The feature a founder is proudest of may barely register with customers. The benefit repeated throughout the pitch may be something competitors already provide. A product can solve a meaningful problem while its advertising speaks to the wrong person.
MuirMed provides product, customer, and competitive research for agencies and strategy teams. The work establishes the foundation of a convincing campaign: the audience, the alternatives, and the decision the customer is actually making.
Hands-on product assessment, direct customer conversations, and comparison of competing experiences help explain why people purchase, hesitate, leave, or return. Those findings become a strategic direction the creative team can use.
Account planning and brand strategy
A creative brief should make a choice. It needs to establish whose behavior the campaign is intended to change, what currently stands in the way, and why the proposed message could make a difference.
Customer research and close examination of the business give that choice an evidentiary foundation.
An assignment can begin with a new agency client, a product launch, a repositioning effort, or an existing campaign whose results suggest the strategy needs another look.
The investigation addresses:
- What business outcome is the client trying to achieve?
- Who has the strongest reason to choose the offering?
- What does that person believe about the category?
- What event or frustration prompts them to consider a purchase?
- Which alternatives do they consider?
- What creates doubt, indifference, or resistance?
- What can this product credibly promise?
- What proof would make that promise convincing?
Deliverables include a positioning recommendation and strategic brief identifying the audience, customer insight, barrier to action, central proposition, supporting evidence, and desired response.
Customer insight: understanding the decision behind the purchase
Customers can describe liking a product without explaining the reason it became valuable to them. A useful interview needs to go further.
The interview follows the decision from its beginning: what was happening before the customer found the product, what triggered the search, which alternatives they compared, who influenced the decision, and what changed after adoption.
For a business product, the person using it may have little authority over the purchase. The department paying may care about different outcomes. An advertising strategy that treats those people as one audience can miss the decision entirely.
Customer research can examine:
- The difference between users, buyers, approvers, and influential third parties.
- What customers expect before purchase and value afterward.
- Why interested prospects fail to convert.
- Why customers stop using or paying for the product.
- Which customer segments describe materially different needs.
- Whether the company’s preferred language matches how customers describe the problem.
- Which findings recur across interviews and which may reflect individual experiences.
Interviews can generate explanations worth testing. Broader claims about customer populations require an appropriate research design and supporting data. Campaign recommendations preserve that distinction.
Competitive positioning
A competitive review needs to establish more than who uses which tagline.
The comparison covers the products, the experience of choosing and using them, the audiences they pursue, and the promises their communications make.
The assessment examines whether a proposed position is meaningfully different, whether customers care about that difference, and whether the business can support it consistently.
Potential outputs include:
- A comparison of competing products and customer experiences.
- An examination of competitors’ positioning and supporting claims.
- Identification of benefits that have become standard within the category.
- An assessment of overlooked customer frustrations or unmet expectations.
- Positioning options, with evidence and tradeoffs for each.
- Questions the agency should resolve before committing to a direction.
The recommendation should explain why a position is worth pursuing and what evidence could undermine it.
Campaign diagnosis
When a campaign underperforms, several explanations can produce similar symptoms.
The audience may be wrong. The message may be unclear. The promise may be unconvincing. The purchase process may introduce friction. The product itself may fail to justify the asking price.
Campaign diagnosis examines those possibilities before recommending a change in creative direction.
The investigation can combine a review of the intended customer journey, prospect interviews, purchase-experience testing, customer objections, and collaboration with the analytics team to identify where behavior diverges from expectations.
Deliverables include a diagnosis of the leading explanations, the evidence for each, and a proposed sequence of tests. Media allocation, attribution, and causal measurement are coordinated with the specialists responsible for those functions.
New-business pitches and unfamiliar categories
An agency may need to understand a prospective client’s business quickly enough to offer a credible point of view.
Pitch support concentrates that investigation into a practical briefing: the category, the product, the customer’s decision, the alternatives, and the questions that reveal the opportunity.
Pitch support can provide a category briefing, a competitor assessment, initial audience hypotheses, strategic territories to explore, and a clear account of what would need to be validated after winning the work.
Clinical training adds particular depth to healthcare, pharmaceutical, and medically complex accounts. Customer, technology, and product research is also available across other categories.
Stay involved as the work meets the audience
Continued involvement connects the research to the creative brief, the work presented to the audience, and the lessons from its response.
Ongoing support can include refining the strategy, reviewing whether claims remain faithful to the product, investigating unexpected results, and helping the team decide what to change.
The work should leave the agency with something it can use: a better-defined audience, a defensible position, a sharper brief, or a clearer explanation of why the current approach is falling short.
Discuss a campaign, pitch, or positioning question that needs a deeper understanding of the customer and the business.