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The research mistake that kills good messaging

On a podcast recently, someone asked me: What’s the biggest mistake product marketers make when researching for messaging?

It’s tempting to point to obvious traps—confirmation bias, talking to the wrong users, skipping research altogether. But the deeper issue is simpler:

Teams confuse collecting data with doing research.

Most have plenty of material lying around. Surveys. Gong calls. Reviews. Analytics dashboards. The problem is, they stop there. They never push past “what customers said” into “what customers did” or “why they decided.”

That’s how you end up with:

• Marketing telling one version of the story, product telling another, and sales improvising something else entirely.
• Messaging that’s political internally, and generic in the market.
• Competitor copycatting, because it feels safer to sound like everyone else than risk being wrong.

If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Even experienced teams with plenty of data on hand fall into these traps—it’s the natural byproduct of moving fast and trying to keep everyone happy.

The good news is, there’s a way out.

How to avoid it:

• Treat research as strategy. Don’t just check the box. Use it to map how people make decisions, not just to harvest a few quotes (or to look good). That means combining interviews and jobs-to-be-done with your surveys and usage data, then making sense of it all.
• Turn insights into systems. A spreadsheet of notes won’t change how your team works. Frameworks, positioning canvases, annotated wireframes, those scale insight across people and functions. How are you putting that into action?
• Layer your inputs. Start with what people say (reviews, surveys). Validate with what they do (heatmaps, flows). Dig into why they decide (interviews, objections, decision criteria). I call it the Research Iceberg.
• Make it continuous. Messaging rots faster than most teams think. Revisit it every 6–12 months, or whenever competitors shift or your product evolves.
• And as I always blab about it, respect UX and psychology. Copy isn’t just “what we say.” It’s how people process it, in the order they see it, with all their anxieties in play. Words without structure don’t convert.

What most teams miss is that research is supposed to reduce guesswork. If all it does is fill a slide deck, you’re still guessing.

The teams that win are the ones who build messaging like they’d build product: testable, structured, and designed to hold up under pressure.

Want to see how your own messaging stacks up? I built a free Message–Market Fit Scorecard to help you spot the exact gaps in your research-to-messaging flow. It takes 5 minutes, and you’ll get a clear picture of where to focus first.

DISCOVERY

Digging deeper into messaging that resonates

If you want the full context behind the question I unpacked in today’s newsletter, here’s the Porter’s Product Marketing Podcast episode where it all started.

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We dig into the messy realities of product messaging, what actually works, what falls flat, and how research changes the game. Worth a listen if you’re tired of copy that sounds smart but doesn’t convert.

RESONANCE

from "The Real Mad Men" by Andrew Cracknell

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Chris

Chris Silvestri Founder & conversion alchemist

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Not sure where to start? Take our free message-market fit scorecard.​