Market research in B2B and understanding the subtle insights that shape buyers’ decisions

Speaker A: There's like a bunch of insights you can uncover. You can uncover unmet needs, you can uncover decision making dynamics, you can uncover hidden fears, you can uncover internal politics. Because if you are B2B, that's like, sometimes such an important aspect that will influence the way things turn out. But where I think insights are most, um, impactful is from understanding the identity of the, um, audience that you serve in the story that they live in. And this is where oftentimes we tend to make a mistake. We try to sell the story of our own business, when in fact we should understand how we can fit ourselves in the story of the existing story of those that we are serving our clients.

Speaker B: If you're finding that your messages don't resonate, sales are moving slower than they should, then the problem might not be the product or the service, but, but the way that you're framing your message and your story and that they're disconnected from your target audience. And this is where market research comes in. It enables you to uncover what actually triggers people to buy, discover unmet needs, learn about decision making dynamics, and uncover hidden fears. Keep listening to this episode to learn how to run research the right way, how to transform data into insights, and then into decisions that matter and of course, mistakes to avoid in the process. I'm happy to introduce Aurelia, my guest today. She is partner at, uh, Innate Motion. Aurelia is a business humanizer and for over 10 years she has worked with global brands to turn human insights into meaningful business growth. She's fascinated by how people think, choose and change, and how businesses can grow not by pushing harder, but by understanding better. I hope you tune in and listen to the episode. If you find it interesting, please consider subscribing to the show and sharing with a friend or colleague. I'm Elena, your host, and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, Aurelia. Good morning. Welcome to the Value Driven Marketing podcast. How are you?

Speaker A: I'm very good, thank you. And I'm also very excited to be here. So I very much look forward to our conversation.

Speaker B: I very much look forward to our conversation as well. Um, because it's about market research and I think marketing should start from insights, which you should get from your clients and from the market. I know a lot of marketers and a lot of business owners are aware of this. However, in many cases, market research is not prioritized because work gets in a way, budgets are always tied. I'm hoping that they will explore the different insights that, um, P2B companies can uncover. Through research and how they can secure budgets and maybe how they can start with um, a smaller budget if that's possible. But before we jump in, I do want to know more um, about Innate Motion. What do you guys do, who do you help and how?

Speaker A: Innate Motion is a strategy consultancy that is focused on human centered growth. And I want to pause for just a second on human centered because I think this is the perspective that I'm going to bring in today and it's what sets us apart in the world of consultancies. Uh, so you'll have consultancies that work with analyzing lots of data and facts, you'll have consultancies that leverage AI, so on and so forth, will come in with a very in depth understanding of humans and societies and cultures. We do that because we really started with this fundamental belief that actually a business is a sum of relationships that work in harmony really well on the inside and therefore operate with success towards the outside. So in order for a business to be successful, you really want to understand people. Not only the ones you serve as a company, but also the ones that serve you on the inside. So basically this is what initmotion does. We are helping brands to reconnect their business ambitions with the real human needs. Whether those are customers or employees or partners, it doesn't matter. Um, so we'll work on things like positioning, portfolio innovation and culture. Always with this deep human insight at the core of um, everything. We're a global team. Um, it's half psychologists, sociologists, half business experts that really bring their expertises together to make this magic happen. I'm here today as a business humanizer and I'll bring a bit of this business uh, humanizing perspective towards the world of research.

Speaker B: I love the humanizing aspect of the things and your positioning because a lot of emotion backs our uh, day to day decisions. Thank you for the intro. So let's um, dive straight in. Why is market research so critical today? Especially when there's so much information also online through different communities. Also many companies do feel like they know their clients really well because they speak to them day to day. Why is market research so important?

