market research questions for clothing

Fashion Market Research: Specifics, Challenges, and Tips

• by Alice Ananian
• May 2, 2024

In the fashion industry, being on top of trends and consumer preferences is the key between launching a hit product and facing an inventory full of unsold merch. Market research is the compass that guides fashion entrepreneurs, retail analysts, and marketing professionals in the right direction, helping them to stay ahead of the game.

Understanding the specifics of fashion market research, overcoming industry-specific challenges, and utilizing the right tools and resources are essential for any player in the fashion industry who wants to thrive. This comprehensive guide equips you with the knowledge and techniques necessary to excel in fashion market research.

Market Research for the Fashion Industry

Market research within the fashion industry is not merely about spotting trends; it’s about understanding the complex web of factors that influence buying decisions. From cultural shifts to economic indicators, a multitude of elements influence what we wear and why. Brands that translate this data into innovative products and marketing strategies are the ones that capture market share.

The fashion industry, notorious for its rapid shifts and turnovers, demands a heightened emphasis on timeliness and accuracy in market research. What was “in” last season might be long-forgotten by the time the next collection hits the shelves. Therefore, the methodology and tools must be as dynamic and trend-responsive as the industry itself.

Fashion market research typically encompasses four key components:

Consumer Behavior and Trends

Studying consumer behavior involves collecting data on shopping habits, brand loyalty, and demographics. To predict upcoming trends, fashion researchers need to be one step ahead, analyzing emerging micro-trends that reflect a changing social landscape.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding your competitors is crucial in the saturated fashion market. This includes identifying key players, benchmarking performance, and keeping an eye on their moves in terms of products, pricing, and promotions.

Product Research and Development

Researching products involves exploring concepts, materials, and designs that resonate with consumers. Feedback loops from surveys, focus groups, and prototype testing can be invaluable in refining products prior to launch.

Marketing and Branding

Effective marketing and branding research involves evaluating the impact of advertisements, the effectiveness of branding statements, and the resonance of the brand’s image with the intended audience.

How to do Fashion Market Research [Step-by-Step Guide]

Fashion is a dynamic industry fueled by trends and consumer preferences. Conducting thorough market research is crucial for any fashion business, from established brands to aspiring designers. Here’s a step-by-step guide to navigate the process:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

What do you want to learn? Are you trying to validate a new product idea, understand your target audience better, or analyze competitor strategies?

Clearly defined goals will guide your research methods and ensure you gather relevant information.

Example:   A handbag designer wants to launch a line of eco-friendly totes. Their research objective might be to understand consumer preferences for sustainable materials in handbags and their willingness to pay a premium.

Step 2: Find the Right Sources and Tools

There are two main types of research sources: primary and secondary.

Primary Research: Data you collect directly from your target audience. This can involve:

Surveys: Online questionnaires to gather a large pool of data on demographics, preferences, and buying habits. (e.g., Google Forms , SurveyMonkey )

Focus Groups: In-depth discussions with a smaller group to gain qualitative insights into attitudes and motivations.

Interviews: One-on-one conversations for detailed feedback from potential customers.

Pre-launching: This is a goldmine for market research in the fashion industry. By creating a landing page with your concept and gauging customer response, you gain real-time insights into demand, iterate on your design based on feedback, and avoid investing heavily in an idea that might flop. This direct interaction with potential customers makes pre-launching a powerful primary research tool.

Secondary Research: Existing data collected by others. Look for:

Industry Reports: Market research firms publish reports on fashion trends, consumer spending, and market size. 

Here’s where to look:

• Euromonitor International : Provides comprehensive reports on various fashion segments like apparel, footwear, and accessories, with a global perspective. 
• LWD (Leather Working Group) : Focuses on the leather industry, offering reports on sustainability practices, sourcing trends, and market analysis. 
• Nielsen : Offers reports on consumer spending habits and demographics, including insights relevant to the fashion industry. 

Fashion Publications: Trade publications and online fashion magazines often feature trend forecasts and consumer analysis. 

• The Business of Fashion (BoF) : Publishes insightful reports on various fashion industry topics, including market analysis, trend forecasts, and business strategies. 
• Vogue Business : Offers in-depth reports on luxury fashion trends, consumer preferences, and the business landscape within the high-end segment. 
• WWD (Women’s Wear Daily) : Provides regular reports on fashion trends, retail analysis, and industry news, often with a focus on the US market. 

Step 3: Analyze Your Insights

Once you have collected data, it’s time to make sense of it. Analyze survey responses and identify trends in demographics, preferences, and buying habits.

Look for common themes emerging from focus groups and interviews. Summarize key takeaways from industry reports and publications.

Step 4: Develop Buyer Personas

Use your research findings to create detailed profiles of your ideal customers. These buyer personas should include:

• Demographics (age, gender, income)
• Lifestyle and interests
• Fashion preferences and needs
• Shopping habits and preferred channels

Example: Based on your research, you discover a significant demand for eco-friendly totes among millennial women who prioritize sustainability and ethical manufacturing. This informs your buyer persona.

Pro tip: Make sure to leverage the power of online communities like those on Reddit . Use platforms like this to examine your target audiences threads and not what topics they discuss. 

Step 5:  Understand Your Competitors

Start by identifying your main competitors in the market and conduct a thorough analysis of their products, pricing strategies, marketing channels, and brand image. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of their offerings and how they position themselves in the industry.

Next, scrutinize the market to identify any gaps or unmet needs that your competitors are overlooking. This is your opportunity to carve out a niche for your brand. Think about what unique value proposition your brand can offer to fill these gaps and differentiate itself from the competition. Consider how your products or services can solve problems or meet needs that are currently being neglected.

By focusing on these areas, you can develop a strategic approach that leverages your brand’s unique strengths, setting you apart in a crowded marketplace and positioning you for success

Pro tip: To circumvent all the hassle of a detailed competitor analysis use tools such as the AI Market Research Assistant by Prelaunch.com. This tool allows you to analyze thousands of reviews and feedback to discover top customer praises and complaints simply by entering your competitor’s links.

Step 6:  Summarize Your Findings and Take Action

Create a clear and concise report summarizing your research findings.

Use this information to make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and pricing.

Step 7:  Keep Checking In

Fashion trends and consumer preferences are constantly evolving.  Monitor industry publications, conduct surveys periodically, and stay updated on competitor strategies.

Here’s a list of major fashion industry publications:

• Harper’s Bazaar
• WWD (Women’s Wear Daily)
• The Business of Fashion (BoF)
• Another Man (menswear)
• GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) (menswear)
• Numéro (considered more avant-garde than mainstream publications)

By following these steps and continuously refining your research, you can gain valuable insights that will give your fashion business a competitive edge.

Tools and Resources for Fashion Market Research

Fashion market research equips you with valuable customer insights to design successful clothing lines, marketing campaigns, and pricing strategies. Here’s a breakdown of tools and resources categorized by primary and secondary research methods:

Primary Research

SurveyMonkey and Google Forms : Create online surveys to gather a large pool of data on demographics, preferences, and buying habits from your target audience. These tools offer user-friendly interfaces for designing questionnaires, distributing them electronically, and analyzing the collected data.

UserTesting : Conduct remote usability testing to see how potential customers interact with your clothing line prototypes or website. This online platform allows you to recruit participants, moderate testing sessions, and gain valuable insights into user experience.

Focus Group Discussion Platforms: Platforms like Lookback and User Interviews enable you to conduct online focus groups where you can moderate discussions with a smaller group to gain qualitative insights into attitudes and motivations.

Pro tip: Instead of scattering around to compile a combination of different primary research sources, get all your data in one place with Prelaunch.com . The idea validation platform lets you quickly create a landing page and share it with your friends and wider community to start generating first-hand feedback on your latest apparel concept.

Secondary Research

Industry Reports: Market research firms like Euromonitor International , LWD (Leather Working Group) , and Nielsen publish comprehensive reports on fashion trends, consumer spending, and market size. These reports provide valuable data-driven insights into the industry landscape. Fashion Publications: Stay updated on current trends and consumer analysis through trade publications like Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and online fashion magazines like The Business of Fashion (BoF) and Vogue Business .

Social Media Listening Tools: Brandwatch and Sprout Social are social media listening tools that allow you to track brand mentions, analyze online conversations, and understand consumer sentiment about fashion trends and brands.

E-commerce Trend Reports: Platforms like Etsy and Trendalytics offer trend reports based on their sales data, giving you insights into what’s popular with online shoppers.

Additional Resources:

Fashion Trend Forecasting Services: WGSN and NellyRodi are fashion trend forecasting services that offer insights into upcoming trends, color palettes, and materials. Subscription fees apply, but these services can be invaluable for staying ahead of the curve.

By leveraging this comprehensive toolkit, you can conduct thorough market research that empowers you to make informed decisions and achieve success in the ever-evolving fashion industry.

Case Study [Start-up brand]: Reformation – Sustainable Style Takes Root

Brand: Reformation

Challenge: Reformation, a sustainable fashion brand launched in 2009, aimed to disrupt the industry with eco-friendly clothing but needed to validate their concept and target market.

Market Research Strategy: Reformation utilized a combination of online and offline methods:

• Social Media Engagement: Reformation actively engaged with their target audience on social media platforms like Instagram, conducting polls and surveys to understand their preferences for sustainable clothing.
• Trend Analysis: The company closely monitored fashion trend reports and social media conversations to identify styles and silhouettes in high demand.
• Customer Reviews: Reformation analyzed customer reviews of their existing products to understand what resonated with their audience and identify areas for improvement.

Key Insights:   The research revealed a strong consumer interest in sustainable fashion, particularly among millennials and Gen Z.  They identified a demand for trendy yet timeless pieces made with eco-friendly materials.

Action Taken:

• Focused on using recycled and sustainable materials like organic cotton and Tencel.
• Developed a core collection of versatile pieces that aligned with current trends but offered longevity.
• Utilized social media to showcase their commitment to sustainability and connect with environmentally conscious consumers.

Results:   Reformation’s market research ensured their products catered directly to their target audience’s desires.  Their focus on sustainability and trendy styles propelled their growth, establishing them as a leader in the sustainable fashion movement.

These case studies illustrate how established and start-up brands can leverage market research to gain valuable customer insights, adapt their offerings, and achieve success in the dynamic fashion industry.

Overcoming Challenges in Fashion Industry

The fast-paced and ever-evolving nature of the fashion industry presents unique challenges for market researchers. Here are some common roadblocks and how to navigate them:

Fickle Consumer Tastes: Trends shift quickly, making it difficult to predict what will be popular next season.

Social Media Influence:   Viral trends and influencer marketing can significantly impact buying decisions, adding a layer of complexity.

Data Saturation & Inaccuracy:   Consumers may not accurately report their preferences or be swayed by marketing messages in surveys.

Reaching Target Audiences:   Identifying and engaging with specific demographics across diverse online and offline channels can be tricky.

Fast Response Times:   Fashion cycles are short, requiring research to be agile and deliver insights quickly.

Embrace Trend Forecasting: Utilize trend forecasting services and analyze historical data to identify emerging trends with long-term potential.

Monitor Social Media Conversations: Track social media buzz, analyze influencer endorsements, and engage with online communities to understand real-time trends.

Employ Qualitative Research Methods: Conduct focus groups or in-depth interviews to gain deeper insights into consumer motivations and purchase decisions.

This is easier said than done. So a more realistic alternative is to set up a landing page on using the Prelaunch concept validaiton tool to start gaining real insights into purchase intent, as well as what could be improved. 

(e.g. You might offer a garment in certain colors and not others. Based on feedback that is conveniently complied into a single Dashboard you’ll be able to learn what iteration is most popular with your target audience, who they are both demographically/psychographically and and even the optimal price point to set.)

Utilize Diverse Research Methods: Combine quantitative surveys with qualitative methods like focus groups to get a more holistic picture of consumer preferences.

Partner with Social Listening Platforms: Track brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and competitor activity to gain real-time market intelligence.

Rapid Prototyping & A/B Testing:   Create low-fidelity prototypes of designs or marketing campaigns and conduct A/B testing to gather quick feedback and iterate quickly.

Market research is the backbone of success in the fashion industry. By meticulously studying consumer behavior, keeping a finger on the pulse of trends, and analyzing the strategies of competitors, fashion professionals can craft a robust business model. Utilizing the right tools, case studies, and overcoming challenges, your path to informed decision-making is set.

In a realm where yesterday’s fad is tomorrow’s old news, thorough market research ensures you’re always on the cusp of what’s next in fashion. It’s the secret to crafting not just great products, but legacies.

What is fashion market research?

Fashion market research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of data that pertains to the market’s preferences, economic indicators, and various other factors that contribute to the behavior of fashion consumers. This research helps brands and retailers understand what products to create, how to promote them, and at what price point.

Who should be conducting fashion market research?

Anyone involved in the lifecycle of a fashion product should be involved in market research to some degree. This includes designers, manufacturers, retailers, marketers, and any other professionals with a vested interest in the success of a product in the market.

What types of market research are most appropriate for the fashion industry?

A mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods are most appropriate for the fashion industry. This includes surveys, focus groups, trend analysis, and consumer panel studies, among others. These methods help capture both broad market trends and individual consumer preferences.

Alice Ananian

Alice has over 8 years experience as a strong communicator and creative thinker. She enjoys helping companies refine their branding, deepen their values, and reach their intended audiences through language.

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68 market research questions to ask (and how to ask them)

Example market research questions, market research questions to ask customers, market research questions for product development, market research questions for brand tracking, pricing survey questions for market research, how to write your own market research questions.

No two market research projects are alike, but happily there are some tried-and-tested questions you can use for inspiration to get the consumer insights you’re looking for.

It’s all about asking questions that are most relevant to the goals of your research. Every so often the best questions are actually quite straightforward, like asking consumers where they do their grocery shopping.

If you’re creating a customer profile, you’ll ask different questions than when you’re running creative testing with your target audience, or getting insights on key consumer trends in your market.

The right market research questions are the ones that will lead you to actionable insights, and give you a competitive advantage in your target market.

Let’s kick this off and get straight into some questions, shall we?

Where do we even begin with this?! There are so many types of research and we’ll get into which questions work for each below, but here are some classic example market research questions to get you started.

These particular questions are good for surveys that you might run when you’re running some essential consumer profiling research.

• Which of these products have you purchased in the last 3 months?
• Which of the following types of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY< do you buy at least once a month?
• Approximately, how much would you say you spend on >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY< per month?
• What is stopping you from buying more of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• When was the last time you tried a new >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• Please rank the following on how important or unimportant they are when deciding which >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to buy?
• Which of these brands are you aware of?
• Which of these brands have you purchased from in the last 3 months?
• How do you prefer to shop for >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• Why do you prefer to shop online?
• Why do you prefer to shop in-store?
• Thinking about the following, how often do you use/listen/watch each of these media?
• Where do you go to keep up to date with the news?
• Which social media platforms do you use daily?
• What mobile phone do you currently own?

Surely you want to talk to your current customers to understand why they buy from you and what they think about your products?

Correct! But your consumer research should definitely not end with current customers!

Here’s why you should think about broadening your research to include other groups and different market research methods :

• Current customers: This is a must! Running research to your current customers will help you understand how you can make your product or service better. These are the people who’ve spent their hard-earned cash on your products so they have a unique perspective on what kind of value you offer. In addition, understanding why your existing customer base chose your brand over others can help you create messaging that resonates with people who are still on the fence.
• Previous customers: People who used to buy your products but don’t anymore can give you valuable insight into areas you might need to improve. Perhaps your brand perception has shifted making some customers buy elsewhere, or maybe your competitors offer customers better value for money than you currently do. These are the kinds of areas you can learn about by running research to previous customers.
• Non-customers: You should also ask people who haven’t bought your products why they haven’t. That way you’ll learn what you need to improve to bring new customers in. You should ideally ask the same kinds of questions, so that you can learn about what product features you need to work on but also things like the messaging you should be putting out there to win people over.

Here are some questions that are perfect for competitive market analysis research. Some of these questions might sound similar to some from our previous section on consumer profiling—that’s because there’s often some crossover between these types of research. Consumer profiling often refers to a more general type of research that covers similar ground to market analysis. If you’re wondering how to calculate market size , questions like these would be a great starting point.

• How often do you usually purchase >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• Why do you buy >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• What types of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY< do you buy?
• How often do you buy the following types of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• Where do you buy your >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• Where do you find out about >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• Which of these brands have your purchased in the last 12 months?
• How would you feel if you could no longer buy >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
• How important or unimportant do you find the following topics? (e.g. sustainability, diversity and inclusion, ethical supply chain)
• What could be improved about the products you currently use?

By involving consumers in the product development process, you can make sure that your products are designed to meet—and ideally exceed—their needs.

Product market research can be done at several points in the product development process, by asking potential customers in your target market questions about existing products (yours or competitors’), prototypes, or just your own early-stage product ideas.

You can dive into the customer experience, specific product features or simply find out if the product quality matches the value proposition you’re putting out there.

Sometimes you even get a surprising answer to the question: how does our product or service help people?

You might learn from the survey responses that customers are using your product in a different way than you intended, opening you up to new target markets and different product types in the future.

Asking these questions also allows you to get feedback on your designs, so that you can make necessary changes before the product is released. Here’s some inspiration for when you’re conducting product market research.

