Google and Facebook - a new approach to market research

Everyone knows that market research is a necessary step before launching a new product. Otherwise you are simply guessing whether your market really needs your product or not

Today conducting a research is not that difficult nor very expensive; you do not have to be a professional in performing a survey to identify a go/no go signal. You simply have to follow some basic guidelines such as "do not try to bias the answers to where you want them to be", etc. You can see how much traction Survey Monkey receives to see how mainstream market research has become.

However, when you are building something new, something that your target consumer has never seen before, the questions you are asking are not likely to get the right answer. How can we expect someone to answer something h/she cannot visualize or experiment?

Alternatively, when you are coping with a need that has both physical barriers as well as  psychological ones. If you ask "suppose I take all the physical barriers, will you use my product?" You are likely to get a very positive response (if not, do not build the product!). But even if you do, the survey will not address the psychological barriers, only reality will reveal them.

So what can you do?

• Should you build a product without doing a research?
• Should you do a research with the artificial thinking you are safe?

I suggest a somewhat different approach. You use Google or Facebook. These are platforms that allow you to put an ad and target it to a very segmented target groups.

What you do is:

1. Mock up website that offers your product
2. Apologize in the end of the text for not being ready, or say "coming soon"
3. Put an ad to this product and choose your target market
4. Allocate a small budget that allows you to see in reality if people are clicking your ad. Since a cost per click is on average between 1-3 dollars and 50 people forms a nice sample, this is a very small budget
5. Monitor like a hawk the ad impressions to actual click conversion and time spent on your home page. Now you know if people wish at least to see what you offer. This is a real signal.

You might want that this mock-up website will be under a totally different name than the real one you will build, in order not to harm your brand when you build it

Bottom line,
Try to check reality as much as you can. Checking actual behavior is much better than asking hypothetical questions, and it does not cost that much.

This is probably not what Google and Facebook have in mind, but hey, this is a great use to their platform

Amir