How top brands use market research – With examples!

What makes market research impactful?

Something to bear in mind whenever you’re doing market research is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing if the theory or hypothesis you originally had turns out to be wrong. 

The purpose of market research is to reveal the truth to you and your business, and even if that truth is a surprise or means that you have to change direction, at the very least you ended up more informed than you started. 

Here are some examples of companies who’ve used market research and seen great success (and better brand positioning) as a result. 

How Little Moons used market research to reach their ideal audience

Let’s take Little Moons, UK mochi ice cream brand who early in twenty twenty one became the subject of a viral TikTok sensation, with sales rocketing up by more than one thousand percent. The team wanted to find out whether this was going to be a long-term trend, or whether sales would slow once the trend had passed. 

Using market research, Little Moons discovered that their new customers from TikTok weren’t to be their source of long-term sales and growth. 

They refocused their PR strategy to tell the TikTok story, and ended up being featured in publications that were actually read by their target audience. 

Bloom & Wild’s Valentine’s Day gamble

Let’s take UK flower delivery brand Bloom & Wild. When looking for their next campaign, they decided to put it to the people. 

They asked consumers what they really thought about red roses for Valentine’s Day. 

Through their research they discovered that people think red roses are a cliche, and that they’d overwhelmingly prefer a more thoughtful gift. 

So they chose not to sell red roses for Valentine’s Day twenty twenty one, resulting in a sizeable fifty one percent increase in press coverage year on year. 

And what about some big global brands?

Oracle, the Global IT leader, has created insightful content for its audiences for years. But they realised they needed a better understanding of what people wanted from their content. 

Using market research they found a completely new approach to how they created research reports, resulting in a five times increase in new business opportunities and a seven times increase in the value of those opportunities.  

And for even more evidence that market research is a crucial part of any marketer’s job, let’s look at an example of what happens when a company skips that all-important market research.

In 2013 Facebook partnered with HTC to launch a smartphone, called First. 

Using Facebook’s interface as its home screen, the First hit the market with a muted response to say the least. 

Poor sales and massive product development costs could have been avoided if Facebook had only tested the idea with their target consumers first. 

These are just a couple of examples of how market research can make or break your business. Make sure your brand is one of the success stories.  

We have loads more consumer profiling examples like these, so head to the link in the description below to hear about seven epic fails that consumer testing can help you avoid.