Buyer Decision Research for Fashion, Kids and Insurance

Twenty-four recorded interviews, read against your own transaction data, is usually the point where the answer stops changing. Below about fifteen we are still hearing new reasons. Past thirty we are hearing the same six reasons in different words. That is the method: get to the point where the reasons repeat, then show you which of them your own records confirm and which one your team has been assuming for three years. The rule we work to: A finding does not enter the report unless it appears twice, once in a transcript and once in your own data. An interview saying the sizing runs small becomes a finding when the return-reason codes agree. A claim that price is the objection becomes a finding when the quote-abandon step agrees. Anything that appears once is written into an appendix marked single-source, and we say so out loud in the readback rather than letting it drift into the summary. Who we talk to: Buyers who bought, buyers who reached the last step and left, and buyers who chose someone else. The third group is expensive to recruit and it is the only one that has ever changed a positioning decision in our experience. In kids and family work we interview the payer and the user separately and never in the same room; the eight-year-old's reason and the grandmother's reason are different reasons, and merging them produces a description of nobody. In insurance we interview at renewal rather than at purchase, because the renewal conversation is where the real view of the product is held. What the apparel work looks like: Return-reason coding against size run and fabric. The secondhand market treated as part of the competitive set rather than a footnote. The consideration list buyers name unprompted, which is rarely the list in your competitor tracker. What the insurance work looks like: The quote-and-buy path, including where the price comparison sites sit in the buyer's sequence, what buyers believe is covered against what the policy wording says, and how that gap surfaces in first-notification-of-loss calls. Consumer Duty fair value evidence falls out of this work naturally; we will hand it to your compliance team, and we do not write the assessment. What ships: A written document, not a deck. The recordings, transcripts, coding sheet and any survey data, in formats you keep. A demand map showing which segments are worth serving and which two you should stop paying to acquire. One recommendation, argued, with the case against it written by us. Not included: Brand tracking, awareness studies, or anything that reports a number quarterly with no decision attached. Creative and concept testing. Personas as a deliverable; we build them internally to sort the data and then discard them. Syndicated research resold as our own analysis. If the answer is already in a Mintel report, we will tell you to buy the Mintel report. Who this is not for: Businesses that have made the decision and want evidence for it. We have declined that engagement four times and will decline it again. Teams that cannot release the raw export; anonymised is fine, aggregated is not. Anyone who needs the work to conclude that the current strategy is correct. How we start: A forty-five minute call to establish whether the question you are asking is the question that will change what you do. Roughly one in three of those calls ends with us saying research is not your constraint, and naming what is.