Why We Keep Choosing the Same Suppliers

The Shortlist in Our Heads 

My team and I used to love this one Turkish restaurant. Most of our lunches and celebrations would end up there. The staff was friendly and the food was outstanding. There was only one issue: their menu wasn’t really a menu, it was a small book. Hundreds of dishes. I tried to meticulously study it the first time, but eventually I stopped asking for it.

“I’ll have the baked aubergine, please.”

My team was always amused with my lack of originality but, funnily enough, our table kept looking boringly unchanged. They were all ordering the same things too.

We had endless choice. And yet we all quietly developed our own shortlist.

And that is when it hit me: isn’t this exactly what we experience at work, day after day?

When Trust Becomes Habit 

A new brief lands in my inbox, right on top of five others. I scan it. Decisions need to be taken quickly. We work in an industry where deadlines rarely wait.

“Hey David, for this one I think we need to contact XYZ for sample support. Could you drop them an email, please?”

Why spend time browsing through the “menu” of all our sample suppliers when I already know XYZ can deliver this audience, and I trust them completely?

We spend a lot of time talking about data quality. We invest in better technology, stronger fraud detection, increasingly sophisticated methodologies and experts who know how to untangle complex data. All of that matters. But some of the most important decisions happen before a single respondent enters a survey. They happen when we decide who is going to help us deliver the work.

I don’t think we kept ordering the same meals because we lacked choice. Quite the opposite. We did it because we had already found something we trusted, and our taste buds knew what to expect.

What happens in research is surprisingly similar. Over time, every agency builds its own mental shortlist. Suppliers who have delivered before gradually become the first names that come to mind. And it’s not because we are too lazy to look further. It’s our experience and intuition doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: helping us make good decisions quickly.

The problem is that many suppliers have strengths we don’t always know about. One may be particularly strong with healthcare professionals in the Nordics. Another may have exceptional reach among senior hospitality decision-makers. A third may quietly become the team that somehow always delivers those painfully difficult niche quotas that everyone else struggles with.

If those suppliers never receive the brief, not because they’re unsuitable but simply because they weren’t the first names that came to mind, we don’t just miss the opportunity to work with them. We miss the opportunity to discover something we didn’t already know.

Our experience and intuition are among the greatest assets any researcher can have. They help us move faster, spot risks earlier and make better decisions under pressure.

But they can also create habits. And habits, however useful, have a quiet way of narrowing our field of vision.

Perhaps this isn’t only about memory, either. In most agencies, what we know about suppliers is scattered across people’s heads, inboxes and spreadsheets. One person remembers who delivered an impossible quota three years ago. Someone else knows which provider was unusually strong in a particular market. But unless that knowledge is easy to find and compare, the practical choice will nearly always be the supplier whose name comes to mind first.

That doesn’t mean our judgement has failed. It means our judgement is working with what is visible.

Fit is Not the Same as Familiarity 

The irony is that the supplier we don’t contact isn’t necessarily the least capable. More often, they’re simply the one we didn’t think of.

I can think of projects my agency didn’t win where supplier choice may have played a bigger role than we realised at the time.

On one occasion, the feedback was familiar: our price was simply too high. But price is the result of dozens of decisions. We approached the suppliers we knew and trusted, and their cautious assumptions about a difficult audience shaped the proposal we eventually submitted. Looking back, it’s entirely possible that another supplier, one we hadn’t considered, would have approached that audience very differently.

On another project, the client felt that a competing agency had offered greater confidence around several particularly difficult quotas, while we could only afford to be prudent. Perhaps our supplier blend simply wasn’t quite the right one for that particular brief.

Naturally, we’ll never know whether contacting different suppliers would have changed either outcome. But both projects left me wondering something.

How often is an agency’s proposal guided by the suppliers it knows, rather than by the suppliers that are genuinely the best fit for that specific project?

This isn’t an argument for abandoning the suppliers we trust, or for sending every brief to an ever-growing list. Trust is earned, and more often than not, the familiar choice will still be the right one. I’ll probably still order the baked aubergine next time I visit that Turkish restaurant.

But every project deserves one small pause before habit takes over.

What is genuinely difficult about this brief? Which suppliers have proved themselves particularly strong in that area? And are we choosing based on what we know, or simply on which names were easiest to remember?

The goal isn’t a longer shortlist.

It’s a shortlist built for the brief.