Your leadership team is sure about a customer who no longer exists
Author
Katie Buckley
Managing Partner, Consumer US
Author
Katie Buckley
Managing Partner, Consumer US
Ask most leadership teams about their customer and you’ll get a confident answer. They can describe the person in detail. What they want, what they spend, what they scroll past without a second look.
Then ask when anyone in the room last sat in that customer’s living room, or pushed a cart beside them, or rode along while they talked themselves into a purchase they weren’t sure about.
That’s usually a longer pause.
The confidence is real. The closeness behind it expired a while ago. Somewhere along the line the customer turned into a deck. A segmentation from two years ago. A persona slide copied across so many presentations that nobody remembers the research underneath. It described a real person once. The question is whether it still does.
While that picture sat still, the customer kept moving. AI rewired the whole journey, how people discover things, how they judge them, how they decide. New tools, new shortcuts, new habits that read like early blips on a trend chart and are already the default. The behavior you’d file as emerging has often already taken over. So the problem isn’t only that the insight is old. The customer it described has changed underneath it.
You feel the cost when the market moves and the team doesn’t. The launch gets built for who the customer used to be. The message would have landed two years ago. Then a competitor who stayed closer starts taking share of a category you were sure you owned.
AI can get you insight faster. It can’t get you closer.
It’s never been easier to feel informed without being close. AI can read a thousand reviews before lunch and hand you a clean summary. We use it across our own work and it’s genuinely good at the fast, wide read: what’s moving, where, at what scale.
What a summary can’t do is put your leadership team in the room while a customer actually decides. Watching someone move through their real shopping process, the tabs they open, who they text before they commit, what they pick up and put back, the moment they talk themselves in or out of it. You can read that a behavior is happening. It hits differently when the person who signs off the strategy watches it happen up close and realizes the plan was built for a customer who shops nothing like this anymore.
Here’s the shift. The fast, wide read is available to everyone now, us included, so it stops being the edge. The edge is closeness. Getting the people who make the calls close enough to see how their customer behaves today, not how they behaved when the last deck was written.
What getting close actually does
Front Row is how we keep leadership close enough that the picture can’t quietly go stale. Time in living rooms and stores, in-context interviews, shop-alongs, watching real behavior instead of reading a summary of it months later. It can be a single immersion before a big decision, or a steady program that keeps a team in touch with its market all year.
What people take from it is the slightly uncomfortable experience of seeing where they were wrong, while there’s still time to do something about it. That tends to stay with them longer than any deck.
How this came to life for a global fashion brand
We ran an immersion for a national apparel brand whose insight, strategy, and creative teams had all turned over in a couple of years. The program put those teams inside their customers’ homes, closets, and real shopping trips. Online diaries, in-home ethnography, shop-alongs.
What they found cut against everything they’d been working from. Quality came down to confidence, whether a purchase left someone feeling sure of the choice. Specs barely entered into it. “Designer” didn’t read as “better.” Value got decided in the moment, on the shop floor, in ways no internal debate had predicted.
That up-close read did what months of internal argument hadn’t. It got three teams who’d been talking past each other aligned, and it shaped the campaign they’re running now.
So, one question
When did your leadership team last sit with a real customer and let themselves be surprised?
If the honest answer is a while ago, the picture you’re all so sure about has probably moved on without you.
We’ve been helping teams close that gap, and I’m always happy to share what we’re finding.
Katie Buckley leads Basis Global’s Consumer US practice.
