Why Is Market Research Important in Business?

Author: Mark Lydon,  Senior Content Manager

In an increasingly competitive landscape, market research holds the key for companies to make smarter business decisions. While competitors may gather information from a loose collection of questionable sources, brands can gain an edge by leveraging accurate, evidence-based intelligence.

Key Takeaways:

• Organizations contend with several challenges across the competitive, customer demand, and socio-economic lenses. These challenges are roadblocks to achieving strategic goals.
• Market research matters because it guides organizations along the right path toward smarter decision-making and sustained business growth.
• Market intelligence plays a vital role in competitive analysis, executive strategy, marketing, product development, and startup growth.

Market research takes the guesswork out of corporate strategy. It provides actionable insight that organizations use to optimize product development, plan future rollouts, and generate demand for their solutions.

All too many companies have had their “Kodak Moment.” They failed to make a strategic pivot due to a lack of future foresight.

For forward-thinking companies, market intelligence plays an invaluable role in establishing and sustaining business success. Customer preferences change, new competitive threats materialize, and industry trends disrupt the status quo. That’s why it’s essential to keep a pulse on both your target audience and the wider market.

Let’s explore why market research is important for business growth, highlighting how it impacts five critical business priorities:

• Competitive Intelligence
• Executive Strategy
• Marketing
• Product Development
• Startup Growth

Table 1: Benefits of Market Research by Business Priority

What Is Market Research?

Market research refers to the process of collecting and assessing information about a company’s customers, products/services, and the broader market. These research-backed findings support an organization’s efforts to introduce a new solution, emphasize unique characteristics, identify sales opportunities, and adjust business models.

Research collation ensures that their Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy aligns with industry trends and customer pain points. Without business intelligence, vendors would be left in the dark, simply guessing what works best.

The top benefits of market research are:

• Identifying emerging opportunities
• Understanding your customers
• Maintaining a competitive edge
• Successfully implementing technology

To gather this business intelligence, you can use a variety of tactics. Market research methodologies include application analysis reports, market sizing, competitive benchmarking, customer surveys, and strategy calls.

These data-driven insights provide a clear picture of what enterprises and consumers look for in a brand and how other vendors are catering to the market. From there, an organization can modify its product, content marketing, and sales focus to maximize revenue potential.

In the boardroom, research-backed findings provide the hard evidence needed to guide and justify future business decisions.

Why Is Market Research Important for Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence teams are responsible for staying up-to-date on the latest competitive dynamics in their industry. This information is relayed to the rest of the organization to align product, marketing, and sales teams.

According to Crayon’s 2025 State of Competitive Intelligence report, businesses face competition in 68% of deals. Yet they are ill-prepared to fend off the competition, with the average organization rating itself a 3.8 out of 10 in competitive selling.

Some of the top challenges competitive intelligence leaders currently face include disconnected research sources, time-consuming research processes, competitive blind spots, and difficulty in proving Return on Investment (ROI).

Market research can address these challenges by providing comprehensive intelligence-gathering that scales with the organization. Expert-backed studies identify emerging industry trends and competitor updates, ensuring your company never misses a beat.

Seasoned analysts are by your side throughout the research journey, offering the timely insight that executive stakeholders demand. For good measure, checking in every quarter on strategy calls helps build a strategic roadmap for product development and brand positioning.

With market research, competitive intelligence professionals gain the following benefits:

• Consolidate all your market intelligence in one place
• Tap into analyst expertise on demand
• Accelerate time to insight with AI-powered research tools
• Stay ahead with proactive market alerts
• Tune in to strategic planning sessions
• Gain early access to market sentiment & survey insights
• Empower teams with enterprise-wide intelligence sharing
• Customize research around your strategic priorities

Case Study

ABI Research’s market reports and advisory services helped a semiconductor company maintain its leadership status. The client’s competitive intelligence team leverages a continuous feed of customized datasets on a deep, granular level. The data are transmitted to the client portal through a File Transfer Protocol (FTP), ensuring direct access to over 60 million data points at any time.

