Today, my guest is Mitchell Atchison, Senior Associate in US Immunology Marketing Research at a leading global pharmaceutical firm. Mitchell has spent his career in both retail and pharma.

This episode is brought to you by Attest. Attest is a powerful, easy-to-use SaaS platform that connects businesses to over 100 million consumers in 80 countries on demand in just a few clicks. Ask your burning questions. Select who you want to answer. View actionable insights that help you grow your business. Join the hundreds of leading brands who already utilize the power of Attest’s scalable intelligence platform. Contact Attest today at www.askattest.com/happymr

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Website: Chilmark Digital

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[00:00]

On Episode 207 of the Happy Market Research Podcast, I’m chatting with Mitchell Atchison, U.S. Immunology Marketing Researcher at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms.

But first, a word from our sponsor:  This episode is brought to you by Attest.  Attest is a powerful, easy-to-use SAS platform that connects businesses to over 100 million consumers in 80 countries on-demand in just a few clicks.  Ask your burning questions, select who you want to answer, view actual insights that help you grow your business. Join the hundreds of leading brands who already utilize the power of Attest’s scalable intelligence platform.  Contact Attest today at www.askattest.com/happymr or find the link in the episodes show notes.

[00:56]

Hey, guys.  This is Jamin Brazil.  You’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast.  Today my guest is Mitchell Atchison, Senior Associate in U.S. Immunology Marketing Research at a leading global pharmaceutical firm.   He has spent his career in both retail and pharma. Mitchell, thanks so much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast with me today.

[01:17]

Thank you so much for having me.  Really looking forward to our conversation today.

[01:22]

So, tell me about your parents.  What did they do and how has that informed your career?

[01:27]

Thank you so much.  I’m really close with my parents, always have been.  My mom is a teacher, and my dad is an engineer. But he actually got his MBA and the type of work that he has done over the course of his career is very business-focused.  He does bring an engineering, analytical mindset to what he does, but he’s always been an operations manager or an operations supervisor. So he’s had that business background.  I’ve looked up to my parents my whole life; I still do. Honestly, I think the biggest thing that encouraged me to get to where I am today was probably my dad’s background, his business mindset.  And here I am: I’m actually living out the dream. I just recently started a business with my mom but also, on a day-to-day basis, working and marketing within pharmaceuticals. It’s been a journey, but it’s been a lot of fun in the process.

[02:36]

So, what area did you grow up in?

[02:37]

I’ve kind of moved all over the place, growing up.  I was born in Seymour, Indiana, before moving to South Carolina, when I was a baby.  Spent about seven years or so out on South Carolina. Loved in out there: loved the weather, loved the people, and everything about South Carolina.  It’s actually one of my favorite vacation destinations. Then moved out to south central California – Hanford, California, which is just down the road from you, Jamin.  Spent about seven years there as well before moving to the frozen tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota, after that.

[03:21]

It’s so funny.  Hanford, I was literally just in Hanford, which is an hour away from where I live, in Fresno, California.  This last weekend, my grandmother at 102 years old finally passed, and so we had a lot of family flying in from all over.  It was a great experience for us, celebrating her life. It is interesting to me being in that particular ecosystem because I think of Fresno as a…  It’s a whatever, half a million people, fifth largest city in California. Hanford is this really small microcosm of tight knit community. The downtown is really cool.  The people (at least I came in contact with) were friendly. It was like a real special… It’s a special neat sort of, not Mayberry-esque, but maybe a little bit where time has quite not caught up to it.

[04:28]

Yeah, absolutely.  First off, I’m so sorry hear that news.  I mean it’s always tough.

[04:35]

Well, 102.  She had a fantastic life.  I didn’t mean to take that with it.  I will say this little anecdote about her.  She is probably the most positive person I had ever met.  She had a tremendous amount of adversity in her life, growing up.  You think about all the technological advances that she has undergone.  She grew up and lived about half of her life in Arkansas and then moved to California in the hopes of a better life.  The framework there was farm labor and just a lot of primary-earner responsibilities and the household. Just a ton of what normal people would consider to be stress.  Every day for her was the best day of her life.

