By Kate Eady, Brand Strategist & Founding Director at Wrapped Agency
Why digital intelligence, audience research and understanding buying behaviour should come before developing your brand.
I’ve been involved in hundreds of brand workshops over the years, and there’s something I’ve learnt. The people who know a business best don’t always know how their customers see it.
That’s not a criticism. Business owners and leadership teams spend years building their organisations, developing products, managing people and making decisions, so of course they have strong opinions about what makes their business different and why customers choose them. But those opinions are inevitably influenced by what happens inside the organisation, and that’s not always the same as what’s happening outside it.
I’ve been in workshops where the managing director believes the business is chosen for its innovation, the sales director is convinced it’s the relationships they’ve built, and the operations team argues that reliability is what really sets them apart. And the interesting thing is, they could all be right. But until we understand what customers actually value, we’re making assumptions about which of those strengths really influences the buying decision.
This is why I believe research and digital intelligence should come before developing a brand strategy. Not afterwards, when we’re trying to justify decisions we’ve already made, but right at the beginning, when we’re establishing what we actually need to understand.
The danger of knowing your business too well
One of the most interesting things about working with established organisations is how familiar everyone becomes with the way things have always been done. Over time, certain beliefs about the business become accepted as facts, particularly when they’ve been repeated in board meetings, sales presentations and marketing materials for years.
The business might believe it’s the most innovative in its sector, that its customer service is exceptional or that its experience is what makes it different. And those things may well be true, but they’re not necessarily the reasons customers choose it.
They might also be exactly the same claims every competitor is making.
I’ve seen businesses become very attached to what they believe makes them special, without really questioning whether those strengths are distinctive, relevant or even recognised by their audiences.
That’s where external evidence becomes so valuable. It gives us the opportunity to look at the business through a different lens and challenge assumptions that might otherwise influence the entire brand strategy.
And sometimes what we discover is uncomfortable. A service the leadership team considers central to the business might not be particularly important to customers, while something they’ve barely mentioned in their marketing could be one of their strongest competitive advantages.
That’s not a problem. That’s an opportunity to make better decisions.
Your customers are leaving clues everywhere
One of the things I find particularly interesting about digital intelligence is how much it can reveal about the way people behave, the problems they’re trying to solve and the language they use when looking for solutions.
Search behaviour can help us understand what people are actively interested in, what questions they’re asking and how they describe their needs. Website analytics can reveal which areas of a business attract attention, how visitors navigate information and where they might be losing interest. Competitor analysis can help identify how other organisations are positioning themselves and whether there are opportunities to communicate something genuinely different.
For example, a business might be investing heavily in promoting a particular service because it’s strategically important to the leadership team, while search research reveals that potential customers are describing the problem in completely different language. That doesn’t necessarily mean the service is wrong, but it could mean the way it’s being presented is creating an unnecessary barrier between the business and the people it wants to reach.
And this is where digital insight becomes much more than a marketing tool. It can influence how we structure a brand, how we describe its offering, which audiences we prioritise and what messages are likely to be most relevant to them.
Of course, digital data doesn’t tell us everything. A page receiving thousands of visits doesn’t automatically mean the content is effective, and search volumes alone can’t explain why someone makes a purchasing decision. But when we combine digital intelligence with customer interviews, market research, competitor analysis and commercial understanding, we start to build a much more informed picture.
The skill isn’t simply gathering the information. It’s understanding what it means, recognising what it doesn’t tell us and knowing which questions to ask next.
Research should challenge thinking, not just confirm it
I’ve seen research become an exercise in collecting enormous amounts of information that nobody quite knows what to do with. Pages of statistics, competitor screenshots, market trends and audience descriptions that look impressive in a presentation but don’t necessarily influence a single commercial decision.
For me, that’s missing the point.
Good research should help us understand what really matters to customers, what influences their decisions, what creates confidence and what might prevent them from choosing a business. It should also help us understand where competitors are genuinely strong, where they’re simply making a lot of noise and where there might be an opportunity to position the business differently.
