Question 1

How do you interview customers usefully?

Accepted Answer

By asking about **what they actually did**, not what they think or would do — because people are unreliable narrators of their own future behaviour and reliable reporters of their past.

**The central rule.** "Would you use a feature that did X?" produces a polite yes that predicts nothing. "Tell me about the last time you had this problem" produces evidence. **Past behaviour is data; hypothetical preference is noise.**

**Questions that work:**

**"Walk me through the last time this happened."** Specific, recent, concrete.

**"What did you do about it?"** Including nothing, which is informative.

**"What were you using before, and why did you stop?"**

**"What made you start looking for a solution that week?"** — the trigger, which is frequently the most commercially valuable thing you will learn, because it tells you when to reach people.

**"How are you handling it now?"** — the honest competitive set.

**"What have you tried that did not work?"**

**"How much time or money does this cost you?"**

**What to avoid:**

**Pitching.** The moment you describe your solution, the interview becomes a sales conversation and honest feedback ends.

**Leading questions**, which people answer agreeably.

**Asking about price hypothetically**, which produces answers unrelated to behaviour.

**Talking.** Aim to speak for a small minority of the time. **Silence after an answer produces the most valuable material**, because people fill it with the qualification they were holding back.

**Accepting the first answer**, rather than asking why two or three times.

**Who to talk to:** current customers, recent churners, people who evaluated and chose otherwise — **the most useful and least contacted group** — and people in the target market who have not engaged at all.

**How many.** Patterns emerge quickly for qualitative work; five to twelve conversations with a consistent segment usually surfaces the major themes, with diminishing returns after.

**Record and transcribe** with consent, tag the transcripts, and **share quotations rather than summaries** — summaries lose the specificity that makes findings persuasive.

Question 2

How do you write a survey that gives useful answers?

Accepted Answer

By recognising that the question shapes the answer, and that most surveys measure the phrasing rather than the opinion — which is why two surveys on the same subject routinely reach opposite

Question 3

How do you write a case study?

Accepted Answer

As a story with numbers, structured so a reader recognises their own situation in the first paragraph — because a case study that does not resemble the reader's circumstances persuades nobody,

Question 4

Why do marketing tests so often produce misleading results?

Accepted Answer

Because most tests are underpowered, stopped early, or measuring the wrong thing — and each of those produces a confident number that does not survive contact with reality. Stopping early is the

Question 5

What is tone of voice, and does it actually matter?

Accepted Answer

How a brand sounds in its writing — vocabulary, rhythm, formality, humour, what it says and what it refuses to say. It matters considerably more than its reputation as a soft branding exercise

Question 6

What makes a call to action work?

Accepted Answer

A call to action (CTA) is the instruction telling someone what to do next. It is one of the highest-leverage elements on a page, and most CTAs fail for identifiable reasons. What the research and

Question 7

How to write effective email marketing copy?

Accepted Answer

Effective email marketing copy includes compelling subject lines, personalization, clear messaging, strong CTAs, and regular testing. These elements enhance engagement and drive conversions.

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