From Data to Direction: Why CMOs Should Be in the Research Trenches

In an airport lounge, a CMO stares at her quarterly brand tracker results. The numbers look good. Awareness is up 6%, consideration is stable, and NPS is climbing. Yet sales are flat, and the new campaign, perfectly aligned with yesterday’s focus group feedback, isn’t moving the needle. This disconnect isn’t just frustrating—it’s increasingly common. Today’s CMOs find themselves drowning in data yet starving for insight. They’re receiving more information than ever while understanding their customers less. The problem isn’t insufficient research—it’s inadequate depth.

The Evolving CMO Role

This gap between what customers say and what they do creates costly mistakes. Consider Tropicana’s 2009 packaging redesign—a decision that led to a 20% sales decline in just two months despite positive focus group feedback. The company failed to understand the nonconscious emotional attachment consumers had to their original packaging. When brands rely solely on surface-level research, they miss the Human Truth—the deeper emotional and psychological drivers that actually determine customer behavior. This disconnect isn’t just a marketing problem. It’s a business problem.

Why Direct Research Involvement Matters

For too long, research has been delegated down the organizational chart. CMOs review polished presentations with key findings while junior team members conduct the actual research. This arms-length approach creates a dangerous gap between leadership and customer reality.

When CMOs personally engage in research—observing customers directly, participating in interviews, immersing themselves in social listening—something transformative happens. They develop both psychological and emotional understanding of their customers. This firsthand understanding creates a foundation for strategy that spreadsheets and PowerPoints can’t replicate. Consider how former Harley-Davidson CMO Mark-Hans Richer transformed the brand by spending hundreds of hours with riders, participating in rallies, and immersing himself in biker culture. This deep understanding led to marketing programs that expanded Harley’s appeal to younger and more diverse riders without alienating their core audience. The difference between reading about customers and experiencing them directly is the difference between knowing about someone and knowing them personally. Any relationship built on secondhand information remains superficial at best.

The Human Truth Advantage

Human Truth goes beyond what customers say to reveal why they feel, think, and act as they do. These deeper drivers provide the foundation for transformative brand strategies—strategies that create genuine connection rather than simply capturing attention. When brands align with Human Truths, those brands don’t just communicate—they resonate. They don’t just sell products—they fulfill deep-seated needs and desires.

Take Starbucks, for example. The surface understanding is that people pay $6.45 for an Americano because they want good coffee. The Human Truth is that Starbucks fulfills a deeper need to feel “a tiny bit special”—to feel that “I did a good job and I can go ahead and afford and treat myself to this expensive coffee and get exactly what I want and believe I deserve.” This deeper understanding reveals that “the coffee almost doesn’t matter.” What matters is the experience—the feeling of being understood, abundance, and personal elevation. These customer insights can’t be captured in standard surveys or focus groups. They require methods specifically designed to access nonconscious motivations. In fact, tenured CMOs know that emotional branding drives brand value.

When CMOs engage directly with research focused on uncovering these deeper truths, they develop a profound understanding of their customers that becomes a competitive advantage. This understanding clarifies what the brand needs to say and do to create meaningful connections.

The Dodge Ram case study offers a powerful example. Traditional research showed women weren’t buying trucks. But deeper Human Truth research revealed women thought of trucks relationally—emphasizing what the vehicle could do for themselves and their families. This insight informed a strategy that nearly doubled female ownership over three years while increasing Ram’s overall market position. In this way, when brands understand the emotional triggers driving purchase decisions, they can create strategies that engage the nonconscious mind, where 95% of decisions actually happen.

Making it Happen

The challenge for today’s time-starved CMOs isn’t theoretical; it’s practical. How do you prioritize deep customer understanding when your calendar is already overflowing with executive meetings, agency reviews, and quarterly presentations? Here are practical approaches for CMOs seeking to get closer to customer truth:

1. Create protected research time
Block recurring time on your calendar specifically for customer research—whether that’s reviewing social listening insights, participating in customer interviews, or spending time in stores/on sites where your product is used. This isn’t optional time; it’s essential strategic work.

2. Leverage AI for continuous insight
As Travis notes, “Now with AI, my gosh, we can monitor it constantly and easily. AI can raise its hand and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been listening to this forever and look what I see here.'” CMOs should implement AI-powered tools that continuously monitor customer conversations and flag emerging patterns and shifts.

3. Build a research-driven culture
Make customer understanding a team sport. Institute regular customer immersion days where everyone from marketing leaders to junior team members engages directly with customers. Create systems for sharing insights across the organization.

4. Use methodologies designed for depth
Traditional research methods won’t uncover nonconscious motivations. Seek approaches specifically designed to bypass rational barriers and access deeper drivers—methodologies grounded in behavioral science and psychology.

5. Create direct feedback loops
Establish direct channels between yourself and customers, whether through regular customer advisory panels, social media engagement, or store/site visits. These unfiltered interactions provide insights that formal research might miss.

The key insight is that understanding customers isn’t something you delegate—it’s central to your role as CMO. The role of CMO is not a creative endeavor so much as a committed endeavor, and this commitment to customer understanding creates the foundation for everything else in your role. But when done and done well, the return can be great. In fact, Brands that connect with deeper Human Truths consistently outperform their competitors across key metrics: