May 2026 psychology brief — explicit research gaps and source-quality caveats

What this brief explicitly does not know:

• Canadian-specific residential builder marketing-spend benchmarks. CHBA's Pulse Survey appears to track member statistics but does not publish marketing-spend figures at a level verifiable from open sources. Most available figures are U.S. (NAHB) or aggregated industry-wide (Gartner, Duke/AMA CMO Survey). A custom CHBA member request would be the next step.
• Peer-reviewed Canadian academic research on the role of the GC owner's spouse in vendor decisions. Widely observed in practice ([[gc-owner-spouse-as-primary-buyer-not-gatekeeper]]) and treated in family-business literature, but no Canadian construction-specific peer-reviewed study was located. Family Enterprise Foundation of Canada and BDC may have unpublished data.
• Causal direction of the coaching ↔ marketing-receptivity correlation. Selection vs treatment vs joint adoption is currently impossible to distinguish from available data ([[coaching-marketing-correlation-causal-direction-unclear]]).
• Size of the "agency-burned" cohort relative to the never-engaged cohort. Industry discourse implies most GCs have been burned. The Buildern 1.8–3.2% spend figure ([[buildern-2026-1-8-to-3-2pct-residential-builder-spend]]) implies most GCs have never invested enough to have been burned. The discrepancy is unresolved.
• Empirical evaluation of whether RenoMark membership predicts marketing engagement. Correlation observable; no controlled study located.
• Province-level RenoMark counts beyond GTA (~300) and national (1,100+). Ontario-specific counts may be available from OHBA or BILD but were not surfaced in open searches.
• Direct measurement of the loss-aversion ratio in trades-business owners specifically. The 2:1 figure ([[kahneman-tversky-prospect-theory-loss-aversion-2to1]]) is the general-population estimate; may be higher or lower for this cohort.
• Reliable cross-tabulation of GC marketing engagement by generation (founder vs second-gen vs acquired). Pattern observable in industry sources, not empirically isolated.

Source-quality caveats applied throughout the brief:

• Marketing-agency blogs (Hook Agency, Builder Funnel, Buildern, etc.) are treated as evidence of the discourse the buyer is exposed to, not as authoritative claims about contractor psychology. Their numbers (e.g., Buildern's 1.8–3.2%) are useful as directional benchmarks, not as peer-reviewed.
• Breakthrough Academy member outcomes (−22 hrs/week, +69% net profit year one) are organization-self-reported and not independently audited ([[breakthrough-academy-coaching-self-reported-outcomes]]).
• The Pioneer Craftsmen reference case ([[pioneer-craftsmen-kitchener-design-build-reference-case]]) is single-source (the firm's own published materials and GuildQuality reviews).
• Forrester / Gartner B2B buying-committee figures (13 stakeholders, etc.) are not realistic at the $3M residential GC scale; the underlying multi-stakeholder dynamic, not the headline number, is the transferable insight ([[forrester-state-business-buying-2024-13-stakeholders]]).
• All U.S. statistics (NAHB, FTC, Angi SEC filings, BLS) are explicitly U.S.-jurisdictional. Canadian-specific data are used where available (BuildForce, Statistics Canada, Job Bank, HCRA, Tarion, CHBA, BILD).

Confidence: Verified (this is meta-documentation of the brief's own limits, not a claim about external reality).

For future psychology briefs: Each new brief should declare its own gaps in the same shape, and link back to this one if the gap persists.