January 2026 · Strategy Process
Stop hiring agencies to agree with you.
You brought in outside expertise. Then you made it very clear what answers were acceptable.
January 2026 · Strategy Process
You brought in outside expertise. Then you made it very clear what answers were acceptable.
Here is a scene I have lived more times than I can count. A company hires an agency. They say the right things in the kickoff. We want fresh eyes. We want to be challenged. Tell us what we're missing. Then the research comes back, and it doesn't say what they hoped it would say. The room goes quiet. Someone asks if we can run another round of interviews. With different people this time.
That silence is where strategy actually begins. And most companies flee from it.
Confirmation bias isn't a flaw in the research. It's a flaw in the briefing. I worked with an outdoor brand a few years ago that wanted to understand why they were losing share with younger consumers. We ran the study. The answer was clear: younger buyers didn't see the brand as relevant to their lives. Not hostile, not negative. Just invisible.
The leadership team had already decided the problem was awareness. They wanted a campaign. What the data showed was a positioning gap so wide that no amount of media spend was going to close it. The brand wasn't under-known. It was under-meaningful.
They didn't want to hear that. They wanted permission to do what they'd already planned.
The most expensive agency engagement is the one where everyone agrees from the start. You're paying for a mirror, not a map.
This is the confirmation trap. You hire strategists to validate your instincts instead of testing them. You design the research to find what you're looking for. You invite the agency in, but only into the room where the answers are comfortable.
I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that the best work I do makes clients uncomfortable. Not because I enjoy being difficult. Because the whole point of hiring outside counsel is to see what insiders can't.
A consumer tech company once brought me in to sharpen their brand voice. Two weeks into the work, it was obvious that voice wasn't the problem. Their product experience was fractured across three different teams with three different ideas of who the customer was. The voice couldn't cohere because the brand couldn't cohere.
I told them. They did not love it. But we rebuilt the brand foundation from the product experience outward, and the voice work that followed was the strongest either of us had done. It only worked because we were willing to sit in the discomfort of the real problem before rushing to the cosmetic one.
The agencies that always agree with you are the ones that need your retainer more than they need your respect. That is not partnership. That is performance.
Brand research is extraordinarily easy to manipulate. Not with bad data, but with comfortable questions. If you only ask consumers to react to concepts you've already built, you will learn that consumers react to concepts you've already built. That tells you almost nothing.
I've sat in debrief rooms where the findings were a perfect echo of the brief. Every insight pre-approved. Every recommendation already in the deck. The client was thrilled. The work was useless.
If the research confirms everything you already believed, you didn't do research. You did theater.
Real research makes you revise. It surfaces the gap between how you see your brand and how the world sees it. Sometimes that gap is small and manageable. Sometimes it's the whole story. Either way, you need to see it clearly before you can close it. And you can't see it clearly if your agency is too polite or too scared to point at it.
Hire agencies you trust enough to disagree with you. Then let them. Set the expectation in the kickoff that you want the uncomfortable findings first, not buried on slide forty-seven. Ask your strategist what surprised them. If nothing did, the work isn't done.
Build the relationship so that your agency can say I think you're wrong about this without it being a career-ending sentence. Because the alternative is an agency that tells you what you want to hear, takes the check, and watches you spend a year executing a strategy that was dead on arrival.
The best agencies I've worked alongside, and the best work I've done, share one quality: the willingness to make the room uncomfortable. Not cruel. Not contrarian for its own sake. But honest in a way that earns trust slowly and pays off enormously.
You don't need an agency that agrees with you. You need one brave enough not to.