Market research survey template: the 13 questions and how to read them
The whole sample, not an extract: 13 questions in five labelled blocks, every answer option written out, about five minutes. Take it below, copy it, or edit every word.
- 13questions
- About 5 minto answer
- 5 blocksdelete any you do not need
- Anonymousno name or email asked
What a market research survey measures
A market you do not know yet: what people do about the problem now, how often it bites, who decides, what they last paid, and who they would pick.
One respondent, one window. Question 1 fixes who is answering: somebody who buys or uses the category, not a customer of yours. Question 2 fixes the window at the last twelve months, so a four-year-old memory is never averaged with last week's purchase.
Five blocks you can delete. Screener, problem and workaround, how buying happens, price and rivals, then your words and the score. Question 5 asks how well today's workaround serves them; question 13 asks how well the market does, and the distance between the two is the result. All 13 are already built in the free questionnaire maker.
What it is not. It does not measure whether anybody has heard of you, which is the brand awareness survey. It does not describe who your buyers are either: that is the customer profile survey, so there is no age, income or company-size question here.
The 13 market research survey questions
Every question, every answer option, and what an odd answer is telling you.
Block 1. Screener
Two questions that decide who belongs. Two is the limit: a third and people fail them on purpose.
- Which of these describes you best when it comes to [CATEGORY]?The respondent, fixed in one answer. Buyers, choosers and lapsed buyers cannot be averaged together.
- When did you last buy or use something in [CATEGORY]?The window. More than a year ago is memory, not behaviour.
Block 2. Problem and workaround
What people already do about the problem, asked before you mention anything you might sell. It shows who you really compete with.
- What do you use today to deal with [PROBLEM]?The real competitive set. Doing nothing usually wins, and nothing is the hardest thing to displace.
- How often does [PROBLEM] come up for you?A weekly problem and a yearly one are different markets, even with the same people in them.
- The way I handle this today works well enough.How well their own workaround serves them, asked before the survey plants any idea.
- Which of these did you pay for in the last 12 months to deal with [PROBLEM]?Money that already moved: the only evidence here that is behaviour, not opinion.
Block 3. How buying happens
Who signs, and where they look first. Delete it for a consumer category, keep it for a business one.
- Who decides whether to buy something like this?The decision unit. A recommender who cannot sign needs different material.
- Where do you look first when you need something in [CATEGORY]?First stop, and usually not where the category spends its budget.
Block 4. Price and rivals
One price question about what was actually paid, then two showing who else could have had it.
- Roughly what did you pay the last time you bought something in [CATEGORY]?What the market already pays, from behaviour rather than a guess. Edit the bands.
- If you had to choose one of these today, which would you pick?Preference among named rivals. Put four real names in, and keep the refusal option.
- It would be easy for me to switch away from what I use now.Switching cost. Easy to leave plus a clear favourite is a defended market, not an opening.
Block 5. Your words and the score
The open question sits second from last: the final question on any survey is the one most likely to go unanswered.
- If you could change one thing about the options on the market today, what would it be?The change request, and where the sentences you will quote come from.
- The options available today solve [PROBLEM] for me.The unmet-need score: how well served this reader thinks the market is.
The brackets are placeholders. Put your category, your problem and four real rival names in first. The wording is ours: edit and translate it freely.
Why the order runs this way. Screening first, so the wrong people go early. Behaviour before attitude. The open question second from last: answers get shorter the further in they are.[4]
No hypothetical price thresholds here, on purpose. Asking a respondent to supply price figures of their own is a separate exercise, with four questions that only work scored together, and it belongs on the willingness to pay survey. Two of them used to sit here, so neither page did its job. Question 9 asks what was paid instead.
Scoring a market research survey
Three things to work out, one of them the headline. No statistics software needed.
| What to work out | How to calculate it | What it is worth |
|---|---|---|
| Unmet-need score | Percent answering 1 or 2 on question 13, minus the percent answering 4 or 5. Cut by question 1, then question 5. | The headline. The gap between two screener groups is the finding. |
| Money already moving | Percent picking anything except "Nothing" on question 6, beside the top band on question 9. | Behaviour, not opinion, so it outranks every rating above it. |
| Switching cost | Average question 11, read next to the winner of question 10. | Hard to leave plus a clear favourite is a defended market; easy plus a split vote is an opening. |
Read it by group, not just overall. Cut the unmet-need score by the screener answer, then by question 5, and stop: two cuts is what a couple of hundred responses support. Say 62 percent choosing for a company rate the market at 1 or 2, against 28 percent buying for themselves. That 34 point gap is the finding.
