In most companies, October brings the same question: what do we do with the budget that is left? The money usually goes to another media flight, an extra wave of the brand tracker, or a dashboard project. Each gives the team more of what it already has: more reach, more opinions, more correlations.
None of them tells you what makes customers choose you and what stops more of them from doing it. That is the question the 2027 plan depends on.
Why growth stalls even with a good strategy
Strategy matters, and execution matters even more. Both rest on how well you understand your customers, and that is where almost every brand falls short. The reasons are well known. They get pushed aside because there seemed to be no alternative.
The say-do gap. Market research measures opinions. However well it does that, it only explains on the surface why people buy. Purchase decisions run largely on processes customers cannot report when you ask them. Methods to measure these subconscious processes now exist, and they have been tested in practice.
Spurious correlations. Good decisions need cause and effect. Dashboards, correlations and KPI comparisons cannot show causality. Causal AI can derive it from data combined with context knowledge.
What this looks like in practice
In 2013, T-Mobile US was number four in the US mobile market, with 33 million customers and a $7.3 billion annual loss. Our analysis identified the lever: being the Robin Hood of mobile carriers. It also identified the bottleneck: customers would only believe that promise if they saw proof. That is where the “Uncarrier” moves came from.
In the four years that followed, customers grew by 115% and revenue by 90%, and the loss turned into a $1.4 billion profit. Today T-Mobile is the US market leader with 142 million customers.
Your 2027 Growth Diagnostic
The project has three steps.
1. Understand. Deeply research the brands situation and market: what do we already know, and where the open questions and contradictions are.
2. Research. Survey your real target group with a method that does not ask for opinions. It measures implicit reactions and derives (infers) causal relationships, first qualitatively, then quantitatively.
3. Derive the strategy. Combine the results with your team’s experience and run it thru the Demand Architecture Framework. Then a get clear growth strategy evolves: the levers, the bottlenecks, and an holistic story how to work on each of them.
On your brands side, it takes one briefing session, access to product information, and time for the results workshop – and a commitment to pilot with SUPRA consulting.
Why this is the right place for the remaining budget
The project takes typically six weeks from kickoff to results workshop. Start in November and you have the results by Christmas, before the 2027 campaigns and budgets are set.
The investment required is limited. At Supra we make a “satisfaction guarantee” commitment. Performance can be even measured when we create assets that beats your current one in an A/B test.
The first step:
A 30-minute call. I will give you my estimate of how much growth potential there is in your specific case, we get to know each other, and you can ask your questions. If this sounds intriguing book a slot here: https://supra.consulting/Termin
- Frank Buckler
P.S. If you want to see the thinking behind the method first, my book The Top 5% lays it out.