10 min read What is business research and why does it matter? Here are some of the ways business research can be helpful to your company, whichever method you choose to carry it out.
The Essential Guide to Business Research
For companies looking to gain a competitive edge, make informed decisions, and better understand their customers, business research is a crucial activity. But what exactly is business research and why has it become so vital in the modern business landscape? This comprehensive guide will explain everything you need to know.
We’ll cover key topics like
- Defining business research and its objectives
- Major types of business research methods
- Quantitative vs qualitative research approaches
- Using market research and competitor analysis
- The role of surveys, interviews, and focus groups
- Best practices for conducting effective research
- How to turn research insights into strategic action
After reading this guide, you’ll understand the immense value of business research and be equipped to harness its power to drive growth, innovation and success for your organization.
What is Business Research?
Business research refers to the systematic process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information or data to aid business decisions. It serves several core objectives:
- Gain actionable insights about target markets
- Understand customer behaviors, needs, and preferences
- Assess demand for existing and potential new products/services
- Provide feedback on current business performance
- Identify areas for improvement across the business
- Analyze the competitive landscape
- Detect emerging trends with growth opportunities
- Inform evidence-based strategic planning
- Reduce risk and uncertainty in decision-making
Effective business research provides companies with a detailed 360-degree view of all internal and external factors affecting the enterprise. This intelligence powers informed strategic choices and enables organizations to meet customer needs, outperform competitors, and maximize success.
Major Types of Business Research
There are two major categories of research approaches, which we’ll examine in detail:
Quantitative Business Research
Quantitative research focuses on numerical, measurable data that can be analyzed statistically to uncover patterns and provide objective insights. Key techniques include:
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Surveys – Highly structured questionnaires distributed to large samples Provides numerical data on customer behaviors, preferences, etc
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Metrics Analysis – Statistical analysis of business performance data and metrics. Reveals relationships between internal factors.
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Forecasting Models – Predictive analytical models that estimate future outcomes based on historical data.
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Correlational Research – Identifies statistical relationships between variables, like sales and advertising spend.
Qualitative Business Research
Qualitative techniques explore attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and motivations through direct interactions and observation. Methods include:
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Interviews – One-on-one questioning of customers or subject experts provides detailed personal perspectives.
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Focus Groups – Group discussions among key segments reveal shared attitudes through interaction.
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Ethnographic Research – Studying people in real-world settings provides true-to-life behavioral insights.
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Case Studies – Deep evaluation of a single event, organization, or individual uncovers nuanced learnings.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research
Quantitative and qualitative approaches have different strengths and applications:
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Quantitative – Measures objective data from large samples. Identifies statistical relationships and tests hypotheses.
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Qualitative – Reveals subjective insights on attitudes, experiences and behaviors through direct interactions.
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Uses – Quantitative is ideal for tracking metrics, identifying market segments, forecasting. Qualitative helps understand motivations, gain empathy, and explore new concepts.
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Data – Quantitative uses structured, numerical data. Qualitative collects unstructured text data from discussions, observations, etc.
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Analysis – Quantitative uses statistical methods like regression to analyze massive datasets. Qualitative relies on categorizing and interpreting text data.
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Scalability – Quantitative scales to very large samples and provides generalizable results. Qualitative offers in-depth insights from small samples.
An integrated research approach combines quantitative and qualitative techniques to uncover both statistically valid insights and deeper human perspectives.
Conducting Market Research
A pivotal type of business research is market research – understanding your industry, competitors, and customers through data. Key activities include:
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Competitor analysis – Thoroughly research rival companies’ products, pricing, promotions, strengths, and weaknesses.
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Industry analysis – Assess the landscape and dynamics of your overall industry, including suppliers, regulations, and trends.
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Customer analysis – Identify key customer demographics, behaviors, motivations, and unmet needs through surveys, interviews, and data analysis.
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Market segmentation – Divide customers into groups based on shared traits like demographics or purchase behaviors using statistical techniques.
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Brand tracking – Continuously survey brand awareness, reputation, and consumer perceptions of your company vs. competitors.
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Sales data analytics – Statistical analysis of internal sales data and metrics to optimize pricing, products, channels, and promotions.
Surveys Provide Vital Consumer Insights
Surveys are one of the most important business research tools, providing wide-reaching quantitative insights directly from customers. Some key best practices include:
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Targeting – Survey your core customer segments and key demographic groups.
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Large samples – Larger sample sizes increase data accuracy and reveal subtler insights.
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Random sampling – Select respondents randomly rather than convenience samples to avoid bias.