There are different types of new product development research. A key type is Jobs to be done research. This research digs into the practical reasons people buy products—the jobs they need to get done with a specific product. You use these insights to help you create products that will genuinely help consumers, and that they’ll ultimately want to buy.

• How many times have you carried out [INSERT ACTIVITY] in the last 12 months?
• How much time would you typically spend on this [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
• How important or unimportant is carrying out this [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
• How satisfied or unsatisfied do you feel when carrying out this [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
• What is the best thing about carrying out [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
• How does carrying out [INSERT ACTIVITY] make you feel? Please select all that apply
• What particular problems or challenges do you run into while carrying out [INSERT ACTIVITY]?

When you’re cooking up your brand’s next product, you’ll want to go through a concept testing phase. This is where you ask consumers what they think about your idea and find out whether it’s likely to be a success. Here are some of the questions you could ask in your concept testing research.

• To what extent do you like or dislike this idea/product? [ATTACH IMAGE]
• What do you like about this idea/product?
• What do you dislike about this idea/product?
• Is easy to use
• Sounds tasty
• Is good quality
• Is Innovative
• Is different from others
• Purchase this product
• Replace the product I currently own with this
• What other products this idea/product reminds you of? Please provide as much detail as possible including the product name.
• What feature(s), if any, do you feel are missing from this product?
• How would you improve this idea/product? Be as descriptive as possible!
• What issues do you solve through the use of this product?
• When can you see yourself using this product? Please select all that apply.
• The price for this product is $25.00 per item. How likely or unlikely would you be to buy this product at this price?

Get inspired with NPD survey templates

Our in-house research experts have created New Product Development (NPD) survey templates to give you the perfect starting point for your product research!

Does the perspective of new customers change over time? How do you compare to other brands, and how do you become the preferred brand in your market and increase that market share?

Brand perception and brand awareness are super important metrics to track. These insights can be used to improve customer experience and satisfaction on a higher level than just product: the relationship you have with your customers.

This research can also help you understand how to reach the holy grail of branding: turning loyal customers into brand ambassadors.

You should also remember to ask marketing research questions about your brand to existing and potential customers.

Existing customers might have a different view after having interacted with your team and products, and you can use that to manage the expectations of your target customers down the line. And potential customers can help you understand what’s holding them back from joining your customer base.

Top tip: it’s completely fine (and super beneficial!) to run brand tracking into your competitors’ brands as well as your own. Replicating research for different brands will give you a tailored benchmark for your category and position.

Here are some key questions to ask in your brand tracking research.

• Which of the following, if any, have you purchased in the past 12 months?
• Thinking about >INSERT YOUR CATEGORY<, what brands, if any, are you aware of? Please type in all that you can think of.
• Which of these brands of facial wipes, if any, are you aware of?
• Which of these facial wipe brands, if any, have you ever purchased?
• Which of these facial wipe brands, if any, would you consider purchasing in the next 6 months?
• e.g. Innovative
• Easy to use
• Traditional
• We’d now like to ask you some specific questions about >INSERT YOUR BRAND<.
• When did you last use >INSERT YOUR BRAND<?
• What do you like most about >INSERT YOUR BRAND<?
• What do you like least about >INSERT YOUR BRAND<?
• How likely would you be to recommend >INSERT YOUR BRAND< to a friend, family or colleague?
• Why did you give that score? Include as much detail as possible
• In newspapers/magazines
• On Instagram
• On Facebook
• On the radio
• Through friends/family/colleagues
• When did you last use >INSERT MAIN COMPETITOR BRAND<?
• How likely would you be to recommend >INSERT MAIN COMPETITOR BRAND< to a friend, family or colleague?

Kick off your brand tracking with templates

Track your brand to spot—and act on!—how your brand’s perception and awareness affects how people buy. Our survey templates give you the ideal starting point!

When it comes to pricing your product, there’s no need to wing it—a pricing survey can give you the insights you need to arrive at the perfect price point.

By asking customers questions about their willingness to pay for your product, you can get a realistic sense of what price point will be most attractive to them and, not unimportant, why.

Top tip: good pricing research can be tough to get right. Asking how much people would theoretically be willing to pay for a product is very different from them actually choosing it in a shop, on a shelf next to competitors’ products, and with a whole load of other economic context that you can’t possibly test for. Price testing is useful, but should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt.

Here are some questions you could use in your pricing research.

• Which of the following product categories have you bought in the last 12 months?
• How often do you currently purchase >INSERT YOUR CATEGORY<?
• At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? (Too expensive)
• At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you have to give some thought to buying it? (e.g. Expensive)
• At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be a bargain—a great buy for the money? (e.g. cheap)
• At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good? (Too cheap)
• How much do you currently pay for >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY<? Please type in below
• Thinking about this product, please rank the following aspects based on how much value they add, where 1 = adds the most value 10 = adds the least value.
• Thinking about the product category as a whole, please rank the following brands in order of value, where 1 is the most expensive and 10 is the least.

Formulating market research questions can be tricky. On the one hand, you want to be specific enough that you can get tangible, useful answers. But on the other hand, you don’t want to ask questions that are so difficult or unclear that respondents will get frustrated and give up halfway through.

Think about what answers you need and what actions you are hoping to take based on those answers.

We’ll help you get started with a list of steps to take when formulating your own market research questions, and putting them together in a survey that makes sense.

1. Define your research goals and link them to actions you can take

Before you can write great market research questions, you need to know what you want to learn from your research.

What are your goals? What do you want to find out? Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you can start brainstorming questions that will help you achieve them.

2. Know your target market and the language they use

Who are you conducting market research for? It’s important to know your audience before you start writing questions, as this will help you determine the best way to phrase them.

For example, if you’re conducting market research for a new product aimed at teenagers, you’ll want to use different language than if you were conducting research for a new financial planning service aimed at retirees.

3. Keep it simple, and break things into smaller pieces

Don’t make your questions too complicated. Stick to simple, straightforward questions that can be easily understood by your target audience.

The more complex your questions are, the more likely it is that respondents will get confused and provide inaccurate answers.

If you feel a question is too difficult, see if you can break it up into smaller pieces and add follow-up questions on top.

And don’t ever load two questions into one! This falls into Consumer Research 101, but it’s amazing how often it happens. Instead of ‘What’s your favorite chocolate bar, and why?’ ask two questions: ‘What’s your favorite chocolate bar?’ and ‘Why is this your favorite chocolate bar?’

4. Be super specific

Make sure your questions are specific enough to get the information you need. Vague questions will only lead to vague answers.

For example, instead of asking ‘What do you think of this product?’, ask ‘What did you think of the taste of this product?’ or ‘What did you think of the packaging of this product?’.

5. Avoid leading questions

Leading questions are those that suggest a particular answer or course of action. For example, instead of asking ‘Do you like our new product?’, which suggests that the respondent should like the product, try asking ‘What are your thoughts on this product?

This question is neutral and allows the respondent to answer freely without feeling pressured in any particular direction. It’s also brand-neutral: people answering this question will have no idea who’s asking, and their opinion won’t be biased as a result.

6. Make sure your question is clear

It’s important that your question is clear and concise so that respondents understand exactly what they’re being asked. If there is any ambiguity in your question, respondents may interpret it in different ways and provide inaccurate answers.

Always test your questions on a few people before sending them to a larger group to make sure they understand what they’re being asked.

7. Avoid loaded words

Loaded words are those with positive or negative connotations that could influence the way respondents answer the question. For example, instead of asking ‘Do you love this product?’, which has a positive connotation, try asking ‘What are your thoughts on this product?’

This question is neutral and allows the respondent to answer freely without feeling pressured in any particular direction

8. Make sure the question is answerable

Before you include a question in your market research survey, make sure it’s actually answerable. There’s no point in asking a question if there’s no way for respondents to answer it properly. If a question isn’t answerable, either revise the question or remove it from your survey altogether.

9. Use an appropriate question type

When designing your market research survey, be sure to use an appropriate question type for each question you include. Using the wrong question type can lead to inaccurate or unusable results, so it’s important to choose wisely. Some common question types used in market research surveys include multiple choice, rating scale, and open-ended questions.

10. Pay attention to question order

The order of the questions in your survey can also impact the results you get from your research. In general, it’s best to start with more general questions and then move on to more specific ones later on in the survey. This will help ensure that respondents are properly warmed up and able to provide detailed answers by the time they reach the end of the survey.

Make smart decisions with the reliable insights

To make sure you make smart decisions that have real impact on your business, get consumer insights you can rely on. Here’s our rundown of the top market research tools.

Survey questions for market research are designed to collect information about a target market or audience. They can be used to gather data about consumer preferences, opinions, and behavior. Some common types of market research survey questions include demographic questions, behavioral questions and attitudinal questions.

There are many different types of market research questions that companies can use to gather information about consumer preferences and buying habits. They can be divided into different categories, like a competitive analysis, customer satisfaction or market trends, after which you can make them more specific and turn them into survey questions. These are some of the things your research questions can help you answer: – What is the target market for our product? – Who is our competition? – What do consumers think of our product? – How often do consumers purchase our product? – What is the typical customer profile for our product? – What motivates consumers to purchase our product?

When conducting market research, surveys are an invaluable tool for gathering insights about your target audience. But how do you write a market research questionnaire that will get you the information you need? First, determine the purpose of your survey and who your target respondents are. This will help you to write questions that are relevant and targeted. Next, craft clear and concise questions that can be easily understood. Be sure to avoid ambiguity, leading questions and loaded language. Finally, pilot your survey with a small group of people to make sure that it is effective. With these tips in mind, you can write a market research survey that will help you to gather the crucial insights you need.

Elliot Barnard

Customer Research Lead 

Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.

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20 Market Research Questions To Ask In Your Customer Survey

The primary reason you conduct any customer survey with market research questions is to make effective decisions that grow your business by selling more to both existing customers, as well as by acquiring new customers by increasing the effectiveness of your product/service to suit their needs better. But when you take even a closer look, we’re making these decisions because the main objective is to become the obvious choice for that ideal customer. For that to happen and to reach market research goals, you need to ask:

What are Market Research Questions?

Market research questions is a questionnaire that is answered by customers or potential consumers, to understand their perception and opinion on a given subject, typically pertaining to product or service feasibility, understanding consumer needs and interests, and pricing concepts.

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For example: A customer survey on market research of an existing product line that focuses on the usefulness of specific features in a product line. Based on the feedback received from this survey, a business can now decide which features to invest and enhance/improve, and which features to relatively defocus/discontinue. This market research , therefore, enables a business to efficiently allocate resources based on real, data-oriented insights from their own customers.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

A similar set of market research questions can also be sent to potential consumers of a product, to understand market absorption capability.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Surveys

What Market Research Questions should I ask in my Customer Survey?

• Who is our ideal customer? These are typically demographic market research questions such as gender survey questions , education level, income level or location.  You can expand these questions to find out your customer’s occupation or if your ideal customer is a parent, pet owner. Don’t skimp on demographics or psychographics .  If anything, get really creative with them. You might consider conducting a survey with nothing but profiling questions that include where your customers shop, or where they prefer to eat. It’s critical to know as much as possible about your ideal customer so that you can begin focusing your marketing decisions around their preferences.
• What do they struggle with? Another root set of data that market researchers are searching for within their ideal customer is “what they struggle with.”  What are the 5 to 7 frustrations that they are dealing with when it comes to interacting with our product or service? Suppose you are a golf accessories company and you ask your ideal customer what frustrates them about their golfing experience. In that case, you might get responses such as “expensive golf clubs getting wet during a rainstorm.”  If you get enough of those responses, you may consider developing a golf accessory that protects golf clubs in the rain.
• What does your ideal customer really WANT? No matter how you phrase the market research questions (and there are countless creative formats) all we really want to know is what our customer will actually purchase as a solution.  What is it that they WANT? Of course, they’re NOT going to say that they want something that doesn’t exist yet — in the 1960’s the average person would NOT have known that they wanted a microwave. They wanted hot food fast. One good way to get at these wants is to give your respondents some examples of product offerings and combinations and see how they rate them.
• What sets you apart from your competition? Competitive analysis and bench-marking are critical if you want to increase the profitability of your product and build your brand. An effective way to measure or identify differentiators or competitive advantage is to ask Customer Satisfaction questions . The key to asking these market research questions is getting the attributes right.  For example “How important is it that your tires have a run-flat safety feature?” instead of asking “How important is it that your car has tires.”For example, A survey can be conducted by either Apple or Samsung to find out how satisfied are the customers with their products and what are the other features that the consumer prefers from the competitive brand. Using such data a company can incorporate features based on the demand and can also benchmark their features that the customers prefer. A Apple vs Samsung Survey Questions template can help to achieve the data required to compare their products with the competition and strategize accordingly .
• What benefits do your customers perceive? Because we all choose and purchase based on emotion — it’s important to understand specifically what emotional benefits our customers receive from our products and services. The more we connect with our customers on an emotional level and provide that benefit — the more likely they are to choose us. This is an ideal place to use matrix questions that rate the degree to which customers agree or disagree with a variety of “benefit” statements.  Here is an example “I can count on Service X to pull me out of a bind.”
• Who is currently buying from us? A very important research metric to track is the “who” is currently buying a product or a service from you. Deriving a pattern from the current purchasing population, helps you target and market to a similar potential demographic. This also is an ideal place to use demographic questions extensively but it also helps if other factors like geographical metrics are tracked. You don’t want to be ignoring your existing customer base and also be smart and agile in attracting new business to your brand.
• Why are other people not buying from us? While it is imperative to know who is your potential customer or map your existing customer base, you need to find out who is not buying from you. This information is essential to understand if there are shortcomings in a product or service and at what milestone customers drop out of the purchasing process . This also helps to identify the way your business is conducted, if additional training is required to make a sale or if your product or service lacks in quality. Understanding why people are not buying from you also helps monitor if there is something fundamentally wrong with what you are offering to the masses.
• Who can buy from us in the future? It is a known fact that is about 10x more expensive to create a new customer rather than to maintain the one you currently have. That, however, is no reason not to aim for new business. It is therefore important to have a clear picture of your potential future business. Targeting potential customers, is a mix of customer demographics that have purchased from you in the past and a mix of demographics you advertise and market to. It is therefore important to have a well-rounded product or solution. For example, since your barbecue sauces and rubs are famous and widely used in the midwest does not mean they cannot be bought in the southern states.
• Why do people buy from you? What value or need does it fulfill? Customers only buy from you because of a perceived value . This value is either what you depict to potential customers or repeat customers have been privy to the value of your product or service. Customers also make a purchase because of the trust they have either in the product or service or the brand or sometimes even certain individuals. It is therefore important that you understand the value of your brand and stick to the morals and ethics of delivering high quality to ensure that the perceived and actual brand quotient is very high. The other reason why customers purchase from you is if their need is fulfilled by what you have on offer. This could either be a direct or an indirect need.
• What would make you a perfect brand? No brand can be perfect! But you can surely be close to perfect. What this means is everything about your product or service is easy to use, intuitive, is value for money, scalable and ancillary support is impeccable. All of this is obviously immaterial if the product does not solve a real problem or make life easier for the customer. Having a very high customer oriented focus gives your brand a positive ring and becomes increasingly the go-to brand. You can use a simple Net Promoter Score question to understand how referrable is your brand and who are the promoters and detractors of your brand.
• What single aspect about your brand makes it stand out and makes clients trust you? People buy from you or transact with you mostly when there is a high trust factor. Very rarely is the purchasing decision purely based on need or ease of access. To identify and build on that one factor that makes you a preferred buying choice over your competitors is very important. You can map preferred aspects of your brand to age, sex, geographical location , financial limitations etc. because each of those factors can appeal to your brand differently. It is important that you identify and fortify those aspects of your business. Your brand can also be preferred because of other factors like personnel, customer service , ethos and perception amongst peers, consumers and the society alike. Abercrombie & Fitch was a respected brand but lost a lot of market share and goodwill due to CEO’s words in one isolated incident. It takes lots of work and time to build trust but takes none to lose all of it!
• What is the best way to communicate with the kind of people you are trying to reach out to? What’s caused the downfall for a lot of brands is the inability to reach out to target customers despite their product or service being impeccable. Not knowing how to reach your target audience or potential customer makes all your hardwork go down the drain. For example, if a new life saving drug is making its way to the market, but medical professionals and doctors don’t know about it or how to administer it and its benefits, about 20 years of work goes down the drain. You need to identify the right channels and avenues to reach out to the people that will consume your product or service.
• What do customers make of your product and/or service line? There are a few brands that have one product or service and that rakes in the customers and money for them because of the nature of the product or service. But most brands aren’t this way! They would need to branch out into multiple products or services or very often, a mix of both. It is, therefore important to understand the value of your products and/or services. It is imperative to know if they solve a problem a customer has or make life easier for the customer or any other such reason. This helps in consolidating the customer base.
• What improvements could be made to your products or services to have a wider reach? A product or a service has never achieved the maximum number of customers it can get. There always is someone who could use your product or service; maybe not in the form that it currently is but there is scope to scale. This makes it so much more important to collect periodic feedback on what additions your current customer base would like to see in your brand and what can bring in new customers from your competitors. Chipping away at deadwood features and making increased usability tweaks increases the adoption and use of your product and service. For example, a retail store wants to promote the use of its self-service checkout systems. However, a lot of customers still are not opting for the system. There can be many reasons to why the customer is choosing not to use the system, like complex operation, no readability, or even slow speed of the system. To understand the reason, a Usability survey for self-service checkouts can be conducted. This will enable the store to gather first-hand information from the customers and make improvements in the system accordingly.

