Market Research &
Stakeholder Engagement
Strategic growth is the reward you get from leading with curiosity, exploring new opportunities, and recognizing what’s most important to your stakeholders and customers.
Market Insights Give You a Competitive Advantage
If you want to grow, you need to be experts in understanding and addressing customers’ evolving priorities.
Insights are fuel for the R&D process that leads to innovative solutions your customers want. Whether you need new approaches for persistent challenges, strategies to break into new markets, or differentiated features to make your solutions stand out in a crowded market, you need unbiased information about what customers really want.
Market insights explain which target audiences will lead to growth, where unmet market needs exist, how attitudes and audiences have changed, and where your solutions may be missing the mark.
The aha moment starts with a reframe.
Before a brilliant idea, a brilliant insight reframes reality. These surprising truths and blind spots reveal the hidden puzzle pieces that describe what moves and motivates people. The reframe unlocks new ways of thinking, which leads to new solutions designed precisely for customers’ needs. Albert Einstein said it best - "The world as we have created it is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
Leaders who model curiosity pave the way for innovation and strategic growth.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. The adage ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ applies to everyone. When you’re passionate about your work and immersed in your product and programs-- informed by years of experience-- it’s hard to know when expert bias prevents your team from seeing new opportunities. Even teams that collect customer satisfaction data often fail to apply the information for strategic growth opportunities. This is why you must be intentional about finding what you’re missing.
Stakeholder Engagement that Reveals Needs & Builds Trust
People support what they help to create. Allowing stakeholders to feel heard builds trust and earns commitment. When customers tell you what’s important to them, they feel a sense of agency and optimism that you’re with them in making their experience better.
Even when you’re close to your customers, it can be challenging for them to be completely honest about what’s going on in their world. An objective third party makes it easier for clients to share feedback, and it makes it easier for your team to process the information.
Who participates matters. Missing key groups or talking to the wrong people creates bad results. We develop a strategy to engage hard-to-reach stakeholders in meaningful ways. Through expertly designed interviews, focus groups, forums, and surveys, we meet people where they are and motivate them to show up and open up.
We facilitate stakeholder engagement that inspires people to imagine better solutions.
Our work includes facilitation, data analysis, environmental scanning, and community needs assessment.
Personas & Analysis that Define Growth Opportunities
Customer segments and stakeholder groups are growing more diverse, with increasingly divergent expectations. If you try to appeal to everyone, your solution loses focus and might look like everyone else’s. That’s no way to stand out or elevate your value.
So, before you can design customer experiences that magnetically attract your target audience, you need to understand the ideal clients at the center of the bullseye. To help you do this, we deliver actionable reports that go beyond basic demographics. We create Market Profiles and Customer Personas, that describe the challenges, attitudes, and behaviors of decision makers who have a need you can fill. These deliverables are valuable assets for sales and marketing campaigns, customer-centered process improvement, product redesigns, and community development planning.
Here’s How Align Creates
Value with Market Research:
Align’s customer-centered research expertise enables teams to unearth new information and organize the evidence for objective, fact-based design and decision-making. We synthesize all the information to show where opportunities intersect and where to focus your innovation efforts.
How to Discover
What You Might Be Missing
The right research will help you see clients and stakeholders with fresh eyes and find new opportunities. Choosing the right method depends on what you know for sure already and what you want to achieve.
Interview
When you don’t know what you don’t know
Focus Groups
To Specific topics and understand why
Survey
When you know
what to measure
Group Forum
To present info & invite feedback & collaboration
How to Focus & Start
See your customers with fresh eyes and find new opportunities. Learn how market research works and get free tools for stakeholder mapping and creating a customer persona.
Next Steps
Market Risk & Research Planner
It’s not a question of whether customer preferences will change, but when and how they will change. Scan for risks and identify areas where a little research can lead to a big advantage for new strategies and solutions.
The Market Risk and Research Planner will equip you with the questions you need to ask to avoid costly surprises and misguided solutions.
Our market research primer provides an overview of different approaches, how market research creates value, and how to scope projects correctly - so you get exactly what you need. You’ll learn how to get started with small projects that define your path forward, and you’ll get examples of vital planning tools for stakeholder mapping and creating a customer persona.
Download the Market Risk and Research Planner to begin identifying your risks and learn where market intelligence can accelerate your business goals. Schedule a meeting to discuss your results and get free recommendations.
Get Expert Advice
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Get Expert Advice •
Let’s meet! Take the lead by exploring your best options.
Download the guide and schedule a free meeting to discuss your unique situation and get recommendations for a project that delivers results.