Are your customer insights deep enough to compete?
The hidden advantage in complex markets isn’t more data—it’s deeper understanding.
Your marketing team probably isn’t short on customer data. Chances are you have well-constructed personas, detailed journey maps, voice-of-customer programs, and regular feedback loops. The work is often thoughtful. It’s thorough. It’s backed by insights from surveys, interviews, and analytics dashboards.
And yet—somehow—it still misses. Campaigns feel accurate but lack bite. Messaging sounds right but doesn’t quite cut through. The strategy is logical but doesn’t make a real impact. Sound familiar?
This isn’t about laziness or guesswork. It’s about a deeper problem: the limits of traditional research—and how easy it is to mistake rigour for relevance
And in complex categories like tech, finance, logistics, science or healthcare, the customer story gets messier. Because decisions there aren’t made in a vacuum. They’re shaped by internal politics, legacy systems, risk frameworks, procurement hurdles, regulatory pressure, and the ever-present fear of getting in trouble for getting it wrong.
And if your insight doesn’t reflect that reality, then you’re not seeing the full picture. You’re just watching from a safe distance.
Which begs the question: what if your biggest competitive edge isn’t louder creative or a bigger budget—but a richer, more true understanding of your customer than anyone else in your market?
Why deeper insights matter
In high-consideration categories, shallow insight is dangerous. It can give the illusion of certainty while your competitors might be getting closer to the truth.
Functional understanding (what your audience does, what they need) is only part of the picture. To get real cut through you need to understand what’s truely motivating them, what’s holding them back, and what they’re really trying to solve for.
That’s the kind of insight that helps you:
• Spot tensions and unmet needs your competitors miss
• Build sharper, stickier positioning
• Create content, campaigns and creative that actually connect because they reflect how people actually think, act, and decide
As Harvard Business Review puts it: companies that embed deep customer insight into their strategy, operations, and decision-making processes outperform competitors. Not because they’re more creative—but because they’re more connected.
Why asking isn’t always enough
Surveys, interviews and focus groups all have their place. Used well, they offer valuable direction, especially in early discovery phases or when you need a broad pulse on sentiment. But these methods can be insufficient, particularly in complex B2B and technical environments. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re incomplete, or at the very least misleading.
You see, people aren’t always the best narrators of their own behaviour. They’ll tell you what they think they do, not what they actually do. They’ll offer rational explanations for decisions driven by emotion. They’ll say what feels reasonable, rather than what really happened. And that’s not deception, that human. We’re all by nature unreliable narrators.
It’s no different in professional contexts. Responses are shaped by internal filters, brand perceptions, status dynamics—even how people want to be seen by their peers or team. That filtering means you end up with research that’s thorough, but not quite true.
And when strategy is built on that kind of input, it tends to drift. The story looks coherent. The logic tracks. But something’s off—and it shows in the results.
So how do you get deeper insights?
If traditional research gives you the "what"—deep insight helps you uncover the "why." It reveals the hidden constraints, contradictions, and triggers that drive decision-making and that you can use in your next campaig.
Here’s how to dig.
Behaviour beats opinion
Start with what people do. Not what they report. Not what they remember. Your analytics, CRM, product usage data, even email open and click patterns can give you far more insight than most survey responses. Where do users drop off? What gets ignored? What creates friction? This is insight without the self-edit. It’s where preference becomes action.
For one financial services client, a sudden drop in new business submissions had the exec team bracing for news of a competitor move. Turns out, a system update had made the new business user interface harder—and insurance agents simply stopped using it. The fix was simple. The insight? Buried in behaviour, not feedback.
Talk to the front line
Marketing often sits a few layers away from the real story. But your support and sales teams? They’re deep in it. They hear the raw questions, the objections and all the awkward hesitations.
In one recent project, reviewing 10 hours of support recordings gave us more usable insight than 12 months of formal research. The key? Don’t just listen for the complaints—listen for what’s beneath them.
Lurk, don’t lead
Sounds counterintuitive, but sometimes the best research happens when you don’t ask questions at all. It still means listening though, Hang out where your audience talks when they’re not being prompted—Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn comments, technical forums, niche Slack communities. Listen in. Watch how they talk about their problems, your category, their peers. That’s where the contradictions show up. The rants. The real comparisons.
For a tech client, Reddit threads around enterprise systems support revealed hidden workarounds and strong feelings that never surfaced in interviews or AI tools. By reframing the message around what users valued (and hated), their next campaign landed hard.
Cognitive walkthroughs
Ask someone to explain how they use your product or process—and watch where they falter. Better yet, ask them to explain it to someone else. You’ll start to see the hidden assumptions: the steps they skip, the things they misunderstand, the real reasons they hesitate. In technical products, this is often where the aha moments happen. Not during the demo, but when someone tries to make it work in real life.
