Market Research

Don't Enter the Market Blind. Navigate with Precision Intelligence.

Guessing is a growth strategy of the past. We deliver deep, actionable market research that uncovers your true opportunity, reveals competitive weaknesses, and provides the data-driven roadmap to win.

In Atlanta's competitive landscape, instinct alone isn't enough. Growth demands evidence. CEO GPS transforms uncertainty into your greatest advantage through comprehensive, strategic market research. We go beyond surface-level data to provide the deep customer, competitor, and industry insights that inform pivotal decisions—from product development and messaging to market entry and expansion. Think of us as your intelligence unit, arming you with the clarity to allocate resources confidently and outmaneuver competitors.

Why Market Research is Your Non-Negotiable First Step

Before you invest a dollar in a new campaign, a single hour in product development, or make one pivotal strategic shift, there is a foundational question you must answer: "What does the market actually want?"

Launching a new product based on an internal hunch, entering a new Atlanta neighborhood on a gut feeling, or pivoting your entire messaging without evidence isn't bold—it's a costly gamble with your capital, your team's morale, and your brand's credibility. In today's data-rich environment, operating without market intelligence is a choice to accept unnecessary risk and leave opportunity on the table.

Our research services are the essential antidote to that risk. We transform critical unknowns into your most powerful strategic assets, illuminating a clear, data-validated path to ROI. This process systematically answers the core questions that determine success or failure:

"Who is my true ideal customer?" We move beyond basic demographics to uncover the psychographics, behavioral triggers, and hidden pain points of the audience most likely to become your most profitable, loyal advocates. This ensures every marketing dollar is spent attracting the right people, not just more people.

"What do they desperately need that isn't being served?" We identify the gaps between what your competitors offer and what the market truly desires. This is where true innovation and uncontested market space—your "blue ocean"—is found, allowing you to create offers that feel tailor-made and impossible to ignore.

"How do my competitors actually position themselves?" We decode their real-world strengths, operational weaknesses, and customer perceptions. This isn't about copying; it's about finding the strategic openings they've missed and the vulnerabilities in their armor that you can exploit.

"Where are the uncontested gaps in the Atlanta market?" Hyper-local intelligence is key. We analyze neighborhood trends, local economic shifts, and regional consumer behavior to pinpoint exactly where your specific solution fits within the Metro Atlanta landscape, giving you a home-field advantage.

Market research is not an expense; it's your first and most critical investment. It’s the due diligence that validates your vision, protects your resources, and provides the confidence to move forward with speed and precision. It turns strategic decisions from leaps of faith into calculated steps on a mapped route to growth. Before you build anything for the market, let us help you understand the market you're building for.

Our Comprehensive Market Research Framework: A Blueprint for Clarity

At CEO GPS, we reject the notion that market research is a simple report. It is a rigorous, multi-layered investigation designed to build a complete 360-degree view of your strategic opportunity. We believe the most powerful insights are born from the marriage of hard numbers and human truth. That's why our framework systematically combines broad, quantitative data—which tells you what is happening—with deep, qualitative depth—which reveals why it's happening and how people feel about it.

This phased methodology ensures no stone is left unturned, transforming scattered information into a coherent, actionable intelligence asset. It is a deliberate process of discovery, analysis, and synthesis built to answer not just "who's out there," but "how do we win?"

Phase 1: Competitive Landscape Analysis – Understanding Your Battlefield

You cannot outmaneuver an opponent you do not understand. This phase is a tactical reconnaissance mission to map your entire competitive ecosystem. We look beyond obvious, direct rivals to identify indirect substitutes (alternative solutions your customer might choose) and emerging threats (disruptive startups or adjacent market entrants). This holistic view prevents strategic blind spots.

Our analysis is built on five investigative pillars:

• SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats): This is more than a simple grid; it's a structured, evidence-based assessment that juxtaposes your internal capabilities against the external market realities created by your competitors. It answers: Where are we vulnerable? Where can we attack? What market shifts can we exploit that they are ignoring?

• Pricing & Offer Teardown: We dissect the perceived value equation of your competitors. This involves analyzing not just listed prices, but their pricing models (subscription, tiered, one-time), service bundles, discounting strategies, and promotional language. The goal is to understand the value narrative they are selling and identify gaps in their pricing architecture where you can create a more compelling offer.

• Digital Footprint Audit: In today's market, a competitor's digital presence is their public-facing battle plan. We conduct a forensic audit of their online ecosystem: their SEO strategy (what keywords do they own?), their content marketing (what topics establish their authority?), their social media engagement (how do they connect with the community?), and their review sentiment (what are their praised strengths and complained-about weaknesses?). This reveals their marketing efficacy and customer relationship health.

• Messaging & Positioning Decoding: Words are weapons in the battle for mindshare. We analyze their website copy, ad creatives, sales collateral, and public communications to reverse-engineer their core messaging hierarchy. What primary benefit do they lead with? What emotional triggers do they pull? How do they differentiate themselves? This decoding allows you to craft a positioning that is distinct, resonant, and breaks through the competitive noise.

• Atlanta-Specific Competitive Intel: A national strategy often fails on local streets. We provide a hyper-local lens, analyzing market saturation in specific Atlanta neighborhoods, variations in service or messaging by region, and the community reputation each competitor holds on local forums, neighborhood apps, and Atlanta-focused media. This intelligence is critical for dominating your home turf.

Phase 2: Target Audience & Customer Insight Research – Knowing Your Customer Better Than They Know Themselves

A broad demographic label like "women 35-54" or "Atlanta small business owners" is a starting point, not a strategy. True competitive advantage comes from understanding the human beings behind the data—their motivations, frustrations, unspoken needs, and the subconscious drivers behind their decisions. In this phase, we transform your target "market segment" into richly drawn, actionable buyer personas that feel real to your entire team, guiding product development, messaging, and sales conversations with precision.

We build this deep understanding through a multi-source, empathetic research process:

• Demographic & Psychographic Profiling: We establish the foundational "who." Demographics (age, income, location, job title) provide the skeleton. We then give it life, depth, and color with psychographics. This explores their core values, lifestyle aspirations, personality traits, interests, and anxieties. What publications do they trust? What brands do they admire? What does "success" mean to them personally and professionally? This profile ensures your brand speaks to their identity, not just their job description.

• Pain Point & Need State Validation: Assumptions about customer problems are the root of failed products and weak messaging. We move from "we think they need X" to "we have validated they struggle with Y." Using a mix of targeted surveys, in-depth one-on-one interviews, and social listening across forums and communities, we identify and confirm the core frustrations, inefficiencies, and emotional tensions your audience experiences. We distinguish between stated needs (what they say they want) and latent needs (the deeper problem they haven't articulated).

• Buying Journey Mapping: A customer's path to purchase is rarely a straight line. We chart the nonlinear, often messy journey from initial awareness of a problem through consideration, decision, and beyond. For each stage, we document:

• Key Actions & Touchpoints: Where do they go for information? (Google, LinkedIn, referrals?)

• Critical Questions: What must they answer to move forward? ("Is this worth the cost?" "Will it work with my system?")

• Decision Criteria: What factors become most important at the moment of choice? (Price, credibility, speed, support?)

• Emotional State: What are they feeling? (Anxious, overwhelmed, hopeful, skeptical?)

This map becomes a blueprint for placing the right message in the right place at the right time, effectively guiding prospects to a confident "yes."

• Voice of Customer (VoC) Analysis: Some of the most raw and honest insights already exist in your (and your competitors') existing customer interactions. We systematically aggregate and analyze unstructured VoC data from online reviews, customer support ticket logs, social media mentions, and call transcripts. Using thematic analysis, we uncover:

• Unmet Needs: Features, services, or assurances repeatedly wished for.

• Sentiment Trends: How perception of key brand attributes (e.g., "ease of use," "customer service") shifts over time.

• Moments of Friction: The specific, often repeated, pain points in the post-purchase experience.

