or marketing depends on how well you know your customers. When you know your customers better, you can make better product or marketing decisions.

In this article, we break down:

• What customer research is
• Why it’s valuable for your business
• Different types of customer research
• Six customer research methods you can use to refine and grow your business

Customer research (or consumer research ) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.

Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.

Businesses typically conduct customer research to uncover new insights on their customers. They then use these newly uncovered insights to improve their product, craft an effective marketing strategy, and more.

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

• Who are my ideal customers? Who is the best fit (or worst fit) for our product?
• What channels can I use to find and communicate with my ideal customers?

Online survey tools like SurveySparrow can help you answer these questions. With omnichannel survey distribution, snazzy data visualization, and 1,500+ integrations with your favorite tools, SurveySparrow simplifies customer research for your GTM and product teams.

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A. How well do you know your customers? Not knowing enough about your customers can cost you time and money.

For example, a recent survey revealed that 46% of customers broke up with a brand because they received irrelevant content pushes.

Successful marketers realize that research is necessary to understand and cater to the ever-changing needs of today’s customers. According to a study by Coschedule:

• Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter.
• 56% of the study’s most elite marketers research at least once a month.

B. You shouldn’t make assumptions about your customers’ preferences or needs. You have to go out there and get opinions from real customers.

C. You need to go beyond your general idea about your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to serve them with your product or service.

D. If you want to make your product the best in the market, you need to identify any unmet needs and learn how well your product serves the needs of your current customers.

E. Customer research helps you learn more about your customers, both the potential and existing ones. Serving your customers better than the alternatives starts with understanding them better and more deeply.

F. Here are other key reasons why you should research customers:

• Know the Why : Your analytics dashboard merely tells you what your customers do. Only research can help you understand why they do that.
• Validate Assumptions and Best Practices : In most cases, guesswork leads to terrible decisions. Your customers might not need what you think they need. And what works for most businesses might not work for you. The only real way to know is to talk to your customers.

Customer research can be done in two distinct ways: primary and secondary.

Primary research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. In other words, in primary research, you collect the data yourself. Some examples of primary research are face-to-face interviews, surveys, and social media interactions.

Secondary research

Secondary research (or desk research ) is done by someone else. In secondary research, you make use of data that’s been collected by other people. A few examples of secondary research are forums or communities, industry reports, and online databases.

Primary and secondary research can be further broken down into two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is descriptive and conceptual. And the nature of the data makes it subjective and interpretive. Examples of qualitative data include descriptions of certain attributes, such as blue eyes or chocolate-flavored ice cream .

Quantitative data

Quantitative data can be expressed using numbers, which means it can be counted or measured. As opposed to qualitative data, it’s objective and conclusive. Examples of quantitative data include numerical values such as measurements , length , cost , or weight .

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

Now that you know what customer research is and why it’s important, read on to learn the different consumer research methods you can use to make the most of it.

In a survey, you ask a series of questions to your customers regarding a subject or concept.

You can conduct a survey in person, over the phone, through emails, or online forms.

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

• Quickly collect a ton of insightful data without the high costs.
• The data you collect using surveys is simple to analyze.
• You can ask various questions since you get a wide range of question formats.

When it comes to surveys, it’s all about how you ask. Clear and concise questions can help you get reliable information.

An online survey tool is your best bet for quickly gathering customer information. All you need to do is create a survey with a ready-to-use template and send your customers a link to take it.

If you’re in need of a cost-free and easy-to-use solution for conducting customer research surveys and beyond, consider exploring SurveySparrow . This tool aids in gathering essential data by enabling you to conduct thorough data analysis via its user-friendly and conversational survey format.

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In an interview, you speak directly to your customers and ask them open-ended questions.

• Interviews allow you to have deep, one-on-one conversations with your customers and explore a topic in-depth.
• You can go into the details, obtain data beyond surface-level information, and gather deeper insights.

While interviews allow you to probe deeper into a subject, success depends on the expertise and skills of the researcher (or interviewer) conducting the interviews.

Conducting interviews isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and costly. However, the information you collect can be invaluable for your company’s growth.

You can meet your customers in person to conduct your interviews. Or you can use video conferencing tools such as Google Meet or Zoom to converse with your customers online.

Your analytics dashboard lets you in on your customers’ actions within your product.

Just a glance at it and you’ll know what your customers do and how they engage with your product.

The irony is that customers don’t know what they want or why. They might think they need something but that might not be the case.

What they say they need doesn’t equate to what they do.

The point is that customer-reported behavior is different from actual behavior. That’s why it pays to track and observe your customers’ behavior.

You can use heatmaps, click tracking, scroll mapping, and user-recorded sessions to gain insights into your users’ actions and behavior.

Focus Groups

In this method, you combine a small group based on certain criteria such as demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

And you ask this group about whatever topic or concept. It could be about your product, marketing message, or something else that’s related to your customers or business.

The idea is to get them to talk to each other and have meaningful conversations.

A moderator helps facilitate the conversations between the individuals in this group. The moderator will try to draw meaningful insights from these conversations and discussions.

You mainly use this technique to understand a certain topic or subject better.

Competitive Analysis

Studying your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to learn more about the target market and the existing solutions.

You can analyze both your direct and indirect competitors depending on the needs you address and the customers you cater to.

You can conduct a competitive analysis from a marketing or product perspective.

If you conduct your analysis from a marketing perspective, you study your competition’s SEO strategy , landing page copy, blog content, PR coverage, social media presence, etc.

You can also conduct your competitive analysis from a product perspective and analyze your competitors’ user experience, features, pricing structure, etc.

Review Mining

The reviews of you and your competitors are another great way to get inside your customer’s head. This method can be especially valuable if you are a SAAS company.

It helps you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. This understanding helps you improve your own products and better address the needs of your ideal customers.

This kind of data is easy to acquire as it’s publicly available, and you can get them on:

• Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra.
• Forums and niche communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, Quora, etc.

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

SurveySparrow facilitates comprehensive customer research by enabling businesses to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback, leading to better informed and customer-centric decisions.

• Collect Feedback Easily : Create simple surveys to find out what customers think about your products or services.
• Understand Satisfaction : Use surveys to figure out how happy customers are with what you offer.
• Learn Buying Habits : Find out why customers buy certain products, which helps in planning what to sell.
• Get Product Opinions : Ask customers what they like or don’t like about your products to make improvements.
• See How People View Your Brand : Understand how customers see your brand, which is important for your marketing.
• Keep Up with Trends : Regular surveys help you stay updated on what your customers want or need.
• Group Customers : Identify different types of customers to target them more effectively with your marketing.
• Improve Customer Experience : Learn where you can make the buying process better for your customers.
• Test New Ideas : Before launching new products, check if your customers would be interested.
• Check Customer Loyalty : Find out if customers would keep using your products or recommend them to others.

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Final thoughts.

Businesses that deeply understand their customers have a huge advantage over the ones that don’t. Period.

Whatever you’re looking to learn or achieve, it becomes a lot clearer with a little research.

When done right, customer research can be your competitive advantage.

Be sure to pick a method that’s right for your situation. What are you looking to learn and achieve? Think through each research method carefully and pick the one that works best for you.

Have you conducted customer research? What did you learn? And how did it go? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

And if you’re looking to conduct customer research through surveys, feel free to check out SurveySparrow .

I'm a developer turned marketer, working as a Product Marketer at SurveySparrow — A survey tool that lets anyone create beautiful, conversational surveys people love to answer.

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Consumer Market Research – A Comprehensive Guide for 2022

Consumer trends are shifting more quickly than ever.

And businesses are shifting with them, focusing on keeping aligned with their consumers. After all, it’s all about the customer.

But what implications does this have for brands?

To future proof your business and continue to stay relevant, you need access to learnings and insights about your consumers and the greater market. 

This is where consumer market research comes in.

What is Consumer Market Research?

Consumer market research is the overall study of the target consumer in a particular industry. Brand marketers turn to consumer market research to gain business intelligence in three main areas:

• Customers (Habits, needs, desires, pain points, overall sentiment)
• Their company and products (Feelings about their overall brand and products)
• Competitors (What’s working for them, strategies, etc.)

Types of Consumer Market Research

There are two types of consumer market research:

• Primary research
• Secondary research

Primary research involves actively collecting information and data. The research can be further divided into quantitative research, such as surveys, charts, and statistics, or qualitative research, which are ideas, feelings, focus groups, and interviews.

Secondary research is working with aggregate data that already exists and information that’s already out there, such as looking at product reviews. 

Why Use Consumer Market Research?

Brands can use insights gathered from their consumers in several different ways. Here are some of the most common use cases.

• Brand Research – Managing your company’s brand/identity, including the images, narratives, and characteristics that people associate with it. This can include your consumers’ advocacy, awareness, loyalty, and perceptions, as well as your brand’s penetration, positioning, and value.
• Product development – Developing new products is made easier by incorporating feedback from your target consumers. It allows you to research and test the product, positioning, packaging, messaging, and more. 
• Understanding audiences – Segmenting specific audiences to understand their motivations, needs, pain points, and how to best approach them and speak to them. 
• Tracking brand sentiment – Tracking brand sentiment helps you understand how your target audience feels about your brand, what differentiates you from your competitors, and the overall trends in the industry, such as pricing, that can determine where opportunities lie.
• Testing ad campaigns – Test creative from your ad campaigns with consumer market research to see what resonates with your audience and creates the desired impact.
• Measuring satisfaction – Consumer market research can measure customer satisfaction and overall loyalty to your brand.
• Competitive analysis – Assess competitive brands’ strengths and weaknesses and analyze consumer perception.
• Usability testing – Observe how consumers use your product in real-time, or journey testing on a website or application.

Consumer Market Research Best Practices

Consumer market research is a critical tool in a marketer’s arsenal for a variety of objectives. However, success hinges on a set of best practices. By following these best practices, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of consumer market research and further your marketing strategy.

Pre-qualify Your Consumers/Define Your Scope

Make sure you are speaking to the right consumers for your study by screening them first. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do they use your product category? 
• Do they use your brand or a competitor brand? 
• Do they shop at a particular retailer? 
• Do they fit the lifestyle/attitudes of your consumer target? 
• Is your product premium or casual?

You should ensure you are talking to consumers who fit your target audience. If not, your efforts won’t yield many benefits.

Be Clear About Your Purpose

You should know ahead of time what you want to learn from the study and how the data will support your business decisions. To do this, form some hypotheses that the study will be designed to prove/disprove, and specific questions should be built around that purpose.

Work Backward From Business Issue to Survey Question

The best way to plan out consumer market research and find success is to work backward from the issue itself to the survey questions. For example:

• What decision are you trying to make, or what issue or knowledge gap in your business are you trying to solve?
• What consumer data would help address that issue or inform that decision?
• What survey questions would best help to obtain that consumer data?

Keep it Simple

• Ask consumers clear and concise questions designed to specifically obtain the information that is relevant to your brand. 
• Do not ask leading questions that push consumer response in a certain direction. 
• Allow for “Neutral” and “Does not apply” answer choices.
• A single survey should be addressing three research goals at most to ensure your survey is focused and not overwhelming. Keep to no more than 30 questions total.

Choose An Appropriate Structure or Format For Each Question

The answer scales and options you provide to consumers in your survey are very important and will impact the data you receive. 

• Know when to ask “Select one” vs. “Select all that apply,” or when to use a scale.
• Randomize answers when appropriate.
• Keep answer choices balanced and not lopsided.
• Use comprehensive answer choices and avoid overlapping.
• Make sure the answer choices you provide fit with the question asked.
• Use open-ended questions sparingly.

Preview and Test Your Survey

You’ll want to ensure that the survey you put out reflects your initial goals. Previewing your survey beforehand helps avoid any potential mistakes and allows you to check that your survey is logical, engaging, and not too overwhelming. 

You should also have someone else in your organization test your survey for a second opinion.

Ensure You Have a Sufficient Sample Size

Make sure you have a sufficient sample size for your data to be readable and representative. It can be a serious mistake to make crucial business decisions based on data that might not be meaningful due to the sample size.

As a rule of thumb, the more important the business decision you’re making based on this data, the higher the threshold. 

Any differences in the data you highlight should not be within the margin of error—too small to be considered a meaningful difference. A difference of 5% or less may be within the margin of error, especially if you do not have a considerable sample size.

Segment Your Results for Deeper Insights

Your total sample results are only part of the story! 

Some of the most meaningful survey results can be found by splitting your survey results. 

For example:

• Male/female
• Different age ranges 
• Users of your product vs. your competitor product 
• First-time parents vs. parents with multiple children

Achieving deeper and more valuable insights starts with segmenting the results of your overall surveys. 

How To Perform Consumer Market Research

Consumer market research can take on many different forms, such as:

• Focus groups
• In-depth interviews
• Message boards
• Behavioral observations (purchase activity, website activity, etc.)
• Applied consumer neuroscience (eye-tracking, facial coding, etc.)
• Social media listening

Although some larger brands have internal research teams, many brands turn to a market research agency to conduct their consumer market research. Working with a research firm is usually done on a project basis. A number of firms specialize in consumer market research, including:

After reaching out to a research firm, you’ll need to share your objectives with them. The firm needs to know what you’re looking to learn and who your consumer market is. The research firm will then recruit people, build the necessary surveys, conduct research, collect the data, analyze, and then produce the results you’re seeking. Typically, this process takes between six and eight weeks. This timeline can be a hindrance since brands typically need answers fast, and starting from scratch for every study can be inefficient. 

