The Lazy Marketer's Guide to Customer Research
A client of mine recently dismissed what seemed like a promising idea in under 10 seconds.
No endless debates. No committee approvals. No back-and-forth emails. Just five simple words:
"The research doesn’t support it."
I’m not going to lie, I nearly got emotional.
Instead of relying on gut instinct or the loudest voice in the room, my client had real customer insights at their fingertips. The idea died a dignified death, and we moved on.
This is the power of being a lazy marketer.
The Two Ways to Do Marketing
There are two ways to approach marketing decisions.
The Exhausting Way
Does this sound familiar?
A room full of opinions, each assuming they "just know" the customer (that is, if they even, gulp, think of the customer at all).
Hours of debate, often led by the highest-paid person in the room.
Weeks (or months) implementing the idea.
Weeks (or months) trying to figure out why it didn’t work.
It’s a cycle that drains energy, wastes resources, and still doesn’t guarantee results.
Why? Because the whole process is built on assumptions rather than evidence.
The Lazy / Smart Way (depending on your capacity for self-deception)
Contrast that with how a smart (lazy) marketer operates… they invest time upfront in proper customer research.
Yes, it takes initial effort.
Yes, it requires resources.
But what happens next is where they fully get to embrace their inner sloth (no offence to sloths).
Instead of endless debates, decisions become clearer and faster.
("The research doesn’t support it" is a pretty good argument-winner.)
Rather than guessing what might work, they know what their customers actually value.
When someone suggests a new initiative or campaign, they can quickly assess it against real customer insights instead of opinions.
The real magic happens in the energy saved:
✅ Decisions get made faster and with more confidence
✅ Failed campaigns become rarer
✅ Time spent fixing poor decisions drops dramatically
✅ Resources get allocated more effectively from the start
Customer Research That Actually Works
For the truly lazy marketer, not all research is created equal.
If you want real, actionable insights without the headache, customer interviews are your best bet.
I do this for a living, and I guarantee that if you talk to 5–10 real customers for 30 minutes each, you’ll uncover gold.
Imagine what a difference it would make to your decision-making process if you could find out, for example:
How your business came on to their radar
What nearly stopped them from buying
Why they chose you over the alternatives
What they can do now that they couldn’t before (or how their life is better now than it was before they bought your product or service)
How they’d describe your business / product /service to a friend or family member if they wanted to convince them to buy
The answers will surprise you, I guarantee. I have been doing this for 5 years and not once, not one single time has a client not learned something new and useful from customer interviews.
(Full disclosure, I have had one client who genuinely understood their clients so well that I worried I would have nothing new to share with them. In the end, I’m relieved to say, I did find one key valuable insight that made the whole project worthwhile. Phew!)
True stories
After customer interviews, one of my clients realised that their entire brand position was based on something that, while it was a genuine point of difference, was not something that was of any value to their customers.
Another learned that their customers’ real reason for choosing them over the competitor literally across the road, was something so basic that they hadn’t even mentioned in their messaging. Yet it was of critical importance to those customers.
If you don’t ask, you don’t know.
The ROI of Being Lazy
This is all very nice, and sounds good in theory, right? But numbers talk. So let’s talk numbers.
You can find statistics about the benefits of customer research. I’ve listed some of them here.
Coschedule will tell you:
56% of marketers who “strongly agree” their marketing is successful conduct audience research once or more per month.
Successful marketers are 242% more likely than their competitors to have conducted audience research at least once in the last three months.
Marketers who do audience research at least once per year or more are 303% more likely to achieve their marketing goals.
Numbers are good.
Numbers are evidence.
Here are some numbers from my own clients:
💰 A client with a $20K niche product hadn’t made a sale in 18 months. After rewriting their messaging based on what I found in customer interviews, they sold two products within six weeks of the new copy going live.
📈 Another client saw a 900% increase in customer acquisition from October 2023 to October 2024 after I did research and a very talented copywriter rewrote their copy based on what buyers actually cared about.
These aren’t flukes. They’re what happens when marketing is evidence-based instead of assumption-driven.
The Smartest Marketers Are the Laziest
But here’s the catch: You have to earn the right to be lazy.
Like sharpening an axe before chopping wood, putting in the effort upfront makes everything easier later.
The truly laziest (and smartest) marketers I know:
✔ Front-load effort into understanding their customers deeply
✔ Build a solid foundation of evidence for decision-making
✔ Save their energy for execution—not endless debates
Investing in customer research is like a making downpayment on future success. Why wouldn’t you do it?
Got questions?
Join my free monthly Customer Research Q+A on the second Thursday of every month.
I’ll answer your burning questions on customer interviews and research, so you can stop guessing and start making evidence-based decisions. Whether you’re wondering what to ask customers, how to get them to talk, or if you’d rather skip the DIY approach and have someone else do it for you, this session is for you.
