Market Research

As part of every successful food business, it is critical to research market trends and predict possible new product demands. Every good operator is looking for the next big thing.

Market research is a business strategy to gather information about a market and its customers. It is a key factor to get an advantage over your competition. Market research provides you with information to identify and analyse the market needs, trends, market size and competition. Market research is for discovering what people want, need, believe or even how they act.

When developing a new product, market research can be used to help you find that GAP in the market.

Typical questions that you may ask when doing research could be:

1. Who are my competitors, what do they serve and what do they charge?
2. How many people in the market would use my product?
3. What are the trends that I can capitalise on?
4. Who is my market for my product?
5. What are they trying to solve by using this product?
6. What is missing on our menu / product range?
7. Are there other products that we don’t have that could be combined with an existing product?
8. Is there a product that we offer that could be adapted?
9. How could you put product X to some other use?
10. If customers could eliminate something from their diet, what would it be? What would they replace it with?
11. What food habits would customers like to replace, and with what?
12. How well does a particular product fit the brand?

It does not matter if you have a going food business selling food products at a local market, have a small range of food products or own a restaurant, you need to understand the market.

There is a British idiom that says, “Do not carry coals to Newcastle”. Newcastle on Tyne was a well-known coal producing town and therefore it would be pointless to take coal to Newcastle. Similarly, you would not launch a product where there is no market or into a saturated market unless you can do it better or for less.

Go to Business Victoria and read more on how to conduct market research, Survey Monkey also provides a very useful platform for you to create market research surveys and their Basic Plan is free.

Activity

Create a small survey questionnaire about the product that you would like to launch and conduct some market research in your local area using your survey. Once you have done this, please comment on how you found conducting your research? What did you find difficult? Did you have any interesting findings?