This turns passive feedback into an active strategic tool for improving offerings and preemptively addressing concerns.

• The Outcome: You won't just know who to target. You'll know how to speak to them in a way that resonates deeply, what to offer that solves their real problems, and where to meet them at every step of their journey. This is the foundation for marketing that feels less like an interruption and more like a welcome solution.

Phase 3: Market Sizing & Opportunity Assessment – Quantifying Your Potential

Visionary ideas need financial footing. "There's an opportunity" is the spark; "this is the exact size and value of the opportunity" is the business case that secures investment, aligns your team, and dictates strategic resource allocation. This phase transforms abstract market potential into concrete, quantified targets, moving your strategy from conceptual to calculable.

We employ a tiered, realistic model to map your opportunity from the total industry down to your actionable first-year goals, providing the numerical clarity needed for confident planning.

Total Addressable Market (TAM): The Universe of Possibility

This is the absolute ceiling—the total annual revenue demand for your product or service category if you theoretically achieved 100% market share with no competition or geographic limits. We calculate TAM by analyzing broad industry reports, government economic data, and aggregated consumer spending figures. 

• Why it matters: It defines the scale of the playing field. A large TAM indicates a significant industry, attractive to investors and suggesting room for multiple players. It answers the question, "How big is the entire pie?"

Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): Your Realistic Playing Field

The TAM is often global and theoretical. The SAM brings focus by narrowing it to the segment you can actually reach and serve with your current operational model. This is defined by two key filters:

• Geographic Reach: For CEO GPS and many clients, this starts with Metro Atlanta—the specific MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) we are equipped to serve physically or digitally with localized impact.

• Service/Product Capability: The specific niche or customer segment your solution is built for (e.g., "B2B SaaS for logistics companies with 50-200 employees").
• Why it matters: The SAM is your true battlefield. It represents the portion of the pie sitting on your table. It focuses sales, marketing, and operational efforts on the prospects you can realistically convert.

Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): Your Near-Term Revenue Target

• This is the most critical and actionable number. The SOM is your realistic, achievable market share of the SAM within a defined planning period (e.g., Year 1-3). We calculate this by analyzing:

• Competitive Density: The number and strength of established competitors already serving your SAM.

• Your Resources: Your sales capacity, marketing budget, and operational bandwidth.

• Market Entry Barriers: The cost and effort required for customers to switch from existing solutions.

• Why it matters: The SOM is your quota. It’s the grounded, data-informed revenue target that forms the basis of your financial forecasts, hiring plans, and growth KPIs. It answers, "What specific slice of the pie can we realistically take right now?"

Trend & Growth Forecasting: Navigating the Future Curve

A static snapshot of the market is insufficient for strategic planning. We analyze forward-looking indicators to project where your TAM, SAM, and SOM are headed. This involves synthesizing:

• Industry Trend Reports: Expert projections on technological adoption, regulatory changes, and consumer behavior shifts.

• Local Economic Data: Atlanta-specific growth projections, employment trends, and commercial development plans.

• Search & Social Trend Data: Using tools like Google Trends to gauge rising interest in relevant keywords and topics, indicating increasing or decreasing demand.

• Why it matters: This tells you if you are entering a growing, stagnant, or declining market. It allows you to align your strategy with the market’s trajectory, investing in rising waves and avoiding fading niches. It answers, "Is this market on an upward trend, and where are the specific growth pockets?"

• The Outcome: You will have a clear, defensible set of numbers. You can walk into a boardroom or planning session with confidence, presenting not just a vision, but a financially-modeled opportunity: "The total market is $X billion. Our addressable segment in Atlanta is $Y million. Based on our capacity and competition, our realistic 3-year target is $Z million, and all indicators point to this segment growing at __% annually." This is the language of execution.

Phase 4: Brand Perception & Market Positioning Audit – Seeing Your Brand Through the Market's Eyes

Your brand is not what you say it is. It's what your customers, prospects, and the market collectively believe, feel, and say about you. This critical phase closes the "Perception Gap"—the often-significant distance between your carefully crafted brand identity and the market's lived reality. We conduct a forensic audit of your external brand health, providing the unvarnished truth about your reputation and competitive standing. This isn't about ego; it's about equipping you with the empirical data needed to align perception with strategy.