One alternative to gain continuity of results and speed is creating a dedicated panel. Dedicated panels also help reveal trends, and because the same set is followed across studies, it can provide deeper understanding and connected learnings. However, this can mean a larger upfront investment with a research firm to recruit and qualify panel members as well as more ongoing costs to “maintain” the panel. 

The challenge with consumer panels is providing ongoing engagement and occupying the members to give them a reason to keep coming back between studies, which can be months apart. Just like in baseball, panel members need to be kept warm on the bench in between studies.

How Vesta Can Help With Consumer Market Research  

Another alternative to many of the drawbacks and challenges that come with using research firms for consumer market research is the Vesta platform.

With your Vesta online brand community , you have a consumer panel ready to go at all times, meaning there’s no time needed for recruiting. Research needs arise constantly, and you need to be able to deliver results on a dime. Vesta delivers the speed that research firms, unfortunately, can’t provide. 

There’s also the issue of engagement. When a research firm forms a panel, the period between surveys requires a certain level of engagement to avoid panel decay. The Vesta platform has activities, discussions, and quick offers to keep consumers interested and engaged, ensuring they’re always available when insights are needed. 

Vesta also provides a ton of flexibility, with many different types of research tools, from polls for quick and fun insights to in-depth qualitative research in the form of focus groups and interviews. Vesta also offers applied consumer neuroscience options, such as eye-tracking and facial coding, to target non-conscious decision-making. 

We know that consumer market research provides a ton of value to marketers. That’s why we’re here to help. 

Consumer Market Research Can Greatly Impact Your Marketing Efforts 

The power of consumer market research can’t be overstated. In a world where consumers have more control than ever, understanding what makes them tick can provide you with a considerable edge over your competitors. 

Consumer market research helps brands in nearly every aspect of their business, from overall product development to the intricacies of ad creative. 

While it might not be a magic pill, consumer market research can help you develop an effective marketing strategy and give you unparalleled insights into your target market. 

Questions About Consumer Market Research?

The Vesta team is here to answer any questions you have, whether you’re looking for more information on consumer market research or how the Vesta platform can help. Reach out to us . We’re always here to help.

Interested in more?

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VP, Product Strategy

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Consumer Research: Definition, Methods and Benefits (+ Templates)

Nemanja Jovancic

Sep 02 2020

No comments

Launching a new product? Considering whether you should offer new services or tweak the current ones? Such moments can be challenging both for established brands and those just trying to break into the market.

Whenever you have something new to offer to your customers, there are numerous factors to be taken into account if you want to make well-informed decisions that would increase the chances of a successful launch, instead of stumbling in the dark and hoping for the best.

This is where consumer research kicks in.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research is the aspect of market research that focuses on identifying the motivation, preferences, and purchase behavior of (potential) consumers.

Companies rely on consumer research to analyze and better understand consumer psychology so as to improve their products or services, making them more customer-oriented, and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and the number of sales.

Having a deep understanding of consumer decision-making and purchase behavior allows brands to build products that will find their market fit more easily, put the optimal price tag onto them, and establish the right distribution and promotion channels.

Let’s say a beauty industry company wants to launch a new skincare product. In order to de-risk their production and product placement, they could launch a skincare quiz to find out what it is that their consumers actually need:

And then they could do additional market research to find out more about their ideal customer’s demographics and purchase habits. Conducting this kind of consumer research is expected to facilitate a successful launch for the new product and ensure that there’s actual demand for such a product on the market.

Before we dig any deeper into consumer research, here’s a survey template you could easily use to do your own market research.

Consumer research survey template

Just here for an easy way to conduct your own consumer research? No worries, we’ve got you covered – grab this market research template and learn more about your consumers right now.

If you would like to learn more about how and why you should conduct the research using the template above, keep on reading.

Why you should conduct consumer research

Often, people do research just because they’ve been told to do so. But if you’re looking to better understand your consumers and their needs, you need to know why you should be conducting consumer research in the first place. Even though there are plenty of benefits, here are the top three I’d like to point out:

Understand market readiness

No matter how good you think your products or services are, there’s a fair chance you’re not completely objective nor representative of your ideal target consumer.

When launching a new product, there’s a lot of investments going around and, naturally, you’d expect adequate ROI. However, if there’s not enough market potential, your investment might fail. This is where consumer research kicks in.

Identify target consumers

Another important benefit of conducting consumer research is the ability to identify and analyze your target customers. In other words, this allows you to determine who might be interested in buying your products or using your services.

For example, you can use a demographic survey  to obtain various information on your customers such as age, gender, geographic location, employment, marital status, and more. Or you can rely on different types of market segmentation  to reach your ideal customer. This would allow you to customize your marketing efforts to better appeal to particular customer sets.

Get feedback on existing products or services

Finally, consumer research can help you obtain valuable feedback on your current business offer. Such feedback can help you update or improve your current products based on the valuable information from the actual consumers.

Getting feedback is important because it helps brands and businesses better understand the consumers’ standing point and come up with an improved product that would help address the challenges they’ve been having and fully meet the actual market needs and requirements.

Main consumer research methods

There are two main types of consumer research – quantitative and qualitative . Both types rely on different research techniques that we’ll explore in more detail down below.

Quantitative consumer research

By 2025, the global data pool is expected to rise up to 175 zettabytes . That’s why meaningful data has become more valuable than ever and the way companies collect data  can either make or break their business success.

Quantitative research is a data collection method that revolves around numbers and stats. It’s an essential part of consumer research that can provide businesses with measurable data on their customers. Such data can be mathematically and statistically analyzed in order to gain more insight into consumer behavior.

The most effective and most popular techniques for obtaining quantitative data are different types of online questionnaires such as surveys and polls.

Surveys and polls

Nowadays, the easiest way to obtain consumer data is through online surveys, questionnaires, and polls. Thanks to highly-advanced and intuitive survey tools , it’s now easier than ever to create your own data collectors, either from scratch or using professionally written templates.

All the LeadQuizzes users, for example, gain free access to 78 professionally written and beautifully designed survey, quiz, and form templates. This includes market and consumer research survey templates such as the ones shown in the image below:

To access the LeadQuizzes templates, just log in to your account (or sign up for a free trial  if you don’t have an account yet) and select your preferred template from the selection of pre-made templates . You can use the templates as they are or easily customize them to meet your specific needs.

One of the easiest ways to obtain quantitative customer data is by using an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey . This customer research technique allows you to easily evaluate the satisfaction of your current users and express it through numbers for easy analysis. With just one single question – “How likely are you to refer our business?” – you can easily measure consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

To preview (or use) an NPS survey template, just click on the image below:

Qualitative consumer research

Unlike quantitative research, which relies on numbers, qualitative consumer research is descriptive in nature. To obtain qualitative data, you need to be using open-ended questions with no predefined answer options. While this means that you can still be using online surveys to obtain qualitative data as well, there are a few more options to choose from.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small group of people who are experts on a particular subject matter and whose job is to analyze a particular aspect of consumer research – e.g. a new update, feature, product, and so on.

Ideally, focus groups contain somewhere between 3-10 people, including an obligatory moderator. Depending on the research topic and goal, the members of a focus group should be brought together around certain common denominators.

For example, if you’re doing research on the use of birth control pills, all the members of your focus group need to be sexually active females. The remaining parameters like age, education, employment, and so on, may or may not be relevant here.

1-to-1 interviews

In most cases, this is a conversational method that presupposes an interviewer and an interviewee. During this type of consumer research, the researcher (the interviewer) asks questions (that are equivalent to the open-ended survey questions) related to products and services.

There are two main limitations to this method. Firstly, it’s very time consuming and might become overwhelming if you have to interview an excessively large number of consumers. And secondly, it very much relies on the researcher’s expertise and ability to extract the relevant information from interviewees.

Social media monitoring

This type of consumer research could also be described as content or text analysis but, in recent years, it primarily refers to the analysis of consumer behavior on social media. Here, the researchers analyze consumers’ social life by decoding their social media posts and interactions to draw inferences related to their consumer behavior and habits.

After the research

Above, we’ve introduced you to consumer research – what it is, why you need to conduct it, and what are some of the best ways to do so. Once you’ve managed to conduct your research, gather the necessary data, analyze it, and come to certain conclusions, you should have a better insight into the exact needs and pain points of your customers.

This will allow you to adapt your business, update, tweak or completely revamp your products and services, and develop a better marketing plan that would allow you to attract more consumers, determine the optimal price, increase the number of sales, and reduce costs.

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• Guide to consumer research

An Introductory Guide to Consumer Research And How to Conduct One

Consumer research is used across industries in order to gain key insights into consumer behavior and needs. In this article, we will explore the key aspects of consumer research, namely what it is and how to do it. 

What Is Consumer Research? 

Consumer research is research undertaken to gain an idea of customers' preferences, attitudes, motivations, and buying behaviors. This information can enable you to categorize customers into groups or segments, and tailor marketing efforts (or other aspects of the business, such as product development) to those who are most likely to spend their money on your product or service. 

Research can take many different forms - such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. All of which enable you to gain answers to questions that your business is struggling to find through other means. 

For example, most businesses have some kind of customer service department. Through consumer research, you can find out what methods of customer service are most preferred by your customers and invest more in these methods resulting in greater customer satisfaction.   

Consumer research enables you to group customers into customer segments. A customer segment is simply a collection of individuals with similar consumer data - possibly in terms of the personal demographics such as age, gender, or location, or it could be that their spending habits, AOV , and preferences are similar. 

These customer segments can be targeted in different ways, enabling you to maximize revenue from each individual.

2 Types of Consumer Research

There are two basic types of research, both of which apply to consumer research. 

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research produces quantifiable data. This means that it can be considered directly in numbers and percentages and, as a result, is usually easier to analyze. 

For example, perhaps you want to evaluate your quality assurance strategies . In order to gain quantitative data for this, you might ask yes/no questions or ask customers to rank statements on a scale from 1 to 10, such as “I frequently come across bugs in X software”. 10 would indicate all the time, and 1 would be never. The responses can then be added together to create a percentage. 

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is often more in-depth, and questions enable responders to explore their answers in full detail. In 2021, 67% of researchers agreed that online or virtual qualitative research is helpful to consumer research. Qualitative research enables a much deeper understanding of the customer experience and opinion but is harder to analyze. 

For example, returning to our example of experiencing bugs in software, a qualitative researcher may approach this question as follows: 

Q: How often do you experience bugs when using our software? Explain in detail when and where this occurs. 

A: I only experience bugs when using the accounting tool of the application. Whenever I try to export a report of my accounts, the app glitches and deletes my data. 

This answer provides specific examples to the researcher and would make solving the problem much simpler. This is reflected in how business practices and software development intersect, as business needs are shaping new technology, a response that is driven through research. 

However, if you are dealing with hundreds of responses, getting through them all can be challenging. 

3 Benefits of Consumer Research 

1. provides valuable market insight.

Consumer research provides insights that you cannot get from analytics alone, as it gives you insight into the thoughts and feelings of the consumers. These insights are extremely valuable, as if you know how to use customer analytics , you can apply these skills to implementing the data gathered from your consumer research. 

2. Improve Marketing and Business Decisions 

Once you have gained these insights, consumer research can actually be used to inform your marketing and business decisions and can even help the creation of brand marketing reports . For example, your research could suggest that your business lacks organization across its teams. This could lead to your business investing in WFM tools and ultimately revolutionizing its reputation. 

3. Assists in Determining Market Position

Another benefit of consumer research is that it can provide insights into where your business sits within the market. You can find out whether you are preferred to your competition or vice versa, and why. It helps your business define its market position and make adjustments to improve this or solidify its brand identity. 

5 Methods of Consumer Research 

There are many different methods of conducting customer research. In this section, we will go through some of the key options available. 

Interviews are a great way to conduct consumer research. The nature of spoken conversation often enables previously unconsidered ideas to come up naturally and opens up opportunities for discussions that reveal deeper insights. Furthermore, if you have access to software offering a free video call online , these interviews no longer need to be done in person. 

• Focus Groups

Interviews can be conducted in focus groups where a select group of individuals discuss and offer their opinions on a matter together. These individuals might be from the same customer sectors or may represent different perspectives. How you choose to structure these is up to you. 

• One-on-one Interviews

Alternatively, you may prefer to approach these with one-on-one interviews. This form of interview can often lead to a more in-depth conversation but, for logical reasons, are less time-efficient and can miss out on the group dynamic spurring new ideas. 

Surveys are a written alternative to interviews and do not require a researcher to be present at the time of research. They can also be sent to a much larger group of respondents (meaning a more detailed set of data) and can be a combination of quantitative and qualitative responses. 

