Another thought provoking post. i personally don't assume and spend most time and budget market research and asking via survey.Split testing 'til it hurts and constantly listening to existing customers suggestions and requirements are stock in trade……

Another thought provoking post. i personally don't assume and spend most time and budget market research and asking via survey.Split testing 'til it hurts and constantly listening to existing customers suggestions and requirements are stock in trade……

Yes, there is need for general market research to know and understand
industries, but as your team (I'm assuming you're affiliated with them) is
proving, high level research and insights is a commodity that can be had
without spending an arm and a leg. What's most important in guiding brand
decision-making is knowing what your customers want/need and what your
potential customers want/need. No pie chart shows us that. You have to ask
enough of them until you begin to see trends and commonalities in the
answers. Then you go solve those problems for them.

Social media offers the opportunity to take small sample focus groups of
customers/fans WHO CARE ABOUT YOU specific questions about your product or
service. All the focus group and market research to date has been with a
couple hundred (or sometimes thousand) people in Kansas City (or some other
such nominal middle-America market) and is done with people who sometimes
don't even know who you are.

Market research should be done on your market, not on randomly chosen people
who might be. Social media closes that gap and makes it so you can ask the
right questions (which you've done) of the right people (which you probably
haven't).

Make sense?

Mobile phones… here is a very inexpensive, basic, simple market research site (I would actually recommend it, much more user friendly than other sites!)–

http://researchmob.com/research_mob/industry?in…

How many of these stats are you going to get off facebook?

Ok, I will give you that I was being a bit facetious, social media is important on the customer end of the research, but that's only really half the picture. If you were going to start say something related to mobile phones, you wouldn't just want to know who you would sell to, you would need to know related products, prices, revenue structures, competitors, etc. So in my opinion despite the changes brought on by social media, there is still quite a need for market research.