Learn More: User Interface Survey Template

• What is the right price to charge? Pricing a product or service is one of the most important aspects of your business. Pricing right can decide the revenue, brand perception, profitability and adoption of the product or service. Pricing too slow has a negative connotation and may increase in bringing in lower revenue. Pricing high gives the feeling of being elite and then the profitability and revenue hinge on the factors of per unit adoption rather than a very high adoption. Pricing just right is a myth – what someone finds cheap, someone else could find expensive. Where someone finds your product or service value for money, others may find it exorbitant. Hence, it is important to collect extensive feedback from your existing and potential customers about what they think is an ideal price to play. It is also important to conduct due diligence on competitors to map how they price versus the service and product features they provide. These factors will help you come close to an “ideal price” to charge.
• What is the vision for the brand? A vision for a brand dictates the level the brand aspires to be and wants to scale up to be. Apple is now a preferred phone because the vision was to be an experience, not a device. The device is the means to ensuring that vision. They wanted to make the ecosystem so robust that any device you use, that familiarity and ease of use is standardized but also stonewall easy. Despite being expensive and facing ridicule during early days due to the ecosystem being different, they are now a one trillion behemoth, more than the GDP of some countries, due to having a vision for the brand.
• What is the way to ensure you reach that vision? A vision is easy to have but tough to follow through on. This is because your vision may see many roadblocks and may not be the current flavor of the market, but it is the right thing to stick with it. Innovate in your product and service lines by taking into consideration what your customers want and need and items they themselves don’t know that they need. Despite enduring hardships, if you stick to your vision, it is easier to use that as a launchpad for being an immaculate and preferred brand.
• What should the brand branch out into to avoid stagnation or imitation? While launching a product or service, it’s essential to understand where your competitors stand on the same product type or service line. How soon can they catch up to you and imitate your service or product? On the other hand, stagnation brings the ultimate demise of a brand, product, or service line. With little innovation and competitors saturating the market by imitating your product or service line, you’ll soon see your customer base dwindle. To ensure your customers don’t drop out, the key question to ask is, “What next?”. The best way to innovate or bundle your product or service is to understand what your customers struggle with and what value they are looking for. For example, Sony is known for its PlayStations, but competitors like Xbox don’t take long to catch up to their new products. How Sony does manage to stay ahead of the market is by constantly branching into new products and services.
• What bundled service or product you can offer in conjunction with yours? Good partnerships are hard to come by, strategic ones are even harder. This question tackles two of your problems, how to offer  something new to your customers and how to reduce competitors in market. Your bundled service or product though has to make sense to the use, should complement your brand and cannot be an operational and logistical nightmare for your brand which then makes it counter-productive. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram to consolidate on social images and short content rich video, is a strategic initiative to increase customer base as well as reduce competition at the same time. The key to building strong brand partnerships is to ensure your vision and product values align. Summing up, offering a bundled service or product in partnership will not only retain the existing customer base but also attract and increase new customers.

No matter why you are conducting a survey, you’ll find these 20 research questions at the core of “WHY” you want to know. Remember, your respondents will read or spend time with absolutely ANYTHING as long as they are at the center.  Be sure to keep these 20 questions in mind when creating your survey and everyone involved will save time, aggravation and money. You can use single ease questions . A single-ease question is a straightforward query that elicits a concise and uncomplicated response.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

Beyond these 20 market research questions, here are 350+ Market Research Templates for you to use completely free!

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The Most Insightful Market Research Questions You Can Ask

With great customer expectations in today’s ever-growing digital world, market research has become exceedingly important. It should be at the forefront of every business’s strategy. Even if you feel as though you’ve nailed your target market down to a tee, there will always remain work to be done on the market research front.

That’s because market trends sway, as do the opinions and desires of your customer base. That means when you least expect it, even your most loyal customers will turn to your competitors, sometimes for good. But you can still stay in the know about what your customers want and think by running a sturdy market research plan.

As part of any solid market research endeavor, you’ll need an apt set of questions to help answer the most pressing needs and opinions of your customers. You’ll also need sets of questions that pertain to your needs as well; this is especially crucial to understanding your customers’ minds about your product or service.

Let’s explore four sets of insightful market research questions.

Questions Based on Pain Points

These questions are thematically based on the difficulties customers may have undergone, are currently experiencing, or may run into in the future. In regards to the latter, these types of questions are great in that they are wired to prevent the pain points from occurring in the first place.

Here are some examples of market research questions on customer experience (CX) and customer journey points of friction.

What is the most difficult aspect of [action related to your product]?

What bothers you the most about ?

What issues do you typically run into on our website?

How can we better support your needs when shopping for…?

What frustrates you the most about ?

Questions Based on Goals

Goals-based questions help answer what your customers want, in that they inquire specifically about what it is customers are looking for and what they hope to gain from a product or service. These questions do not necessarily have to zero in a particular product/service — although some of them should. Rather, they can focus on improving specific tasks/actions related to your field. This will not only help you understand how your customers feel about your market but will allow you to innovate more and faster.

Here you’ll find some examples of market research questions on customer goals.

What do you look for in a ?

What do you think can do to improve its usefulness?

What can do to help improve your overall user experience?

What aspects would you like to see in new ?

What do you hope to gain when taking on [problem or goal within a market]?

Questions Based on Pricing

Pricing has always been (and will remain to be) a major part of the buying equation. Even customers in the luxury sector care about prices to some extent. No one wants to be ripped off; even businesses aim to save money. For example, in 2020, 69% of companies are expected to decrease ad spending.

Thus, it is ideal to have reasonably priced goods or services. But you won’t know what is considered a reasonable price until you conduct a questionnaire on your target market. Referring to general internet research alone will not suffice for this.

Here are a few examples of market research questions to ask about pricing.

What is a reasonable price range for ?

Are there any conditions in which you’d be willing to buy at a higher range?

What do you think is the ideal price for ?

How would you rate the prices within [industry, niche, or specific market]?

Is [price point] too high, low, or a fair ask for ?

Questions Based On Psychographic Traits

Psychographic questions help reveal the psychological characteristics within your target market, or your entire pool of respondents. This type of approach to market research questions involves the feelings, interests, and attitudes your customer base holds.

It allows brands to understand their customers at a more intimate level, specifically, their views on any topic. You can tailor these to focus on your product/service or the desired act of making purchases.

Here are a few examples of questions based on psychographic traits.

Which of the following is most important to you?

How do you like to spend your free time?

If you had more time, which of the following would you do?

If you had more time, what would you spend more money on?

How do you favor making purchases?

What interests you?

What draws you to one brand over another in the [niche, industry, space, etc.]?

A Reminder on Market Research Questions

All four of the question types covered in this article are critical to tap into the brains of your current and potential customers. What’s more empowering about these kinds of questions is that they can help you expand your target market and appeal to a much wider audience. They can inform both your marketing strategies, your content, and the innovation of your product/service itself.

But you must remember, these in-depth questions do NOT cover demographics. Instead, these questions are for those who already passed the screening question portion of the survey.

Screening questions, which determine the eligibility of a respondent to partake in a survey, answer demographic questions about the responders. While they are incredibly necessary to understand who your respondents are, they do not necessarily allow you to conclude your customers’ behaviors, needs, and attitudes (although a few of them might).

A strong survey should combine both sets of questions for a comprehensive market research assemblage.

If you’re looking for more great resources on using surveys to meet your business and marketing goals, check out the Pollfish Resource Center, or reach out to our 24/7 customer experience team for guidance and support.

Frequently asked questions

What is market research.

Market research is an important aspect of business strategy that focuses on gathering information about the target market.

How are surveys used in market research?

Surveys can be used to gather first-hand information while conducting market research. Surveys are an example of primary research and are tailored to gather information specific to your business.

What is the purpose of goals-based questions in a market research survey?

Goals-based questions help you understand what your customers want from a certain product or service. This type of question will help you understand your customers’ wants and needs better so you can create or improve a product to meet their needs.

What are psychographic questions?

Psychographic questions help a researcher understand consumers’ feelings, values, interests, and lifestyle choices. Understanding the psychographic traits of an audience can help a company market to them more effectively.

What are screening questions?

Screening questions are conducted before a survey is distributed. They help researchers identify the eligibility of individuals to take part in the survey. Typically, screening questions focus on demographics and the relationship to a company’s products or services.

Do you want to distribute your survey? Pollfish offers you access to millions of targeted consumers to get survey responses from $0.95 per complete. Launch your survey today.

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Exploring Fashion Trends Through a Unique Survey Questionnaire

Fashion Survey Questionnaire is a comprehensive set of questions designed to delve into the preferences, habits, and opinions of individuals regarding the fashion industry. This survey, categorised under 'User Experience', aims to gather valuable insights from participants about their shopping behaviours, style preferences, and attitudes towards sustainability in fashion. With questions ranging from frequency of shopping to favorite fashion trends and designer choices, the survey provides a holistic view of how individuals interact with the world of fashion. By exploring topics such as preferred clothing materials, accessory choices, and sources of fashion inspiration, the questionnaire aims to capture the diverse perspectives and tastes within the fashion landscape. Through this survey, participants can reflect on their personal style, shopping habits, and perceptions of the latest fashion trends, offering valuable feedback for brands and designers looking to better understand their target audience. Whether you're a fashion enthusiast or simply curious about the ever-evolving world of style, the Fashion Survey Questionnaire invites you to share your thoughts and experiences in the exciting realm of fashion.

63 Insightful Market Research Questions to Ask in 2023

Better understand your target customer with these must-ask questions.

Understanding your target market, and how they respond to your product, is the key to successful promotional campaigns. Even if you feel like you understand your market perfectly, markets do change over time. Your customers’ opinions, needs, and wants will change along with current trends in society, politics, pop culture, and other influences. Asking the right market research questions can help you stay on top of your changing market.

The market research questions below will help you understand your market’s most pressing concerns , along with potential pain points.

Market research questions to understand customer demographics and psychology

Aside from basic demographic questions, like age, gender, income, and location, you can create a more specific customer profile. Ask these questions to get to know your customers better:

• How do you primarily spend your time?
• In which industry do you work?
• What kind of hobbies do you regularly participate in?
• What are your main interests?
• If money or time were not an issue, what do you prefer to spend money on?
• What draws you to one brand over another?
• How do you choose between brands and products? 
• Who makes the primary purchasing decisions in your household?
• How many people do you shop for on a regular basis?
• What’s your preferred method of shopping? Why?
• What makes you decide to avoid a brand in the future?
• How do you feel about available products in [your product category]?
• How often do you shop for [your product category]? 
• How much do you spend on [product category] on a monthly basis?
• How do you use [product type] in your everyday life?

Market research questions for new products

If you’re gathering information to create or launch new products, these questions can provide valuable insight:

• What do you look for when purchasing [new product or service]?
• What is the most important feature for a [product type]?
• How does [product type] make your life easier?
• How often do you use [product type]?
• Describe how you use [product type].
• How much would you prefer to spend on a similar product or service?
• What features would encourage you to pay more for a product or service?
• Are there any features in [similar product or service] that you wouldn’t use?
• Do you feel [competing products] are priced fairly?
• What would convince you to try a new product or service in this category?

Market research questions for pain points

Understanding how your customers are responding to your current offerings, whether product, service, advertising, or customer service, can help you understand where your business can improve. Ask these questions to learn more:

• When was the last time you purchased from [company]?
• Describe your experience with your last purchase.
• Where did we succeed in meeting your expectations?
• Where did we fail in meeting your expectations?
• What would make your experience with [product] better?
• Are there any features you don’t use?
• What would your ideal product or service include?
• Have you ever talked to our customer service team?
• Describe your reason for needing customer service assistance.
• Describe your experience with our customer service team.
• Was your issue resolved?
• How quickly was your issue resolved?
• Were you satisfied with the outcome?
• What would have made the experience better?
• What’s the most difficult part of using our products or services?
• Do you use our website? How do you use it?
• Have you experienced any problems contacting us for assistance? What were they?
• Have you experienced any problems on our website? What were they?

Market research questions for pricing and placement

Understanding how your product pricing and placement compare to those of your competitors can be helpful. Use these questions to refine your pricing and promotional strategies:

• How much do you currently pay for [product type]?
• Do you think our product is priced fairly?
• Have you found [product or service] for less? Did you purchase it? Why or why not?
• What is a reasonable price range for [product or service]?
• What is the ideal price for [product or service]?
• Is [price point] too low or too high for a similar product/service?
• Have you seen our products in stores before?
• Where have you seen our products mentioned/placed/advertised?
• Where would you like to see our products or services mentioned/placed/advertised?

Market research questions for advertising and brand awareness

Advertising, marketing, and branding create an image in your customers’ minds. While brand awareness is its own market research niche, these questions will help you understand how customers perceive your brand and advertising campaigns:

• Are you familiar with our brand?
• How did you find our brand/company?
• Have you ever seen any reviews of our brand/product/company? How did they influence your purchase?
• Have you ever seen advertisements for our brand/product/company? How did they influence your opinion of us?
• Who do you think our target customer is?
• When you think of our brand, how do you feel?
• Does our advertising and branding accurately reflect your experience with our company?
• What should potential customers know about our products and services?
• What do you think our brand/company stands for?
• Have you ever followed any of our social media channels? Which ones? How do you feel about our social media presence?

Ask the insightful questions with Voiceform

When it’s time to ask the market research questions that will get you the insight you desire, Voiceform will make the process simple. Our feature-rich, innovative multimedia survey platform empowers companies to get the answers they need. From voice and video functions to AI transcription and analysis , this powerful survey platform can help you create, launch and distribute multiple survey types. Learn more about our products today by scheduling a demonstration.

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100+ Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

Expert Writer

Dwayne Charrington shares insights on creating effective surveys, improving navigation, and using A/B testing for smarter decisions. Additionally, he focuses on optimizing mobile experiences and champions privacy-by-design, ensuring users feel satisfied, secure, and valued.

Asking the right market research questions can help you understand your target customers and map their behavior and preferences. 

But what does it actually mean?

Let’s look at a sample from a market research survey report for mapping brand awareness:

From this simple Q&A report, you can:

• Visualize the proportions of demographic segments among your audience.
• Measure how your brand is performing in comparison to others.
• Pick the top preferred brand among the customers, explore what makes it stand out, and apply the same techniques to your brand.
• See how your target market perceives brand advertisements and promotional efforts.

Now imagine if this type of data set is available for different aspects of your business – product development, marketing campaigns, optimization plans, and more.

That’s what market research does for you.

With the evolution of customer interaction points and constantly changing market trends, more and more businesses are fueling efforts to do in-depth market research, as evidenced by the steady increase in the revenue of the market research industry worldwide.

Market research can help you develop essential business strategies and maintain a competitive advantage over other brands to increase conversions and customer base.

And it all starts with asking the right questions to the right audience.

That’s why we have created this collection of 100+ market research questions to ask your target market. Each question aims to uncover a specific attribute about your customers. You can use a combination of these customer research survey questions, interviews, and othe marketing questionnaires for customers.

We have also added key tips to help you write your own effective market analysis questions if the needed.

100+ Great Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

The main challenge while designing and conducting research is – “What questions should I ask in my customer research survey?

That’s why we have a carefully curated list of market research questions to help you get started.

To Explore New Product Opportunities

• What was your first reaction to the product?
• Would you purchase this product if it were available today?
• What feature would you like to see on the website/product?
• Which feature do you think will help improve the product experience for you?
• Of these four options, what’s the next thing you think we should build?
• What’s the one feature we can add that would make our product indispensable for you?
• Would implementing [this feature] increase the usability of the [product name]?
• Please let us know how we can further  improve this feature.
• What problem would you like to solve with our product?

To Collect Feedback on Existing Products

• Have you heard of [product name or category] before?
• How would you feel if [product name] was no longer available?
• How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use [Product/feature name?]
• How often do you use [product name]?
• How long have you been using [product name] for?
• When was the last time you used [product name]?
• Please rate the following product features according to their importance to you.
• According to you, In which area is this product/service lacking the most? Specify below.
• How does the product run after the update?
• Rate our product based on the following aspects:
• Have you faced any problems with the product? Specify below.
• What feature did you expect but not find?
• How are you planning to use [product or service]?
• How satisfied are you with the product?

To Segment the Target Market

Please specify your age.

• Please specify your gender.
• Select your highest level of education.
• What is your current occupation?
• What is your monthly household income?
• What is your current marital status?

• What is the name of your company?
• Where is your company’s headquarters located?
• Please specify the number of employees that work in your company.
• What is your job title?
• In which location do you work?
• Which activity do you prefer in your free time?
• Which other physical activities do you take part in?
• Where is your dream holiday destination?
• Please rate the following as per their priority in your life – Family, work, and social life?
• Are you happy with your current work-life balance?
• Do you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist?
• How often do you give to charity?
• How do you travel to work?
• How do you do your Holiday shopping?

