Complete Market Research Guide for Hair & Beauty Salons

Most salon owners set their prices, build their service menu and plan their staffing on instinct. A new balayage price gets set by checking what two nearby salons charge. A treatment is added because a supplier recommended it, and another is dropped because it rarely gets booked. When a client stops coming, the appointment book simply shows a gap, and the reason almost never reaches the owner.

There is one more thing that sets salons apart from most local businesses. Clients often choose a person rather than a place. Salon reviews regularly name the stylist, colorist or therapist who did the work, and praise or criticism is attached to that individual as much as to the salon. That makes staff planning a research question, and it makes the departure of a popular stylist a business risk that the reviews can help you see in advance.

This guide shows how a hair salon, beauty salon, barbershop, nail studio or skin clinic can turn the feedback it already has, together with the reviews its clients and its competitors' clients write in public, into real market research about its own business, its competitors and the wider beauty market.

Key Research Questions

Before collecting anything, it helps to decide what the research should answer. For a salon, the questions fall into three groups: questions about your own salon, questions about the salons competing for the same clients, and questions about where the beauty market as a whole is moving.

Your Salon

Start with why clients choose you. The answer is rarely just price or location. It might be one colorist's skill with blondes, the way the salon handles curly or textured hair, a relaxed atmosphere on weekday evenings, or the fact that appointments start on time. Knowing which of these actually brings people in tells you what to protect when you change the menu, the prices or the team.

Then look at where the experience breaks. In a salon it tends to break at a few predictable moments: booking an appointment, the welcome and consultation, the service itself, the moment the client sees the result, and the days after, when the color settles, the nails hold or the skin reacts. The research question is which of these moments produces the most frustration and what exactly goes wrong there.

Finally, ask why clients stop coming. Some reasons are outside your control, such as moving away. Many are not: a result that did not match what was asked for, a price increase without explanation, a stylist who left, or a booking process that became harder than it should be.

Your Competitors

Direct competitors are the other salons, barbershops and studios within reach of your clients. Indirect competitors offer a different answer to the same need: home color kits, a mobile stylist who visits clients at home, a specialist lash or brow bar, or a clinic offering treatments you do not.

The questions mirror the ones about your own salon. What do clients of nearby salons praise, and is it something you already offer? What do they complain about, and could you solve it? Which needs does no salon in your area seem to meet, such as evening appointments, experience with a particular hair type or clear prices for color work? A competitor's reviews are often more useful than your own for finding these gaps, because they describe experiences you have never seen.

The Beauty Market

The third group concerns the category. Which services are gaining or losing interest? What do people do at home instead of booking an appointment, and why? How are expectations changing around ingredients, aftercare advice or online booking? These questions matter most before a larger investment, such as adding a treatment room, training staff in a new technique or opening a second location.

The products clients use between appointments belong to the same market. Kimola's published research on Polar Haircare Shampoo, a color shampoo for gray coverage, shows what category research built from customer reviews looks like, and what people write about color results, application and sensitivity when they color their hair at home.

Sources of Evidence

Evidence about a salon comes from four places: what clients already tell you, what clients of every salon in your area write in public, what you can ask people directly, and what you can observe and compare yourself. None of these has to come first. Each answers the questions above from a different angle, and the strongest research combines them.

Internal Feedback

Most salons hold more feedback than they realize. Comments made at the reception desk, messages and emails from clients, notes in the booking system, follow-up messages after a color service, redo requests and complaints all contain clients' own words. One at a time they are anecdotes. Collected in one place and analyzed together, they show patterns: which complaints return month after month, which ones are tied to a particular service or day of the week, and which ones are new.

A good first step is to export these into a single spreadsheet, with one row per comment and columns for anything you know about it, such as the date, the service, the location or the team member involved. That spreadsheet is the beginning of a customer feedback analysis practice.

