With the beginning of a new year comes the habit of wanting to materialize a list of projects. Among the goals set, it is possible to find the opening of an establishment offering a service or product. This is a legitimate dream, but it is accompanied by a large number of legitimate doubts and concerns. After making the determination to undertake comes the task of answering a huge number of questions.
In such a scenario, Market Research appears as a great ally. Reducing uncertainty is one of the functions of our discipline. However, a popular saying in Latin America says that in order to be helped, one must first help oneself. In this sense, we would like to point out that there are a series of objectives that you must fulfill before requesting the services of an agency in our sector if you are in the situation described above.
Target consumer. We will always reiterate this point. Although there will be occasions where we can establish it from the results of a market study, it is essential to be clear about which segment of the population you want to focus your brand’s efforts on. To be certain of this, we suggest that you try to define it as if it were a person. Describe their age, gender, habits, fears, hobbies, income range and more. Based on this exercise you can clarify a substantial part of your business plan.
Concept. Each business has very well defined characteristics. It may be that at the beginning these last ones are somewhat diffuse, but the more determined they are from the beginning, the better results you will have and the analysts will have more elements to design a research that really satisfies your needs. Be as neat as you can with the value-added offer that your venture will provide to your customers. Otherwise you could enter the market to compete for quantity and not for quality.
Specific objectives. If you have already advanced to this point, you should sit down and establish a list of key questions that you want to solve. As you will notice, by defining some variables beforehand, you will have fewer questions to answer. For this reason, focus on the questions that have the most weight for your plan and ask them to the market analysts you work with in order to apply a valid and effective study. Even if you would like to solve all the questions, many times it will be enough to find solutions to a few important ones.
Decisions to make. You may think that this is a redundant topic. It is one thing to have established a series of key objectives and quite another to have established what actions will be taken based on their results. For example, within your organization, the same finding may lead you to look for a given size of physical store or choose to open an online store, while another area may choose to offer this or that brand of a certain category in the catalog to the public.
There are more issues to clarify before making your own inquiries with consumers or hiring an agency that specializes in the field. There are also other vendors to consider before moving forward with your plan. Be as organized as possible and you will make your New Year’s goal the start of an exciting and productive activity that will bring you much satisfaction.
At Acertiva we have more than two decades helping companies and brands to carry out their Market Research projects in LATAM. We have a team of analysts and strategic allies in the region to meet your needs of knowledge of people and markets. We are attentive to your message so that we can hear your ideas on the subject. We will get back to you with how together we can make your next success story a reality.
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