Designing Marketing Research That Leaders Can Actually Use

Every important business or marketing decision begins with questions.

Who are we trying to reach? What do they value? How do they see our brand? Where are we strongest? Where is there room to grow? Which direction will give us the greatest opportunity?

Good marketing research helps answer those questions. Great marketing research gives your brand a clearer view of the strategic decisions ahead. We call this “decision-first marketing research,” meaning your brand starts with the decisions or questions it needs to answer and works backward to determine what research will provide the evidence to chart a clear, strategic path forward.

Maybe you’re weighing a brand repositioning. Maybe you’re entering a new market, launching a new offering, or trying to understand why a key audience has gone quiet. Whatever the situation, your research should give you insight and your marketing team should know exactly what to do with that evidence.

At Frankel, we design research for our clients with that larger purpose in mind. We bring together the right methods, questions, and analysis to give leadership a comprehensive understanding of its audience, market, and brand. When designed around the questions your organization is trying to answer, it can shape the whole marketing strategy.

The goal is research your organization can build a strategy around.

So what makes research truly useful? It starts with defining the decisions it needs to inform, choosing the right methods to uncover the answers, building a comprehensive view of your audiences and market, and translating those findings into strategic direction your team can act on. Those are the principles we use to turn research into a foundation for smarter brand decisions.

Step 1: Define the Decision Your Brand Is Facing

Before we design a single survey or interview guide, we start with your business problem.

We ask:

• What decision are you trying to make in the next 3–12 months?
• Who needs to be convinced, and what would convince them?
• What happens if you get this decision wrong?

The answers shape everything downstream to which audiences we need to hear from, what questions matter, and how much evidence your organization needs to act.

Step 2: Match the Research Method to the Question

Different questions call for different research approaches. Here’s how we think about it:

A useful rule of thumb: quantitative research tells you how widespread something is; qualitative research tells you why it’s happening. You often need both to give the company both the human context and the scale needed to make a decision.

More data isn’t automatically better, either. A focused set of 8–10 in-depth interviews, for example, can provide meaningful direction when the strategic question calls for depth versus large, unfocused groups for scale. The right amount of research is whatever it takes to support the decision, no more and no less.

A thoughtful research design also creates room for unexpected findings. The best studies give audiences enough space to reveal what matters to them, including perspectives that may reshape the original hypothesis.

Step 3: Build a Complete Picture of Your Audience

Your customers, prospects, students, donors, clients, or partners each bring their own experiences and expectations to your brand. Research allows you to pull each of these pieces of the puzzle into a complete picture.

That means looking beyond what people say they think about your brand. Research can reveal what they know about you, what they value, what alternatives they consider, what influences their decisions, where they encounter your brand, and what may be creating distance between awareness and action.

Say your research shows that awareness of your brand is strong with a priority audience, but consideration is weak. The number tells you where the problem is. Conversations with that audience can help explain why—what is creating hesitation, what they expect from a brand like yours, what competitors or alternatives are doing differently, and what could move them closer to choosing you.

Together, those insights create a more complete picture of the audience and their relationship with your brand. That picture can shape everything that follows, from your positioning and messaging to the audiences you prioritize, the experiences you create, and the marketing decisions you make.

Step 4: Turn Findings Into a Marketing Strategy

Research creates value when findings become useful choices. Consider the difference between these two ways of reporting a finding:

The first statement tells you what the research found. The second connects that finding to a potential marketing move.

That translation of the research is where marketing strategy enters the process. A strong implication considers the finding, the business context, and the decision leadership is facing. It gives the team something concrete to evaluate and act on.

The most useful recommendations also acknowledge the choices involved.

• Should the brand invest more heavily in awareness or conversion? 
• Prioritize one audience or broaden the target? 
• Refresh the positioning or strengthen the current message?

This is where a research partner can add significant value and make those trade-off decisions easier. Our work at Frankel extends beyond gathering and analyzing information. We also interpret what that information means for the brand.

Within that last mile of usable marketing research, we make deliberate connections between every important finding to a strategic implication, tie each implication back to the original decision, and give leadership a clear set of choices to act on.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Consider a university preparing to launch a new graduate program aimed at working professionals. Leadership assume the biggest barrier to enrollment is awareness, that prospective students simply don’t know the program exists. The initial decision on the table is, how much do we increase digital advertising spend to close that gap?

Quantitative research confirms the awareness problem: only 28% of the target audience know the program has launched. But a round of in-depth interviews surfaces something the survey alone never would have caught. Prospective students who did know about the program were hesitating for a different reason entirely. They doubted they could keep up academically while working full-time, and worried the program wasn’t actually built for people balancing a job and a family.

That research insight reframes an entirely new marketing decision. Instead of a straightforward awareness campaign, the recommendation would turn to a reassurance campaign. It might lead with proof points about flexibility and real-world support. Messaging may center around the program’s night and weekend course options, cohorts of other working professionals, faculty responsiveness, and treat broad-funnel awareness spend as a second-phase investment once that confidence was established. In the end, this research allowed the university to appropriately restructure its launch messaging around “built for your life, not around it,” and phase its media investment accordingly.

The finding from this example research shows that the “28% awareness” metric didn’t necessarily matter. It was the qualitative insight into why people were hesitating that gave the university something to act on, and that’s what made their positioning, “build for your life, not around it,” a win. Reassurance over awareness.

That’s the difference decision-first research makes. The number tells you where to look. The insight tells you what to do. Every engagement should get you to that second part

Let’s Find Your Next Research Question

At Frankel, research sits at the front end of our larger process. We connect audience understanding straight through to brand positioning, messaging, creative, media, and activation. We believe research should inform the strategy, and the strategy should give the organization better direction. In the end product, creative and marketing will bring that direction to life and connect with the identified audience.

Whether you’re building a brand, refining your position, entering a new market, or looking for a stronger connection with the audiences you serve, we can help you identify the questions worth asking, gather the evidence you need, and turn what you learn into a strategy your organization can act on.

Let’s talk about what your next research question could uncover.