Increased Industry Insights = Increased Market Share and Sales

Every year, Axiom issues industry reports that are available free of charge for Axiom’s key vertical markets – horticulture, agriculture, building products, and energy.  Each of the reports contains survey findings from large sample respondent panels that inform Axiom and our clients about market dynamics, buying behavior, purchase drivers, perceptions, trends, and other topics of significance.   

This week, the Axiom team is finalizing 2023 questionnaires for Axiom’s annual Gardening Industry survey and Vegetable Grower Industry survey.  One of the key objectives of both surveys is to ascertain whether the 15-18 million new gardeners who started gardening during COVID-19 will continue to garden in coming years and the factors that impact this.  Related issues include dollars and time spent gardening, retail channels where gardening supplies are purchased, financial tradeoffs due to economic uncertainty, and others.

So, you’re asking why do we do these industry studies on our own dime?   They help us create better marketing strategies to drive increased market share and sales for our clients.  Below are four tips for effective industry market research studies.   

• Define and prioritize the questions that need to be answered. This effort starts with a thoughtful analysis of the topics covered by trade magazines and industry blogs.  Then, the conversation continues with industry leaders to prioritize what issues are most important to them. We often have discussions with trade magazine editors as we are finalizing questionnaires to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Note: all of the above sources are outside of Axiom and its client base.    
• Focus on actionable questions – not nice-to-know questions. What do your readers intend to do with the data? How will they use it?  How will they move their organizations to action?  These are all questions that need to be addressed as simple and clear market research objectives.  All our industry research studies contain no more than three research objectives.  In addition, for the questionnaire review process, we include a rationale for each question about how readers can act upon the data. 
• Identify the why. The why is the single most important information.  Unfortunately, this is not something that is easily obtained in quantitative research methods.  Often, we supplement quantitative data with depth interviews or focus groups.   

AI tools are also useful because they enable us to ask many more open-ended questions.  Because of these tools, we can include an “Other please list” option on all close-ended questions in our industry studies.  

• Increase frequency of data gathering. Many enterprises see market insight gathering as an annual activity that coincides with their strategic plans; however, markets are more dynamic than ever.  Because of this, it’s beneficial to collect insight data more often than once per year.  Our industry studies form the foundation for quarterly update studies that are designed around specific objectives. 

For more information, contact Mike Reiber at mreiber@axiomcom.com