Warning. The following article might put people who don't care much for research and market intelligence to sleep. Avoid reading while driving. But if brand growth is vital to your business, or you geek out on stuff like this (like me), read on.
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A business can know a great deal about its market and its ideal customers and still struggle to decide what to change. I see it happen a great deal.
Marketing has brand tracker and some market research reports. Innovation has a concept test. Leadership looks at market size, segmentation, and KPI's they track. Each project may have answered its brief well. Yet when leadership asks where to invest, which proposition to strengthen or why customers are choosing an alternative, the answers do not necessarily add up.
A research budget buys answers. A coherent picture requires someone to establish how those answers relate, and where they don't.
And even with armies of LLM's, so many companies still feel paralyzed when it comes to making decisions and placing important bets.
Why is that? Here is my take.
In Brief
Findings about the market, customers and brand should inform a shared, evolving understanding of customer choice, about where markets are moving, and where the brand stands. Each new study should address a decision, connect to relevant earlier evidence and make clear what could change the conclusion. That requires careful interpretation, comparable evidence and ownership between projects.
This used to be fiction. But today it's possible, even without massive investments.
Consider a hypothetical food brand. Its category report identifies growing interest in healthier products. Its interviews suggest that convenience matters. Its brand research finds strong associations with indulgence.
What should it launch?
A healthier range might respond to the category report. A more convenient format might respond to the interviews. An indulgent extension might fit existing brand associations. All three recommendations could arrive with evidence behind them.
The unresolved question is how those findings bear on the same commercial choice. Are the people seeking healthier options the people the brand wants to attract? Does convenience mean preparation time, portability or availability? Is indulgence an asset in the occasions where the proposed product would compete?
The reports have supplied ingredients. Leadership still needs to understand what they make together. And this is the hardest part - synthesizing it all and making the right decisions.
Connecting the answers starts with respecting their differences. A category statistic, a customer interview and a brand survey cannot simply be stacked into a single conclusion. They may cover different people, markets, occasions and periods. A tension between them might reveal an opportunity. It might also reveal that they answer different questions.
Nor can separate studies tell you how the same individuals think across all those subjects unless the research design supports that connection. An aggregate pattern is not a customer journey. Repeatedly asking related questions does not automatically make the answers comparable.
This matters because a persuasive synthesis can conceal a weak connection. If a growth decision depends on the claim that a particular customer group values convenience and sees the brand as inconvenient, those two propositions need evidence about that group and that brand. A general convenience trend plus unrelated brand criticism will not do.
The commercial risk is choosing an intervention the evidence has not earned: changing the message when the obstacle is availability, changing the product when the issue is perceived value, or funding a launch for demand that belongs to a different customer or occasion.
There is also an organisational risk. When nobody owns the interpretation between projects, the next brief can begin from the latest internal concern rather than the most consequential unresolved question. The business commissions another answer while leaving the earlier uncertainty intact.
My recommendation is to put three questions into every research brief.
Which decision could this study change?
“Understand our customers better” is an ambition. Choosing which of two propositions to develop is a decision. So is deciding whether an apparent weakness requires product investment, clearer communication or further investigation.
Naming the decision helps determine what evidence is necessary—and what would be interesting but insufficient. It also makes room for a legitimate outcome: the evidence may support keeping the current course.
Which earlier evidence must it connect to?
Specify the relevant findings, their sources, dates and limits. Explain what the new work is intended to confirm, challenge or clarify.
That connection must remain open to disagreement. Earlier findings should help sharpen the investigation without scripting its answers. Contradictions deserve examination, not editing out to preserve a tidy story. Where the studies are not comparable, say so and identify what would make the connection defensible.
What would warrant revisiting the conclusion?
A conclusion should include the conditions under which it may stop being useful. Those could include a change in the alternatives customers consider, evidence that a barrier has disappeared, or a finding that challenges the original explanation.
Keep the earlier conclusion and the evidence available at the time. Record what changed and why. Otherwise, the organisation loses the ability to distinguish a reasonable decision overtaken by events from an interpretation that was weak from the start.
None of this establishes that continuous research always outperforms an individual project. A well-designed study can settle a bounded question. Repeating it without a reason adds cost. Some findings remain useful for a long time; others need attention when the conditions behind them change.
The appropriate cadence follows the decision, the uncertainty and the cost of being wrong.
For a CMO reviewing the annual research plan, the practical starting point is to map the important decisions against what the business already knows. Then identify the gaps, the conflicting explanations and the evidence needed to resolve them. Give someone responsibility for maintaining that view between commissions.
The next study may be essential. Its value will depend partly on whether it changes what the organisation understands and can act on.
Before approving the brief, ask: when this answer arrives, what will we be able to decide that we cannot decide today?
p.s. this is what we're solving for at Original Minds. We continually read the Market, Customers, and our client's Brand to provide the judgement that makes those hard decisions easier to make.
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