When you have decisions to make for your building products operation, you want those decisions to be informed by thorough and up-to-date information.

That means not only taking a look at what is going in the home improvement industry as a whole but also customizing your market research to get a better understanding of the “why” behind the “what.” In other words, it’s not just about getting a depth of data, but exploring the nuances driving changes and behaviors in the metrics as well. From there, you and your marketing, sales, channel, and products team determine how it applies specifically to your company, customers or products.

What is Big Data in Marketing?

Big data is a large volume of information about products, customers or other topics relevant to your industry, business or general population. Nowadays, it is generated almost automatically, thanks to technology. 

For example, customers’ preferences and selections are passively tracked on a regular basis, based on their online activity on search engines, social media or your own company website. There are a variety of network-centric, user-centric and site-centric measurements you can access for information.

You then can use business intelligence (BI) tools to parse through and analyze these large datasets.

Big Data Isn’t Enough

While big data can yield some general information for you to use, more isn’t always better. In fact, you may end up with more information than is useful, because it doesn’t have the parameters you need for accuracy.

You’ll find the marginal utility of the information declines as the amount of data increases, and you can’t reduce sample bias—which is a concern in any type of research—by collecting more of the same. 

That’s where customized market research comes into play.

How to Leverage Custom Research with Your BI Tools

The modern robustness of big data collected passively has caused the function of primary market research methods to change as well. Because custom market research requires more active efforts to gather data in the first place, big data has allowed more depth of knowledge to be gathered and assessed in hand with troves of big data. 

Big data you own internally and secondary market research gives you a place to start when exploring market sizing, customer usage and attitudes, or brand health and awareness metrics.  It tells you “what” may be happening. 

But it only tells part of the story. Oftentimes when reviewing internal data sets, team members leave with more questions left unanswered than they started with. To understand the “why” behind the information and identify deeper relationships between disparate datasets, you must get into specifics.

Big data shows you where to focus. Internal datasets give you the starting line for where to investigate further with custom primary research.

Explore Unanswered Questions Behind Customer Preferences and Product Selections

With customized market research, you can explore these unanswered questions specific to your needs. For example, tracking big data may reveal that a certain type of exterior paint appears to be the most popular, in terms of the units sold in a specific quarter, for a particular region. Based on that information alone, you could assume that producing more of that type of paint would yield the greatest return for your company.

That’s “what” is happening; however, there could be multiple variables at play influencing “why” those units sales are higher that you wouldn’t know about unless you conducted custom market research to understand the “why” behind the “what”. 

• Could it be that that type of exterior paint possesses characteristics that make it suitable for summer use, which is why sales were high during that particular quarter? 
• Could it be that other brands or product subcategories weren’t well-represented in distribution centers? 
• Could it be one of your big box distributors was running a promotion during that quarter and adjusted their marketing to suit?
• Could it be that consumer interest spiked due to social media influencers increasing attention on certain DIY projects?
• Could it be that consumers were more interested in certain features only offered in that SKU?

Gain Concrete Evidence for Product Development Decisions

Supporting internal data sets with custom market research is similarly useful for product development efforts. Knowing that a specific type of power tool is popular doesn’t give you enough information to support decision-making for future development. You need to know why. 

• Why do customers like the tool? 
• How do you they use it? 
• Is there anything they don’t like about? 
• What do customers determine as “valuable” in certain product lines?
• Which adjustments would likely result in an increase in sales? 
• Are there opportunities for diversifying the product to target a new demographic?

By commissioning customized market research, you get the opportunity to connect with your targeted customer base and get feedback to answer these questions, yielding the kind of pointed insights you need to make future predictions and decisions. 

You also can refine your BI tools and develop more advanced analytics to address issues such as measurement errors and lack of variables when collecting new data in the future.

Conducting Market Research in the Home Improvement Industry

Big data research is a warehouse that contains masses of information and trends waiting to be uncovered and customized research is a magnifying glass to cut through the statistical noise, focus on the information in question, discover specific details, and explore the context for a more complete story. 

When you’re starting with in-house big data tools for your building materials company, but unsure if you have enough information to inform the right decisions, The Farnsworth Group can help you determine what type of customized research is appropriate to uncover the “why” behind the “what” and move forward with answers.