I remember there’s two like anecdotes that stand out to me:  the first one being… I don’t know when she slept. Nobody knew when she slept.  And I actually asked her one time, “Grandma, when do you sleep?’” or “How much do you sleep?”  And she told me, “Jamin, if I lay down too long, they’re going to start throwing dirt on me,” which I thought was just like..  Then the second thing, which happened about three years ago, she… 99 years old, coherent, doing great, but she lost the ability to swallow food.  So they had to insert a feeding tube, which, of course, sounds very sad. But she went through that whole process. After surgery, the family comes in and checks on her and my dad says, “How are they treating you?“  She responds, “They’re treating me great, and the food is fantastic.” Of course, at this point, my father is absolutely convinced that early stage dementia has set in. She looks at him and goes, “You don’t understand.  It actually smells really good.” So she’s always had this bent on positivity, and that’s something that I’ve sort of aspired to. And I think that it’s largely fallen… a lot of that has fallen into the community that she was a part of.

[06:46]

Yeah, Jamin, yeah, that’s so cool to hear.  I can share on that. My grandparents have been very inspiring in that same way.  To your point about Hanford, I think what’s cool about it… You mentioned the innocence, if you will, of Hanford and the ideal, kind of simple life style, if you will.  We very much experienced that when we lived out there. I think it’s probably something… it’s what a lot of people aspire to have. I know whenever we first moved out there, I think the town might have been maybe 30,000ish.  It may not even have been that. I think now it’s probably around may be 50, 60 thousand, somewhere in that range. That’s still not a big city but, at the same time, to nearly double growth within a very short period of time, just within the last basically decade or decade and a half is pretty impressive.  I think it really speaks to the quality of the town, what the town is able to offer, and just the community as a whole.

[07:59]

It’s interesting through a marketing researcher’s lens, almost 20% of the U.S. population lives in what’s classified as rural areas, which is by far and away (I think it’s over 90% of the actual land in the U.S.).  There is meaningful differences between cities and rural from a consumption perspective. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to make sure that market research has an adequate representation so that you do have that clear view of the market perspective, which, of course, informs sample frames and things like that.

[08:45]

Yeah, and that’s something too.  Whenever I’m doing my sampling or like setting up screeners and things like that with my partner agencies, one of the first things that I always ask or more or less direct them to is to say, “Hey, at the day I want a very representative sample of the broader population of physicians or the broader population of patients or whatever the responder base may be.”  I, ultimately, am going to make decisions off of that sample. So I want that sample to be representative of the population that I’m, ultimately, informing decisions on. So it’s absolutely crucial to ensure that in the grander universe of the population, we want to ensure that our sample is very representative of that.

[09:40]

So, tell me about one of the biggest challenges that you have overcome either personally or professionally.

[09:47]

You know it’s funny.  We actually just kind of started talking a little bit about it, Jamin. As I had mentioned, we had moved around all the time growing up.  So I think if I were to synthesize in just a couple of words of the biggest challenge, I think it’s been dealing with the consistent transition that I’ve gone through within my life.  I had mentioned all the states that I have lived in. Actually, I went to three different high schools, three different states, three different parts of the country, three straight semesters.  That was a challenge. That was a very sensitive time in life to move to the degree that I had done. I really think that just the consistent transition and constant moving, not really ever feeling like I had a home so to speak, growing up was a real challenge.  To be frank though, even though it’s been a challenge, I usually look at challenges as a… to try and be optimistic about them, to say, “Hey, what can I learn from these challenges?” Because I find that in those challenges, it seems to be where you learn the most.  So I really did grow a lot within that experience. Ultimately, I think I was able to become very comfortable in uncomfortable situations, and that’s helped me today. And it’s helped me to be very adaptable, dealing with different situations, dealing with different people, dealing with just different frames of mind and different ways of thinking.  I think that’s just being surrounded by so many different types of people in so many different parts of the country and even the world, for that matter, growing up. It’s just really opened up my mind, just to be very empathetic to other person or the audience, and from a business perspective, being able to craft the message towards that particular audience.

