Non-customer surveys in short: A non-customer survey gathers feedback from people who fit your target market but do not currently buy from your company. It helps explain why buyers choose competitors, what prevents them from considering your brand, and what could persuade them to buy.
Customer surveys tell you how people who already chose your business feel about their experience. But they cannot fully explain why someone chose a competitor, never considered your brand, or stopped short of buying.
A non-customer survey is designed to answer those questions. It collects feedback from people who fit your target market but are not current customers. Depending on the study, that could mean competitor customers, prospective buyers, lost opportunities, or people shopping within your category.
For marketing and insights teams, this creates a much broader view of the market. You can measure awareness, uncover barriers to consideration, compare your brand against competitors, and understand what could persuade more buyers to choose you.
Drive Research conducts online surveys with non-buyers for both B2B and B2C organizations. In this guide, we’ll explain how these studies work and how to recruit the right respondents. We’ll also share sample non-customer survey questions and examples from our own research.
A non-customer survey is a research study that gathers feedback from people who are not current customers of a company but are relevant to the market it serves.
The key phrase there is relevant to the market.
You usually do not want feedback from any random person who would never purchase from your company. You want people who realistically could.
For a consumer brand, that may be shoppers who currently purchase competing products. Whereas, a financial institution may want feedback from people who have bank accounts and make their household’s financial decisions but use another bank.
The same idea applies in B2B research. A software company may want to survey decision-makers who recently evaluated products in its category but selected another provider.
This distinction matters because the goal is not simply to hear from people outside your customer database. It is to understand the buyers your organization has an opportunity to win.
There is an important limitation to customer-only research: everyone in the study has already chosen your company.
That makes customer feedback extremely useful for measuring satisfaction and improving the experience. It is much less useful for explaining what is happening among the much larger group of people who did not buy.
Marketing teams sometimes assume they need more awareness because growth has slowed.
A non-customer survey can test that assumption.
If only a small percentage of the target market knows your brand, awareness may indeed be the first challenge. But if buyers know the company and still do not consider it, buying more impressions may not solve much.
The issue could be how the brand is perceived, what people believe the product costs, or how it compares with the alternatives they already use.
That distinction gives marketing a much clearer problem to solve.
Non-buyers can help identify the barriers that exist throughout the purchase journey.
Some people may never put your company on their initial shortlist. Others investigate the brand but eliminate it later. A prospect may make it all the way to a sales conversation before choosing someone else.
Those are very different problems.
Here’s an example from our work.
An insurance company wanted to understand the barriers consumers faced at different stages of its purchase funnel, including consideration and the quote or purchase stage.
Drive Research surveyed 4,011 people, with both customers and non-customers represented in the study. We used structural equation modeling because the company needed to evaluate a large number of potential barriers and understand how they related to one another.
The research gave the company evidence it could use to shape future marketing and product decisions rather than treating every lost buyer as the result of the same issue.
One of the most useful non-customer groups is often people currently buying from your competitors.
You can learn what led them to their current provider, which attributes mattered during the decision, and where their existing provider performs particularly well.
It can also reveal weaknesses.
For example, competitor customers may be relatively satisfied overall but consistently frustrated with one part of the experience. That does not mean your marketing should immediately attack the competitor. It gives your team a better understanding of which differences could actually matter when positioning your own offer.
A customer database can tell you a lot about the people who already buy from you. But it cannot tell you how representative those buyers are of the market you are trying to reach.
Non-customer research can help marketers understand how buyer preferences differ outside the existing customer base. The findings may influence audience targeting or the value proposition. They can also show which messages are unlikely to change behavior.
That is more useful than building the next campaign around internal assumptions about why people are not converting.
The right audience depends on what you need the research to explain.
