3 Ways a Luxury Jewelry Brand Can Gather Market Research

Feature Friday: 3 Ways a Luxury Jewelry Brand Can Gather Market Research

Guest Blog by Michelle Adorjan Chila

We all want our marketing messages to shine bright like a diamond. But sometimes (to our chagrin), the hook isn’t always a hit. As a marketer, it’s fair to say that I’m always interested in how to best communicate the right messages to the perfectly targeted audience. And whether that audience is defined as future consumers, current clients, or reaching our business-to-business partners – I’ve learned that good communication is less about my brands’ message, and more about understanding my audience.

In other words, I need to know what’s going to move them.

The key to getting to that point of understanding, as Stephen R. Covey would say is, “seek first to understand and then to be understood”. Because once we know what moves people, we can find ways to get that emotion or action that we’re looking to create.

Specifically at a luxury jewelry company, we have at least three tools in our arsenal to help gather research and information from our distinct audience groups in ways that add value to our brand knowledge, and help us maintain a prestige relationship with our audience.

Research from General Consumers

via Proprietary Research

This is when we take the pulse of our brand from a representative sample of likely purchasers, and see where we stand. Questions like: What’s our awareness level, next to those of our neighbors? What’s our affinity level? Intent to purchase? And so on.

For this sort of benchmarking information, we prefer using independent third-party research vendors to conduct proprietary research.

With this information in hand, we leverage this intelligence for directional positioning and use the benchmarks to gauge progress.

Research from Advocate Groups

via Social Media

This is when we look to our fan base – the passionate group of people who know and love Tacori – to help us answer “why”? And what more can we do to deepen this relationship?

For research questions like this, we love utilizing Social Media. It could be as simple as a Poll on Facebook (which is a topic of recent controversy) asking them their favorite Diamond Shape, or asking their preference for which Advertising image should be our newest Cover photo. Or, it could be a link to a longer form survey to gather more in-depth answers.

In many ways, I see every single post, tweet, pin and photo — and every reaction (or non-reaction) – as a form of micro-research that tells us what our advocate group likes (or doesn’t). And every bit of micro-research can then be instantly optimized and re-tested, which is what makes Social Media perhaps the most exciting form of real-time research available to marketers.

Research from Business-to-Business Clients

via Survey Monkey

Specific to our distribution network, our actual clients (the ones who pay us directly for our products) are our retail business partners. So even though most of our marketing messages go to the end-consumer to tout the beauty and quality of our designs, our truest communication must be filtered through our business partners.

And they, understandably, have very different needs and motivations than the aforementioned consumer groups; and perhaps most saliently, they are also a “hidden” group, that isn’t necessarily seen by the end consumer until their point of purchase.

Because this audience group is not “public”, we rule out Social Media as a place to field research (micro or otherwise); and because the sample size is not representative, we also rule out major benchmarking surveys.

For this particular group, we prefer to create personalized surveys and questionnaires, primarily through services like Survey Monkey and the like.

It’s quick, efficient, and allows us to ask questions about services, products, concepts and get immediate responses. So even as we’re learning what motivates this group, we’re inherently adding value to their experience by tailoring their feedback notes into our next messages.

Regardless of method, better understanding the audience you’re trying to reach will make your message sparkle that much more brightly.

These three research tools are just a few of what we’ve used in the past. What other research methods would you recommend? Let us know in the comments.