[11:52]

I think one of my favorite words is “empathy,” “kindness.”  This idea that… People naturally have a tendency to judge.  As we divorce ourselves from that tendency and move in a situation where we’re non-judgmental and more empathetic towards one another or even from a brand to a consumer framework, then there’s a connection that’s able to be made that is, I believe, paramount for success whether that’s at the individual level – you, me individually – or, if you think about it, again thinking about the relationship between brands and the empathy that they show towards their consumer group.  One of my go-to examples right now: I heard a talk recently from one of the head researchers at McDonald’s, and they were talking about how they have moved from a… maximize shareholder value through an antiquated concept like share of wallet to seeing customers as partners. So the way that they’re illustrating the partnership is actually how can they maximize the wallet value of the purchase for the consumer and then communicating that at the point of sale so that it literally translates to a, “Wow, I feel like McDonald’s is helping me maximize my value when I need that help at the register.”  They have a bunch of tactics, of course, around that. But I just love those stories of how brands are, in fact, partnering with their customers in order to improve the customer’s life as opposed to steal from it.

[13:41]

I couldn’t agree more.  At the end of the day we have to, as industries, regardless of the field that industry is in, we have to meet our customers where they are.  Yes, we may seek to change and move attitudes and beliefs, but at the end of the day, we need to meet them where they are and seek to form our marketing and promotional efforts in a manner that’s catering to their wants and their needs and their desires.  That’s all shaped by the atmosphere that these customers whether it’s the end-consumer or not If they’ve ultimately been surrounded with. Kind of getting back to that empathy piece, we need to empathize with our customers and, ultimately, cater to where they’re at now, what are their wants, what are their needs, and what are their desires that we can, ultimately, as an organization that sells products or services that we can fit those needs for those specific customers.

[14:51]

Yeah, and the empathy, it’s interesting as it starts informing your overall behavior, obviously at a macro-level (brand to consumer), but at a micro-level internally.  Market researchers, we have internal customers really, don’t we? How can we help them, empower them, aid them in their decision-making processes to be data or customer-centric?

[15:16]

Yes, that’s exactly right, that is exactly right, yeah.

[15:20]

So, tell me a little bit about a research project that you’re most proud of.

[15:24]

Yeah, I’ve had multiple roles in my career so far, all within analytics or market research.  I think probably my favorite project actually comes from… About two jobs ago, I actually worked in forecasting market research.  Within this role, we would essentially project out the demand and, ultimately, the revenue across each of the products within a given portfolio.  Every year, we went through a process called strategic planning. And this is where again we project out the demand and the revenue for anywhere between five and ten years in the future.  This helps just to inform whatever organization it is: here’s what you can expect from a general revenue perspective. And it can just inform whether or not there are any gaps in revenue expectations.  That way, we can cater our strategy and investment strategy to whatever that may be. With this, we leverage a variety of secondary sources, syndicated sources, primary market research, ultimately, leverage our deep understanding of each of the respective areas that will be your end.  Then, we project out what that demand would be and what our expectations are for each of the given products. And then we seek to gain alignment at various levels of the company and, ultimately, the CEO is the one that signs off. It’s through those efforts that we get a really solid, collaborative effort to understand the state of the business and where we’re heading.

[17:25]

That sounds awesome.  [laughs] I mean any time…  I love the triangulation of truth to truth where you can take consumer self-reported data and then combine that with external data in order to really add to the story narrative on, in your case, predicting what the market’s going to do.  That sort of empowerment helps the C-Suite understand and frame the importance of those consumer opinions.

[18:05]

That’s exactly right, yeah.  And we try as much as we can leverage all the data that we have in front of us.  So that way, that truly guides the decisions and the inputs into the forecast that we always make.  But I will say, though, one thing that we often do caveat (now, granted we may not do this if there’s a vice-president in the room), but we always jokingly say, “The first rule of forecasting is that the forecast is always wrong.”  [laughs] We can leverage all the tools in front of us, but at the end of the day, they’re all projections. In many cases, they’re pretty close, but we do have to realize that we’re dealing with, in some cases, imperfect data, but we are making projections in the future that may or may not come true.

[18:59]

What is your biggest market research challenge?

