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Knowing your customers - market research
A short extract from an article whic appeared in Manager's Corner section of Early Years Educator magazine, January 2004.
What do you need to know?
The bottom line of market research is 'you can never know too much about your customers'. No matter how good you think the service you want to provide is, if it isn't what the majority of customers want, it will not succeed in the long term.
Spending time, effort (and money) on carrying out a focussed, carefully thought out market research project will help to:
- refine your ideas to make sure that they meet local needs;
- give you the information you need to help you plan the detail of the services you intend to provide;
- indicate a suitable time scale for development of the project;
- provide the supporting information for a well researched business plan;
- help you to gain the funding you need to get your project started;
- measure how well your service is meeting a defined need and what improvements you can make.
As with most successful initiatives, the more time you spend in the early stages of the project defining what it is you really need to know, the more focussed and cost effective your market research will be and the greater the likelihood of it providing you with really useful information. .
