Most successful companies know their product's target audience and it segmentation. However, rapid technological advancements, sweeping changes in customers' attitudes and expectations, and the rise in the importance of product experience leave many companies scrambling to understand how the changing landscape of customers' preferences impacts their new or redesigned products.

Since it is the role of marketing departments to identify and engage product audiences, they are constantly researching their markets. This research helps shape the brand's identity and mission statement, develop advertising campaigns, deal with competition, guide the direction of products, and identify new market opportunities. Marketing research supports experience research and is crucial in shaping the product's experience strategy, which explains why marketing departments typically champion investments in experience design.

Occasionally, an organization might discount the need for early research, claiming to have a good understanding of its audience. This may be true in some cases, but generally, forgoing research is a risk. Fast rate of technological change makes it difficult for business stakeholders busy running their organization, to sense changes in sentiment toward their offerings, or identify the emergence of a serious competitor outside of the known field of existing competitions.

Experience strategists focus audience research activities on collecting quantitative and qualitative data on people's needs from a product and their experience expectations. The methods used include online surveys and visioning workshops. The latter promises to be more effective for experience research than traditional focus groups, because designers get to actively engage users in imagining the future of a product in a workshop.