Should You Really Be Doing Consumer Research for That?

For someone who genuinely loves market research, and has built a career around it, you wouldn’t expect me to say this: sometimes, you really don’t need to do research.

I know. It feels almost illegal to say out loud.

But as much as I love immersions, diaries, ethnos, and a beautifully weighted dataset… it physically pains me to see tens of thousands of dollars spent on studies that end up as a PDF on a shared drive titled “Final_v7_reallyfinal_USETHISONE.pptx” and never referenced again.

Research is powerful. But unnecessary research is just very expensive noise.

So before you commission another study, here are the questions I always ask—especially when budgets are tight, timelines are tighter, and patience is… well, nonexistent.