Analytics is nothing new to anyone working in marketing, and it can be an excellent tool for conducting consumer research. Analytics will provide quantitative insights into consumer behavior, such as conversion rates and average sale values, and can contribute to consumer research. 

Review Mining

Review mining can be a great way to gain consumer insights, and it doesn’t involve actively pursuing new research. 

Previous reviews can often provide a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research through written descriptions and “star” system reviews. However, this method limits you to what is already available, and these reviews may not specifically target areas you are keen to research. 

Secondary Research

Secondary research refers to looking at previously created research in your industry. Lots of this can be accessed online, and even if this isn’t the method you primarily choose to use, it can be a great starting point to guide your own research. 

5 Steps to Conduct Consumer Research

1. set smart research goals and objectives.

SMART goals should be set before any business pursuit. Standing for specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, and time-bounded, these goals can help guide your research and avoid going off topic.

2. Determine the Research Methodology and Audience

As previously mentioned, there are several different methods of conducting consumer research. Choosing from the list above (and you are not limited to only one method), you should cover both quantitative and qualitative data for the best insight. 

Develop a Buyer Persona

Develop a buyer persona in order to determine who your audience will be for the research. Buyer personas can be seen somewhat like “characters” in a story. They have certain wants, motivations, and behavior patterns. They make up your customer segments and who the research will target. 

3. Conduct Research and Compile Data Findings

Put the research into action: send out surveys, schedule interviews, review your google analytics. Put all your findings into a spreadsheet, and begin to group responses logically. With qualitative data, it may be useful to identify “themes” in responses and categorize them according to these. 

Once data is compiled, it is recommended to present it in a visually effective report , including charts or graphs depending on the content. 

4. Analyze and Interpret Data Results

Take your data and consider what the information is telling you. Are you seeing frequent negative responses in one area? Do customers feel like you are overpricing your service? Interpret the data and come to conclusions as to what your business may need to do. 

5. Take Action in Response to the Findings

Put your findings into action! If you are seeing consistent weaknesses in one area, this is a great time to bring the team together and brainstorm ideas to work around this and improve your business. When you implement changes that benefit the customers, you will see results coming back around to you in the form of increased engagement. 

Key Takeaway

Consumer research is a brilliant way to ensure the success of any business. Enabling you to see how your customers view your company and gain key insights into how your business can improve. Provided your research has clear goals and gathers in-depth data, there is no reason your research shouldn’t be a raging success! 

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad , an AI-powered cloud communication platform that fosters better team collaboration and boosts lead generation strategies . She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn .

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Market Research and Consumer Behavior

This course is part of Marketing Strategy Specialization

Taught in English

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Instructor: Shameek Sinha

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What you'll learn

Conduct marketing research, interpret the findings, understand consumer behavior, and use this knowledge to develop effective marketing strategies

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• Market Research
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There are 4 modules in this course

Your marketing quest begins here! The first course in this specialization lays the neccessary groundwork for an overall successful marketing strategy. It is separated into two sections: Market Research and Consumer Behavior.

Gain the tools and techniques to translate a decision problem into a research question in the Market Research module. Learn how to design a research plan, analyze the data gathered and accurately interpret and communicate survey reports, translating the results into practical recommendations. You will then focus in on the consumer decision-making process, highlighting the key moments from identifying a need to buying and consuming a product. Adopt a true “consumer focus” in your managerial decisions by analyzing how consumers make decisions, what happens (in their hearts and minds) at different stages of the decision making process, and the variables that influence those decisions. This course will equip you with the knowledge required to understand the state of your product before approaching the market strategy. There’s no better place to build the foundations of your marketing journey!

Consumer Behavioral Fundamentals

This Course consists of two blocks: Marketing Research and Consumer Behavior. First, learners will see the tools and methods to be able to effectively conduct (or hire) and interpret marketing research. Second, they will learn the foundations of consumer behavior and the consumer decision-making process and how to use this knowledge in the formulation of effective marketing strategies and tactic. In this first module, you will head-dive into your consumer's thought-processes to really get to know what makes them tick, and, more specifically, what makes them make their purchase decisions. Getting into the mind of your customer is the first step in developing a marketing strategy that is effective.

What's included

8 videos 1 reading 1 quiz

8 videos • Total 39 minutes

• Course Trailer • 0 minutes • Preview module
• Why is Consumer Behavior Important in the Marketing Process Framework? • 6 minutes
• The Consumer Behavior Process • 8 minutes
• The Consumers' Attitudes Perspective • 4 minutes
• The Contiuum of Consumers' Thought Process • 5 minutes
• Prospect Theory: How Your Customers' Rationality Affects Their Decisions • 5 minutes
• Understanding Your Customers' Limits • 4 minutes
• The Continuum of Buying-Decision Behavior • 4 minutes

1 reading • Total 18 minutes

• Reading: Motivation, Cognition, Learning: Basic Factors in Consumer Behavior • 18 minutes

1 quiz • Total 30 minutes

• Graded Quiz • 30 minutes

The Consumer Decision Process

Module 2 will guide you through the consumer decision-making process. Here you will explore how a potential-buyer researches a product, how they make their purchase decision, and their post-purchase evaluation. You will also understand the difference between consumer markets and business markets.

7 videos 1 reading 1 quiz

7 videos • Total 36 minutes

• Stages of the Consumer Decision-Making Process • 4 minutes • Preview module
• Need Recognition and Information Search • 4 minutes
• Evaluation of Alternatives & Purchase • 4 minutes
• Post-Purchase Evaluation • 4 minutes
• What Constraints do Consumers Encounter? • 4 minutes
• Information Processing and Overload • 7 minutes
• How Perceptions & Attitudes Affect Consumers' Decisions • 6 minutes

1 reading • Total 50 minutes

• Reading: Consumer Attitudes and Perceptions on Sustainability • 50 minutes

Marketing Research Fundamentals

In the second half of this course, you will explore the world of marketing research. In Module 3, Professor Sinha will share with you the importance of market research and how to acquire data. Later, you will delve into the different types of experimental research and design.

8 videos 1 quiz

8 videos • Total 41 minutes

• The Importance of Marketing Research & Its Role In Marketing Management • 6 minutes • Preview module
• The Steps to Conducting Marketing Research • 5 minutes
• Types of Market Research • 7 minutes
• Exploratory, Descriptive and Causal Research – Part I • 5 minutes
• Exploratory, Descriptive and Causal Research – Part II • 3 minutes
• Types of Experimentation • 4 minutes
• Validity & Reliability • 4 minutes
• Types of Experimental Designs • 3 minutes

Marketing Research Data Collection & Analysis

In the last Module of this course, you will learn with more detail the various types of data acquired during the marketing research process and how to evaluate and assess it. Discovering the importance of, and how to create an effective survey, will also be covered.In the second half of this course, you will explore the world of marketing research.

6 videos 1 reading 1 quiz

6 videos • Total 29 minutes

• Primary Data in Market Research • 3 minutes • Preview module
• Secondary Data & Scales of Measurement • 4 minutes
• How to Design a Questionnaire • 6 minutes
• How to Measure and Scale our Consumers' Attitudes • 6 minutes
• Target Population and Sampling • 2 minutes
• Categorical Data, Metric Data & Hypothesis Testing • 5 minutes

1 reading • Total 40 minutes

• Self-Reports: How the Questions Shape the Answers • 40 minutes

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IE Business School is an internationally recognized business school where the leaders of tomorrow shape their ideas and learn to become global citizens. For over 40 years, IE Business School has promoted innovation and change in organizations, equipping managers with an entrepreneurial mindset that generates employment, wealth, and social well-being. Regularly featured among the top business schools in the world, IE Business School has an urban campus in Madrid and a faculty of more than 400 professors who teach students from approximately 90 countries in its undergraduate and master programs. IE uses innovative online, face-to-face, and blended learning formats, including the IE Communities Platform where knowledge and experiences are exchanged with over 50,000 IE graduates that currently hold management positions in more than 100 countries worldwide.

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4,686 reviews

Reviewed on Apr 8, 2020

One of the best course to take in order to learn about what really goes inside the mind of a consumer while shopping. The course content, course instructor and layout all were really great.

Reviewed on Jun 28, 2020

Nice and systematic presentation of the contents help to gain the knowledge to anyone.

Really nice and helpful for me , it develops a basic ideas of market and customer relations understanding.

Reviewed on Oct 12, 2019

As a fundamental course in market research and consumer behavior, the course covers major areas that come under research and consumer behavior. I find the flow of the course interesting.

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Access to lectures and assignments depends on your type of enrollment. If you take a course in audit mode, you will be able to see most course materials for free. To access graded assignments and to earn a Certificate, you will need to purchase the Certificate experience, during or after your audit. If you don't see the audit option:

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When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. Your electronic Certificate will be added to your Accomplishments page - from there, you can print your Certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free.

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Consumers’ Research was founded in 1929 with the mission to educate and protect consumers from harmful products.

Fredrick J. Schlink, the founder of Consumers’ Research, started the organization with the intent to answer the question “Who – or what – best serves the consumer?” during a time when there were little to no consumer protection laws or oversight.

Consumers’ Research quickly became a top resource for consumer advocacy and product testing. Today, these values still hold true, as Consumers’ Research has evolved from a product-focused organization to a broader consumer advocacy organization – focused on educating consumers on the policies, products and services of concern to them and to promote the freedom to act on that knowledge and understanding.

Read about founder Fredrick J. Schlink here

Read about former Executive Director M. Stanton Evans here

Establishment

Consumers’ Research founder Frederick J. Schlink published the first Consumers’ Club Bulletin

Consumers’ Research incorporated in New York

Arthur Kallet and Frederick J. Schlink published the consumer defense book 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs

Consumers’ Research consumer product testing lab opened

Consumers’ Research Bulletin is first published

Consumers’ Research Magazine published

Consumers’ Research sold to M. Stanton Evans and moved to Washington, D.C.

Consumers’ Research shut down the consumer product testing lab and shifted focus to the Consumers’ Research Magazine

M. Stanton Evans published articles critical of the federal healthcare policies known as HillaryCare, showcasing Consumers’ Research move from strictly product analysis to consumer impacts from government programs, laws, and regulation

M. Stanton Evans published an essay in the Consumers’ Research Bulletin , about federal regulations in relation to gas prices and the impacts it has on the industry’s ability to adapt for the consumer

Consumers’ Research began an extensive examination on the half-measure deregulation of the airline industry, concluding the biggest problem for consumers is the limited competition which allowed little incentive for the industry to focus on consumer satisfaction

Consumers’ Research analyzed the effects of government intervention in telecommunications access, concluding government intervention has not improved services for the consumer

Consumers’ Research hosts its first Bretton Woods Conference, bringing together leaders from various backgrounds to build consensus on the perception, regulation, and adoption of technologies such as cryptocurrency for the benefit of consumers. Consumers’ Research would go on to host crypto-related conferences for several years.

Consumers’ Research releases Bretton Woods Summit Paper—”Guiding Principles on Consumer Protection Best Practices for Businesses Working with Digital Currencies and other Blockchain-Derived Distributed Technology Assets”— cementing its commitment to focusing on the relationship between consumers and the evolving crypto industry.

Will Hild became Consumers’ Research executive director

Consumers First Initiative launched, putting corporations on notice that they need to start serving their customers, not woke politicians

For more information on the history of Consumers’ Research visit Rutgers University Archives

To see more of Consumers’ Research past work, visit the archived website

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The past, present, and future of consumer research

Maayan s. malter.

1 Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, NY USA

Morris B. Holbrook

Barbara e. kahn.

2 The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA USA

Jeffrey R. Parker

3 Department of Marketing, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL USA

Donald R. Lehmann

In this article, we document the evolution of research trends (concepts, methods, and aims) within the field of consumer behavior, from the time of its early development to the present day, as a multidisciplinary area of research within marketing. We describe current changes in retailing and real-world consumption and offer suggestions on how to use observations of consumption phenomena to generate new and interesting consumer behavior research questions. Consumption continues to change with technological advancements and shifts in consumers’ values and goals. We cannot know the exact shape of things to come, but we polled a sample of leading scholars and summarize their predictions on where the field may be headed in the next twenty years.

Introduction

Beginning in the late 1950s, business schools shifted from descriptive and practitioner-focused studies to more theoretically driven and academically rigorous research (Dahl et al. 1959 ). As the field expanded from an applied form of economics to embrace theories and methodologies from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and statistics, there was an increased emphasis on understanding the thoughts, desires, and experiences of individual consumers. For academic marketing, this meant that research not only focused on the decisions and strategies of marketing managers but also on the decisions and thought processes on the other side of the market—customers.

Since then, the academic study of consumer behavior has evolved and incorporated concepts and methods, not only from marketing at large but also from related social science disciplines, and from the ever-changing landscape of real-world consumption behavior. Its position as an area of study within a larger discipline that comprises researchers from diverse theoretical backgrounds and methodological training has stirred debates over its identity. One article describes consumer behavior as a multidisciplinary subdiscipline of marketing “characterized by the study of people operating in a consumer role involving acquisition, consumption, and disposition of marketplace products, services, and experiences” (MacInnis and Folkes 2009 , p. 900).

