Why Brands Have More Customer Data—but Less Real, Impactful Understanding
Brands today have more customer data than ever, yet often less real understanding of the people they serve. Metrics tell us what happened, but rarely why it mattered.
This piece argues that modern marketing has drifted too far from lived experience, replacing immersion with abstraction and psychographics with true insight. Drawing from ethnography, old-school account planning, and human-centered design, it makes the case for getting back into the trenches with real people.
Because the most meaningful brand work doesn’t start with dashboards. It starts with understanding how people actually live, decide, and find meaning—long before it shows up as a metric.
Why Brands Need to Get Back Into the Trenches of Qualitative Understanding
I came across a Reddit post recently that hit a nerve. They author asks a brilliant question, and in their language you can sense the strain and bewilderment of the predicament:
“Is ‘knowing the customer’ harder now despite having more data?”
They articulate a tension many brands are quietly living with: we have a plethora of customer data, yet very little true understanding of people and their lived experiences.
Dashboards are full. Reports are robust. Psychographic decks are polished. And still, brands struggle to explain why customers choose them, hesitate, abandon, or disengage. The issue isn’t a lack of information. It’s a lack of fidelity.
Measuring Motion Instead of Meaning
Modern marketing data excels at measuring what’s easy to capture: clicks, paths, impressions, attribution touchpoints. But it struggles to capture what actually shapes preference: cultural context, peer influence, offline conversations, trust, memory, and lived experience.
Most customer data describes behavior after meaning has already formed, not how meaning formed in the first place. This distinction matters. Without understanding the forces that shape meaning, brands risk becoming data-rich and insight-poor.
This isn’t a new critique. Account planners have been warning about this gap for decades. Strategists like Jon Steel emphasized that the planner’s role was to be the “voice of the consumer,” grounding strategy in real human understanding rather than abstract metrics (see discussions of Steel’s philosophy summarized here).
How Marketers Got Here
Let’s no sugarcoat this: We did this to ourselves.
We got one crucial thing ass backwards:
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”
The rise of performance marketing nuked our ability to see clearly the cultural and category challenges and opportunities that actually matter.
We let the pressure to pay for efficiency and optimize every little customer touchpoint justify our marketing decisions. As a consequence, marketers have increasingly replaced immersion with abstraction. We lean on boilerplate psychographics, personas, and generalized “audience insights” as if they tell the whole story.
Psychographics can be useful, but they are often treated as conclusions rather than starting points. They describe tendencies, not tensions. Preferences, not pressures. They flatten people into segments and miss the messy context in which real decisions are made.
Account planning and cultural strategy were originally designed to prevent exactly this problem. Academic descriptions of account planning consistently emphasize qualitative research, observation, and synthesis as core inputs, not nice-to-have add-ons (see foundational account planning curricula such as Florida State University’s overview of the discipline).
Why Ethnography Still Produces the Best Work
The most effective work I’ve ever been part of came from ethnographic research.
Ethnography is slower, messier, and more expensive than surveys or analytics. It requires observing people in context, listening without a script, and spending time in environments where behavior actually unfolds. But it captures something metrics can’t: meaning before it becomes measurable.
That approach shaped my work with Domino’s (and many others).
We rode along with delivery drivers. We spent winter evenings with families during pizza night in rural North Dakota. We saw how pizza wasn’t just food; it was a planned moment of joy in places where conditions were unpredictable and unforgiving.
That’s where the insight emerged.
In those towns, a single pothole could derail a delivery. A blizzard could ruin a family’s one planned treat of the week. Pizza night wasn’t casual; it was an event. And when that event failed, it failed emotionally, not just operationally.
That understanding didn’t come from performance data or sentiment analysis. It came from lived observation. And it’s what led to Domino’s Paving for Pizza initiative — a program grounded in customers’ real environments rather than abstract brand promises (the campaign).
What We Can Learn from Human-Centered Design
This way of working isn’t unique to marketing. It’s foundational to human-centered design.
Organizations like IDEO define human-centered design as a problem-solving approach that starts with people, prioritizes empathy, and builds solutions grounded in real human needs and constraints (overview of IDEO’s HCD process via UserTesting).
IDEO.org’s Design Kit goes further, explicitly stating that human-centered design requires deep immersion in people’s lives — observing behavior, understanding context, and learning directly from lived experience before attempting to design solutions (IDEO design kit).
At its core, human-centered design shares the same DNA as ethnography and old-school account planning. It recognizes that people don’t live in funnels. They live in environments shaped by culture, infrastructure, relationships, weather, emotion, and constraint.
Academic and reference definitions of human-centered design consistently emphasize ethnographic observation as a core method, not an optional one (Wiki on HCD).
Reconnecting Data to Real Life
None of this is an argument against “data” or using quantifiable metrics and KPIs.
Data is essential. But without lived context, data risks becoming self-referential. It optimizes systems while quietly eroding understanding. It measures motion while missing meaning.
Ethnography, cultural strategy, and human-centered design remind us that relevance is earned by understanding people where they actually live — not just where they click.
Until brands reconnect their data to real human context — how people talk, decide, doubt, justify, and influence one another — we’ll keep mistaking motion for understanding, and wonder why all that information isn’t translating into work that truly resonates.
Interested in seeing how this approach can illuminate your customers in more detail?
Reach out to schedule a brief consultation to see if I can design bespoke research specific to your brand and customer.