Public Reviews

The richest public source for a salon is Google Business. Every location has its own listing, and clients use it to describe the service, the result and the person who did the work. Yelp is an important source in many US cities and tends to contain long, detailed reviews. Instagram matters more for salons than for most local businesses, because the work is visual and clients comment under before-and-after posts, both on your account and on your competitors' accounts. For the products you sell at the counter, Amazon reviews show what people think of the same brands when they use them at home.

What makes these sources valuable is that they cover the people your internal records miss: clients who came once and never returned, clients of competing salons, and people who are comparing several options before they book.

Surveys, Interviews and Visits

Traditional methods still have a place, and a good research plan uses them on purpose. A short survey sent a few days after an appointment can combine a rating question with one or two open questions, such as how the result looks now and what would have made the visit better. Rating questions give you numbers to track over time; open questions give you the reasons behind them. Sending the survey a few days later, rather than at the desk, captures how the result held up.

One-on-one conversations go deeper. The most useful people to talk to are new clients and lapsed clients as well as regulars, since they can describe the moments when they decided to book or stopped booking. Ask open questions and follow up on specifics: when someone says the consultation felt rushed, ask what they wanted to discuss.

Booking an appointment at a competing salon is still the best way to understand what a rival actually offers, from how the phone is answered to how the result is explained. The limitation of all three methods is scale. A small salon can run a handful of conversations and visits, which is enough to form hypotheses and rarely enough to confirm them. Survey answers and interview notes are also qualitative research data, and they need the same structured analysis as reviews to become more than a collection of quotes.

Location and Pricing

Two practical checks sit slightly outside feedback research. A location check looks at who lives and works nearby, how visible and accessible the salon is, whether parking or public transport is adequate, and how many salons already compete for the same street. Walking the area at different times of day remains the most reliable part of this check.

A pricing check compares service menus across your direct competitors: what is included in a cut, how color is priced by length or time, whether consultations and patch tests are charged, and how packages and memberships are structured. Keep the comparison in a table and update it a few times a year. Reviews add something a price list cannot: they show whether clients of a cheaper salon feel they get what they pay for, and whether clients of a premium salon feel the price is justified.

Researching Salons with Kimola

Kimola is an AI platform that turns customer feedback into enterprise-grade market research. For a salon, that means taking the reviews and comments described above and turning them into a structured study of your clients, your competitors and your market. The steps below follow the order a researcher would work in, and you can start with a free account, without a credit card.

Building the Dataset

After signing up, go to the Create your report area on the Home screen. Paste the link to your salon's Google Business listing, or use the Add Multiple option to paste several links, one per line: your own locations and the listings of the salons you compete with. Kimola collects the reviews from all of them into a single dataset, so your salon and its competitors are analyzed in the same report. Amazon product pages for the brands you sell can be added the same way in a separate report. The support article on creating a report by adding links walks through each screen.

For Yelp and Instagram, Kimola's browser extension, Airset Generator, collects the reviews or comments from the page and sends them to your account as an Airset, which you can turn into a report. Your own data, such as client messages, follow-up survey answers or redo requests, can be uploaded as an .xls, .xlsx, .csv or .tsv file. If the file contains columns like location, service or month, Kimola reads them, and you can filter and compare the results by those values.

Salon reviews often include the names of individual team members. Treat that information with care: the purpose of the research is to improve how the salon works, not to single out or blame individual people.

Choosing Dimensions

Dimensions are the research questions Kimola asks of every piece of feedback. You choose them when you create the report or add them later, and the guide to Dimensions explains each one. For a salon, five are especially useful.

Motivations asks why people choose a place. In salon reviews it separates clients who came for convenience or price from those who came for a particular specialist, technique or atmosphere, which shows what your actual value proposition is and how much of it depends on specific people.

Pain Points asks what goes wrong. Running late, a result that differs from the reference photo, unexpected charges, pressure to buy products and difficulty getting an appointment are typical candidates, but the point is to see which ones dominate for your salon and for each competitor.