Speaker A: I want to start with what's market research because you can also see it from very different perspectives. And for me market research is empathy at work. It means step in the shoes of the um, audience that you're serving and understand their deep um, needs, aspirations, intentions. Um, and oftentimes when you do uh, sales calls or you interact with customers on product or service related issues, that's not really Stepping into the shoes of the audience that is more focused on the product and trying to understand how you connect with the customer on a product level or how you want to sell this product. But being successful with your audience goes far beyond the product. It's really about understanding their life and their aspirations beyond whatever you are producing or servicing. And so B2B or B2C, it actually doesn't matter. Research is critical always and everywhere because in the end of the day, it's human decisions. So even if you're serving businesses, which our consultancy also does, we are servicing the humans behind the business. Um, and so what you'll want to know is not what they buy. Uh, you'll want to know what makes them choose a certain thing, what makes them click, what makes them hesitate, what makes them switch. This is where I'm saying that empathy is such an important aspect because it helps you also to find a different frame of reference, to understand the emotional and the strategic drivers behind that, um, that specific decision. And there's also a question of similarity, because it's right, human to human decision. The more you are similar within the company with the customer or the identity of the customer that you serve, the more likely you are to understand and to have, let's say, an um, instinctive or natural ease in positioning a product right or innovating in the right way. But oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes the people that are working in your business are actually very different from the customers that you're serving. In that case, what you really need to do is to allow your team to immerse and truly feel and understand the personalities and the character of the businesses that they are serving in order to be able to adopt the frame of reference of those people and also be able to then adjust their product or their communication or their service in a way that it matches, um, the one of the people that you serve.

Speaker B: And also I feel that as marketers and as business people, we should realize we're not our customers. And what they experience is different from what we experience. Right, because we spend time with our product or service 8 hours a day or even more. You've alluded to insights. What are the kind of insights that we can uncover through research?

Speaker A: There's like a bunch of insights you can uncover. You can uncover unmet needs, you can uncover decision making dynamics, you can uncover hidden fears, you can uncover internal politics. Because if you are B2B, that's like sometimes such an important aspect that will influence the way things turn out. But where I think insights are most impactful is from understanding the identity of the um, audience that you serve, understanding the story that they live in. And this is where oftentimes we tend to make a mistake. We try to sell the story of our own business when in fact we should understand how we can fit ourselves in the story of the existing story of those that we are serving, of our clients. And that's such an important nuance because it's shifting us from being focused on ourselves and on what we want to sell to understanding the ecosystem in which we operate and trying to find um, the way we can bring value and our role in a way that is meaningful and it's relevant to those that we are actually wanting to serve. And I want to give an example of this one. We have been working with a 3D printing company selling to engineers. And so at some point they come up with a uh, solution that is going to solve all the problems of the engineers. That thing didn't work out at all. So we were called in to understand what's going on. And so talking with engineers we actually understood that the fundamental identity of an engineer is to solve problems. The moment you come with a ah, product that is solving problems, you are taking away why an engineer exists. So we shifted this from solving all of your problems to co creating together in order to solve the problem of the client, of the client. And that made a massive difference because we were able to take into account the identity of the business, um, we were serving and everything changed. So this is what I mean with identity in terms of insights because you can have lots of, lots of different insights. But I think the one that is often making biggest difference in terms of the success we can achieve is the ones that is related to understanding the identity and applying it to your own story as a business.

Speaker B: This sounds so familiar, um, with companies saying I have this product or I have this service and it's really good and yet people don't get it. What is wrong with my audience and the point of reference and how you're positioning that story and that product into their world. That doesn't fit exactly.

Speaker A: Because sometimes you forget who sits in front of you, you forget their profession and you're focused and obsessing on your product or your service, which is good because you do want to have a perfect service and a perfect product, but it has to be perfect not from your perspective, but from the perspective of the person that is going to use it. And the story around it is as important as the product itself. And sometimes it's really minor shift in the way you position this product or service in their world, as opposed to changing the product or blaming the audience for not understanding.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely agree. And that leads me to the next question, which is in which moment should companies conduct market research?

