What role do market trends play in your wider market research program/thought process?

It's about grounding the organization in an understanding of the market opportunity, ecosystem, mindset, external factors impacting potential buyers. There's so many flavors with different goals...Market Sizing (whats the market attractiveness), Pricing research (how do we maximize business value), Buyer research (how can we connect to buyer behaviors and motives), etc. But there are also always on programs – Voice of Customer programs feed into personas, product strategy. Competitive intelligence program research feeds into enablement. Industry research feeds into positioning, new product lines, PR, and influencer marketing. 

Ultimately you want product marketing to be the subject market expert on the industry, customer, competitors – the hub. And doing market research, even if it's informal, is critical to becoming the trusted experts for the organization. 

I agree with you - tracking market trends is not something I'm doing on a continuous basis. Mostly because in our category, the trends don't change that often. We will look into big shifts and market trends about annually as part of our company's annual strategic & operational planning process. Additionally, we may dive into trends whenever we're creating thought leadership content—whether it be written guides or presentations for events—to make sure we're on-trend.

Market shifts cannot be ignored, otherwise you will be left behind and will no longer be relevant. In the last two and a half years, we’ve all seen significant changes in the market given global events and cultural shifts on a number of fronts especially in terms of the pandemic and for social justice.

Within a month of covid shutting down the US, Glassdoor quickly created a Covid-19 Response Campaign that offered a slew of resources and tips for job seekers from directing them to companies who were surge hiring and work from home jobs to offering a collection of blog tips and a webinar on how to find a job during that challenging time.

In the aftermath of George Floyd, DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) is now a focus for many companies; the top hiring priority for companies is now Diversity & Inclusion according to a Lighthouse research study in 2022. With the ongoing civil unrest during the summer of 2020 and calls for righting systemic injustice, Glassdoor immediately chose to proactively meet this critical cultural moment and the needs of those who do not have a voice. Glassdoor made a public commitment to leverage its product and resources to help achieve equity in the workplace. We spun up a DEI Product task force to create products and features that help underrepresented and traditionally marginalized job seekers learn how people like them experience the culture at companies of interest, so we can shine a light on inequities and hold companies accountable. On the other side of the coin, employers are now able to highlight their DEI efforts and make statements in how they want to reach their DEI goals (i.e. increase women representation among senior leadership to 50% by 2025, increase Black employee representation to 8% in 2025). Learn more on Glassdoor’s initial DEI efforts here and our expansion of DEI features the following year.

In relation to this, pay equity has been a growing issue highlighted both in social media and the growing number of states that have enacted equal pay laws, acts or statutes. Therefore, Glassdoor has obsessively focused on delivering a much more comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-digest view of a person’s total pay potential by investing in an advanced AI driven machine learning model. Along with that, we created features where job seekers and employees can see salaries broken down by gender and race/ethnicity to see where there are inequities in pay. We then generated campaigns around Equal Pay day to highlight these products and our core belief that everyone deserves to be paid fairly, and to get there, we need salary transparency to create more equality.

The brief for our fall 2021 brand campaign also took into account the forces that were affecting the market. We chose to focus on those who were most affected by covid and the job market - women of color with children, with our ads telling a compelling story of one of these moms and how Glassdoor could help them find a job they love. The campaign resulted in a significant increase in both awareness and consideration.

We also have a stellar Glassdoor Economic Research team that provides timely insights and research on today’s labor market by unearthing important trends in hiring, pay and the broader economy. They take current market forces into account and have released recent studies on parents return to the workforce, hybrid work, changes for Gen Z employees returning to the workforce, and a pay equity analysis. Much of their work is picked up in the press and media, positioning Glassdoor as thought leaders in this space.

Bonnie’s pro tip: Get the most out of your research by using it to advance your organization’s thought leadership within your industry. If your perspective shifted after learning something, chances are that you’re not the only one who would benefit from that knowledge. For an example of thought leadership research, check out Glassdoor’s Employer Branding Report.

I think being aware of and ideally staying ahead of trends that change the way you work, or impact your buyers is important. But some trends are short-term and don't change much at all. Seeing the difference and not chasing after every trend will be important to the outcome of your research efforts.

Rather than doing specfiic research on every single trend, I think it's important to continue to do research on how your audiences work and how that evolves and looking at how this information evolves - along with the broader market will generally give you insight into broader trends happening.

Let's take the current market (as of December 2022) as an example. The economy has shifted, decision makers in especially large purchases are changing, budgets are shrinking (generally speaking), and employees are being asked to do more with less. We have to be aware of this market shift because it affects our positioning, way we enable Sales, content, and more. Naturally if we continue to connect with buyers and users and understand how their process and day-to-day lives are changing we can be aware of this current trend and evolve along with it.