When building a brand its essential you seek to stand out against competitors. This means being unusual. With that in mind I often find one interesting exercise is to get a multi-disiplined group together who know the market well and get them to list out all of the typical things they would expect customers to experience, see and feel. Next get them to "flip" these assumptions - what would be the opposite of having that type of experience look like? Finally review the outcomes and see if there is any untapped value which you could lean into in order to build your presence and get noticed.
Here are some unconventional market analysis methods I've found valuable: Social listening. Monitor online conversations. Reveals customer pain points, unmet needs. Provides direct voice of customer. Competitor hiring trends. Look at job postings. See where competitors are investing. Uncovers their strategic priorities and growth areas. Unconventional KOLs. Don't just look at obvious industry influencers. Find niche experts, industry-adjacent thought leaders. Offer unique perspectives competitors miss. "Day in the life" research. Shadow target customers. Observe their actual behaviors and workarounds. Identifies innovation opportunities. Extreme user analysis. Study "power users" and those who hate your product. Amplifies unmet needs. Pushes you to reimagine solutions.
Se stepped outside our own echo chamber to get information from online forums or niche blogs where potential users talked about their problems without being prompted by a survey question. By extrapolating a customer’s journey from these conversations, we identified specific pain points and drivers of satisfaction that would never be captured using a standard market research methodology. This enabled us to target our solutions and services more precisely, offering higher net value to our customers. This approach allowed us to more effectively differentiate our market analysis, enhance our product development strategies, and even revolutionise our customer-service operations.
The one unconventional method we used was direct questioning our consumers about our products, getting their feedback and understanding their needs. While working for a company, our team did on-ground public surveys, where we asked the audience about their experiences and feedback on our product. We also asked the non-users about reasons for not using our products. The process gave us deeper insights into our product and areas to work on. Hence, we tailored our products according to consumer feedback and saw a great increase in sales.