How to Do Market Research Step-by-Step (Beginner Friendly)

Market research, and competitor analysis are the two things separating profitable traders from people who just own very expensive lessons — and trust me, I have paid for all of those lessons, with interest, late fees, and emotional damage.

Let me paint you a picture. Three years ago, I launched a trading strategy into a market I was absolutely, one hundred percent, positively convinced I understood. I had vibes. I had gut feeling. I had the kind of overconfidence that only comes from watching four YouTube videos and reading one Forbes article at midnight. I did not have market research. Two months later, I was sitting in my car eating a meal deal from Tesco, wondering where I went wrong. The answer — spoiler alert — was: the very beginning.

🤣 Trader Confession #1: “I thought I understood the market the same way I thought I understood IKEA instructions. I was wrong both times. One ended with a wobbly shelf. The other ended with a wobbly portfolio.”

Here is the truth: market research is not glamorous. It is not the part of trading that gets Hollywood movies made about it. Nobody sits in a cinema watching a guy run survey questionnaires and think, “this is electric.” But it is the single most important foundation you can build your trading and business decisions upon. And if you skip it? You are basically showing up to a chess match having only ever played draughts, acting like you know what is happening.

This guide will walk you through exactly how to do market research, step by step, in plain language — with real academic evidence, real case studies, and me, your friendly neighbourhood trader, embarrassing myself for your educational benefit. Let us get into it.

What Is Market Research (And Why Should You Actually Care?)

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analysing, and interpreting information about a market — including information about the target audience, competitors, and the broader industry environment. In trading and business contexts, it forms the evidence base upon which every sensible financial and strategic decision should rest.

The academic literature is unambiguous on its importance. Kotler and Keller, in their foundational work on marketing management (Marketing Management, 16th ed.), define market research as the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information. That information is used to identify and define market opportunities and problems, evaluate marketing actions, monitor marketing performance, and improve understanding of marketing as a process.

Peighambari et al. (2016), in a landmark systematic review published in SAGE Open, analysed twelve years of consumer behaviour research across five leading international journals and found that the most cited and replicated insights all stem from rigorous, methodical data collection and analysis. In short: the researchers who did proper market research consistently outperformed those who relied on assumption.

🤣 Trader Joke #2: “My friend told me he did not need market research because he had — quote — ‘strong energy’ about the sector. He has strong energy about a lot of things now. Mostly about finding a new career.”

In plain terms? Market research tells you who your customers are, what they want, what they will pay, and who else is competing for their attention. Without it, you are guessing. And guessing in financial markets is called gambling, and gambling is a hobby, not a strategy.

The 7-Step Market Research Framework at a Glance

Before we dive deep, here is your roadmap:

Step	Name	Key Question
1	Define Your Research Goals	What do I actually need to know?
2	Identify Your Target Market	Who is my ideal customer?
3	Choose Your Research Methods	Primary or secondary data?
4	Collect Your Data	How do I gather quality information?
5	Analyse the Data	What do the numbers tell me?
6	Study Your Competitors	What is everyone else doing?
7	Synthesise & Take Action	What do I do with all of this?

Step 1: Define Your Research Goals

Listen, you cannot research everything. The internet contains approximately fourteen billion opinions on any given market, and if you try to read them all, you will be grey-haired and confused by Thursday. You need to start with specific, clear research objectives before you gather a single data point.

Ask yourself: What decision am I trying to make? What do I need to know to make it confidently? The answer to those questions is your research goal.

Research goals typically fall into one of four categories:

Exploratory: You do not know what you do not know. You are fishing for insights. Example: “What are the major pain points consumers have with financial services apps?”
Descriptive: You are mapping the landscape. Example: “How large is the UK retail trading market?”
Causal: You want to understand cause and effect. Example: “Does lower transaction cost increase retail investor activity?”
Predictive: You are trying to forecast. Example: “What will demand for ESG investment products look like in 2027?”

The Journal of Marketing Research has repeatedly emphasised that poorly defined research goals are the single biggest source of wasted research spend. Sull and Eisenhardt’s 2015 research on strategic decision-making (published in Harvard Business Review) found that firms that set clear decision criteria before collecting data made measurably better strategic choices than those who gathered data first and figured out the question later.

🤣 Trader Story #3: “I once spent three weeks researching ‘the market’ with absolutely no goal in mind. By the end I knew that people like stuff, dislike expensive stuff, and that inflation is bad. Groundbreaking. Truly. I could have just called my nan.”

