Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conducting market research can be helpful during the product life cycle, from introduction, to growth, to maturity, and even to decline. If you are not sure how to proceed, gaining a greater understanding of your customers is always a good initial step. 

At Applied Marketing Science (AMS), we recommend all companies do market research at three key stages: 

• During the “fuzzy front end” of innovation, when you’re not exactly sure where to focus your efforts. 
• Once you’ve developed a potential solution, and you need to figure out whether you have a winning idea before investing a lot of time, effort, and money into the product or solution. 
• Once you’ve settled on a product or service, but you’re not sure how to price it.  

Of course, there are many other times when market research makes sense, too. Some examples include monitoring customer satisfaction and enhancing customer experience. 

Whether you’re a product developer, engineer, marketer, manager, sales manager or a customer experience professional, you will find our market research training program beneficial. At AMS, we provide both in-house and public training courses on Voice of the Customer, Interviewing, Ethnography, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Journey Mapping, and more. 

Our hands-on customer insights training programs provide you with practical, step-by-step instructions into how you can implement our methods within your organization. 

We also offer Action Learning engagements, where we provide personalized, directed training throughout the whole market research process. 

Broadly speaking, there are two types of market research: primary research and secondary research. AMS specializes in full-service market research in both primary and secondary market research. We can craft interview and survey questions to answer your specific questions, collect data from customers in your target market, and develop a custom and confidential report tailored to your organization. We can also uncover insights in data you already have using our proprietary supervised finetuned AI model. Learn more about the different services AMS offers by reading more about our solutions. When organizations use secondary research, they use data and reports that have been compiled and published by others for general use. Common secondary sources include data provided by government entities and trade associations.

AMS provides market research consulting, training, and coaching. While we have many trusted partners to help us find the right people for your studies, we do not offer standalone recruiting services and are unable to accommodate requests for them.

At AMS, we use both qualitative and quantitative research methods. 

The goal of qualitative research is to understand both “why” and “how” people think, feel, and act the way they do. We use qualitative data when our goal is to understand issues and experiences, explore nuance, and deeply understand the perspective of a few people. Qualitative methods are inherently open-ended, and they allow respondents to answer questions freely. 

In contrast, quantitative methods are used to generalize to a larger population. Quantitative research is used when you want to look at how common a particular opinion is, measure the relationship between variables, and test hypotheses with significance testing. 

We start our engagements by creating a screener survey—a small list of questions that respondents must answer in a particular way to qualify for our study. The initial survey is the easy part; the hard part is finding and recruiting those who qualify. 

In B2C categories, where the average consumer is in your target market, recruiting is relatively simple. However, in some B2B categories, particularly those focusing on industrial products or medical devices, it can take effort to find the right respondents. 

AMS has longstanding relationships with several third-party suppliers that specialize in recruiting. At times, we also do our own in-house recruiting. In the end, we can find those hard-to-reach respondents that you are looking for. 

Designing survey questions is a collaborative effort between AMS researchers and our clients. We begin by having detailed conversations with you and your stakeholders. We’ll want to understand answers to several key questions, including: Why did you reach out to us? What important questions do you need answered? How will you use what you learn from the research?

After we ask you the important questions, we then use our expertise to create a discussion guide or survey that will provide you with the answers you need.

Research questions can be broad or quite narrow. Some of our research tackles the “fuzzy front end” of innovation: when our clients have big, nebulous questions about who their customers are, what their unmet needs are, and where the market is heading. Other projects focus on more straightforward questions, such as whether to modify a specific product feature or how much customers are willing to pay for a new service.

You can conduct market research in-house. In fact, many companies never work with outside research providers at all. However, there are several benefits to outsourcing your major research projects: 

1. Our methodology is rooted in academia, but adapted for industry. Our co-founder is a professor at MIT who has published many award-winning articles in top marketing science journals. 

1. We bring decades of experience across a wide variety of industries across B2B, B2C, and healthcare. Often, we learn something from one industry that will help make sense of what we’re hearing in others. 

1. We can handle complexity. We have our own in-house technology for conducting virtual interviews and programming surveys. At AMS, we have strong relationships with global partners who can help us recruit those hard-to-reach respondents. 

1. We understand the complex questions you have about your customers. Our research goes beyond the obvious and uncovers latent customer needs that your organization may be missing. 

You can and should do research with your current customers. It is important to understand what those who regularly use your product like and dislike about their experience. However, if you’re only talking to your current customers, you’re missing out on valuable insights about what it would take to capture more market share. You might find that your product needs only slight tweaks, or that your marketing messages need to be framed differently, to appeal to more customers. 

Yes, market research can help you with competitive analysis. In fact, almost every one of our engagements asks respondents to compare our clients’ companies to their competitors. We’ll help you understand where you’re perceived better than the competition—and where you need to improve. 

While we use many different techniques to uncover customer insights, the original term, “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) was developed by one of our firm’s co-founders, Professor John Hauser, and his graduate student at the time, Dr. Abbie Griffin, to mean something very specific. We continue that legacy today by focusing on VOC as the study of customer needs. The insights we glean through VOC are rooted in cutting-edge research methods and the latest developments in AI.

