Research ROI Is a Leadership Conversation, Not a Measurement Problem
Many research teams try to solve a communication problem with a metrics problem. There is a particular kind of frustration that shows up in insights functions that are doing good work and still struggling to be heard. The research is rigorous, the outputs are well-presented, the team responds quickly to requests, but when budget season […]
How Behavioral Data Turns Insight Communities Into Systems of Action
Ask a customer what they bought last month and you’ll get an answer. It just won’t always be the right one. It’s not that respondents are careless, but often, people don’t accurately remember their own behavior. Researchers have documented that for nearly 50 years. What surprises me is how little our research systems have done […]
Introducing FC Repository
Research should compound, not disappear. Insights teams have spent years learning things about their customers that no general-purpose AI model could inherently know. Why customers chose one product over another. What made them leave. How they reacted to a new concept. What they said in an interview three years ago that suddenly matters again today. […]
What the Best Insights Leaders Do Differently
Four habits that help insights leaders move beyond order-taking and shape business decisions. An insights team can hit every deadline, produce excellent research, and still hear about the important decisions after they’ve been made. That should bother us. Our industry spends a lot of time talking about earning a seat at the table. The usual […]
The Agent Is the Visible Part. The Harness Is the Hard Part.
What goes inside the infrastructure that determines whether enterprise market research AI can be trusted The difference between an impressive market research AI demonstration and a dependable enterprise capability is the harness — the layer of enforced structure between the model and everything it touches. This piece is about what that harness actually contains. Separate […]
Every Market Research AI Demo Works. That’s the Problem.
Why the harness — not the model or the orchestrator — decides whether enterprise research can be trusted Ask an AI agent to size a market, identify competitors, analyze customer feedback, or summarize an industry trend, and it will usually produce an impressive result in under two minutes. It searches the web, reads a few […]
Qualitative Research: The Complete Guide for Market Researchers
Numbers tell you what happened. Qualitative research tells you why. For market researchers, that distinction is the whole game. A survey can tell you that 62% of customers abandoned your onboarding flow — but it can’t tell you what “abandoned” actually felt like from the customer’s seat, or which specific moment in the flow did […]
How to Run an Online Focus Group: A Practical Guide for Market Researchers
Focus groups have always been one of the most efficient ways to gather qualitative insight — a skilled moderator, a group of participants, and 90 minutes can produce more usable material than weeks of survey analysis. Moving them online hasn’t changed that. It’s made them faster, cheaper, and accessible to audiences that in-person recruitment could […]
Qualitative Interviewing: A Guide to In-Depth Interviews for Market Researchers
One-on-one interviews are the most direct form of qualitative research. A researcher and a participant, with enough time to go deep. Done well, they surface the context, reasoning, and emotion behind a decision that no survey can capture. This guide covers what qualitative interviewing is, when to use it, and how to get better results […]
Why Every Study You Run Should Make the Next One Smarter
Most research programs are a collection of projects. A study launches, fieldwork closes, a report goes to the stakeholder, and the data sits in a folder. The next question arrives and the process starts over — new recruit, new sample, no memory of what came before. That’s not a program. That’s a project list. And […]