If you need to understand… | Survey… | Why |
|---|---|---|
Satisfaction and loyalty among people using your company | Customers | They can evaluate their actual experience with the organization |
Why target buyers do not choose your brand | Non-customers | They can explain awareness gaps, barriers, and competitive decisions |
Overall brand health in the marketplace | Customers and non-customers | You can compare your customer base with the broader market |
A potential new market or offering | Qualified non-customers, sometimes alongside customers | The study can measure demand beyond people already familiar with your business |
In our experience, customers and non-customers are especially valuable together when an organization needs to understand its position in the overall market.
Consider a company with excellent customer satisfaction metrics but weak market share. Customer research alone may suggest things are going extremely well.
The non-customer portion of the study might tell a different story. Perhaps few people know the brand exists. Or the market knows the company but associates it with a product it no longer specializes in.
Both findings can be true at the same time.
The process for surveying non-customers is similar to other quantitative market research, but recruiting deserves much more attention.
You do not have the convenience of opening your CRM and emailing everyone in it. You have to define the people you want to hear from and find a credible way to reach them.
For more context, here are the typical steps our market research company takes when surveying non-customers.
Step 1: Define the decision the research needs to support
Start with the business question you are trying to answer or the challenge you’re trying to solve.
“We want to learn more about non-customers” is too broad.
A stronger objective might be: Determine why category buyers are aware of our brand but do not include it in their consideration set.
Now the research team knows what audience to recruit and what the questionnaire needs to investigate.
Research Tip: We often ask clients how they plan to use the findings when the project is finished. If there is no clear answer, the study objectives usually need more work.
Step 2: Define exactly who qualifies as a non-customer
The target audience should reflect the real buying opportunity.
Step 3: Determine how you will reach the audience
This is one of the biggest differences between customer and non-customer research.
Organizations already own the relationship with their customers, but finding qualified non-buyers usually requires an outside sample source or custom recruiting.
Drive Research builds the sourcing strategy around the audience rather than relying on one panel company. Depending on the project, our recruiting can use vetted panel partners and social outreach. More specialized studies may require opt-in lists, professional associations, or custom recruiting.
This becomes particularly important with low-incidence B2B audiences.
If you need CFOs at manufacturers with more than 1,000 employees who purchased a particular technology within the past 12 months, access to “business professionals” is not enough.
You need a recruitment process capable of confirming those qualifications.
Step 4: Design the Non-Customer Survey
The questionnaire should follow the objectives you established at the beginning. It should also account for how familiar someone is with your company.
For example, asking, “Why haven’t you purchased from Brand XYZ?” assumes respondents knew Brand XYZ was an option in the first place.
They may not have.
A better survey flow measures awareness first. Respondents who know the brand can then answer questions about perceptions or consideration. Those who have never heard of it can move through a different path.
That gives you cleaner data and prevents the survey itself from creating awareness before you measure it.
Step 5: Field the survey and protect data quality
Once the survey is tested, fieldwork begins with qualified respondents.
This is an area where non-customer research requires real oversight. You are often recruiting people your organization has no direct relationship with, so respondent validation and data cleaning matter.
Drive Research combines automated fraud controls with analyst review throughout fieldwork. Checks include duplicate detection and response consistency. Analysts also review open-ended responses, completion patterns, location concerns, and other signals that can indicate poor-quality participation.
For professional audiences, additional verification can be used to confirm respondents actually fit the roles required for the study.
The goal is not to collect the largest possible number of responses. It is to collect enough credible responses from the people who can actually answer your business question.
Useful Resource: Review this resource to learn more about our data quality controls and best practices.
Step 6: Analyze the results around the decision
A strong non-customer survey report should do more than show percentages. The analysis should connect the findings back to why the research happened.
Imagine the results show that non-buyers have strong awareness of a brand but low consideration. The analysis should dig into what separates people who would consider the brand from those who would not.
Perhaps perceived price is the biggest gap. Maybe competitor buyers place far more importance on a feature the brand barely discusses in its marketing.
Those findings lead to very different recommendations.
The final report should make that distinction clear so teams know what to do next.
Non-customer surveys typically include questions that explore the reasons why individuals haven’t chosen to engage with a particular product or service, what factors influence their decision-making, and what might attract them in the future.