This article reviews the evolution of the field of consumer behavior over the past half century, describes its current status, and predicts how it may evolve over the next twenty years. Our review is by no means a comprehensive history of the field (see Schumann et al. 2008 ; Rapp and Hill 2015 ; Wang et al. 2015 ; Wilkie and Moore 2003 , to name a few) but rather focuses on a few key thematic developments. Though we observe many major shifts during this period, certain questions and debates have persisted: Does consumer behavior research need to be relevant to marketing managers or is there intrinsic value from studying the consumer as a project pursued for its own sake? What counts as consumption: only consumption from traditional marketplace transactions or also consumption in a broader sense of non-marketplace interactions? Which are the most appropriate theoretical traditions and methodological tools for addressing questions in consumer behavior research?

A brief history of consumer research over the past sixty years—1960 to 2020

In 1969, the Association for Consumer Research was founded and a yearly conference to share marketing research specifically from the consumer’s perspective was instituted. This event marked the culmination of the growing interest in the topic by formalizing it as an area of research within marketing (consumer psychology had become a formalized branch of psychology within the APA in 1960). So, what was consumer behavior before 1969? Scanning current consumer-behavior doctoral seminar syllabi reveals few works predating 1969, with most of those coming from psychology and economics, namely Herbert Simon’s A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (1955), Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation (1943), and Ernest Dichter’s Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964). In short, research that illuminated and informed our understanding of consumer behavior prior to 1969 rarely focused on marketing-specific topics, much less consumers or consumption (Dichter’s handbook being a notable exception). Yet, these works were crucial to the rise of consumer behavior research because, in the decades after 1969, there was a shift within academic marketing to thinking about research from a behavioral or decision science perspective (Wilkie and Moore 2003 ). The following section details some ways in which this shift occurred. We draw on a framework proposed by the philosopher Larry Laudan ( 1986 ), who distinguished among three inter-related aspects of scientific inquiry—namely, concepts (the relevant ideas, theories, hypotheses, and constructs); methods (the techniques employed to test and validate these concepts); and aims (the purposes or goals that motivate the investigation).

Key concepts in the late - 1960s

During the late-1960s, we tended to view the buyer as a computer-like machine for processing information according to various formal rules that embody economic rationality to form a preference for one or another option in order to arrive at a purchase decision. This view tended to manifest itself in a couple of conspicuous ways. The first was a model of buyer behavior introduced by John Howard in 1963 in the second edition of his marketing textbook and quickly adopted by virtually every theorist working in our field—including, Howard and Sheth (of course), Engel-Kollat-&-Blackwell, Franco Nicosia, Alan Andreasen, Jim Bettman, and Joel Cohen. Howard’s great innovation—which he based on a scheme that he had found in the work of Plato (namely, the linkages among Cognition, Affect, and Conation)—took the form of a boxes-and-arrows formulation heavily influenced by the approach to organizational behavior theory that Howard (University of Pittsburgh) had picked up from Herbert Simon (Carnegie Melon University). The model represented a chain of events

where I = inputs of information (from advertising, word-of-mouth, brand features, etc.); C = cognitions (beliefs or perceptions about a brand); A = Affect (liking or preference for the brand); B = behavior (purchase of the brand); and S = satisfaction (post-purchase evaluation of the brand that feeds back onto earlier stages of the sequence, according to a learning model in which reinforced behavior tends to be repeated). This formulation lay at the heart of Howard’s work, which he updated, elaborated on, and streamlined over the remainder of his career. Importantly, it informed virtually every buyer-behavior model that blossomed forth during the last half of the twentieth century.

To represent the link between cognitions and affect, buyer-behavior researchers used various forms of the multi-attribute attitude model (MAAM), originally proposed by psychologists such as Fishbein and Rosenberg as part of what Fishbein and Ajzen ( 1975 ) called the theory of reasoned action. Under MAAM, cognitions (beliefs about brand attributes) are weighted by their importance and summed to create an explanation or prediction of affect (liking for a brand or preference for one brand versus another), which in turn determines behavior (choice of a brand or intention to purchase a brand). This took the work of economist Kelvin Lancaster (with whom Howard interacted), which assumed attitude was based on objective attributes, and extended it to include subjective ones (Lancaster 1966 ; Ratchford 1975 ). Overall, the set of concepts that prevailed in the late-1960s assumed the buyer exhibited economic rationality and acted as a computer-like information-processing machine when making purchase decisions.

Favored methods in the late-1960s

The methods favored during the late-1960s tended to be almost exclusively neo-positivistic in nature. That is, buyer-behavior research adopted the kinds of methodological rigor that we associate with the physical sciences and the hypothetico-deductive approaches advocated by the neo-positivistic philosophers of science.

Thus, the accepted approaches tended to be either experimental or survey based. For example, numerous laboratory studies tested variations of the MAAM and focused on questions about how to measure beliefs, how to weight the beliefs, how to combine the weighted beliefs, and so forth (e.g., Beckwith and Lehmann 1973 ). Here again, these assumed a rational economic decision-maker who processed information something like a computer.

Seeking rigor, buyer-behavior studies tended to be quantitative in their analyses, employing multivariate statistics, structural equation models, multidimensional scaling, conjoint analysis, and other mathematically sophisticated techniques. For example, various attempts to test the ICABS formulation developed simultaneous (now called structural) equation models such as those deployed by Farley and Ring ( 1970 , 1974 ) to test the Howard and Sheth ( 1969 ) model and by Beckwith and Lehmann ( 1973 ) to measure halo effects.

Aims in the late-1960s

During this time period, buyer-behavior research was still considered a subdivision of marketing research, the purpose of which was to provide insights useful to marketing managers in making strategic decisions. Essentially, every paper concluded with a section on “Implications for Marketing Managers.” Authors who failed to conform to this expectation could generally count on having their work rejected by leading journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research ( JMR ) and the Journal of Marketing ( JM ).

Summary—the three R’s in the late-1960s

Starting in the late-1960s to the early-1980s, virtually every buyer-behavior researcher followed the traditional approach to concepts, methods, and aims, now encapsulated under what we might call the three R’s —namely, rationality , rigor , and relevance . However, as we transitioned into the 1980s and beyond, that changed as some (though by no means all) consumer researchers began to expand their approaches and to evolve different perspectives.

Concepts after 1980

In some circles, the traditional emphasis on the buyer’s rationality—that is, a view of the buyer as a rational-economic, decision-oriented, information-processing, computer-like machine for making choices—began to evolve in at least two primary ways.

First, behavioral economics (originally studied in marketing under the label Behavioral Decision Theory)—developed in psychology by Kahneman and Tversky, in economics by Thaler, and applied in marketing by a number of forward-thinking theorists (e.g., Eric Johnson, Jim Bettman, John Payne, Itamar Simonson, Jay Russo, Joel Huber, and more recently, Dan Ariely)—challenged the rationality of consumers as decision-makers. It was shown that numerous commonly used decision heuristics depart from rational choice and are exceptions to the traditional assumptions of economic rationality. This trend shed light on understanding consumer financial decision-making (Prelec and Loewenstein 1998 ; Gourville 1998 ; Lynch Jr 2011 ) and how to develop “nudges” to help consumers make better decisions for their personal finances (summarized in Johnson et al. 2012 ).

Second, the emerging experiential view (anticipated by Alderson, Levy, and others; developed by Holbrook and Hirschman, and embellished by Schmitt, Pine, and Gilmore, and countless followers) regarded consumers as flesh-and-blood human beings (rather than as information-processing computer-like machines), focused on hedonic aspects of consumption, and expanded the concepts embodied by ICABS (Table ​ (Table1 1 ).

Extended ICABS Framework after 1980

Methods after 1980

The two burgeoning areas of research—behavioral economics and experiential theories—differed in their methodological approaches. The former relied on controlled randomized experiments with a focus on decision strategies and behavioral outcomes. For example, experiments tested the process by which consumers evaluate options using information display boards and “Mouselab” matrices of aspects and attributes (Payne et al. 1988 ). This school of thought also focused on behavioral dependent measures, such as choice (Huber et al. 1982 ; Simonson 1989 ; Iyengar and Lepper 2000 ).

The latter was influenced by post-positivistic philosophers of science—such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty—and approaches expanded to include various qualitative techniques (interpretive, ethnographic, humanistic, and even introspective methods) not previously prominent in the field of consumer research. These included:

• Interpretive approaches —such as those drawing on semiotics and hermeneutics—in an effort to gain a richer understanding of the symbolic meanings involved in consumption experiences;
• Ethnographic approaches — borrowed from cultural anthropology—such as those illustrated by the influential Consumer Behavior Odyssey (Belk et al. 1989 ) and its discoveries about phenomena related to sacred aspects of consumption or the deep meanings of collections and other possessions;
• Humanistic approaches —such as those borrowed from cultural studies or from literary criticism and more recently gathered together under the general heading of consumer culture theory ( CCT );
• Introspective or autoethnographic approaches —such as those associated with a method called subjective personal introspection ( SPI ) that various consumer researchers like Sidney Levy and Steve Gould have pursued to gain insights based on their own private lives.

These qualitative approaches tended not to appear in the more traditional journals such as the Journal of Marketing , Journal of Marketing Research , or Marketing Science . However, newer journals such as Consumption, Markets, & Culture and Marketing Theory began to publish papers that drew on the various interpretive, ethnographic, humanistic, or introspective methods.

Aims after 1980

In 1974, consumer research finally got its own journal with the launch of the Journal of Consumer Research ( JCR ). The early editors of JCR —especially Bob Ferber, Hal Kassarjian, and Jim Bettman—held a rather divergent attitude about the importance or even the desirability of managerial relevance as a key goal of consumer studies. Under their influence, some researchers began to believe that consumer behavior is a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right—purely for the purpose of understanding it better. The journal incorporated articles from an array of methodologies: quantitative (both secondary data analysis and experimental techniques) and qualitative. The “right” balance between theoretical insight and substantive relevance—which are not in inherent conflict—is a matter of debate to this day and will likely continue to be debated well into the future.

Summary—the three I’s after 1980

In sum, beginning in the early-1980s, consumer research branched out. Much of the work in consumer studies remained within the earlier tradition of the three R’s—that is, rationality (an information-processing decision-oriented buyer), rigor (neo-positivistic experimental designs and quantitative techniques), and relevance (usefulness to marketing managers). Nonetheless, many studies embraced enlarged views of the three major aspects that might be called the three I’s —that is, irrationality (broadened perspectives that incorporate illogical, heuristic, experiential, or hedonic aspects of consumption), interpretation (various qualitative or “postmodern” approaches), and intrinsic motivation (the joy of pursuing a managerially irrelevant consumer study purely for the sake of satisfying one’s own curiosity, without concern for whether it does or does not help a marketing practitioner make a bigger profit).

The present—the consumer behavior field today

Present concepts.

In recent years, technological changes have significantly influenced the nature of consumption as the customer journey has transitioned to include more interaction on digital platforms that complements interaction in physical stores. This shift poses a major conceptual challenge in understanding if and how these technological changes affect consumption. Does the medium through which consumption occurs fundamentally alter the psychological and social processes identified in earlier research? In addition, this shift allows us to collect more data at different stages of the customer journey, which further allows us to analyze behavior in ways that were not previously available.

Revisiting the ICABS framework, many of the previous concepts are still present, but we are now addressing them through a lens of technological change (Table ​ (Table2 2 ). In recent years, a number of concepts (e.g., identity, beliefs/lay theories, affect as information, self-control, time, psychological ownership, search for meaning and happiness, social belonging, creativity, and status) have emerged as integral factors that influence and are influenced by consumption. To better understand these concepts, a number of influential theories from social psychology have been adopted into consumer behavior research. Self-construal (Markus and Kitayama 1991 ), regulatory focus (Higgins 1998 ), construal level (Trope and Liberman 2010 ), and goal systems (Kruglanski et al. 2002 ) all provide social-cognition frameworks through which consumer behavior researchers study the psychological processes behind consumer behavior. This “adoption” of social psychological theories into consumer behavior is a symbiotic relationship that further enhances the theories. Tory Higgins happily stated that he learned more about his own theories from the work of marketing academics (he cited Angela Lee and Michel Pham) in further testing and extending them.

ICABS framework in the digital age

Present Methods

Not only have technological advancements changed the nature of consumption but they have also significantly influenced the methods used in consumer research by adding both new sources of data and improved analytical tools (Ding et al. 2020 ). Researchers continue to use traditional methods from psychology in empirical research (scale development, laboratory experiments, quantitative analyses, etc.) and interpretive approaches in qualitative research. Additionally, online experiments using participants from panels such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific have become commonplace in the last decade. While they raise concerns about the quality of the data and about the external validity of the results, these online experiments have greatly increased the speed and decreased the cost of collecting data, so researchers continue to use them, albeit with some caution. Reminiscent of the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s about the use of student subjects, the projectability of the online responses and of an increasingly conditioned “professional” group of online respondents (MTurkers) is a major concern.