What makes a good voice? A good voice is a complete set of the customer’s wants and needs that are expressed in the customer’s own words; they should also be organized and prioritized by the customer in terms of importance and current satisfaction.

Ask any product manager how much time their organization has invested in developing a product and the answer will be “weeks,” “months,” or even “years.” After all that effort, a dilemma arises: set prices too high, and you miss out on sales. Set them too low, and you miss out on revenue. How do you determine how much your customers are willing to pay for your product or service and optimize return on investment? The answer is pricing research.

AMS consultants are well-versed in designing and analyzing pricing studies that utilize four established methods, including conjoint analysis. The pricing experts at AMS have extensive experience matching client pricing objectives with the best methodology.

We firmly believe that market research is a critical component of any product or marketing strategy. However, there may be instances where market research may not be necessary, including:

When you’re making a low-risk decision. If you’re making a minor product tweak or adding a new service that can easily be modified as you learn more about the market, you may not need to conduct market research.

If you have already done a lot of research, but you find yourself thinking that just one more study will help you decide. There is always a risk when you’re launching a new product or service. No one ever has a 100% take rate. Occasionally, we see clients who are paralyzed by the thought of making the wrong decision, so they use research as a crutch.

If your stakeholders won’t listen to the data anyway. Unfortunately, we run into this every now and again. If your leaders are intent on “listening to their gut” or simply following what your top competitor is doing, save yourself the time, energy, and cost of conducting a market research study. That said, AMS has a plethora of resources to help your stakeholders understand the value of understanding customer insights, which are crucial to business health.

A journey map provides a structured and actionable understanding of what customers want, how, and when. It tells the story of how your target market experiences the purchase and usage cycle. Journey maps can be used in any industry, including medical products and pharmaceuticals.

Learn more about our research projects involving journey maps and how they can help organizations improve customer experience.

We’ve helped many clients analyze existing data. Our proprietary supervised, finetuned large language model developed with leading academic collaborators, that’s revolutionizing VOC research. Fast, precise, and efficient, it understands the complexity of customer needs uncovering functional and emotional, fleeting and enduring and universal and segment needs, keeping organizations at the forefront of innovation.

This AI model is a powerful tool that can aggregate and analyze customer data from a wide range of sources, such as online reviews and call center transcripts, providing insights comparable to those generated by professional market research analysts. Learn more about our AI capabilities here. 

Yes. We conduct highly interactive and engaging virtual workshops. We utilize popular video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom, along with online whiteboarding, interactive surveys, and breakout rooms for seamless collaboration. Virtual workshop sizes are also limited to 10-20 attendees to encourage collaboration and communication. That said, we know that some organizations prefer to meet in person for an added level of participation and engagement. AMS offers a variety of research and customer insights strategy programs in virtual and on-site modalities – learn more about our training offerings here. 

There are many market research consultants out there – how do you choose the best one for your organization’s needs? We recommend looking for a company that does the following: 

• Understands what your company or business is trying to accomplish. For example, during your initial meeting, high-quality suppliers will ask good questions, share their perspectives, and help you clarify your own thinking on your research questions. 
• Clearly explains their research approach and rationale. 
• Provides clear, actionable insights and recommended next steps to help you make sense of all the data. 
• Provides thorough case studies and client testimonials. 
• Meets your budget and timeline. 
• Acts as an ongoing partner. 

AMS consultants go above and beyond to support our clients in research engagement, delivering actionable insights via compelling presentations and comprehensive reports. We follow rigorous, academically based methods and are fueled by the latest advancements in AI to enable cutting-edge research and more precise customer insights. To learn more about our services, view our solutions. 

One of the unique skills that our talented consultants possess is our ability to talk with any type of customer about any subject. We have experience in almost every category imaginable. 

When it comes to B2B research, AMS has covered many complex topic areas. For example, we have conducted interviews with: 

• Radiation oncologists and neurosurgeons about how they treat brain tumors. 
• Welders about how they choose and use their welding equipment. 
• Energy managers about how they purchase energy for their factories and plants. 
• Builders and contractors about how they select HVAC equipment.
• Farmers about how they grow fruits and vegetables.
• Car painters about their color matching process.

You can learn more about the industries we have worked with by checking out our powerful results. 

Our consultants have extensive experience handling sensitive topics with care and compassion. Our expert interviewers are trained to put all respondents at ease (regardless of the topic), listen with empathy, use active listening, ask difficult questions, and continually gauge whether respondents are uncomfortable with the interview. 

We’ve talked with: 

• Parents and their adolescents about menstrual care 
• People who are obese about their weight loss journeys 
• People who are paraplegic about their bowel management processes 
• Those recently diagnosed with breast cancer or prostate cancer about their medical journey 

Because we conduct custom market research, each project is tailored to your needs, so costs vary widely depending on the engagement. Contact us to discuss your market research needs and pricing. 

Yes. We are proud to have clients from around the world. We have many trusted on-the-ground recruiting partners in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Our consultants regularly travel internationally for client work.