Market research that turns evidence into strategy.
Most businesses build strategy from internal assumptions, a look at competitor websites and whatever their loudest customers happen to say. We combine customer, stakeholder, competitor and category research to find what is actually happening, then turn that evidence into positioning, messaging, customer experience and a practical growth roadmap.
Research is not the product. Better strategy is the product.
Questionnaires. Interviews. Market evidence. Strategic decisions.
A market research agency in Brisbane working with organisations across Australia, on the decisions that are too expensive to guess at.
- Designed around your decision, not a template
- Customers, team, suppliers and partners
- Evidence graded for confidence
- Findings carried through to execution
The expensive decisions are usually made with the weakest evidence.
Rebrands, market entries, product changes, customer experience investments and long-term marketing strategies get decided every week on inputs that were never built to carry that weight.
- Internal workshops on their own
- Leadership assumptions
- Anecdotal customer feedback
- A review of competitor websites
- AI-generated observations
- Search data with no direct customer evidence
- The opinion of whoever speaks most confidently
Each of these has its uses. None of them, alone or stacked together, is enough to commit a business to a direction for the next five years.
When the decision matters, the evidence behind it should be visible.
Anything a machine can answer, your competitors already know.
Desktop research, industry reports and AI all draw on what has already been published. That makes them useful for context and useless for advantage: everyone competing with you can reach the same material in an afternoon, and increasingly in about four minutes. The evidence that changes a decision is the evidence nobody has collected yet, because it is sitting with your customers, your suppliers and your team.
What desktop research and AI can tell you
- What competitors say about themselves
- The conventions of your category
- Search demand and public commentary
- Broad industry patterns and benchmarks
- What has already been written down
Genuinely useful, and we use all of it. None of it is yours.
What only your stakeholders can tell you
- Why they chose you over who they used before
- What nearly made them leave, and what stopped them
- Which part of the service they would pay more for
- What they say about you to other people in their trade
- Where your own team knows the promise breaks down
Published nowhere. It has to be asked for, by a person, one at a time.
If the answer could be found without asking anyone, it is not an advantage. It is a search result.
Evidence, pointed at the decisions that cost the most.
Research earns its place when it changes something. These are the decisions it is built to inform.
Market positioning
What customers value, where competitors are credible or exposed, and which position can be both distinctive and proven rather than merely claimed.
Customer segmentation
The real differences in buying criteria, behaviour, motivation, need, value and switching risk, instead of demographic groups that never change a decision.
Brand strategy
Value proposition, brand promise, USP, proof points, personality, tone and message hierarchy, built from stakeholder evidence rather than a workshop whiteboard.
Customer experience
The points where buying, service, delivery, digital journeys or internal process create effort the customer should never have had to spend.
Product and service strategy
Unmet needs, how people actually select, where the service falls short, how the range is structured and what is worth building next.
Brand architecture
How parent brands, divisions, sub-brands, locations, products and services should relate, so the structure helps buyers instead of explaining your org chart.
Expansion strategy
What has to be protected, standardised, changed or built before you enter a new market or take on a new growth model.
Marketing strategy
Real customer language and buying motivation turned into website copy, content priorities, SEO targets, offers, campaigns and channel decisions.
Strategic roadmap
Recommendations ordered by evidence strength, commercial importance, urgency and what implementing them actually requires.
Different questions require different evidence.
The research program is designed around the decisions that need to be made. There is no standard survey that goes out to every client regardless of what they asked.
Leadership discovery
Structured sessions and questionnaires with owners and leaders: the ambition, the commercial realities, the internal assumptions, and the decisions that need clarity. This frames the research. It is not treated as independent market evidence, because it is not.
Customer and audience questionnaires
Written questionnaires built for your decision, used to surface recurring buying motivations, decision criteria, friction, the comparisons people make and where audiences differ from each other.
Stakeholder questionnaires
The same discipline applied to team members, suppliers, commercial and referral partners, distributors, members, or whichever groups genuinely shape how the business performs.
One-on-one interviews
Selected conversations that take the strategically important answers further: the contradictions, the risks, the opportunities. Questionnaires give breadth. Interviews give context, cause and evidence.
Competitor and category research
Competitor positioning, claims, offers, customer journeys, product structures, search visibility and category conventions, read for strengths, vulnerabilities and the gap worth owning.
Search and behavioural evidence
Where it is relevant: search demand, analytics, customer journeys, conversion data, sales patterns and other observable commercial information, used to support and test what stakeholders tell us.
Evidence synthesis
Consolidating, coding, comparing, testing and interpreting everything gathered before a single recommendation is written.
We interview people one at a time. On purpose.
A supplier will not tell you what is wrong with your business in a room that contains your team. A tradesman will not mention he nearly moved to a competitor while another customer is listening. Groups produce consensus, and consensus is precisely the thing you are paying us to see past.
So stakeholder research is conducted individually and handled confidentially. Findings are reported by theme and by pattern, never as a transcript with somebody's name attached. That is what makes people say the thing they would not say in front of you.
