How to Survive—And Even Thrive—During A Recession with Market Research

It’s no longer a matter of if a recession will happen but when.

And while the very idea of a recession can send a shiver up the spine of brands and consumers alike, macroeconomic events offer a potential opportunity for businesses of all sizes to lean in.

Consumer thoughts, attitudes, expectations, and beliefs about brands and categories impact how they behave—what they do or do not buy. With less money going around during a recession, the behavior you’ve come to expect from consumers will change. That includes their perceptions and relationship with your brand.

Brands that don’t move to keep up with consumer change run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Surviving a recession isn’t just about keeping your head above water, after all. To make it through a difficult economic period, you still need to drive growth. Just because things are changing and there are hard times doesn’t mean you can’t come out of it ahead. Instead, it’s time to consider the innovation and messaging opportunities you can take advantage of by surveying your target consumers.

To understand how you can keep up with behavior change, double down on market research.

Understanding Shifting Consumer Behaviors

One common misconception during a recession is that consumers spend less. That’s not always true—after all, people have needs. They may, however, become choosier in what they do buy. It’s necessary to know what choices and trade-offs consumers will make and how that may change their relationship with your brand.

For example, your product or service may become a treat instead of a regular purchase, changing the consumer’s experience with your brand. That may lead to less volume, but it could ultimately strengthen your brand stature.

Or the attitude towards an entire industry may change. Take, for example, the shift that happens when gas prices get high. Consumers don’t just feel the pinch at the pump. They now need something new: a higher mileage car, so they don’t have to fill up as often. In the past, that wasn’t necessarily a big priority for consumers. As fuel grew increasingly expensive, electric cars came into demand.

For a more in-depth guide to consumer behavior change, download the free ebook: The Consumer Evolution and How To Make Sense of Behavior Change.

The Research You Must Conduct During A Recession

As people change their behavior during economic strain, you first need to understand pricing. Rising costs are a significant concern for consumers, so research to understand if you are priced appropriately. This research will help you know if your value proposition is still relevant too.

Next, running usage and attitude studies (U&A) with your target consumers is a good idea. This research will help you understand how they feel about your product and how they use it, especially during a changing economic climate. That will help you understand your brand and product line’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Study brand awareness to know how well your brand is doing, especially in relation to your competitors. Brand awareness studies will help you measure how well your efforts align with consumers and if you are achieving relevance.

Finally, don’t forget to do qualitative research too. The first rule of research is never to ask for something you can observe, like purchase behavior data. Using qualitative research, you can uncover the why behind those behavior changes you may see in your data by interacting directly with your consumers. Maybe the price is too high, or the amount of product is no longer worth the price. Understanding what goes on behind the scenes is critical for brands that want to keep up with consumers.

Staying Relevant through Innovation

Even if brands can’t drive growth during a low economic period, it’s vitally important to keep your brand relevant or risk being forgotten. To stay relevant, brands may need to pivot and innovate their product offerings. Can you offer a pared-down version of your flagship product? Are there more relevant versions of what you can offer?

That’s true for your messaging too. If advertising can’t drive demand, your communications need to meet shifting values. It’s a great opportunity to come up with a new value proposition for your brand or product.

Thrive, Don’t Just Survive

At Suzy, we already have some advice on approaching your market research process during a recession. Our clients are using:

• Iterative learning plans to keep up with their ever-evolving consumers
• The retargeting abilities in our platform to continue the conversation with the same consumers to learn about their needs over and over again
• Super-speedy research to make faster decisions
• A forward-thinking approach to get ahead of the evolving landscape

To keep up with consumers, keep up with your market research. Understanding their behavior changes will help you better meet consumers where they are. And keeping up with their attitudes, expectations, beliefs, and more will help you stay relevant with their changing values so you don’t get left behind.

Things may be tough right now, but there are new opportunities. It’s time to double down if you can.