To Conduct a Competition Analysis

• Which product/service would you consider as an alternative to ours?
• Rate our competitor based on the following:
• Have you seen any website/product/app with a similar feature?
• How would you compare our products to our competitors? 
• Why did you choose to use our [product] over other options?
• Compared to our competitors, is our product quality better, worse, or about the same?
• Which other options did you consider before choosing [product name]?
• Please list the top three things that persuaded you to use us rather than a competitor.
• According to you, which brand best fits each of the following traits.

To Gauge Brand Awareness

• [Your brand name] Have you heard of the brand before?
• How do you feel about this brand?
• How did you hear about us?
• Describe [brand name] in one sentence.
• If yes, please tell us what you like the most about [your brand name]?
• If no, please specify the reason.
• How likely are you to purchase a product from this company again?
• If yes, where have you seen or heard about our brand recently? (Select all that apply)
• Do you currently use the product of this brand?
• Have you purchased from this brand before?
• Of all the brands offering similar products, which do you feel is the best brand?
• Please specify what makes it the best brand for you in the category.
• Which of the following products have you tried? (Select all that apply)
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you recommend this brand to a friend or colleague?

To Map Customers’ Preferences

• Have you ever boycotted a brand? If so, which brand and why?
• What influences your purchase decision more – price or quality of the item?
• How many hours do you spend on social media like Facebook, Instagram, etc.?
• How do you do your monthly grocery shopping – online or through outlets?
• How do you search for the products you want to buy?
• Rate the factors that affect your buying decision for [product].
• What persuaded you to purchase from us?
• How likely are you to purchase a product from us again?
• Please rate the following aspects of our product based on their importance to you.
• What is the most important value our product offers to you?
• Which of the following features do you use least?
• How well does the product meet your needs?

To Map Customers’ Reservations

• Is there anything preventing you from purchasing at this point?
• What’s preventing you from starting a trial?
• Do you have any questions before you complete your purchase?
• What is the main reason you’re canceling your account?
• What are your main reasons for leaving?
• What was your biggest fear or concern about purchasing from us?
• What is the problem that the product/service helped to solve for you?
• What problems did you encounter while using our [product]?
• How easy did we make it to solve your problem?
• What is your greatest concern about [product]?
• Have you started using other similar products? If yes, what made you choose that product?

To Perform Pricing Analysis

• Would you purchase the product at [price]
• According to you, what should be the ideal price of the [product name]?
• Is our product pricing clear?
• According to you, what is the ideal price range for the product?

To Collect Feedback on Website Copy

• Please rate the website based on the following aspects:
• How well does the website meet your needs?
• Was the information easy to find?
• Was the information clearly presented?
• What other information should we provide on our website?
• How can we make the site easier to use?
• What could we do to make this site more useful?
• Is there anything on this site that doesn’t work the way you expected it to?
• How easy was it to find the information you were looking for?
• Have feedback or an idea? Leave it here!
• Help us make the product better. Please leave your feedback.

To Assess Website/Product Usability

• Are you satisfied with the website layout?
• What features do you think are missing on our website?
• What features do you not like on our website?
• Was our website navigation simple and user-friendly?
• How much time did it take to find what you were looking for on our website?
• Was it easy to find the products you are looking for?
• Was the payment process convenient?

To Uncover Market Trends and Industry Insights

• Did you purchase our product out of peer influence or individual preference?
• How do you form your opinion about our product?
• Do you follow trends of the product, or do you prefer to go with what you know?
• Do discounts or incentives impact your decision-making process?

Market Research Survey Templates

One of the easiest ways to conduct market research is to use survey templates. They can help you save time and effort in creating your own market research surveys.

There are many types of market research survey templates available, depending on your objectives and target audience. Some of the most popular ones are:

• Demographic Templates: These templates help you segment your customers based on their location. It can help you tailor your marketing strategies and offers to different customer groups.

• Consumer Behavior Templates: These templates help you keep your pulse on your target market.

Industry Insights Templates: These templates help you get detailed information about your target industry and business.

Case Study:

Check out how AWA Digital increased revenue per customer for Avis by understanding the market and promoting add-on products.

Read Full Story Here

Breakdown of Different Market Research Questions

The answer choices in a market research survey question can significantly impact the quality and reliability of the response data you collect from the audience.

Some answer types help categorize the audience, while others measure their satisfaction or agreement. 

So, before listing the customer research survey questions to ask your target audience, let’s understand their types:

Multiple Choice

A multiple-choice question type lets users select more than one answer from the given options. These questions are great for collecting multiple data sets using the same question and gauging people’s preferences, opinions, and suggestions .

Single Choice

In a single-choice question, the respondent can select only one answer from the given options. This question type is great for:

• Segregating the users.
• Prioritizing product updates based on user consensus.
• Disqualifying irrelevant respondents by placing the question at the start of your customer research survey.

Matrix Match

A matrix matching grid can combine multiple market research questions into one to make the survey shorter . There is only one condition – the individual questions should have the same response anchors as shown in the image below:

The questions are arranged in rows while the answer options occupy the grid columns.

Ranking Question

A ranking question can help map customers’ preferences and set priorities for product development . This question type asks the respondent to arrange the given options in their decreasing/increasing preference.

Dichotomous

A dichotomous question poses a simple yes or no scenario to the respondent. These question types can help disqualify irrelevant people from the survey and categorize the users into two groups .

Likert Scale

Likert scale market research questions can help you measure the extent of respondents’ agreement/disagreement with the given statement . The answer options are arranged from positive to negative sentiments or vice-versa, with the neutral option in the middle.

There are two types of Likert scales: 5-point and 7-point .

Open-ended market questions let you explore the respondents’ minds without adding any restrictions to the answer . This question type is followed by a blank space for the respondent to add a free-text response.

You can add an open-ended question as a follow-up after the first question to explore the reasons for the customer’s previous answer. It also lets you collect more in-depth information about their issues, pain points, and delights.

Tools like Qualaroo offer tons of different question types for your surveys. Just pick the question and match its answer option type from the drop-down. To make it more effective, you can add branching to the survey.

How to Write Your Marketing Research Questions

It’s imperative to have a dedicated repository of market research questions for your surveys. But nothing’s better than crafting your questions.

For this, you need to sit with your team and discuss what information you require from the customers. It lets you analyze and document how much data you already have in your system, which can help set the market research scope.

We have listed some questions you need to ask yourself before asking market research questions to your potential customers or target market:

Audience Segmentation Questions

Audience segmentation questions help to size up your target market and provide a granular view of the audience . Not all customers are equal, and audience segmentation makes it possible to focus on each group individually to address their issues, fears, and expectations.

Here’s what you need to know before you start writing customer research survey questions to understand your audience:

• Do we understand the demographics of the new market we are trying to target? (Age, location, ethnicity, education, company, annual income, etc.)
• What are the locations that drive the most customers to our business? How are these locations different from others?
• What are the interests, preferences, and fears of people from our new target market? Have we addressed these situations for our current customer base?
• What are the psychographics attributes of the current customers and potential market? Are we targeting these in our campaigns?
• What are the most popular engagement channels for our customers? Which channels drive the most traffic to our website?
• Do we have enough data to perform value segmentation to separate high-value customers from low-value customers? 
• How often do these high-value customers make a purchase?

Product-Based Market Research Questions

Product-based market research questions can produce precious insights to channel into your product development and optimization strategies . You can see how changing technology affects customers’ behavior, what new features they want to see in your product, and how they perceive your products and services over the competition.

Start by gathering information about the following:

• How does our product compare to the competition based on the features?
• What products do our competitors offer?
• What new features do customers want to see in our products? Do we have a product roadmap to deliver these updates?
• What unique solutions do our products offer? What is the value proposition that reflects this offering?
• Does our product incorporate the latest technological advancements?
• What channels do we use to collect product feedback from our users?
• What are customers’ preferences while choosing our products over competitors?

Pricing Market Research Questions

Pricing analysis can help you make your product more affordable to different customer segments while maintaining the desired gross margin. It also lets you restructure the pricing tiers to provide features depending on the customers’ requirements and company size .

Watch: (1/5) Supercharge Your Revenue With Data-Driven Pricing

Your sales and marketing team can help you hone in on the market research questions to ask your customers for running pricing analysis:

• Do the customers ever complain about the difficulty in finding the pricing information?
• What is the pricing structure of our competitors for the same products? What features do they include for a specific price?
• How do customers find our pricing when compared to the competitors?
• Do our products provide value for money to the customers? Does the sales pitch reflect this point?
• Can we restructure the pricing, and how will it affect the revenue?
• Are there any customer segments that have high-value potential but find the current pricing unaffordable? What are the plans for such customers?
• Are we in a situation to offer a basic free plan to encourage customers to try our product before upgrading?
• What promotions can we run to attract more customers?
• Should we target customers based on income, company size, or type of solution to set our product prices?

Brand Reputation Market Research Questions

A brand reputation questionnaire for marketing research gives you information on how well your target market knows about your brand. You can uncover previously unidentified channels to increase brand awareness and find potential customers to promote your brand .

Start by gauging what customers are saying about your brand:

• Which channels receive mentions of our brand? Are these posts positive or negative?
• Do we have a system in place to analyze and monitor these reviews and posts?
• What are the reviews of our brand on different sites? What is the overall impression of our brand in the market?
• How are we currently addressing the negative reviews and complaints? What do our customers think about the handling process?
• What is the impression of our brand in our target market?
• What brand awareness campaigns are our competitors running?
• Is our brand among the top choices of our target customers?

Advertisement & Campaign-Based Questions

These customer research survey questions let you assess the effectiveness of your current value propositions and campaigns . You can channel the customer insights into your advertising strategies to design targeted campaigns for different customer segments to reduce the overall acquisition cost and increase conversions.

Ask the following questions to collect information about the different marketing campaigns that are performing:

• What are the best modes to run the advertisement campaigns to reach our target audience?
• What is the estimated lifetime value of customers acquired from current campaigns? Is it higher or lower than the acquisition costs?
• Which campaigns bring the most ROI and why?
• How well do our advertisements present our value proposition to the customers? Do they address customers’ fears and expectations to attract them?
• Are we running A/B tests to improve our online campaigns? How are we gathering data to build the A/B test hypotheses – surveys, heatmaps, eye tracking, etc.?
• What advertisement campaigns do our competitors run?

7 Question Types to Use in Market Research Surveys

We mentioned earlier that market research questions provide important data for different operations like product development, marketing campaigns, sales pipeline and more.

But to what extent?

Let’s break it down to individual processes and understand how insights from customer research surveys can impact them:

To Know Your Target Market

Understanding your target audience is the fundamental aspect of market research, be it a new target market or existing customers. If you know what marketing research survey questions to ask your target market, you can identify different customer types’ unique traits and preferences.

The data can help you segment the users based on demographic, psychographic, geographic, and other attributes. These include their behavior, purchase preferences, age, location, habits, delights, frustrations, and more.

You can then create various customer personas and fuel your sales strategies to maximize ROI.

Case study – How Avis increased its revenue per customer

Avis, a leading car rental company, was looking to enhance customer experience by offering useful car add-ons like navigation systems, child seats, insurance, etc., to customers with their booking. So, it reached out to AWA Digital to find a way to promote these products and increase their sales.

AWA digital implemented customer research campaigns using targeted surveys to determine which add-ons were popular among the customers and why. 

Using these insights, the team added an interstitial pop-up just before the booking page to show relevant add-ons to the customers.

This simple update dramatically increased the sales of add-on items and helped Avis generate more revenue per customer.

Read the entire case study here .

To Plan the Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is a visual representation of the current status of your product and planned updates over time. It shows a high-level summary of planned activities and priorities for different teams to take the product to the next level. Understanding different types of summary can help you create more effective and concise roadmaps that clearly communicate your vision and strategy.

Steve Jobs famously said – “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”

And market research helps to align your product strategies with the customer demand. Using targeted marketing survey questions, you can gauge what new features or functionality customers want to see in your products.

It helps to plan product development strategies based on customers’ consensus to prioritize the ideas that can have the most impact on customers and replace intuition-based approaches with data-backed decisions.

Customers’ demands change with market trends and technological advancements. That’s why your product map also needs to evolve constantly with time to reflect these changes in your product development cycle.

By designing targeted market research questions to ask the customers, you can uncover their expectations to deliver optimal product solutions. 

That’s what our next case study demonstrates.

Case study – How customer research drives Twilio’s operations  

Twilio, a cloud communications platform places customer discovery and research at the core of their product development strategies. It helps its teams to anticipate customer needs in a constantly changing market.

Lack of time and budget are the two biggest challenges that the company faces in its product development cycle. So, the team uses targeted market research questionnaires for a product to understand the challenges the customers face today and the ones they will face tomorrow. 

With an abundance of ideas and no time to test them all, the feedback data from surveys is used to prioritize the hypotheses to run the tests. It makes the process more efficient and effective in producing positive results. 

This data-backed approach is used across 18 different teams at Twilio to release new functionality every week and deliver optimal solutions to the clients.

Read the complete case study here .

To Reduce Acquisition Costs

Your customer base consists of multiple customer segments with different preferences and purchase potential. That’s why you cannot sell to everyone and need to find the right audience for your products.

If an acquired customer doesn’t bring in more revenue than it costs to acquire them, it will increase your acquisition costs over time.

We don’t want that, do we?

For example, let’s say you are targeting the entire market population using the same campaign. If your acquisition cost per customer is $300 and you acquire 20 customers from one campaign, you need to make more than $6000 to register profits.

The difficulty is you don’t know about these customers’ purchase behavior and capacity, so you cannot be sure if you will reach your goals. It adds unnecessary risks to your marketing ventures.

But, if you were targeting a specific segment with high income, regular shopping habits, or proven history of brand loyalty, You can obtain better results.

Now, the question is – 

How will you separate these potential long-term customers from one-time buyers and high-value targets from other segments?

One way to do this is by building customer personas using the data from the market research survey questions. A buyer persona defines different attributes of a particular customer segment so you can hone in on the right audience to funnel your marketing efforts.

Here’s what a typical persona includes:

• Target regions
• Target demographic (age, marital status, gender)
• Ideal psychographics (hobbies, social channels, activities they indulge in, goals)
• Preferred interaction channels
• Favorite brands and products
• Total revenue till date
• Estimated lifetime value

Once you have a clearer picture of different customers, you can find high-value prospects with the potential to be long-term customers looking for product solutions that your business offers. 

You can then design the correct pitch using the market research data to bring in these customers and control the overall acquisition costs.

For example:

• Plugin the demographic and psychographic data into CRM software like BIGContacts or Salesforce to convert high-value targets.
• Use your CRM to create segmented lists of prospects based on estimated value, location, current status, and more. Then target these groups individually with personalized value propositions to increase conversion rates.
• Identify their preferred mode of communication and technographic inclinations to find the right opportunities to pitch your product offering at the precise moment.

Even if acquiring and retaining such customers costs more, their overall revenue can balance the acquisition costs to deliver higher profits.

To Design Targeted Marketing Campaigns

By knowing how your target audience behaves and interacts with your business, you can find the exact opportunities to target them with personalized campaigns.

• You can use mail campaigns to target website users with app-exclusive offers to encourage them to download your app and improve app adoption.
• Add in-app broadcast messages about upcoming offers, exclusive membership benefits, and other incentives for new users to push them towards the end of the funnel.
• Create multiple landing pages to target different customer types.
• Design location-based ad campaigns with personalized value propositions based on audience preferences and problems at each location. 

Case Study – How Canon’s campaigns generated 700% ROI

AWA digital was tasked by Canon, one of the biggest electronics companies worldwide, to assess and increase the demand for their products in different geographies. So, the AWA team conducted customer research using target market survey questions and discovered the following attributes about customers’ purchase behavior and reservations:

• In some regions, people were reluctant to spend money on a Canon camera as they weren’t sure if Canon was an authoritative brand.
• In other regions, authority was not as important to the users.

Using these insights, AWA optimized the ads campaigns’ messaging for different locations to include what consumers deemed important purchase factors.

The results?

With in-depth customer feedback, Canon generated an overall ROI of 700% in all regions using personalized campaigns to target the audience.

To Improve Brand Awareness

Whether you are into soft drinks or not, You probably would have heard of Coca-Cola’s 2011 Share-A-Coke ad. This single campaign put the Coke brand back on the map and reversed the 10-year steady decline in sales in the US.  

Coke understood what motivates their customers and delivered a product offering that appealed to the masses to increase its brand equity- the excitement to get a Coca-Cola bottle with their name on it.

How did they do it?

In 2011, Coca-Cola rolled out its share-a-coke campaign in Australia. The company debranded the traditional Coke logo from the bottle and replaced it with the phrase “Share a Coke with” followed by a name.

The campaign used the list of the country’s most popular names (nicknames). The purpose was to make people go out and find the Coke bottle with their name on it and share it with their friends. The campaign was subsequently rolled out in 80 countries.

How did it impact Coca-Cola as a brand:

• In Australia, it’s estimated that the campaign increased Coke’s share by 4% and increased consumption among young adults by 7%.
• #ShareACoke became the top trending hashtag on Twitter globally and received over 1 billion impressions.
• In the USA, the campaign increased Coke’s market share by over 2% and brought 11% more sales compared to the previous year.

It’s not limited to big brands only.  

Understanding the customers and placing your product’s value offering along with their habits, lifestyle, and behavior can help you extend your brand’s reach.

Today, there are multiple touchpoints to connect with your customers and map their journey to uncover their issues, motivations, and fears to address in your campaigns.

