At PBC, we place a lot of importance on market listening – staying genuinely close to what your customers want, how they talk about you, and what’s actually driving their decisions.
Plenty of businesses do this well, as an ongoing habit rather than a one-off exercise.
For others, it’s the kind of thing that slips down the list, and that makes complete sense – when you’re focused on improving the product, fixing something operational, or juggling the dozen other things a growing business needs, market listening is often the first thing to get deprioritised.
If that’s where you’re at, this is really just a gentle prompt to bring it back into the mix.
Knowing who’s buying from you is only the first part of the picture. The fuller picture comes from understanding who your best buyers actually are – not the average customer, but the ones genuinely driving your growth – and what’s really behind their decisions.
A few practical places to begin: go and find your best customers, and ask them directly what led them to choose you. Talk to the people whose experience wasn’t as positive as you’d like too, since they’ll often tell you more about where the gaps are than your happiest customers will.
Try to understand why people choose you over the alternative, without assuming you already know the answer. And pay attention to how they describe what you do in their own words – it’s often different to how you’d describe it yourselves, and that gap can be genuinely useful for shaping how you communicate.
Ultimately, it comes down to understanding the job your product or service is doing for them, and what it’s actually changing – in their life, or in their business.
This holds whether you’re talking with a pet owner working out which food genuinely suits their dog, or a vet clinic or livestock procurement manager weighing suppliers against welfare and traceability requirements further up their own chain.
Different buyers, different pressures, same underlying question:
Do you know what’s driving their decision, or is that still an assumption worth testing?
Talking directly to customers gets you a long way, and for a lot of businesses, that’s enough to work with. But there’s real value in more formal research when the stakes justify it – a proper survey across your customer base, for instance, or one of the newer AI-powered research tools that can give you a fast read on brand awareness, consideration, and how you’re actually perceived against competitors. Both are worth having in the toolkit alongside the more direct, conversational approach.
Markets shift, sometimes gradually and sometimes quickly, and insight that was accurate a couple of years ago can drift out of date without it being obvious from the inside.
We saw this clearly while putting together our own Animal Health & Wellbeing Market Report 2026 – buyer behaviour across this category has genuinely moved in the past few years, in ways that would be easy to miss if you weren’t actively looking.
Market listening is a critical part of the Reveal stage of our RISE framework, and it’s worth knowing that RISE isn’t a straight line – it’s a cycle.
Even once a strategy has been shaped and a campaign is out in the world, we come back to Reveal again, to listen to the market and see what’s changed and where the next opportunity sits – whether that’s in the product, the price, the promotion, or simply how the brand is being perceived.
Market listening is less a step you complete and more a discipline you keep practising – the thing that keeps your product, your campaigns, and your customers genuinely aligned, so everything else you do in marketing works harder.
Leads have slowed, campaigns are landing softer, and marketing still feels busy without it being clear it’s working. Before spending more, it’s worth asking whether the real issue is actually upstream of where it’s showing up.
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