The Reality of Buyer Intent
The challenge?
Most marketing teams are optimised around the signals buyers leave at the end of their journey, the click, the form fill, the enquiry, not the invisible research phase where the real decision is already forming.
The insight we built the campaign around:
Over half of buyers (54.6%) say their final decision is driven by their own research, not brand messaging. And 63.2% return to brands they're considering without ever clicking, enquiring or making contact. The majority of the buying journey is happening in the dark.
What we did:
We designed and produced a research programme surveying 2,000 buyers and 500 marketers across the UK, supported by four focus groups with senior marketing leaders. We turned that data into a narrative around five core signals, translating complex behavioural patterns into a story that was genuinely useful for marketing and commercial teams.
The headline? Marketers are confident they're reaching buyers at the right moment. Buyers disagree. Only 7.3% say brand messaging matches where they are in their journey very well, while 90.2% of marketers describe themselves as fairly or very confident it does. That gap is where revenue is lost.
The output:
The report, The Reality of Buyer Intent, launched as a research report and live event series across Leeds, Manchester and London. Download it here.