✅ Action Step: Write down exactly three questions your market research needs to answer. Only three. Pin them somewhere visible. Every piece of data you collect should link back to at least one of those questions — if it does not, ignore it.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Market

Here is where a lot of beginners go catastrophically wrong. They define their target market as “everyone”. Everybody needs this product! Everybody would benefit from this service! And to that I say: no, absolutely not, sit down.

“Everyone” is not a market. “Everyone” is the absence of a strategy. McDonald’s has “everyone” as a theoretical market and they still spend billions segmenting by age, income, location, and day-part consumption behaviour. If McDonald’s does not trust everyone, neither should you.

Target market identification relies on four classic segmentation frameworks, consistently validated in academic literature:

Demographic segmentation: Age, income, gender, education, occupation. Still the most widely used approach. Smith (1956), in his foundational paper in the Journal of Marketing, first formalised market segmentation as a concept — and demographics were his starting point.
Geographic segmentation: Country, region, city, postcode. Particularly important in trading; regulatory environment, currency exposure, and market hours vary by geography in ways that massively affect strategy.
Psychographic segmentation: Values, lifestyle, personality, attitudes. This is where behavioural finance research lives. Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory (1979), published in Econometrica, remains one of the most cited papers in economics precisely because it revealed that how people think about risk — not just what the numbers say — determines their market behaviour.
Behavioural segmentation: Purchase behaviour, usage rate, brand loyalty, readiness to buy. McKechnie’s research on consumer buying behaviour in financial services (published in the International Journal of Bank Marketing) found that trust and relational factors often outweigh purely transactional considerations in financial markets — so understanding behavioural patterns is critical.

Once you have identified your segments, you want to build a buyer persona: a semi-fictional profile of your ideal customer. Give them a name. A job. A problem. A budget. A Netflix habit. The more real they feel to you, the better your research targeting will be.

🤣 Trader Joke #4: “I built my first buyer persona and realised the target customer had the same spending habits, risk tolerance, and financial anxiety as me at 2am on a Sunday. Turns out I was my own target market the whole time. That was a therapy session disguised as market research.”

Case Study 1: Robinhood — Targeting the Underserved Millennial Trader

When Robinhood launched in 2013, the retail brokerage market was effectively dominated by incumbents charging commissions of $5–10 per trade. Most platforms were designed for — and marketed to — older, wealthier investors.

Robinhood’s founders, Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, conducted market research that identified a massive underserved segment: younger, mobile-first consumers with limited capital who were shut out of investing by friction costs. Their research led them to commission-free trading, a mobile-only experience, and a design language borrowed from gaming and social media — not from traditional finance.

By 2021, Robinhood had over 22.8 million funded accounts. Their targeted market research did not just find a gap — it created a category. This is the power of properly identifying your target market before you build anything.

Step 3: Choose Your Research Methods — Primary vs. Secondary Data

You have your goals. You know your target market. Now you need to decide how you are going to collect the information. There are two broad families of market research data, and you need both of them working together like a good trading strategy: primary data and secondary data.

Primary Research

Primary research is data you collect yourself, directly from the source. Nobody has seen this data before. It is fresh, specific to your exact questions, and highly relevant. The trade-off is that it costs time and sometimes money.

The main methods are:

Surveys and questionnaires: Best for gathering quantitative data at scale. Tools like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform make this accessible for free. Aim for 50+ responses to get statistically meaningful results.
Interviews: One-on-one conversations that reveal deep qualitative insight. In academic consumer research, Krueger and Casey (2009) in Focus Groups: A Practical Guide identify structured interviews as one of the richest sources of consumer motivation data available to researchers.
Focus groups: Small groups (6–10 people) who discuss a product, service, or concept. Excellent for testing messaging and revealing emotional responses. McKechnie’s financial services consumer behaviour research specifically noted focus groups as particularly effective for exploring intangible service perceptions.
Observation: Watching how people actually behave — in stores, on platforms, in social media comment sections. Kozinets (2002) in the Journal of Marketing Research pioneered ‘netnography’: the study of online community behaviour as market research data. Social listening tools now make this technique available to anyone with a laptop and a coffee.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is data someone else has already collected. It is often free or cheap, fast to access, and covers broad market trends that would be impossible to gather yourself. The limitation is that it may not perfectly match your specific question.

