One thing I’ve always appreciated about research is that you don’t have to assume you know where it’s going to take you.
You might start a project looking for answers to a specific business question, only to find that the most useful insight comes from something you hadn’t originally considered. Other times, the research confirms what you suspected all along, which can be just as important when you’re making a significant investment or trying to get an organization aligned around a decision.
Either way, there’s a tendency to focus on the findings themselves rather than what they mean for the business. We spend a lot of time talking about what customers said, how a brand performed against competitors or which attributes ranked highest in a survey. Those are all useful things to know, but they’re really just the starting point. The more interesting conversation is what we’re going to do with that information and whether it changes how we approach the work.
That’s especially true when research is part of developing a marketing strategy. The earlier we can get involved in understanding the business challenge, the more opportunity we have to help shape the direction.
Understanding the Question Behind the Question
When a client comes to us with a research need, they may enter the conversation wanting to discuss a particular methodology. They might be interested in a customer survey, a competitive analysis or a series of interviews. Those may very well be the right approaches, but before we get into how we’re going to conduct the research, we want to understand what prompted the request in the first place.
What is the business trying to accomplish? What do we already know? Where are we making assumptions? And perhaps most importantly, what decisions are going to be made based on what we learn?
These conversations are particularly valuable in industrial markets, where customer relationships and buying decisions tend to be complicated. A company may have decades of experience serving its customers and a very good understanding of what makes its products successful. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it understands how the broader market perceives the brand.
There’s also a difference between what customers say they value and what actually influences their decisions. Product quality, service, availability, trust and long-standing relationships can all factor into the equation, and their relative importance can vary depending on the customer, situation or region.
Part of our job as researchers is to bring those different perspectives together and help the team understand what they mean in the context of the business. That often requires looking beyond any single data point or research method to see the larger picture.
What Our Research for Knapheide Helped Us Understand
An example of this approach is our work with Knapheide, a leader in manufacturing commercial work truck bodies and their distribution. We’ve partnered with Knapheide for more than a decade, helping the company strengthen its brand and support its growth. As the business began preparing for a national brand launch, we had an opportunity to revisit how the market perceived Knapheide and what that meant for its ambition to become a nationally recognized category leader.
We approached the research from several directions, including brand awareness and usage research, voice-of-customer insights, competitive analysis and persona development. Each provided a different perspective of the market, and together they helped us build a more complete understanding of where Knapheide stood.
One of the things that became clear was that Knapheide had a strong reputation among the customers who knew the brand. Customers familiar with Knapheide generally associated it with high product quality, reliability and strong customer relationships. Satisfaction and loyalty were also particularly favorable.
At the same time, there was room to build awareness beyond that existing customer base, particularly when awareness was compared to its strong market share. Knapheide was well established in the industry, but its reputation wasn’t necessarily reaching everyone it needed to as they looked toward national growth.
We also spent time understanding the attributes customers valued and how those compared to perceptions of Knapheide and its competitors. The research reinforced the importance of things like craftsmanship, American manufacturing and the sense of partnership customers associated with the brand. Those were strengths Knapheide had built over many years, and they gave us a credible foundation to work from.
As we brought the findings together, the opportunity started to look a little different from a traditional awareness campaign. The competitive landscape suggested that while individual manufacturers had established reputations, no single commercial truck body brand had firmly claimed the broader idea of the American work truck.
That was worth exploring because Knapheide already had many of the qualities customers associated with category leadership. Rather than focusing only on how to communicate those attributes more effectively, we considered how they might support a larger position in the market.
How Research Shaped the Direction of the Work
This is one of the reasons it’s important to allow research to influence the strategy rather than simply use it to validate an idea that’s already been developed.
When we began looking at Knapheide’s ambitions, there were several reasonable directions the marketing could have taken. We could have focused on increasing awareness, emphasizing product quality or highlighting specific competitive advantages. The research supported aspects of all those approaches. But looking at the findings collectively helped us recognize an opportunity to connect those strengths under a broader positioning platform.
That thinking informed the development of America’s Work Truck™, which brought together Knapheide’s manufacturing heritage, customer relationships and product and distribution leadership in a way that could extend well beyond a single campaign. From a research perspective, what’s valuable about that outcome is how the insights contributed to the decisions that followed. Once the positioning was established, it provided a common direction for creative, media, public relations, social content and the many other elements involved in bringing the brand to market nationally.
Of course, research alone didn’t create the platform. It took collaboration across strategy, creative and the broader team to interpret the opportunity and develop an idea that could bring it to life. But the research gave us a stronger understanding of the market and helped establish why that direction made sense.
[See how the America’s Work Truck platform came to life in our full Knapheide case study.]
Keeping Research Connected to the Work
The usefulness of research depends a great deal on what happens after the findings are presented. It’s possible to conduct a very thorough study, produce a detailed report and still leave a marketing team wondering what to do next. That doesn’t necessarily mean the research was unsuccessful, but it may mean we haven’t gone far enough in connecting the information to the decisions the business needs to make.
That’s why our research team is involved throughout the strategic process. At Simantel, we have the opportunity to work directly with the people responsible for developing the strategy, creative and activation plans. We can discuss what the findings mean, explore different interpretations and continue asking and answering questions as the work develops. That collaboration is particularly useful when the research reveals something that wasn’t part of the original conversation. It gives us the opportunity to investigate an idea further, pressure-test an assumption or help the team understand whether a particular direction is supported by what we’ve learned.
It also means we’re not approaching every business question with the same research solution. Sometimes we can learn a great deal through existing industry data, secondary research or competitive intelligence. Other situations call for direct conversations with customers or a quantitative study that helps us understand how widely certain perceptions are held. The value of research lies in whether we’ve helped the business develop a better understanding of its customers, its market and the decisions in front of it.
Making Room For What You Might Learn
Not every research project is going to uncover an entirely new opportunity, and we wouldn’t suggest that it should. There are plenty of situations where validating what an organization already believes is exactly what’s needed. Having evidence to support a decision can be valuable, especially when multiple stakeholders need to agree on a direction. But there’s something to be said for approaching research with an open mind. When we become too focused on proving a particular assumption or answering a narrowly defined question, we can miss information that might be more useful to the business.
Our work with Knapheide is a good reminder of that. We set out to better understand the company’s position in the market as it prepared for national growth. What we learned helped the team think more broadly about the opportunity and ultimately contributed to a positioning platform that will support the business for years to come.
That’s what makes research such an important part of the marketing process. It helps us understand what’s happening in the market, but it also gives us a chance to reconsider what we think we know and make more informed decisions about where to go next.
Make Research Part of Your Next Big Decision
Whether you’re entering a new market, evaluating your brand position or planning your next campaign, Simantel can help turn customer and market insights into actionable strategy. Let’s talk.
