Accurate consumer insights can make or break a product, with nearly 90% of new products failing due to poor market research.
Great survey questions bridge the gap between understanding consumer needs and meeting them. Poorly crafted questions lead to misleading data and bad decisions.
This article covers how to write market research questions, common pitfalls, and example questions for different objectives. We'll also show how Highlight can improve your approach for deeper insights.
Market research questions aren’t one-size-fits-all. They should be carefully crafted based on your research goals.
For example, asking customers what features they value most can guide product improvements, while questions about overall satisfaction can help improve the customer experience.
Here are some examples:
These questions help uncover pain points, highlight frequently used features, and reveal how your product stacks up against competitors.
Customer feedback is essential in pinpointing friction points in your service, whether it’s a confusing user interface or the need for better customer support.
These questions focus on understanding how your brand is perceived in the market and how that perception affects purchasing decisions.
Tailoring your market research questions to your industry or product category makes the data more relevant and actionable.
Food, Beverage & Supplements
Personal Care & Beauty
Apparel
Household Cleaning & Goods
Highlight can assist with creating industry-specific question sets, ensuring you gather the right data for your business goals.
When crafting market research questions, a mix of question types helps to gather well-rounded insights into your audience. Below are some key categories of questions that can help you dig deeper into consumer behavior and preferences:
1. Demographic questions give you a profile of who your consumers are.Example: “What is your age range?”
Other important demographic questions could focus on income level, gender, education, or location.
2. Psychographic questions focus on consumer attitudes, values, and lifestyle choices, providing insight into why consumers make certain purchasing decisions.Example: “What motivates you to purchase eco-friendly products?”
Understanding consumer motivations and values allows you to align your product and messaging with what your audience cares about most.
3. Behavioral questions identify usage patterns, preferences, and habits, providing insight into how your product fits into their daily lives.Example: “When do you most frequently use this product?”
With behavioral data, you can make informed decisions on product development and marketing strategies.
4. JAR (Just About Right) Scale questions assess the optimal level of product attributes, such as flavor, texture, or scent, by asking consumers to rate whether these characteristics are too much, too little, or just right.By using JAR scale questions, you can fine-tune product attributes to meet consumer preferences more effectively.
5. TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) Analysis questions focus on understanding which combination of products, features, or attributes will reach the largest number of unique consumers.TURF analysis helps you optimize product offerings by identifying the combination that maximizes consumer reach and satisfaction.
Highlight’s platform allows you to filter your audience by 30+ demographic and behavioral criteria, giving you precise insights into the exact consumer profiles you’re looking to reach – perfect for product testing beginners and experts. Whether you're conducting a demographic deep dive or analyzing psychographic trends, Highlight’s community of testers ensures that your market research questions are delivered to the right people.
Effective market research questions require clarity and precision to yield actionable, unbiased insights. Here’s how:
1. Be clear and specific.Avoid vague questions like “How do you feel about this product?” Instead, ask, “Which feature of this product do you find most useful?”
2. Avoid leading questions.Leading questions skew results. Replace “Wouldn’t you agree this product is great?” with “How would you rate your satisfaction with this product?” to ensure credibility.
3. Balance quantitative and qualitative questions.Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions for deeper consumer insights.
Quantitative Questions
Qualitative Questions
Using industry jargon or overly technical language can confuse respondents and lead to incomplete or inaccurate responses. Instead of “What’s your opinion on the product’s UX/UI functionality?” use “How easy is it to use this product?”
2. Avoid Asking Double-Barreled QuestionsA double-barreled question asks about two different things but expects a single answer. This can lead to unclear results. Questions like “How do you feel about the product’s design and price?” combine two topics, leading to unclear answers. Split it into “How satisfied are you with the product’s design?” and “How do you feel about the product’s price?"
3. Pre-Test Before DeploymentHighlight’s Solution Blueprints provide templates that help market researchers create effective surveys that avoid these common pitfalls. Some of the available solutions include:
Sensory Evaluator: Identify the key strengths and areas of improvement for a product’s sensory features.
Prototype Tester: Compare different prototypes across various KPIs to determine which performs best.
Highlight Greenlight: Gauge whether a product is ready for market based on performance benchmarks.
Alienation Assessor: Understand the impact of product changes on performance.
Product Refresher: Identify in-market product performance improvements.
The difference between a good and a bad question can directly impact the quality of the data you collect. Below, we’ll compare examples of well-designed questions versus bad ones and explain why some questions perform better than others.
|
Good Question |
Bad Question |
|
“How satisfied are you with the product’s durability?” |
“You’re happy with this product, right?” |
|
Why it works: It’s clear, specific, and unbiased. |
Why it fails: This question is leading. |
If you’re not sure where to start, free tools like ChatGPT can help you get the ball rolling. But remember, the responses any tool generates are only as good as the prompts you provide to it.
Here’s an example prompt that we put into ChatGPT:
“Generate 5 market research questions aimed at understanding user preferences for eco-friendly cleaning products.”
And here’s what it generated in response:
These AI-generated questions are clear, specific, and targeted toward understanding consumer preferences, making them more likely to yield actionable insights.
A word of caution: as tempting as it can be to rely on AI to do the market research work for you, it absolutely can–and will–make mistakes. It might be able to pull insights from past surveys, but it struggles to understand and apply recent cultural shifts or emerging consumer sentiments that could impact your research.
In short, don’t use AI to interpret nuanced human emotions or as a single source of truth. When you have millions invested in product development on the line, use AI for streamlining your baseline data analysis and brainstorming market research questions, but let the human professionals take it from there.
The right questions lead to the right answers—insights that truly move the needle.
Clear, focused market research questions can reveal the real needs, preferences, and behaviors of your audience.
With Highlight, you’ll have access to cutting-edge technology alongside real humans (with decades of market research experience) to refine your approach. Get real, actionable insights that translate into smarter strategies and bigger wins.