Customer and market research for high-stakes decisions

Ambiguity is where my work begins. A defensible decision is where your journey starts.

I help marketing, product, strategy, and communications leaders answer difficult customer and market questions using original research, competitive intelligence, existing evidence, and senior judgment.

The result is a clear recommendation—or an original point of view your company can credibly own.

Svetlana Gershman
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20+ years

of experience

Technology, telecom, media, and entertainment

sector experience

Qualitative, quantitative, and competitive intelligence

integrated evidence

Built research programs from the ground up

strategy, systems, and organizational adoption

When to call

Bring me in when the decision is too important to guess.

The work is designed for consequential questions where waiting, guessing, or following the loudest opinion carries a real cost.

Your research, dashboards, and internal opinions point in different directions.

A launch, expansion, product, or positioning decision carries meaningful financial or reputational risk.

Leadership needs a recommendation, not another presentation full of findings.

You need to understand what customers will actually value, adopt, or pay attention to.

Your company needs original evidence to support a credible industry point of view.

The question crosses marketing, product, strategy, and communications, and no single function owns the complete answer.

Decision-first methodology

Research should begin with a question, not a method.

Every engagement is built around the choice leaders need to make and the evidence that could genuinely change it.

Read Start with a Question
  1. Define

    Clarify the decision, stakeholders, constraints, and cost of getting it wrong.

  2. Audit

    Determine what is already known, where the evidence diverges, and what is still missing.

  3. Investigate

    Use the appropriate combination of qualitative research, quantitative research, competitive intelligence, market analysis, and behavioral evidence.

  4. Synthesize

    Separate signal from noise and connect the findings across customers, markets, competitors, and internal priorities.

  5. Recommend

    Translate the evidence into a defensible recommendation, tradeoffs, risks, and next steps.

Blog

Signal & Substance

Articles on decision-first research, customer behavior, AI, growth, and the judgment required to turn evidence into action.

Read the blog

Start a conversation

What decision is too important to guess?

Contact me