There is one room where a group belongs, and it is not your customers.
Once the evidence is in, we put your leadership team around a table and work through what it means together. That session should be an argument: about which findings you accept, what they cost to act on, and what you are prepared to change. It should happen in front of us, because the disagreement is the useful part.
Our strength is strategic, qualitative and stakeholder-led research, supported by relevant commercial and digital evidence. We do not run nationally representative consumer panels or advanced statistical modelling. Where a decision genuinely needs large-scale quantitative research, we scope it separately or run it with specialist research partners, and we say so before the project starts rather than after.
Written answers show the pattern. Conversations explain it.
Questionnaires tell us what is recurring across a group. Interviews tell us why it happens, what it costs and whether it is worth fixing. Run in that order, each one makes the other sharper.
- 01
Tailored questionnaires go out to the relevant stakeholder groups.
- 02
Responses are reviewed across those groups, not just within them.
- 03
Patterns, contradictions, risks and opportunities are identified.
- 04
Interview participants are selected from that evidence.
- 05
A different discussion plan is written for each participant.
- 06
Interviews turn selected opinions into examples, causes and commercial implications.
- 07
Questionnaire and interview evidence are interpreted together.
One question, followed properly
Questionnaire question
Where does dealing with your current supplier require more effort than it should?
Written response
It can be difficult to know whether the product I need is available.
Interview follow-up
Can you talk me through the last time that happened? How did you try to confirm availability? What happened next? Is that typical? Did it change where you bought?
Strategic value
This separates a minor communication issue from a recurring stock, product data, ecommerce or customer experience problem. Those need very different investments.
We follow the evidence, not a fixed interview script.
What “deeper” actually means.
Depth is easy to claim and hard to compare. It is also not a fixed quantity: the size of a research program is set by the decision in front of you, and these are the things that move it.
How many groups genuinely shape the business
A trade supplier with buyers, specifiers and a supplier base has three audiences to hear from. A business with one customer type has one, heard in more depth.
How much the decision has to carry
Repositioning a single site is not the same as building a brand that has to hold up across three states and a franchise model.
Where the written evidence disagrees
Contradiction is what interviews are for. The number of interviews is settled after the questionnaires come back, never booked in advance.
What is already known, and how reliable it is
Some businesses arrive with real evidence behind them. Most arrive with confident assumptions nobody has tested.
What that looks like in practice
For a multi-site business weighing a rebrand and a move into new markets, a program might run:
- 3 groupsCustomers, suppliers or commercial partners, and team members, invited to respond in writing.
- ~10 eachAn invitation pool per group - enough breadth to see what recurs and where the groups genuinely differ.
- Then interviewsParticipants selected from the written evidence, each with a discussion plan written for them and the specific thing they need to explain.
- 2 leadsHazel Anthony runs the interview program and collates the evidence. James Webb leads the strategic interpretation.
An invitation pool is not a promise that every person responds, and none of these figures is a package. The groups, the numbers and the interview allowance are set against your decision and agreed in writing, with a fixed fee, before any research begins.
Every question must earn its place.
We have built a stakeholder research suite: a strategically mapped question bank, an interview methodology, analysis logic and a findings framework. It exists so that nothing gets asked out of habit.
Research that cannot change a decision is a cost.
The suite covers
Our full methodology remains proprietary. The findings, strategic frameworks and recommendations created for your business are yours.
What we gather, and what it settles.
Buying criteria and motivations
Helps us understand
Why people choose, stay, spend more or leave
Decisions informed
Value proposition, messaging and which customers to prioritise
Competitive comparisons
Helps us understand
Where you are credible, distinctive or exposed
Decisions informed
Positioning, category frame and proof points
Natural customer language
Helps us understand
How buyers describe their problem, their need and value
Decisions informed
Tone of voice, message hierarchy, website and campaigns
Audience differences
Helps us understand
Where needs and decisions genuinely diverge
Decisions informed
Segmentation, audience profiles and customer journeys
Experience and friction
Helps us understand
Where buying or service creates unnecessary effort
Decisions informed
Customer experience, website and operational priorities
Internal strengths and constraints
Helps us understand
Whether the business can actually deliver the promise it wants to make
Decisions informed
Brand promise, culture and implementation roadmap
Growth expectations and risks
Helps us understand
What must be protected, changed or built
Decisions informed
Expansion principles, brand architecture and roadmap
A finding is not the same as a popular opinion.
The gap between raw responses and a recommendation you can act on is analysis, and it is where most research quietly goes wrong.
Findings you can make decisions from.
Subject to scope. The questionnaire is never the deliverable: the strategy built from the evidence is.
