Fall budgets cleared somewhere around the second week of September, which means my inbox has been filling with the same email it fills with every year. A client has money for a study. The study has to land before the holiday planning cycle closes. Can we scope it by Friday.
Nine years ago I sat in a conference room in the Pearl while a client walked our team through the research she wanted commissioned. She had the sample size. She had the regions. She had, and I want to be precise here, the finding.
Not the question. The finding.
She wanted to know whether customers preferred the new packaging. She had approved the new packaging in June. The tooling was already ordered. What she needed was four hundred people in a panel agreeing with her, so that when someone upstairs asked why, she could say the research supported it.
We ran it. It supported it.
Most commissioned consumer research is not an instrument of discovery, it is an instrument of cover, and the difference shows up in when it gets ordered.
Here is the tell, and it is almost always the same tell. Research meant to inform a decision arrives before the decision. Research meant to protect a decision arrives after. Ask when the budget line got created relative to the meeting where the direction was chosen. If the direction came first, you are not funding insight. You are funding a receipt.
The second tell is the shape of the questions. Honest research asks people what they already do. Permission research asks people whether they like a thing you have already built and tooled and staffed. Nobody in a panel has ever reliably predicted their own future behavior, every strategist I know knows this, and we keep asking anyway because the answer comes back quotable and it fits on a slide.
The third tell is what happens to the data that disagrees. Tropicana had usable signal before that 2009 redesign shipped. Gap had signal in 2010. The signal existed in both rooms. It lost, because the work was already approved, and contradicting a direction your VP has announced to the whole floor is a career move rather than a research finding.
I am not against studies. I have built good ones. But a study you commission after you have decided is an expensive way to write your own permission slip, and the four hundred strangers in the panel are not the ones who have to live with the result.
Research meant to inform a decision arrives before the decision. Research meant to protect a decision arrives after.
For feedback with genuinely no agenda I recommend a cat. Truffles walked across my laptop while I was writing this and closed the document without saving. Barnaby watched. Neither of them asked what I had already decided.