Market Research 101
Once you know how you will approach branding, you can move on to researching your markets.
As you can imagine, it’s hard to create a successful brand that appeals to your customers if you don’t even know who they are and what they see as valuable.
What unmet needs do your customers have?
What makes them want to purchase your products?
What experience are they looking for?
How do they like to be talked to?
What are their values?
Once you have gathered enough data to fully answer these questions, you will want to create a customer persona that summarizes well your target customers.
In case you do not know what a customer persona is, this is basically like creating the profile of a fake person who would be as close as possible to the perfect representation of your customers – like if you had to merge all your target customers into a single person, this would be them.
Often this persona is created using a sort of CV or resume which highlights the persona’s demographics, social status, personality traits, likes and dislikes and so on.
This is particularly useful as it’s a lot easier to remember a person whenever you’re busy building your brand rather than remembering a long list of bullet points.
Researching Competitors
Besides finding out who your customers are, you will want to research your competitors.
What products are already being provided to meet the needs of your customers?
What are they lacking?
And from this: what is it that your business – and then by extension, your brand – can provide that’s of value to your customers that your competitors cannot?
This step is extremely important for the welfare of your brand, as being misinformed about any of these points can break it.
You may sell scented candles and decide to start a brand focusing on Mediterranean flowers because you saw demand but no competitors…only to find out months of hard work later that the demand you saw was actually inexistent, or actually there was a massive competitor who actually just went temporarily out of stock and sucks up all the traffic.
Don’t forget to vary your sources of information – don’t rely on just a single keyword tool or the opinions of a few friends who could be biased.
Search the Web, ask on forums, create online surveys, ask a wide range of friends and family, conduct individual interviews with potential customers if necessary.
Do what you need to be as certain as possible that your research is correct.
Once you have your customer persona completed and you have a good idea of what opportunities might lie ahead of you, it’s time to put it all together and position your brand on your market.
