An Australian-led survey involving 112 senior marketing leaders has highlighted that just 5 per cent are confident their team knows why customers choose their brand, or walk away.
The findings come from The Behavioural Blind Spot, a 2026 white paper based on Melbourne AI-powered marketing platform, Flowing Bee’s original research conducted in December 2025.
Forty-five per cent of those surveyed said their team “relies on intuition or past experience as a primary source of customer understanding”, and only 4 per cent believe their marketing “actually changes customer behaviour”.
“Nineteen in twenty marketing leaders are spending budgets without really knowing why their customers behave the way they do,” Flowing Bee co-founder and behavioural scientist Dr Michael Sankey said.
“That is a huge risk when every dollar is under pressure to perform.”
According to him, the research identifies three compounding gaps that widen with every campaign cycle.
He believes teams are now “defaulting to gut-feel”, with 45 per cent relying on intuition or executive opinion in the absence of evidence.
Then, he said the understanding that does exist is getting lost in the handoff, with 55 per cent of organisations having insight, execution and measurement sitting with separate teams or suppliers.
And according to Sankey, another clear gap is that “measurement is getting weaker”, with 37 per cent citing poor post-campaign learning as a primary constraint, with reporting that shows what moved but not why.
Sankey described that gap as “structural”.
Marketing teams have never had more data on what customers do. But analytics, CRM and survey tools were built to track records of behaviour, not explain what’s driving it.
“Marketers are doing the best they can with what’s available, and what’s available shows them what customers do, not why,” Sankey said. “The only way to break the cycle is to address it at the root, by building behavioural understanding before execution begins. That means asking why before the brief is written, not after the channel is chosen.
