Start with the people who said no

Most brand research starts with happy clients. They are easy to reach and kind on the phone, and they tell you what you already believe. We start with the people who looked at you and bought from someone else.

Why lost leads are worth the trouble

A client who chose you has already forgiven your weak points. A lead who walked away noticed them. For Mintline Bank, ten calls with people who had closed their accounts told us more than forty survey answers from loyal customers. Almost all of them said the same thing: they could not find their balance.

That one line changed the whole brief. The bank thought it needed a new look. It needed a new first screen.

Happy clients would never have told us that. They had learned where the balance lived years ago and stopped noticing the extra taps. The people who left had no such habit, so they saw the app the way a new customer sees it on the first day.

How we run the calls

• We ask your sales team for twenty names from the last twelve months.
• We call from BrandDo, not from your company, so people speak freely.
• Each call takes twenty minutes and follows the same six questions.
• We record nothing without permission and never pass names back to you.

About one in three people agree to talk, and that is enough. After eight or nine calls the same reasons start to repeat, and by the twelfth we rarely hear anything new.

What to do with the answers

We sort every reason into price, proof or feeling. Price means the offer was wrong. Proof means they did not believe you. Feeling means they did not see themselves in your brand.

Only the last pile is a design problem, and it is rarely the biggest one. Knowing that before the first workshop saves weeks of arguing about colours that were never the issue.