One of the most valuable things research can do is reveal a gap between what a business believes it offers and what its audiences actually recognise or value. A manufacturer might be enormously proud of its technical innovation, for example, while its customers are more interested in reliability, installation time or reducing operational risk. The innovation is still important, but perhaps we need to communicate its benefits differently.
This is also why I think research needs to go beyond asking customers whether they like a brand. People can tell you they like something without ever intending to buy it, and they don’t always find it easy to explain what influences their decisions.
Understanding buying behaviour means looking at the wider context. Who is involved in the decision? What alternatives are being considered? What might make someone postpone a purchase or remain with an existing supplier? What evidence do they need before they’re prepared to commit?
Those insights can be far more useful than simply knowing whether someone likes your logo or thinks your website looks professional.
Then we get everyone in the room
I love a good brand workshop. Bringing experienced people together, challenging their thinking and helping them see their business from a different perspective is one of the most rewarding parts of what I do. But I believe those conversations are significantly more valuable when we’ve done the work beforehand.
When we arrive with meaningful research and digital intelligence, we’re not starting with a blank sheet of paper or asking everyone to describe what they think the brand should be. We have evidence to explore, assumptions to challenge and opportunities to investigate.
That changes the quality of the conversation.
Instead of spending hours debating whether the business is innovative or customer-focused, we can look at what those claims actually mean, whether customers recognise them and how they compare with competitors. We can examine which audiences offer the greatest commercial opportunity, what matters to them and how the organisation can communicate its value more effectively.
The experience and judgement of the leadership team remain enormously important because they understand the capabilities, ambitions and commercial realities of the business. Research doesn’t replace that knowledge; it gives us a way to test it, challenge it and combine it with a much clearer understanding of the outside world.
And importantly, it means we’re making decisions together based on something more substantial than personal preference.
Why digital shouldn’t be bolted on afterwards
There’s another reason I feel strongly about this approach, and it’s the relationship between brand and digital.
Too often, businesses treat them as two separate exercises. They develop a new brand, agree the positioning, approve the messaging and create a visual identity, then hand everything over to a digital team and ask them to build a website.
But what happens if digital research reveals that customers search for the offering in a completely different way? What if the website needs to serve several audiences with very different priorities, or the buying journey is more complicated than the brand structure allows for?
Suddenly, decisions that have already been made need to be revisited, sometimes at considerable expense.
This is why I believe digital thinking should be involved from the beginning, not simply introduced when it’s time to build the website or plan a marketing campaign.
I’m not suggesting that search data should dictate an entire brand strategy. That would be just as misguided as developing a brand based entirely on the opinions of the leadership team. But digital intelligence can help inform the architecture, audience priorities, content structure and messaging before those decisions become fixed.
And the relationship works both ways. A clear brand strategy should inform the digital experience, helping determine what information people need, how it should be organised and what they should understand about the business at different stages of their journey.
When brand and digital are developed together, the result should be a much more coherent experience for customers and a more commercially useful platform for the business.
Evidence before ego
There’s a phrase I come back to when working with businesses: just because you’ve always done something a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the right way to keep doing it. The same applies to brand strategy. Just because a business has always described itself in a particular way doesn’t mean that’s how its customers understand it. Just because the leadership team loves a particular service doesn’t mean it’s what the market values most, and just because a competitor is doing something doesn’t mean you should copy it.
Research gives us the opportunity to question those assumptions before they become expensive decisions.
Of course, brand strategy still requires experience, creativity and commercial judgement. Research won’t magically produce a compelling proposition or tell you exactly what your brand should look like. It can’t make every decision for you, and sometimes the most interesting opportunities come from seeing something in the evidence that nobody else has recognised.
That’s where the strategist earns their place at the table.
But the more we understand before we begin developing the brand, the better informed those decisions can be.
So before investing in a new identity, website or marketing campaign, I’d encourage businesses to ask themselves whether they genuinely understand why customers choose them, what influences those decisions and how their competitors are positioned. And perhaps most importantly, whether they’re prepared to discover that some of their assumptions might be wrong.
Because brand strategy shouldn’t simply reflect what a business believes about itself. It should connect what the organisation genuinely offers with what its audiences value and where its future opportunities lie.
And for that, I’d much rather start with evidence than opinion.
