Research; why it should be at the heart of everything you do.
- ritchiet6
- Aug 13
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 14
By Nina Musgrave
As I’m sure you all know, I absolutely love student research and insight. Whether that’s helping clients to understand their customers, members and community’s needs, preferences and opinions on an extremely broad range of topics; the competitive commercial landscape in which they’re competing to gain advantage and improve income streams; or whether they want to explore new markets and opportunities and understand the pitfalls and risks of the new venture; research is always at the heart of the project.
Whatever the goal, research enables us to expand knowledge, answer questions, and address specific problems, and will provide essential insights that will shape our understanding and ensure we make the right decisions.
So why is customer research increasingly more important?
In a previous life, I was in charge of all F&B and marketing for two major pub companies and what was at the time the largest leisure operator in the UK. Every year, we consistently conducted research on our key customer demographics to inform all decisions regarding everything from our Christmas menus, pub décor and facilities, pricing strategies, to the types of DJs and music to play in our 50 nightclubs.
Overall, the research results would be quite similar from year to year, with only subtle changes; the more noticeable trends or differences only occurred every 4 to 5 years. At the turn of the millennium new trends began to accelerate, resulting in a life cycle that shortened to every 3 years – which is comparable with the average time a student spends at university. Everything stayed like this until 2020 and Covid hit. The pandemic was a real game changer. Now based on my personal experience and CEO responses in the Benchmark SUrvey, shifts in the student cohort are noticeable, on average, every two years. For this reason alone, regular research ensures you are meeting the changing needs, wants and priorities of your student population and futureproofing your services, facilities and offers.
What is Customer Research?
Customer research is defined as the systematic process of gathering and analysing information about customers, their behaviours, needs, preferences, and experiences. It can involve a wide range of qualitative and quantitative studies to understand the target audience in order to make informed decisions that will meet and preferably exceed student expectations, improve their experience as well as enhance retention and increase engagement and income streams where appropriate.
The key components of customer research typically include the following:
Research Objectives: Clearly defining the objectives and goals of the research is crucial. This involves determining what specific information or insights the organisation aims to gather from the research, and how it will help achieve your goals.
Target Audience Definition: Identifying the target audience or customer segments are also essential. Are you targeting the whole student community or key demographics? Not all research should be open to everyone, and selective targeting will give you far more effective response.
Research Methodology: Choosing the appropriate research methods and techniques is important to ensure you gather relevant data. The methodology may include a combination of quantitative, qualitative or ethnographic (observation) approaches such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, or data analytics. The chosen methods should align with the research objectives, provide the depth of responses you require whilst also appealing to all of your customer base.
Data Collection: This is obviously the core component of customer research. Depending on the method used this may include distributing surveys, conducting interviews or focus groups, observing customer behaviours, analysing existing data sources or a combination of one or more methods.
Data Analysis: Once the data is collected, it needs to be analysed to extract meaningful insights. Data analysis involves organising, categorising, and interpreting the collected data. This may include quantitative statistical techniques, such as descriptive statistics or regression analysis, and qualitative research involving the identification of patterns, themes, and trends in the data.
Findings and Insights: This involves summarising and presenting the results in a clear and understandable manner. The findings should address the research objectives and provide valuable insights into customer behaviours, preferences, needs, or pain points.
Recommendations: Based on the research findings, recommendations should be practical, actionable, and aligned with the organisation’s goals. They may involve suggestions for product improvements, marketing strategies, customer experience enhancements, market segmentation approaches, or any other relevant areas.
Types of student / customer research:
There are various types of customer research that organisations can conduct to gather insights into customer experiences, behaviour, and preferences. Some of the common types include:
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction research focuses on measuring customer satisfaction levels with a product, service, or overall experience. It often involves surveys or feedback forms to gather customer opinions and perceptions. Customer satisfaction research helps organisations identify areas for improvement, gauge customer loyalty, and track changes in customer satisfaction over time.
Customer needs and preferences
This type of research aims to uncover the needs, preferences, and expectations of customers. It helps organisations understand what customers value, what drives their purchasing decisions, and what features or attributes they desire in a product or service. Customer needs and preferences research can involve surveys, interviews, focus groups, or ethnographic (observational) research methods.
Customer experience (CX)
CX research focuses on understanding how users interact with a product, website, or service. It involves observing and analysing user behaviours, attitudes, and perceptions to identify usability issues, pain and pinch points, and opportunities for improvement. The insights gained from CX research help organisations enhance the customer experience and increase satisfaction.
Brand perception
Brand perception research aims to understand how customers perceive a brand and its reputation in the market compared to other competitors and key brands. It involves gathering customer feedback on brand awareness, brand image, brand associations, and brand loyalty. Brand perception research helps organisations assess the effectiveness of their branding strategies, identify brand strengths and weaknesses, and make informed decisions to enhance brand positioning.
Customer segmentation
This involves grouping customers into distinct segments based on common characteristics, demographics, behaviours, or needs. It helps organisations understand their customer base and tailor their marketing strategies and offerings to specific customer segments. It also helps them to engage with all of the student community, not just those who are the most vocal.
Competitive landscape
Competitive research focuses on analysing competitors’ strategies, products, and customer
experiences. It aims to gain insights into the competitive landscape and identify opportunities for differentiation. Competitive research also involves analysing competitors’ websites, conducting mystery shopping, monitoring social media, and gathering intelligence through industry reports or secondary research.
