Almost every aspect of the shopper experience has changed recently and it’s hard for brands to keep up. From the rise of online shopping to the global pandemic, record inflation, and increased pressure on household budgets, your business can’t take anything for granted when it comes to consumer behavior. Understanding your customers better and being ahead of the curve with new ideas is critical to your brand’s success. But when you haven’t got the time or the budget for customized primary research, how do you inspire new hypotheses and spark ideas within your team? Syndicated market research reports are the answer.
The Trouble with Customized Market Research Reports
Keeping on top of current trends in your industry is your bread and butter. But going into a meeting without the data to back up your ideas and inform those initial discussions is a dead-end for the conversation. The trouble is, that pivoting your marketing strategy in time to take advantage of current and emerging trends gives you very little time to put together a market research study. Getting the budget approved is another hurdle.
Primary research is not only expensive and time-consuming (especially when it involves face-to-face contact with participants), but it can also be difficult to do on your own. Basics of the marketing research process, like recruiting enough participants for a truly valuable result, are a challenge, for starters. Bringing on a market research specialist to conduct a robust market research study, customized to answer your burning business questions would be your first choice. Unfortunately, it’s just not an option when you’re under pressure to come up with solutions quickly and within budget. You need fast answers that inspire the right conversations.
Thankfully, there is a lot of research out in the ether, just waiting for a shopper insights specialist to pluck out of obscurity and put to good use. Whether commissioned by your organization or publicly available, secondary research in the form of syndicated research reports can help you to fill the gap when time-consuming and costly customized reports are out of the question.
How Syndicated Market Research Reports Inspire New Research Hypotheses
Market research is an invaluable tool for gathering intelligence on your consumers, your competitors, current trends, and shifts in the market as a whole. Collecting and analyzing data on factors influencing your sector helps your brand to ensure maximum ROI on your marketing spend and prepare for future market developments. Whether you’re an emerging or established brand, pulling together the funds for custom research can be next to impossible. But not having access to the kind of information you need is no reason to put a hold on your ideas.
As an insights professional, you are constantly consuming data and being asked by your team for your thoughts on the market right now. Rather than relying solely on anecdotal evidence or potentially outdated reports you’ve previously used, syndicated reports can provide you with valuable insights that validate your thoughts and help you turn them into hypotheses to share with your organization.
What’s more, syndicated reports serve another valuable role, in that they can help to evaluate your existing data from past research and determine whether it is still applicable. Leveraging your team’s internal knowledge and past research alongside syndicated data can help you to jumpstart projects and save money.
Let’s sum up what syndicated market research reports can do for you:
- Save you time and money
- Give you quick answers on new and emerging trends
- Validate your thoughts on the market
- Help you form hypotheses and start a conversation
- Persuade internal stakeholders with multiple, robust data sources
- Contextualize what you’re seeing in the sales data
- Help you better understand your consumers’ behavior
- Prompt a budget expansion for customized research in future
Finding the Right Market Research Partner Specifically for Shopper Insights
Unfortunately, not all market research reports are created equal. At Explorer Research, many of our team have been right where you are, on the client side of the equation. We know the pressures you’re under to keep on top of trends and form new ideas for your team to act on. We also understand that it can be difficult to know where to start when searching for reliable market research reports, let alone finding a firm to conduct a customized market research study for your brand. How do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Here’s what we know from years of cumulative industry experience:
Find industry insights that align with your business.
Do the syndicated reports from a particular agency align with your business questions and help you leverage your existing data? How can their reports help you to utilize your team’s internal knowledge for quick, cost-effective answers now, and form the basis for more specific questions and research later?
Look for thought leadership.
A publicly available or inexpensive market research study is not an act of charity, but rather a desire of market research specialists to provide genuine, valuable insights to industries. From your point of view, syndicated data should highlight a shopper insights firm’s expertise in the area – providing you with access to great data and letting you know they’re authorities in the field when it comes time to commission your customized market research study.
Think about growth within a vertical.
Ask yourself, are the syndicated reports and publicly available studies from this organization aimed at growing the vertical in a positive way? Do their reports inspire meaningful conversations within your organization? Easy-to-access market data from market research companies indicates their desire to help contribute to your industry by sharing their expertise.
Evaluate the key insights generated.
Does the shopper insights partner in question have data on the current and emerging trends or insights your brand is concerned with? At Explorer Research, we regularly spend our own research budget on insights into key touchpoints that matter to our clients, including:
Cannabis: Cannabis Shopping Trends and Cannabis Beverage Naming Case Study
Easter: Easter Shopping Trends and Easter Shopping Behavior Report
Sustainability: Sustainability Study and Sustainable Packaging Trends in 2022
Inflation: Inflationary Impacts to Shopping Behavior
These kinds of reports are particularly important to smaller companies, whose budget for customized research is limited. Syndicated reports like these can not only fill the gaps in your market research data but also inspire research hypotheses so that as the company grows and research budgets become a reality, your team is ready to launch into a customized study.
Syndicated research is an underrated and underappreciated resource to businesses of all kinds. With the right data, smart minds with bright ideas can contextualize the learnings and inspire new marketing approaches that address current consumer trends. Using syndicated data to its full potential is a powerful tool in your arsenal, helping you leverage your existing knowledge, generate new ideas, and laser-focus your marketing initiatives on trend and in time.