Example non-buying customer survey questions include:
Notice that these questions do not all assume the respondent knows your brand. That is intentional.
Someone who has never heard of your organization should not be asked to rate its customer service or explain why its prices are too high. Good survey programming uses skip logic so questions only appear when respondents have enough knowledge to answer them.
Demographics or B2B firmographics can also be included when they will improve the analysis. The key is collecting information you have a reason to use.
If company size will influence your B2B strategy, ask about it. If you are never going to analyze results by a respondent characteristic, there may be little value in adding another question just because it is traditionally included in surveys.
Recruitment is not only about finding people. You also want to avoid telling respondents so much about the study that they can figure out how to qualify.
If an invitation says, “We’re looking for non-customers of Brand XYZ who recently purchased Product ABC,” you have already revealed most of the screening criteria.
That makes the survey much easier to game.
Our current data-quality approach uses broader screening language and masks important study details when appropriate. Key qualification criteria can also be cross-checked later in the questionnaire to make sure responses remain consistent.
This matters even more when incentives are involved. Respondents should qualify because they genuinely fit the target, not because the screener showed them which boxes to check.
Companies can certainly conduct some surveys internally. The bigger challenge with non-customer research is often everything that happens before someone reaches the questionnaire.
Your organization probably has an email address for many of its customers. You probably do not have contact information for thousands of people who buy from your competitors.
A market research company can provide access to external sample and build custom recruiting approaches for audiences that are difficult to reach.
That is useful for consumer studies, but it becomes especially important in B2B research where incidence can be low and participant qualifications are much narrower.
A third party market research firm creates distance between respondents and the company sponsoring the research.
This is particularly useful when measuring brand perceptions or asking people to critique companies in the category.
The sponsor can be blinded when appropriate so respondents are not shaping their answers based on who they believe wants to hear them.
An independent research partner also provides another layer between the business question and the questionnaire itself. Internal teams naturally have hypotheses about what is happening in the market. Those assumptions should inform the research, but they should not be baked into questions in a way that pushes respondents toward a preferred answer.
A non-customer survey gathers feedback from people who are not current customers but fit the market an organization wants to understand. These studies are commonly used to measure brand awareness, identify barriers to purchase, and understand why buyers choose competitors.
The terms non-buyer survey and non-customer survey are often used to describe similar research. In both cases, the goal is to collect feedback from qualified people who have not purchased from the sponsoring organization.
The exact audience should still be defined carefully. A non-buyer who has never purchased anything in the category may be much less useful than someone who actively buys from your competitors.
Non-customers can be recruited through online research panels or custom outreach. The appropriate source depends on how specific the target audience is.
Niche professional studies may require several recruitment sources and additional respondent verification.
Yes, when the research needs to compare your current customer base with the broader marketplace.
Brand health research is a good example. Customers can evaluate their experience with the company, while non-customers provide insight into awareness and market perceptions.
The groups should be identified in the questionnaire so their results can be analyzed separately.
There is no sample size that works for every non-customer survey.
The right number depends on the size of the target market and how precise the results need to be. Sample requirements also increase when the organization needs reliable comparisons between audience segments.
For difficult B2B audiences, respondent quality should take priority over pursuing a large sample simply to produce a bigger number.
No. B2B companies can use non-customer surveys to understand lost opportunities, competitive perceptions, buying criteria, or market awareness among business decision-makers.
The main difference is recruiting. B2B studies often require more precise screening because respondents need direct knowledge of the purchase or category being researched.
Drive Research is a full-service market research company that conducts custom non-customer surveys for B2B and B2C organizations.
Our team can manage the research from survey design through fieldwork. We also handle data quality, analysis, and reporting so the final findings connect back to the decision that started the project.
Most importantly, we build the recruiting approach around the people you actually need to hear from. That could mean broad consumer audiences or highly specific business decision-makers.
Get a custom non-customer survey recommendation from Drive Research.
