Stop Pretending You Are Doing Research

by: Grant Gooding

Read Time: 4 minutes

If you don’t know what you are doing, stop surveying your customers.

After 15 years of working inside boardrooms one pattern is clear. Virtually all companies absolutely butcher customer research.

I don’t think it’s because people are careless or unintelligent.  It’s because surveys are incredibly easy to send and surprisingly difficult to do well.  

And when they are done poorly, the damage is both enormous and invisible. 

Bad research doesn’t just waste time and money. It’s much worse. It quietly sends organizations confidently in the wrong direction. By the time anyone realizes it, the company may have spent months, sometimes years, pursuing a strategy built on the wrong insight.

The Meeting Everyone Has Been In

You’ve probably been in this meeting before.

Someone suggests it would be helpful to “get customer feedback.” A survey seems like the obvious way to do it, so the group starts brainstorming questions. Someone wants feedback on features. Marketing wants to test messaging. Sales wants to understand decision maker preferences.  

And the list keeps growing.

Soon the questions begin stretching across multiple topics. Each question feels reasonable on its own, so none of them get removed. The survey slowly expands to cover a little bit of everything the organization is curious about. Most believe they’re asking useful questions. Eventually, the results come back and everyone gathers to review them.

The charts are presented. People lean forward and squint at the screen.

And then the room goes quiet.

Everyone looks at each other, waiting for someone to find the insight that tells them what to do next.  It never comes.

Good research doesn’t just produce answers. It’s structured so that when the answers arrive, the next move is obvious. 

Why Bad Research is Worse Than No Research

That moment when no one knows what to do next, that is where the real risk starts.

When research isn’t tightly connected to a decision, the answers leave room for interpretation. Opinions start filling the gaps. People gravitate toward the conclusions that feel most reasonable or confirm what they already suspected. And the organization moves forward believing it understands the customer.

But when the research wasn’t designed to guide a decision, that confidence is misplaced. What looks like insight is often just information without direction.

And that’s how companies end up pursuing the wrong strategy with complete confidence.

Which is what makes this so dangerous.

The moment that sets all this in motion feels harmless. Someone says, “Let’s ask our customers.”  The team starts thinking about survey tools and question lists. How to ask it. What to include. How to field it.

Almost no time is spent asking a much more important question: 

“What will we actually do with the answer?”

Because surveys are easy to send.

But if you don’t know how to structure them to produce insight, they do more than waste time.

They’ll shape decisions.
They’ll reinforce the wrong beliefs.
Over time, they’ll train your customers to ignore you.
And they’ll send you confidently in the wrong direction.

And that’s why, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you should stop surveying your customers.