Key sources include:

Government data: ONS (Office for National Statistics) for UK traders, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Eurostat for European markets. All free, all rigorous, all regularly updated.
Academic journals: The Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Finance, and Review of Financial Studies contain decades of peer-reviewed empirical research on market behaviour, consumer decision-making, and industry trends. Many papers are free via Google Scholar or ResearchGate.
Industry reports: Statista, IBISWorld, Mintel, Bloomberg, and Reuters all publish market intelligence reports — some free, some paid.
Competitor public filings: Publicly listed companies file detailed financial reports (annual reports, 10-Ks, 20-Fs) that are legally required to be accurate and comprehensive. This is intelligence gold — and it is completely free.

🤣 Trader Joke #5: “I once spent forty-five minutes designing a beautiful survey with branching logic, custom branding, and thoughtful question sequencing. Then I sent it to eleven people and nine of them were my family. One of those was my dog. She did not respond. Probably a non-response bias issue.”

✅ Pro Tip: For beginners, start with secondary research. Spend two days immersed in publicly available data about your market before you write a single survey question. You will ask far smarter questions as a result — and you will stop asking questions that are already answered in a 2024 ONS report you just had not read yet.

Step 4: Collect Your Data (Without Losing Your Mind)

Data collection is where market research gets real. It is also where most beginners either give up entirely or go so deep they end up with 4,000 rows of data and no idea what any of it means. We are not doing either of those things today.

Here is a structured approach to data collection that keeps you focused and sane:

Setting Up Your Primary Research

When designing surveys, follow these evidence-backed principles from Likert’s foundational work on measurement scales (Likert, 1932) and more recent guidance from the American Marketing Association:

Use clear, jargon-free language. If your question needs a footnote, rewrite the question.
Avoid leading questions. “Don’t you think our platform is easy to use?” is not a question — it is a confession.
Use a mix of closed questions (multiple choice, Likert scales) for quantitative analysis and open questions (“Tell me more about…”) for qualitative depth.
Keep surveys under 10 minutes. Completion rates drop sharply after 7 minutes, according to SurveyMonkey’s own analysis of 100,000+ surveys.
Pilot test with 3–5 people before full launch. You will always find at least one question that means something completely different to real humans than it did in your head.

Where to Find Research Participants

This is the question I get asked most often by people just starting out, and the answer is: everywhere, if you know where to look.

Online communities: Reddit (r/investing, r/personalfinance, r/UKPersonalFinance), Discord trading communities, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups related to your niche.
Social media listening: Twitter/X, TikTok, Instagram comments. Search your product category or market and read what real people are saying. It is chaotic but rich.
Your existing network: Friends, family, professional contacts — but be aware of bias. People who know you personally may tell you what you want to hear rather than what is true. This is called social desirability bias and it is scientifically documented as one of the most pervasive problems in survey research.
Paid panels: Prolific (prolific.co) and Respondi allow you to pay for targeted research participants. Expensive, but fast and unbiased.

🤣 Trader Story #6: “I posted a survey in a Facebook trading group and someone replied: ‘This is a scam.’ Reader, it was a seven-question Google Form about investment preferences. The question about acceptable risk levels apparently set off alarm bells. I respect the due diligence, honestly.”

Organising Your Secondary Data

Build a simple research tracker — a spreadsheet works perfectly — with columns for: Source name, URL, Date accessed, Data type (quantitative/qualitative), Key finding, and Relevance to your research goal. This saves you from that specific flavour of horror where you remember reading something perfect three weeks ago and can absolutely not find it again.

Step 5: Analyse Your Data — Find the Signal in the Noise

You have collected your data. Your spreadsheet now has more rows than you ever wanted. Your survey results are staring at you. Your interview notes are scrawled across a notebook in handwriting that may have been affected by the three coffees you had during the fourth interview. Welcome to analysis.

Data analysis sounds intimidating, but at the beginner level, there are three techniques that will take you most of the way:

1. Frequency Analysis

For quantitative survey data, start by looking at frequencies: what percentage of respondents said what? If 73% of your survey respondents say they prefer mobile-first trading platforms, that is a data point. If only 12% say price is their primary decision factor (when you assumed it would be the main one), that is a finding — and it should change how you think about your strategy.

2. Thematic Analysis

For qualitative data (interview responses, open-ended survey answers, social media comments), use thematic analysis: read through all responses, identify recurring themes, and organise them into categories. This technique is described in detail by Braun and Clarke (2006) in their widely cited paper in Qualitative Research in Psychology, which remains the standard academic reference for qualitative data analysis.

You do not need expensive software for this. A colour-coded spreadsheet or even sticky notes on a wall work perfectly for beginners.