Win/loss interviews
It’s easy to focus only on your happy customers. But your best insight often comes from the ones who didn’t choose you—or who nearly didn’t.
Ask:
What were you comparing us to?
What mattered most in the decision?
What was the moment you knew we weren’t right—or that we were?
And always ask why. That one word will tell you more than any slide in your strategy deck. If I could have that written on a t-shirt I would.
Combined, this gets you closer to the truth of the market: not just who buys, but why, how, and what they were really solving for.
Longitudinal and diary studies
In slow, high-stakes buying environments (hello healthcare, compliance, enterprise IT), decisions unfold over weeks or months not a neat two-week funnel.
Diary-style research helps you understand what really happens over time. What triggers action? What gets ignored? What do teams work around? This kind of insight doesn’t emerge in one conversation. This is gold in understanding the nuance of decision-making in complex orgs. It’s not always fast but it’s incredibly revealing.
What to do once you’ve got the good stuff
So, you’ve uncovered something real. Something raw. An insight that cuts through the noise and makes you think: Ooh, this is what’s really going on. Now what?
Too often, insight becomes a trophy—pulled out for presentations and promptly shelved. But real insight should reshape what you say, how you show up, and how you sell. Here’s how to make it work.
Segment by mindset, not title
Demographics and job titles tell you who people are on paper. Mindsets tell you what matters to them, how they make decisions, and how they want to be seen. What’s driving this person? Are they trying to innovate quietly? Prove something internally? Avoid embarrassment? Are they solving for internal politics, personal progress, or team-wide transformation?
These mental models are far more powerful than traditional personas especially in B2B, where people with the same title can behave in radically different ways depending on what’s driving them.
For example: CFO at a mid-sized firm tells you one thing. CFO trying to drive transformation without rocking the boat? That’s someone you can speak to with relevance and precision.
Position around the problem, not just the product
Good insight reframes what you’re selling. It helps you stop leading with features and start leading with value. If your audience is stuck in status quo mode, insight can surface the risk of inaction. If your product is technically better but harder to adopt, insight helps you position around what makes switching feel safer, smarter, or more socially validated.
Don’t just list what you do, show that you understand why it matters now.
Use their actual language
Insight isn't just about what customers think. It’s also about how they talk. When you get this right, your copy lands harder. Your value props sound like truth, not marketing. Your brand feels like it gets them, not like it’s guessing. Borrow their metaphors, mirror their concerns. Sound like someone who gets it, not a brand doing its best impression.
This is where social listening, support transcripts and open-form feedback can be gold because the phrases and words people use tell you how to meet them where they are. Your messaging won’t just land better, it’ll feel true.
Brands that get it
You can feel when a brand is running on real insight. The narrative has shape. The creative has confidence. It doesn’t sound like marketing, it sounds like someone who lives in your world.
Here are a few examples we love:
Tracksmith
Deeper insight: Amateur runners don’t see themselves as casual joggers. They take it seriously—even if they’re not pros.
Tracksmith has tapped into that identity: the rituals, the pride, the quiet competitiveness in their Love of running campaigns. With themes like Church of the long run and No days off, they aren't just about gear, they're about spirit. The result? A brand that has grown out of knowing and celebrating their community, not by trying to grow a market segment.
Shopify
Deeper insight: Many small business owners don’t see themselves as “entrepreneurs.” But they want to build something bigger than a side hustle.
Getty Images
Their brand work isn’t about ecommerce tech. It’s about identity, legitimacy, and self-belief. The message? You’re not just selling mugs. You’re building a business, and we believe in you.
Calm
Deeper insight: Stress is intensely personal—but increasingly shaped by collective, cultural forces.
From its origins as a low-fi web site where you were invited to do nothing for 2 minutes to today’s $2B empire, Calm’s content is driven by what people are feeling right now. Not just generic wellness tips, but specific, relevant resources tuned into public mood. They stay topical because they stay connected to the emotional undercurrent of their audience.
Dove
Deeper insight: Traditional beauty marketing undermines the very confidence it claims to support.
Dove shifted the conversation with its Real Beauty platform—because it understood that the biggest barrier wasn’t access to skincare. It was self-worth. That deep insight powered a global brand movement that’s been able to keep up with changing perceptions for 20 years. Read the deepdive.
Final word: Insight isn’t a phase. It’s a mindset.
The best marketers aren’t just great storytellers. They’re great listeners, observers, and translators. They know that surface-level insight is easy to collect, and even easier to mistake for truth. But the real advantage comes from going deeper and listening harder. Shaping strategy around what’s actually going on beneath the surface.
Because in complex markets, better insight doesn’t just mean better marketing. It means winning.
Want to move beyond surface-level insights?
Align your team and uncover the hidden forces behind your customer decisions with our strategic discussion guide.
