How to Commission Clinical Trials that Sell + Increases Valuation
Many clinical trials commissioned by supplement and nutrition brands don’t move the needle, here's how to do it creates ROI.
Many clinical trials commissioned by supplement and nutrition brands don’t move the needle.
They get run, they get published in a journal nobody outside the field reads, and they get cited once on a product page.
This isn’t because the science is bad. Often the science is fine. It’s because the trial was commissioned to answer a question that, even if answered perfectly, wouldn’t change anything commercially.
And in the world most of my clients operate in, “didn’t change anything commercially” is the same as “didn’t work.”
So let’s be honest about what a commissioned trial actually is.
All trials are commercial trials
When brands talk about why they want a study, I hear three framings.
It’s a PR play: we want third-party validation we can put in front of journalists and retailers.
It’s a regulatory move: we need the data to access a market or substantiate a claim.
It’s R&D: we want to understand our ingredient better so we can build the next product.
In my mind, all three are the same thing. PR builds brand trust, which leads to more product sales. Regulatory unlocks shelves, which sell more products. R&D feeds the next launch, which sells more product.
If your R&D isn’t eventually pointing at a product story, it’s a hobby, and that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s a commercial decision.
Once we accept this notion, the question stops being "what kind of trial should we run?" and becomes "what commercial outcome am I buying, and is this study designed to deliver it?"
That second question is the one most commissioned trials fail to address.
The mistake of confirming what’s already known
Let’s take omega-3, which is where I’ve spent the last three years of my life as a PhD student.
The cardiovascular evidence is enormous.
The cognitive evidence is enormous.
If you commission the forty-seventh study showing omega-3 supports heart health in middle-aged adults, it’s better than no trial… but it probably won’t move the needle in a meaningful way.
No journalist will write about it. Big, high-impact journals probably won’t care to publish it. Your sales team can’t open a conversation with the buyer across the table because they already assume omega-3 is good for the heart.
The study confirmed what everyone already believed, so it told nobody anything new.
This is the trap.
Brands commission trials in the most established part of an ingredient’s evidence base because it feels safe, and the result is almost guaranteed.
But “almost guaranteed result” and “commercially useless result” are usually the same thing.
The principle: commission at the edge of emerging evidence
The scientifically interesting question and the commercially interesting question are the same question. Both audiences, researchers and consumers, respond to novelty.
So the trial worth commissioning is the one at the front of the evidence base, not the one at the back.
Where the mechanism is plausible, the early signal is real, but the definitive study hasn’t been done.
That’s where a well-designed RCT changes the conversation rather than appending to it.
Back to omega-3. The cardiovascular and cognitive stories are saturated. But omega-3, skeletal muscle, protein synthesis, anabolic resistance in older adults, recovery, and healthy ageing are areas where the evidence is genuinely emerging.
The mechanism is there. The early human work is promising. The definitive trials haven’t been run.
That’s a commissioning opportunity.
A brand that funds a well-designed RCT in that space gets a result that’s genuinely new, which means journalists will cover it, conferences will feature it, and…
The sales team has a story that competitors selling the same molecule literally cannot tell.
The same logic applies elsewhere: creatine beyond strength, magnesium beyond sleep, protein beyond muscle mass. Every mature ingredient has an edge; that’s where the opportunity is.
Why this is harder than it sounds
If commissioning a better trial were straightforward, everyone would already be doing it. The reason they’re not is that the industry has trained brands to choose between two bad options.
Option one: go to a traditional CRO. You’ll get scientific rigour, but you’ll wait eighteen months, spend six figures you didn’t need to spend, and get back a study designed for a regulator rather than a buyer.
Option two: go to a marketing agency that runs “studies” consumer panels, in-house questionnaires, and small open-label work dressed up as evidence. It’s fast and cheap, but it’s scientifically flimsy, which reduces trust rather than building it, especially with investors.
Underneath this is a simpler reason for the gap: the skill combination is rare. Scientists who genuinely understand commercial dynamics, what a sales team can use, what a journalist will write about, and what an investor will trust are uncommon.
Commercial operators who can read a study protocol and spot the design choice that determines whether the result is usable are uncommon, too.
Most people are competent on one side of the line. The few who can sit on both sides at once are the ones worth commissioning a trial with, because they design the study around the question that actually matters.
That gap is the problem worth solving.
Marketing-led, R&D-assisted
This inverts how most brands run the process.
From my experience, the standard model is: R&D decides what to study, and marketing figures out how to talk about the results.
The result is a study that’s scientifically defensible but not as commercially interesting.
The better model: marketing identifies the story it wants to tell in 18 months.
R&D then designs the study that, if successful, produces that story with scientific integrity intact.
Marketing leads on the question. R&D leads on the method.
Brands that get this right end up with something rare: a commercial incentive and a scientific-quality bar that points in the same direction. The trial is designed well because the commercial story depends on the result being credible. And the next study gets commissioned at the next edge of the evidence base, because that’s where the next commercial story lives.
The bottom line
If you’re a brand sitting on a budget for a study and asking yourself which trial to commission, three questions to start with.
What’s the commercial story you’d want to be telling in eighteen months? Not the abstract, the press release headline.
What’s the question at the edge of your ingredient’s evidence base where a well-run study could produce that headline?
And are you willing to commission it, knowing the answer might be no?
If you can answer those three, the study design itself.
If you can’t, or if you want to talk through what a study at the edge of your evidence base could actually look like before you commit a budget to it, that’s a conversation worth having.
You don’t need to have the answer in-house yet. That’s what we’re here for.
Clinical-level data on commercial timelines, science you can defend in front of either audience.
If that’s the trial you’re trying to commission, book a call.