Strategy

Evidence Based Marketing

Market Research

Strategic Market Research: How We Practise It at Flybridge

A study is on the table, but what follows from it for product, brand or sales? Strategic market research answers this question within the same mandate: data collection, interpretation and recommendation come from one team that combines scientific methodology with marketing strategy. This post shows in seven steps how such a mandate unfolds at Flybridge, where strategic market research makes a difference and what stands at the end, from product strategy to brand architecture. Eight anonymised cases from our work show how numbers turn into decisions.

Dr. Clemens Ammann

Captain

“We have a study. But what do we do with it now?” We hear this sentence more often than you might think. That is exactly where strategic market research begins: with the question of how numbers turn into decisions.

At Flybridge, data collection, interpretation and recommendation belong to the same mandate. What that means in practice is best shown by projects from our own work. The clients stay anonymous, the cases are real.

What is strategic market research?

Strategic market research is market research in the service of a specific marketing strategy: a product decision, a brand decision, a shop or sales strategy. It delivers the data and, at the same time, contributes to the strategy itself. Methodology and marketing expertise come from the same team.

The term has a history, even if no textbook gives it a chapter of its own. In 1981, George Day described strategic market analysis in the Strategic Management Journal: how a market is defined depends on the strategic purpose the analysis is meant to serve. In 1996, Bijmolt, Frambach and Verhallen introduced the term strategic marketing research in the Journal of Marketing Management: the collection and analysis of data in support of strategic marketing management, from market definition to the strategy for the individual marketing instruments. Aaker and Moorman build their textbook Strategic Market Management (Wiley, 2017) on the same idea: strategy is developed from the market, out of the analysis of customers, competitors and environment.

In 2016, Rebecca Hamilton put her finger on what sets this apart from classic market research in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science: consumer research generates insights, consumer-based strategy takes the next step and builds strategy from them. That next step is what we mean. At Flybridge it is part of the mandate, whether the unit of analysis is the consumer, a brand, a shop or a supplier.

Strategic market research is what we do best. Flybridge grew out of the chair of Prof. Dr. Harley Krohmer at the Institute of Marketing and Management (IMU) at the University of Bern, and that still shapes our profile today. The ambition behind it: a study should help with a decision in the end. That is what we design every study around, from the first conversation to the report.

In everyday life the term still needs explaining. The head of an in-house market research department recently asked us: “Which study would I actually approach you for?” Fair question. The short answer is in the FAQ at the end, the long one in the cases below.

How a mandate at Flybridge unfolds

Seven steps, from the first conversation to implementation. What stands at the end depends on the brief: a recommendation, a decision or a complete strategy, for a product, a brand or a sales channel. Steps 1, 5 and 6 set a strategic mandate apart from a pure data delivery. This is where the implications take shape, and they are central to how we understand market research. That is why they get time, often a quarter of the budget.

Step	What happens	What you can hold us to
1 Understand the problem	Often we first receive a description of a problem, not yet a research question. We listen, ask questions and clarify which decision is pending and who will take it.	We understand your problem in depth before we talk about methods.
2 Design	The method follows the question: survey, interviews, observation, experiment or a combination. Desk research, best practices and academic literature are almost always part of it.	You can rely on the method fitting your context.
3 Fieldwork	Programming, recruitment, field control. We conduct the interviews ourselves, and the people named in the proposal are the ones who do it.	We take care of everything and keep you informed throughout.
4 Analysis	Descriptive and inferential, and where the question calls for it MaxDiff, driver analysis or content analysis.	The results are prepared for your audience: no wall of numbers, but with the analytical rigour that is needed.
5 Interpretation	What do the results mean for product, brand, sales? This is where methodology and marketing strategy sit at the same table, together with your project team.	The report ends with prioritised recommendations that your team helped develop.
6 Decision and strategy	Results workshop with the decision makers, often up to executive management or the board of directors. Afterwards we keep working in tandem with your project team, if you wish all the way to a finished product, brand or sales strategy.	The outcome is a decision or a strategy that your team helped develop, and that is why it holds.
7 Implementation	On request we stay on board: sparring, rollout, repeat measurement.	A year later, the study has still left its mark in the organisation.

Where strategic market research makes a difference

Wherever a marketing or business decision needs solid evidence. Eight fields of application come up particularly often in our work. The third column shows what typically stands at the end of a mandate. That is the part that goes beyond the classic study.

Field of application	Typical question	What comes out of it
Product strategy	Which offering fits which target group?	Prioritised portfolio of offerings per segment. A decision on what gets built and what does not.
Communication impact measurement	Does the campaign achieve what it is meant to?	Budget moves to the levers that work. A measurement toolkit for the next campaigns.
Public value	What value does an organisation create for its region?	Evidence-based argumentation towards sponsors, authorities and politics.
Brand positioning and brand architecture	What do we stand for in the eyes of our customers, and does that match our self-image?	A gap analysis between inside and outside view. Where self-image and customer perception diverge, that is where the measures start. Plus a shared understanding of the brand within the company.
Sales and distribution channels	Which channel pays off for which segment?	Channel strategy and an acquisition programme with tested measures.
Customer experience and segmentation	Which customer groups, which touchpoints?	Segmentation as a basis for steering, a touchpoint roadmap, ongoing measurement.
CRM and dashboards	How do we manage customer relationships and sponsorship in a measurable way?	A KPI set and a cockpit. Portfolio decisions on individual engagements.
Customer needs and satisfaction	What do our customers need that we do not deliver today, and where are we losing them?	Needs profiles per customer group as a basis for offering and communication. Satisfaction measurement becomes an early warning system with measures per field of action.