Research Findings and Insights Report
- Key findings
- Supporting evidence
- What it means
- Strategic implication
- Recommendation
- Confidence level
- Stakeholder agreement or contradiction
- Assumptions still needing validation
Competitor and Category Analysis
- Competitor positions
- Category conventions
- Market gaps
- Strengths and vulnerabilities
- Customer journey comparisons
- The proof required to hold a stronger position
Customer Segmentation and Audience Profiles
- Priority customer groups
- Needs
- Buying motivations
- Decision criteria
- Friction
- Language
- Switching risk
- Strategic value
Brand Positioning Framework
- Market position
- Category frame
- Value proposition
- USP and UBS
- Brand promise
- Proof points
- Messaging priorities
- Brand and sub-brand relationships
Customer, Product or Digital Experience Recommendations
- Customer journey issues
- Product architecture
- Website structure
- Service improvements
- Digital requirements
- Implementation priorities
Prioritised Strategic Roadmap
- Immediate decisions
- Strategic priorities
- Capabilities required
- Medium-term opportunities
- Longer-term growth direction
- Assumptions still needing validation
The difference between a result and a recommendation.
Customers value certainty and expert guidance more than breadth of range, but the marketing leads with the catalogue.
- Evidence
- Across customer questionnaires, the most repeated reasons for choosing a supplier were confidence the item is right and access to someone who knows the answer. Range size was mentioned far less, and mostly by the largest accounts. Interviews returned the same order.
- What it means
- Buyers are managing the risk of getting it wrong. Breadth matters to them only once certainty is handled.
- Strategic implication
- The current message competes on the attribute customers rank lowest, in a category where every competitor claims the same thing.
- Recommendation
- Reposition around expertise and certainty, prove it with response times and named specialists, and move range from the headline to the supporting evidence.
- Confidence
- High. Consistent across two stakeholder groups and both methods.
- Contradiction
- Leadership believed range was the primary advantage. That belief is not supported by customer evidence, and the disagreement is reported rather than resolved quietly.
- Assumption to validate
- Whether the largest accounts, who did value range, are commercially significant enough to need a separate message.
Use research when the decision is too important to guess.
- Repositioning or rebranding
- Entering a new market
- National or multi-location expansion
- Naming and brand architecture
- Customer segmentation
- Retention that is slipping and nobody can say why
- Launching a product or service
- Redesigning a website or ecommerce experience
- Working out why buyers choose a competitor
- Aligning the customer promise with what operations can deliver
- Building a five to ten year business, brand or marketing roadmap
- Established privately owned businesses
- Multi-location businesses
- B2B and trade businesses
- Professional services firms
- Product and ecommerce businesses
- Organisations preparing to expand
- Leadership teams facing a major brand, market or customer decision
LINK is a Brisbane-based marketing and strategy consultancy. We run research for organisations across Australia, and we are in the room in person when being in the room is what the work needs.
The people who find the insight can also build what comes next.
A research provider finishes at the findings presentation, and that is a perfectly good place to finish. We keep going, because the same people who sat in the interviews write the positioning and build the site.
Who leads the research and strategy.
Hazel Anthony
Creative Director
Leads the interview program: participant preparation, facilitation and evidence collation.
James Webb
Strategy Director
Leads the strategic interpretation, turning evidence into positioning, audience strategy, brand architecture, messaging, customer experience and the longer-term roadmap.
The same core team then carries that direction into the brand, website and marketing. There is no disconnected handover between a research provider and the people responsible for what comes next.
Market research is not a separate service sitting beside our framework. It is the deep version of its first stage. Evidence decides the strategy, the strategy shapes conversion, and only then is there something worth scaling.
Research and strategy.
Establish what is true, what matters, and the position the business should own.
The Strategy stage
02Conversion.
Turn that strategy into positioning, messaging, offers, customer journeys and a website.
The Conversion stage
03Growth.
Scale the validated direction through SEO, content, advertising and campaigns.
The Growth stage
Related: the Strategy-to-Leads Framework, the Strategy Session, enterprise marketing, growth marketing, content marketing and case studies with real numbers.
Tell us the decision, not the brief.
Projects are scoped around the decisions that need evidence: how many stakeholder groups, how many participants, how deep the competitor and category work goes, how many interviews, and which outputs you need.
If research is not the right spend, we will say so. Sometimes the evidence you need already exists in your own data, and the honest answer is to read that first and keep the budget.
How a research project is commissioned.
- 01A conversation about the decision. Not a brief and not a pitch. What has to be decided, what it costs to get wrong, and what you already know.
- 02A scope built against it. Which stakeholder groups, how many participants, how deep the competitor and category work goes, how many interviews and which outputs.
- 03A written proposal and fixed fee. Method, participants, deliverables and price agreed in writing before any research begins.
- 04The research runs. You are kept current as evidence lands, not presented with a surprise at the end.
Scope and fee are agreed in writing before any research begins. Prefer to talk it through first? Call 07 3899 8311.
Prefer to start with the whole picture?
Start with a Strategy SessionMarket research in Brisbane, answered straight.
Stop asking what sounds good. Find out what is true.
Tell us the decision you are trying to make and we will scope the research against it.