Technology has also changed research methodology. Currently, there is a large increase in the use of secondary data thanks to the availability of Big Data about online and offline behavior. Methods in computer science have advanced our ability to analyze large corpuses of unstructured data (text, voice, visual images) in an efficient and rigorous way and, thus, to tap into a wealth of nuanced thoughts, feelings, and behaviors heretofore only accessible to qualitative researchers through laboriously conducted content analyses. There are also new neuro-marketing techniques like eye-tracking, fMRI’s, body arousal measures (e.g., heart rate, sweat), and emotion detectors that allow us to measure automatic responses. Lastly, there has been an increase in large-scale field experiments that can be run in online B2C marketplaces.

Present Aims

Along with a focus on real-world observations and data, there is a renewed emphasis on managerial relevance. Countless conference addresses and editorials in JCR , JCP , and other journals have emphasized the importance of making consumer research useful outside of academia—that is, to help companies, policy makers, and consumers. For instance, understanding how the “new” consumer interacts over time with other consumers and companies in the current marketplace is a key area for future research. As global and social concerns become more salient in all aspects of life, issues of long-term sustainability, social equality, and ethical business practices have also become more central research topics. Fortunately, despite this emphasis on relevance, theoretical contributions and novel ideas are still highly valued. An appropriate balance of theory and practice has become the holy grail of consumer research.

The effects of the current trends in real-world consumption will increase in magnitude with time as more consumers are digitally native. Therefore, a better understanding of current consumer behavior can give us insights and help predict how it will continue to evolve in the years to come.

The future—the consumer behavior field in 2040 1

Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand for a single person to hazard a guess about the state of the consumer behavior field twenty years from now. Therefore, predictions from 34 active consumer researchers were collected to address this task. Here, we briefly summarize those predictions.

Future Concepts

While few respondents proffered guesses regarding specific concepts that would be of interest twenty years from now, many suggested broad topics and trends they expected to see in the field. Expectations for topics could largely be grouped into three main areas. Many suspected that we will be examining essentially the same core topics, perhaps at a finer-grained level, from different perspectives or in ways that we currently cannot utilize due to methodological limitations (more on methods below). A second contingent predicted that much research would center on the impending crises the world faces today, most mentioning environmental and social issues (the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet begun when these predictions were collected and, unsurprisingly, was not anticipated by any of our respondents). The last group, citing the widely expected profound impact of AI on consumers’ lives, argued that AI and other technology-related topics will be dominant subjects in consumer research circa 2040.

While the topic of technology is likely to be focal in the field, our current expectations for the impact of technology on consumers’ lives are narrower than it should be. Rather than merely offering innumerable conveniences and experiences, it seems likely that technology will begin to be integrated into consumers’ thoughts, identities, and personal relationships—probably sooner than we collectively expect. The integration of machines into humans’ bodies and lives will present the field with an expanding list of research questions that do not exist today. For example, how will the concepts of the self, identity, privacy, and goal pursuit change when web-connected technology seamlessly integrates with human consciousness and cognition? Major questions will also need to be answered regarding philosophy of mind, ethics, and social inequality. We suspect that the impact of technology on consumers and consumer research will be far broader than most consumer-behavior researchers anticipate.

As for broader trends within consumer research, there were two camps: (1) those who expect (or hope) that dominant theories (both current and yet to be developed) will become more integrated and comprehensive and (2) those who expect theoretical contributions to become smaller and smaller, to the point of becoming trivial. Both groups felt that current researchers are filling smaller cracks than before, but disagreed on how this would ultimately be resolved.

Future Methods

As was the case with concepts, respondents’ expectations regarding consumer-research methodologies in 2030 can also be divided into three broad baskets. Unsurprisingly, many indicated that we would be using many technologies not currently available or in wide use. Perhaps more surprising was that most cited the use of technology such as AI, machine-learning algorithms, and robots in designing—as opposed to executing or analyzing—experiments. (Some did point to the use of technologies such as virtual reality in the actual execution of experiments.) The second camp indicated that a focus on reliable and replicable results (discussed further below) will encourage a greater tendency for pre-registering studies, more use of “Big Data,” and a demand for more studies per paper (versus more papers per topic, which some believe is a more fruitful direction). Finally, the third lot indicated that “real data” would be in high demand, thereby necessitating the use of incentive-compatible, consequential dependent variables and a greater prevalence of field studies in consumer research.

As a result, young scholars would benefit from developing a “toolkit” of methodologies for collecting and analyzing the abundant new data of interest to the field. This includes (but is not limited to) a deep understanding of designing and implementing field studies (Gerber and Green 2012 ), data analysis software (R, Python, etc.), text mining and analysis (Humphreys and Wang 2018 ), and analytical tools for other unstructured forms of data such as image and sound. The replication crisis in experimental research means that future scholars will also need to take a more critical approach to validity (internal, external, construct), statistical power, and significance in their work.

Future Aims

While there was an air of existential concern about the future of the field, most agreed that the trend will be toward increasing the relevance and reliability of consumer research. Specifically, echoing calls from journals and thought leaders, the respondents felt that papers will need to offer more actionable implications for consumers, managers, or policy makers. However, few thought that this increased focus would come at the expense of theoretical insights, suggesting a more demanding overall standard for consumer research in 2040. Likewise, most felt that methodological transparency, open access to data and materials, and study pre-registration will become the norm as the field seeks to allay concerns about the reliability and meaningfulness of its research findings.

Summary - Future research questions and directions

Despite some well-justified pessimism, the future of consumer research is as bright as ever. As we revised this paper amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that many aspects of marketplace behavior, consumption, and life in general will change as a result of this unprecedented global crisis. Given this, and the radical technological, social, and environmental changes that loom on the horizon, consumer researchers will have a treasure trove of topics to tackle in the next ten years, many of which will carry profound substantive importance. While research approaches will evolve, the core goals will remain consistent—namely, to generate theoretically insightful, empirically supported, and substantively impactful research (Table ​ (Table3 3 ).

Future consumer behavior research questions

At any given moment in time, the focal concepts, methods, and aims of consumer-behavior scholarship reflect both the prior development of the field and trends in the larger scientific community. However, despite shifting trends, the core of the field has remained constant—namely, to understand the motivations, thought processes, and experiences of individuals as they consume goods, services, information, and other offerings, and to use these insights to develop interventions to improve both marketing strategy for firms and consumer welfare for individuals and groups. Amidst the excitement of new technologies, social trends, and consumption experiences, it is important to look back and remind ourselves of the insights the field has already generated. Effectively integrating these past findings with new observations and fresh research will help the field advance our understanding of consumer behavior.

1 The other papers use 2030 as a target year but we asked our survey respondents to make predictions for 2040 and thus we have a different future target year.

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Published October 17 th 2023

10 Essential Methods for Effective Consumer and Market Research

When it comes to understanding the world around you, market research is an essential step.

We live in a world that’s overflowing with information. Sifting through all the noise to extract the most relevant insights on a certain market or audience can be tough.

That’s where market research comes in – it’s a way for brands and researchers to collect information from target markets and audiences.

Once reliant on traditional methods like focus groups or surveys, market research is now at a crossroads. Newer tools for extracting insights, like social listening tools, have joined the array of market research techniques available.

Here, we break down what market research is and the different methods you can choose from to make the most of it.

What is market research, and why is it critical for you as a marketer?

Market research involves collecting and analyzing data about a specific industry, market, or audience to inform strategic decision-making. It offers marketers valuable insights into the industry, market trends, consumer preferences, competition, and opportunities, enabling businesses to refine their strategies effectively.

By conducting market research, organizations can identify unmet needs, assess product demands, enhance value propositions, and create marketing campaigns that resonate with their target audience. 

This practice serves as a compass, guiding businesses in making data-driven decisions for successful product launches, improved customer relationships, and a stronger positioning in the business landscape. 

For marketers and insights professionals, market research is an indispensable tool. It helps them make smarter decisions and achieve growth and success in the market.

These 10 market research methods form the backbone of effective market research strategies. 

Continue reading or jump directly to each method by tapping the link below.

• Focus groups
• Consumer research with social media listening
• Experiments and field trials
• Observation
• Competitive analysis
• Public domain data
• Buy research
• Analyze sales data

Use of primary vs secondary market research

Market research can be split into two distinct sections: primary and secondary. These are the two main types of market research.

They can also be known as field and desk, respectively (although this terminology feels out of date, as plenty of primary research can be carried out from your desk).

Primary (field) research

Primary market research is research you carry out yourself. Examples of primary market research methods include running your own focus groups or conducting surveys. These are some of the key methods of consumer research. The ‘field’ part refers to going out into the field to get data.

Secondary (desk) research

Secondary market research is research carried out by other people that you want to use. Examples of secondary market research methods include studies carried out by researchers or financial data released by companies.

10 effective methods to do market research

The methods in this list cover both areas. Which ones you want to use will depend on your goals. Have a browse through and see what fits.

1. Focus groups

It’s a simple concept but one that can be hard to put into practice.

You bring together a group of individuals into a room, record their discussions, and ask them questions about various topics you are researching. For some, it’ll be new product ideas. For others, it might be views on a political candidate.

From these discussions, the organizer will try to pull out some insights or use them to judge the wider society’s view on something. The participants will generally be chosen based on certain criteria, such as demographics, interests, or occupations.

A focus group’s strength is in the natural conversation and discussion that can take place between participants (if they’re done right).

Compared to a questionnaire or survey with a rigid set of questions, a focus group can go off on tangents the organizer could not have predicted (and therefore not planned questions for). This can be good in that unexpected topics can arise; or bad if the aims of the research are to answer a very particular set of questions.

The nature of the discussion is important to recognize as a potential factor that skews the resulting data. Focus groups can encourage participants to talk about things they might not have otherwise, and others might impact the group. This can also affect unstructured one-on-one interviews.

In survey research, survey questions are given to respondents (in person, over the phone, by email, or via an online form). Questions can be close-ended or open-ended. As far as close-ended questions go, there are many different types:

• Dichotomous (two choices, such as ‘yes’ or ‘no’)
• Multiple choice
• Rating scale
• Likert scale (common version is five options between ‘strongly agree’ and ‘strongly disagree’)
• Matrix (options presented on a grid)
• Demographic (asking for information such as gender, age, or occupation)

Surveys are massively versatile because of the range of question formats. Knowing how to mix and match them to get what you need takes consideration and thought. Different questions need the right setup.

It’s also about how you ask. Good questions lead to good analysis. Writing clear, concise questions that abstain from vague expressions and don’t lead respondents down a certain path can help your results reflect the true colors of respondents.

There are a ton of different ways to conduct surveys as well, from creating your own from scratch or using tools that do lots of the heavy lifting for you.

3. Consumer research with social media listening

Social media has reached a point where it is seamlessly integrated into our lives. And because it is a digital extension of ourselves, people freely express their opinions, thoughts, and hot takes on social media.

Because people share so much content on social media and the sharing is so instant, social media is a treasure trove for market research. There is plenty of data to monitor , tap into, and dissect.

By using a social listening tool, like Consumer Research , researchers can identify topics of interest and then analyze relevant social posts. For example, they can track brand mentions and what consumers are saying about the products owned by that brand. These are real-world consumer research examples.

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Social media listening democratizes insights, and is especially useful for market research because of the vast amount of unfiltered information available. Because it’s unprompted, you can be fairly sure that what’s shared is an accurate account of what the person really cares about and thinks (as opposed to them being given a subject to dwell on in the presence of a researcher).

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4. Interviews

In interviews, the interviewer speaks directly with the respondent. This type of market research method is more personal, allowing for communication and clarification, making it good for open-ended questions. Furthermore, interviews enable the interviewer to go beyond surface-level responses and investigate deeper.

However, the drawback is that interviews can be time-intensive and costly. Those who opt for this method will need to figure out how to allocate their resources effectively. You also need to be careful with leading or poor questions that lead to useless results. Here’s a good introduction to leading questions .

5. Experiments and field trials

Field experiments are conducted in the participants’ environment. They rely on the independent variable and the dependent variable – the researcher controls the independent variable in order to test its impact on the dependent variable. The key here is to establish whether there’s causality.

For example, take Hofling’s experiment that tested obedience, conducted in a hospital setting. The point was to test if nurses followed authority figures (doctors) and if the authority figures’ rules violated standards (The dependent variable being the nurses, the independent variable being a fake doctor calling up and ordering the nurses to administer treatment.)

According to Simply Psychology , there are key strengths and limitations to this method.

The assessment reads:

• Strength: Behavior in a field experiment is more likely to reflect real life because of its natural setting, i.e., higher ecological validity than a lab experiment.
• Strength: There is less likelihood of demand characteristics affecting the results, as participants may not know they are being studied. This occurs when the study is covert.
• Limitation: There is less control over extraneous variables that might bias the results. This makes it difficult for another researcher to replicate the study in exactly the same way.

There are also massive ethical implications for these kinds of experiments and experiments in general (especially if people are unaware of their involvement). Don’t take this lightly, and be sure to read up on all the guidelines that apply to the region where you’re based.

6. Observation

Observational market research is a qualitative research method where the researcher observes their subjects in a natural or controlled environment. This method is much like being a fly on the wall, but the fly takes notes and analyzes them later. In observational market research, subjects are likely to behave naturally, which reveals their true selves. 

