Research designed to deeply understand new opportunities and white space to power GTM efforts.
The company was trying to acquire an audience at a specific pre-conversion moment in their journey. Nobody had studied them before. Nobody knew when preferences formed, what triggered them, or what it would take to influence them.
Three-phase mixed-methods program: diary study to capture the journey as it unfolded, in-depth interviews to go deep on the moments that mattered, and a quantitative survey to size and prioritize findings.
A diary study was the right call because this audience journey is longitudinal. It unfolds over months. A single interview captures a snapshot; a diary study captures the decision-making process as it actually happens, including what triggers behavior change and what information sources emerge at each stage. This is a UX research method that market research almost never uses. It was exactly right here.
The research surfaced a "foggy window of discovery": a specific window in the audience journey when sourcing preferences form, a window in which the company was almost entirely absent. That finding became a pillar product priority and identified a significant educational gap in the category that the business had not previously mapped.
Recruit at an earlier stage. Most participants had already formed preferences by the time we talked to them. Next time I'd push criteria to catch preference formation as it happens, not after the fact.