Market Research Survey Template
Screen for real buyers, then map how they discover, choose, and spend in your category. A ranking question forces honest trade-offs.
A short study about how people shop in this category. Five minutes, anonymous, one question at a time. Your answers steer what gets built and sold.
Market research lives or dies on who you ask. Ten answers from genuine category buyers beat a hundred from people being polite, which is why this template opens with a screener and politely exits non-buyers before they can dilute the data. Everything after the screen is built to map the three things a go-to-market plan needs: where buyers look, how they decide, and what they spend. Founders validate a category before building with it, marketers refresh channel budgets with the discovery data, product teams hunt for the gap an incumbent left open, and students run a real study with an instrument that won't embarrass them in a methodology review.
The screener does the quality control. Purchase frequency is the cleanest qualifier in consumer research: it is factual, instant to answer, and hard to get wrong. A logic rule watches it: anyone answering "Never" skips the remaining questions entirely and lands on a courteous early ending. That is a real screen-out rather than a guilt trip, and it keeps your dataset strictly buyers. The rule lives in the Logic panel if your study needs a different qualifying bar, like screening on weekly buyers only.
Why a ranking instead of another rating. Ask people to rate price, quality, reputation, reviews, and convenience and everything scores "important". Forcing a rank makes respondents spend a budget, and the trade-off is the data. Discovery channels cap at three picks for the same reason: constraint reveals priority. Spend uses bands rather than a number field because people answer ranges truthfully and exact figures badly. The frustration question is the strategy gold: unmet needs, in the buyer's own vocabulary, ready to become positioning copy. Age closes the survey because demographics placed early depress completion, and it carries a "Prefer not to say" escape.
Left off the study. Competitor brand lists (naming brands turns research into a poll and biases the frustration answers), exact income, and any willingness-to-pay items. Pricing questions deserve their own dedicated instrument rather than a slot bolted onto a discovery study. If a respondent names a competitor unprompted in the open answer, that spontaneous mention is stronger evidence than any checklist could collect.
Pointing it at your category. Name your actual category in the intro and first question ("skincare", "project management software", "coffee beans") and adjust the spend bands to match its price ladder. If you need a fixed sample size, set the form to close automatically after a target number of responses in Settings; combined with duplicate prevention per device, your quota arrives clean. Export the CSV to cross-tab rankings by age band or spend band; with each ranking position in its own column, first-choice share per factor is one pivot away.
Frequently asked questions
How does the screening question work?
A logic rule watches the purchase-frequency answer: "Never" hides every later question and routes to an early thank-you ending. Change the qualifying answers in the Logic panel to tighten or loosen the screen.
Can I stop collecting once I reach my sample size?
Set "close after N responses" in Settings and the form stops accepting new submissions at your quota. You can also set a closing date for time-boxed studies.
How do ranking answers appear in the export?
Each respondent's order exports with the position for every factor, so you can compute average rank or first-place share per factor in a spreadsheet straight from the CSV.
How do I keep one person from answering multiple times?
Turn on duplicate prevention (per device or per IP) in Settings. Combined with the buyer screen, it keeps panel-stuffing and repeat submissions out of your dataset.