In Q1 of 2026, PANDORA Agency conducted a seven-week, three-state field research engagement for a mobility client preparing for market entry in Nigeria.
This case study documents:
- The methodology,
- The strategic principles that shaped it, and
- What a research-led approach to market entry actually produces,
showcasing how to commission research that drives decisions, not reports that sit in folders.
The client has not been named at their request, though the methodology and findings are shared with their permission.
PANDORA Agency’s research and insights offer the bedrock that makes everything else more precise, from market entry strategy to pricing, customer acquisition, and competitive positioning. This is an account of what that looks like in practice
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This distinction matters more than most leaders across teams realise. It is often the question that both founders, market-entry leads, and strategy teams alike ask before commissioning research:
“Is market research necessary?”
This is the wrong question.
The right question should be: ”Would I rather build my market position on assumptions or on verified evidence of how your customers actually behave?”
And here’s why.
Ask your customers why they left your platform, and they will tell you the price was too high. Ask them why they chose a competitor, and they will cite features. Ask them how they use your product, and they will describe the ideal version, the one they imagine, not the one they actually live.
And it’s not even dishonesty, it is simply how human psychology works. People report behaviour as they wish it were, not how it actually is. And this is exactly why market research is so important, because the gap between stated behaviour and actual behaviour is where poorly informed strategies break.
Because market research at its core is not about asking what people say but about investigating how people behave and what they do.
Why Stated Behaviour Is One of the Biggest Research Traps
The stated behaviour gap is not one that is Nigeria or Africa centric, it is universal, but is more pronounced in complex and rapidly shifting markets, of which Nigeria’s mobility sector is a fine example.
‘What people say they do (stated behaviour)’ and ‘what they actually do (actual behaviour)’ are rarely the same thing, and the gap widens the moment interactions leave formal settings.
Consumers say they are loyal to one brand, but switch when the price increases. They say they prefer platform A, but use platform B for the transactions that actually matter to them.
For brands that are looking to penetrate the market, launch a product or develop a pricing strategy, this gap is not a minor data issue; it is, in fact, the difference between a strategy grounded in data and one based on assumptions or questionnaires. This data requires going into the field.
“The goal was never to capture what people say. It was to understand what they actually do and then build a strategy on that.” Mr. Michael, Head of Research, PANDORA Agency
The Research: Scope, Design, and What was at Stake
The client we partnered with as stated previously is an emerging ride-hailing and logistics operator with ambitions to compete across multiple major cities simultaneously. They had not yet gone live, and major commercial decisions were still in front of them.
The client was navigating four consequential decisions:
- How to price a new offering in a strongly established market where pricing was not standardized;
- Which geographies to prioritise for entry and in what sequence;
- How to acquire early-stage customers and drivers in a market with low platform trust, and
- Which of their core assumptions about user behaviour were safe to build on, and which needed to be discarded before they committed resources.
The scope of the project reflected the weight of the decisions to be made: seven weeks in the field, ten researchers deployed, three core geographical points: Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt and four audience segments researched across the full ecosystem of the mobility market: ride-hailing and towing drivers, dispatch riders, small and medium enterprises, and end users.
The choice of geographies was intentional. Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt are markets with materially different consumer behaviours, informal infrastructure and competitive dynamics. Treating them as a single population would have resulted in findings that worked at one location but failed at the others.
The same logic shaped the decision to study four different audience segments rather than just the end users. In complex markets, as we have seen, the behaviours of drivers, intermediates and SMEs alike shape what is possible commercially.
Methodology: How the Research Was Conducted
Methodology is not an afterthought in research projects. It is an invaluable factor that determines what a research project sees and misses. For this research project, PANDORA deployed three data collection methods, one to see what the others missed.
1. In-person interviews
In-person interviews were designed to create an environment where responders could speak with sincerity, not the curated answers that formal settings usually produce. But these responses weren’t treated as findings; instead, these user interviews were treated as hypotheses to be tested against observed behaviour.
2. Structured questionnaires
This created a consistent baseline for interstate comparison. This was less about the volume of responses and more about identifying if behavioural patterns observed in Lagos were present in Abuja or Port Harcourt, or if different geographical touch points meant completely different patterns and dynamics.
3. On-site observation
The most revealing and resource-intensive method to execute well.
Watching transactions, interactions, and informal negotiations happen in real market conditions revealed behaviours that no respondent could describe in an interview, because these behaviours were largely invisible to them. Observation is what closes the gap between what people report and what actually happens.
Where interview accounts and observed behaviour conflicted, those conflicts became the primary focus.
A driver’s account of platform pricing was compared to what an end user reported. The gaps between the two defined the dynamics around which a market-entry strategy had to be built.
Triangulation: PANDORA’s Methodological Signature
Where interview accounts and observed behaviour conflicted, those conflicts were not treated as noise to be resolved; they were treated as signals:
The primary analytical focus.
This approach to triangulation, treating conflict in observations as a diagnostic tool rather than a data quality problem, is what separates research that surfaces market reality from research that confirms existing assumptions.
A further differentiator was the use of local researchers. Each city was covered by researchers who were genuinely familiar with the terrain: how transactions happen, how platforms are trusted or distrusted, and how pricing operates outside of formal structures. This is not replicable by external teams.
The Counterintuitive Finding: Why We Recommended Lagos Mainland Over Lagos Island
The instinct for any mobility platform entering Lagos is to lead with Lagos Island: Victoria Island, Ikoyi, and Lekki, as this is where purchasing power is concentrated.
