With no doubt, customer interviews and surveys during market research are great tools to better understand customers’ needs, wants, purchasing behaviors and consumption patterns to list few benefits.
Nevertheless, too often, the market research activities focus only on already existing customers that are already buying and using the offerings available to them. Therefore, while conducting market research it is worthwhile investigating also non-customers or non-users for two main reasons.
The first reason is that by disregarding non-users and non-customers, analysts fail to have a complete view of the entire market potential. Indeed, non-users are also part of the market potential; the part that has not been reached yet.
The second reason is that interviews are a great opportunity to understand why non-users are not purchasing the available offerings and thus could understand the reasons why they are not buying and what could be done to make them change their behavior and get them to start buying.
An additional critical element to get the most of interviews and surveys is to make good use of the segmentation criteria at the beginning of the interview/survey to be able and the end of the process to generate customers’ profiles, summarizing findings for each segment that share the same characteristics.