Five mandates from the inside

Product strategy for a provider of senior residences

The question: which housing and service offerings does the next generation of residents need, and how do the language regions differ?

We analysed the market and the competition, surveyed 1,000 people in three national languages and, in parallel, gathered the views of executive management and the site managers with mini surveys. The results went into a strategy workshop on site. The outcome was a product strategy with prioritised offerings per segment.

The survey alone would have said what people want. The workshop decided what the company builds of it.

The strategic consequence: the company knows which offerings it expands per region, which it puts on hold, and in what order. The product strategy is at the same time an investment sequence.

Impact measurement of a prevention campaign for an insurer

The question: does the prevention campaign have an effect, and which lever works?

We measured before and after the campaign, several hundred people each time from the population in the insurer’s territory, in two national languages, along an impact model (DPRG/ICV) from awareness to knowledge to behaviour. Added to that came the data that already existed in-house: the campaign budget, web analytics, the media agency’s reporting and the loss models of the specialist department, which calculate how much damage a protective measure prevents. Brought together in the impact model, this gives one continuous picture, from the franc invested through reach and knowledge to the damage prevented. That made it possible to show at which stage the campaign works and where it fizzles out.

Beyond the result, the client received a modular toolkit for measuring future campaigns along the same pattern. The study answered the current question and, at the same time, built the instrument for the next ones.

For the communication strategy this means: the insurer knows at which impact stage future campaigns have to start, and allocates its prevention budget along these stages.

Requirements validation for an online shop in building services

The question: which of the 19 planned functions of the new online shop do trade customers really need, before development starts costing money?

We tested every user story with the Customer Effort Score in an online survey in German and French among several hundred trade customers and deepened the results in in-depth interviews. The result was a ranking: build now, later, leave out.

The requirements specification thus became a basis for decisions before the first line of code was written. For a digital project of this size, that is the cheapest moment to be wrong.

The ranking became the development roadmap: the order of releases, the scope of the first version and a budget that flows into functions that actually make trade customers’ work easier.

Brand architecture for a financial institution

The question: how does the institution’s brand presence interact with that of its parent group, and where does that strengthen or hold back the brand?

A representative survey, plus 15 expert interviews, then the presentation to the board of directors. Six weeks from kick-off to the board. That is tight. It was possible because the same team built the questionnaire and wrote the presentation for the board. There was no handover between data collection and recommendation.

With that, the board had the basis for its decision on brand architecture: how closely the two brands appear together, where they set themselves apart, and what that means for communication and sales.

Sparring partner for the customer experience department of an energy utility

The question: how does a customer experience team build its own market research without having an institute in-house?

For several years now, we have been this team’s market research experts in the background. It started with a customer panel as a minimum viable version and training for the team. Then we mapped the five most important touchpoints together, set up the satisfaction surveys via e-mail, SMS and QR code and piloted them. Today the team runs the instrument itself. Most recently, a segmentation and needs study was added: which customer groups exist, what do they need, and how does the utility address them.

Our role alternates between project lead and sparring. Sometimes we build the instrument, sometimes we review a questionnaire the team wrote itself, sometimes we sit in the weekly and think along. Out of the ongoing measurement grew a basis for the marketing strategy, and the methodological know-how stayed in-house.

And for SMEs?

There we are often the extended arm of executive management for business development and marketing. An SME rarely has a department that can commission a study and write the strategy from it on its own. We take on both, over years and across changing topics.

A manufacturer of vehicle care products has worked with us since 2020. The topics since then read like a marketing curriculum: market research, social media strategy, employee and customer surveys, brand positioning, generative AI in marketing up to a TV spot, a B2C strategy with an action plan, new customer acquisition with tested measures and, most recently, the export business, that is, the question of how the company supports its partners abroad with marketing material. For all of this, executive management has not built its own marketing department. They call us.

A regional media company has worked with us since 2020: first personas and segmentation, then a strategy with vision, positioning and values, then the naming of a new online news portal, for which we tested five name candidates quantitatively. Since 2023, an employee survey has been added every year. Nine projects since 2020, each with a concrete decision at the end.

A large music festival wanted to show sponsors and authorities what it does for the region. We quantified the regional value creation from financial data, secondary data and interviews, a figure in the tens of millions. That number has been part of the festival’s argumentation ever since. How such studies work is explained in the post More Than Profit: Why Public Value Secures Business Success.