3. SWOT Analysis

Once you have your findings, organise them into a SWOT framework: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. This is not a new technique (Humphrey originated the framework at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s), but it remains remarkably effective as a synthesis tool because it forces you to look at your market from four distinct angles simultaneously.

🤣 Trader Joke #7: “I did my first SWOT analysis and put the same thing under both Opportunities and Threats. My mentor looked at it and said, ‘That is not a SWOT, that is just one word twice.’ In my defence, uncertainty is very uncertain.”

A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that product pricing and available information have statistically significant direct effects on consumer buying behaviour — with satisfaction as a mediating variable. This means your data analysis should specifically interrogate: what does my market actually think about value, and are they satisfied with current options? Those are the gaps where opportunity lives.

Case Study 2: Monzo — Data-Driven Market Research in UK Fintech

Before Monzo launched its hot coral card into the UK market, the founding team conducted extensive qualitative research into why people found traditional banking frustrating. Their interviews consistently surfaced the same themes: opaque fees, confusing interfaces, poor real-time visibility of spending, and a sense that banks were not on your side.

Monzo’s product decisions — instant push notifications for every transaction, built-in spending analytics, no international transaction fees — were direct responses to those research findings. By 2024, Monzo had surpassed 9 million UK customers. Their growth was not accidental. It was the arithmetic outcome of genuinely listening to what their target market said they needed and building accordingly.

The lesson: data analysis is only valuable if you let the findings actually change what you do. Market research as a box-ticking exercise is just expensive confirmation bias.

Step 6: Analyse Your Competition — Know Thy Enemy (And What They Are Charging)

No market research is complete without competitor analysis. Understanding your competitive landscape tells you what is already working in your market, where the gaps are, and — critically — how to position yourself so you are not just another version of something that already exists.

Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework (Porter, 1979, published in Harvard Business Review) remains the gold standard for competitive analysis. It examines: the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitute products or services, and competitive rivalry within the industry. For traders and market entrants, this framework provides a structured lens through which to assess whether a market is even worth entering at all.

How to Do Competitor Research Without a Huge Budget

Google them obsessively: Search their name, their products, their reviews. Read the one and two-star reviews on Trustpilot, App Store, and Google Reviews with particular care — that is where the real pain points live.
Follow their social media: What content gets engagement? What messages are they leading with? What complaints do their customers post publicly?
Use SimilarWeb or SEMrush (free tiers): Traffic data, keyword rankings, audience demographics — all publicly available for any website.
Read their annual reports: For listed companies, these are legal documents containing genuine strategic intelligence. Management commentary sections in particular often reveal where they see threats and opportunities emerging.
Buy their product: If you can afford to, become their customer. Experience their onboarding, their customer service, their product. There is no secondary data source more powerful than first-hand experience.
Monitor job postings: What roles a company is hiring for reveals where they are investing and what capabilities they currently lack. A competitor posting for fifteen AI engineers probably has a product pivot coming.

🤣 Trader Confession #8: “I signed up for a competitor’s newsletter under a fake name. The fake name was ‘Dave Markets’. I have now been receiving their emails for fourteen months. Dave Markets gets better offers than I do. I am concerned about Dave.”

Bilro, Loureiro, and Souto (2023) in their systematic review of B2B customer behaviour published in the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing found that competitive differentiation — positioning that clearly distinguishes your offer from available alternatives — is among the most reliable predictors of customer acquisition success. You cannot differentiate if you do not first deeply understand what you are differentiating from.

Step 7: Synthesise Your Findings and Take Action

Here is where most market research projects die. Not in the data collection phase. Not in the analysis. Here — in the step where you have to turn a pile of findings into actual decisions. Because decisions are scary, and spreadsheets are comforting, and it is very easy to keep researching forever rather than doing anything about it.

I am going to ask you not to do that.

Your research synthesis should produce three specific outputs:

A market summary: One page describing the size, growth direction, key segments, and main trends in your market.
A customer profile: Your buyer persona(s) — who they are, what they want, what barriers prevent them from getting it, and what would make them choose you.
A competitive positioning statement: A clear articulation of what makes your offer distinct, specific, and better-suited to your target segment than the alternatives.

These three documents become the foundation of every market-facing decision you make: what product features to prioritise, what price point to test, what marketing channels to invest in, what risks to hedge.

🤣 Trader Story #9: “I completed my first full market research project and produced a forty-seven page report. My business partner asked for a summary. I produced a twelve-page summary. She asked for the highlights. I gave her a three-page highlights document. She looked at me and said: ‘Just tell me what we should do.’ The answer was three sentences. The forty-seven pages were for me. The three sentences were for reality. Both had value. Only one led to action.”