Brand Sentiment Analysis: The Emotional Temperature of Your Brand

We move beyond counting mentions to measuring emotion. Using advanced social listening and AI-driven natural language processing, we analyze online conversations, reviews, forum posts, and social commentary to quantify the tone and sentiment surrounding your brand. Is the discourse positive, negative, or neutral? What specific emotions are triggered—trust, frustration, excitement, indifference? We track sentiment trends over time and in response to specific events, providing a real-time gauge of your brand's emotional equity. This reveals whether you are seen as a trusted ally, a necessary evil, or an invisible commodity.

Awareness & Association Studies: What Comes to Mind When They Hear Your Name?

• We measure the two pillars of brand strength: Recall and Reputation. Through targeted surveys and digital analysis, we answer:

• Awareness (Recall): In your category, do prospects spontaneously name you (unaided awareness)? Do they recognize you when prompted (aided awareness)?

• Associations (Reputation): What specific adjectives, attributes, and qualities are intrinsically linked to your brand in the minds of the market? When they think "CEO GPS," do they immediately think "strategic," "Atlanta-based," "data-driven," or something else? We map these associations against your key competitors to see who "owns" critical attributes like "innovative," "reliable," or "high-value."

Differentiation Analysis: Unique Value or Interchangeable Commodity?

This is a ruthless assessment of your competitive distinctiveness. We plot your brand and key competitors on a perceptual map based on the core attributes that drive customer choice (e.g., Price vs. Quality, Innovation vs. Reliability). The analysis reveals:

• Clusters: Are you grouped tightly with competitors, signaling you are seen as a commodity with little differentiation?

• White Space: Are there valuable attribute combinations that no competitor currently owns, representing a positioning opportunity?

• Your Unique Ground: Do you hold a distinct, defensible position on the map? This analysis moves you from subjective claims of being "different" to objective evidence of your unique market position—or the urgent need to create one.

Message Testing: De-risking Your Marketing Investment

Before you invest a dollar in a major campaign, we validate your core messages with scientific rigor. We expose your key value propositions, taglines, and campaign concepts to segments of your target audience to measure:

• Clarity: Is the message instantly understood?

• Believability: Does it resonate as authentic and credible?

• Motivation: Does it compel action or create desire?

Differentiation: Does it clearly set you apart from the competitive noise?

This pre-emptive testing identifies winning messages and filters out confusing or ineffective ones, ensuring your market launch is built on proven communication, not guesswork.

• The Outcome: You will receive a detailed "Brand Reality Report." This document will clearly illustrate the Perception Gap, quantify your brand's true sentiment and awareness, definitively show how you are differentiated (or not), and provide validated messaging that resonates. This audit turns brand management from a creative exercise into a data-driven science, giving you the insights to fortify your reputation, claim a unique position, and communicate with undeniable impact.

Deliverables That Drive Decision-Making: From Insight to Action

• Our philosophy is simple: research is only as valuable as its ability to spur confident action. We reject the "data dump"—the overwhelming, dense report that collects dust on a digital shelf. Instead, we deliver a suite of strategic assets designed for clarity, collaboration, and execution. Each deliverable is crafted to answer a specific stakeholder's needs, transforming complex findings into a clear roadmap for your entire organization.

1. The Comprehensive Research Report: The Single Source of Truth

This is your foundational master document, built for depth and reference. Structured for both the executive skimmer and the analytical deep-diver, it includes:

• An Executive Summary (The 10-Minute Briefing): A high-impact overview of critical findings, the size of the opportunity, and top strategic imperatives. Designed for leadership to grasp the core implications immediately.

• Detailed Findings & Analysis (The "Why" Behind the "What"): A clear, chapter-by-chapter breakdown of each research phase (Competitive, Customer, Market Size, Brand). This section provides the narrative, connecting data points to tell the complete story of your market landscape.

