Research notebook — the work behind the strategy

Chapter 02

Ground It in Research.

Marketing built on internal assumptions fails at the same rate as marketing built on bad data. The companies that grow are the ones who talk to their customers before making decisions.

Why Opinion Fails

Most marketing briefs are written by people who know the product too well to see it clearly. They’ve heard the internal narrative so many times it sounds like fact. But customers don’t care about your internal narrative. They care about their own problems.

Research closes that gap. Not surveys with 200 respondents and a confidence interval. Real conversations with real customers about what they were trying to do when they found you, what they were afraid of, and whether you delivered.

Three Research Inputs

No single method tells the whole story. The companies that get strategy right use at least three inputs before making a direction decision.

Evidence to collect

  • Why customers chose you over alternatives
  • The specific problem they were solving
  • What almost stopped them from buying
  • How they describe what you do to others
  • What they wish you did differently

What to avoid

  • Leading questions
  • Surveys about future intent
  • Asking only satisfied customers
  • Treating one strong opinion as a pattern
  • Research that only confirms what you already believe

What Good Research Produces

Research done right produces two things: a clear picture of who your best customer actually is (not who you wish they were), and language — specific words and phrases that customers use to describe their own problems. That language belongs in your marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Because it was written from inside the building. A team gets in a room, brainstorms what feels right, and walks out with a deck that could have been written for any of fifteen companies in the same industry. It feels strategic, but it isn't grounded in anything you could point to. The recommendations don't survive contact with a real customer because they were never built from real customers in the first place.
Less than you'd think for the first version, more than most companies do. The minimum is a small set of customer interviews — somewhere between eight and fifteen — a structured competitive scan, and a clean look at your own internal data, especially CRM, win/loss, and any analytics you already have. That gets you the triangulation you need to make defensible recommendations. Bigger budgets can support quantitative surveys and segmentation studies, but they don't replace the foundation; they just sharpen it.
What was happening in their business when they started looking. How they evaluated their options. Why they chose you. What the experience has been since. What they would tell a peer considering the same purchase. Notice that none of those are 'what features do you want?' Customers are bad at predicting what they want. They are very good at describing what they did and why.
Ask the leadership team to write down, individually, the top three reasons your best customers chose you and the top three reasons your worst-fit prospects passed. Then compare the answers. The disagreement in the room is the gap between what you think you know and what's actually true. That gap is the case for research.
Customer interviews land better when they're conducted by a third party — customers are more honest with someone who isn't on the payroll. Competitive analysis can go either way. Internal data should be pulled by whoever owns the systems. The synthesis — the part where the three sources turn into a strategy — benefits from an outside perspective, because the in-house team is too close to the noise.
For a mid-market company with a focused scope, four to eight weeks. Long enough to do the interviews properly and process them, short enough that the findings are still relevant. Anything that runs longer is usually a sign of scope creep, and anything shorter is usually a sign that the interviews were rushed.

Chapter 03

Craft a Brand Promise


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