Only research a company actually needs is whether or not certain sounding speaker will sell a lot of units. It seems that boosted bass and treble sells units so you need pretty convincing reason to stop producing them and start making new ones which adhere to some preference research.
As I said before I think the B&W 706 sounds just fine and is a big step-up compared to any cheapish mainstream solution like bluetooth boomboxes, soundbars, gaming oriented computer speakers and the like. I don't think I'm too far off if I guess that about 99% of people buying speakers are not interested at all in measurements, audio research or accuracy of the speaker.
As I said before I think the B&W 706 sounds just fine and is a big step-up compared to any cheapish mainstream solution like bluetooth boomboxes, soundbars, gaming oriented computer speakers and the like. I don't think I'm too far off if I guess that about 99% of people buying speakers are not interested at all in measurements, audio research or accuracy of the speaker.