Marketing is often misconstrued as merely synonymous with advertising: the billboard on your commute or the eerily well-timed ad that overheard your last conversation. But completing the Mini Marketing MBA during 2025 reminded me just how much more marketing truly is.
In fact, if training for a marathon over the past few months taught me anything (and yes, I’m seizing any opportunity to mention I ran 26.2 miles), it’s just how similar the two are. In both, the finish line isn’t reached by chance. It’s earned through preparation, guided by insight, and sustained by adaptability.
Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint – a disciplined journey of understanding the challenge, planning for it, and finally executing that plan. And research? It’s your course map, your coach and your smartwatch—guiding every step. Skip research and you’re like an untrained runner: ambitious, but destined to hit the wall.
Stage 1: Scouting the Course
Every successful race starts with knowing the terrain. Marketing and research are no different. You study the course—the market or landscape you’re entering. Where are the hills? What’s the weather like? Where will the crowds cheer you on? Where are the easy stretches, and where will it get tough?
This critical stage in research is called market orientation. It’s about acknowledging what you don’t know and being open to learn. Research helps you step outside your own perspective and ground yourself in real people’s needs and behaviours. It gives you a clear view of the full course—laying the foundation for everything that follows. Only then can you plan how to navigate it.
Stage 2: Building the Plan
Once you know the course, you design your training plan: goal pace, mileage targets, speed work and recovery days. Strategy works the same way – it’s about choice and sacrifice. Defining who is and isn’t your target audience, how you want to position yourself, and what your ultimate objective is.
These decisions can only be made with the invaluable insights research gives you.
- How can you decide who to target without a sense of who makes up the whole market and where your brand currently fits?
- How can you decide how to position your brand without knowing your target’s needs, their alternatives, and your perceived strengths?
- And without mapping the customer journey, you can’t possibly know where your weakest link is – or what you need to do to strengthen it
Just as a runner can’t set a realistic pace without knowing the elevation profile, in marketing, you can’t build funnels, objectives and positioning without the research data.
Stage 3: Race-Day Adjustments
Once your strategy is set, it’s time to put it into action. Tactics are simply the initiatives that bring your strategy to life – across every touchpoint. That could mean launching a new comms campaign, introducing a product to market, or adjusting price. When it comes to tactics, research plays a dual role. It fuels decisions and monitors performance. Think of it as the energy gels that keep you moving, and the smartwatch that tracks you.
Your fuel
Research inspires and informs the choices you make – about products, pricing & comms. Take product innovation, for example. Without research, it’s easy to get lost in the abyss of relentless innovation—creation for the sake of creation. Research keeps you anchored to real needs, uncovering the jobs consumers ‘hire’ products to do, and ensuring innovation solves those jobs better.
Monitoring & Optimising
Even with the best plan, race day brings surprises—heat, wind, fatigue, cramps. You adjust as you go. That’s tactical optimisation in marketing—responding to real-time data and conditions to stay on track and finish strong.
Research gives you insight into how marketing initiatives are performing. It builds confidence, facilitates ongoing discovery about your customers, and empowers you to have an optimisation mindset. It gives you the insights you need to constantly push for improvements—just like checking your splits mid-race and adjusting your pace.
Ever-Evolving Support
In the marathon of marketing, research isn’t optional – it’s the difference between finishing strong and crawling to the finish line. You wouldn’t run a marathon without training, so why do marketing without research?
And as the landscape ahead gets faster and more complex, research will only become more essential. AI and smarter data can show us patterns at speed, but only human-centric research can truly explain them.
The strongest brands will recognise the value of both, treating research as a continuous blend of rapid intelligence and real human understanding. Because the marathon ahead isn’t just about keeping pace; it’s about building the resilience to go even further.