They are not under much pressure. However, if they’re aware of the observation, they can act differently.

This type of research applies well to retail, where the researcher can observe shoppers’ behavior by day of the week, by season, when discounts are offered, and more. However, observational research can be time-consuming, and researchers have no control over the environments they research.

7. Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis is a highly strategic and specific form of market research in which the researchers analyze their company’s competitors. It is critical to see how your brand stacks up to rivals. 

Competitive analysis starts by defining the product, service, brand, and market segment. There are different topics to compare your firm with your competitors. It could be from a marketing perspective: content produced, SEO structure, PR coverage, and social media presence and engagement. It can also be from a product perspective: types of offerings, pricing structure. SWOT analysis is key in assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

We’ve written a whole blog post on this tactic, which you can read here .

8. Public domain data

The internet is a wondrous place. Public data exists for those strapped for resources or simply seeking to support their research with more data.  With more and more data produced every year, the question about access and curation becomes increasingly prominent – that’s why researchers and librarians are keen on open data.

Plenty of different types of open data are useful for market research: government databases, polling data, “fact tanks” like Pew Research Center, and more. 

Furthermore, APIs grant developers programmatic access to applications. A lot of this data is free, which is a real bonus.

9. Buy research

Money can’t buy everything, but it can buy research. Subscriptions exist for those who want to buy relevant industry and research reports. Sites like Euromonitor, Statista, Mintel, and BCC Research host a litany of reports for purchase, oftentimes with the option of a single-user license or a subscription.

This can be a massive time saver, and you’ll have a better idea of what you’re getting from the very beginning. You’ll also get all your data in a format that makes sense, saving you effort in cleaning and organizing.

10. Analyze sales data

Sales data is like a puzzle piece that can help reveal the full picture of market research insights. Essentially, it indicates the results. Paired with other market research data, sales data helps researchers better understand actions and consequences. Understanding your customers, their buying habits, and how they change over time is important.

This research will be limited to customers, and it’s important to keep that in mind. Nevertheless, the value of this data should not be underestimated. If you’re not already tracking customer data, there’s no time like the present.

Choosing the right market research method for your strategy

Not all methods will be right for your situation or your business. Once you’ve looked through the list and seen some that take your fancy, spend more time researching each option.You’ll want to consider what you want to achieve, what data you’ll need, the pros and cons of each method, the costs of conducting the research, and the cost of analyzing the results.

Get it right, and it’ll be worth all the effort.

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The goods on consumer behavior

Research by consumer psychologists aims to promote consumers’ well-being in sustainability, health, and money management

Vol. 52 No. 4

• Applied Psychology
• Marketing and Advertising

People’s decisions about how to spend their money can have a huge impact on their own lives and on the planet. Credit card debt, climate change, plastic pollution, dietary choices—all these and more, to some extent, depend on companies’ decisions about what to sell and consumers’ decisions about what to buy.

That’s why some consumer psychologists and researchers in related fields, like marketing and business, are interested in tackling these social issues through the lens of consumerism. Consumer researchers are working to understand how and why consumers make beneficial choices in areas including sustainability, health, and financial well-being. They’re also studying how to convince companies of the value of improving their supply chains or offering customers healthier, more responsible choices.

“Good, responsible scholars are trying to think about not only what is good for individuals but also what is good for society,” said Lynn Kahle, PhD, a consumer psychologist and director of the sports marketing program at Pace University in New York City.

Sustainable consumption

One big challenge facing society is switching over to a more ecologically sustainable way of life. Making sustainable choices can be a tough sell for consumers, said Katherine White, PhD, a consumer psychologist at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in Canada. “It’s this really interesting trade-off between some kind of cost to the self in order to do something for others,” White said. (A trade-off not dissimilar to many of the public health interventions enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.) The potential benefits of individual sustainable behaviors—recycling, choosing reusable goods, installing solar panels, eating less meat—are fuzzy and in the future, White said, and the status quo is largely set up to enable less-sustainable choices. But to tackle problems like climate change and environmental degradation, both systems and individuals will have to change, she said. “It’s probably the most challenging behavior-change question of our time.”

When consumer psychologists first began studying sustainable behavior in the 1970s, their focus was largely on how to identify consumers who were already prone to go green, said Remi Trudel, PhD, an associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Over time, though, researchers have begun to focus on how to influence more people. “The biggest question is, how do we nudge people into behaving more sustainably?” Trudel said.

In a 2019 review, White and her colleagues organized research on the topic into a framework they call SHIFT ( Journal of Marketing , Vol. 83, No. 3, 2019 ). SHIFT stands for social influence, habit formation, individual self, feelings and cognition, and tangibility—each a key factor in whether a consumer makes green (or not-so-green) choices. Social influence is one of the most powerful tools available, White said. For example, a study in California led by New York University Stern School of Business associate professor of marketing Bryan Bollinger, PhD, found that every installation of solar panels on a home in a given ZIP code increased the likelihood of another install by 0.78 percentage points ( Marketing Science , Vol. 31, No. 6, 2012 ).

Habits refer to everyday behaviors, like getting coffee every morning in a disposable cup rather than bringing one’s own mug, White said. Any way to make the greener choice easier can help break unsustainable habits, she said. Individual self refers to what resonates with any given person. It’s relatively easy to connect with individuals who already care about sustainability, White said. But sometimes advertisers, marketers, and companies need to work a little harder to link a person’s preexisting values to sustainability.

For example, religious and cultural values can play a role in how people approach environmental values, said Elizabeth Minton, PhD, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Wyoming. “Western consumers view what’s important as sustaining the family unit, sustaining the community, and sustaining the loved ones,” Minton said. Framing sustainability—protecting the environment—as a way to protect family and community, then, becomes a way for marketers to encourage demand for sustainable products.

Research into feelings and cognition has found complex patterns. Some research suggests that while negative emotions such as guilt can prompt environmentally friendly actions, guilt should be deployed with care. For example, after the United Kingdom instituted a policy of charging a small sum for disposable plastic grocery bags, mass communications researcher Sidharth Muralidharan, PhD, of Southern Methodist University, conducted an online survey that found that women who reported high guilt over forgetting to carry reusable bags were more likely to carry them more consistently, but men with high levels of guilt weren’t, suggesting women were more susceptible to “green guilt” than men. In a follow-up experiment, Muralidharan and his colleagues exposed consumers to guilt-inducing advertisements based around either saving the environment or saving money by carrying reusable bags. They found that the environment-based ads were less effective at inducing guilt than the savings-based ads ( Journal of Advertising Research , Vol. 58, No. 3, 2018 ). In other words, guilt must be directed toward an effective target—which is not always related to sustainability—to work.

Finally, tangibility in the SHIFT framework refers to the need to link an action to real consequences, given that the outcome of any behavior is uncertain, White said. Focusing on the near-term benefits of sustainability, such as preventing current environmental degradation, can help, according to research led by Audhesh Paswan, PhD, a professor of marketing at the University of North Texas ( Journal of Consumer Marketing , Vol. 34, No. 5, 2017 ).

One big question is how younger generations of consumers will approach sustainable consumption. Gen Z—the colloquial term for anyone born between the late 1990s and around 2010—tends to hold consumer brands to high standards, said Brent Coker, PhD, a lecturer in marketing at the University of Melbourne. They’re savvy to marketing strategies and don’t like empty platitudes, he said, which can lead to anger at brands they perceive as doing social (or environmental) harm. However, social media marketing can lead to impulse purchasing in Gen Z, according to research by marketing lecturer Elmira Djafavora, PhD, of Northumbria University Newcastle ( Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services , Vol. 59, 2021), which could feed overconsumption.

Promoting health

Another area where consumers might need to put aside their immediate impulses for long-term benefits is when making health choices. As with sustainability, consumers may well be aware that a choice—such as buying a sugary beverage—isn’t in their ultimate best interest, but still make that choice nonetheless.

“We know that incentives and information don’t always work as well as we would hope them to,” said Leslie John, PhD, who has a doctorate in behavioral decision research and is an associate professor at Harvard Business School. “What I’ve been trying to do is use insights from psychology to make these tools much more effective at actually changing behavior.”

In one study, John and her colleagues explored whether putting warning labels on sugary beverages discourages their purchase. In a real cafeteria setting, the researchers tested three different types of warning labels: One label simply listed the caloric content of the soda. Another read, “Warning: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay.” A third label contained the same text but with accompanying images of an obese abdomen, a person self-injecting insulin, and rotten teeth. The researchers found that only the graphic warnings had a statistically significant impact, reducing the share of sugary beverages purchased from 21.4% to 18.2% ( Psychological Science , Vol. 29, No. 8, 2018 ). At the same time, in a result that could incentivize firms as well as policymakers, the study also showed that the warning labels didn’t reduce drink sales overall, as consumers chose to buy bottled water instead.

“They’re still buying something; they’re just buying something healthier,” John said of the consumers in the study.

Food-labeling research often lands at the intersection of politics and science. Christina Roberto, PhD, the director of the Psychology of Eating and Consumer Health (PEACH) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, focuses her research on what she calls “strategic science,” which means that she collaborates with policymakers to develop research questions. For example, in 2018, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health approached Roberto for insights on what kind of label they could use to educate consumers about foods high in salt. Roberto and her colleagues tested a variety of label options for the department, including a saltshaker inside a triangle as required on New York City menus, and a traffic light option with red representing high-salt items. The saltshaker performed the worst in tests of consumer understanding of the symbols, while the traffic light was the clearest. Unfortunately, the traffic light was a legal no-go, Roberto said, because the interpretation of which items got the red light could easily be challenged by food companies in court.

The researchers were also able to show in their data that putting text that read “sodium warning” next to the saltshaker symbol significantly boosted consumer understanding of the label. “We basically said, ‘Look, if you have to compromise and you have to use the saltshaker triangle, at least get the words ‘sodium warning’ next to it,’” she said.

That labeling strategy went into effect in September 2019 in Philadelphia restaurant chains with 15 or more locations. Boosting the potential effectiveness of the warning was a win, Roberto said, because if Philadelphia had used New York’s symbol without changes, that symbol likely would have become the standard for any other cities or states planning to institute sodium warning labels. Now, she said, there is an existing label with a stronger evidence base that new cities can choose to adopt in the future.

Money matters

Consumer psychologists are also tackling big-picture issues in the realm of money management, an area of great interest since many Americans are in precarious financial positions. According to a Congressional Research Service report, unemployment was elevated throughout 2020, peaking at 14.8% in April ( Unemployment Rates During the COVID-19 Pandemic: In Brief, 2021 ). Savings rates rose sharply, however, hitting 33% of people’s disposable incomes that same month as Americans halted their spending. As of February 2021, the savings rate had declined to 13.6% ( Bureau of Economic Analysis , 2020 ).

Researchers tackle consumer spending and saving in multiple ways. One strategy is to study what types of spending make people happiest. On that front, the research is clear: Buying experiences generally makes people happier than buying stuff. Experiential consumption also seems to trigger a greater sense of gratitude than material consumption, and it can even make people more generous to others in lab-based economic games, according to research led by psychologist Jesse Walker, PhD, an assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University ( Emotion , Vol. 16, No. 8, 2016 ).

“This is kind of cool because it suggests that these social benefits of experiential consumption don’t just apply to the consumers themselves but to those around them as well,” said Amit Kumar, PhD, a psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, who coauthored that research.

Experiential consumption seems to make people happier because it strengthens social ties, Kumar said. People tend to bond over conversations about their trips to Italy more than they do about that new furniture set they bought at Ikea. That’s an important thing to know when weighing how to spend your hard-earned money, Kumar said.

But there can be a dark side to the glow of experiential purchases. People are more willing to go into debt for experiential purchases than for material purchases, according to research by Eesha Sharma, PhD, an associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business ( Journal of Consumer Research , Vol. 44, No. 5, 2018 ). This seems to be because experiences are often time-dependent, Sharma said. If you decide to delay the purchase of a dining room table from July until December, it doesn’t feel like you’ve missed out on owning the table. If you delay your summer beach trip from July until December? Well, then you’ve missed summer vacation altogether.

In general, consumers tend to maintain positive illusions about their own money management, said Emily Garbinsky, PhD, a psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame. Garbinsky is researching ways to “gently shatter” these illusions at the point at which people make savings decisions, perhaps during the use of banking apps. There is evidence from other research that software nudges can boost real-world savings. For example, a field experiment using TurboTax’s free edition led by Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely, PhD, nudged low- and middle-income tax filers to save a portion of their tax refunds. Compared with a control group that received no messaging, the taxpayers who were presented a message about the importance of emergency savings and given choices of ways to save their refund increased deposits to their savings accounts by 50% ( Behavioral Science & Policy , Vol. 3, No. 2, 2017 ).

Garbinsky’s work also zeroes in on how emotions affect money management decisions. She and her colleagues have found, for example, that couples who share bank accounts are more likely to make utilitarian purchases than hedonic ones, in contrast with couples who keep separate bank accounts ( Journal of Consumer Psychology , Vol. 29, No. 3, 2019 ). These results held in both lab and field experiments, as well as in analyses of real banking transactions. Other research under review suggests that couples who pool finances may have more relationship satisfaction, though the findings are correlational.

