How Often Does “Solving the Problem” Actually Start With Understanding the Customer?
Over the years, I’ve had the same conversation with many senior leaders, CMOs, agency principals, and consultants. The setting changes, the industry changes, but the pattern does not.
It usually starts with a clearly defined problem. Customer churn is creeping up. Engagement is declining. A brand initiative is underperforming. A client is unhappy and wants answers.
My first question is always the same: “What do your customers actually think about you, and why?”
Most executives can answer the first part, at least in broad strokes. The second part is where the conversation pauses. When I ask, “How do you know?”, the response is often anecdotal. A handful of sales calls. Feedback passed up through the organization. A few memorable complaints or compliments that stick in people’s minds.
Sometimes there is research, but even then it usually explains what customers think, not why they think it. And almost never does it connect those insights back to individual customers in a way that marketing teams can act on quickly.
This gap is not new. I encountered it years ago as an agency CEO, and later as a consultant working directly with C-suite teams. In most cases, the realization that “we don’t really know why” led to research. Interviews. Surveys. Focus groups. All useful, all insightful, and all slow.
The problem is not that research fails to deliver answers. The problem is what happens next.
Traditional research is time-consuming to analyze, limited in scope, and largely locked at the segment or persona level. Focus groups introduce small-sample bias. Surveys generate volumes of open-ended responses that take weeks to synthesize. By the time insights are ready, the moment to act has often passed.
In recent years, online research platforms have improved speed and scale. They can analyze thousands of responses in minutes, which is progress. But they still stop short of what modern marketing actually needs. They do not capture and retain customer language at the individual level, they do not allow segmentation based on how each person thinks and feels, and they rarely translate insight directly into actionable marketing recommendations.
That is where the approach needs to change.
Understanding customers today means understanding their language, their emotions, their motivations, and their perceptions, and doing so in a way that is immediately usable. When customer language is captured, analyzed, and appended to each individual profile, insight stops being a report and starts becoming a growth engine.
This is precisely the gap Oomiji was built to address. It captures customer language, analyzes it at both the individual and aggregate level in seconds, enables segmentation down to a single customer, and translates insight into clear marketing and communication recommendations.
The implications are significant. Brands can identify and activate true brand advocates, not based on demographics, but on shared motivations and beliefs. Unhappy customers can be identified and addressed with relevance and empathy before churn occurs. Marketing teams can move from generalized messaging to communication that feels personal, timely, and earned.
All of this matters even more in today’s environment, where customer attention is fragmented beyond anything we have seen before. Hundreds of billions of emails are sent every day. Millions of social posts, messages, and notifications compete for attention every minute. In that noise, generic marketing simply disappears.
The brands that break through are the ones that truly understand their own communities. They listen carefully. They learn continuously. They turn insight into action without delay. They build Customer Lifetime Value by deepening relationships, not just increasing reach.
Research still plays a critical role in that process. But when research is combined with real-time analysis, individual-level segmentation, and immediate activation, it becomes far more than a diagnostic tool. It becomes a strategic advantage.
For senior marketing leaders, agencies, and consultants tasked with driving growth, loyalty, and relevance, this shift is no longer optional. The question is not whether you need deeper customer understanding. It is whether your current tools are actually designed to deliver it.