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Question writing – Avoid leading or confusing questions. Keep language simple.
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Question sequencing – Organize survey topics and questions in a logical flow.
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Response options – Provide appropriate multiple choice options. Include N/A or neutral options.
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Confidentiality – Keep respondent identities anonymous to encourage honest feedback.
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Incentives – Consider rewards or prize draws to increase response rates.
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Survey distribution – Leverage multiple channels – email, social media, website, mobile apps.
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Data analysis – Use statistical techniques to analyze results and uncover meaningful patterns.
Direct Interactions: Interviews & Focus Groups
For qualitative insights, interviews and focus groups facilitate extremely valuable direct interactions with customers:
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Interviews – One-on-one conversations enabling deep probing into customer opinions, experiences, and perspectives.
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Focus groups – Group discussions among 6-12 participants from a target segment. Allows observing interactions between participants.
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Recruiting – Carefully screen and select participants who match target demographics and attributes.
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Moderator skills – Talented moderators can extract great insights by guiding interactions and probing responses.
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Discussion guides – Use pre-planned scripts to cover key topics while allowing for free-flowing conversations.
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Text analysis – Review transcripts and recordings to systematically extract themes and findings.
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Actionability – Translate insights into concrete product, marketing, pricing, and service improvements.
Turning Research into Strategic Action
While excellent research is invaluable, companies must take steps to implement the findings:
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Identify priorities – Determine the most impactful insights with the greatest potential business value.
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Set strategic goals – Outline specific goals for product changes, customer targeting, messaging, etc. based on research learnings.
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Devise initiatives – Design new initiatives across departments – R&D, marketing, operations – to address research insights.
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Assign ownership – Assign staff and teams to take ownership of launching research-driven initiatives.
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Allocate resources – Invest adequate resources – staffing, budget – toward research implementation.
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Set timelines – Define milestones, targets, and deadlines to launch initiatives aimed at turning research into business results.
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Measure impact – After implementation, conduct follow-up research to quantify gains in customer experience, revenues, etc.
With careful planning and commitment to execution, research can guide transformational improvements across the customer experience, internal business operations, and your company’s bottom line.
The Future of Business Research
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and big data analytics are enhancing the speed, sophistication, and strategic value of business research. But core objectives remain unchanged – leveraging research to satisfy customers, outperform competitors, maximize profitability, and make better decisions under uncertainty. For forward-looking companies, business research remains a top priority and a true competitive advantage.
In today’s turbulent global business environment, data and insights are more essential than ever to navigate complexity and lead with vision. This guide provided an overview of the vast potential of business research to drive growth, innovation, and success. By mastering both quantitative and qualitative techniques, and seamlessly integrating research into strategic planning, companies can unlock immense value and shape the future. The winners will be those guided by the deepest business insights.
Frequency of Entities:
business research: 32
quantitative research: 10
qualitative research: 11
surveys: 7
interviews: 5
focus groups: 5
What is business research?
Business research helps companies make better business decisions by gathering information. The scope of the term business research is quite broad – it acts as an umbrella that covers every aspect of business, from finances to advertising creative. It can include research methods which help a company better understand its target market. It could focus on customer experience and assess customer satisfaction levels. Or it could involve sizing up the competition through competitor research.
Often when carrying out business research, companies are looking at their own data, sourced from their employees, their customers and their business records. However, business researchers can go beyond their own company in order to collect relevant information and understand patterns that may help leaders make informed decisions. For example, a business may carry out ethnographic research where the participants are studied in the context of their everyday lives, rather than just in their role as consumer, or look at secondary data sources such as open access public records and empirical research carried out in academic studies.
There is also a body of knowledge about business in general that can be mined for business research purposes. For example organizational theory and general studies on consumer behavior.
Types of business research
Business research methods vary widely, but they can be grouped into two broad categories – qualitative research and quantitative research.
Qualitative business research deals with non-numerical data such as people’s thoughts, feelings and opinions. It relies heavily on the observations of researchers, who collect data from a relatively small number of participants – often through direct interactions.
Qualitative research interviews take place one-on-one between a researcher and participant. In a business context, the participant might be a customer, a supplier, an employee or other stakeholder. Using open-ended questions, the researcher conducts the interview in either a structured or unstructured format. Structured interviews stick closely to a question list and scripted phrases, while unstructured interviews are more conversational and exploratory. As well as listening to the participant’s responses, the interviewer will observe non-verbal information such as posture, tone of voice and facial expression.