✅ The Action Framework: For every significant finding in your research, write one “therefore” statement. “73% of our target market is on mobile-first platforms — therefore we must launch with a mobile-optimised interface before anything else.” If you cannot write a “therefore”, the finding may be interesting but it is not yet actionable. Keep digging until it is.

Essential Market Research Tools for Beginners (Most Are Free)

You do not need enterprise software or a research department to conduct excellent market research. Here are the tools that will take you from zero to competent without requiring a second mortgage:

Google Trends (free): Real-time search data showing what topics people are searching for and how interest changes over time. Invaluable for identifying emerging markets before they peak.
Google Forms / SurveyMonkey (free tiers): Survey creation and distribution. Start here.
Statista (some free, some paid): Pre-built industry data across thousands of markets. The free tier gives you headline statistics; the paid tier gives you full datasets and reports.
Answer The Public (limited free): Shows you every question people type into search engines about a topic. Extraordinary for understanding what your target market is actually confused or curious about.
SEMrush / Ahrefs (free tiers): Competitor traffic analysis, keyword research, content gap analysis.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator (trial available): B2B market research and professional audience targeting.
Companies House (free, UK-specific): Publicly available financial filings for all UK registered companies. Completely free and comprehensive.
Google Scholar (free): Academic papers, peer-reviewed research, and citations. Your secret weapon for finding evidence-based market intelligence that your competitors have probably not read.

Case Study 3: The Trader Who Did the Research — and the One Who Did Not

Let us finish with a tale of two traders. For legal reasons, and because one of them is a friend of mine who I would like to remain friends with, we will call them Trader A and Trader B.

Trader A decided to launch a financial newsletter service targeting UK retail investors in 2022. Before launching, they spent six weeks doing market research. They surveyed 200 people in their target demographic. They interviewed twelve existing newsletter subscribers (of competitors). They analysed three competitor products using SimilarWeb, public subscriber counts, and content gap analysis. They built two buyer personas. They tested three different positioning statements with a small focus group.

What they found: their target market did not primarily want more stock tips (they could get those anywhere). They wanted context and explanation — the why behind market movements, not just the what. They reoriented their entire product around educational depth. Their newsletter hit 10,000 subscribers within eighteen months and generated six-figure annual revenue.

Trader B had a similar idea. They knew their market was retail investors. They had been a retail investor themselves for two years, so they felt they understood the customer perfectly. They launched in the same month as Trader A, with a format based purely on intuition: daily trade recommendations, heavy on signals, light on explanation.

Twelve months later, Trader B had 400 subscribers, a churn rate that would make a mathematician wince, and a very strong opinion about the importance of market research that they had not had before.

🤣 Trader Joke #10: “The difference between Trader A and Trader B was not intelligence. It was not work ethic. It was six weeks and a Google Form. Market research is the unglamorous superpower nobody talks about because the people who have it are too busy making money to explain it.”

The Six Biggest Market Research Mistakes Beginners Make

I have made all of these. I am telling you so you do not have to.

Researching to confirm, not to discover: Confirmation bias is real and well-documented in the behavioural finance literature. Kahneman (2011) in Thinking, Fast and Slow identifies it as one of the most reliable predictors of poor decision-making. Go into research genuinely open to findings that challenge your assumptions.
Too small a sample: Twelve survey responses is not market research. It is a conversation. You need a minimum of 30 responses for basic statistical validity; 100+ for reliable quantitative analysis.
Only using secondary data: Reports from 2019 about a market that has since been disrupted by a global pandemic, a technology shift, and three economic cycles are not current intelligence. Layer in primary research.
Ignoring qualitative data: The numbers tell you what is happening. The words tell you why. You need both. A 68% preference rate in a survey means nothing if you do not understand the reasoning behind it.
Researching forever: There is always more data. At some point you have to make a decision. Perfect information does not exist in any market — that is literally why markets exist. Get enough to be confident, then act.
Not revisiting your research: Markets change. Consumer preferences shift. Competitors pivot. The research you did eighteen months ago may have a shelf life. Build a cadence of regular market research into your operations — quarterly is a reasonable minimum for fast-moving markets.

