What market research methods are you currently using to understand industry trends and customer behavior?

I'll break this up into two parts:

Industry trends: I tend to look to public information here. Press pickup, analyst reports, what's going viral online (for a consumer product). If I were to turn to research for this, I'd suggest a qualitative study where I wrap this into a line of questions around another topic. As in, it's probably not meaty enough to do a study just to understand industry trends, but if you're covering another topic you could wrap this in.

Customer Behavior: I worked with a research vendor on a customer behavior study last year and the process we followed was a qual, quant, qual.

• For the initial qual, we did a series of in-depth interviews (you could also do a diary study) to set a baseline for how users were engaging with the space we were trying to explore. So specifically not our product, but the ecosystem in which our product sits in.

• Then we used that to shape a quant where we could fine tune use cases to test and broader business impact around the behaviors we were studying.

• Then we used the quant to do another qual that was more specific to our product, but anchoring on that original qual's baseline and the learnings from the quant to validate some of our hypotheses.

You dont necessarily need to be that broad, and MVP on this would just be the front-end qual (IDI or Diary Study being good places to start) .

While surveys to a representative sample are a key input for keeping your finger on the pulse of industry trends, they likely won’t tell you what you aren’t thinking to ask. 

Imagine being in a library and only picking out books that you want to read; you’ll continue to learn more about what you already want to know. Imagine instead that you ask others for some book recommendations; you’ll more likely end up expanding your horizons and learning things you didn’t even know to ask about. So, depending on your industry, you should expand your inputs and sources—sign up for newsletters, find thought leaders in the field and follow them so hear what’s top of mind (their LinkedIns, their blogs), subscribe to industry publications, set up Google alerts for hot topics, attend conferences. 

To understand industry trends and customer behavior, i like to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative market research methods. On the quant side, lots of number crunching is done using source data from SFDC, email automation and other CRM like systems. On the qual side, message testing, website user analysis, and win/loss interviews.