The One Part of the Brief That Gets Cut First - and Costs the Most

by Grant Race

At some point in almost every product development or brand project I’ve been involved in, someone has suggested cutting the research.

Sometimes it’s framed as a cost decision. Sometimes a timeline pressure. Occasionally it’s more direct than that: we already know what the market wants. The brief is clear. The concept has been signed off. Let’s move.

It is the single most expensive decision a business can make — and it almost never appears on a risk register.

Market research is routinely treated as the discretionary element of the NPD and brand development process. Budgets get trimmed and it goes first. Timelines compress and it gets shortened. Commercial conviction runs high and it gets bypassed entirely. The result, consistently and across businesses of every size, is product and brand investment built on assumption rather than evidence.

Nielsen’s Innovation Reports put new consumer product failure rates at around 85% within the first two years. That is not a manufacturing problem or a distribution problem. It is, in the majority of cases, a product-market fit problem — a failure to validate whether the right product exists for the right audience at the right price.

The pressure that replaces evidence

In the consumer durables industry, the conditions for this failure are built into the commercial calendar.

Every season brings the same pressure: newness, differentiation, something the competition hasn’t done yet. Distributors want it. Sales want it. The P&L needs it. Product development teams find themselves responding to commercially driven requests grounded not in consumer insight but in competitive anxiety, personal conviction, or a single conversation with a buyer that has since taken on a life of its own.

A buyer mentions in passing that they’d like to see a certain product. That comment reaches a commercial leader. By the time it comes back into the system, it’s no longer a passing comment. It’s a brief. “The buyer definitely wants this. We must proceed.”

The product couldn’t be manufactured at the target price. The cost structure made it commercially unworkable. Neither fact slowed the project down, because the buyer had said they wanted it, and commercial pressure filled the gap where evidence should have been.

Simon-Kucher & Partners’ annual Global Pricing Study has repeatedly found that businesses across industries consistently misjudge consumer willingness to pay, often at precisely the point where commercial conviction is highest. That is exactly what was happening here.

It took market research, commissioned only after sustained internal pressure, to prove categorically that there was no price elasticity for a product of that kind. That single finding did what months of internal argument couldn’t. It diffused the pressure. It gave people permission to say no.

That is what research actually does. It provides the evidence to stop bad ideas before the tooling spend, the packaging costs, and the launch budget turn a poor concept into an expensive failure. Without it, the only mechanism available is internal politics — and internal politics rarely wins against a buyer relationship and a P&L target.

The rebrand that failed, and the one that didn’t

The same dynamic plays out in brand development, and the consequences are just as costly.

A rebrand is one of the most visible and politically charged decisions a business can make. Everyone has an opinion. Senior stakeholders have strong ones. Regional markets have their own requirements. Retail partners have preferences. The temptation, particularly when time and budget are tight, is to accommodate as many of them as possible.

I’ve seen what happens when you do.

A rebrand process involving too many stakeholders, too many markets, and too many competing opinions produced work designed to offend nobody. The result offended everybody. It was lived with, because it had to be, but it was always understood it would have to be redone. The cost of that process — the agency fees, the production, the rollout, and eventually doing it all again — was entirely avoidable.

A few years later, it was redone. The second attempt was run differently.

A core team of marketers. A small, select group from the C-suite. A clear brief built around brand positioning, not individual preferences. And a structured research process before a single creative decision was locked.

We reviewed the competitive landscape. We audited the brand’s history — not the guidelines document, but the record of how customers had actually described and experienced it. Reviews, recommendations, unsolicited feedback. What people said about the brand, not what the business thought they said, or wanted them to say. That distinction matters more than most businesses realise. Solutions were then tested through focus groups, online surveys, and heat mapping. Results were compared against three sets of metrics: what the brand was currently known for, what it wanted to own, and where competitors ranked strongly.

The research told us what the creative brief alone never could: whether the work actually landed with the people it was made for.

When the new brand was presented globally, the opening line was: “Here is the new direction for Brand X. We don’t care if you don’t like it.”

The silence in the room was significant.

Then the evidence was unveiled. The research showed categorically that the target audience responded strongly to the execution. It outperformed competitors on the key metrics the business wanted to own. It scored above benchmarks across markets.

Commercial teams no longer had to justify it to buyers, because the data did it for them. Buyer conversations changed in character. The subjectivity that usually dominates those discussions — does it look right, will our customers respond, we preferred the previous version — was replaced with evidence. It removed the eye from the storm.

The launch was a significant success. The return on the research investment was realised not just in revenue, but in the organisational confidence it produced at every level of the business.

The misconception about cost

The most persistent objection to proper validation is budget. Research is expensive, the argument goes. We can’t justify it on this project.

The Product Development and Management Association’s Best Practices Study consistently finds a measurable correlation between structured consumer research at the validation stage and successful launch outcomes. Businesses that treat research as a non-negotiable deliverable outperform those that treat it as optional. The data on this is consistent.

Product development is typically capitalised and amortised over a number of years. Market research sits in the same category and can be treated the same way. You wouldn’t cut corners on QC testing, technical development, or pack production. Those are understood as non-negotiable. Research is no different. It is the element that tells you whether any of the rest of it is worth doing.

The comparison that matters is not research cost against project budget. It is research cost against the cost of a failed launch.

How to make it non-negotiable

Build research into the development cycle from the outset, not as an afterthought when doubts emerge. Treat it as a deliverable, with the same status as any other stage gate in the process.

Use it to validate the concept, test the pricing architecture, assess the messaging, and benchmark against competitive alternatives. Use focus groups where you need depth of understanding. Surveys where you need scale. Heat mapping where you need behavioural data that respondents won’t self-report accurately.

And when the research says no, accept it.

That is the hardest part. A concept with momentum, political sponsorship, and months of development behind it is difficult to stop. But the research that says no is not a failure. It is the process working exactly as it should.

Most product and brand failures are not failures of execution. They are failures of validation: a buyer’s passing comment elevated to market truth, commercial pressure substituted for consumer insight, a senior executive’s personal vision mistaken for consumer demand.

The research exists to separate those things. It is the one part of the brief that should be the last to be cut.

As it stands, it is almost always the first.