Consumer research & buyer personas

Research into who actually buys, what triggers the decision, and which channels reach them — done before the budget is committed rather than inferred from campaign data afterwards.

The cost of the study is roughly one month of ad spend. Without it, the first months of advertising function as unstructured paid research anyway: you learn the same things, more slowly, and you pay the platforms for the privilege.

For each segment: the demographic profile, the psychographic profile, a day-in-the-life narrative, the fears attached to the category, the buying behaviour, and the media consumption.

Online and offline behaviour both. Purchase behaviour at a shelf, in a pharmacy or in a venue follows different rules than behaviour in a feed, and brands selling in both keep applying one logic to the other.

Segments that look similar demographically often buy in completely different ways, and that difference decides the channel mix, the purchase path and the tone of voice for each group. It also tells you where not to spend, which is usually the more valuable half of the answer.

A documented set of personas, and the strategic implications written out: which channels serve which segment, what each segment responds to, and what to stop doing.

Access to whatever you already know: existing customer data, order history, reviews, support conversations, and anyone on your team who talks to customers directly. Where the category allows it, primary research with real buyers.

It is not a demographic breakdown of your existing analytics. Analytics tells you what happened. This is about why.