I start with the choice at stake: whom to serve, which problem to prioritise or how to describe a proposition.
Customer evidence should test internal assumptions as well as confirm them. The most useful findings often reveal friction between the story a business tells and the experience customers describe. Acting on that gap requires collaboration beyond the marketing function.
Research fails to change decisions for familiar reasons. It is often commissioned to validate a direction already chosen, so its findings arrive as reassurance rather than challenge. It frequently lands after the relevant decision has been made, or reaches only the marketing team when the choice sits with product or operations. Uncomfortable findings tend to be softened as they travel upwards, because nobody wants to deliver a message that contradicts a senior leader's belief. The organisation ends up spending on listening without ever quite hearing what it has been told.
Before any significant research begins, I ask for a short decision brief. It names the decision the research will inform, the person who will make it and the point by which it must be made. It records the current assumption and states what result would change that assumption. I also ask decision makers to attend some customer conversations themselves rather than relying only on a summary. Hearing a customer describe a frustration in their own words tends to carry more weight in a later discussion than any slide that reports it.
Consider a business convinced that customers choose it for the breadth of its range. Interviews reveal something different: customers value the advice they receive from account staff and find the range confusing when they browse alone. That finding challenges sales incentives, product decisions and messaging at the same time. The resulting decision might be to simplify the range and invest in advisory roles, which is uncomfortable for teams who built their plans around breadth. It is also the kind of decision that research should exist to inform.
A common response to inconvenient research is the claim that customers do not know what they want. There is some truth in it: customers are poor designers of solutions and unreliable forecasters of their own behaviour. But research is not meant to ask customers to design anything. It is meant to understand their problems, contexts and choices. Observation of what people actually do, combined with careful questioning about why, is far more reliable than asking for opinions about hypothetical products. Used that way, research earns its place alongside internal expertise rather than competing with it.
This asks the leadership team to commit, before seeing the results, to acting on what the research shows, and to make room for findings that challenge favoured assumptions. It asks decision owners outside marketing to take part in framing the questions, so the work addresses choices they genuinely face. And it asks marketing to bring customer evidence into the forums where decisions are taken, in a form that clarifies the choice rather than overwhelming it. When those conditions hold, insight becomes a routine input to judgement rather than an occasional report.
The insight programmes I value most end in a decision someone was willing to make: a feature reprioritised, a promise withdrawn, a service redesigned. Insight that only produces presentations teaches the organisation that listening to customers is optional. Insight that changes a decision teaches the opposite.