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How customer insights enable business strategy validation—and more

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 10 July, 2017

Customer insights encourage, enable and inform, from the drawing board through to the final execution. But they also offer the opportunity to put hard data to your strategic assumptions—and ensure that you can remain agile in a constantly changing business environment.

How market research enables strategy validation—and much more

Start as you mean to go on

Every business strategy should begin with an insight or a series of insights. That may come from customer or market research, but alternative sources are also solid choices. Knowledge of your demographics, your environment, your competitors and your brand perception are just a few of the building blocks that any new product offering or strategic direction need to be successful.

Every strategic development should begin with an insight or a series of insights. 

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With this initial foundation, you can start creating your strategy and, more importantly, validate it against the relevant market forces. Notice that a particular demographic is overrepresented in your fanbase? It may be time to adjust your brand voice to better align with them. But could this alienate a particular high-value segment of your customer database?

Market research can answer questions like these, enabling you to quickly adapt and adjust your business, remaining agile in an ever-changing environment. They reveal new opportunities that you can quickly capitalise on with a probe-and-learn approach, reducing the risk that is part-and-parcel of a large, less-informed strategic sea change.

 

Read more: Should you use a market research agency?

 

Test and retest

However, if you are relegating market research to only the beginning of your planning process, then you are making a mistake. These insights are not a one-and-done, single use item; they are part of your periodic strategic evaluation as well.

You might have reached the middle of the year, prompting you and your team to take a good look at your current business plan and evaluate its success. You can use all the usual metrics to do so, but what you may be missing is the addition of continuous strategic validation.

The world we live in is a constantly changing one, and what was true six months ago when you began your strategy execution may no longer be true. Have your demographics shifted? Has the market adjusted? What about your competitors; what have they done? Without these kind of new insights at the evaluation point, you could end up working with a plan that is no longer suitable to your business environment.

 

Opening new avenues

And what if you do find that your strategy is no longer aligned with market forces? Should you simply close your eyes and follow a plan that may no longer be working? No. Accepting the changes and developing a new direction (or even scrapping the plan altogether), can be a hard choice to make, but the reality is that if the market research reveals your strategy isn't market-aligned, then chances are it’s going to fail.

If the market research reveals your strategy isn't market-aligned, then chances are it’s going to fail.

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But it isn’t all bad news. As you will have noticed during your original strategy development, market research offers opportunities as well as guidance. It can help you uncover niches that your business could fill with the right planning and execution.

These opportunities must be capitalised on as soon as you are able to do so, as they may not be present by the end of your strategic cycle. This is why it is integral to test, check and validate current strategies with market research. It doesn’t just allow you to improve your current strategy, but opens up the opportunities for brand new directions as well.

 

Read more: Understanding your audience [Free Guide]

 

Summary

From beginning to end, strategic research insights can help develop your business direction from good to great, open new avenues and ensure that you are making the most of your strategic execution.

 

To find out more about making the most of your market research, investigate the free ebook below.

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Topics: Market Insights


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