Big decisions without a big team

Why mid-sized businesses face the same make-or-break questions as corporates, but with a fraction of the support, and what it takes to reach an answer the whole business will act on.

Most mid-sized businesses don’t think of themselves as needing much research, and for most of the year they’re probably right. They know their customers, they watch the numbers, and the people at the top often built the business and have good instincts. But every so often a moment comes along that’s genuinely different – a new leader, sales that have stalled for no obvious reason, a move into a new market, a rebrand that’s been put off for years – and the questions it raises are every bit as big as the ones facing a FTSE 100 board.

The difference is what they have to answer them with. A big corporate has an insight team, an agency roster and a research budget. A business with a few hundred staff usually has a marketing director, a stretched team, and an ad or design agency whose answer, quite understandably, tends to look like the thing they make.

So people reach for what’s to hand: a quick survey to the customer database, a few conversations with friendly customers and, increasingly, an afternoon with ChatGPT, which will cheerfully produce a set of personas and a positioning that sounds entirely plausible. We don’t want to knock any of these – we use AI every day, and there’s a lot it does well. But plausible isn’t the same as right, and it’s certainly not the same as something the people inside a business will commit to. AI draws on what has already been said about a category, so it’s weakest exactly where a growing business needs help most: on what’s new, on the customers it hasn’t won yet, and on the reasons people don’t buy that they’d never think to write down.

The other route is to hire an agency, and this is where we think mid-sized businesses are often let down. Many research agencies see their job as answering the brief: collecting the data and telling you what it said. That’s useful as far as it goes, but it leaves the hardest parts to a team that’s already stretched. Most don’t have the business know-how, processes and frameworks to make sure you’re asking the question that will actually address your commercial challenge, to get your ideas into a state where customers can respond to them properly, to turn what they hear into a complete strategy that’s ready to implement, or to make sure the rest of the organisation buys into it.

In our experience, some of the most valuable work we do for mid-sized clients happens before a single customer is spoken to. We talk to the people whose views matter – the SLT, the sales lead, the person who runs operations – understand the commercial challenge, and agree what question we really need to answer, who we need to hear from and what a good answer would look like. More often than you’d expect, the brief changes as a result.

From there it’s about getting under the skin of customers’ needs, journeys and decisions, using whatever method fits the question. For a regional broadband network, that meant following people from first hearing about the service through to installation, to see exactly where interest leaked away. For a B2B software business, it meant in-depth conversations with the people who sign off the purchase, mapping the barriers and the things that tip a decision. And for a premium heritage brand up against cheaper copies and challengers, it meant hearing, in people’s own words, what they really valued about it and what they’d lose with a lookalike.

This is where we think mid-sized businesses most need an agency to go further than a research brief would usually allow. A report full of findings is of limited use to a team without the time or specialist skills to turn it into something. So we put the team in front of customers, help them develop ideas, and craft the strongest into fully formed positionings, propositions or journeys, which we then test with the customers who matter most – in ways that improve the ideas rather than simply score them.

The last step is the one we’d argue matters most, and it matters more in a mid-sized business than in a large corporate. In a company of a few hundred people, a new positioning or customer strategy only works if the founder, the sales team, the people on the phones and the agencies all understand it and act on it. That’s why we don’t stop at the debrief. We bring the strategy to life across the organisation, brief the agencies, and help the team judge the work that comes back.

In effect, we act as the insight team you don’t have – from the first conversation about what the question really is, to a complete answer you can act on, and a business that believes in it.

KSBR Brand Futures. From commercial challenge to a customer strategy the whole organisation believes in.