[19:01]

There are many challenges.  I think probably the biggest one that comes to mind is probably communication synthesis.  As market researchers, we’re used to dealing with a lot of data, but I always have to remember that, as a market researcher, I have to recognize that a majority of my audience, if not all of my audience, doesn’t have two different things:  It’s one: they don’t know the data to the degree that I do because I spend as much time as what I do with the data; I have a trained market research background. So my audience just in most cases doesn’t have that. Secondly, my audience doesn’t the time to digest all of the data that I’m used to dealing with.  So I truly believe that my task as a market researcher is to make my market research and make the data matter to them. Again, communication synthesis is key.

So a couple of things that I really seek to do whenever I’m synthesizing, whatever message it is that I’m communicating:  First off, I really seek to just be… keep my message brief, concise, and to the point and, ultimately, communicating the most important things that matter to my audience or to my customer, if you will, that I’m talking to.  Then, secondly, I try and communicate the “So What’s?” of the research, as opposed to just maybe messaging that data. Some of the things that I do for that specifically… Whenever I’m communicating verbally in a formal presentation and informal presentation, (I’ll tell you I’m one of the bigger data geeks out there.)  But at the same time when I’m communicating my message, actually I’ll try to rarely communicate in numbers. I try and speak in relative terms because at the end of the day, most of the people I’m talking to are not data-junkies like what I may be. I try to communicate – again back to what we talked about earlier – empathy.  I try to empathize with them and speak in a manner that’s going to make sense to them. I really try and speak in very relative terms. I use numbers when needed, but I try to avoid them if possible. If I can deliver even a stronger message when not using those numbers. Whenever it comes to written communication, one thing that I always do is I always provide an executive summary and within that, I present the most important information for my audience.  It may be three bullet points; it may be five bullet points. But I try to keep it very concise, to the point, and even in the executive summaries I try and avoid the numbers because just trying to communicate again the “So-Whats.” Why does this matter to the audience? and What do they really need to know? If they only had two minutes to digest what I’m communicating to them, I want them to take this because that’s, ultimately, what’s needed to make and shape decisions.

[22:28]

So, two things there really stand out to me.  One is your framework for using relative terms versus absolute.  My go-to example for that is no one knows how much a six-cylinder car is worth on an absolute basis, but we ALL know it’s worth more than a four-cylinder car, right?  So the point is that human beings, when you give us an absolute number, it’s really hard for us to digest and process that. But, as soon as you can move it to a relative measure, then it becomes easy to say, “Holy crap!  Yeah, that’s a lot better, or a lot worse, or big problem, or doing great.”

[23:06]

That’s exactly right; it’s exactly right.  Even though I may have absolute numbers, I may present – speaking of the relative piece – I may use ordinal references whenever I’m talking about a particular attribute that I’m referencing.  Even though the question I may have asked in that particular survey, it may not have been an ordinal question, so to speak by nature, but I still may present it an ordinal fashion. I’ll say, “Hey, relatively speaking, our product is decently close to the leading product or a maybe little bit ahead” or something like that.  But I’ll speak in very relative terms as opposed to using “Such and such product is .3 percentage points ahead of the other product, and then that product is 6 percentage points ahead of the other product over there.” I just think presenting in relative terms, at least the audience that I’m dealing with on a day-in, day-out basis, that’s how they prefer to receive information.  I’ve always found that the discussions are much more rich and the take-aways are much more actionable whenever I present in those kinds of terms.

[24:29]

Yeah, absolutely.  You’re getting to the “So-What,” of course, feeds that perfectly because as soon as you get to the relative – this is bigger than that or more valuable than that – then, of course, you have to deal with what is the implication of that.

And the second thing that you said that really stood out to me (and I think that we as market researchers need to hear this repeatedly) is that we need to have headline communications.  A good example of that is when I send a memo; I might have ten hours invested in the memo itself, from just gathering content and whatever research and having a point of view. If you only have 30 seconds, just read this.   That’s the three bullet points or whatever that synthesizes exactly what the overall points are. And, if they decide they want more information or have time, then – guess what? – there’s a bunch of documentation and etc., etc.