Customer journey mapping
This involves visualising and understanding the end-to-end customer experience across various touchpoints and interactions with an organisation. It helps organisations identify pain points, gaps, and opportunities for improvement at each stage of the customer journey.
My top tips to ensure you obtain meaningful data and achieve your goals:
1. Get organised – plan ahead
In order to produce meaningful results and robust recommendations you need to plan ahead and devote time to the planning of the project. You will need to determine your goals and objectives; what do you want to achieve by the project, who you are targeting, your expected outcomes and what you will do with the results?
The best time to conduct any student research is in semester one. Students are engaged, you have a new student intake and work pressures are not yet obvious. This is a time for most students to socialise, take part and engage. However, in terms of workloads for your team everything will be full on with Welcome Week, Freshers etc. so dedicating the time to produce meaningful results can be challenging. The second-best time is at the start of term two before exams and the Easter break. Any time after these two terms will mean you are likely to get very limited results from all students, including your most ‘experienced’ cohort in year three and above.
2. Choose your methodology (ies) carefully
Once you have agreed your goals, what you want to achieve, and who you are targeting, you need to determine the most appropriate method(s). In my experience each methodology comes with its pros and cons and some methods lend themselves to particular types of research. For example the top three methodologies include:
a) Web surveys
Web surveys pros – perfect if you are targeting the whole student community and want to understand the needs and preferences of thousands of students. The results from quantitative questions are quick and easy to analyse, charts are instantly generated and if your main objective is to give everyone a voice and gain an overall opinion web surveys are perfect.
Web survey cons – survey fatigue is common place. Every term, multiple surveys will land in your students’ inboxes from a variety of different sources. So, unless yours is interesting, incentivised or it’s something which either sparks interest or is relevant to that student then encouraging participation can be challenging.
How to make your survey popular:
Timing is essential. Ensure no other major surveys are going out at the same time or 3-4 weeks prior to launch.
Incentivise – sadly students or people don’t necessarily complete research out of the goodness of their hearts; but cash speaks volumes. Amazon vouchers, summer ball or freshers’ tickets, free entry into clubs, live music venues, free merchandise, food, drinks, etc the bigger the price the greater the incentive to participate.
Use ambassadors – ask key personnel to promote your survey, including your Officers, society and club members, student staff, or SU and University staff, the more people talking about it the better.
Provide regular updates and challenge people to reach new targets – how long is left before closure, numbers of participants, etc.
Use a wide variety of mediums to promote including email, social media, physical posters and materials, websites, outlets etc.
In addition to more formal web surveys, quantitative methods also lend themselves to shorter and quicker straw polls, flash surveys and social media quizzes.
b) Focus groups
Focus group pros:
The beauty of focus groups is they provide really rich qualitative data which cannot be achieved through the more traditional quantitative methods. A key advantage of focus groups is that they take place face-to-face, this ensures that you’re not only getting a person’s opinions, but their reactions, too. You can glean key info from visual cues, such as the respondents’ expressions or gestures, as well as audial ones, like the tone, cadence, and volume of their voices. Plus, unlike with surveys, focus groups don’t limit your insights to what the respondent wants, feels like, or is able to articulate in words. With focus groups, you do not get a few pieces of the puzzle, you will get a much wider picture.
Focus groups also enable you to ask further questions and explore specific comments and reactions, leading to a deeper understanding of your customers’ motivations and pain points. It’s this intimate knowledge of what makes your audience tick that will play a pivotal role in shaping the direction and development of your strategies in years ahead.
Focus group cons:
Facilitating focus groups is a real skill. It is essential to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their views and ensuring that the discussion is not monopolised by a few outspoken participants, all while maintaining a natural flow of conversation, which takes years of experience to master. Recognising when to explore a tangent and acknowledging a significant remark that may not seem entirely relevant to an outsider is also a valuable skill.
Each focus group should be a deep dive into specific questions or areas you want to examine. They are not just repeats of questions asked in a web survey. Recruiting and selecting the right participants is an art and not always easy.
3. Ethnographical research
Sometimes you don’t actually need your customers to be involved in the research. This is where ethnographical or observational research comes into its own. Simply watching customers interact with staff, (and vice versa), watching the service evolve over several hours and participating at key touch points can provide a wealth of information which cannot be provided by more tradition research techniques. Again, this takes skill and experience, but this methodology certainly helps to fill the gaps more traditional research methodologies cannot fill.
A word on AI… A lot of people ask me about the use of AI to analyse their research results, and as much as I think AI can be helpful for summarising raw quantitative data, (something which all survey programmes do now), its handling of qualitative results are in the main very weak. For example, AI currently struggles to recognise sarcasm, humour, or some local phrases, whilst putting words and phrases into context can be hit and miss. I am sure this will evolve over time; in the meantime, like many researchers I will continue to use my skills and experience.
How can we help you?
Working in partnership with all students’ unions and universities we can offer a full range of research services including student, institution, organisation, sector and market-based research support. This includes:
Commercial services
Capital development
Space development
Health and wellbeing
Democracy
Governance
Food and drink
Concept development
Events
Sports and activities
Gender safety
Student engagement
Organisational health
For more information please contact:
Nina Musgrave
07971 899103
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