Experience Stages places each comment at a moment in the client's visit. For a salon, the stages are usually booking, the welcome and consultation, the service, the result and the days after. Seeing which stage produces the most negative feedback tells you where to intervene first.

Personas groups reviewers by who they are and what they want, such as the regular who books the same cut every six weeks, the client planning a big color change, the bride preparing for a wedding or the client with sensitive skin. Different personas often want different things from the same appointment.

Underlying Causes looks behind a complaint to its source. A complaint about hair color can come from technique, from the products used or from a consultation in which the client and the colorist understood the goal differently. Knowing which one is behind the complaint decides whether the answer is training, a product change or a better consultation.

Reading the Report

The Overview shows the main themes in the reviews and how sentiment is distributed. Kimola finds those themes in the data itself instead of sorting comments into a fixed list of categories, so a review about the service can be tagged with something as specific as brassy tones after a lightening service or a consultation that skipped the patch test.

Each review can mention several themes, and each theme gets its own sentiment. A client who loves the haircut but found the wait at reception too long contributes a positive mention of the cut and a negative mention of the wait, instead of a single mixed score that hides both.

The Performance screen ranks themes with a Satisfaction Score and a Dissatisfaction Score. These scores account for how many reviews mention a theme as well as the percentage. This matters for a salon with a modest number of reviews: a theme with five glowing reviews looks perfect as a percentage but says very little, and Kimola ranks a theme backed by fifty reviews above it. It is a safeguard against the most common mistake in small-scale research, which is drawing confident conclusions from a handful of comments.

Signals

Signals are findings that have passed a statistical test. Kimola crosses every theme and Dimension with the columns in your dataset, such as the salon a review is about, its star rating or its date, and checks whether a topic is discussed more often or more negatively in one group than in the others (Differences) or more often recently than before (Trends). Only significant results become Signals, and they are ranked so the most important ones come first. A Signal might show that complaints about color results are concentrated in the reviews of one competitor, or that mentions of booking difficulties have increased in recent months. The explanation of how Signals are tested covers the method in more detail.

Signals need enough feedback and at least some selected Dimensions. If a dataset is small, or nothing stands out, the report shows no Signals. That is an honest result: the data simply did not contain a pattern strong enough to report.

Compare

Compare puts segments of a report side by side. In a report built with Add Multiple, the natural use is to compare your salon with up to four competitors at once and see the volume of feedback, the sentiment distribution, the themes they share and the themes that appear for only one of them. Those unshared themes are often where positioning ideas come from: a specialty clients praise at a rival and never mention at your salon, or a complaint that appears everywhere except at yours. Compare can also set one-star reviews against five-star reviews, which shows what separates a disappointing visit from an excellent one.

Action Plans

Action Plans turn the findings into steps. You start by choosing or creating a Profile that describes your salon, then select a perspective: Our own offering, A rival or Our market. These match the three groups of questions at the beginning of this guide. A sensible first plan for a salon uses Our own offering. Once you have a report that includes your competitors, a second plan with the Competitive Strategy goal focuses on how to position your salon against them.

Kimola builds hypotheses from the report, tests each one against the feedback and drops the actions the evidence does not support. Each remaining action comes with a confidence level and explains why it matters, who it is for, when and where to act, the risk involved and how to see that it worked, along with the evidence behind it. A plan contains up to 12 actions. Plans work best when the report already has Signals, as the support article on how actions are built explains.

From Findings to Decisions

Research is only useful if it changes a decision. For a salon the decisions are concrete, and each one connects to a specific part of the report.

Service Menu and Pricing

If Motivations shows that many clients chose you for one specific service, such as color correction or curly cuts, that service deserves a clear place on the menu and a price that reflects the skill involved. If Pain Points in competitors' reviews concentrate on unexpected charges for color work, a menu that explains how color is priced can become a point of difference.