Speaker A: I'm going to try and summarize this into three big buckets. So there is a first bucket that is relevance. Imagine markets shift, a crisis happens, a generation changes. You move from serving Millennials to Gen Z. Any shift that happens in society or in culture will trigger a question about the relevance of what you deliver. And that's where you ask yourself as a business, to what extent am I still relevant in this new context for this new generation? And how can I adjust my story or my product and my service in order to the new needs? So this is what I call relevance. Um, it's a question also of opportunity and understanding. At what momentum in time do you seize a certain opportunity? Because there has been a shift in the context in which you operate. Another one is expansion. You want to expand your category, uh, you want to expand to a new country, you want to expand your portfolio, or you want to expand to new audiences. So what's important to note that innovation is not necessarily innovating the product. It can also be innovating the audience to which you deliver. And if you want to deliver to a new audience, it means you need to understand, to create a whole new understanding about who's that audience and how do I need to position and to relate to them in a way that my products is relevant. So that would be the expansion one, and then I think the last one would partnerships. But here actually, I mean any kind of cooperations between companies. It could also be mergers and acquisitions. If there has been a merger and acquisition, you have a whole new team in place. You've brought together two different groups that most probably will have two completely different identities. And what you want to do is to create a new sense of we, a new sense that will allow this group to relate to each other and to create that those successful relationships that allow them to also produce the successful output towards the audience that you serve. Sometimes we focus research so much on the outside world that we forget to apply it on the inside. When in fact, if you have a large business with hundreds of people, the same, uh, rules apply. You are, you are operating with human needs, you're operating with human intentions. And as leadership is so important to understand, um, what are those aspirations, what are those tensions and how can you leverage these in order to create, uh, a force that will, you know, push your company forward. So, yeah, partnerships, relevance and expansion.

Speaker B: They also advise that businesses run market research every year when they, um, start or, you know, before when they start planning their year, um, doing their business plan, their marketing plan.

Speaker A: It depends a lot on the objectives you have and also on the researches that you have already completed. Because in a way, research is not an end goal. Research is a means towards achieving an objective. Right. So if you have already a, uh, strategy in place that was built based on fundamental work done in market research, then you kind of have your plan and you'll notice whether there are smaller gaps that need validation. Um, want to do a small market research on activation. Market research is basically this ability to always be in tune with what the clients that you serve need and want to hear from you. And is something that you're going to activate this button whenever you feel there is a loss of, uh, pulse.

Speaker B: So what I'm hearing is that when things get stuck, when maybe messages don't resonate, campaigns don't perform well, you don't really know why. Maybe those things. There are things there that you need to clarify, which is who you want to reach.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's indeed so. And that's also because you may think that market research is costly. You are better off doing this, uh, you know, hypothesis by yourself. But actually a failed product or a failed positioning or a failed communication campaign will cost you much more than the research upfront. So this is a risk that it's not worth taking.

Speaker B: I absolutely agree because you end, uh, up testing and hypothesizing and making assumptions endlessly. But if you're not starting from a real insight, then I guess the possibilities are endless. And you wouldn't know what test. What are the different types of research that companies can use in order to uncover the, uh, insights that we just discussed about needs, problems, uh, different hesitations that your target audience might have. So which are the ways to uncover those?

