2025 Review and 2026 predictions: The strategic role of research & insight

2025 Review: A defining year for insight

2025 has marked a significant shift in what businesses demanded from research and insight. With market conditions characterised by rapid change, clients increasingly turned to Mobas to help them understand audiences, validate decisions, and build resilient brand strategies. Insight transitioned from supportive background work to a central, indispensable pillar of strategic decision-making.

Across the year, insight formed a core component of thirty-two client briefs, spanning brand, marketing, HR, product development, and organisational transformation.

2025 Research methodologies in numbers

Throughout 2025, we delivered a breadth of qualitative and quantitative research programmes tailored to the diverse challenges our clients faced:

• 12 Internal staff surveys – strengthening employee engagement, cultural alignment, and organisational performance.
• 8 Customer surveys – capturing shifting expectations and informing product and service optimisation.
• 4 Online focus groups – enabling rich, real-time qualitative understanding of targeted segments.
• 6 Co-creation sessions – collaborating directly with audiences to refine campaigns, products, and brand narratives.
• 12 Audience and creative testing surveys – validating concepts and creative execution prior to investment.

The most in-demand insight offerings of 2025

The dominant trend across our client portfolio was the demand for brand proposition development, our most comprehensive and transformative insight offering. We completed four major proposition development programmes, each delivering:

• Clear alignment between organisational identity and market perception
• Strong, distinctive value propositions rooted in evidence
• Directional guidance for messaging, creative, and brand experience
• Future-proofed positioning ready for complex and evolving markets

These projects did more than sharpen brand narratives; they equipped leadership teams with the clarity and confidence needed to invest decisively in the future.

Mobas also supported clients through a variety of other challenges, including:

• 12 x Internal surveys and 4 focus groups
  • Informing HR, recruitment, culture, and employee value proposition initiatives, strengthening alignment between internal behaviours and brand values.
• 6 x Campaign co-creation and validation programmes
  • Partnering with target audiences to refine messaging and creative concepts, ensuring campaigns land meaningfully and effectively.
• Segmentation, creative testing, and brand tracking programmes, which supported the development and launch of new products and service lines, ensuring decisions were rooted in robust evidence and category understanding.

Through this work, one theme became clear: businesses that invested in insight made faster, more confident decisions, and were better equipped to adapt to uncertainty.

What will UK businesses require from insight in 2026?

As we enter 2026, the landscape becomes even more unpredictable. UK businesses face a convergence of pressures: economic volatility, geopolitical tension, labour shortages, supply-chain fragility, and above all, accelerating AI adoption. These forces are reshaping customer expectations, brand trust, and competitive dynamics at unprecedented speed.

In this environment, insight is not optional. It is the strategic mechanism through which organisations will reduce risk, anticipate disruption, and create opportunity. We’ve highlighted three key insight requirements UK businesses will require to help navigate 2026 and beyond, including:

1. Forward-looking intelligence, not historical reporting

Businesses can no longer rely on retrospective data to guide decisions. In 2026, they will require predictive trend modelling that identifies emerging behaviour shifts early and real-time consumer sentiment tracking, particularly across digital and social platforms. Insight must move decisively from “What happened?” to “What will matter next?”.

2. Understanding the post-AI consumer mindset

AI-infused experiences are reshaping every industry, from finance and healthcare to retail and professional services. Businesses urgently need research that reveals how customers perceive AI-enabled products and services, and where trust is fragile, and which risks matter most to different segments.

It will also be key to understand how automation changes brand perception, loyalty, and expectations of human interaction. Ultimately, insight will be crucial in helping organisations design and deploy AI responsibly, in ways that feel human, valuable, and trustworthy.

3. Evidence to de-risk and accelerate decision-making

With margins under pressure and competition intensifying, every strategic move must be justified with data. In 2026, organisations will require rapid proposition, campaign, and innovation validation and clear ROI modelling to prioritise investment. Insight becomes the backbone of commercial decision-making, providing the evidence leaders need to act decisively.

Why insight will be the competitive advantage in 2026

Insight in 2026 is not merely descriptive; it is predictive, preventative, and performance-driving.

• It identifies opportunities before competitors see them.
• It exposes risk before it escalates.
• It turns uncertainty into informed action.
• It helps brands maintain trust in an increasingly automated world.

For organisations facing rapid change, insight becomes the most cost-effective and impactful tool for navigating complexity.

As UK businesses brace for another year of uncertainty, research and insight stand at the centre of competitive advantage. They are no longer passive observers of market reality; they are engines of foresight, resilience, alignment, and transformation.

The organisations that thrive in 2026 will be those that:

• Understand their audiences more deeply
• See market shifts earlier
• Make decisions grounded in evidence
• Build brands that remain relevant in an AI-enabled world

Mobas is uniquely positioned to support this journey. With deep behavioural expertise, advanced methodology, and a proven track record across sectors, our insight team helps organisations not just respond to change but lead through it.

If your business is preparing for 2026 and wants the clarity, confidence, and competitive edge that only evidence-based insight can deliver, now is the moment to talk to us say.hello@mobas.com

Mobas stands ready to help you navigate the year ahead and thrive within it.