Furthermore, the client has 24-hour access to the analyst team to make sure their most pressing questions are answered quickly. Through this collaboration, the client continues to seize new revenue opportunities with research-backed decision-making, and it remains a market leader.

Why Is Market Research Important for Executive Strategy?

Market research is important for executive strategy because it drives better decision-making at the highest level.

Recent survey findings from Sentry Insurance show that 2 out of 3 U.S. executives feel more stressed in 2025 compared to 2024. Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Strategy Officers (CSOs), company presidents, board members, and other high-level personnel are under immense pressure to digitally transform.

Executives cite labor shortages, macroeconomic uncertainty, sustainability, and legal liabilities as key challenges to overcome. Organizational leaders can leverage market research to navigate these headwinds with confidence.

Business intelligence enables executives to make sound decisions based on facts and objective, data-driven insights. For executive leaders, the advantages of market research include:

• Align every initiative with clear strategic objectives
• Rely on senior analyst support for high-stakes decisions
• Anticipate competitors with curated intelligence
• Ground executive strategy in complete market insight
• Access on-demand analyst guidance when it matters most
• Challenge assumptions through executive strategy sessions
• Surface critical insights faster with AI-powered tools
• Drive enterprise-wide understanding of strategic intelligence

Case Study

A U.K.-based telecommunications provider came to ABI Research to broaden its Total Addressable Market (TAM). The client’s executive team leverages accurate and up-to-date market data, competitive benchmarking, ongoing strategy calls, and segment evaluations to tailor their strategic alignment. This research solution has proven essential in helping the client identify new areas of customer acquisition and business expansion.

Why Is Market Research Important for Marketing?

Marketing teams drive a company’s sales pipeline by educating audiences and crafting the right messages to convert them. Marketers currently face challenges such as economic uncertainty, low engagement, resource shortages, and content creation scaling.

According to Pipeline360’s “2025 State of B2B Pipeline Growth” survey, 70% of Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers prefer actionable support, such as delivered insights or done-for-you services, over adding new tools to their tech stack.

Market research precisely meets this need. It helps identify the most promising audiences within your market and speak to them directly. They provide the qualitative and quantitative data needed to create compelling content. You can also use research to develop thought leadership content backed by data.

Examples include:

• Custom marketing programs
• Target audience research
• Multi-channel lead generation
• Media licenses
• Customer surveys

Through thorough research across multiple marketing lenses, companies will see significant outcomes:

• Differentiate in competitive markets
• Align messaging with customer sentiment
• Get third-party validation for your products
• Turn events into trusted industry platforms
• Plan consistent, research-backed campaigns
• Elevate campaign resonance with expert-driven findings
• Lead industry conversations with analyst authority

For many firms, market research has proven vital to educating audiences, generating high-quality leads, and achieving marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff notes that "the speed of innovation is far exceeding the speed of adoption." While companies are developing value-driving solutions for enterprises, education is often lacking. Moreover, solution providers must understand at what stage of adoption customers are at and align their marketing campaign with that stage. Market research unveils this vital information, enabling marketing managers to maximize resonance with their target audience. 

Case Study

An industrial technology vendor has leveraged ABI Research’s marketing services for over 6 years now. The tech giant has a broad reach across the manufacturing B2B space, thanks to a diverse marketing mix.

Our analyst team develops a steady stream of research-backed demand generation content, including whitepapers, executive briefs, Snapshot Videos, webinars, and infographics. These assets have been instrumental to the client launching new products, informing customers of the benefits of its software tools, and validating its market leadership.

Why Is Market Research Important for Product Strategy?

Market research is essential for product strategy, providing rapid insight into competing brands, customer feedback, and industry shifts. ProductPlan’s The 2024 State of Product Management Report found that internal and external feedback are nearly equal in importance when developing a product strategy. The top influences are senior leadership, customer feedback, and competitive analysis.

