In today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, businesses face a constant onslaught of challenges. Consumer expectations evolve rapidly, markets shift overnight, and new competitors enter with aggressive strategies. While these challenges may seem overwhelming, they’re not insurmountable—if you have the right insights.

That’s where market research comes in.

At Global Survey, we’ve helped businesses across industries navigate uncertainty and make confident, data-backed decisions. In this blog, we explore five pressing business problems that market research can solve right now—problems that many businesses are either experiencing or on the brink of encountering.

1. Stagnating Sales Despite Increased Marketing Spend

The Problem:
You’re investing more into advertising, content, and promotions than ever before—but revenue growth isn’t keeping pace. Why?

How Market Research Helps:
When sales flatten or decline, the assumption is often that marketing needs to be louder, flashier, or more frequent. However, this overlooks a critical possibility: maybe you’re not addressing the right audience or communicating the right message.

Market research provides clarity. With customer segmentation and persona research, we can identify which audience segments are most valuable—and which ones you might be wasting resources on. Surveys, focus groups, and competitor benchmarking further clarify whether your value proposition aligns with what consumers actually care about.

Real-world application:
A SaaS client of ours faced this exact issue. Their paid ads were generating clicks but no conversions. A combination of usability testing and buyer journey mapping revealed a critical friction point in the pricing page layout and a mismatch between ad messaging and actual service features. A small pivot—guided by research—led to a 36% increase in conversion rate within six weeks.

2. Product Launches That Miss the Mark

The Problem:
You’ve launched a new product or feature expecting market enthusiasm—but the response has been lukewarm, or worse, negative.

How Market Research Helps:
One of the biggest pitfalls in product development is building based on internal assumptions. Even teams with excellent technical knowledge can fall into the “build it and they will come” trap.

Through concept testing, usability studies, and prototype evaluations, market research ensures that your product meets real consumer needs before launch. Research can answer critical questions like:

• Does the product solve a real problem?

• Are customers willing to pay for it?

• How does it compare to existing solutions?

• What features are most and least valuable?

Real-world application:
A consumer electronics brand approached us after their smart home device underperformed. Post-launch surveys and in-home usage studies revealed that consumers found the setup process confusing and lacked trust in the data privacy protocols. These issues hadn’t been uncovered during internal testing. Armed with research insights, the company revamped its onboarding experience and revised its marketing to clearly address privacy concerns—resulting in a successful re-launch and improved adoption.

3. Losing Market Share to New Competitors

The Problem:
An upstart competitor is rapidly gaining ground. You’re seeing customer churn and losing bids to rivals you hadn’t even considered a year ago.

How Market Research Helps:
Competitive analysis is one of the most valuable, yet underutilized, tools in market research. With it, you can uncover:

• What customers like about competitors that you don’t offer

• How pricing and product positioning compares

• Where your brand sits in the consumer’s mental hierarchy

We conduct SWOT analyses, social listening, brand perception studies, and secret shopper evaluations to extract actionable intelligence. This helps businesses understand where they stand—and how to reassert dominance.

Real-world application:
A logistics company we worked with lost 20% of their B2B clients over six months. Competitive benchmarking revealed that a new entrant had streamlined booking through an AI-based portal, while our client’s system was cumbersome. The solution wasn’t to outprice the competition—it was to innovate on user experience. Within three months of launching their own simplified interface, client retention stabilized and inbound leads increased by 18%.

4. Uncertainty Around Expanding Into New Markets

The Problem:
Your current market is saturated, and leadership is eyeing expansion—either geographically or demographically. But there’s little internal data on these new targets, and guesswork is a risky foundation for strategic decisions.

How Market Research Helps:
Entering new markets without insight is like launching a ship without a map. Market research offers that map, showing you where opportunities lie and how to approach them. With tools like:

• Market sizing and demand forecasting

• Local consumer behavior studies

• Competitive landscape analysis

• Pricing sensitivity research

• Cultural barriers and localization needs

you can enter with confidence, not hope.

Real-world application:
A fashion retailer wanted to expand from the UK into Southeast Asia. Rather than blindly duplicating their UK strategy, they partnered with us for regional market analysis. We identified that while there was high interest in Western styles, preferences skewed toward modest fashion, mobile-first ecommerce, and influencer-based marketing. By adapting their approach, they not only entered the market successfully but also became one of the fastest-growing fashion brands in the region within 18 months.

5. Misalignment Between Brand Identity and Customer Perception

The Problem:
Internally, your company sees itself one way—innovative, premium, customer-centric. But customer reviews, social media chatter, and sales trends suggest otherwise. There’s a gap.

How Market Research Helps:
Brand health tracking and perception studies are essential tools for closing the perception-reality gap. Through surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) tracking, sentiment analysis, and customer interviews, research helps you understand:

• What people really think about your brand

• Which attributes they associate with your company

• How brand perception has changed over time

• How you compare to others in your category

Real-world application:
We worked with a fintech startup that had positioned itself as “the most secure and user-friendly payment app.” Yet churn was high, and app store reviews were mediocre. Brand audits revealed a significant trust deficit around data privacy—despite actual technical superiority. Messaging was too focused on innovation and not enough on security. After rebranding and adjusting communications based on our findings, they saw a 40% boost in user trust ratings and a 25% decrease in churn within three months.

Final Thoughts: The Right Research at the Right Time

Market research isn’t just for big brands or new product development—it’s a strategic weapon for companies of all sizes and stages. Whether you’re launching a startup, scaling into new territories, or battling shrinking market share, the right research at the right time can unlock solutions that guesswork never could.

Let’s recap the five business problems we explored:

1. Stagnating sales despite marketing efforts

2. Failed product launches due to poor market fit

3. Eroding market share from emerging competitors

4. Uncertainty in expansion into new markets

5. Brand perception issues that hurt growth

Each of these challenges can be transformed into opportunities—with insight, clarity, and action. That’s the power of market research.

Ready to Solve Your Business Problem?

At Global Survey, we combine qualitative depth with quantitative precision to deliver custom insights that solve real problems. Whether it’s exploratory research or advanced analytics, we help businesses move forward with confidence.

Jun 11, 2025