• Monitor brand mentions on social media and engage with the users to cultivate an online community and promote your brand.
• Reach out to satisfied customers and turn them into your brand ambassadors.
• Use targeted ad campaigns that connect people’s emotions and general behavior to imprint your brand’s image in their minds.

Quick Tips for Writing Awesome Market Research Survey Questions

With the inter-team research complete, you are ready to write your own market research questions to ask your target audience. Keep these general dos and don’ts in mind to ensure that the market survey fulfills the purpose without affecting the data quality or response rate.

Use Mutually Exclusive Response Options

If you are using response anchors with specific ranges like age group or income, check that the options do not overlap . Otherwise, it will produce an irregular data set.

Please specify your age:

In the above example, the respondent lying on either extremity of the given age ranges may get confused on which option to choose. For example, a 28-year-old respondent can choose from both second or third options.

Plus, two different respondents of the same age may select different options, which will skew your demographic data.

You can avoid this confusion by creating mutually exclusive groups as shown below:

Always Add A “Not Applicable” Or “Rather Not Say” Option

Since market research questions extract personal information, some respondents may not want to share such details with you. These include questions about age, income, gender, hobbies, social activities, and more.

Forcing such questions on the customers without allowing them to skip can irate them and lead to survey abandonment .

That’s why you can also use Qualaroo’s skip and branching logic to create smart surveys that only ask relevant questions to your respondents based on their previous answers.

Calculate the Required Sample Size

Sample size plays a vital role in your market research questions to determine the reliability of your response data.

If the response volume is low, the results may not be conclusive to point towards customers’ consensus. On the other hand, a larger sample size than required means a waste of the company’s valuable resources and time.

That’s why it’s important to calculate the required sample size to estimate the number of responses you need for your market research survey questions.

You can use any survey sample size calculator available online to get started. Just fill in the required details to get the required sample size.

For example, to reach a statistical significance of 99%, you need at least 3145 responses to your market research questionnaire.

Consider Adding Incentives

Studies show that incentivized customer research surveys or questionnaires fetch higher response rates than general surveys.

The incentives encourage customers to invest their time in a survey and get something in return.

It means creating a gated questionnaire for market research can help you reach the required sample size quickly . The incentive can be a simple discount code, free shipping coupon, free ebook, or other freebies.

However, there is a possibility that irrelevant respondents may fill out the survey randomly just to get to the offer, which may skew the results. You can use screening questions to filter out unsuitable respondents.

Avoid Double-Barreled Market Research Questions

A double-barreled question poses two questions into one. The problem with such questions is that the respondent may have opposing views about the two statements in the questions. It makes it harder for them to choose one answer from the options .

“Please rate the [product name] on a scale of 1-10 based on overall quality and price?”

Here, the respondent may find the product quality appreciable while thinking it to be overpriced at the same time. In such a case, they may skip the question or select any option randomly.

You can easily sidestep this hurdle by breaking your double-barreled market research question into two to make it less confusing for the respondents.

Importance of Market Research

We mentioned earlier that market research questions provide important data for different operations like product development, marketing campaigns, sales pipeline, and more.

Understanding your target audience is the fundamental aspect of market research, be it a new target market or existing customers. If you know what customer research survey questions to ask your target market, you can identify different customer types’ unique traits and preferences.

AWA Digital implemented research campaigns using targeted customer research surveys to determine which add-ons were popular among the customers and why.

Case study – How customer research drives Twilio’s operations

Twilio, a cloud communications platform, places customer discovery and research at the core of its product development strategies. It helps its teams to anticipate customer needs in a constantly changing market.

Lack of time and budget are the two biggest challenges that the company faces in its product development cycle. So, the team uses targeted market research questionnaires for a product to understand the challenges the customers face today and the ones they will face tomorrow.

With an abundance of ideas and no time to test them all, the feedback data from customer research surveys is used to prioritize the hypotheses to run the tests. It makes the process more efficient and effective in producing positive results.

AWA Digital was tasked by Canon, one of the biggest electronics companies worldwide, to assess and increase the demand for their products in different geographies. So, the AWA team conducted a customer research survey using target market questions and discovered the following attributes about customers’ purchase behavior and reservations:

• In other regions, authority was not so important to the users.

Whether you are into soft drinks or not, you probably would have heard of Coca-Cola’s 2011 Share-A-Coke ad. This single campaign put the Coke brand back on the map and reversed the 10-year steady decline in sales in the US.  

Coke understood what motivates its customers and delivered a product offering that appealed to the masses to increase its brand equity- the excitement to get a Coca-Cola bottle with its name on it.

• In Australia, it’s estimated that the campaign increased Coke’s share by 4% and consumption among young adults by 7%.

It’s not limited to big brands only. 

Market Research: A Key to Your Business’ Success

Market research is a vital process for any business wanting to understand its customers and market better. By asking the right questions and using the right tools like Qualaroo, you can gain valuable insights that can help you improve your products or services, enhance your customer experiences, and grow your business.

In this blog, we have shared some of the best market research questions to ask your customers, as well as some of the best customer research survey templates to find market trends and industry insights. We hope that this blog has helped you learn more about market research and how to conduct it effectively.

About the author

Dwayne Charrington

Dwayne Charrington is an expert writer in customer feedback management, UX design, and user research. He helps businesses understand user intent and enhance the customer experience. Dwayne covers feedback management, lead generation, survey accessibility, and the impact of AI and VR on user interaction. He shares insights on creating effective surveys, improving navigation, and using A/B testing for smarter decisions. Additionally, he focuses on optimizing mobile experiences and champions privacy-by-design, ensuring users feel satisfied, secure, and valued.

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Fashion trends and consumer behavior questionnaire template

1. how often do you buy new clothes, 2. why do you most often buy new clothes, 3. which type of clothing do you buy most often, 4. please nominate your favourite clothing brand below, 5. what is your usual clothing size, 6. what is your favourite colour to wear, 7. what is your favourite pattern to wear, 8. how often do you buy shoes, 9. how many pairs of shoes do you currently own, 10. have you ever attended a fashion show, 11. do you follow current fashion trends, 12. how much do you spend on clothing per year, 13. please confirm your gender:, 14. please confirm your age:, fashion trends and consumer behavior survey, template categories, survio is a survey software for everyone., create a questionnaire in less than one minute, collect survey responses on multiple channels, analyze survey results with a single click, what people say about us, it’s not just a template. you’ll get the entire survey platform to collect desired data and understand them., enter survio, create engaging surveys, get genuine data and make the right decisions., start surveying now, contact sales.

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Market Research for Fashion Brands- 5 effective step Guide

• By Madhu Singh
• On January 18, 2023

Understanding how to conduct market research for fashion brands will be the first big step in starting your company , as it will allow you to assess the present status of the industry and whether there is sufficient demand for what you want to offer. To gain this understanding all you need is market research for fashion brands.

Don’t worry if you’re not sure how to go about conducting market research. We’ll walk you through the process of market research and how to use the knowledge to propel your clothing line to success in this guide on how to do market research for fashion brands.

What exactly is market research for fashion  brands?

#1 to increase your customer base, #2 to generate insights, #3 set goals for yourself., #4 to dig into innovations, primary data-, secondary data-, first- specify your goal., second- locate the appropriate resources and tools., third- examine your findings., fourth- adopt, fifth- continue to check in., to wrap up…….

Market research for fashion brands can give you the assurance you need to flourish in such a competitive field. The ultimate purpose of fashion market research is to gather enough data to make informed decisions about your company’s future success. It can assist you in determining how people feel about your brand or a competitor’s brand, as well as identifying new markets and customer segments.

Why to conduct market research for fashion brands? 

Your business will be more successful if you can attract more clients. Any marketing strategy should include market research on fashion. Certain folks will be more interested in and require your product than others. Market research for fashion brands will reveal who these individuals are, allowing you to tailor a marketing strategy to them .

Market research may provide you with a wealth of information about what people think of your company. It’s an excellent approach to find out whether or not any future plans will be approved . A panel sample should be included in every market research study to demonstrate that the items have been investigated and that the data is reliable.

Having the appropriate information about your clients and products might help you figure out where you’ll find success. Having goals indicates that you have a plan to follow that will lead to success. Remember that realistic goals are more important than huge concepts in getting you where you want to go.

Market research can also assist you in coming up with new concepts. Simply asking your clients what they think will allow you to discover what they truly want from you, and even if it isn’t anything you had considered previously, whatever they say may be exactly what your company requires to advance to the next level of accomplishment.

What are the sources of market research for fashion brands?

Because the fashion industry is so large, both traditional and virtual, it might be difficult to obtain statistics that represent your segment of the market. You’ll need to obtain solid data by combining primary and secondary research if you want your research to stay relevant. Let’s have a look at some places where you may get information to assist you make informed decisions .

Depending on what you need, information that comes straight off the shelf comes from consumers or even store owners. Online surveys, focus groups, test marketing, interviews, and other methods of primary market research can be used in the fashion sector.

Secondary research can help you find figures like annual spending, market size, growth rates, and pricing changes. There are a plethora of government statistics available , as well as other fashion brands that will make it easier by releasing their own reports.

How to conduct market research for fashion brands? 

Instead of simply sifting through all of the secondary information available to determine if there’s anything worth focusing on. Go the other way around. What is the purpose of your company? What are you particularly interested in? Then, working backwards, find the data you’ll need to complete your goal or answer your query.

Before you start seeking for answers, figure out how you’ll get them and from what sources you’ll get them. Also, if you’re using a survey or anything similar for primary research, make sure it’s ready and double-checked by everyone involved before launching it, so you don’t get the results and realize you forgot to ask a key question.

Check out surveykshan ! It is your one stop destination for any research related requirement .

Begin by organizing all of the information you’ve gathered. You choose to draw conclusions based on the big picture, not anything that was highlighted by chance along the way.

Not only should market research be used to gather insights, but it should also be used to take action. If you’re using it to create a marketing strategy, make sure you follow through with it. If you’re using it to learn more about consumer behavior, make sure you ask marketing how companies plan to use it.

Try to follow up on both the outcomes and how the research was implemented, depending on the nature and duration of the study.

To ensure you take the right steps and avoid all the common mistakes mentioned above you need experience and time. This might be difficult to arrange if you are a new company or conducting a market research for the first time. Thus, in such scenarios it is always advisable to hire a research company for conducting market research flawlessly with the most efficient result.

You can try Suvekshan for your first time research experience. Surveykshan is the industry leader in market research, merging all research methods into a single point of contact. Corporate researchers, marketers, marketing research companies, and consultants can use the firm’s high-quality data collection services. The agencies’ platforms use cutting-edge technology and cloud-based servers to increase output, quality, and security. We’ve put in place strict security and privacy procedures. Qualitative methodologies used by the organization include traditional and online focus groups, bulletin boards, and in-depth interviews. Quantitative methodologies include CATI/CAWI, online surveys, and face-to-face interviews. The company is dedicated to providing clients with high-quality research services at a reasonable cost.

Website – https://www.surveykshan.com/

Contact Details :

Email –  [email protected]

Phone –   8800766787, 7289038981

Address – 13-A, 2nd floor, Pratap Nagar, Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi, 110091

Listening to your consumers has the extra benefit of demonstrating that you are interested in what they have to say. Even if you don’t implement all of their suggestions, the fact that you really want to hear what they have to say says a lot about your organization and encourages brand loyalty.

Madhu Singh

An active content creator and consumer. Practicing my love for content writing and market analysis professionally, with key interest in market research. I believe the sky cannot be the limit as we have footprints on the moon too. Find me where creativity is in demand!

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99 Market Research Questions You Should Be Asking

Asking the right market research questions at the right time can pay dividends. You wouldn’t buy a house without first researching the neighborhood – and it’s unlikely you’d take a job without doing your homework on your prospective employer. So why should starting a business be any different?

Whichever way you look at it, asking the right market research questions makes sense as a first step.

Do you want to gain a foothold in the market? Get to grips with the competition? Start thinking like your target audience? Introduce a new product or mobile app?

Whatever your goal, market research will help you understand all aspects of your industry, brand, potential customers, and rivals – good market questions can make a world of difference.

Below, we’ll walk you through 99 questions to ask for market research to succeed in the digital world. We started out as a research intelligence tool , so we know our stuff when it comes to defining a market, mapping key players, marketing strategies , and understanding trends , and target audiences.

So read on for all the questions your market research strategy needs – and how Similarweb can help you answer them.

How to choose market research questions

The market research questions you pick will depend on where your business is in its lifecycle. As we’ll get to in a moment, there are a lot of market research questions – so how exactly do you choose?

Pre-start-up – If you’ve not launched a business yet, and are just cultivating an idea – you’ll want to start with some formal market research first. Then, ask more general market research questions, and some targeted at start-ups. This will help you determine if there’s a financially viable market, whether it has blockbuster prospects, or is better off left in the cutting room.

Early start-up – If you’ve just started out, you’ll want to reach out to your target market with survey questions to help you tailor your products and services to them.

Established – If you’ve been around a little longer – and already have a few current customers – you’ll want to learn more about how you can keep improving your customer experience.

Finally, you can look at questions to ask for market research that focus on competitor analysis. These aren’t limited to any particular stage of your business’s journey. After all, getting clued up on the competitive landscape is always handy – whether you’ve just entered the market or are one of its most established players.

99 market research questions: discover, define, drill down

There’s no need to limit yourself! The best types of market research should – and do – include general questions and those addressing both existing and prospective customers. Indeed, an intelligent approach to market research should cover demographic questions all the way to those that’ll help you plan a product launch , drill down into your target market , and get the jump on your competitors.

Read on to see the best examples of market research questions in action!

Generic market research questions

These questions are most useful at the planning stage. They can apply to all businesses at any stage because markets shift, along with consumer behaviors, needs, and demands.

General market research is the process of figuring out how rich the soil is and whether the conditions are optimal to allow your business’s roots to take hold.

Some general market research questions you should be asking include:

1. How large is my product’s total addressable market (TAM)? 2. Will this market hold firm, or will it grow or decrease with time? 3. Are there already similar products or services out there? 4. If so, who’s offering them? (see the competitor analysis questions below for more) 5. Who are my buyer personas ? 6. What pain points does my product address? 7. How much market share is available for my business to take? 8. What external factors might affect the health and viability of my chosen market? 9. Which website demographics will I target? 10. Will I market my product internationally or target a specific geographical location or a single location (if so, why?) 11. Do I need to consider a website alone, or should I invest in a mobile app? (use mobile app intelligence to help to figure this one out) 12. Which suppliers or manufacturers operate in the space, and are they reputable? 13. Which marketing channels will I prioritize, and which affiliates or advertisers could I look to in order to expand my reach?

Market research questions for start-ups

Regardless of your sector, there are key things you need to establish before setting up a business. Read on to discover the fifteen market research questions all start-ups need to ask.

14. What is the total addressable market (tam), serviceable available market (sam), and share of market (som)? 15. What are the latest (and predicted) trends impacting your market? 16. Do you know who your direct and indirect competitors are?

Read through questions 71-99 for examples of market research questions to help you with this.

17. What’s your USP in the market? What’s the value-add that’ll make you stand out? 18. What do your competitors charge, and will you charge the same, more, or less?

You’ll also need to consider pricing models. For instance,  pay-monthly, annual subscription, or other?

19. Do you know how much people are willing to pay for a product/service like yours? 20. Can you trial your product or service with a beta group before launch to get feedback and/or testimonials? 21. What are the most effective marketing channels for businesses like yours? 22. How active are your customers and competitors on social media? 23. How will you onboard/welcome new customers? 24. Do rivals offer new customer or loyalty discounts? 25. What kind of customer support will you offer? Look at your rival’s offerings and decide whether you want to stick with the same or do better. 26. Are potential customers driven by price, product, or service? 27. Are your competitors or market impacted by seasonal trends ? 28. What opening hours and service level agreements (SLAs) will you advertise on your site?

Market research questions for a new product

Whether established, pre-launch or newly set up, you may need to ask specific market research questions for a new product launch. Whether you simply want to test the water with an idea or concept or go a little deeper to get clearer insights, these questions will help.

29. Is there a specific pain point your product will address? (if you have already identified an ideal customer, what kinds of things do they struggle with?) 30. Is there a demand for your product in the market? 31. Are there any opportunities to partner with other companies to get referrals for your product? 32. How do you plan to market and launch your product? 33. Will you release a minimum viable product (MVP) to market first?

If you release an MVP or offer a free trial to a select group of people, you’ll need to follow this up with a survey or specific questions to get feedback around usage, benefits, and improvements. A few examples of market research questions like these could include:

34. Which feature of the product did you use the most? 35. What improvements would you like to see? 36. How much would you be willing to pay for this product? 37. Was the product easy to use? 38. Was there anything you experienced during the trial that may deter you from using our product in the future? 39. How often did you use the product? 40. Would you recommend this product to someone else? If yes, why? If no, why?

Market research questions for your target audience

Once you’re sure there’s a viable market for your business, it’s time to drill down into that market – your audience and website demographics .

To begin, you’ll want to ask your respondents a few demographic questions to understand the basics. These might include:

41. How old are you? 42. Which gender do you identify as (if any)? 43. What’s your level of education? 44. What’s your profession? 45. What’s your household size? 46. What is your household income? 47. Which ethnic/cultural group do you identify with? 48. Where do you live? 49. Do you have any dependents? 50. What are your hobbies?

