From Signals to Evidence: When Is Informal Feedback No Longer Enough?

When did you last talk to your consumer?

Not through a dashboard, a report or a presentation from your research agency. When did you last hear directly from the people buying, using, considering – or rejecting – your brand?

Marketers should never stop asking questions themselves and talking directly with their consumers. Go on trade rounds. Talk to consumers and sellers. Listen to the sales team. Check what people are saying online. Watch what competitors are doing. Follow the news. Observe what is changing around you.

These are important ways of staying close to the market, and they are often where the first signals of change emerge. A retailer may tell you that more consumers are choosing smaller pack sizes. Your sales team may notice greater resistance to price. Customers may begin asking different questions about the product. Online conversations may point to an emerging concern, while a competitor may start gaining traction with an offer that did not seem important a few months ago.

The market continues to evolve, accelerated by digital disruption – increasing the speed at which consumers are exposed to new choices, influences and ways of doing things. This means marketers cannot always rely on what they knew about consumers a few years ago, to even a few months ago especially if other brands are highly active in promoting themselves.

These observations and conversations are valuable. A few conversations can tell us that something may be happening, but not necessarily how widespread it is. Social media can reveal strong reactions, but those speaking the loudest may not represent the wider market. Even updates coming from within the company can give us only one view of what is happening outside it.

Take Gen Z. Suppose sales among younger consumers are softening, competitor activity is increasing, and previous studies suggest weakening relevance among the same group. At the same time, younger consumers may also be feeling greater pressure around price and value. The question then becomes more complex: Are younger consumers choosing us less because of price, because the brand is becoming less relevant to them, because competitors are offering something more compelling – or because several of these factors are happening at the same time?

This is where the question from the first article becomes useful. Once the business question is clearer, marketers can look at what they already have – sales data, customer feedback, trade input, digital conversations, previous research – and see how far these can take them.

But when we need to know which explanation actually holds across a wider market, understand what is driving the behavior, compare how different segments or locations may be responding, or answer a business question that requires a broader scale of understanding, informal feedback may no longer be enough.

Systematic research can show how prevalent an issue is, whether it differs across segments or locations, what may actually be driving the behavior, and which explanations are more likely to hold. It can also help test assumptions more objectively and establish whether a signal is isolated or part of a broader market pattern.

The point is for marketers to continue being curious and maintain a firsthand connection with consumers. Stay close to what is happening. Connect the signals you are seeing. Establish the business questions they point to, and determine what you really need to understand about the market. Then check what you already have. Can your internal data, sales reports, customer feedback or previous research answer the question? If they can, use them. If not, ask the next practical questions:

• Do we need to know how widespread this is?
• Do we need to test which explanation is correct?
• Do we need to understand whether the issue differs across segments, locations or types of consumers?
• Will the answer materially affect what we decide to do and how soon we need to do it?

If the answer to any of these is yes, that is the point where anecdotes and informal feedback should give way to more systematic research.

So keep talking to consumers. Keep listening to the trade. Keep watching the market.

But use what you hear as the starting point: spot the signal, frame the business question, check what you already know – and when the answer needs to be broader, more reliable or more conclusive, validate it systematically through research.