Booking and Waiting

When Experience Stages shows that negative feedback clusters at booking or on arrival, the problem is in scheduling rather than in the chair. A Signal that ties waiting complaints to a particular day or time points to a staffing gap that the schedule can fix.

Stylists and Staff

If a large share of positive feedback names individual stylists, your team is a central part of your value proposition, and the departure of one of them is a risk worth planning for, for example by making sure clients get to know more than one team member. If negative feedback clusters around the consultation or the welcome rather than the technical work, it points to a communication or training issue.

Results and Aftercare

Underlying Causes is especially useful here. When complaints about results trace back to the consultation, better reference photos, clearer expectations about what one appointment can achieve and a written summary of the plan may help more than additional technical training. When complaints appear in the days after a service, aftercare advice and follow-up messages are the place to look.

Retail Products

Reviews of the products you sell, collected from Amazon, show what clients experience with them at home, which ingredients they look for and which complaints recur. Compare across the brands on your shelf shows which ones match what your clients value, and gives your team better answers when a client asks for a recommendation.

Client Loyalty

Combining your own records of lapsed clients with public reviews gives you both the visible gap in the appointment book and the fuller story behind it. When the same Pain Point appears in both sources, it is a strong candidate for a real reason clients stop coming.

Ongoing Research

A single report gives you a snapshot, and a salon changes every season: services are added, prices change, team members arrive and leave, a new salon opens down the street. Repeating the research at regular intervals, for example every quarter, shows whether the changes you made actually moved the themes they were meant to move.

On paid plans, Feeds keep the research running continuously. A Feed collects public mentions from social media, news sites, blogs, forums, YouTube and review sites, based on the keywords and links you define. Alerts email your team when something important happens, and Mailings send a regular summary. Over time, Trends Signals show which topics are rising and which are fading.

Salon Chains and Multi-Location Studios

Salon chains and franchise groups face the same questions at a larger scale, with one more added: why does the same brand perform differently from one location to another? On the Enterprise plan, each location, survey program or feedback channel can become a Space, a continuously growing source of feedback classified with the same Funnel, which is a shared set of custom models and Dimensions. Because every location is analyzed the same way, results stay comparable over time and across the network. Spaces also calculate an NPS from what clients write, on a scale from -100 to 100. It is derived from the positive and negative share of written feedback, so it is not the same as a Net Promoter Score from a 0 to 10 survey, and NPS targets can be set for each location.

When a finding needs action, Tasks assign it to a team member with the underlying feedback attached as evidence, and Tasks can be sent to Jira. After a Task is closed, Kimola measures feedback on the same topic again two and four weeks later, so you can see whether clients noticed the change. Executive summary screens give leadership a single view of what clients are saying across the organization. Enterprise accounts are set up together with a dedicated Account Manager, and you can request a demo to discuss your setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

A few practical questions come up when a salon starts researching with customer feedback for the first time.

How many reviews do I need before the findings mean anything?

There is no fixed threshold, and the ranking on the Performance screen is designed to protect you from small samples by weighing how many reviews support each theme. A single salon with a few dozen reviews can still yield useful themes; Signals need more data and appear only when a pattern is statistically significant. Adding competitors' listings to the same report is the easiest way to build a larger dataset.

Can I research a salon I have never visited?

Yes. Its Google Business listing can be added to a report just like your own, and its Yelp reviews and Instagram comments can be collected with Airset Generator. Booking an appointment there will still tell you things reviews cannot, so the two methods work best together.

What should I do when reviews mention my staff by name?

Use them to understand what clients value and where the experience breaks, and discuss the findings with your team as a whole. The aim is to improve the salon, so patterns matter more than any single comment about one person.

Getting Started

Your clients, and your competitors' clients, have already written much of the research your salon needs. Create a free Kimola account, add your salon and two or three competitors to a single report, and read what they have been saying. If you run a related business, the market research guides for fitness centers and fashion stores apply the same approach, and the market research guide for small businesses covers the method for any industry.