Is your marketing research drowning out your personal brand?
There’s definitely value to doing your research. If you’re trying to find a safe car seat for your kid. If you’re looking at buying a new house. When you want to choose the right marketing service provider to support your brand.
However, when it comes to figuring out what we want to do or what we want to offer, the advice of all the gurus is, “do your market research”. With an education in market research, I want to share with you what those activities actually do, and how they may be impacting your messaging.
Some Definitions
Market Research, by definition, is, “the action or activity of gathering information about consumers' needs and preferences.”
If we look at Personal Branding in a comparable definition, it would be, “the action or activity of discovering information about your values and preferences.”
I also want to define what a hypothesis is, as I’ll be using it throughout this post: “a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.”
A Process
Here’s a simple process for market research:
Create a hypothesis
Do your market research
Prove (or disprove) your hypothesis
Why do you need to start with a hypothesis? Because without a focus, market research can go anywhere. OR worst case, nowhere. You MUST know what you are trying to learn before you pose a question. Otherwise, how can you possibly get the answer you desire?
The Problem
Can you see the problem here? We’re creating our hypotheses with the WRONG starting point.
One of these activities is focused on YOU, and one of them is focused on another person. And when we start with a supposition or proposed explanation that resides outside of our self, we don’t align our hypothesis with our personal brand.
As an example, let me ask you this: in the past, when you made a decision based on what someone else thought, and it went AGAINST what you thought, how did that feel?
Not very good right?
You trade a little bit of you - your personal brand - for someone else.
Is that really the way you want to build your business?
A Solution
Like I started with, there is value in market research…WHEN what you are researching is focused on proving (or disproving) a certain hypothesis.
This hypothesis needs to be based on YOU.
A possible solution is to flip the script. Instead of doing market research to FIND a problem, PICK a problem that you know you can solve, and do your market research to prove (or disprove) that hypothesis.
Creating a hypothesis based on random market research, and then trying to fit yourself into a box to meet those needs is folly. So next time you think, “market research is the answer”, just make sure your hypothesis is based on you.
If you’re not sure how to accomplish that, let’s hop on a Discovery Call!
