The best ROI action is to talk with a client

Girl saying so charming you must be a marketer

The other night, I was scrolling through the r/marketing Reddit and I stumbled on a peculiar post:

Dating and relationships as a marketing professional Hi everyone, My name is Sam and I’m a dating coach. I work with a lot of busy professionals and I’m always looking to better understand my audience. Question: as a marketing professional, what are the challenges you’ve faced in your dating lives? Thanks in advance

With this simple question, he collected some interesting ideas and insights about how marketers struggle to resist the temptation to give the partner exactly what they want, as if they were a customer (I am not sure I can confirm that).

The post made me chuckle for several reasons, but most importantly, among many other posts about SEO, metrics, leads, and conversions, the only person talking about understanding and listening to the clients was a non-marketer.

That one post, half joke, half insight, reminded me of something I (and many marketers) often forget, too:
The best thing you can do tomorrow for your brand, your positioning, and your strategy… is talk to a real person. Everyone is talking about the best ROI action, and there it is: the best ROI action is to talk with a client.

The power of a client opinion

Table of Contents

The power of a client opinion
If you can’t answer these questions, a coffee with your client will have a higher ROI than any AD or other initiative you could run
They don’t think like you, but their perception drives your decision
The illusion of digital clarity
Restart from people
About the author:

A simple client’s opinion can destroy 2 months of beautifully and carefully planned actions.

No amount of dashboards will tell you what they thought when they saw your product on the shelf.
No heatmap will tell you why they don’t see any difference between you and your competitor.
No metrics will help you understand what they thought about your new video.

One sentence. That’s all it takes. And it never comes from inside the building.

If you can’t answer these questions, a coffee with your client will have a higher ROI than any AD or other initiative you could run

Why did they choose you, really?
- A couple of months ago, we discovered that a purchaser of one aircraft (one of our clients is a major aircraft manufacturer for personal aviation) was not even aware of the name that marketing was using to promote it and bought it for his nephew because if was already available and thought it would have had a better resale value in the future. An insight we were not really exploiting at that time.
What’s the thing you do that makes the biggest difference to them?
- We once worked with a client whose messaging was laser-focused on innovation. Product specs, videos, even packaging: all screaming “cutting-edge.” But when we spoke with their B2B clients, the story was different. What they valued most wasn’t the technology; it was how fast their team answered emails. Responsiveness, not innovation, was what made them stay.
Where did they look for information before finding you?
- Sometimes, we think we have to be on every channel and that we should invest a huge amount of time on social media because everyone is there. But depending on your brand and your target, you can find better channels to meet with your clients.
What was stopping clients from choosing you?
- Clients can say no for many reasons and will usually say it’s too expensive for them, but the reality is that something stopped them, or what you did was enough to arouse them.
What would they lose if they stopped working with you tomorrow?
- Not just functionally, emotionally, practically, or socially. Would they miss efficiency? Peace of mind? A sense of control? If the answer is “nothing important,” you have a retention problem masked as satisfaction.

If you don’t know how to answer this, the best ROI action is to talk with a client and not to perform a new campaign.

They don’t think like you, but their perception drives your decision

We often build brands thinking everyone sees what we see. We obsess over brand colors, naming, campaigns, and customer journeys. But when you talk to real clients, you realize something humbling: they don’t think like marketers.

Last year, while conducting an ethnographic study on the tribe of padel players in Portugal, we stumbled upon a perfect example. Carlsberg and Heineken were the two brands most actively sponsoring padel courts across the country. Great exposure. Strategic placements. Strong KPIs.

After a match, we asked a couple of players which brand they thought was sponsoring the field they had just played on.

“Heineken!” they said, without hesitation.

It was Carlsberg.

This kind of disconnect happens all the time. A campaign is optimized for impressions, but no one remembers it. The field is branded, but the brand isn’t relevant. The focus is on visibility, but not on meaning.

In this case, the brand team had done everything by the book: budgeted correctly, negotiated sponsorships, and implemented. But they had skipped one step, asking what mattered to the players.

For many padel players, the sport isn’t just a pastime, it’s a social ritual and a personal challenge. A way to unwind with friends and simultaneously push toward becoming a better athlete. And no brand was showing up in that emotional space.

No brand was helping them train. No one was celebrating their progress. No brand was saying: We see your effort. Let’s raise your game.

Sometimes, the smartest move isn’t more visibility, it’s relevance.

The illusion of digital clarity

In digital marketing, we’ve built an entire religion around metrics. We measure everything: clicks, time on page, bounce rate, scroll depth, attribution windows, conversion lag. But the more we measure, the more we convince ourselves we understand.

The truth is, most of these numbers are proxies. They hint at behavior, but they rarely explain why it happened. Your CTR went up? Great, but was it curiosity, confusion, or a misplaced finger? Your form completion rate dropped? Okay, but did they change their mind, or just get interrupted by a Slack notification?

The dashboards tell you what. Only conversations tell you why. Without the why, you’re optimizing a map that doesn’t match the territory.

Restart from people

Before you plan your next campaign, use your social channels, your CRM, your time, and your budget to understand what your clients really expect. Is there something you’re missing? A need you haven’t seen yet? A reason they choose you that you’ve never asked about? Start there. Because surprising people doesn’t come from saying more. It comes from knowing better. The best ROI action is to talk with a client of yours.

At Human Centric Group, our job is to help brands understand people, not just as users or targets, but as human beings with contradictions, routines, emotions, and needs. We do it through data, yes, but also by spending time in the field, listening, observing, and asking questions without scripts. We map behaviours, create human segments, and uncover insights that go beyond demographics or purchase funnels. Then we translate what we find into brand strategies that are relevant, grounded, and often surprising.

About the author:

Francesco De Nittis is manager at Human Centric Group. He is an expert market researcher and branding consultant. With a track record of working with leading brands like Carlsberg, Remarkable, and Tecnam Aircraft, he helps companies unlock data-driven insights for strategic growth.