People often find this difficult to do. Some research suggestions that may assist you are:

focus groups: this is where a group of potential customers come together to provide feedback and suggestions on your products, services or marketing strategy.

The information gathered using this method is very valuable. It will help you qualify your ideas. It will confirm customer preferences, emotions and attitudes. The information always provides a new and fresh perspective, the customers.

Test Marketing: I always say, test, test, test. In some ways we never stop testing and learning in business. This will involve going out to a small part of the market place. It will always produce significant learning.

It provides an opportunity to test marketing ideas, verify customer attitudes and preferences. You can then use this information to revise and evolve your product and service offerings. It is like a real life focus group

Survey: you can create a survey and then go and ask the questions and record the responses. Usually these will be done face to face but can also be successful over the telephone.

Observation: watching people in real life situations in a store or on video will provide insights into shopping patterns and perceptions.

Experiment: you can interview people in a real life situation, observe them or some combination of the above strategies.