Speaker A: This is very, very dependent on the business objective that a company will have. And it's also what I was saying in the beginning. Right. The market research is really not an end goal, is a means. And it very much depends on whether you're doing a positioning, whether you're doing a portfolio activation. Qualitative, uh, and quantitative are both important in, in their own way. But I do want to speak a little bit about the difference between volume and value, because quantitative data is data. You'll have a lot and actually you'll tend to want to know as much as possible. And there's Often, like, what's enough? You still need to read that data, uh, and those facts in order to extract what is valuable for you. And that's where the qualitative insights will come into the game. When you'll read the qualitative insight, it will be such an evident truth. And in a way, it will be so simple that you'll go, like, how did I not see it before? Like, it's so evident, you'll be able to relate with it so well. It's not just information. Data will give you a lot of information. If you want to validate something, it's perfect. You'll go for data. But if you want to understand how to position, or if you want to understand, um, the direction of a certain strategic decision, you'll need an insight. And that insight will be this very simple truth, uh, that once you've read it, you are not able to see things the same way. You will not be able to see your product the same way, or your category the same way, or your people the same way. It will basically change your perspectives, and it will also guide you. It will be clear on what are the next decisions that the business has to make in order to tweak things into that direction. And maybe I can give here also an example which is you'll be able to relate to, because it's a Romanian brand, is Dacia. Okay, so we've been working with Dacia, uh, about five, six years ago, uh, and when Dacia came to us, um, there was a strong hypothesis about low cost because it was rather cheap cars compared to other cars. And so after conducting market research, we actually saw that those people are extremely connected to nature. They loved to live in the suburbs. They were not at all limited in terms of finance. They were just consciously choosing to live, uh, closer to nature with the mantra of, uh, less is more or simpler is better. And so what we've done is that we've shifted them from low cost to essential. And this word essential changed the way they were producing and they were communicating and they were innovating. Because once you know that your car is not low cost, your car is essential. You also know you don't need any superfluous buttons, you don't need any, like, electric things that won't work. Those people don't need it. But you do need an electric car very fast, because those people care about nature. So you can't deploy it 10 years after, like, it has to be tomorrow. So it really changes very much. One single word changed the way this brand has structured Itself and has looked at a uh, product portfolio from then onwards. So it was really reframing um, from scarcity to liberation. Mhm. From low cost to essential. So it's that M. Data can give you information. Data can help you validate. If you'll have multiple routes, for instance, you have different product packages or you'll have different uh, campaign ideas uh, on a specific product, then you can those and a quantitative um, survey will give you input about which one resonates better but it won't give you the information about how it needs to change or how it needs to be different in order to be successful. And so that's the part that you have to, that's the homework that business has to do up front. You first need to run the qualitative research which allows you to get the. These yeah this human insight that can make um, positioning or a product or communication successful. And then afterwards after you've done, you've put all the pieces together, you can then run it by customers through quantitative and see which tweak will work better.

Speaker B: That makes total sense. First uncover the insights and then if you have multiple then you can go validate uh, which one.

Speaker A: I think this is such an important piece to understand because oftentimes research is indeed associated with lots of facts and just a lengthy report that lands on your desk which is great as information but it doesn't, it's not sufficient in order to guide your strategic decisions. And this is where market research fails.

Speaker B: You spoke about uh, not doing research being actually expensive, more expensive than doing the research itself. And I wanted to ask how would you advise a marketing leader or a business leader trying to secure budget for uh, doing market research? How should they build a business case for obtaining that budget?

Speaker A: Yeah, tight budget is really um, it's a challenge for lots of companies at the moment. So it's something that we are also um, we hear it uh, in our ecosystem. The thing is that we live in a world where there's like, there's limitless possibilities in terms of how you can connect to people. I remember for instance when I started 10 years ago, uh, we were doing in home immersions. So I was going to people homes for two hours and we were talking about basically life. Um, and this was the absolute favorite part of my job because every hour would be opening up completely new world. Um now you have dozens options. You can have uh, 10 minutes digital conversations that maybe it's not even with a human but it's with an AI bot that will help you to uncover in depth things. So it's really depends on the way you set it up and like on, yeah, thinking smartly upfront and engineering for these uh, in depth insights to come out. And then it doesn't matter whether you want to do it with um, very lengthy two hours in home setup that will cost you more versus using um, what modern technology is offering as a possibility and doing, let's say more with less, um, actually meaning is not directly proportionate with budget. You can have very high budgets with very meaningless outputs and you can have very tight budgets with rather deep meaning. So meaning doesn't come from budget and it comes from the ability to break down the business challenge into this human challenge and really use this psychological sociological lens to understand what is the most humane way and efficient way at the same time. To get that in depth, um, answer that you need I think to answer the question, you can get it done with a tight budget. Yes. And it depends on the ability to put together the right journey for the right business challenge. Adapting the parameters based on the budget that is available. Mhm, mhm.

