Market Research Survey Template
Screen for real buyers, then map how they discover, choose, and spend in your category — with a ranking question that 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 actually needs: where buyers look, how they decide, and what they spend.
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, not 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 — 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 honestly 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.
What we left out. 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, not 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.
Who uses this. Founders validating a category before building, marketers refreshing channel budgets with discovery data, product teams hunting for the gap an incumbent left open, and students running a real study with an instrument that won't embarrass them in a methodology review.
Make it yours. 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?
Yes — 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.