Why do people pay so much money for reports from dubious firms like Gartner?

The game they are playing is almost like a coin toss. If you look at the Gartner reports that become publicly visible, they are often wrong.

So why do reports from companies like Gartner still sell?

Because they reduce the anxiety of the owner or decision-maker.

Business is complex. Even a bad product can succeed because of advertising. Exaggerated marketing, fraud, timing, distribution, and luck all exist, and they can all produce success. UX is an ideal. But in practice, developers often have to satisfy OX: owner experience.

Companies appear to pursue profit because most owners like money. But in reality, many companies are closer to the realization of the owner’s ideology, taste, and worldview.

So what matters?

For a developer, it becomes important to judge how closely the owner’s taste aligns with the public, and with the target audience. That is why developers often end up flattering the owner: not merely because of hierarchy, but because the owner’s taste is frequently the actual operating system of the business.

This, so much.

I'm the IT Director of a medium sized (for our industry) company. Some years ago I worked with an amazing free-lance developer, and our then-director of marketing, to build a custom website that we were pretty proud of. A year ago our new marketing director paid mid-five figures to move to one of the site-builder services because 1.) the old CMS back-end to update content was "too technical", and the hours / a day wait for me or the developer to do it instead was too long, 2.) marketing didn't have direct control over design elements, and our questions like "do you want all of the buttons changed to match this style?", or "we use drop-downs on these other similar forms, should we use that here, too?" were... impertinent, I guess?

The mistake we made, which you beautifully articulate, was paying insufficient attention to the Owner Experience. The old CMS was functional, but it was ugly; the previous marketing director didn't care about back-end looks, and didn't want to put resources into making it look pretty. I should have recognized that that priority had changed. We also could have made them a form-builder + page-builder of some kind, with a way to directly edit templates. Whatever it took, we should have made the old system more satisfying to its new "owner" - and I should have put that expense into the IT budget, rather than have expected it to come out of theirs. That would have better for the company. Live and learn.

All that apart, not being responsible for the website is great: it's nice not to deal with text editing and image updates. I said my piece about the advantages of a custom site, and was heard and overruled, and that's fine. I made sure I am not an owner of the new site; they have their playground, and are welcome to it.

UX is, of course, degenerating, and marketing are (predictably; I predicted it) starting to chafe against the limitations of this company's product. I expect we'll move back to a custom site in a few years. But, what they've got is for now a better Owner Experience, which for them is worth the many multiples of cost, and the current functionality shortcomings.

I expect next go-around they'll want to pay some big design agency for a custom site; it'll probably be six figures. I don't know how I should approach that discussion. Any ideas?

How does this generalize to firms with more than one stakeholder/owner? I don't see how it does without some magic where we assume that all members of e.g. the C-suite have similar, model-able reasoning.