Types of Market Research Studies: Pick by the Decision You Face

Write the decision as a sentence before anything else: "We will launch, change or drop X depending on Y." If you cannot finish the sentence, you need an exploratory study first. If you can, the verb tells you the group.

• Where do we stand? Brand and market studies.
• What do we launch? Product and ad studies.
• What do we charge? Price studies.
• What do we fix? Customer experience studies.
• Who do we target? Audience studies.
• How do our people feel? Organisation studies.

Each study type then maps to a design. Pick the design with our research design chooser, which covers monadic, sequential monadic, MaxDiff, Kano and TURF.

Use these to see where the brand and the category stand. Most are descriptive: one linear questionnaire, or the same questionnaire repeated in waves.

Use these to choose what to launch or air. They need a discrete stimulus: a concept, a product, a pack, an ad or a feature list. That makes the design choice real.

Price studies use their own designs: Van Westendorp for a range, Gabor-Granger for a demand curve, and monadic price cells to compare single prices. For Van Westendorp and Gabor-Granger, the platform builds the survey and you compute the curve. Price also appears inside concept tests, so decide whether you need a separate study.

Use these with people who already buy from you. They are usually linear questionnaires with a fixed set of named measures.

For NPS, the formula is the share scoring 9 or 10 minus the share scoring 0 to 6 on a 0 to 10 recommend question. See NPS methodology. Usability here is self-reported: a survey does not time tasks.

Use these to decide who to target and how to talk to them.

If you do not yet know the questions, run a few interviews first. Our jobs-to-be-done guide shows how to turn them into a survey.

Designs are explained in the research design chooser. Match sample size to the cells you need: a pure monadic test with 3 cells needs 3 times the respondents of one cell.

• Classes and cities. Use NCCS classes (A1 to C1), city tier and region. Western income bands do not fit Indian households. See our tier 2 and tier 3 guide.
• Scales. Yes-saying is a known risk, so prefer fully labelled scales and forced choice over long agree-disagree grids.
• Length. Aim for 8 to 12 minutes on a smartphone, with short screens and grids of 5 to 7 rows at most.
• Language. Use short, plain sentences and test the translation. See the multilingual survey guide.
• Sample. Decide quotas before fieldwork. See sampling methods.

If your job is a consumer survey in India, our survey builder has playbooks for all 22 study types above. It picks the design from your stimuli and names the KPI instrument, so you do not invent a home-made variant. This is the cost of a typical study at list price.

Pro is sold in bundles of 400 to 1,000 responses and costs 20% less per response than Plus. Enterprise plans come with a dedicated research team and are priced on request.

Respondents come from the SuperJ app, which has a 25M+ consumer footprint. The survey-eligible panel is a subset, and what you can reach depends on your targeting. Members complete Aadhaar-based KYC once, then take part through a zero-knowledge proof. You can target by city tier, age, gender (male or female) and NCCS class. Surveys run in 8+ Indian languages, and speeders, straight-liners and inconsistent answers are removed before analysis (panel methodology). The panel is in India only and app-based, so offline households need face-to-face fieldwork.