July 29th, 2007
by
Brett Bumeter
To prevail in the global economy, marketing information is the currency of the 21st century. Knowing what type of market research instrument to use is quite important.
As a product strategy consultant to a wireless startup, I prefer the mixed use of questioning and observation.
In terms of questioning, I use qualitative marketing research techniques where I focused on a small number of respondents.
When using an observation instrument, I prefer to focus on observing the social phenomena in a certain marketing niche where I use product-use analysis to get my answers.
To the newbie, one book that I recommend is “Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation 2006 (5th Edition) by Naresh Malhotra. (ISBN 0132221179). This book is essential read for marketing researchers.
March 28th, 2007
by
Brett Bumeter
Before you launch a website, you need to perform some initial market research. These days it’s very easy to throw up a blog or a website that looks terrific, however it’s important to know the niche that you’re jumping into.
As an example top 10 Tech covers technology at a high level. However we also break down technology into several sub niche areas. Currently we’re looking at starting up a section to cover music technology. Our future section will likely cover anything that is used in technology by bands or artists to generate music, fine tune music, or deliver a better experience to the audience. I’m sure will also touch on the delivery process and much more but that’s the general idea.
The thing is that can cover everything from the musical instruments, to the computers that makes the recordings, to the mixer boards, to the cables and stands and software and the Web tools used to share that great song with millions of people at a time.
Plus for our tech site it will tie in very nicely with with podcasting, our computers section and our software section too.
Regardless if you’re setting up a website you need to know your market. You need research whose operating in that realm today as they will be your future competitors and possibly her partners too. For a website you need to understand how cluttered up the search engine rankings are for that particular topic. If you see gaps in the search engine results, or if you perform research and you can’t find the information you’re looking for online odds are there could be a market for that information. The second question is how big is the market. Someone may need that information someday, but how many “someone’s” are out there that will come visit your site and on a regular basis.
Ask yourself these questions before you begin, and spend some time putting together the answers to those questions so that she’ll have a solid game plan to achieve your goals.
