Extending The Half-Life of Research

The thought leadership took months to build. A week after launch, 300 people downloaded it and the related posts got a strong response. Three weeks later it was on 330 downloads and the noise had died down. Sales sent out the PDF, but the insights weren't making it into calls.

The team knew they'd missed something. This happens more often than it should, and it's rarely about research quality. It's planning and follow-through.

The organisations that get this right treat public research as a campaign, not a one-off report.

The most influential findings aren't always about future trends. They're usable now. They get dropped into project plans and pulled back out for months.

Why most teams struggle with this

Most firms do one part well. Research firms gather data and produce findings, then hand off a deck. Strategy firms build frameworks and recommendations, and often start with the answer.

The value sits between the two. Design research that holds up, then turn it into a narrative that helps people make decisions. That takes good study design, solid analysis, and storylining that doesn't drift. Most organisations have one capability, maybe two.

That narrative work decides whether programmes last. Research produces findings. The narrative decides what they mean, what's uncomfortable, and what executives should do next.

What keeps it alive

Not every study needs to contradict conventional wisdom. Some of the most valuable work confirms what people suspect but can't prove. Everyone says soft skills matter for AI adoption. Few have measured it with any rigour. Build a quantitative maturity model with benchmarks by role and industry, and the discipline becomes the differentiator.

But rigour only matters if you're measuring the right friction. Organisations aren't single entities. Strategy lives in one place, execution in another. The gap between them is where useful research sits.

We ran a study on customer journey ownership. Marketing believed responsibility was shared across CX and marketing. IT saw it completely differently. Fifty-five percent of IT claimed ownership, with marketing barely registering. That's not a technology problem, it's structural. The gap is the insight.

You need specificity to surface that friction. Generic research fades fast. We're building a state of agentic AI report for mid-market firms. That's the audience, and it shapes the questions.

Specificity protects credibility. Without it you drift into vague claims. You see studies claiming 75% adoption of something nobody recognises, because vague scales let respondents hedge. You end up with tidy averages that mean nothing.

The best thought leadership programmes validate a product roadmap, a service offering or a strategic point of view. The Adobe Digital Trends work we've supported for years surfaces market challenges, quantifies them and shows where specific solutions fit. It stays credible because it exposes the uncomfortable friction alongside the validation. When research shows the gap between executive belief and practitioner reality, between strategic intent and operational execution, readers trust it even when it clearly supports a commercial agenda.

How to design for reuse

Design for multiple uses from the start. A single study can fuel lead generation, inform product positioning, guide internal strategy and provide content for a year of events. But only if the design makes room for it. Know who needs what before the survey goes out.

Build content systems, not single releases. The main report is the anchor. Then come interactive dashboards, podcasts exploring specific findings, regional cuts, industry briefs.

Make it work internally. Research influences markets by changing internal conversations first. Sales teams reference it in pitches, product teams pull from it in roadmap debates, leadership uses it to frame decisions. That needs a story that holds across contexts.

Measure what actually matters. Lead volume is one signal. The real test is whether the work becomes a reference point. Does it get cited in competitor reports? Does it show up in conversations months later? Do practitioners recognise themselves in it?

A quick test

Look at your next programme. Does it expose friction or smooth it over? Will it be used to win an argument in six months, or will it be another PDF with 53 views?

If you want help designing research that still has pull six months after launch, get in touch.

« Back to All Posts