These questions provide a top-level understanding of your target audience . So, you can then utilize psychographic segmentation to dig a little deeper. These inquiries are designed to draw out your customers’ attitudes, lifestyles, likes, dislikes, motivations, and beliefs – particularly if they relate to your product or service.

The goal? To match your business with its ideal customer . Examples of these types of market research questions include:

51. Do you actively seek out new experiences or prefer to stick with what you know? 52. What do you most enjoy doing in your free time? 53. What was the last big-ticket item you purchased? 54. Have you ever boycotted a brand? If so, which brand – and why? 55. Which matters more when you make a purchase – price or quality? 56. Would you rather have more time or money? 57. How do you like to make purchases – do you prefer apps or web-based services? 58. How do you prefer to seek customer support? 59. What’s your main source of information?

For a more detailed deep dive into the above, see our guide on the what and why of market segmentation – and how to become a pro at it!

Market research questions for your customers

So, you’ve established the market for your product, nailed your target audience, and now… you’ve got customers! Congrats – that’s a surefire sign that you’re on the right track.

But simply having new customers isn’t enough. To be truly successful, you’ll need to maintain engagement , foster loyalty to your product, and keep your customers coming back for more – in other words, build your brand.

Fortunately, this is where market research can help. By asking your existing customers a few questions, you can find out what you’re doing well, what you could be doing better, and – crucially – what your brand means to them. With this knowledge, you can do more of what your customers love, and identify key areas for improvement.

Here are some of the market research questions you can ask your customers to get useful feedback:

60. How did you first hear about our brand? 61. What made you choose us? 62. How long have you been a customer? 63. How would you rate your most recent experience with us? 64. Did we answer all your questions and requests for support? 65. Would you use us again? 66. How likely are you to recommend us to a friend? 67. What do you wish our product could do? 68. Do you believe our product is priced fairly? 69. What’s the maximum you’d pay for this kind of product? 70. What do you like most about our product?

Explore our complete guide to audience development for more tips, tricks, and strategies around this type of customer analysis.

Market research questions for competitor analysis

Death, taxes, and… competition .

Yep – no matter how original or innovative your idea is, pretty soon, there’ll be hordes of wannabes targeting the same space with similar products, and guess who they’ll be targetting? Your customers.

So how do you keep your friends close and your competition even closer?

Well, a SWOT analysis is a good place to start. It involves swotting up on your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s a heady mix of evaluating your business and the external factors that could affect it. So it’s naturally a great place to get your competitor analysis and benchmarking off the mark.

You could also begin by asking yourself the following market research questions:

71. Who are our main competitors? 72. What are they doing that we’re not? 73. What’s our unique value proposition? 74. How much web traffic do our competitors receive? 75. Do they have a mobile app? If so, is it on iOS or android? How many monthly or daily active users do they have? 76. What’s their bounce rate ? 77. Which keywords and search terms do they target? 78. Which marketing channels do they prioritize, and how frequently do they advertise? 79. How do the backlink profiles of our competitors compare to our own? 80. Are our competitors seen as more authoritative in the space? 81. What kind of content do our competitors produce? 82. How do our competitors attract customers? 83. What are the unique selling points of our competitors? 84. What do our competitors charge? 85. What social media channels do our competitors use? 86. What kind of discounts and promotions do our competitors run? 87. Which sources and affiliates drive traffic to our competitors’ sites? 88. How does our business model compare to those of our rivals?

Remember, your customers are a potential goldmine of information about your competitors . Reach out to your client base with the following market research questions:

89. Who do you seek advice from when shopping for this kind of product? 90. Are you loyal to a particular brand in the space? 91. If so, what do you love most about this brand? 92. Is there anything that this brand could do better? 93. How did you find the last product you bought in the industry? 94. Is there anything you see our competitors doing that you’d like us to do? 95. What’s most likely to make you buy a product from another brand? 98. Can you tell us the top three things that made you choose us over a competitor? 99. What one thing matters most to you when deciding between brands that offer the same product?

You may also consider including some open-ended questions so you can hear from your loyal customers in their own words. Market research surveys are a great way to uncover and collect this type of data.

If you’re unsure where to start, learn about the seven types of competitor analysis frameworks – and how to use them to get your strategy off the ground.

Similarweb Competitor Analysis Frameworks

Whether you're B2B or B2C, get started with our free and easy to use template

How to answer these questions with Similarweb

Now that you’re armed with the 99 research questions you need to succeed in your market research endeavors, how do you answer them?

Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence is a great place to start. With these tools (which you can try for free) you can effortlessly do market sizing, gauge your audience’s loyalty and engagement rate , uncover mobile app intelligence for your market, improve your site’s retention rates, and more.

In the same vein, Similarweb can also help you conduct that all-important competitor analysis . You can build a picture of which rival sites your customers frequent and form a data-driven understanding of why.

With Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence, you get an entire suite of market research and analysis tools at your fingertips. You can monitor your industry in real time via a personalized dashboard with on-demand access to industry, company, and consumer trends. With a broad view across web and mobile app intelligence, you can clearly understand the digital landscape that matters to you ( and your customers ) most.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Check out what Similarweb can do for you today, and start tackling those big questions now!

Level up your market research

Get the data you need to adapt to market changes and industry trends.

What is market research?

Market research assesses the viability of a product or service by reaching out to its target market. It can include primary research – such as interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires – and secondary research , like articles and white papers.

What is the best way to ask market research questions to customers?

Because they’re quick to set up, relatively low-cost, and easy to use, market research surveys are a great tool to use if you want to ask a group of people market research questions.

What’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative market research?

While qualitative data is typically mined through close observation with participants – such as in focus groups or face-to-face interviews – quantitative processes tend to involve larger-scale data grabbing. This could use forms, surveys, polls, or questionnaires to collect opinions en masse, often via emails or social media.

Qualitative data captures people’s thoughts and feelings – the prevailing sentiment around a product or service. Its quantitative counterpart, however, is more concerned with the cold, hard facts. That could be traffic metrics, engagement levels, bounce rates: anything that paints a data-driven picture!

by Liz March

Digital Research Specialist

Liz March has 15 years of experience in content creation. She enjoys the outdoors, F1, and reading, and is pursuing a BSc in Environmental Science.

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How to conduct your own market research survey (with example)

After watching a few of those sketches, you can imagine why real-life focus groups tend to be pretty small. Even without any over-the-top personalities involved, it's easy for these groups to go off the rails.

So what happens when you want to collect market research at a larger scale? That's where the market research survey comes in. Market surveys allow you to get just as much valuable information as an in-person interview, without the burden of herding hundreds of rowdy Eagles fans through a product test.

Table of contents:

What is a market research survey?

Market surveys are what's known as "primary research"—that is, information that the researching company gathers firsthand. Secondary research consists of data that another organization gathered and published, which other researchers can then use for their own reports. Primary research is more expensive and time-intensive than secondary research, which is why you should only use market research surveys to obtain information that you can't get anywhere else. 

A market research survey can collect information on your target customers':

Experiences

Preferences, desires, and needs

Values and motivations

The types of information that can usually be found in a secondary source, and therefore aren't good candidates for a market survey, include your target customers':

Demographic data

Consumer spending data

Household size

Why conduct market research?

Here are some examples of how market research surveys can be used to fill a wide range of knowledge gaps for companies:

A B2B software company asks real users in its industry about Kanban board usage to help prioritize their project view change rollout.

A B2C software company asks its target demographic about their mobile browsing habits to help them find features to incorporate into their forthcoming mobile app.

A printing company asks its target demographic about fabric preferences to gauge interest in a premium material option for their apparel lines.

A wholesale food vendor surveys regional restaurant owners to find ideas for seasonal products to offer.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market surveys are what's known as "primary research"—that is, information that the researching company gathers firsthand. Secondary research consists of data that another organization gathered and published, which other researchers can then use for their own reports. 

Primary research is more expensive and time-intensive than secondary research, which is why you should only use market research surveys to obtain information that you can't get anywhere else. 

If you've exhausted your secondary research options and still have unanswered questions, it's time to start thinking about conducting a market research survey.

6 types of market research survey

Depending on your goal, you'll need different types of market research. Here are six types of market research surveys.

1. Buyer persona research

A buyer persona research survey will help you learn more about things like demographics, household makeup, income and education levels, and lifestyle markers. The more you learn about your existing customers, the more specific you can get in targeting potential customers. You may find that there are more buyer personas within your user base than the ones that you've been targeting.

2. Sales funnel research

With a sales funnel research survey, you can learn about potential customers' main drivers at different stages of the sales funnel. You can also get feedback on how effective different sales strategies are. Use this survey to find out:

How close potential buyers are to making a purchase

What tools and experiences have been most effective in moving prospective customers closer to conversion

3. Customer loyalty research

The demographics of your most loyal customers

What tools are most effective in turning customers into advocates

What you can do to encourage more brand loyalty

4. Branding and marketing research

The Charmin focus group featured in that SNL sketch is an example of branding and marketing research, in which a company looks for feedback on a particular advertising angle to get a sense of whether it will be effective before the company spends money on running the ad at scale. Use this type of survey to find out:

Whether a new advertising angle will do well with existing customers

Whether a campaign will do well with a new customer segment you haven't targeted yet

What types of campaign angles do well with a particular demographic

5. New products or features research

What features they wish your product currently had

What they think of a particular product or feature idea

6. Competitor research

Whether your competitors have found success with a buyer persona you're not targeting

Information about buyers for a product that's similar to one you're thinking about launching

Feedback on what features your competitors' customers wish their version of a product had

How to write and conduct a market research survey

Once you've narrowed down your survey's objectives, you can move forward with designing and running your survey.

Step 1: Write your survey questions

A poorly worded survey, or a survey that uses the wrong question format, can render all of your data moot. If you write a question that results in most respondents answering "none of the above," you haven't learned much. 

Categorical questions

Also known as a nominal question, this question type provides numbers and percentages for easy visualization, like "35% said ABC." It works great for bar graphs and pie charts, but you can't take averages or test correlations with nominal-level data.

Multiple choice: Use this type of question if you need more nuance than a Yes/No answer gives. You can add as many answers as you want, and your respondents can pick only one answer to the question. 

Checkbox: Checkbox questions add the flexibility to select all the answers that apply. Add as many answers as you want, and respondents aren't limited to just one. 

Ordinal questions

This type of question requires survey-takers to pick from options presented in a specific order, like "income of $0-$25K, $26K-$40K, $41K+." Like nominal questions, ordinal questions elicit responses that allow you to analyze counts and percentages, though you can't calculate averages or assess correlations with ordinal-level data.

Dropdown: Responses to ordinal questions can be presented as a dropdown, from which survey-takers can only make one selection. You could use this question type to gather demographic data, like the respondent's country or state of residence. 

Ranking: This is a unique question type that allows respondents to arrange a list of answers in their preferred order, providing feedback on each option in the process. 

Interval/ratio questions

For precise data and advanced analysis, use interval or ratio questions. These can help you calculate more advanced analytics, like averages, test correlations, and run regression models. Interval questions commonly use scales of 1-5 or 1-7, like "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree." Ratio questions have a true zero and often ask for numerical inputs (like "How many cups of coffee do you drink per day? ____").

Ranking scale: A ranking scale presents answer choices along an ordered value-based sequence, either using numbers, a like/love scale, a never/always scale, or some other ratio interval. It gives more insight into people's thoughts than a Yes/No question. 

Matrix: Have a lot of interval questions to ask? You can put a number of questions in a list and use the same scale for all of them. It simplifies gathering data about a lot of similar items at once. 

Example : How much do you like the following: oranges, apples, grapes? Hate/Dislike/Ok/Like/Love

Textbox: A textbox question is needed for collecting direct feedback or personal data like names. There will be a blank space where the respondent can enter their answer to your question on their own. 

Step 2: Choose a survey platform

Most survey apps today look great on mobile, but be sure to preview your survey on your phone and computer, at least, to make sure it'll look good for all of your users.

If you have the budget, you can also purchase survey services from a larger research agency. 

Step 3: Run a test survey

Before you run your full survey, conduct a smaller test on 5%-10% of your target respondent pool size. This will allow you to work out any confusing wording or questions that result in unhelpful responses without spending the full cost of the survey. Look out for:

Survey rejection from the platform for prohibited topics

Joke or nonsense textbox answers that indicate the respondent didn't answer the survey in earnest

Multiple choice questions with an outsized percentage of "none of the above" or "N/A" responses

Step 4: Launch your survey

If your test survey comes back looking good, you're ready to launch the full thing! Make sure that you leave ample time for the survey to run—you'd be surprised at how long it takes to get a few thousand respondents. 

Even if you've run similar surveys in the past, leave more time than you need. Some surveys take longer than others for no clear reason, and you also want to build in time to conduct a comprehensive data analysis.

Step 5: Organize and interpret the data

Tips for running a market research survey.

You know the basics of how to conduct a market research survey, but here are some tips to enhance the quality of your data and the reliability of your findings.

Find the right audience: You could have meticulously crafted survey questions, but if you don't target the appropriate demographic or customer segment, it doesn't really matter. You need to collect responses from the people you're trying to understand. Targeted audiences you can send surveys to include your existing customers, current social media followers, newsletter subscribers, attendees at relevant industry events, and community members from online forums, discussion boards, or other online communities that cater to your target audience. 

Focus questions on a desired data type: As you conceptualize your survey, consider whether a qualitative or quantitative approach will better suit your research goals. Qualitative methods are best for exploring in-depth insights and underlying motivations, while quantitative methods are better for obtaining statistical data and measurable trends. For an outcome like "optimize our ice cream shop's menu offerings," you may want to find out which flavors of ice cream are most popular with teens. This would require a quantitative approach, for which you would use categorical questions that can help you rank potential flavors numerically.

Establish a timeline: Set a realistic timeline for your survey, from creation to distribution to data collection and analysis. You'll want to balance having your survey out long enough to generate a significant amount of responses but not so long that it loses relevance. That length can vary widely based on factors like type of survey, number of questions, audience size, time sensitivity, question format, and question length.

Market research survey campaign example

Let's say you own a market research company, and you want to use a survey to gain critical insights into your market. You prompt users to fill out your survey before they can access gated premium content.

Survey questions: 

1. What size is your business? 

<10 employees

11-50 employees

51-100 employees

101-200 employees

>200 employees

2. What industry type best describes your role?

3. On a scale of 1-4, how important would you say access to market data is?

1 - Not important

2 - Somewhat important

3 - Very important

4 - Critically important

4. On a scale of 1 (least important) to 5 (most important), rank how important these market data access factors are.

Accuracy of data

Attractive presentation of data

Cost of data access

Range of data presentation formats

Timeliness of data

5. True or false: your job relies on access to accurate, up-to-date market data.

Survey findings: 

63% of respondents represent businesses with over 100 employees, while only 8% represent businesses with under 10.

71% of respondents work in sales, marketing, or operations.

80% of respondents consider access to market data to be either very important or critically important.

"Timeliness of data" (38%) and "Accuracy of data" (32%) were most commonly ranked as the most important market data access factor.

86% of respondents claimed that their jobs rely on accessing accurate, up-to-date market data.

Insights and recommendations: Independent analysis of the survey indicates that a large percentage of users work in the sales, marketing, or operations fields of large companies, and these customers value timeliness and accuracy most. These findings can help you position future report offerings more effectively by highlighting key benefits that are important to customers that fit into related customer profiles. 

Market research survey example questions

Your individual questions will vary by your industry, market, and research goals, so don't expect a cut-and-paste survey to suit your needs. To help you get started, here are market research survey example questions to give you a sense of the format.

Yes/No: Have you purchased our product before?

Multiple choice: How many employees work at your company?

<10 / 10-20 / 21-50 / 51-100 / 101-250 / 250+

Checkbox: Which of the following features do you use in our app?

Push notifications / Dashboard / Profile customization / In-app chat

Dropdown: What's your household income? 

$0-$10K / $11-$35K / $36-$60K / $61K+

Ranking: Which social media platforms do you use the most? Rank in order, from most to least.

Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / LinkedIn / Reddit

Ranking scale: On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate our customer service? 

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

Textbox: How many apps are installed on your phone? Enter a number: 

Market research survey question types

Good survey apps typically offer pre-designed templates as a starting point. But to give you a more visual sense of what these questions might look like, we've put together a document showcasing common market research survey question types.

Use automation to put survey results into action

Related reading:

This article was originally published in June 2015 by Stephanie Briggs. The most recent update, with contributions from Cecilia Gillen, was in September 2023.

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Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

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How to Use Market Research to Launch Your Clothing Line

by Kathleen Zacrep , on September 30, 2014

Before launching any business, it’s imperative you do your research. According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start small businesses fail within the first 18 months, a vast 80% don’t succeed. So, if you want to be a part of that successful 20%, you have to put together your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, business plan, and marketing plan – none of which can be done without reliable and professional market research.

