Businesses have access to more data than they ever did before. On a near constant basis, it’s possible for businesses to profile their customers, evaluate demand patterns and assess customer experiences. But often the data can be incomplete, or ‘in the moment’ transactional data gathered in quite disparate ways across the organisation. The result is a lack of confidence to make critical decisions about securing business growth.
Research can provide that confidence. Confidence that investments will generate returns. Confidence that customers will buy. Confidence that market conditions are favourable. Confidence that strategic decisions will create shareholder value.
When integrated into commercial decision-making, research reduces uncertainty, validates assumptions, identifies growth opportunities, and improves the likelihood that strategic investments deliver positive returns.
This paper explores the ways in which research can support commercial decisions across growth strategy, customer acquisition, product development, pricing, market expansion, and investment planning.
Why Commercial Decisions Need Evidence
Each significant business decision contains elements of risk. Businesses want to know:
- Where should we invest for growth?
- Which customer segments offer the highest potential value?
- Are we pricing our products correctly?
- Do we enter a new market?
- How do we prioritise product investment?
- What competitive threats should we prepare for?
Without robust evidence, these decisions rely heavily on experience, assumptions, or instinct. There’s no doubt that executive judgement remains critical to these decisions, but research strengthens decision-making by testing assumptions and calculating the risk before significant resources are committed. The outcome that we should all be striving for is not simply better or more information, it is better commercial outcomes.
1. Research as an Enabler for Revenue Growth
One of the most direct commercial applications of research is identifying and validating growth opportunities; the key commercial question is where is the future growth going to come from.
Research can identify: unmet customer needs, emerging market opportunities, high-growth customer segments, changing purchasing behaviours and new use cases for existing products.
Research on customer demand can therefore help confirm the specific areas where revenue growth is likely to come from - whether that be specific customer groups, new/evolved product categories/use cases or new geographic regions. This means that rather than investing broadly, organisations can focus resources where growth potential is demonstrably highest.
Recent client work at Brand Ignite helped a supplier in the construction industry reallocate its sales and marketing investments on a particular segment after research identified that the decision making chain was changing, a result of evolving legislation, with a new set of decision-makers emerging. A refocused strategy expected to protect and build revenues and help maintain its competitive position.
2. Research Supports More Effective Market Entry Decisions
For any business, entering a new market requires significant investment and the cost of getting it wrong can be substantial.
When a business needs to know if they should enter market X, research can assess: market size, growth rates, customer demand, competitive intensity, barriers to entry and regulatory considerations.
Research can therefore provide evidence that a target market can support the revenue objectives required to justify investment and allow board level decisions to be made with confidence and knowledge of the success factors. Understanding the potential of the market can help forecast revenue growth, capital efficiency and time to profitability.
3. Research Reduces Product Investment Risk
Investment in products and services is substantial for any business, therefore businesses need to know that the customer demand exists to not only provide a return on the initial investment, but that it will also drive long-term business growth.
Research can validate demand before launch, prioritise high-value features, test willingness to pay and identify adoption barriers, providing confidence that business resources are focused on products and improvements that customers will genuinely value.
A recent client project by Brand Ignite identified the success rate for an established brand in the consumer goods market that wanted to bring out a new product range to compete with a challenger brand. The research confirmed strong willingness to adopt the new product without cannibalising existing product ranges, reducing launch risk and strengthening the business case for investment.
4. Research Strengthens Pricing Decisions
Pricing is one of the most powerful, yet underutilised, drivers of profitability. Small pricing improvements often generate disproportionately large impacts on margin with less than expected impact on customer buying behaviours and loyalty.
The key commercial question is are we maximising commercial value from our pricing strategy?
Research helps organisations understand: price sensitivity, perceived value, competitive positioning and purchase drivers.
Research in this area therefore enables pricing decisions based on customer value rather than any internal assumptions.
Recent work by Brand Ignite helped identify if there was a commercial risk to the client’s business from the pricing parameters and average selling price set by the wider market and therefore if the client needed to adapt its pricing strategy to protect its gross margins and revenues.
5. Research Optimises Customer Acquisition Investment
Marketing and sales investments need to be made with sufficient evidence regarding audience priorities and buying behaviour. At Brand Ignite, we see the key question as where should customer acquisition budgets be focused?
Research identifies: high-value audiences, buying triggers, decision-making criteria, preferred channels and brand perceptions
Research in these areas then guides more efficient allocation of acquisition spend by identifying the customer segments most likely to convert, enabling more targeted investment and improving return on marketing expenditure.
6. Research Improves Customer Retention and Lifetime Value
Business growth is not only created through acquisition. For most organisations, increasing retention generates more value than attracting new customers. The key question to answer is how do we increase the lifetime value of our most profitable customers?
Research can uncover: drivers of loyalty, causes of churn, areas of service dissatisfaction and opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.
If customer research, for example, revealed that service responsiveness was the primary predictor of retention, then this information can prioritise investment in operational areas that will drive service responsiveness improvements, supporting revenue preservation and protecting recurring revenue.
7. Research Helps Validate Strategic Investments
Major transformation programmes, acquisitions, and capital investments often involve millions of pounds of expenditure. Senior leaders are therefore often faced with decisions about whether to proceed with this type and level of investment.
Research provides evidence relating to: market attractiveness, customer demand, competitive dynamics, strategic fit and growth potential. Reducing uncertainty and improving board-level confidence.
At Brand Ignite we recently identified if a client should proceed with a business transformation project and implement a new business model to drive revenue and loyalty. The research identified that the client customer base was not ready to accept this new model until certain service issues were addressed, helping to save the organisation massive expenditure and commercial risk in going to market too early with a new structure.
Final thoughts
Research should not be viewed as a mechanism for gathering information. It should be viewed as a tool for increasing commercial certainty. The most successful organisations do not use research as a one-off activity. They embed evidence into decision-making processes. When aligned to business priorities, research helps organisations answer the questions that matter most, such as where growth will come from, which investments should be prioritised, how can profitability be improved and how do you mitigate risk.
The organisations that consistently outperform competitors are often those that make better decisions sooner. Research provides the evidence needed to do exactly that.
