By Shona Sabah (Senior Manager - Strategic Growth Lead)
In banks and payment companies especially, I hear the same frustration time and time again from product marketers that reach out to us. Their teams do the hard work to generate strong insight and a clear narrative, turn it into a well-designed deck, and then watch it get shared, nodded at...and then quietly forgotten. Naturally, it leaves them asking why their work, which has real value, sometimes fails to translate into significant change.
After years working alongside product marketers in these sectors, I’ve learned that research only drives impact when it’s designed to survive the internal reality it has to live in i.e. senior stakeholders, competing priorities, regulatory constraints, and long product roadmaps.
The difference between research that simply exists vs. research that shapes decisions typically comes down to how deliberately it’s designed, integrated, and positioned. If you can get all of those things right, you’re onto a winner - not only will it help improve outcomes for the business, but it will also elevate the role of product marketing as a strategic function.
Here are six practical ways I’ve seen product marketers make their research genuinely shape decisions ⤵️
1. Start with the decision, not the research.
If you want research to matter at leadership level, it needs to make a specific decision easier for someone who carries real accountability.
Before you brief a project, pressure-test it with three simple questions:
In banking and payments, leaders are constantly weighing risk, revenue, compliance, and customer impact. Research that’s framed as ‘interesting insight’ rarely cuts through, but research that reduces uncertainty around their decision does.
When product marketing consistently anchors research to decisions leaders actually own, something shifts. You stop being the team that ‘brings insight’ and start being the team that helps the business decide. These questions also anchor the scope and focus of the project as it progresses ensuring that additional asks constitute a valuable addition to the research, rather than a distraction.
2. Combine customer and competitor insight-or expect confusion.
One of the fastest ways for research to lose clarity is when customer insight and competitor insight are treated as separate exercises – they should be integrated!
Customer research should tell you what really matters in the buying decision (e.g. speed, cost, reliability, trust) whereas competitor insight should then show how well the market delivers against those priorities.
When those two are brought together:
This is especially important in payments, where it’s easy to chase shiny capabilities that look good on a roadmap but don’t actually influence selection or retention. Integrated insight gives product marketers a sharper filter and helps leadership make trade-offs with confidence.
3. Flex the format to fit the audience
Product marketing increasingly acts as the connective tissue across teams e.g. product, sales, and leadership. That often means the same research needs to do very different jobs at once.
For example:
Treating insight as a single deck for everyone usually dilutes its impact, so adapting the format to how each audience likes to absorb, socialise, and act on insight can make a huge difference in how it lands.
I promise this isn’t just about extra polish (or work!) - it’s a really important step because when insight is presented in the right shape, for the right audience, it’s far more likely to influence the decisions it was designed to inform.
Research that simply confirms what the organisation already believes rarely changes behaviour. The strongest projects I see are deliberately designed to understand:
This is uncomfortable, particularly in regulated, complex environments, but it’s also where trust is built. When product marketing brings well-evidenced, sometimes inconvenient truths into the room, leaders start to rely on them as a strategic sounding board, not just another delivery function.
5. Use partners who understand your market, not just the method
Good research process matters, but in banking and payments, context matters just as much. Choosing partners with deep industry expertise is one of the most effective ways to raise the quality and credibility of research. Partners with deep sector experience know:
That perspective shows up in the interpretation and in how credible the output feels internally. For product marketers, this can be the difference between insight being debated endlessly, or being accepted as a solid foundation for action.
Insight creates influence when it leads somewhere. The most effective product marketers don’t stop at findings. They are explicit about:
This doesn’t mean over-reaching. It means having the confidence to translate evidence into a recommendation. That’s often where product marketing earns its seat at the table - not by just knowing the market best, but by helping the business actually respond to it.
To sum up, when research is designed with intent, it delivers a double return, because the business gets clearer priorities, better decisions, and propositions grounded in real customer value - and product marketing builds credibility as a strategic partner that shapes overall direction.
If you can achieve those things, research stops being a ‘good deck’ that ends up in a folder hidden away in your internal system, and starts becoming one of the most powerful tools product marketing has.
📞 If you’d like to talk about how we’ve helped product marketers in banks and payment companies do this in practice, or how you might embed these approaches in your own organisation, we’re always happy to compare notes – feel free to set up a quick intro call.