Often, consumer researchers study single decisions, such as how much money people save or how much debt they’re willing to take on—but money decisions don’t occur in a vacuum, Sharma said. If you’re borrowing money to save more for retirement, for example, it might look beneficial from a savings perspective but disastrous from a debt perspective.

“It’s really important for future research to look at multiple financial decisions together,” she said. “Research that integrates multiple financial decisions, looks at trade-offs, looks at decisions over time, will lead to a more nuanced and better understanding of these choices.” 

Further reading

Communicating sustainability for the green economy Kahle, L. R., & Gurel-Atay, E. (Eds.), Routledge, 2014

How psychological insights can inform food policies to address unhealthy eating habits Roberto, C. A., American Psychologist , 2020

Sustainable consumer behavior Trudel, R., Consumer Psychology Review , 2019

The elusive green consumer White, K., et al., Harvard Business Review , July/August 2019

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Understanding the ever-evolving, always-surprising consumer

For many consumers around the world, a return to normalcy feels so close, yet so far away, in light of the alarming spread of COVID-19 variants. Although it’s unclear what the next 12 to 24 months will bring, what’s almost certain is that consumers won’t simply revert to doing exactly what they did in 2019. In this episode of the McKinsey on Consumer and Retail podcast, three consumer-behavior experts share their insights into how consumers’ spending patterns and purchasing behaviors are changing, and what companies should do given those changes. An edited transcript of the conversation with executive editor Monica Toriello follows. Subscribe to the podcast .

Monica Toriello: Over the past several weeks, people in some parts of the world have resumed their prepandemic habits. Maybe you’ve recently seen a movie at a theater, or flown on an airplane, or even just stopped for a cup of coffee on your way to the office for the first time in over a year. But a return to “normal” won’t look the same for everyone. Today, we’ll hear from three people who intensively study consumer behavior. They’ll share fascinating insights into how consumers are changing and what companies should do about it.

Kari Alldredge is a McKinsey partner based in Minneapolis. Kari has been advising consumer-goods companies for more than 20 years on a variety of topics, and she leads McKinsey’s work in consumer-goods growth transformation. She is an author of several articles, including a recent one on COVID-19’s impact on demand and costs in the consumer-packaged-goods [CPG] industry .

Anne Grimmelt is a senior knowledge expert in McKinsey’s Consumer Packaged Goods Practice. She is based in Stamford, Connecticut. Anne has been one of the driving forces behind McKinsey’s consumer-sentiment survey , which was launched in 2008 and during the pandemic has expanded to 45 countries. It provides a rich fact base for how consumers are feeling about their finances and how their buying behavior is changing.

And our third guest is Anjali Lai, a senior analyst at Forrester. Anjali, who is based in New York, helps chief marketing officers [CMOs] and other business leaders to understand the shifts in consumer behavior and consumer decision making and then to figure out what these changes mean for the future of brands and industries.

[To comply with Forrester’s Citation Policy, this transcript excludes Anjali Lai’s comments. Listen to the full episode on McKinsey.com or on Apple, Google, and other podcast platforms.]

A ‘reversal of fortune’ for big brands

Monica Toriello: Kari, Anne, Anjali, it’s great to have you here today. All three of you have been keeping your fingers on the pulse of consumers, both before and throughout the pandemic. Have there been any surprises? Are consumers doing things that you didn’t expect? Or is there anything that seemed to be going one way in, say, March or April 2020 but is going in a different direction today?

Kari Alldredge: In 2019 or early 2020, the topic on the minds of large branded consumer-packaged-goods manufacturers was portfolio shaping: how to reimagine their portfolios, how to move away from center-of-store food products and big brands and instead engage with consumers in very different, more targeted, niche-oriented ways. The degree to which the pandemic pushed people back toward big brands in the center of the store, and toward cooking at home, has been a complete turnaround, a reversal of fortune, for large CPG companies.

Some of those changes could have been anticipated, but others are quite shocking: the notion that bread baking would become a phenomenon among millennials, or that pet ownership would skyrocket to the extent that it has, and that those same millennials would be willing to spend more than they spend on their daily Starbucks to feed their new pets.

So, many of those companies that were desperately searching for growth 18 months ago now have the opposite problem: their supply chains can’t keep up . The big question for all of them is which of those consumer behaviors are truly going to persist  and be “sticky” coming out of this pandemic? Certainly, the dog that you adopted is likely to stay at your home. But when you go back to ordering your daily Starbucks and spending $7 a day on a coffee, are you going to spend the same amount to feed your pet? Those are the questions that are on many company leaders’ minds.

Anne Grimmelt: As Kari said, we saw a complete shift. Prepandemic, the growth was in smaller, niche brands, but early in the pandemic, it was large CPG players that really gained scale because their products were available on the shelf. They were also brands that were trusted by consumers, so consumers felt good buying them. If you look at point-of-sale data from IRI or Nielsen, you see that large companies—those with more than $2.5 billion in retail sales in the US market—picked up most of the share growth early in the pandemic, whereas smaller and midsize companies, as well as private label, were really not picking up growth.

In the second half of 2020 and in early 2021, small and midsize companies are regaining their sales growth. And we expect that private label is going to be powerful again , because if you dive into the why—why did consumers pick a new brand, and why did they pick the brands they chose?—it was about availability, it was about purpose, but it was also about value . It was about price points. Going forward, value is going to be even more important, and private label will gain strength in the future.

Trust as a strategic imperative

Monica Toriello: All three of you to some extent have written about customer loyalty: how to win it and how to retain it, particularly in an environment where people are willing to try new brands. Anne and Kari, you found that 39 percent of consumers tried new brands during the pandemic. And Anjali, in your research, you found that small brands are particularly good at earning consumers’ trust and consequently their loyalty. In a recent blog post, you wrote, “Now is the time for companies to embrace trust as a strategic imperative.” What does that mean? How should companies do that?

Even relatively mundane CPG companies are thinking about the end-to-end consumer journey, including consumer experience pre- and postpurchase. Kari Alldredge

Kari Alldredge: I’m seeing two interesting things in response to the trends you just talked about, Anjali. One is the degree to which even relatively mundane CPG companies are thinking about the end-to-end consumer journey, including consumer experience pre- and postpurchase, as they try to understand how to serve their existing consumers but also look for new ways to better meet consumer needs. The notion that there is a pre- and postpurchase experience related to a can of soda or a can of soup is a relatively novel idea, right? But, increasingly, the most forward-thinking companies are doing research across that entire journey to be able to understand the needs of consumers as they’re considering the range of options that are available to them—all the way through to satisfaction with usage and even disposal of the packaging of products.

Another interesting thing I’m seeing is a recognition that marketing is a dialogue, and a recognition of the degree to which consumers now “own” or shape the narratives of many brands. This, too, was happening before the pandemic but was vastly accelerated during the pandemic. The notion that a marketer positions the brand and delivers a message and a promise to consumers is really becoming quite an antiquated one, I think, as consumers themselves—through reviews, ratings , blogs, videos, and social-media posts—shape the identity of many of these brands. Recommendations from friends and family become part of the brand’s identity and are critical to shaping both loyalty and consumer trust.

We found in our research that about 33 percent of millennial and Gen Z consumers say they choose to buy a brand from a company that has their values, versus about 12 percent of baby boomers. Anne Grimmelt

Anne Grimmelt: Our research corroborates that. We found in our research that about 33 percent of millennial and Gen Z consumers  say they choose to buy a brand from a company that has their values, versus about 12 percent of baby boomers. But every demographic group is leaning toward that.

Another finding from our research is the reasons why consumers change to a new brand. It is definitely the younger generation that more often indicates that it’s because of purpose. It’s because of what the company stands for, how it treats its employees, et cetera.

Purpose: More than just a buzzword

Monica Toriello: We’ve been hearing a lot about purpose and values, but I also hear some skepticism in certain pockets of the corporate world as to whether an emphasis on corporate purpose  actually pays off. Because there is an attitude–behavior gap, right? What’s your response to a CEO who says, “Consumers like to say they care about purpose and values, but when they’re at the point of deciding to buy something, they truly only care about convenience or price or quality. Purpose is just a buzzword.”

Kari Alldredge: It’s necessary but not sufficient. I think there’s an increasing recognition that alignment with a consumer’s values may put you in the consideration set but won’t drive you over the line to purchase. You still have to have product superiority, whether that’s taste superiority, functional superiority, or a price-to-value equation that works for that particular consumer.

We talk a lot about the pandemic, which definitely shone a light on health in general, but there are other crises—like social justice  and climate change —that have come to light over the past year and a half and that have really shaken the corporate community. These crises have helped companies understand that some of these factors are fundamental in how consumers perceive themselves and the world around them, to the point where we now actually see some change happening.

One of the things that I was struck by was the speed and seriousness with which many of the household-cleaning companies responded to the pandemic and the heroic efforts to convert production capacity to manufacture things like wipes and sanitizer. Yes, some of that was for financial gain, but I think there really was an almost wartime mentality that I saw companies get new energy from.

I think about center-of-store food manufacturers who, prepandemic, maybe viewed themselves as being a bit sleepy and not exciting in terms of attracting the best talent. Now when you hear them talk about what they do, there’s real pride in the fact that they fed America, or they kept America safe. It really changed the way they think about the importance of what they do.

Subscribe to the McKinsey on Consumer and Retail podcast

Sources of insight.

Monica Toriello: All three of you are experts in consumer behavior. But consumers are changing fast and they’re changing constantly. Anjali, in another recent blog post, you wrote, “Rather than expect consumers to settle into a defined postpandemic normal, CMOs should prepare for a constant evolution of consumer needs and expectations over the next 12 to 24 months.” So beyond reading the latest consumer research and analysis, what are the best ways for CMOs and CEOs to understand where consumers are and where they’re headed?

Kari Alldredge: One of the best sources of insights is their online channel partners and their own D2C [direct to consumer] sites . Companies should mine online data to get a quick pulse on the way consumers are thinking or feeling. They should look at ratings and reviews using advanced analytics to understand and see trends and what’s selling on sites like Kroger.com, Walmart.com, or Amazon.com. They could even develop products that they can quickly test in an online environment and then change and adjust, as opposed to thinking about mass development of a product that gets pushed out to thousands and thousands of brick-and-mortar retail stores.

Consumers don’t always know what they want, and they can’t predict how their behavior will change. So traditional consumer research—which asks consumers how likely they are to purchase something—is becoming less relevant or reliable than actual data in market. That’s why data from e-commerce sites can be so valuable.

Anne Grimmelt: Another very powerful way to understand consumers  is by looking at what your peer companies do. You can go to industry conferences like the CAGNY [Consumer Analyst Group of New York] conference and hear a company like L’Oréal talk about how they use their D2C and their online-sales platform to see what type of color lipstick people try—not buy , but try —on their online platform. That information is critical for them to know where to innovate. What are the colors that people want and what are the products that people like to try out on the digital platform?

Similarly, I think it’s very important to keep an open mind beyond your own borders, to realize what’s happening elsewhere in the world. Going back to the topic of purpose, for instance, it is very much alive in the US but it’s also very much alive in Europe. Learning about the power of what consumers demand and how purpose is driving consumer decisions about CPG companies—and what companies in Europe are doing to meet consumer demand—can be valuable, wherever you are in the world.

Kari Alldredge: I think we also shouldn’t underestimate the resilience of consumers and the gravitational pull of life as we knew it before the pandemic. One thing that surprised me even in the past several weeks is the degree to which behaviors have bounced back. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past 18 months it’s that I don’t have a crystal ball, or if I did, it is certainly broken—because there is no part of this last 18 months that I ever could have in a million years predicted.

At the beginning of the pandemic, one company I work with asked every board member, “When you look back, what’s the one thing that will be blazingly obvious that we either should always have done or never have been doing?” And one of the things that came up was shaking hands: “We’re never going to shake hands again.” But I attended a graduation ceremony in the beginning of June—so, early into the recovery—and what was striking to me is that the dean of that school shook the hand of, and physically embraced, every single one of the thousand students who crossed that stage. And this was at an institution that had been, like most educational institutions, incredibly thoughtful and conservative about their public-health response. Literally days after restrictions were lifted, the urge to connect was so strong that it looked as if the pandemic had never happened.

People are resilient. Hundreds of years of behavior certainly have been meaningfully changed by the past 18 months, but I think a lot of the old behaviors will bounce back pretty quickly.

Monica Toriello: So if you could gather all the CEOs and CMOs of consumer companies in one room and leave them with one message, what would it be? What is the one thing they need to do to position themselves for success in 2021 and 2022?

Anne Grimmelt: My one-liner would be, “Be open to change and be agile .”

Kari Alldredge: I would say, “Listen; don’t tell.”

Kari Alldredge is a partner in McKinsey’s Minneapolis office, and  Anne Grimmelt is a senior knowledge expert in the Stamford office.  Monica Toriello is an executive editor in the New York office.

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Statistics > Methodology

Title: projective techniques in consumer research: a mixed methods-focused review and empirical reanalysis.