Market research supports each of these three aspects:

• Senior Leadership: Gather critical insights from technology experts to craft the optimal product strategy you can present to executives. Research-backed findings reveal cutting-edge product features, amplify brand visibility, and pinpoint the perfect time to launch new products. From there, product development teams are better prepared to persuade C-Suite personnel to take the direction they see as the best fit.
• Customer Feedback: Reviewing customer feedback is one of the most popular ways for companies to better understand their target audience. Gathering customer feedback can be as simple as sending users a questionnaire to rate your product or as in-depth as a focus group. More in-depth surveys administered by market research firms can provide much richer insight into how various customer segments perceive your product(s).
• Competitive Analysis: Benchmark your tech solutions against others in your market. Reading competitive assessments enables companies to compare their products to the competition and analyze the top innovators. This allows product strategists to spot differentiation opportunities and prioritize key areas for product development.

Maziar Adl, cofounder and CTO of cloud-based SaaS company Gocious, stresses in a Forbes Technology Council post that transparency is essential to product strategy. "Transparency should be top of mind among CIOs. By creating an environment that elevates that level of seamless communication and accessibility, product strategy becomes easier for all levels of an organization to understand." Market research provides the intelligence needed to ensure product teams are on the same page and can communicate evidence-based findings to upper management. 

Case Study

ABI Research’s strategy group provides a global electronics company with key market metrics across high-growth customer segments. The client’s product strategy team leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools to quickly distill the most relevant data points from our forecasts. Our research partnership is consequential to the client aligning internally with product development priorities.

Why Is Market Research Important for Startup Growth?

Market research can be the difference between a tech startup's success and early demise.

Startups fail for many reasons, but there are several common denominators. After analyzing 111 entrepreneurial downfalls, CB Insights found that the top five reasons are:

• Running out of cash/failure to raise new capital
• No market need
• Got outcompeted
• Flawed business model
• Regulatory/legal challenges

Tech startups can avoid these common pitfalls by leveraging a large body of primary and secondary research, as well as advice from technology experts. Market research lets organizations validate product-market fit, analyze competitors, raise brand awareness, identify a winning Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy, and secure investor funding.

Research-backed studies help startup founders:

• Understand niche markets and refine positioning
• Build credibility and strengthen market profile
• Raise Venture Capital (VC) seed money
• Connect with key partners interested in your solution
• Evaluate products and uncover revenue growth opportunities
• Make informed decisions about GTM planning

Pitching to an angel investor can be both daunting and nerve-racking. However, it can be the turning point that propels a startup to success. Market intelligence enhances the investor pitch by giving you a more authoritative voice, backed by trusted market growth projections, expert recommendations, and Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analyses.

In summary, market research is important for startups because it qualifies a product’s fit within a particular market and provides the building blocks for a sustainable business model.

Case Study

A Canadian cybersecurity startup required speedy detection of competitor updates, Information Technology (IT) trends, and market shifts. The company reached out to ABI Research to gain ongoing support from the digital security analyst team.

Since this partnership, the client has improved its knowledge of the market and seized emerging opportunities more quickly than most of its competitors. The client also appreciates being featured objectively in our research, which strengthens its market profile in the eyes of prospects and industry partners.

Staying Ahead with Market Insights

The importance of market research in business cannot be understated.

It cuts through the clutter by grounding business decisions in objective analysis.

Without research, organizational leaders are simply devising strategy based on instinct and, in many cases, inaccurate information.

Your company must react to disruptive trends in real time and anticipate upcoming industry shifts. Market research provides the business intelligence required to do so, ensuring internal teams are aligned on strategic priorities.

ABI Research guides technology companies through market uncertainty with data-driven insights, competitive intelligence, and trusted forecasts. For over 3 decades, our market research services have fueled growth for some of the biggest brand names in the world across the following business priorities:

• Competitive Intelligence
• Executive Strategy
• Marketing
• Product Development
• Startup Growth
• Technology Implementation

Speak with our team today to learn how our technology experts can support your business objectives.

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