According to  realthread.com , one of the 6 tips to launching a successful clothing line is “research, research & more research.” They explain that because there are so many different options available, you don’t want to short change yourself to one style because you didn’t take the time or effort to look into other creative options to yield different results. In his blog post  “How to Use Market Research: An Entrepreneur’s Perspective,” CEO of MarketResearch.com , Rob Granader, explains “if you are looking to grow your business, find out the mindset of your customers or potential customers, look for new revenue streams, growth projections, potential customers, then look inside the pages of a Market Research report and find the answers.” Plunkett Research, Ltd. reports that the clothing and apparel industries are expected to reach $264 billion by 2020. To avoid being part of that 80%, you should conduct the following necessary steps before starting your business.

1. SWOT Analysis

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – information you need to know to succeed. Your strengths are what give you a leg up over other businesses. Weaknesses are the exact opposite – your disadvantages as a company relative to others. Opportunities are components that your business can use to its advantage, while threats could put your business in trouble. Determine where your business is today and where it could be in the future. Market research will provide you with the information necessary to determine these factors.

2. Business Plan

Outline the next 3-5 years for your business. A business plan includes information about your competitors, costs, plans for growth, target market and an executive summary, plus more information. This is where you will also include your SWOT analysis. A guideline for writing a business plan can be found on SBA.gov . Market research reports will play a big role in your business plan. Data collected from reports will help contribute to information about competitors, plans for growth, your target market and more.

3. Marketing

First and foremost, you have to decide what your marketing purpose and budget are for your clothing line. As described in one of our previous posts , "5 Steps for Using Market Research to Advertise Your Product," your purpose is all about your intention of advertising your product. Networking is essential in any marketing plan. As smallbusiness.chron.com  explains, to start marketing, you need to compile a contact list of fashion buyers, media editors, merchandisers, boutique owners and clothing distributors. These will be the people to whom you send invitations for your shows, as well as your lines sheets, look-book and press releases. Start making pieces from your first collection for a look-book and line sheet. Market research will be helpful when developing line sheets to help determine recommended retail prices or best sellers. Researching competitors will influence your decision on pricing and what to sell.

In addition to your competitors, you also need to understand your  target market . Understanding and learning their behaviors, when, where and how to reach them through marketing will be critical to achieving success. Once you have learned the behaviors of your target market, consider your budget and organize the most effective advertising campaign.

No matter where you may be in the process of launching your clothing line, whether you have already started the process, or are just starting out, even well after your company is established – market research is necessary every step of the way. The apparel industry is constantly changing with new trends, and you never want to fall behind or you’ll find yourself becoming a part of that 80%.

For more information on the apparel industry, check out our related reports . To learn more about using market research to launch a business, download our free white paper .

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Apparel Market Research Reports & Industry Analysis

When it comes to the apparel industry, trends are constantly changing, and consumer preferences can vary greatly by region and country. The demand for a specific product in the United States may differ sharply with the demand in Turkey or Malaysia, for example. Getting a clear view of the market and where it is headed is essential for long-term success. That's why MarketResearch.com offers a wide range of apparel market research reports to help you understand the latest trends in this dynamic industry and adjust and pivot as needed.

Newly Published Apparel Market Analysis

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Apparel Industry Research & Market Reports

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Market Research and Competitive Analysis in the Fashion Industry

• Market Research & Competitive Analysis in the Fashion Industry

Are you active in the fashion industry as an apparel company? That’s great! 

However, as you already know, the clothing industry is highly competitive, with an estimated worth of 1.9 trillion US dollars . 

The most prominent apparel market, by far, is the United States and some of the highest-earning clothing brands include famous houses, such as:

• Victoria’s Secret
• American Eagle Outfitters

So, how can you successfully compete with such world-renowned names? In fact: Just trying to gain a foothold as an established apparel label is a formidable challenge.

But it’s not impossible. 

It’s a matter of choosing the right products and managing said products profitably. 

How to do that: Effective preparation is one of the most critical steps when launching a new product line— that includes market research and competitive analysis. 

What do these terms mean? And why are they so important? 

In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about skyrocketing your clothing brand. And also advise you on doing both types of research conveniently with EpiProdux. 

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

What Is Market Research and Competitive Analysis?

Market research involves gathering information on the needs of your potential customers and determining how viable your new products (or business) will be in today’s highly competitive fashion industry. You can conduct market research to develop a clear idea of your target market, collect opinions from actual consumers likely to purchase your products, and reduce the risk of releasing goods nobody wants or needs. 

Market research puts you in direct contact with potential consumers who have the shopping experience to provide valuable and actionable feedback. 

Use market research to:

• Recognize your target customer’s pain points, expectations, and tastes;
• Segment markets to deliver the right products and messaging to the right consumers;
• Explore new markets and the potential they offer;
• Identify opportunities to create new products and test them to determine the viability;
• Gather information on price points to align with customer spending habits;
• Prioritize the most valuable and popular products based on trends and feedback, which helps you increase sales and reach out to a more extensive consumer base;
• Experiment with marketing techniques and messaging;
• Gain insights into your competitors;
• Learn about customer satisfaction and how you can cultivate it with your products and service.

Competitive Landscape Analysis 

Your clothing company has many competitors. 

That’s unavoidable. 

It’s the nature of the business. 

You may have direct competitors (targeting the same audience with a similar product) and/or indirect competitors (targeting the same audience but with a different product).

That said, the number of competitors you have, and the scale of their operations, vary depending on your target market. 

For example, you might have fewer competitors if your business specializes in high-end, luxurious, organic men’s socks than if you wanted to create fashionable clothes for males and females in their 20s and 30s. 

Source: Wearpact

Source: Organicbasics

Regardless of your target market, though, competitive analysis is fundamental to understand the level of competition you face. 

Competitive landscape analysis encompasses multiple areas of assessment:

• Company (revenue, customers, branding)
• Products (features, prices, manufacturing processes)
• Marketing methods (digital marketing, offline marketing, channels, customer service)

With competitive analysis, you can pretty much gather a wealth of data to help you compete with competitive brands more effectively. 

Competitive analysis offers several benefits. It can help you:

• Define your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), also a powerful EpiProdux feature;
• Create priorities in your product development based on those elements customers most value;
• Make better products and deliver better service by being aware of competitors’ weaknesses;
• Set benchmarks for monitoring and measuring your growth over time;
• Identify market segments that your competitors may overlook and find new ways to gain a more significant market share;
• Recognize opportunities to launch products for an underserved demographic to stand out from competitors.

How to Conduct Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is critical. Not least because you can use their data to determine your goals, marketing strategies, tactics, new product lines, pricing, and more. Use competitor analysis to:

• Determine how strong the competition is
• Find opportunities to stand out from the competition
• Decide the pricing for your product

There are a few techniques to find out who your competitors really are. You can start with a Google search, but bear in mind that this will only show you the competition that ranks in the search results. Here’s how to find your competition online:

• Decide the keywords related to your product and business
• Google the terms and make a list of the websites that are ranking in the top ten. 
• Review their offering to find out if they are competitive. 

What’s more, you can also use various online tools to find out who your competitors are. The caveat with this technique is that the tools only really work with companies with a high website traffic volume. 

Here are some tools that you can use to find competitors online:

• Google Similar Pages
• Product Hunt
• AlternativeTo

Once you have a list of your real competitors, you can now dive into their data. Find out what keywords they are targeting either via paid or organic search. Use tools like Ahrefs to determine what keywords they are targeting, which pages most of their traffic lands on, and other key metrics. 

For every relevant keyword, find out the following data:

• Keyword volume: How many people search for this term per month;
• Keyword difficulty: How difficult is it to rank for this keyword;
• CPC: How much are your competitors paying for clicks through on these keywords. 

How Many Competitors Should You Compare?

The answer depends on your time, your budget, and your available resources. Clearly, the more, the better is true here, but we have to be realistic about what can be achieved. 

As a general rule of thumb, 3 to 5 of your biggest competitors would be a great start and should give you plenty of data to use.

Keyword Research

When conducting your market research, you MUST also conduct keyword analysis. While this is often used for SEO purposes, you also use keyword research to understand what your target audience is searching for, the intent behind their searches, and the search terms related to your competitors.

Keyword research helps to:

• Indicate the size and scope of the demand. The more people are searching for your product, the higher the demand;
• Determine the level of competition. The higher the bids on CPC, the more intense your competition will be, and the higher the purchase intent. 

How to Define Your Keywords

Before diving into the data for specific keywords, you need to know what keywords are relevant to your business and product.

To find keywords, you can explore forums, social media groups, and Q&A sites. These are a goldmine of information. Find and save common phrases used by your target audience.

On top of this, your competitors are also a valuable resource. Find out what search terms they’re targeting either organically or on their paid advertising campaigns. There’s a good chance if they’ve gone to the effort of creating a landing page or an ad campaign targeting a specific keyword, it’s a valuable term. So, find out which pages are driving the most traffic to your competitor’s sites. 

You can also use Google to find out the search terms. Simply enter your ideas for keywords and see what ranking is. See whether the first ten results are similar to your product and have a similar intent. In addition, you can use Google autosuggest and the search snippets to see what Google presents in the top spot, too. 

Armed with your list of keywords, head over to EpiProdux. In the Product Profile, enter keyword(s) to determine the search volume, keyword difficulty, and the average cost per click. 

Your keyword research will help you decide what products customers want, what information they’re searching for, and how much monthly demand there is for a product. 

Remember to consider the intent behind a search. Try to understand where a customer is in their buying journey. For example:

Informational Search Intent

Informational searches are related to the start of a customer journey. The buyer is educating themselves about how best to solve their problem. They have pain, but they’re not yet sure of the solution. 

Examples of keywords include:

• Best material for hot weather
• Which hiking boots are waterproof
• Best type of pan for frying

Navigational Search Intent

Once a customer has learned more about their problem and found the type of product that solves their problem, they will search for the specific product they need. These are navigational queries, and they drive a user to particular solutions. 

Examples of keywords:

• Hiking shoes
• Linen trousers

Commercial Search Intent

These are your money terms. Hooray!

When a customer has determined the exact solution for the pain and is ready to buy, the search terms become laser-focused on purchase intent. That is where you will find the highest CPCs.

• Buy linen trousers near me
• Waterproof jacket less than $50

Examples of How Fashion Brands Use Market Research and Competitive Analysis

New Look steers away from competing on high competition non-branded terms when it comes to paid advertising. Instead, the focus on bidding for branded keywords like this:

Farfetch gets more than 4 million visitors per month from SEO tactics. This traffic is from people searching for luxury fashion brands like Versace, Givenchy, Burberry, Saint Laurent, and Valentino. 

We can also see that Farfetch uses highly targeted ad copy for specific keywords which are neatly aligned with their landing pages. 

Like search engine optimization, the essence of paid search is to attract people in need of Farfetch products when searching for them.

A vital part of market research is listening to consumers and paying attention to what they can’t find. This applies both during the early stages of building your brand and when you run an active presence.

For example, the fashion brand Zara is renowned for its direct approach to research.

One famous case involves multiple customers in Tokyo, Toronto, San Francisco, and Frankfurt entering Zara stores to purchase a pink scarf, only to find none available. At the same time, many other customers started to experience the same issue around the world.

It’s not that these branches had sold out: Zara didn’t have any in its collection. But more than 2,000 stores received stock of pink scarves, and 500,000 units sold out within three days. 

Similarly, Zara trains its in-store managers and sales assistants to be aware of customer shopping habits. Workers are encouraged to research behaviors and trends right in their stores. They do this by listening to customers’ comments on clothing options, suggestions for improving products, and studying what shoppers are wearing to inspire Zara’s new products.

It’s not hard to see why Zara’s brand value is $14.7 billion as of late July 2020 and operates in more than 95 countries. 

How to Do Market Research and Competitive Analysis Quickly and Easily 

EpiProdux helps you streamline your market research reports and competitive analysis with user-friendly tools. We’ll break the process down for you to help you hit the ground running. Start by signing into EpiProdux and choosing a product. You’ll see the Product Profile and Product Objectives. 

Next, click on the Markets icon on the left side of the screen. This will take you to select relevant markets for that product, e.g., California Organic Apparel. 

In the Markets section, view the Details section to run a competitive analysis. 

By doing so, you define:

• Total Competition, based on such factors as market position, keyword difficulty, product strength, pricing, and funding, to name a few;
• Ease of Access to see how easy it’s to enter the chosen market.

• Ease of doing business in a specific country based on policies and current infrastructure, so you can plan how to take your first steps in that location;
• How easy Trading Across Borders will be for importing and exporting products;
• Digital Readiness to identify if consumers in the target market have the technologies and knowledge to access and use your products;
• Entry Barriers in the market could prevent you from entering it and earning your fair market share.

You can also utilize EpiProdux to conduct in-depth market research, such as measuring Market Size and performing Market Validation. Both provide you with an invaluable look at:

• Revenue Model
• Purchase Frequency
• Total Available Market (TAM)
• Serviceable Market Segment (SAM)
• Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)

Use EpiProdux to calculate your revenue, market share, and other crucial data to make informed decisions. This can prevent you from investing in products that may not generate adequate ROI or affect your reputation. 

The Market Validation section enables you to run Experiments to validate products before spending money and time on them. Distribute surveys, check demand, and analyze fashion industry sales data to estimate your SAM size realistically. 

Any fashion brand selling clothing and apparel can benefit from market research and competitive analysis. It’s simpler than ever to do well, thanks to the variety of online channels to interact with consumers. It can empower you with the data to make intelligent choices about your products, marketing, and more. 

EpiProdux simplifies market research and competitive analysis so you can gather the information you need in a centralized platform. Access essential feedback from customers and data to understand how you can impact your target market.

Want to learn more about how this platform works and how it can benefit you? Try EpiProdux today with a free trial!

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Market Research in Fashion Industry: Meaning, Types and Importance

Shubham Anil Jain Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited Bangalore, India Email: [email protected]

Introduction: The process of gathering and analyzing information to find insights into the fashion industry, which involves its top players, competitors and more importantly the target market is called as market research. Either you own an existing clothing business or are looking for entry into the world of fashion, market research is very necessary and can ensure effective use of the marketing expenditure as well as increase the chance of business success. The feature of fashion market research is that it provides business owners and entrepreneurs with beneficial insights so they can make correct, informed decisions to manage the development or evolution of their fashion business .

Market research in fashion industry is necessary due to following reasons:

• To understand how customers describe to your brand or a competitor’s brand.
• Helps in identifying different areas for growth, new markets, and customer segments.
• To know about how existing customers would like to see your brand evolve.
• To gather information about consumer opinions and interactions with different fashion segments (e.g. fast fashion vs. luxury brands).
• To analyze how  fashion marketing  campaigns influence consumers’ mindset and their behavior.

Why Market Research in the Fashion Industry is Important?

a) The market retaliate strongly to trends: It is seen that, in all types of market, influencers are directly impacting buying decisions. And it’s just not limited to fashion bloggers, but anyone with a decent following, can change the way people shop. Not only runways and social media trends that impact the fashion industry, in case of the pandemic situation after years of being on the rise, both online and brick and mortar fashion outlets experienced a large drop in sales, even they’re still recovering from. The lifestyle of people has changed as well as their buying habits, and it’s up to brands to highlight this out and react cleverly. Even consumers getting more eco-friendly nowadays and more resistant to fast fashion, and a look for more inclusive clothing across genders and sizes, will also automatically leave its mark on the fashion industry.

b) Variation in target segments: Fashion lovers who have grown up buying high fashion brands and loving every second of the experience fast fashion affords, might have turned into environmentally conscious purchasers who are only interested in made to measure concept, or who shop mostly on second-hand apps like Depop or Vinted. It is very visible that, your current customers could shop elsewhere tomorrow. It’s critical to get to know them as well as you can, to sustain them for long enough and create interest.

c) Competitiveness in market: Currently, there are too many brands and stores are available to count, which leads to high competition in the market. It’s not unusual for a kind of for busy shopping streets to have multiple stores of the same brand, walking distance from each other. One can add the e-commerce part of the industry to that, in which brands can easily come and go as they required, and one find yourself in one of the most competitive industries in the world.

d) It’ll help to connect with the target group: Market research can be a tricky yet smart way to connect with your target group. Especially in case of a large scale, for an example by online surveys that are offered with some sort of discount code, brands can earn extra benefits from asking their customers some different types of quick questions. One can ask them about styles and certain products, but one also has to figure out if they’ve seen your recent ads and what they thought of it.

Types of Market Research:

A. Primary Market Research: It is basically a combination of both Qualitative and Quantitative Research. A process where instructions or businesses get in contact with the end consumers or employ a third party to carry out different studies to collect data is known as primary market research. While carrying primary market research, one can collect two types of information: Exploratory and Specific. Exploratory research is simply an open-ended, where a problem is raised by asking open ended questions in a deep interview format usually with a small group of people, also known as a sample, whereas in specific research, as the name suggests it is more specific and is used to solve the problems that are identified by exploratory research.

In qualitative market research study, it includes semi-structured or unstructured data collected through some of the commonly used qualitative research methods like:

1. Focus groups: Focus group is a small group of people usually 6-10 people who typically react or answer to online surveys sent to them. It is more expensive method and used to collect complex information.

2. One-to-one interview: By the name it is clear that, this method involves personal connect in the form of an interview, where the researcher asks a number of questions to collect information or data from the respondents. Here the questions are mostly open ended and asked in a way to get responses.

3. Ethnographic research: It is a in-depth research which is conducted in the natural settings of the respondents. In this method the interviewer adapt himself/herself to the natural environment of the respondents which can be a city or a town area.

