Making good business decisions requires good intelligence and insights.
But for many businesses, this can be more difficult than it reads. It’s more challenging than ever for businesses to keep on top of the unpredictable landscape of technical advances, changing consumer behaviour, economic uncertainty and regulatory changes (to name just a few).
This dynamic nature of business means that leaders must be hyper-vigilant about the many potential impacts on their bottom line and armed with the right data to adapt and pivot successfully. While businesses, in general, have access to their own data through internal systems, understanding how and why to analyse it, as well as where the gaps lie, is another matter. The majority simply don’t have the internal resources to do this successfully.
This is where market research is making a difference to organisations across industries. Many are incorporating market research agencies into their business processes, partnering with them to ensure they have the insights they need to make smart business decisions quickly and easily, ultimately achieving their objectives and succeeding in their market.
In this article, we’ll explore where market research insights can help your own business succeed in 2025.
Market Research is changing too
Like the rest of the business world, market research has developed over the years and gone far beyond the trusty, traditional survey.
It has been evolving quietly but steadfastly, with advanced methods of gathering and analysing vast data collections to provide the key aspects of clients’ needs.
More recently, the insurgence of AI and other digital monitoring tools, such as social listening, has significantly bolstered market research. For a few years, we’ve been at the forefront of this, assisting our clients with advanced insights across the spectrum of digital touchpoints.
The focus remains on the customer
If you’re a private sector organisation, no matter the line of business you’re in, you have customers who buy from you. Without them, your business is no more.
Understanding your customer is more than just their order history, and this is where market research can keep you ahead. Using market research to understand what customers want from you and why, as well as what additional needs they have and how they want to be communicated with, is critical.
As we enter an era of hyper-personalisation, in other words, that age-old marketing approach of sending customers the right messages using the right channel at the right time. Market research can directly uncover what customers really want so that you can further tailor your outbound efforts across all marketing, customer services, and even sales channels.
Digital tools have become more intelligent over the years and will certainly help you measure facts, data, and, in some instances, social sentiment. However, real human-to-human conversations and human-led feedback are where working with market research professionals can be hugely beneficial.
Hopefully, MMC Research will be the first company to spring to mind!
Through surveying, interviewing and research techniques, you’ll discover how to improve personalisation and enhance the real-life experience of dealing with your brand.
MMC began exploring this in 2024, and we’ll delve into it even further in 2025. We certainly see a need and want to learn more about how brands can personalise the customer experience.
From Net Promoter Scores to journey mapping, new product launches, and exploration of innovation, market research provides businesses with the depth of data to ultimately save time and money and, let’s face it, generate more revenue! All of this is without the potentially messy nature of mass data to trawl through or depending on anecdotal feedback.
The route to achieve your objectives
Each business will have its own unique objectives in finer detail, but most commonly, they are trying to reach one or more of these:
Growth
- Breaking into a new market is a big, scary step. We can alleviate that anxiety by researching market potential and demand, consumer perceptions, and competitive landscapes, arming you with the intelligence you need to make your products successful in the new market.
- Product development: Updating existing products or launching new ones is inevitable when remaining stagnant is risky. From helping to design your product roadmap to testing the water in a safe environment to evaluating how it went and what to do better, market research can provide you with the depth of intelligence to enhance the success of your products.
- Mergers and acquisitions (M&A): The risks involved in acquiring a new organisation are huge, and naturally, a lot is invested to ensure that the decision is the right one. Research can help at every stage, but we particularly excel in due diligence in the customer referencing aspect of M&A.
Innovation
- Trend Spotting: It can be difficult to dedicate time to analyse where gaps lie in the market when you have your own business to run. But spotting emerging trends and gaps you can fill is a huge opportunity to grow your market and your business further. Research can dig into market landscape data, highlighting those opportunities through easily digestible insight ready for action.
- Competitive Advantage: Unearth what your competitors (and their customers!) are doing and where you can do better, even the ones you weren’t even aware of. It won’t be a case of copying (or avoiding!) what they’re doing, but the nuances of the ways other businesses are run can feed into your own decision-making.
Operational Efficiency
- Customer feedback: Understanding your customers has many layers, and one of them is listening to and acting on their feedback regarding changes in your processes, marketing, and potentially your products. However, with the enormity of the web, social, AI tools, and traditional word of mouth, there is no easy way for a business to do this without utilising market research solutions.
- Employee engagement: Another strength of ours is understanding your employees; we can gather insight that only an external, impartial specialist can, helping to engage and retain your skilled workforce. We can even apply the same NPS methodology, allowing you to use your score in your employee marketing.
What we can do to help you achieve your 2025 objectives and beyond
In the simplest terms, we can provide you with the intelligence you need to drive your business forward. No fuss, no ifs or buts; evidence-based insight that gives you the answers you need, whether or not you knew the questions in the first place.
Many of our clients come to us with a problem or a concern without necessarily having the methodology to answer their questions. That’s where our wealth of experience and expertise comes in. We design a bespoke solution for every project.
We’ll walk you through the steps if you want to know and then provide recommendations to add more value for your money. We’re always here when you want to revisit your insights, if something else threatens to impact your business, or if an exciting opportunity presents itself that you want to explore.
We’re a friendly, loyal bunch with a reassuring roster of clients who utilise our services repeatedly across their business.
Got a burning question for 2025?