A survey of 112 senior marketing leaders found that just 5% are confident their team knows why customers choose their brand or walk away. The gap between brand investment and brand understanding is widening.
The 95% are not lazy. They are measuring the wrong things. Attribution is a map of the journey. Brand choice research is the reason for the trip.
A survey of 112 senior marketing leaders has produced a number that should stop every CMO mid-meeting. Just 5% said they are confident their team knows why customers choose their brand. Or why they walk away.
That is not a rounding error. It means 95% of senior marketers are making positioning decisions, allocating budgets and briefing agencies without a clear understanding of the single most important question in marketing: why does someone pick us?
The share of senior marketing leaders confident their team knows why customers choose their brand
The gap is not about data. Most marketing teams are drowning in dashboards, attribution models, cohort analyses and sentiment reports. The problem is that none of those tools answer the foundational question. They tell you what happened. They do not tell you why.
Attribution tells you which channel delivered the conversion. It does not tell you what made the customer decide. Brand tracking tells you awareness and consideration numbers. It does not tell you what tipped the balance. NPS tells you whether someone would recommend you. It does not tell you what they would say.
The practical consequence is that marketing teams optimise for efficiency within a positioning framework they cannot defend. They get better at delivering the message without knowing if the message is right. Paid media gets more targeted. Creative gets more polished. But the core value proposition remains untested because nobody asked the customer directly.
This is particularly acute in competitive categories where products are functionally similar. Financial services, SaaS, professional services and retail all suffer from positioning convergence. When every competitor claims reliability, expertise and customer focus, the brand that actually understands its specific reason to win has an asymmetric advantage.
For Australian businesses operating in tight markets, the cost of guessing is higher than the cost of asking. Qualitative brand choice research, structured as win-loss interviews at the point of purchase decision, costs a fraction of a single campaign flight and delivers insights that reshape everything downstream.
Why it matters
Brand strategy built on assumptions rather than evidence is the most expensive kind of marketing waste. It does not show up in a dashboard. It shows up in campaigns that perform adequately but never break through, in positioning that sounds right but does not convert and in competitive losses that nobody can explain.
What to do about it
Five percent is not a benchmark to aspire to. It is a warning about how much of marketing strategy is built on assumption rather than evidence.