There's a version of market research that most product and marketing teams conduct. The quarterly brand tracker that gets presented once and filed away. The pre-launch survey. The post-campaign NPS.
This is the type of market research built into how teams confidently make decisions: The Modern Market Research Engine (MMRE).
That's the conversation we brought to hundreds of marketers and business leaders at the HubSpot UNBOUND conference last week. Here's what we covered, and why it matters for your team.
The real problem isn't getting data. It's trusting it.
Before the session, we ran a poll (we are SurveyMonkey, after all) and asked marketers what their single biggest challenge is when it comes to understanding their audience.
| Challenge | % of marketers |
| Knowing what data to trust | 35% |
| Keeping up with change | 29% |
| Turning insights into action | 27% |
| Getting fresh feedback | 8% |
Only 8% responded that getting fresh feedback was their biggest challenge. This means organizations aren't starving for data, they're actually drowning in it. Teams no longer know what data to trust, given that the world is changing so quickly.
That's the market research gap we discussed at our UNBOUND session. We shared how to build a research program that connects the signals you already have, how to figure out what's missing, and how to produce insights your team can actually move on.
Closing the gap between customer expectations and research
Customer expectations aren't getting higher. The line isn't moving steadily up and to the right. It's moving all over the place.
What’s causing this zig-zagging is customer expectations are getting harder to predict.
One day customers want more personalization, the next more privacy. More convenience, but also more human connection. What matters to them is constantly shifting.
Meanwhile, most market research still happens quarterly, annually, or around a major launch.
That's the speed gap: customers are changing every day, while our understanding of them only gets updated every few months.
When research can't keep pace, teams risk making today's decisions based on yesterday's customer.
Closing that gap isn't about collecting more data. It's about building research into how your business operates, so your understanding of customers evolves as quickly as they do.
What a market research engine actually is
At HubSpot UNBOUND, our Head of Human Insights, Dr. Wendy Smith walked through what it looks like to build market research into the rhythm of how a business operates, across three types of customer signals:
- Directed research Examples are surveys, concept tests, A/B tests. This signal gives you precision and control. You own the questions, the sample, and the hypotheses. This is where SurveyMonkey has always been strong. But it's one piece of a larger picture.
- Open feedback channels Examples are reviews, support tickets, social comments, feature requests. These capture what customers say without being asked. Unstructured and often messy, but full of the blind spots that directed research doesn't know to look for.
- Behavioral data Examples are usage patterns, conversion funnels, churn signals. These show what customers actually do. Continuous and unbiased, but it can't tell you why.
The insight lives in the combination of all three. A research engine brings these together, on a regular cadence, so that the teams making decisions are always working from a complete, current picture of their customer.
What it produces
Three examples we shared at HubSpot UNBOUND:
Noom needed to validate a new mindfulness feature category before building it. They started small, refined the concept, and scaled testing to 30,000 respondents. The result: 50% weekly retention on launch compared to a 3% industry standard.
ClickUp was preparing for their first ad at the biggest football game of the year. Rather than commit to a creative concept based on internal instinct, they tested two options with more than 5,000 respondents in under a week. The ad they chose drove the highest site traffic spike in company history.
A leading cosmetic procedures brand launched a national TV campaign that underperformed. Mid-flight, they used ad testing to diagnose what wasn't working, revised the creative based on what they learned, and ran all three versions simultaneously to optimize in real time. The research didn't save the original campaign, but it saved the investment.
These aren't research teams at large enterprises with unlimited budgets. These are marketing and product teams that built a system for testing before decisions were irreversible. That's available to any team willing to build it.
Market research in an AI world
We're a market research platform, built for the marketing leaders, product managers, brand strategists, and teams who need to understand their customers deeply, continuously, and quickly enough to do something about it.
Everyday, our customers use SurveyMonkey to run concept tests before a product launch, validate creative before it goes to production, track brand perception in real time, test messaging before a campaign breaks, and build the kind of ongoing customer intelligence that turns gut instinct into grounded decisions.
That's the conversation we had at HubSpot UNBOUND. And it's one we'd like to have with your team.
How to build a research engine fit for 2027
If you're a marketer or product leader who wants to make faster, more confident decisions, we'd like to show you what that looks like in practice.
Book a quick sync with our team to learn how you can better understand your market and customers today.
SurveyMonkey helps over 260,000 organizations worldwide turn customer signals into confident decisions. Learn more at surveymonkey.com.
