Entrepreneurship Research Guide : Research
This guide is a collaborative effort between the Wisconsin School of Business and the Business Library.
One: Observe carefully
Who is your customer? Do you fully understand the problems they face?
- Get out and talk to customers directly
Two: Sharpening the ability to observe situations carefully
- Space: The physical place or places
- Actor: The people involved
- Activity: A set of related acts people do
- Object: The physical things that are present
- Event: A set of related activities people carry out
- Time: The sequencing that happens over time
- Goal: The things people are trying to accomplish
- Feeling: The emotions felt and repressed
Three: Sample techniques/frameworks
- AEIOU FrameworkAEIOU is a coding structure mnemonic used to organize data under the following sections: Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users. The framework can be applied as-is or customized and adapted into a new taxonomy. In both cases, the goal of using this framework is to make interpreting and analyzing data easier, while visually mapping the significant relationships and interactions between categories.
- Customer PersonaA customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you’ve collected from user research and web analytics. It gives you insight into what your prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh potential options that address the problem they want to solve.
- Empathy MapTraditional empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user or persona in the middle. Empathy maps provide a glance into who a user is as a whole and are not chronological or sequential.
- EthnographyThe use of direct observation and interviews to reveal your customers' true behaviors and motivations.
- Focus groupsA focus group is a moderated discussion that typically involves 5 to 10 participants. Through a focus group, you can learn about users’ attitudes, beliefs, desires, and reactions to concepts.
- In-depth interviewsThis is a marketing research interviewing technique used in situations where expert opinions are needed, or to gather detailed information from customers or users of competing products or services.
- Value CanvasThe Value Proposition Canvas offers an easy to understand overview of what a customer needs (and why) and depending on when and by whom it is used, this is absolutely perfect, for example, as part of a business model review, to document or present pains and gains of specific products for specific customer segments.
Suggested Readings
Cultural Strategy by Call Number: Online ebookISBN: 9780191616334Publication Date: 2010-01-01Market innovation has long been dominated by the worldview of engineers and economists: build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. But there's another important way to build new businesses: with innovative ideologies rather than innovative mousetraps. Consider Coca-Cola, Nike, Jack Daniel's, Marlboro, Starbucks, Corona, Oprah, The Body Shop: all built with innovative ideologies. Further many better mousetraps are much more compelling to consumers when bundled withinnovative ideologies; consider BMW, Apple, and Whole Foods. Cultural Strategy provides a step-by-step guide for managers and entrepreneurs to build businesses in this simple but effective way. Holt and Cameron analyse a series of classic cases that relied on these bold, innovative strategies: Nike, Marlboro, Starbucks, Jack Daniels, vitaminwater, and Ben & Jerry's. They then demonstrate how the theory works as an actionable strategy model, drawing upon their consulting work. They show how cultural strategy takes start-up brands into themass market (Fat Tire beer), overcomes better mousetraps wars in a technology driven category (ClearBlue pregnancy test), effectively challenges a seemingly insurmountable incumbent (FUSE music channel vs MTV), and develops a social innovation (The Freelancers Union). Holt and Cameron also describe the best organizational model for pursuing this approach, which they term the cultural studio. The book demonstrates that the top consumer marketing companies are consistently poor at this type of innovation because they rely on an antithetic organization structure, what the authors term the brand bureaucracy. To succeed at cultural innovation requires not only a very different approach to strategy, but a new way of organizing as well.
Qualitative Consumer and Marketing Research by Call Number: Online ebookISBN: 9780857027665Publication Date: 2012-12-26How is qualitative marketing and consumer research conducted today? - What is rigorous research in this field? - What are the new, cutting edge techniques?
Written for students, scholars, and marketing research practitioners, this book takes readers through the basics to an advanced understanding of the latest developments in qualitative marketing and consumer research. The book offers readers a practical guide to planning, conducting, analyzing, and presenting research using both time-tested and new methods, skills and technologies. With hands-on exercises that researchers can practice and apply, the book leads readers step-by-step through developing qualitative researching skills, using illustrations drawn from the best of recent and classic research. Whatever your background, this book will help you become a better researcher and help your research come alive for others.
