As a CEO, you wear many hats. One of the most prominent being the strategic decision-maker, piloting your company in new directions.

You make your high-impact decisions after having scrupulously combed over all the data, insight, analysis, and risks associated with each decision. 

More often than not, that involves market research.

So, what are some important things every CEO should know about market research? Let’s take a look.

1. Market Research Shows You the Competitive Landscape

As a CEO, knowing the current state of your competition, and the state of the market, in general, is essential. 

Carefully curated market research gives insightful glimpses into both the competitive landscape, as well as the overall state of the market. This can help paint the kind of big-picture overview that can breed innovative ideas for market advancement. It can also point out weak points in your competitor’s approach, which you can leverage to steal their market share.

Your best bet at gaining this type of insight is to conduct a competitive analysis, defined by Entrepreneur as “Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.”

2. Market Research Shows Critical Insight About Your Customer

Traditionally, we thought of market research as a few charts and graphs showing the demographics of your customers.

While it does uncover basic information about your customer, modern methods of market research can help answer impactful questions such as: What are customers most likely to buy? What product attributes are best marketed for each customer segment? What combination of products will drive the most sales?

That’s only part of it. While questions about predictive behavior are important, market research uncovers specific data relative to your existing customers. This information can help you optimize processes, tweak strategies, and implement new campaigns, which is especially critical for brands in volatile industries. In fact, according to a study from Research Now and Lawless Research, a myriad of tech companies reported that internal data was the most useful in helping them maintain their competitive edge. They’re responses pointed to three standout internal data sources: customer profiles (61%); sales or transactions (55%); and customer segments (52%).

3. Market Research is Crucial for Growth

This one is a no-brainer. If a CEO wants to scale their organization, market research is the tool that will give them the information they need to do so. It was designed to pinpoint business opportunities, track the competition, optimize resources, and minimize risk.

Plus, with the help of AI, modern-day market research reporting is capable of answering critical questions to help CEOs make the optimal decision in regards to growing their enterprise.

4. Market Research Allows You to Stay Relevant

Relevancy is without a doubt a major factor in helping brands stay competitive.

Today’s norms and trends dictate the success of a company, plain and simple. Market research allows you to discover the ever-changing preferences and values of the consumer market so you can align your mission with them.

In fact, most modern market research platforms report data in real-time. Therefore, you have continual access to research data and analysis that can help you tailor current initiatives and campaigns to optimize them. These tech advancements in research have grown the market research industry to an astounding 45.8 billion dollar global revenue stream, which continually rows one percent each year.

5. You’ll Die Without Market Research

Okay, so that’s a tad dramatic, but saying that a company can die without market research isn’t all that far off. It’s a worst-case scenario.

Especially because we all saw what happened to giant brands like Blockbuster and Circuit City. Or even Nokia, who was once a market giant, but failed in their market predictions and are barely remembered by customers today. Let’s learn from their failures and conduct adequate market research to stay relevant.