When the data is right but the decision is wrong with Ernest Baskin

Episode notes

Ernest Baskin has built his career across academia and industry, teaching market research while applying it in real business settings. In this episode of The Curiosity Current, he explains why market research continues to fail organizations, even when they believe they are surrounded by data. The conversation opens with the New Coke example. Ernest reframes the failure as a breakdown in how research was used, not whether it existed. Qualitative insights that signaled emotional backlash were sidelined in favor of cleaner quantitative summaries. The decision appeared sound on paper and failed in the real world. Research fails when inconvenient insight is ignored or when the process is shortened. Stephanie and Molly explore a common executive mindset: companies already have more data than they can handle. Ernest explains why this logic falls short. Most internal data looks backward. It shows what happened, not why it happened. Without direct customer conversation, teams miss motivations, barriers, and tradeoffs that shape real behavior. The episode also challenges the belief that primary research must be slow or expensive.