inability of established companies to recognize and respond to market disruption.
The Hidden Cost of Consumer Misunderstanding
In 2022, our team at GeoPoll conducted research that showed a startling statistic: 68 % of brand managers and leaders could not accurately identify their consumers ' top three pain points with their products. This disconnect between what brands believe about their consumers and what consumers actually experience represents one of the most costly forms of brand ignorance.
What ' s particularly concerning is that many of these same companies had invested significantly in traditional market research methodologies. They had the data but lacked the correct interpretation framework to transform it into actionable insights. Their brand health metrics appeared strong on dashboards, yet they missed underlying signals of eroding consumer sentiment.
Take the case of a leading South African telecom provider that invested millions in developing premium voice call packages while its younger users were rapidly shifting to messaging apps like WhatsApp and data-centric communication. The company ' s market research focused on quantifying usage of existing services rather than identifying emerging communication patterns, in the process creating a blind spot that cost them an entire generation of users.
Demographic assumptions are particularly dangerous. When brands rely on outdated segmentation models, they miss how consumer behavior transcends traditional categories like age, gender, and income."
Cosmetics giant Revlon learned this lesson the hard way. While the company was focused on traditional retail-based marketing and celebrity endorsements, younger consumers were discovering new brands through social media influencers and demanding more inclusive product ranges. By the time Revlon adjusted its strategy, it had already lost significant market share to more agile competitors like Fenty Beauty and Glossier. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2022.
Even luxury brands aren ' t immune. When Ferrari ' s CEO Luca di Montezemolo declared in 2013 that Ferrari would never build an SUV to preserve its sports car heritage, he was ignoring clear signals from wealthy consumers who wanted luxury performance vehicles with practical utility. After di Montezemolo ' s departure, Ferrari changed course- the Purosangue SUV now accounts for a significant portion of the company ' s sales.
The Feedback Paradox: Why Brands Struggle to Hear What Consumers Are Saying
In theory, the digital age has made it easier than ever for brands to gather customer feedback. Social media, review sites, and sophisticated CRM systems generate vast amounts of consumer data. Yet many organizations have developed complex mechanisms for filtering out negative feedback before it reaches decision-makers.
There ' s often an inverse relationship between a company ' s size and its ability to process uncomfortable consumer truths. Information that contradicts the prevailing narrative gets watered down as it moves up the corporate ladder.
This filtering happens through multiple mechanisms:
Selective Reporting: Analytics teams highlight metrics that show improvement while downplaying negative indicators.
Sentiment Sanitization: Customer feedback gets categorized and summarized in ways that strip it of emotional impact.
Responsibility Diffusion: Negative feedback becomes everyone ' s problem and therefore no one ' s responsibility.
Dismissive Categorization: Complaints get labeled as " outliers " or coming from " users who don ' t understand the product."
Customer Experience( CX) research often falls victim to this paradox. A comprehensive CX study might identify critical journey pain points, but by the time insights reach executive decisionmakers, they ' ve been stripped of urgency and reframed as " areas for incremental improvement " rather than critical flaws requiring immediate attention. As we conduct CX tracking at GeoPoll, we try to belabour the point that the data is urgent and that’ s why we try to make it as rea-time as possible. Because the trains leave the station rather rapidly. Ghafla bin vuu, your brand is in the trenches.
I read about Marks & Spencer. For years, the company ' s clothing division struggled while executives dismissed customer complaints about style and fit as coming from " non-target customers." Internal reports focused on positive feedback from loyal customers rather than understanding why their base was shrinking. By the time the company acknowledged the problem, they had lost significant market share to more responsive competitors.
In the same way, when BlackBerry ' s leadership dismissed the iPhone ' s touchscreen as a passing fad, they weren ' t simply misjudging a competitor- they were ignoring clear signals from their own customers who were increasingly interested in rich media experiences that BlackBerry ' s devices couldn ' t deliver.
Drowning in Metrics While Missing the Message
Perhaps the most insidious form of brand ignorance in the digital age is what I call " data-rich, insight-poor " syndrome. Companies collect unprecedented amounts of customer data but fail to translate it into meaningful understanding.
At a conference some time back, I spoke with a CEO who described how her team tracks over 300 metrics across their digital platforms( which is why they didn’ t need market research). When I asked which consumer insights had most significantly changed their strategy in the past year, she struggled to name even one.
Many organizations confuse measurement with understanding. They track everything but question nothing.
This phenomenon is particularly evident in digital analytics. A retailer may meticulously track website traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, and dozens of other e-commerce metrics. Yet when consumer research finds that customers find their checkout process frustrating, executives question the findings because their conversion metrics appear " within industry standards." This is measuring the what but missing the why.
Marketing ROI calculations often suffer from similar limitations. Some may focus solely on immediate conversion metrics, and miss longer-term signals of brand equity erosion. A campaign might show excellent short-term ROI while simultaneously damaging brand perception- a trade-off that rarely appears in quarterly dashboards but eventually manifests in declining customer lifetime value.
The streaming industry provides another clear example. Netflix ' s early success came not just from measuring what
58 MAL65 / 25 ISSUE