• Methodology & Raw Data Appendices (Complete Transparency): For teams that need to validate or delve deeper, we include a clear explanation of our research methods and provide access to sanitized raw data, surveys, and interview notes. No black boxes.

2. Actionable Strategic Recommendations: Your Prioritized Playbook

This is where insight becomes instruction. We translate findings into a clear, department-specific action plan:

• For Marketing: Specific messaging pivots, channel priorities (e.g., "Double down on LinkedIn for X persona"), content themes, and campaign concepts validated by our research.

• For Product/Service Teams: Feature development priorities, service bundle adjustments, or roadmap suggestions directly tied to validated customer pain points and unmet needs.

• For Sales: A refined sales playbook with new competitive rebuttals, tailored talking points for different personas, and identified triggers that signal a sales-ready prospect.

Each recommendation is tagged by priority (Immediate, Quarter, Strategic) and potential impact, creating a clear sequence of execution.

3. Visualized Data Dashboards: Insights at a Glance

We believe in the power of sight. Key performance indicators, market trends, and competitive benchmarks are synthesized into custom, living dashboards (using tools like Power BI or Google Looker Studio). These provide real-time, at-a-glance views of market share trajectories, sentiment trends, and audience engagement metrics. Decision-makers can track the health of their market position without wading through reports.

4. Refined Buyer Persona Documents: Your North Star for Engagement

Forget one-page caricatures. We deliver dynamic, multi-page persona profiles that bring your ideal customer to life. Each includes:

• A representative photo and biography.

• Demographic & psychographic snapshots.

• A validated "Day-in-the-Life" journey highlighting pain points.

• Their personal goals and professional KPIs.

• Direct quotes from interviews.

• Most importantly: A dedicated section on "How to Engage [Persona Name]" with specific message hooks, content recommendations, and sales approaches. These are designed to be shared company-wide to align every customer-facing interaction.

5. The Competitive Positioning Map: Your Strategic Battle Map

This powerful visual tool crystallizes your market position. We plot your brand and each key competitor on a matrix using the two most critical axes for your industry (e.g., Premium vs. Affordable on one axis, Innovative vs. Traditional on another). This instantly reveals:

• Market Clusters: Where competitors are grouped, indicating commodity competition.

• Your Coordinates: Your actual perceived position.

• Strategic White Space: The open, desirable quadrant where you can uniquely move to own a new position.

This map becomes the anchor for all positioning discussions, providing an undeniable visual rationale for strategic moves.

• The Outcome: You won't just receive a report; you'll receive an operational toolkit. Our deliverables are built to be used daily—to settle debates with data, to align teams with a shared vision, and to provide the evidence-based confidence required to make bold growth decisions.

Conclusion: Lead with Clarity, Grow with Confidence

The landscape of the Atlanta market is rich with opportunity, but it demands more than ambition to conquer—it demands intelligence. The path to market dominance isn’t found in following the crowd or relying on yesterday’s assumptions. It’s built on a foundation of undeniable truth: deep customer insight, clear competitive understanding, and quantified opportunity.

You didn’t build your business on guesswork. Don’t scale it that way.

Partnering with CEO GPS means choosing to replace uncertainty with evidence and intuition with intelligence. It means equipping your leadership team with the strategic assets and actionable data needed to allocate resources wisely, outmaneuver competitors, and connect with your ideal customers in ways that feel both authentic and inevitable.

Stop navigating in the fog. Let's map your route to market dominance.

The first step toward a data-driven future is a conversation grounded in your strategic reality. We invite you to a complimentary Market Research Consultation & Opportunity Scan. In this session, we’ll explore your high-stakes goals and, using our proven framework, perform a preliminary analysis to pinpoint the most critical research focus that will deliver the fastest clarity and greatest impact for your business.

Claim My Free Research Consultation

Together, let’s turn market intelligence into your most powerful competitive weapon.

CEO GPS | Strategic Market Research & Intelligence | Atlanta, GA
(470) 815-0666