Why Direct Audience Insights Are Becoming Essential to Building Smarter Strategies

The Wave Momentum
Jan 26
4 min read

A practical look at how real buyer and consumer feedback improves product decisions, market entry, and strategic clarity

Executive summary

The U.S. market is complex, particularly for French companies entering it, and failures are unfortunately common. In most cases, the issue is not the product or the chosen approach, but the method. Too often, companies make decisions without considering upfront their customers’ expectations and purchasing behaviors.

Direct audience research, commonly referred to as market intelligence, has therefore become a key asset for deploying a controlled strategy while avoiding unnecessary risk. This is what The Wave Momentum’s dual methodology enables: a B2B market intelligence expert panel and virtual consumer focus groups for D2C.

Two types of audiences, two methodologies tailored to each, and one shared objective: to understand as early as possible what customers truly think, what they expect, and how they make purchasing decisions to build strategies grounded in the reality of the market.

Introduction

Most companies, regardless of their size or industry, define products and shape strategies without meaningfully connecting with the most important component of their ecosystem: their customer. Instead of grounding decisions in real market feedback, teams rely on assumptions, internal hypotheses, and generalized reports that fail to capture the reality and nuances of actual behavior.

In today’s markets that are increasingly competitive, complex, and rapidly shifting, where purchasing decisions are less visible and influenced by many different factors, understanding the real needs and behaviors of your audience is essential. It is the only way to ensure that what you build aligns with what people truly want, rather than what you assume they want.

This gap becomes even wider when companies enter a new geographic market or category. Many carry over the habits and expectations of their domestic market, believing they will translate. They rarely do. The result is misaligned positioning, slow or poor adoption, and costly course corrections or failures.

This is where market intelligence becomes a powerful tool. It is the practice of talking directly to the people who make your business possible: your users, your buyers, your clients, your partners. The closer you get to real people, the clearer and more efficient your decisions become.

Companies that adopt this discipline early refine their strategy faster, identify risks sooner, and avoid wasting resources on ideas that will not resonate. They build based on genuine insights, not internal assumptions. Yet despite its impact, market intelligence remains widely underused, mostly because existing solutions do not match the needs or realities of many businesses or lack accessibility.

The problem with current solutions

Traditional market research tools are often expensive, slow, and heavily standardized. They rely on generalist templates and broad panels that do not necessarily reflect a company’s real audience. The insights delivered are frequently too high level, too theoretical, and too static to be translated into decisions.

For emerging brands or companies entering new markets, this lack of agility becomes a major barrier. Many cannot afford these solutions or do not have internal teams who know how to turn the data into action. What they need is not more static reports, but direct access to the people who matter, in a format that adapts to their specific questions.

The Wave Momentum solution: B2B and D2C Market Intelligence

This is why Wave Momentum integrates a dual market-intelligence platform into its go to market consulting services for both B2B and D2C companies.Powered by Triana Group for B2B insights and Consoomers for D2C insights, each platform was built around two core principles.

Companies need access to the right people.
The way you approach them must adapt to what they are willing to share and where they naturally engage.

This versatile and highly adaptable methodology strengthens Wave Momentum’s ability to refine, validate, and operationalize go-to-market strategies. It is made possible by two assets most companies simply do not have on their own.

B2B: Triana’s highly qualified expert panel

Triana has built a network of more than 5,000 vetted industry professionals across the United States. This network has been developed through years of fieldwork, collaboration, and cross-category experience. These are not generic respondents. They are decision makers, operators, distributors, and strategic contributors who understand their markets from the inside.

This enables real, qualified conversations that support multiple applications such as shaping internal strategy, qualifying acquisition targets, preparing investor materials, and identifying pre-qualified sales opportunities.

D2C: Consoomers’ real consumer community providing unbiased feedback

On the consumer side, Consoomers was built through more than 20 years of hands-on brand development in the CPG industry. The goal is simple: recreate real-life conditions for brands selling to US consumers and help them validate what works and what does not through a variety of programs and campaign tools.

Powered by a community of almost 10,000 qualified consumers across the country, Consoomers offers a direct, fast, and affordable way to understand real behavior and purchase intent. These are actionable insights that brands can use to refine products, strengthen positioning, and improve digital and omnichannel strategies.

This consumer intelligence strengthens Wave Momentum’s D2C consulting work, allowing brands to make decisions rooted in real sentiment rather than surface-level analytics or assumptions.

Both assets serve the same purpose. They provide tangible, actionable insights that shape products, marketing strategies, and business decisions.

And both platforms were designed to remain highly customizable and accessible, allowing Wave Momentum to deliver go-to-market strategies grounded in verified audience reality.