Customers change, markets shift, and familiar patterns do not always hold forever. Research helps us revisit what we think we know.
During one of our recent sharing sessions with research experts from BeeHives Consulting, we brought together a group of business owners from the KarmaClub network to compare notes on how we understand customers, test assumptions, and make decisions.
One idea kept resurfacing: the longer we run a business, the more experience naturally starts to guide our decisions.
“Our customers care about price.”
“People buy us because of the quality.”
“This audience should like this product.”
“Our competitor is growing because their marketing is better.”
Some of those assumptions are probably right.
But customers change. Competitors change. The market changes.
And that is where market research becomes useful.
At its simplest, market research is a way to understand customers, competitors, and the market well enough to make better decisions. More often than not, useful research starts much closer to the day-to-day business.
Sidik, founder of Twostrap, shared a real example from his own experience. His SPG kept noticing customers going back and forth between Twostrap’s laptop sleeves and similar products at other booths. Eventually, they asked why.
The customer said they actually preferred Twostrap’s product, but it was missing one practical feature they needed: a handle.
It was a simple observation, followed by a simple question. But it opened up a very tangible area for improvement. The issue was not necessarily that customers preferred another brand. There was a functional need the team had not accounted for.
We tend to overcomplicate research. Sometimes, it simply starts with noticing a behavior that does not quite make sense, and being curious enough to understand why.
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The questions matter too.
Why do customers choose us in the first place?
Why do some of them stop coming back?
What are we assuming about people who have never bought from us?
What has changed that we may not have noticed yet?
The answers can also depend a lot on who we ask.
Existing customers can help us understand why they buy. Former customers may tell us why they left. Customers of competitors may see something that our own loyal customers do not.
One approach that came up in the discussion was co-creating research.
Rather than only asking people to react to what already exists, the idea is to invite them to imagine the answer with us.
“If this were your brand, what would you want it to be known for?”
“What would make this feel meaningfully different from the other options available?”
The answer itself does not become the strategy. But it can surface expectations, trade-offs, or ways of seeing the business that we may not have considered ourselves.
That may be one of the more useful roles of research in running a business: not to confirm what we already believe, but to keep creating opportunities for those beliefs to be challenged.
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One thing we ended up synthesizing together was that research only becomes useful when it changes how we see the problem.
A customer saying, “Delivery is slow,” is a finding.
Understanding that customers value certainty and speed more than a slightly cheaper price is an insight.
Changing how the business fulfils orders is the decision.
The distinction sounds simple, but its value lies in how it changes the way we see the problem, and eventually, what we do about it. And because customers and markets keep changing, that process is rarely one-and-done.
Perhaps before the next campaign, product launch, pricing change, or expansion, the more useful question to ask is not only:
“What should we do?”
But:
“What are we currently assuming to be true, and when was the last time we checked?”
That, more than any research tool and method, may be the habit worth building.
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