Print the counts beside the percentages: eight out of twelve and eighty out of 120 look identical on a chart. No cross-market average is published, so compare the same category twice, or two segments in one run.
Reading it as a market feasibility survey
The same instrument, pointed at one decision: go ahead here, or do not.
Four answers carry the call. Question 4 says how often the problem bites, question 6 whether money already moves because of it, question 9 how much, and question 13 how badly the market serves them. A frequent problem, money already moving and a low score is the shape of a yes. Miss one of the three and you have a maybe.
What a no looks like. A flat unmet-need score with real spending means the market is served and you would be arguing about price. Real dissatisfaction with no spending means a problem people will complain about and not pay to fix. Both cost one survey rather than one launch.
What it cannot decide. It gives proportions, not a market size. It does not test one described idea, which is what the concept testing questions are for. When the market is settled and you need a timeline and a budget, that is the buying intentions survey.
Fielding a market survey without a list
Three decisions, and the sample size arithmetic under them. Keep a block only if you can name the decision it changes.[2]
Write the screener first
Name who counts as your market in one sentence, then make that sentence questions 1 and 2. Two screening questions is the limit.
Recruit where the behaviour is
A community built around the problem, a partner list, a trade newsletter, a paid panel. Ask the owner first, and post with a closing date.
Clean the data before you read it
Drop anyone who failed the screener or straight-lined the rating items. Cash raised response about a quarter across 46 trials with no loss of quality,[5] and 84 percent of bad cases pass an attention check.[3]
385 completed responses gives a margin of error of about five points at 95 percent confidence for one percentage from a large market.[1] The arithmetic sits on the sample size calculator. Where your list is not random, the sampling guide says what a convenience sample is good for. The send mechanics are in the survey research guide.
Market research survey FAQ
What is a market research survey?
A short questionnaire answered by members of a category rather than by your own customers. It asks what they do about a problem today, how often it comes up, who decides, what they last paid, which rival they would pick and how well the market serves them.
Is this the same as a market feasibility survey?
The same instrument, pointed at a different decision. A market survey describes the market; a feasibility read answers whether to go ahead here. The section above names the four answers that carry the call.
How many responses do I need?
385 completed responses gives a margin of error of about five points at 95 percent confidence for one percentage from a large market.[1] Fewer still tells you something, as long as the counts are printed beside the percentages.
Can I reword or delete the questions?
Yes, all of it. Opening the template puts all 13 in the editor, where a whole block goes in a few clicks. Anything in square brackets is a placeholder.
Market research asks buyers what they want. The reps hear the objections every day, so the sales team survey questions collect that from the inside.
Market research describes the category; it cannot tell you whether the new recipe beat the old one. That is a job for the taste testing questionnaire: coded samples, one per response, scored blind and again labelled.
Methods and sources
What this template is based on
Thirteen questions written for this page, ordered as a purchase runs: who is answering, what they do now, how the buying happens, what it costs and who else could have had it, then their own words and the closing rating. Three items share one 1 to 5 agree scale; the rest are choice questions, because what somebody bought cannot be carried by a rating.[4]
Question licensing
No licensed or proprietary instrument appears, and none is adapted. Two price-expectation questions from a published pricing method were removed in September 2026: that method is carried on one page only, where all four of its questions are scored together. Wording here is free to edit and translate.
Limits and disclosure
A market at one moment, from the people willing to answer, and a convenience sample is not a random one. Proportions do not give a market size. Market sizing, concept testing and product market fit are out of scope.
SuperSurvey makes the editor this template opens in and sells no respondent panel, so the recruitment advice is not a sales pitch.
References
- Sawtooth Software. "Determining sample size for survey research." 2024. sawtoothsoftware.com
- SuperSurvey Response Benchmark, 16 September 2023 to 25 August 2026: 25,112 analysed surveys, 998,864 completed responses. Method note.
- Pew Research Center. "Two common checks fail to catch most bogus cases." 18 February 2020. pewresearch.org
- Galesic, M. and Bosnjak, M. "Effects of questionnaire length on participation and response quality." Public Opinion Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2009): 349-360. academic.oup.com
- Abdelazeem, B. et al. "Does usage of monetary incentive impact the involvement in surveys?" PLOS ONE 18 (2023): e0279128. journals.plos.org
Send the market research survey this week
Thirteen questions in five blocks, about five minutes, anonymous. Delete what you do not need and share one link.
Use this template