Market Research: A Guide to Understanding Buyers

Marketing managers, brand leads, product marketers, and founders are all running studies to answer the same question: “Is this worth pushing into the market?”

Done well, market research gives you a clear view of who’s out there, what they care about, and what opportunities are on the table. It helps you avoid launching the wrong product, entering the wrong market, or pouring budget into a campaign that won’t land. It also shapes your positioning and pricing and helps you prioritize the ideas that are most likely to work.

In this first chapter of Maze’s Market Research Guide, we walk through the foundations of market research, including:

Let’s start with the basics.

Market research is the structured process of understanding your market, customers, and competitors to make better business decisions. It helps you identify who your customers are, how many of them there are, what problems they are trying to solve, how much demand exists, and how your brand or product compares with the alternatives available.

While user research focuses on how people use your product, market research zooms out to look at demand, consumer behavior, brand perception, and competitive positioning.

The value is in how they connect. Market research helps you decide which opportunities, audiences, and value propositions to focus on, and user research gets into the details of how those decisions play out in the product experience.

For product and marketing teams, market research answers questions like:

These insights shape your positioning, pricing, and where you invest your energy and budget.

There are many ways to gather that insight, depending on the question you’re trying to answer. For example, if you want to understand why buyers choose your product (or don’t), you can conduct a win/loss analysis. If you want to understand how buyers perceive your brand and its place in the market, buyer perception research can help.

We explore both methods in more detail in the next two chapters, including when to use them and how to run them effectively.

Market research, user research, customer research, and product research are used interchangeably, but they solve different problems:

Here's a quick breakdown:

A researcher or insights lead often sits across this whole picture, collecting data from each research type, framing the combined evidence as risks, options, and trade-offs, and making it easier for PMs, designers, and marketers to act on the same set of facts.

Market research targets broad market segments, while user research focuses on the profiles that could or do use your product. They answer very different questions. If you start with the wrong one, you either over-engineer a bad idea or under-invest in a great one.

Choose market research when:

Market research behaves like a decision engine. It compares options side by side and uses quantitative methods to answer: “Which one wins in this market, for this audience, under these conditions?”

Choose user research when:

User research behaves like an experience microscope. It zooms into the fine detail of behavior and usability, not the macro question of whether the concept should exist in the first place.

You need both.

Maze’s 2026 State of Market Research Report shows that researchers are working across those boundaries. 64% of participants said the number of business functions they support had increased over the past two years.

When this flow works well, insights move in both directions. Concept tests and demand studies inform design briefs and roadmap priorities. In turn, usability studies and in-product behavior give Marketing and Sales concrete input for campaign copy, sales enablement, and positioning, so the story you tell outside the product reflects what actually happens inside it.

Most teams work with four core types of market research:

In practice, you rarely use just one. A typical study might combine secondary market research to understand the global market landscape, primary research to hear from potential customers, qualitative methods to explore attitudes, and quantitative methods to validate findings at scale.

Let’s look at each of these market research types and where they fit in your research process.

Primary research is any market research where you collect new data directly from your target audience instead of relying on existing reports. You design the study, recruit participants, and control the questions, timing, and context.

Marketing teams use it for:

The method you choose—quantitative or qualitative—depends on your research question. Testing concepts often uses quantitative comparison, while understanding motivations requires qualitative depth. For example, you might use quantitative research to compare reactions to several concepts, or qualitative research to understand why people prefer one over another.

Secondary research means using data that already exists rather than collecting it yourself. You're digging into data from published reports, industry analysis, existing studies, and market intelligence to frame your strategy before committing resources to primary research.

Marketing professionals rely heavily on this approach. They analyze in-house consumer data and also use syndicated data sources—paid reports from firms such as Statista, Mintel, and Nielsen that provide detailed charts, competitor benchmarks, and market forecasts.

Beyond paid syndicated data, teams also draw on public-domain sources and academic and industry reports to build market context. The goal is to gain a broader perspective, frame categories, understand where the market is heading, and identify gaps competitors aren't addressing.

Quantitative research tells the macro story. It gives you numbers, statistical confidence, and the ability to say "X% of our target audience prefers this option". It's about scale, repeatability, and proving decisions with data that leadership can defend.

In a market research context, quantitative studies usually look like:

Sample sizes for quantitative research are usually large. Teams often aim for 100–5,000 respondents, depending on budget, how many segments they care about, and how precise they need the numbers to be for a market research report.

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the ‘why’. It captures emotions, perceptions, and motivations through conversations and narrative feedback.

In market research, qualitative work typically uses:

Sample sizes are typically smaller than in quantitative research—around 5–15 participants per segment—because qualitative research prioritizes identifying patterns in how people think and feel, not measuring how many people think that way.

Running market research doesn't have to be overwhelming. With an AI-first user research platform like Maze, you can move from question to actionable insights in days. Here's a quick framework you can follow, whether you're testing a campaign concept, validating pricing, or measuring brand perception.

Start with the question you're trying to answer. Are you testing brand perception? Exploring demand for a new product concept? Understanding why customers choose competitors?

Good objectives are specific and measurable. For example:

You also need to decide what success looks like. Write down three to five KPIs you'll track after launch so you know if your decisions paid off. Depending on the study, these might include metrics like brand recall lift, market share growth in target segments, conversion rate on new messaging, or customer acquisition cost in priority markets.

