Key rules for improving competitiveness (Part 1) - A complete guide to user research from entrepreneurship to brand positioning

(Image taken from Unsplash)

Understanding customer needs, behaviors, and purchasing motivations, and creating products that can truly meet their needs, is the key to the success of companies and brands! Through user research, we can accurately portray the customer profile and help companies develop more effective product strategies and marketing plans. This article will be divided into three parts according to the different growth stages of the company, introducing 7 types of user research, revealing how they help companies better understand users and make wise business decisions.

Key points:

1. User research for new product development

2. User research for new market development

3. User Research for Brand Positioning

1. User research for new product development

   • New companies often need to confirm whether their products or services truly meet market demand. The Value Proposition Canvas is a tool that emphasizes the match between user needs and product value. It can help companies think about product development directions from the perspective of target customers.

   • The value proposition diagram consists of two parts:

     

     
     

     • Value proposition diagram - value proposition block (left) :

       • This part analyzes your own products and how they can help customers solve pain points and create value.

     • Value Proposition Diagram - User Portrait (right) :

       • This section records the needs, pain points, and benefits of target users.

   • By using the value proposition map, entrepreneurs can gain the following benefits:

     • Think about the value of products and services from the customer's perspective.

     • Find out the pain points and benefit points of your target users.

     • Find the intersection of products and services with customer needs and focus resources on development.

     • Converge product R&D direction and focus development resources on features or services that are helpful to the business.

2. User research for new market development

   • When companies conduct user research to assess market feasibility and write personas based on the research results (personas are virtual characters that represent target customers and are presented in diagrams. They are based on real customer data and research and help companies understand customer needs, behaviors, and motivations, thereby developing more effective product and marketing strategies), the "Design a better business" website provides user research methods that meet this need and can be used as a framework for internal discussions.

   • This framework enables companies to gain a deeper understanding of target users and assess the market feasibility of their products. It consists of 9 parts:

     
     

     

     (Picture taken from Design a better business website)

     
     

     • Name and Role:

       • Give the user a specific name and a brief description to help people get to know him/her immediately. Real names are best.

     • Appearance impression:

       • Draw the user's image based on the clothes he or she will wear, his or her hairstyle, body shape, and various symbols that can help people recognize his or her appearance.

     • need:

       • From the various clues of the above information, find out the real needs of this group of users. For example, what do they really need? How will they make a decision? This is the most critical question.

     • Positive Trends:

       • What are the things that are happening in the user's life that are giving him positive experiences?

     • Brand Opportunity Points:

       • What are some of the positive trends among users that brands have opportunities to focus on?

     • Life hope:

       • What do these users hope for in their future lives? It doesn’t have to be something positive; a simple life is also a hope.

     • Negative trends:

       • What negative experiences are happening in the user's life?

     • Headache points:

       • What are these users experiencing that are causing them headaches?

     • Fear in my heart:

       • What is this person's fear of the future?

3. User Research for Brand Positioning

   • The planning process of brand positioning is to find the most cutting-edge positioning for the brand through user insights, competitor insights and brand true self, so that every user who sees the brand positioning can immediately understand the resonance between the brand and the customer himself through the minimum media investment.

   • User research for brand positioning, focusing on:

     • Find the emotional and functional resonance between the brand and users.

     • Identify the needs that your brand can provide that your competitors cannot meet.

   • If represented as an image, it consists of three overlapping areas:

     

     
     

     • Customer (Consumer):

       • Customer wish list.

     • Competitor:

       • A need that is already being met by competitors.

     • Brand（Company）：

       • The demand provided by its own brand.

         • Among them, the area where the brand and customers overlap and excludes the areas that competitors have already satisfied is "brand positioning", which is the positioning direction in which the brand can develop.

   • Furthermore, in order to develop user research to position the brand uniquely, brands can use data as a basis to draw a graphic character biography in three major directions:

     
     

     

     
     

     • User basic appearance:

       • List the user's profile picture, age, gender, occupation, interests, and behaviors.

     • User function pain points:

       • Based on the data, users' "financial needs", "productivity needs", "process needs" and "support needs" are sorted from large to small according to their proportion.

     • User emotional pain points:

       • Based on the data, users' emotional needs are sorted from large to small in proportion.

Since the purpose of user research for brand positioning is to make brand positioning clearer, there is no need to study too many indicators. It is only necessary to organize data that can help develop differentiated positioning. Otherwise, too much data will make the discussion of brand positioning lose focus.

The above three types of user research for entrepreneurship, user research for measuring the market, user research for evaluating the new product market, and user research for brand positioning are all applicable to different stages of the enterprise. Enterprises should choose appropriate methods to obtain accurate market information based on their own needs to ensure the effectiveness of decision-making. Behind all user research, solid and large amounts of data are needed to support the research results.

In the next article, I will introduce user research for experience design, user research to promote customer value, and user research for e-commerce.