Lesson 2 of 5
Research in a day: reviews, forums and the questions buyers type
What customers really want, straight from reviews and forums
The idea
Say you want to open a pizza place. You could pay for a survey. Or you could spend an afternoon reading the reviews of the five pizza places nearby. The three-star ones tell you exactly what people miss: “great base, always cold by the time it arrives”.
That's desk research: reading what people already wrote. It's free, it's quick, and it's in your customers' own words.
↑ You ask
Conversations
The next lesson
Surveys
Useful once you know what to ask
Reviews, forums, questions
Start here: free and fast
Market data
Search numbers, industry reports
↓ Already written
Where to look
Your rivals' reviews
Read the two- and three-star ones first
Forums and groups
Where people ask for advice before they buy
What people type
Google's “People also ask”, and questions under videos
Your own inbox
The first line of every enquiry you've had
What to copy
Copy whole sentences, not your summary of them, and keep the link. Then sort each one: is it a job, a pain or an objection? “Always cold by the time it arrives” beats anything you'd write yourself.
Sort it
1 of 6
Job, pain or objection?
“I need a proposal out the same day the brief arrives”
Stop when new reviews only repeat what you have. In a small market, that's often after 30 to 50 good quotes.
A fake customer is still fake
Some tools let an AI pretend to be your customer. It's quick and it sounds convincing, but it has never paid you and it agrees with almost anything. Use it to think of questions, never as the answer.
Today, with AI
Reading used to be the slow part. Now an assistant can read 500 reviews in an hour and sort them for you.
So you can afford to listen to far more customers than before. You still decide what it all means.
What AI does well
Collecting reviews and threads, sorting quotes by theme, and counting how often a pain comes up.
Where it goes wrong
Ask for quotes it hasn't read, and it makes up believable ones. It also softens angry words, which hides the strongest signal.
What stays yours
Choosing which sources really speak for your customers, and reading twenty quotes yourself.
Check yourself
Do it in the studio
Checklist
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Your research afternoon
- 01
Open Your report → Competitors to see the businesses like yours. Read the reviews of two of them.
free - 02
Type the questions your customers ask into Google, and copy the ones under “People also ask”.
free - 03
Open Your report → Documents and Read Audience and market. Mark what your quotes confirm and what they contradict.
free - 04
A section is wrong? Edit this section, then Save this section. Or Rewrite it with a note, then Keep it or Keep the old one: 15 credits.
free - 05
Write your three findings, with their links, in In your own words → What the report gets wrong or misses. Then press Save — the team reads it from now on.
free
Done when You have 30 quotes in your customers' own words, each with its link, and three findings the team now reads.
Go deeper
University courses on the same topic, if you want to go further.
King's College London
Artificial Intelligence and Customer Insights (MSc Digital Marketing)Using AI to understand customers
London School of Economics
Marketing Analytics I: Consumer Analysis Fundamentals (MG4E9)How to design research and read its results