60 Management Stripped Bare Customer research: lies and statistics Businesses must know their customers. And customer research is a good way of not finding the truth. Customers lie: attitudes versus behaviour Customers do not mean to lie, but they do. Most customer research is based on attitudes, opinions and post-rationalization. We conducted two pieces of research for a retailer. The first research asked customers why they bought their television. They gave post-rationalizations about price, features, performance and quality. This showed the store should focus on price, features, performance and quality. The second piece of research focused on behaviour, and caught people as they left stores either with or without buying. It showed that they wandered around a few shops and became increasingly confused about all the choices. Just after they had bought, they could not recall the different prices or features of different models. If they did not know this basic information, they could not