"I would love to do market research to study how to best promote steemit to people."

I am not market expert but I can tell you how I would explain it to a friend.
Basicly I would put emphasis on explaining the technology behind the platform ,aka blockchain and IPFS internet protocol.
The blockchain allows for a decentralized platform,giving high degrees of freedom of speech(lack of youtube censorship) and allowing content creators to be directly paid by the likes of their viewers, as oposed to having to cram advertisements down people' s throats.
The IPFS internet protocol makes it possible to create a peer to peer network for video storage and viewing(kinda like how torrents work).
The video storage is done on multiple hosts across the network and when you try to view something you usually turn to the nearest host to your location(I think it would scale wonderfully in the future with more users,but right now as the platform is still new and most of the users are from the US,in europe the website can feel quite a bit slow).