In practice, writing your learning goals directly into your research platform ensures they stay front and center throughout the study. Maze's AI moderator uses these goals to guide interviews and tailor follow-up questions automatically. Your objectives also shape how the AI analyzes responses and generates thematic insights.

You need to get specific about demographics (age, location, income), behaviors (purchase frequency, product usage), and psychographics (values, lifestyle, attitudes).

For example, don't say ‘parents’, say ‘parents of children under 5 who buy organic food and live in suburban areas.’ The more precise you are, the better your insights will match real market behavior.

Create a screener to qualify participants with questions like:

Screener questions help ensure you’re talking to the right profiles within the market. In Maze, when you set up your study, you can add these screener questions in the recruitment settings.

Your research question helps determine your method.

Need to understand why people feel a certain way? Go qualitative. Need to prove how many prefer option A over B? Go quantitative.

You need to match your method to your objective:

Often you'll use both—run qualitative first to explore, then quantitative to validate at scale.

Maze supports AI-moderated interviews for scalable conversations that probe deeper based on responses and unmoderated tests where participants complete tasks at their own pace. You can also run surveys with multiple-choice and rating scales, and diary studies where participants log feedback over days or weeks.

Now you’re ready to launch your market research study and collect responses. Decide on your sample size first. You’ll need around five to 15 participants for qualitative research and 100 to 5,000 for quantitative, depending on how many segments you're testing and the statistical confidence you need.

Maze Panel gives you access to millions of B2B and B2C participants across 150+ countries with 400+ filters like demographics, profession, industry, technology use, shopping behavior, and lifestyle habits. Select your criteria, set your sample size, and Maze recruits, screens, and delivers qualified participants automatically.

Once you’ve recruited participants, the quality of your data depends on your study. For quantitative studies, check that responses are distributed across your target segments so you're not accidentally over-indexing on one group. Monitor response rates as they come in and watch for drop-off points that might signal confusing questions or survey fatigue. For qualitative interviews, keep sessions focused on your original objectives while staying flexible enough to explore unexpected themes that emerge.

This is where you look for themes in qualitative feedback, statistical significance in quantitative data, and segment-specific differences that reveal how different audiences respond.

Maze automatically generates reports once participants start completing your study, including:

You can customize reports with custom slides, remove sections, reorder content, and hide or show specific responses. This makes it easy to add context from secondary research—like industry benchmarks, competitor analysis, or market sizing data—directly alongside your primary research findings. Your team can comment directly on reports to discuss findings and align on next steps.

Plus, you can share reports as live links (no Maze account needed), download PDFs for presentations, or embed directly into Notion, Confluence, Slack, or your roadmap tool.

At this stage, you should be able to answer questions like:

Quote the language participants used in your research to humanize your recommendations and make them stick with stakeholders. For example:

Once you’ve acted on the findings, the next step is to measure whether those decisions delivered the result you expected.

After launch, measure what happened to understand how things changed. To measure success, go back to the three to five KPIs you defined in step one and compare them against your original benchmarks. The metrics you track should connect directly to the question your research was designed to answer.

So, if you changed your positioning, did brand perception improve? If you tested pricing, did conversion rates change? If your research shaped a campaign, did it perform better than your previous baseline?

Depending on your research goals, you might track metrics like:

To understand the return on your research, compare those results with where you started and what changed as a result of the decisions you made. Look at whether the improvements in your chosen KPIs justify the time, budget, and resources spent on the research. You should aim to connect the research to a measurable business outcome, whether that’s higher conversion, better campaign performance, or increased product adoption.

Market research is a cycle. Launch, measure, learn, and iterate. You should keep testing new hypotheses based on what you discovered and keep building on what you learn. Each study gets you closer to understanding what really drives decisions in your industry—and that's how you stay ahead.

Maze fits into a market research strategy as the platform for finding and screening research participants, conducting quantitative and qualitative primary research, and analyzing data collected during market research for Marketing, Product, Sales, and beyond.

It’s best when you need direct feedback from your target audience on questions around buyer needs, positioning, messaging, brand perception, and new product development. To understand the wider market, including its size, industry trends, and competitor performance, you can pair the primary research you conduct in Maze with secondary research from other sources.

Teams can use Maze to:

Under the hood, Maze supports these use cases with AI-powered qualitative research methods like AI-moderated or unmoderated interviews, open-ended questions with AI follow-ups, rating scales, and thematic analysis that turns raw feedback into patterns your team can act on.

Because Maze also supports methods like prototype and usability testing, teams can take promising ideas from market research into product research without switching platforms. Market research helps you identify which opportunities are worth pursuing, while user research helps you understand how those ideas perform in the product experience.

From there, product and UX teams can push the best concepts straight into prototype tests and usability studies in Maze. And what you learn from those tests about language, friction, and mental models can flow back into campaign creative, brand messaging, and sales enablement.

Instead of running market research and user research as separate projects, Maze helps you build a single system of insights that supports both Marketing and Product decisions.

Market research helps you spot promising opportunities before you commit time, budget, or product resources. Combined with user research, it gives you the insights you need to build the right products and services for your audience.

The best opportunities usually come from looking across multiple signals. Combine what you hear from buyers with market trends, competitor research, and behavioral data to see which findings are consistent enough to act on.

Once you know where the opportunity lies, the next important question is what drives buyers to choose one option over another. In the next chapter of this guide, we cover how to identify the reasons behind those buying decisions using win/loss analysis.