Abstract: This article gives an integrative review of research using projective methods in the consumer research domain. We give a general historical overview of the use of projective methods, both in psychology and in consumer research applications, and discuss the reliability and validity aspects and measurement for projective techniques. We review the literature on projective techniques in the areas of marketing, hospitality & tourism, and consumer & food science, with a mixed methods research focus on the interplay of qualitative and quantitative techniques. We review the use of several quantitative techniques used for structuring and analyzing projective data and run an empirical reanalysis of previously gathered data. We give recommendations for improved rigor and for potential future work involving mixed methods in projective techniques.

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Consumers’ Inflation and Labor Market Expectations Remain Largely Stable

NEW YORK—The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data today released the August 2024 Survey of Consumer Expectations , which shows inflation expectations remained unchanged at the short- and longer-term horizons, and rebounded somewhat at the medium-term horizon after a sharp decrease last month. Labor market expectations were mixed, but largely stable. Households were more optimistic about the availability of credit a year from now. Delinquency expectations rose slightly again, to the highest level since April 2020.

The main findings from the August 2024 Survey are:

• Median inflation expectations at the one- and five-year horizons remained unchanged in August at 3.0% and 2.8%, respectively. Median inflation expectations at the three-year horizon rebounded somewhat from the low July reading, increasing from 2.3% to 2.5%. The survey’s measure of disagreement across respondents (the difference between the 75th and 25th percentile of inflation expectations) increased at all three horizons.
• Median inflation uncertainty—or the uncertainty expressed regarding future inflation outcomes—was unchanged at the one-year horizon and declined at the three- and five-year horizons.
• Median home price growth expectations increased to 3.1% from 3.0% in July.
• Median year-ahead expected price changes increased by 0.1 percentage point to 3.6% for gas, by 0.2 percentage point to 7.3% for rent, and 0.4 percentage point to 8.0% for medical care, but declined by 0.3 percentage point to 4.4% for food and 1.3 percentage points to 5.9% for the cost of a college education.

Labor M arket

• Median one-year-ahead expected earnings growth increased to 2.9% from 2.7%, just above its 12-month trailing average of 2.8%. The increase was most pronounced for respondents in households with less than $50,000 annual income.
• Mean unemployment expectations—or the mean probability that the U.S. unemployment rate will be higher one year from now—increased to 37.7% from 36.6% in July.
• The mean perceived probability of losing one’s job in the next 12 months decreased by 1.0 percentage point to 13.3%, falling below the 12-month trailing average of 13.7%. The mean probability of leaving one’s job voluntarily in the next 12 months also decreased, to 19.1% from 20.7%, falling slightly below the 12-month trailing average of 19.4%.
• The mean perceived probability of finding a job if one’s current job was lost decreased by 0.2 percentage point to 52.3%, remaining below the 12-month trailing average of 53.9% and well below its year-ago reading of 55.7%.

Household Finance

• Median expected growth in household income increased by 0.1 percentage point to 3.1%, remaining within the narrow range of 3.0% to 3.1% the series has maintained for the past year. 
• Median household spending growth expectations increased by 0.1 percentage point to 5.0%. The series has moved within a narrow range of 4.9% to 5.2% since November 2023, remaining well above its February 2020 level of 3.1%.     
• Perceptions of credit access compared to a year ago improved with a smaller share reporting tighter conditions compared to a year ago. Expectations about future credit access also improved, with a smaller share of respondents expecting tighter credit conditions a year from now, and a larger share expecting easier conditions. The shares reporting or expecting worse credit conditions are at their lowest levels since early 2022, while the share expecting improved credit availability is at its highest level since September 2021.
• The average perceived probability of missing a minimum debt payment over the next three months increased by 0.3 percentage point to 13.6%, its third consecutive increase. The current reading is the highest since April 2020.
• The median expected year-ahead change in taxes at current income level declined by 0.1 percentage point to 3.9%.
• Median year-ahead expected growth in government debt decreased to 9.1% from 9.3%.
• The mean perceived probability that the average interest rate on saving accounts will be higher in 12 months increased by 1.5 percentage points to 26.6%.
• Perceptions about households’ current financial situations deteriorated slightly with fewer respondents reporting being better off than a year ago and more respondents reporting being worse off. Year-ahead expectations also deteriorated somewhat, with a larger share of respondents expecting to be worse off. Overall, respondents remain considerably more optimistic about their financial situation compared to a year ago.
• The mean perceived probability that U.S. stock prices will be higher 12 months from now remained unchanged at 39.3%.

  About the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) The SCE contains information about how consumers expect overall inflation and prices for food, gas, housing, and education to behave. It also provides insight into Americans’ views about job prospects and earnings growth and their expectations about future spending and access to credit. The SCE also provides measures of uncertainty regarding consumers’ outlooks. Expectations are also available by age, geography, income, education, and numeracy. 

The SCE is a nationally representative, internet-based survey of a rotating panel of approximately 1,300 household heads. Respondents participate in the panel for up to 12 months, with a roughly equal number rotating in and out of the panel each month. Unlike comparable surveys based on repeated cross-sections with a different set of respondents in each wave, this panel allows us to observe the changes in expectations and behavior of the same individuals over time. For further information on the SCE, please refer to an overview of the survey methodology , the interactive chart guide , and the survey questionnaire .

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In Tied Presidential Race, Harris and Trump Have Contrasting Strengths, Weaknesses

7. economic ratings and concerns, table of contents.

• Other findings: An uncertain election outcome, the more critical candidate, Trump and the 2020 election
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Americans’ views of the nation’s economy remain largely negative. And U.S. adults continue to express concern over the price of food and consumer goods and increasing worries about housing prices and the availability of jobs.

A quarter rate economic conditions as excellent or good, while 37% say they are only fair and 38% rate conditions as poor.

Views of the economy have fluctuated only modestly in the past year. In May, for example, 23% expressed positive views of the economy .

Economic ratings remain partisan. About four-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (41%) rate economic conditions positively, up slightly from May (37%). That compares with 10% of Republicans and Republican leaners.

Positive views of the economy plummeted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and have been more negative than positive since then. Fewer than a third of Americans have rated economic conditions as excellent or good over the last several years, although current views are somewhat more positive than they were in the summer of 2022 and throughout 2023.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they are very concerned about the price of food and consumer goods. Other economic concerns – housing costs and job availability – have increased since 2023.

There’s been little change in concerns over prices for food and consumer goods. Since 2022, at least 70% of Americans have said they are very concerned over the cost of food and consumer goods.

Concerns about housing costs have grown over the last year. The share of Americans who express a high degree of concern over the cost of housing has risen 8 percentage points since April 2023, from 61% to 69%.

Job concerns have increased. Four-in-ten Americans say they are very concerned about “people who want to work being unable to find jobs.” That is 9 points higher than in January and 13 points higher than in April 2023.

A relatively small share is concerned about the stock market. The share of Americans who say they are very concerned about how the stock market is doing has risen from 18% in January to 24% today. Concerns about the stock markets are identical to where they stood in April 2023.

Partisanship and economic concerns

While there are sizable differences in economic ratings, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say they are very concerned about food and consumer prices, as well as housing costs.

Still, Republicans are roughly 20 points more likely than Democrats to say they are very concerned about prices for food and consumer goods (85% vs. 64%). The gap is narrower in concerns over housing costs (72% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats).

Roughly four in-ten Republicans (42%) and Democrats (38%) express a great deal of concern about people wanting jobs but being unable to find them.

And Republicans (31%) are nearly twice as likely as Democrats (17%) to say they are very concerned about how the stock market is doing.

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EY Mobility Consumer Index shows US less likely to purchase an EV than last year and compared to global consumers

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However, an increase in interest for hybrid vehicles shows a new pathway to EV adoption

• Of the US consumers planning on purchasing a new vehicle in the next 24 months, only 34% intend to purchase an EV, down 14% from 48% in the 2023 EY MCI.
• Despite a focus on infrastructure and EV education, consumers cite expensive battery replacement (26%) and concerns about public chargers (25%) as major deterrents to buying an EV.
• Amid questions about EV maintenance and value, hybrid vehicles are on the rise, with 21% of US consumers considering a hybrid vehicle as a transitional bridge between ICE and EVs.

The fifth iteration of the EY Mobility Consumer Index (MCI), a global survey of almost 20,000 consumers from 28 countries, found that despite record US consumer interest in electric vehicles (EVs) in 2023, only 34% of US consumers intend to purchase an EV as their next car in 2024. This marks a 14 point decrease since the 2023 MCI findings, proving that EV education is not where it needs to be and barriers to mass EV adoption still exist.

“While we’ve seen substantial increases in interest and purchasing of EVs since 2020, this year’s MCI shows dips in demand for the first time,” said Steve Patton, EY Americas Automotive Leader. “This decrease is due partly to a lack of consumer education around the long-term value of an EV and maintenance requirements vs. traditional ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles.”

Consumer confidence in infrastructure builds, yet concerns about battery maintenance and value fall short

In the last year, consumer confidence in both EV range and charging infrastructure has risen, due in large part to cross-sector collaboration and investments in both education and charging stations. In 2023, MCI findings revealed that 30% of US car buyers were concerned about EVs’ limited range. This year, only 24% of US car buyers felt the limited range of EVs was a top concern. What’s more, the lack of charging stations is less of a worry than it once was. In 2022, MCI noted that 34% of US buyers were concerned about finding charging stations — that number was 23% in 2024, representing an 11 percentage-point decrease. 

That said, confidence in EV range and charging infrastructure has been overshadowed lately by US consumers’ increasing concerns about battery life and maintenance fees. Expensive battery replacement was the top deterrent to purchase an EV for US consumers, overtaking lack of charging stations for the first time. This is especially true for potential first-time EV buyers, as 27% noted concerns about expensive batteries compared to 23% of current EV owners. 

“Over the last five years, we’ve seen tremendous progress around easing the barriers for EV adoption, from curbing reliability and accessibility concerns to instilling charging confidence among US consumers,” said Marc Coltelli, EY Americas Power & Utilities eMobility Leader. “To keep momentum and make EV ownership appealing, it’s imperative to educate and create a seamless customer experience from the dealership to the charge point, throughout the ecosystem and lifecycle of an EV. Now, US consumers are expressing heightened concerns over maintenance and battery replacement costs, when really it costs less to maintain an EV compared to ICE vehicles.” 

Hybrid vehicles prove transitional bridge may be necessary 

While EV demand has decreased, interestingly, hybrid vehicles have risen in popularity. In 2024, the share of US consumers intending to buy a hybrid vehicle as their next car rose 2 percentage points, compared to the global average, which decreased 2 points overall. 

This rise can be attributed to the overall versatility of hybrid vehicles. In fact, 21% of US consumers say they prefer a gradual transition from an ICE vehicle to a fully electric vehicle. What’s more, 26% of US buyers like the security that comes with a hybrid engine (compared to only 19% of global respondents). This shows that optionality is key, and hybrids are stepping in for EVs as a bridge vehicle for those interested but not yet willing to give up the comfort of owning an ICE.

“It’s no surprise that hybrid vehicles are rising in popularity, especially with many potential EV buyers pointing to environmental concerns as their motivation to purchase,” said Raman Ram, EY Americas Aerospace, Defense and Mobility Leader. “With many still hesitant to go all in with EVs, hybrids offer an ‘easier-to-swallow’ solution: the security of ICE with the advancements of EV technology and performance. For those who are looking to transition due to the environment, hybrids allow owners to lessen their reliance on fuel and creates options for batteries and parts. For many, it’s a win-win.”

EVs are leading the future of tech-enabled driving 

Despite decreased demand, automakers have long used EVs in the transition to more connected vehicles. And now, as clear leaders in tech-enabled driving, US consumers expect EVs to have connected service options. For the majority (57%) of US consumers, navigation features are the top feature used when connecting a car to the internet, and a further 45% would pay for navigation services, proving technology enablement has become a basic necessity for potential car buyers. Another need for the majority (56%) of US consumers is safety measures, while almost half (46%) would use connected services for maintenance requests and service updates. 

However, EV owners do feel pain points with the transition to connected cars. Almost half (47%) note high price points for additional services are concerning, with an additional 36% noting most services can be found on their smartphones. 

While the road for consumers to become fully electric is bumpy, and as demand ebbs and flows, education and creating hybrid options will be key to the progression of mass EV adoption. 

For more information, visit https://www.ey.com/en_us/services/mobility . 

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About the EY Mobility Consumer Index

Launched in 2020, the EY Mobility Consumer Index (MCI) is an annual study that gauges car buying intent; analyzes the pace of shift toward the adoption of electric vehicles, challenges in charging infrastructure and interest toward connected features; and assess the consumers’ car buying journey. The MCI 2024 uncovers insights from 19,000 respondents in 28 countries. The US-specific findings account for 1,500 respondents. The latest edition also addresses pressing uncertainties confronting the EV future, namely:

• How has the EV landscape evolved, and do hybrids assume greater prominence?
• Are Chinese companies upending consumer brand preferences in the EV market?
• How has the level of interest in connected features evolved?

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