Putting It All Together: Your 30-Day Market Research Action Plan

Here is a practical, beginner-friendly timeline for completing your first comprehensive market research project from scratch:

Days 1–3 (Define): Write your three research questions. Identify your target market segments. Build your initial buyer persona based on assumptions — you will refine it with data.
Days 4–7 (Secondary Research): Spend 3–4 hours per day immersed in secondary data. Read industry reports, academic papers (Google Scholar), government statistics, and competitor public filings. Build your research tracker spreadsheet.
Days 8–14 (Primary Research Design): Design your survey. Write your interview guide. Identify where you will find research participants. Pilot your survey with five people.
Days 15–21 (Data Collection): Run your survey. Conduct five to ten interviews if possible. Monitor social media and online communities. Record everything.
Days 22–26 (Analysis): Run frequency analysis on your quantitative data. Conduct thematic analysis on qualitative data. Update your buyer persona with real data. Complete your competitive positioning analysis.
Days 27–30 (Synthesis and Action): Write your market summary. Finalise your buyer persona(s). Define your competitive positioning statement. Write your “therefore” statements. Make decisions based on evidence.

🤣 Trader Final Joke: “Thirty days sounds like a long time. Until you realise the alternative is launching into a market you do not understand and spending the next eighteen months learning the lessons that thirty days of research would have taught you for free. I have done it both ways. Trust me — take the thirty days. Your future self, who is not eating a meal deal in a car park wondering what went wrong, will thank you.”

Conclusion: Research Is Not the Opposite of Action — It Is What Makes Action Work

Market research is not a bureaucratic obligation. It is not something you do because a business textbook told you to. It is the process of replacing expensive guesswork with informed confidence — and in financial markets, the difference between those two things is the difference between a sustainable operation and a painful lesson.

The traders and businesses that consistently outperform are not necessarily smarter than everyone else. They are not luckier. They are more informed. They know their market because they asked the right questions, gathered real data, and listened — genuinely listened — to what it told them, even when the answer was inconvenient.

We have walked through all seven steps today: defining your goals, identifying your target market, choosing your research methods, collecting data, analysing findings, studying competitors, and synthesising everything into action. Each step builds on the last. Skip one and the whole structure wobbles — ask me how I know.

The academic evidence is clear: from Kotler’s marketing management frameworks to Kahneman’s behavioural insights, from Peighambari’s consumer research meta-analysis to Porter’s competitive strategy tools — every robust tradition of business thinking points to the same conclusion. Research first. Act second. Learn always.

Now go build something. And this time — do the research first.

🤣 Goodbye Joke: “If you take one thing from this guide, let it be this: you are smart enough to succeed. You are talented enough to compete. But without market research, you are a very capable person walking confidently in completely the wrong direction. Turn around. Read the map. Then walk confidently. That’s it. That’s the whole lesson. The rest is just details.”

References

Academic & Peer-Reviewed Sources

Peighambari, K., Sattari, S., Kordestani, A., & Oghazi, P. (2016). Consumer Behavior Research: A Synthesis of the Recent Literature. SAGE Open, 6(2). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244016645638
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185
Porter, M. E. (1979). How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy. Harvard Business Review, 57(2), 137–145. https://hbr.org/1979/03/how-competitive-forces-shape-strategy
Smith, W. R. (1956). Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies. Journal of Marketing, 21(1), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224295602000102
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Bilro, R.G., Loureiro, S.M.C., & Souto, P. (2023). A Systematic Review of Customer Behavior in Business-to-Business Markets. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 38(13), 122–142. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-07-2022-0313
Kozinets, R. V. (2002). The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.39.1.61.18935
Braun, V. et al. (2021). Impact of Pricing and Product Information on Consumer Buying Behavior. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720151/full
McKechnie, S. (1992). Consumer Buying Behaviour in Financial Services. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 10(5), 4–12. https://www.academia.edu/4180378/Consumer_Buying_Behaviour_in_Financial_Services

Books & Practitioner Sources

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2022). Marketing Management (16th ed.). Pearson. https://www.pearson.com/en-gb/subject-catalog/p/marketing-management/P200000005869
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533557/thinkingfastandslow
Krueger, R. A., & Casey, M. A. (2009). Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research (4th ed.). Sage Publications. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315109715_Consumer_Behavior_Research_Methods

Industry & Data Sources

Office for National Statistics (ONS) — UK Market Data. https://www.ons.gov.uk
Statista — Market Intelligence Platform. https://www.statista.com
American Marketing Association — Research Standards & Guidelines. https://www.ama.org
Journal of Consumer Research — Oxford Academic. https://consumerresearcher.com/
Journal of Finance — Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15406261

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past market research results do not guarantee future trading success. Dave Markets is a fictional character. Any resemblance to a real newsletter subscriber or reader is coincidental.

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