Looking in both directions

Why is it that we treat businesses as the observers of their customers, but much less often as objects of study themselves? It's a slightly strange methodological inheritance. And it’s worth considering because some of the most important strategic findings sit not inside the customer's world or the business's world, but in the space between them.

The convention runs deeply through how research is commissioned and run. The business writes the brief. The researchers go out to study the audience. Findings come back as a presentation about the customer, which the business then uses to make strategic decisions. The business is the implicit observer; the audience is the explicit object. This shape is so taken for granted that we rarely notice it as a methodological choice. But it is one. And like all methodological choices, it shapes what can be seen.

What it tends to obscure is how much variation there is inside a business about what's being studied. Six people in a senior team can read the same audience research and hear six meaningfully different things. Each one is filtering the findings through what they already believe about their customer, their category, and the business itself. Sometimes those filters are close together. Often they're not. The research, no matter how well done, has to be received through the cultural world of the business and that cultural world is rarely the homogeneous thing the brief assumes it is.

Internal research does happen. Plenty of strategy projects include some form of stakeholder interview as a discovery phase, usually as a way of getting the brief right before the external work begins. What's rarer is treating the internal work as a meaningful object of study in its own right, pairing it methodologically with the external work, analysing the two together, and treating the gap between them as the interesting finding. Internal and external as a paired discipline rather than a sequential one opens up new strategic territory.

This is more useful in some kinds of business than in others. In a straightforward FMCG product business, where the product itself does most of the brand's work, the formulation, the packaging, the price, the shelf presence, internal variation matters less. The product holds the brand together. The internal team can be functionally fragmented and the customer experience is largely unaffected.

But that's the exception, not the rule, in a growing share of the businesses Become work with. In retail, where the staff on the floor are the brand. In service businesses, where the experience is the product. In specialty categories, where the customer's relationship with the business is mediated through conversation, advice, expertise, and human judgement. In B2B businesses where the sales relationship carries most of the brand value. In any business where the people are the proposition, internal variation matters enormously, because how the team thinks, talks, and behaves is what the customer encounters.

We’ve done this kind of paired work most often in those contexts. With a commercial vehicles business, the internal research surfaced a particular picture of how the customer relationship and service experience was understood across the dealer network. The language, the priorities, the perceived problems. The external customer research surfaced a subtly but importantly different account of where the relationship worked, where it didn't, what the moments of friction actually were. Neither side was wrong. But the gap between them was where the most useful strategic recommendations sat, because the gap was where the business was misreading its own customer.

A different version of the same pattern showed up in pet retail. The internal team had a strong account of the in-store service experience, what good looked like, why it mattered, where it sat in the overall proposition. The external research showed customers genuinely valued that service experience, but in ways the team hadn't fully recognised presenting a strategic opportunity to bring the service dimension up into the wider brand story, where it had been quietly under claimed. Again, neither account was wrong. The strategic insight was in the relationship between them.

In both cases, the strategic recommendation would have been weaker, or possibly the wrong recommendation altogether, if the work had only looked outward. The audience research alone would have produced findings the business could have interpreted in various ways, including ways that wouldn't have led to the most useful action. Looking inward as well surfaced the specific shape of misalignment that mattered. The gap between the two views became the diagnostic instrument.

There's a name for this paired methodology in the work Become does. We call it Bearings. The process of locating where the business is, where the audience is, and the distance between them. Bearings, in the navigational sense, is the practice of knowing your position. You take a bearing on yourself and a bearing on where you're trying to go and the relationship between the two tells you something about the journey ahead. The research follows the same logic. Two readings. A relational picture rather than a single account.

It’s an approach that leads to valuable outcomes. Research that only looks outward arrives in the business as information that has to be interpreted and the interpretation happens through the same internal filters that were already in place. Research that looks both ways arrives as a relational map, with the business itself implicated in the findings. The conversation that follows is different. People aren't only discussing what their customers think. They're discussing what they themselves had been assuming, sometimes for years, about what their customers think. The gap between assumption and reality is where the actionable strategy lives.

This isn't a critique of conventional research practice. Outward-facing research is real work and it produces real value. The argument is that for a particular kind of business, service-led, retail, expertise mediated, anywhere the people are the brand, there's an additional discipline available, and it changes what strategy can actually do once it's been done.

It can also be more politically sensitive inside the business than purely external research. Internal stakeholder research surfaces things that not everyone is ready to see. Maybe that's part of why it's done less often than it could be. But it's also why, when it's done well, it changes things.

The brands I've worked with that have made the biggest strategic moves have almost always been ones where we looked in both directions. Where the team was willing to see itself with the same attention it was asking us to bring to its audience. Where the findings landed not as here is what your customer thinks but as here is what you and your customer think about each other, and here is what to do about it. That's a more useful kind of finding. And it's the one Bearings is built to produce.