Research replaces opinion with data. Careful investigation, employing methodologies derived from experimental behavioral research and cognitive psychology, is the best way to understand your customers’ needs.
Perceptive Sciences' Behavioral Market Research and User Research services will help you develop a deeper understanding of your customers, a requirement for your products’ success.
Behavioral Market Research
Understanding your customers’ preferences is essential to a product’s
success, but traditional focus groups often cannot accurately answer a majority
of critical marketing questions (See our white
paper addressing the shortcomings of focus groups). Behavioral Market
Research allows us to go beyond what customers are simply able to say and
assess their underlying motivations and decision-making strategies. Behavioral
Market Research examines what your customers do, not what they say.
Using behavioral market research we can uncover your customers’ implicit
preferences and expectations regarding your product or service. Applying
proven experimental techniques allows us to eliminate biases, which often
arise in traditional market research, and have confidence that the results
are real, stable, and replicable.
User Market Research
User research is designed to understand users’ goals, tasks, and mental models as they relate to your business and products. We employ a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, which can be customized to answer business questions regarding users’ interactions with products, services, websites or other interfaces. We can help you understand who your users are through User Profiling, how they perform critical functions through Task Analysis, and the environment in which they make their buying decisions or use your product through Contextual Inquiry. Whether gathering data in our lab or in the field, we can help you understand what your users want, need, and value.
Market Research Services
Attribute Mapping: An attribute map gives development and management a clear understanding of how product features and/or design elements differentially create value in the mind of the customer. It allows the team to more easily prioritize resources towards those attributes most likely to wow, delight, or generate positive perceptions of quality and usefulness.
Branding/Messaging Signal Detection: Memory testing can determine which messages from branded information (i.e. advertising, packaging) leave the strongest impression in the participant's memory, and measure the overall subjective impression created by the branded information.
Conjoint Analysis: Participants make a series of pairwise choices between different attribute collections representing possible products. By manipulating the makeup of each collection, the independent value of each attribute and its value relative to all other attributes can be derived.
Contextual Inquiry: Detailed field observations, interviews, and surveys are administered to understand how customers actually work or play with an existing product or software application.
Customer Walkthroughs: Moderated group sessions with target customers to provide early feedback on emerging products, software, and interfaces. Variations: can be augmented to bring key members of the development team into a joint session.
Ethnography: Ethnography aims to understand customers’ use of a product or service within the course of their daily activities—whether at home, work, or in recreational settings. An ethnographic approach allows researchers to identify a variety of previously unknown (or under-appreciated) situational factors influencing customers’ use and perceptions of a product.
Hybrid Focus Groups: The principle purpose of hybrid focus groups is to obtain unbiased individually-collected data while offering the opportunity for group discussion. This method overcomes the pitfalls of traditional focus groups by employing a mixture of formal individual data collection measures and informal discussion.
Structured Qualitative Data Analysis: This is a useful technique when open-ended, free response measures are desirable to tap customers' unanticipated ideas or reactions to a product or concept. Using this method, open-ended responses can be minutely analyzed for patterns in participants' ideas or responses.
View a complete list of the services we offer.