What this lesson covers
What does my customer need to believe, and how do I find out in their own words?
- Primary and secondary research
- Customer interviews and listening to reviews
- Jobs to Be Done
- Social listening and search data as research
- Writing an insight brief
- B2C (business-to-consumer) vs. B2B (business-to-business) callout: interviewing buyers, users and approvers; win/loss interviews; sales calls as research
Why this matters now
Placeholder for the lesson's opening story: a vivid, real moment where a marketer or small-business owner meets this exact problem.
You can now
Interview customers, mine reviews and search data, and turn what you hear into an insight brief.
For your own business or employer: Write marketing in your customers' own words instead of guessing what they care about.
Industry case studies
Industry Case
Tepary Kitchen
Local restaurant · Local and offline
Case update 2.3
Module 2 of 8 in this case
Twenty tables, three questions
For two weeks, Miguel stops at twenty tables a night and asks three questions. How did you decide to come tonight? What almost stopped you? What would you tell a friend about this place?
Rosa reads all 610 Google reviews the same way, highlighting phrases instead of star ratings.
The pattern arrives fast. Nobody says “Sonoran cuisine.” They say “it tastes like my grandmother's kitchen,” “the kids actually eat everything,” and “it feels like a family dinner without anyone having to cook.” The job guests hire Tepary for is a night out that feels like family, without the work.
Then the surprise. The Tuesday guests, the few there are, keep saying the same thing: “We come on Tuesdays because it's quiet and we never wait.” The thing Rosa sees as a problem, the empty room, is what her weeknight regulars love.
And when Miguel asks the Saturday crowd why they don't come midweek, three tables give the same answer: “I didn't know you were open on Tuesdays.”
That line goes at the top of the insight brief. The problem was never that people don't want to come on a Tuesday. It's that nobody told them they could.
Artifact added
Insight brief: the job guests hire Tepary to do, in their own words
Industry Case
Bajada Plumbing & Drain
Local home service · Demand capture
Case update 2.3
Module 2 of 8 in this case
“I was scared of the number”
Carmen calls ten recent customers and asks them to walk her through the night they called. She writes down their words, not her summary.
Two phrases come up again and again. The first: “I just wanted someone to pick up.” The second surprises her: “I was scared of the number before he even walked in.”
The job isn't really “fix my pipe.” It's make the emergency stop, and don't take advantage of me while I'm desperate. Speed gets Bajada the call. Price clarity is what makes the customer trust the person at the door.
The customers who chose Bajada over a bigger company all mention the same moment: the tech explained the price before he started. That was never in an ad. It might belong in every ad.
Artifact added
Insight brief: what the emergency customer needs to believe, in their own words
Industry Case
Ocotillo & Ash
DTC fashion · Demand creation
Case update 2.3
Module 2 of 8 in this case
“I don't sweat through it”
Lena exports every review and every return note and reads them in one sitting.
The reviews give her language she'd never have written herself: “I don't sweat through it.” “Still looks put-together at 4 p.m.” “The only pants I can wear in a car that's been sitting in the sun.” The job is clear: look polished in heat that wrecks everything else.
The return notes are harder to read and more useful. “Runs long.” “Waist sits higher than I expected.” “Between sizes.” Most returns aren't about whether customers like the clothes. They're about not knowing how the clothes will fit.
Lena builds a swipe file of the best phrases for her ads, and a fit list for her product pages. The customers have already written both.
Artifact added
Insight brief and swipe file: customer phrases from reviews and return notes
B2C vs. B2B
Placeholder for the B2C vs. B2B callout: researching a business purchase means hearing from buyers, users and approvers, running win/loss interviews and treating sales calls as research.
Choose who you serve, then listen
Choose a niche. Segment the businesses you could serve by industry, size, location and need, and test each segment the way 2.1 teaches. A specialist learns faster, builds proof sooner and gets referred more often than a generalist.
Qualify your clients. Write your own ideal client profile (2.2): fit, budget and readiness. A client who can't answer the phone or handle more customers will blame the marketing. Turning down a poor fit protects your time and your reputation.
Run discovery before you propose. Interview the client about goals, past marketing, numbers and what their customers say, and ask for access to reviews, data and a few customers (2.3). You are researching two customers at once: your client, and your client's customer.
Listen
Podcast · Move at the Speed of Culture
Are You Speaking the Right Cultural Language?
Listen for why messages land when they use the customer's own words, the raw material of voice-of-customer research.
More from Move at the Speed of Culture →
Listen online: moveatthespeedofculture.com/speaking-right-cultural-language
Key terms
- B2B (business-to-business): Marketing and selling to companies and organizations that buy for business use.
- B2C (business-to-consumer): Marketing and selling to individual people who buy for themselves or their households.
- Customer interview: A one-on-one conversation with a customer or prospect, designed to learn about their real past behavior and decisions, not to sell to them.
- Insight: A clear, evidence-based truth about customers that explains why they behave as they do and suggests what marketing should do about it.
- Insight brief: A short document that summarizes the research, the key customer insight and what it means for strategy and messaging.
- Jobs to Be Done (JTBD): A framework, associated with Clayton Christensen, that says people "hire" a product to make progress in a specific situation. The job, not the customer's demographics, explains why they buy.
- Primary research: New research you collect yourself for your question, such as interviews, surveys and observation.
- Review mining: Reading customer reviews, of your business and competitors, to find repeated words, praise, complaints and unmet needs.
- Search data: Information on what people type into search engines, and how often, which shows real needs and the words people use for them.
- Secondary research: Research someone else has already collected, such as industry reports, government data, articles and published studies.
- Social listening: Monitoring social media, forums and online communities for what people say about a brand, a competitor or a problem.
- Voice of the customer (VoC): Research that captures how customers describe their needs, problems and experiences in their own words.
- Win/loss interview: In B2B, an interview with a buyer after a deal is won or lost, to learn why they chose, or didn't choose, the company.