Speaker B: And let's say you're a small business, you have very little budget for doing research. However you do want to conduct research. How would you recommend that they approach, uh, this research? What should they do first? What is the recommended framework that they can take in order to extract uh, insights?

Speaker A: It always boils down to the objective that you start with because yeah, you really want to start with a very clear idea of why you're doing this research. Now if we are talking about them doing research for the general purpose of understanding the audience, I think what is important is focus not on facts, uh, but on the story. And especially for B2B market, facts are less important than building relationships. So if you have a tight budget and you want to better understand your audience, do not focus on the facts, focus on the relationships and on the opportunity to connect. Because B2B will often be limited by focusing on telling the story of the product and not of the user. So basically what you'll want to do is to find ways to be really connected with uh, um, fans, or let's say loyal users of your service or your product and be connected to them in a way that goes beyond the transactional relationship, beyond the product. You'll want to know about their job, you'll want to know about what are the actual things they struggle in their own work. What are the things they, why do they do that work in the first place? What do they want to achieve, uh, like what's their ambition and it may seem that it's unrelated to us and it may seem that we actually start very different kinds of businesses. And why would I want to understand the stories of all these people? But you do, because you want to find a red thread between all those people. And even if they work in different businesses and they have different ambitions or tensions, there will be at least one thing that is common and it goes as a puzzle. You'll be able to find a way to link then your product and your service or what you deliver with that thing that there is in common. So um, it's a fluid thing. It's not like a black and white, um, answer. It's not that you do five conversations and you're done for five years. It's almost like a constant effort or a constant um, to know who is purchasing your products, but to know them not for why they purchase your products, but to know them really as um, uh, people, as um, the persons behind the businesses that they are running or that they belong to. So yeah, in a way this um, connection to your customers should almost be an integrated part of your day to day job is made by itself because you're creating value for the entire business.

Speaker B: How can marketers or how can you tell, uh, that the research you've done is good and the insights you've collected, um, are the right ones? How can you make the difference between well done research and not so well done research?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I think it's exactly what we were just saying. Like uh, a well done research won't be just information. Uh, like the information and the facts, they will be used to back up the insight. But there will be an insight. You'll feel it like once you read it. It's not like you read and you try to understand facts you read and you'll feel um, this truth that is valid for your business, that you can relate to and that really uh, like once you read it it just completely shifts the way you've been seeing things in a way that it's like wow, how did I not see that before? But at the same time it's not that it's not like complicating and like completely like detached from your reality. Like you see that it's connected to your business, but it does put things in a completely different light because you

Speaker B: alluded to mistakes that companies can make when uh, doing research. Can we try and summarize what are the main things to look out for? So mistakes we're trying to avoid when doing market research and collecting insights.

Speaker A: I'll try and summarize it into four, um, big mistakes, some of which we touched upon already. So the first one is focusing on lots of data and facts instead of focusing on the quality of the insight. So you'll want to have not a bunch of information that you don't know what to do with. You'll want to have a very clear insight that is giving guidance on how to go further with decision making, with product, with communication and so on. The second important mistake to keep into account is we love as a business to push our story through the other businesses instead of finding a way to fit ourselves in the existing story of those businesses, because those businesses already exist with their story and what we want to do is to understand that story and to help them deliver that story better. The third one is focusing on our product as B2B, especially focusing on the product instead of focusing on the relationship. And the last one is specifically for the marketing department. And I've noticed it in so many years of uh, doing research, the marketing department are the most uneasy one to conduct conversations with the people they serve. You'll have engineers or researchers that will do it with much more ease whilst marketeers have, I don't know, somehow become so comfortable in doing things behind the scenes and working on creating stuff and on thinking the smart thing and on finding the super smart insight that will crack a whole creative campaign. But what they feel uncomfortable with is to go and have that human interaction with the people in the first place. And I think this is so essential because this is also part of what marketeers are. They are those that make the connection with the audience and so being able to interact with them and just drop your big responsibility of creating and delivering an excellent result for one hour, put it aside and just go with a complete open mind and open heart and listen. That will bring an absolute immense source of richness.

Speaker B: The fourth mistake, to be fair, it's quite surprising and yeah, definitely good reminder as a marketing in person, as a market marketeer, stay connected to your audience and you're supposed to be their voice within your company. Maybe you hear it a lot these days, but I do want to ask how AI is changing market research and if uh, AI is making market uh, research more accessible in any way. What do you think?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I think AI is the new reality, is the new player in the game and it's made so many things more accessible for companies and um, for clients. And so for me I see AI bringing a great value in having more access to information. At the same time it Also does a great job at the final piece, which is extracting the output or creating output. But there's a middle piece which is about interpretation, human interpretation. And so the competitive advantage is not who has more data, it's who understands the data better, who is able to translate that into a meaningful strategic direction. And so because we are a business of humans serving another business of humans, there's this human relationship and I think this, um, sense of being, it's the thing that should not be outsourced to AI. You cannot outsource your feelings. You cannot outsource your ability to read the room. You cannot outsource the ability to feel the people. You can rely on AI to facilitate input and output, but the ability to empathize with those that you serve has, uh, to stay in your own hands. There's also a quote that I heard recently which is the fact that growth doesn't happen to you, it happens through you. And if you want, it's the same for a business. Growth doesn't happen to a business, growth happens through a business. And so this ability to empathize cannot be outsourced.

Speaker B: Mhm. So do use AI, but use it in the right places.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. Use AI as much as possible. I mean, for me, uh, it's like an assistant. It's like my assistant. I use it to, um, get data to, to see what's available. I. Yeah, you can use it for lots of things, but it's really you that is typing and asking AI to do things. It's helping us to, to create, but it's not becoming the creator.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. And I, I know there's probably a deeper conversation to be had on AI, but it's good to know that you can use it. However, do use it in the places where it mostly makes sense and keep the human in the loop to make the, the decisions. Okay. This is relevant.

Speaker A: This is that, um, especially now. Right. That you'll have everyone intuitively go and use more of AI. I think m. Um, if you want to stand out, you'll stand out exactly for that reason. Because you're able to bring your human emotion or your human interpretation or your human feeling in the game.

Speaker B: If there was one final piece of advice you would give to a company, let's say MID company or a small company, that hasn't really run market research in a systematic or organized way in the past, but they do want to get into the habit of doing that, what would be that advice?

Speaker A: If there is one Advice I would start with look at market research as your opportunity to bring more value and to improve and to excel your business. Because of this ability to better understand those that you're serving and to understand those that you're serving, it can be as easy as a human to human conversation. Forget the business, forget the product, forget the service. Start with chats, little chats here and there. Have everyone in your company do that because it's really the key to having your team stay connected to what is being built. Instead of going into these uh, systems and processes and operations and forgetting why you started in the first place, which is because you wanted to serve a group of people. So really find ways to make these interactions and these immersions, um, light hearted habit that is part of the culture. And I really want to even say it's not even focusing on the word research because I feel how the word research can feel difficult or can feel like, oh my God, what to do now?

Speaker B: Exactly. Like a big activity.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just see it to start with as these immersive opportunities to have a conversation or to interact on a human base, um, with those that you are selling your products and your services to. It doesn't have to be scary, it doesn't have to be super complex. It's uh, it's humane. It's what we are born to do in a way and, but it's also what we forget to do at work sometimes because we get dragged into again operations and systems and you know, productivity and so on, which is great. But don't lose that um, human ability that is so essential. And it's also what will really, it's what will make the difference between a mediocre business and a super successful business.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Going back to the roots and understanding why you serve and fitting into their story. Thank you so much. Aurelia. This has been super insightful. I hope for the audience as well. And I do hope people listening in um, are more motivated and empowered to doing research, even starting with small steps. Not necessarily thinking of this as a big overhaul project that they need to run. Thank you so much for being here. Absolutely. A pleasure to speak to you.

Speaker A: Pleasure. Likewise. And yeah, uh, I hope indeed that they will take out something useful.

Speaker B: It.