Why we work this way

In the Swiss market, scientific methodology and strategic marketing expertise usually come separately: institutes deliver data, strategy consultancies deliver concepts, and marketing expertise often sits with agencies. We see ourselves as one partner for market research and marketing strategy: a market research institute that brings strategy work and marketing expertise along with it, because we come from a marketing chair. Whoever builds the questionnaire at Flybridge has taught marketing strategy or developed it with companies. Graphic design is not part of it. Our customers have their agencies for that, and we are happy to work with them.

The first gain lies in the transitions. Between data set and recommendation, little gets lost with us, because nobody has to hand over. Our customers keep mentioning further benefits.

Speed. Six weeks from kick-off to the board are possible because design, fieldwork and presentation are in one hand.

Breadth of methods from one team. Survey, in-depth interview, in-store observation, experiment and desk research, combined as needed, without switching providers. The breadth comes from the doctorates: many in the team hold a PhD or are working on one, and every dissertation brings its own repertoire of methods, from experiments to content analysis.

Translation into the language of decision makers. Results arrive in a form that executive management and the board can work with. The analytical depth stays in the report, for everyone who needs it.

Independence. We are tied to no panel and no institute. For every study we choose the field partner that fits your customers and your question. And we earn our money from the study and the strategy work, from nothing else. That is why we recommend what fits, even if that is a lean standard study.

Weight inside your organisation. An assessment from outside often finds an easier hearing in companies than one from within. Our closeness to the university gives this outside view additional backing: a report from us rests on scientific methodology, and that helps your team get decisions through internally.

Enablement. Where it makes sense, we build the instrument so that your team runs it itself, as with the energy utility. We stay available as a sparring partner.

Scientific grounding. Our team teaches and researches at universities. Current literature and methodological standards flow directly into the mandates.

Our team is large enough to run several studies in parallel, and small enough that you know who your contact person is. That person also works on the project, from kick-off to results workshop.

Why strategy needs people

A large part of execution can be handed to AI today: texts, variants, analyses, first drafts. That shifts the bottleneck. When everyone can produce quickly, what gets produced becomes interchangeable. What then separates mediocrity from a lead is the question of what should be built in the first place.

The column “Willkommen im Zeitalter von Taste” in the Swiss trade magazine m&k from June 2026 calls this ability taste and defines it as “radically well understood customer insights” (our translation). That matches our understanding of strategic market research exactly. The data provides the understanding. The judgement about which strategy follows from it stays with people: with your team and with us. We use AI as a tool along the way, in analysis as in drafting. The choice of what counts, we do not hand over.

Conclusion

Do you recognise one of these situations? A product or brand decision is pending, and the basis for it is a gut feeling. The numbers are there, but nobody has time to translate them into a strategy. The marketing team is small, and for the strategic work there is nobody to think along. Or you want to know whether a campaign, a shop or an offering really does what it is supposed to.

In all four cases, strategic market research is the tool, and we are the partner for it. Sometimes a lean standard study is enough, sometimes it takes the full mandate up to the finished strategy. We clarify what fits in the first conversation, and we say so when less is enough. We describe a variant with a continuous flow of data in our post on customer panels as a strategic tool.

FAQ

What sets strategic market research apart from classic market research?

Classic market research has done its job when the data has been collected cleanly and presented in a report. Translating it into measures usually stays with the client. Strategic market research goes one step further: the same team that designs and analyses the study scientifically brings the marketing expertise along, interprets the results and derives recommendations for action, if you wish all the way to a finished product, brand or sales strategy. For you this means one partner for market research and marketing strategy, with no handover between data set and recommendation.

Which methods are used?

Customer surveys (satisfaction, image, segmentation, needs, behaviour), expert interviews, desk research and competitor analyses, experiments and A/B tests, workshops, focus groups, as well as shadowing and structured observation. Which method fits depends on the question.

We have our own market research department. Is Flybridge still a fit?

Yes, many of our mandates run through in-house market research. It knows the company and often brings a finished study concept, we add methodology and marketing expertise and are allowed to challenge the concept. We deliver the results in decision-ready form, so that the internal presentation lands. Typical cases are ad hoc studies with a marketing strategy question, such as brand studies on positioning and brand architecture, or concept and product studies with a strategic derivation.

What does a strategic market research project cost?

The range is wide and depends on the study design. A focused qualitative survey costs less than a quantitative study with pre/post measurement and a strategic roadmap. What matters for the investment decision is the economic weight of the decision the study is meant to secure.

Which company sizes is the format suited for?

Strategic market research scales. Large companies from insurance, finance, telecommunications and energy use it for tailor-made studies. SMEs such as a regional media company or a manufacturer of vehicle care products work with us over years, often with one survey wave a year and changing strategic topics in between.

How long does a typical project take?

From the first concept sketch to the strategic recommendation, six to sixteen weeks are realistic. Qualitative pre-studies are faster, pre/post designs with large samples take longer. The interpretation phase at the end of a mandate should not be compressed. It decides whether the study has an effect or disappears into the filing pile.

If you recognise yourself in one of these situations, get in touch with me directly: Dr. Clemens Ammann, clemens.ammann@flybridge.ch.

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