B. Secondary Market Research: That is managed by outside sources such as government agencies, media, chambers of commerce etc. is called as secondary market research. The example is information published in newspapers, magazines, books, company websites, free government and nongovernment agencies and so on. The secondary source makes use of the following:

1. Public sources: Public sources such as library are a good way of gathering free information. Even government libraries are free of cost and a researcher can document available information.

2. Commercial sources: This sources although reliable but expensive in nature. The examples are local newspapers, magazines, journal, and television media to collect the information.

3. Educational institutions: Although it is not a very famous source of collecting information, most universities and educational institutions are a good source of information as many research projects are carried out there than any of the business sector.

Benefits of Systematic Market Research:

1. Make good and correct decision: As it is fact that, the growth of any organization is highly rely on the way decisions are made by the management. Using market research methodology, the management can take business decisions on the basis results that back their knowledge and experience.

2. Obtain right information: Market research generally gives real and correct information that will prepare the organization for any mistakes that may happen in the future.

3. Identify the market size: With the help of this, a researcher can analyze the size of the market that must be considered in case of selling a product or service in order to make profits.

4. Helps in selecting an appropriate sales system: It helps to select a correct sales system according to what the market is demanding for, and according to this, the product/service can be highlighted in the market.

5. In analyzing the customer preferences: It helps to identify how the preferences and tastes of the clients change so that the business can satisfy their preferences, purchasing habits, and income level.

Conclusion: It is simply all about understanding what you target group needs, and will require in the future. From their spending behavior to the effectiveness of many campaigns, fashion market research covers everything that helps you identify of find out many business opportunities for the next season and many more after. The goals of fashion market research ranges. It can be happen that a brand that’s getting ready for their first collection to drop might want to look into how huge scope is for their future market share, to finalize whether it’s worth it or not to go live.

References:

• Market Research: What it Is, Methods, Types & Examples, https://www.questionpro.com/blog/what-is-market-research/
• https://www.askattest.com/blog/guides/market-research-for-fashion
• https://www.designscene.net/2018/06/market-research-fashion.html
• How to Conduct Fashion Market Research Like a Pro
• https://resources.pollfish.com/market-research/how-to-conduct-fashion-market-research-like-a-pro/

You may also like:

• Fashion Marketing: Effective Strategy for Branding and Promotion
• Marketing Strategies for Luxury Fashion Brands
• Impact of Digital Marketing in Fashion Industry
• Marketing Mix in Fashion Industry

Founder & Editor of Textile Learner. He is a Textile Consultant, Blogger & Entrepreneur. He is working as a textile consultant in several local and international companies. He is also a contributor of Wikipedia.

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• Small Business
• Motivational

How To Do Market Research For A Clothing Line

• by Hyatt Singas
• August 20, 2023 August 20, 2023

Market research is a critical component of launching a successful clothing line, providing insight into your target audience, their preferences, and how to position your brand effectively. In this article, we will outline the essential steps required how to do market research for a clothing line.

By understanding your target audience’s needs and behaviors, conducting competitor analysis, utilizing surveys and focus groups, and reviewing industry reports, you can make informed decisions that drive the success of your clothing line. With these key insights, you can create tailored marketing strategies , product offerings, and pricing decisions resulting in a competitive and profitable fashion business.

Table of Contents

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is a crucial step in conducting effective market research. It involves identifying the specific group of people who are most likely to be interested in purchasing your product or service. By understanding their needs, preferences, and behaviors, you can create products and marketing strategies that cater to their unique needs.

The first step in defining your target audience is to create customer personas or profiles. This involves gathering demographic information such as age, gender, income, and location. You can gather this information through surveys or data analysis. Once you have this information, you can use it to develop a deeper understanding of your target audience.

Creating customer personas enables you to visualize your ideal customer and identify their pain points, motivations, and buying habits. With this knowledge, you can create products and marketing campaigns that are specifically tailored to their needs and preferences. For example, if your target audience consists of young adults who are environmentally conscious, you may consider creating eco-friendly products and using social media platforms to reach them.

By defining your target audience, you also avoid wasting time and resources on marketing efforts that are unlikely to yield results. Instead, you can focus your efforts on reaching the right people at the right time with the right message. This can help you maximize your return on investment and increase your chances of success in the market.

Step 2: Analyze Your Competitors

Analyzing your competitors is a crucial step in conducting effective market research. Competition provides valuable insights into the current market trends and helps businesses identify gaps in the market that they can capitalize on. By analyzing your competitors, you can gain a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and use this information to improve your own products or services.

To begin analyzing your competitors, start by researching your direct competitors. This involves gathering information about their product offerings, pricing strategies, marketing efforts, and any other relevant details. You can obtain this information by visiting their websites, social media platforms, attending trade shows, or even purchasing their products.

By studying your competitors’ product offerings, you can identify areas where your own product or service may be lacking, or where you can improve upon what your competitors are currently offering. Additionally, analyzing their pricing strategies can help you determine how much you should charge for your own products or services, while still remaining competitive in the market.

Studying your competitors’ marketing efforts can also provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t work in your industry. You can observe which channels they’re using to reach their target audience and what messaging they’re using to engage with their customers.

Analyzing your competitors helps you stay ahead of the game and develop strategies that differentiate your business from others in the market. It allows you to leverage your unique strengths and capitalize on the gaps in the market, ultimately helping you to achieve success and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Step 3: Conduct Surveys

Conducting surveys is a powerful way to gather valuable information directly from potential customers. Surveys provide businesses with specific insights about their target audience, allowing them to make informed decisions about their products, services, and marketing strategies. With the help of survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, you can easily design online surveys that cover a broad range of topics, including brand awareness, product preferences, buying habits, and pricing expectations.

Creating effective survey questions requires careful consideration of what information is most important to your business . Questions should be clear and concise, avoiding confusing language or jargon. By asking relevant and well-crafted questions, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience’s needs, interests, pain points, and motivations.

Once you have collected responses from your survey, it is essential to analyze them thoroughly. You can use survey data analysis tools to identify patterns and trends in the results, enabling you to draw meaningful conclusions and make informed decisions. It is also crucial to compare your survey results against industry benchmarks to determine how your business stacks up against competitors.

By conducting surveys, you can gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, which can inform all aspects of your business strategy , from product development to marketing and sales. The information gathered through surveys can help you tailor your messaging, improve your products and services, and ultimately better serve your customers.

Step 4: Focus Groups

Focus groups are a powerful tool for gathering feedback directly from potential customers. They provide businesses with the opportunity to facilitate in-depth discussions with a group of individuals who fit their target audience criteria. Focus groups are typically moderated to ensure that all participants have an equal opportunity to share their opinions and insights.

When conducting focus groups for your clothing line, it’s essential to establish clear goals and objectives for the discussion. You should identify specific topics related to your products or services that you want to explore, such as product design, marketing messaging, and pricing strategies. By focusing on these key areas, you can gain valuable insights into the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience.

Once you’ve identified the topics you want to explore, you can begin recruiting participants who fit your target audience criteria. Participants should be representative of your customer base, ensuring that the insights gained from the focus groups are relevant and informative.

During the focus group discussion, it’s important to create an open and welcoming environment where participants feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions. The moderator should facilitate the conversation, encouraging participants to share their perspectives while keeping the discussion focused on the specific topics at hand.

The insights gained from focus groups can be used to inform all aspects of your business strategy, including product design, marketing messaging, and pricing strategies. By listening carefully to the feedback provided by your focus group participants, you can make informed decisions about how to better serve your customers and grow your business .

Step 5: Check Industry Reports

Industry reports are an essential source of information for businesses conducting market research . These reports provide valuable data on market size, growth trends, and consumer behavior, making them critical resources for making informed decisions about your clothing line. Some reputable sources for industry reports include the U.S. Census Bureau, IBISWorld, and Statista.

When analyzing industry reports, it’s essential to focus on key metrics that are relevant to your business goals. For example, you may want to look at industry-wide sales figures, growth rates, and consumer demographics. By understanding these metrics, you can identify potential opportunities for growth and position your clothing line to take advantage of them.

Industry reports also provide insights into emerging trends and changes in consumer behaviors. By staying up-to-date on these trends, you can adapt your product offerings and marketing strategies to better serve the evolving needs of your target audience. For example, if there is a trend towards sustainable clothing, you may consider incorporating eco-friendly materials into your product line or highlighting your existing sustainability efforts in your marketing messaging.

In addition to providing valuable insights into consumer behavior and market trends, industry reports can also help you benchmark your performance against competitors. By comparing your business metrics to industry averages, you can identify areas where you may be falling behind and make adjustments to remain competitive.

Industry reports are a critical resource for businesses of all sizes and stages. Analyzing these reports can help you make informed decisions about your clothing line, identify potential opportunities for growth, and stay ahead of emerging trends in the market.

Conducting thorough market research is a fundamental step in launching a successful clothing line. It involves defining your target audience, analyzing competitors, conducting surveys and focus groups, and checking industry reports to gather valuable insights. By keeping the customer at the center of your research, you can develop products that cater to their needs and preferences, create effective marketing strategies, and make pricing decisions that are competitive.

Ultimately, understanding your target audience and the market landscape will help you establish a strong brand presence, differentiate yourself from competitors, and increase your chances of success in the fashion industry.

• U.S. Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/
• IBISWorld: https://www.ibisworld.com/
• Statista: https://www.statista.com/

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How ‘woke’ marketing lets fast fashion brands get away with environmental and labour abuses

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Human Ecology, Lund University

Disclosure statement

Mariko Takedomi Karlsson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Lund University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Despite growing awareness of the environmental and social consequences of fast fashion, the overproduction and overconsumption of clothes continues. To attract a more mindful public, fashion brands have employed “woke” marketing tactics and published adverts that illustrate a political and social awareness around race, LGBTQ+, feminism and the environment.

Famously, sportswear brand Nike used images of NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s anti-racism protest in a marketing campaign. You may also recall Dior’s €750 (£640) T-shirt printed with the slogan “we should all be feminists”, a phrase taken from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s feminist TEDx talk which was later used in Beyoncé’s song Flawless.

Fashion can be a useful vehicle for political messaging – until someone asks who makes the clothing. The Spice Girls sported T-shirts with the slogan “#IWANNABEASPICEGIRL” in 2018 to highlight gender pay disparity and promote women’s empowerment. It was later revealed that seamstresses making these T-shirts earned poverty wages in Bangladesh .

Fashion retailer Shein paid influencers to visit its factories in China and post videos lauding the working conditions there. An investigation by Swiss human rights organisation Public Eye later confirmed that many of these garment workers were working around 75 hours a week.

In new research , I uncovered how Swedish fashion companies disproportionately target women with adverts that promise ethical or sustainable consumption, obscuring the environmental and social harm of their supply chains in the process.

Greenwashing in Sweden

Sweden is home to fast-fashion giant H&M and other global brands, many of which engage in green advertising.

In one Instagram advert I analysed, Swedish influencer Bianca Ingrosso made a paid post for fashion company Gina Tricot promoting the brand’s pledge to use proceeds from its sales to create a forest and install commercial bee hives in Denmark.

A couple of years later, it was revealed that only 503 young trees were planted on behalf of Gina Tricot by the organisation Ecotree on a piece of land in Denmark too small to be called a forest. Only two hives were installed (Ecotree stated that Gina Tricot only paid for two years of beehive maintenance, which was later extended by another year).

In another Instagram story, the brand Kappahl presented three women in white T-shirts and jeans overlaid with the text “DO YOUR PART” as part of their Instagram story series titled “Responsible”, which included promotion of a take-back scheme that allows customers to donate unwanted clothes in exchange for a discount. In yet another example, an influencer states that Rönisch is a brand “by women for women that makes sustainable activewear”.

These adverts are often vague, and the product is not always related to the cause or initiative being promoted. However, the underlying message remains the same: women can make the world better by shopping.

As a consumer, it can be hard to distinguish a savvy public relations campaign from a genuine willingness to change. For many years, Swedish H&M-owned brand Monki championed body-size inclusivity in its marketing and communications. At the beginning of 2024, the brand announced it was removing plus-size products from its lines due to a lack of consumer demand. This was met with considerable criticism .

Women and conscious consumption

There is a reason why companies peddle these narratives to women specifically. Consumer surveys tend to show that women are more likely to make sustainable lifestyle choices, whereas research suggests that in some cases, men go out of their way to do the opposite to protect their masculine identity.

There is an old but prevailing stereotype of women as inherently nurturing and caring. When women are targeted with “green” or “feminist” advertisements, they are encouraged to exercise their innate capacity for care through the act of consumption. Instead of telling everyone to consume less, women are told to consume certain products over others, which might lead to more consumption overall.

Women are also traditionally associated with consumer decisions and the household, which is why advertising has always predominantly targeted women.

Making the environment a matter of individual responsibility, with a particular product as the solution, takes the prospect of political commitment out of solving systemic problems and distracts from the potential for collective action. In most cases, using what you already own is preferable to buying more stuff.

Belief in the nurturing woman is used to justify overconsumption and refashion it as sustainable and ethical. Pro-feminist and environmental advertising exploits the idea of care – whether that be caring for your clothes by washing them correctly and ensuring they last longer, or caring for the environment by donating your unwanted clothes (even if they end up in a landfill in Kenya).

It’s telling that these feel-good campaigns don’t extend to the women garment workers who have been reported to earn very little in factories that may simply be adding to environmental calamity.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like? Get our award-winning weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 35,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

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Perspectives: Quarterly economic and market outlook

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Investment outlook remains constructive, but political risks are rising

The global economic outlook is improving. The headwind to growth posed by central banks is declining and broad financial conditions seem reasonably balanced. Early signs of recovery discussed in the last edition of Perspectives are progressing and the number of countries reporting a gradual strengthening in growth has increased. This doesn’t include the U.S. Here, though, evidence is consistent with a benign slowing, and growth appears to be decelerating from an unsustainably fast pace to a rate more consistent with the U.S. economy’s long-term trend. The global growth recovery will likely not prevent a further deceleration in inflation. In particular, recent data from the U.S. service sector have softened. If maintained, this trend will likely facilitate the start of policy easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed), while many other central banks are also expected to loosen policy further in the next 12 months.

Our constructive outlook for the macroeconomy also merits continued cautious optimism for asset markets. We think that equities — particularly those markets with the strongest fundamentals and most attractive valuations — and fixed income can both do reasonably well over the next 12 months. In combination, they’re expected to deliver relatively attractive returns for investors in traditional balanced portfolios.

Assessing the size and source of potential risks to this relatively constructive outlook is, as always, top of mind. Currently, political risks appear to pose a more important challenge to markets and investor sentiment than either economic data or prospective central bank policy rate decisions. Volatility related to idiosyncratic political events has already risen in a number of markets, including in Europe and Latin America. Arguably, the most significant political risks still lie ahead, with U.S. elections in November increasingly relevant to market price action. This event is often associated with positive equity returns and higher market volatility. The starting valuation of U.S. equity markets this time around makes an outsized gain much harder to realize. By contrast, generalized market volatility remains low and is likely to rise as we approach this event, particularly given the current polarized state of U.S. politics. 

At CIBC Asset Management, we’re committed to providing market insights and investment research. We hope our quarterly market and economic outlook are helpful as you find the right investment strategies that align with your portfolio goals. If you have questions or would like to discuss our insights and commentary, contact your advisor or CIBC representative anytime. 

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Embracing Gen AI at Work

• H. James Wilson
• Paul R. Daugherty

The skills you need to succeed in the era of large language models

Today artificial intelligence can be harnessed by nearly anyone, using commands in everyday language instead of code. Soon it will transform more than 40% of all work activity, according to the authors’ research. In this new era of collaboration between humans and machines, the ability to leverage AI effectively will be critical to your professional success.

This article describes the three kinds of “fusion skills” you need to get the best results from gen AI. Intelligent interrogation involves instructing large language models to perform in ways that generate better outcomes—by, say, breaking processes down into steps or visualizing multiple potential paths to a solution. Judgment integration is about incorporating expert and ethical human discernment to make AI’s output more trustworthy, reliable, and accurate. It entails augmenting a model’s training sources with authoritative knowledge bases when necessary, keeping biases out of prompts, ensuring the privacy of any data used by the models, and scrutinizing suspect output. With reciprocal apprenticing, you tailor gen AI to your company’s specific business context by including rich organizational data and know-how into the commands you give it. As you become better at doing that, you yourself learn how to train the AI to tackle more-sophisticated challenges.

The AI revolution is already here. Learning these three skills will prepare you to thrive in it.

Generative artificial intelligence is expected to radically transform all kinds of jobs over the next few years. No longer the exclusive purview of technologists, AI can now be put to work by nearly anyone, using commands in everyday language instead of code. According to our research, most business functions and more than 40% of all U.S. work activity can be augmented, automated, or reinvented with gen AI. The changes are expected to have the largest impact on the legal, banking, insurance, and capital-market sectors—followed by retail, travel, health, and energy.

• H. James Wilson is the global managing director of technology research and thought leadership at Accenture Research. He is the coauthor, with Paul R. Daugherty, of Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, New and Expanded Edition (HBR Press, 2024). hjameswilson
• Paul R. Daugherty is Accenture’s chief technology and innovation officer. He is the coauthor, with H. James Wilson, of Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, New and Expanded Edition (HBR Press, 2024). pauldaugh

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