Vienna UP & Market Research

Hello Hello,

Last week, I found myself doing my own boots-on-the-ground market research at ViennaUP.

https://youtube.com/shorts/8q3DmnKrOZ8?feature=share

Vienna UP & Market Research: Last week, I found myself doing my own boots-on-the-ground market research at ViennaUP.

It’s a brilliant week of entrepreneurship and innovation, and I’m genuinely grateful to the Vienna Business Agency for not only putting it on but highlighting it for me.

Stepping into a completely fresh environment to map out the local landscape for my new business got me pondering: When was the last time I actually did proper market research, rather than just ticking the boxes?

We do love a pristine assumption. Spinning up those classic, polished user personas and so-called 'ideal customers' to make ourselves feel a bit more secure. But has anyone ever actually met an 'ideal customer' in the wild?

These rigid client avatars are often little more than figments of our imagination, perched right on the edge of wishful thinking.

Your true market, your real audience, won’t neatly fit into demographic boxes, no matter how tidy we’d like things to be. Personas can be a handy tool for sparking early creative thinking, but they rarely capture the glorious messiness of human behaviour.

And has anyone seen this stuff about Synthetic data and AI? It might be getting easier and cheaper to do some solid research with it, too.