Mark Osborne warns that marketers often mistake assumptions and poorly designed surveys for real customer insights. A survey with fixed answer choices and no "other" option can generate false motivations that teams then bet on. The fix: acknowledge uncertainty, avoid overconfident decisions, and design research that captures what customers actually think.
We're not connecting. We gotta find out. We gotta stop hallucinating. Cool. Good first step. Acknowledge you're hallucinating, or you might be. And if you're not sure, you probably are, right? Unless you're really sure that that's exactly, and it came from their actual mouth, you might be hallucinating, right? You really don't know. And don't just bet everything on black because 50% of the time, that's a terrible bet, right? Right. So, so what I see a common mistake being is when people say, okay, I believe you, Casey. We're hallucinating. Let's get this straight. All right, let's put a survey out there. And then I remember, I actually just 2 weeks ago, I got this survey and it was like, hey, why did you buy? What was the primary number one motivation for buying our product? There were 4 choices and absolutely none of them were, were why I bought the product. And there was no other, there's no D, all the above. Wow. It was just literally 4 things, probably. And it was their hallucinations creating these different categories.
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