Like the qualitative interview, a focus group is a form of business research that uses direct interaction between the researcher and participants to collect data. In focus groups, a small number of participants (usually around 10) take part in a group discussion led by a researcher who acts as moderator. The researcher asks questions and takes note of the responses, as in a qualitative research interview. Sampling for focus groups is usually purposive rather than random, so that the group members represent varied points of view.
In an observational study, the researcher may not directly interact with participants at all, but will pay attention to practical situations, such as a busy sales floor full of potential customers, or a conference for some relevant business activity. They will hear people speak and watch their interactions, then record relevant data such as behavior patterns that relate to the subject they are interested in. Observational studies can be classified as a type of ethnographic research. They can be used to gain insight about a company’s target audience in their everyday lives, or study employee behaviors in actual business situations.
Ethnographic research is an immersive design of research where one observes peoples’ behavior in their natural environment. Ethnography was most commonly found in the anthropology field and is now practices across a wide range of social sciences.
Ehnography is used to support a designer’s deeper understanding of the design problem – including the relevant domain, audience(s), processes, goals and context(s) of use.
The ethnographic research process is a popular methodology used in the software development lifecycle. It helps create better UI/UX flow based on the real needs of the end-users.
If you truly want to understand your customers’ needs, wants, desires, pain-points “walking a mile” in their shoes enables this. Ethnographic research is this deeply rooted part of research where you truly learn your targe audiences’ problem to craft the perfect solution.
A case study is a detailed piece of research that provides in depth knowledge about a specific person, place or organization. In the context of business research, case study research might focus on organizational dynamics or company culture in an actual business setting, and case studies have been used to develop new theories about how businesses operate. Proponents of case study research feel that it adds significant value in making theoretical and empirical advances. However its detractors point out that it can be time consuming and expensive, requiring highly skilled researchers to carry it out.
Quantitative research focuses on countable data that is objective in nature. It relies on finding the patterns and relationships that emerge from mass data – for example by analyzing the material posted on social media platforms, or via surveys of the target audience. Data collected through quantitative methods is empirical in nature and can be analyzed using statistical techniques. Unlike qualitative approaches, a quantitative research method is usually reliant on finding the right sample size, as this will determine whether the results are representative. These are just a few methods – there are many more.
Surveys are one of the most effective ways to conduct business research. They use a highly structured questionnaire which is distributed to participants, typically online (although in the past, face to face and telephone surveys were widely used). The questions are predominantly closed-ended, limiting the range of responses so that they can be grouped and analyzed at scale using statistical tools. However surveys can also be used to get a better understanding of the pain points customers face by providing open field responses where they can express themselves in their own words. Both types of data can be captured on the same questionnaire, which offers efficiency of time and cost to the researcher.
Correlational research looks at the relationship between two entities, neither of which are manipulated by the researcher. For example, this might be the in-store sales of a certain product line and the proportion of female customers subscribed to a mailing list. Using statistical analysis methods, researchers can determine the strength of the correlation and even discover intricate relationships between the two variables. Compared with simple observation and intuition, correlation may identify further information about business activity and its impact, pointing the way towards potential improvements and more revenue.
It may sound like something that is strictly for scientists, but experimental research is used by both businesses and scholars alike. When conducted as part of the business intelligence process, experimental research is used to test different tactics to see which ones are most successful – for example one marketing approach versus another. In the simplest form of experimental research, the researcher identifies a dependent variable and an independent variable. The hypothesis is that the independent variable has no effect on the dependent variable, and the researcher will change the independent one to test this assumption. In a business context, the hypothesis might be that price has no relationship to customer satisfaction. The researcher manipulates the price and observes the C-Sat scores to see if there’s an effect.
Market Research | The Secret Ingredient for Business Success
What is business research?
(With Methods and Examples) Business research is the process of gathering relevant information regarding a company’s business activities and using it to maximize profit. Regardless of your experience and knowledge, learning about business research can help you improve your organization’s output.
What is the process of Business Research?
The process of business research can be as comprehensive and as detailed as a business wants it to be. Generally, a company takes up research with a certain aim or hypothesis in order to figure out the issues, opportunities and trends and how they can be leveraged in the best way. Here is the step-by-step process of Business Research:
How can business research help a company?
Business research can help companies during any stage. For example, professionals starting a new company can research the market to identify potential market gaps. This can help them design a product that customers need. An existing company can conduct research to find areas to improve.
What is business research design?
Business research can be done for anything and everything. In general, when people speak about business research design, it means asking research questions to know where the money can be spent to increase sales, profits, or market share. Such research is critical to make wise and informed decisions. LEARN ABOUT: Research Process Steps