It is the visible, high-status market. It is also where most established platforms are most deeply entrenched, where driver acquisition costs are highest, and where a new entrant is most likely to compete on price before it has the scale to sustain that competition.
Field validation told a different story. Lagos Mainland offered higher driver availability, stronger SME dispatch demand, and a more receptive operator base: conditions that allow a new platform to establish stable unit economics before facing the full weight of incumbent competition.
The data did not suggest avoiding Lagos Island, but it did suggest earning the right to enter it by demonstrating proof of concept on the Mainland first.
This is the kind of finding that justifies a research engagement, not because it is complicated, but because it is exactly the type of assumption that costs a platform a failed launch if it goes untested.
The Cost of Premature Expansion
Field data across the three cities revealed that driver earnings were affected by customer concentration in a given area. In corridors where platform activity was thin, drivers reported faster migration to competing platforms or off-platform diversion of trips.
The pattern was consistent enough to establish a clear threshold: below a certain level of corridor liquidity, operator retention became difficult. Scaling before that threshold is met does not accelerate growth; it accelerates churn.
A failed multi-state launch typically costs ten to twenty times the investment of the research that would have prevented it. The seven weeks and ten researchers deployed in this engagement were not an expense. They were risk mitigation at a fraction of the cost of a failed entry.
What the Research Produced: Findings and Deliverables
Other than findings regarding the cost of premature expansion and the recommendation of Lagos Mainland over the Island, especially at early entry stages, the team got other deliverables.
These deliverables included: pricing benchmarks and operating realities across all three states, key infrastructural constraints affecting last-mile delivery, a cluster-based go-to-market framework, a phased acquisition strategy, and a validation plan with defined performance thresholds for the first 90 days.
The client did not receive a description of the market. They received the intelligence and data needed to enter the market with confidence and to course-correct efficiently any assumptions that needed to be reviewed.
“Once operator retention drops below a critical liquidity threshold, it becomes nearly impossible to recover. Scaling before reaching that point doesn’t drive growth, it drives churn. And this is not theory, we watched it happen.” Mr. Michael, Head of Research, PANDORA Agency
5 Lessons Brands Can Take From This
These are the lessons that shaped this engagement. They apply to any brand trying to understand a complex market well enough to make critical decisions.
1. Stated behaviour is a hypothesis, not a finding.
Surveys and focus groups are great for gathering hypotheses. But it is dangerous to treat them as conclusions. Before any stated behaviour shapes a decision, it must be tested and tried against observable evidence.
2. Markets behave differently across geography, even within one country
Any research that treats a geographically distributed market as homogeneous will produce recommendations that would work in some locations but quietly crumble in others. Different geographical points must be researched independently from the start.
3. Informal behaviour is not an edge case. It is often the real market
In many Nigerian markets, the gap between formal platform behaviour and informal commercial behaviour is significant. Research that only captures formal responses is not capturing the market; it is capturing the regulatory ideal of the market. Research has to go where the market actually operates.
4. Ecosystem research produces more actionable insight than audience research.
Understanding your end user alone is not sufficient in a complex, interdependent market. The behaviours of suppliers, intermediaries, and adjacent players also shape what is economically possible. In this project, the real insight lived in the relationship between these individual segments, not within any single group.
5. Rigorous research costs a fraction of one bad market-entry decision.
Seven weeks and ten researchers is a meaningful investment. A failed multi-city launch with infrastructure committed, customer acquisition spent, and assumptions proven wrong costs substantially more.
Research as the Intelligence Layer Behind Better Strategy
Serious leaders do not need more data. What they need is data that is designed to answer the right questions. What they need is a research partner that understands both the market and the strategic importance the research serves.
PANDORA Agency’s research and insights capability is not a standalone service; it is the intelligence layer that makes everything else more precise, from market entry strategy to perception management, executive positioning and advisory work.
If your brand is evaluating a market entry, product launch, pricing strategy or a competitive repositioning, the question is not if to invest in research. The question is whether your current approach is designed to provide the intelligence you need for critical decision-making.
BOOK A STRATEGIC DIAGNOSTIC WITH PANDORA
Bring us one decision: a market entry, a pricing change, a competitive repositioning and in a 45-minute session, PANDORA’s research team will identify which of your underlying assumptions carry the most risk, and recommend a research design appropriate to the decision in front of you leaving you with a clear view of what you know, what you are assuming, and what needs to be verified before you commit resources.
FAQs
1. What is the difference between stated behavior and actual behavior in market research?
Stated behavior is what consumers describe when asked how they act. Actual behavior is what they do in real situations. The two often contradict each other around pricing decisions, platform loyalty, and informal workarounds.
2. Why does methodology matter so much in market research?
Methodology determines what a research project sees and misses. A survey-only approach captures stated behavior but not actual behavior, and the gap between the two is where market-entry strategies most often fail.
3. How long does a serious market research project take?
Scope, geography, and the number of segments involved determine the timeline. A multi-state research project with multiple segments and triangulated data collection, as in this case typically runs between four to eight weeks.
4. What should a leadership team expect to receive at the end of an engagement?
At a minimum: field-based insights, an analysis of market dynamics, and clear implications for the brand’s strategic options.
At best: a go-to-market framework, a phased entry or acquisition strategy, and a validation plan that tells you exactly what performance signals to track in the first 90 days. Research that does not end in a clear strategic direction has left work undone.
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