[25:31]

That’s exactly right.  I often will try and think about my audience and say, “What do they really need to know?”  In the executive summary, I put the most important pieces and then too, if I’m framing a presentation, sometimes I may even just present the three bullet points that I have in executive summary.  I try and understand, “OK. What does my audience need to know and how much do they need to know?” Because there may be some other interesting points, but, at the end of the day, if those are just interesting points, I probably don’t need to waste any of my time and, definitely, I don’t need to waste my audience’s time by communicating those points whenever they may not have any sort of business relevance.

[26:31]

How will the market research space be different in the next five years?

[26:35]

You know I think one of the challenges that we’re facing in market research right now is attention spans in this day and age are in competition at a higher rate than ever before.  With the growth in technology and entertainment and things like that, maybe a 15-minute survey, you may have some respondents, they spent an hour and a half working because they’re maybe messing on their phone or watching Netflix or something like that while they’re doing it.  You have to sometimes question the reliability of that data. There’s also, of course, unfortunately, fraudulent survey techniques such as Boxiter, unfortunately becoming more prevalent in this day and age. At the end of the day, these types of things, those are just a couple of examples, they can lead to poor or, in some cases, unreliable data quality within the research that we’re conducting.  Truly, when I think of bad data, I think of bad data as bad insights. Bad insights can ultimately lead to bad decisions that are made for our customers. Meanwhile, “Big Data,” behavioral data, is becoming more and more available, and it’s increasing within its look-back history. When I think about the difference in five years, I think the reliance on that Big Behavioral Data will increase even more significantly in the future.  Not only allows us to just analyze that behavioral data in and of itself but what’s cool is we then also link it back to attitude and belief data where we can truly understand the relationship and the correlation that attitudes and beliefs actually have with behavioral, which I think is really exciting for us as market researchers and analytics professionals.

[28:49]

That’s so funny.  You’re bringing up some interesting points:  One centric to data quality but you’re attacking it from two different points of view.  One is the researcher’s responsibility to consider the research participant or the respondent or the other human beings that are going to take the 15-20 minutes.  I’ve read a lot on maximum attention spans. When I speak, I have a rule, which is I have to earn the consumer’s or the listener’s attention every 20 seconds. So that creates a tremendous burden around the content that I’m planning on presenting.  I think in research we have not yet completely moved away from or even materially moved away from the 20-minute survey. But, if you look at the rest of… The entertainment industry is a great canary is the coal mine. There’s a book written by (I might be misremembering, but I think it was Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death).  The context there is that the space of entertainment is all about faster…hit ‘em, hit ’em, hit ‘em, hit ’em. hit ’us.  So attention spans are just decreasing overall and, on top of it, you have so many things: notifications on your phone or kids or whatever that are now interrupting your time.  As researchers, we need to take a step back and assess the survey instruments that we’re leveraging.

And then the second part of it, which I think is, honestly, one of the, if not the biggest problem or concern of mine in research right now, and that is who’s taking the surveys.  I know of one project this last week that was fulfilled for a CPI of cost-per-interview of $3.75 among CEOs. It was an 18-minute survey. And I’ve just kind of pulled back and I’m like, “Gosh, what CEO do I know that would take an 18-minute survey, let alone for no money?”  You really have to start applying our common-sense factor. We don’t even need spidey sense here in order to say, “Is this real?” because we want it to be real. As researchers. I think that we’re willing to turn a blind eye to both of those facts, saying, “Oh, well, I got my completes.”  We just need to be honest with ourselves when we’re looking through this lens of “Would I take the survey? Would my kids? Would my target audience take the survey?” and “Would they take the survey for that much money?”

[31:45]

And it, ultimately, gets back to what we talked about earlier too when we think about sampling.  Let’s say we were able to get respondents for that, albeit there probably wouldn’t be that many CEOs out there who would be willing to, as you mentioned, take an 18-minute survey for nothing.  At the end of the day, if we did get some respondents, would they truly be representative of the grander population? So I’d even probably question the reliability of the data that we even have as to whether or not that can be applied to the population as well.

[32:26]

What are the three characteristics of an All-Star Employee?

[32:29]

For me, the first thing and probably the most important thing, at least for me that comes to mind, I think is an overall passion for the customer, capital C – Customer, if you will, because at the end of the day, we need to understand, regardless of the industry, that there’s, ultimately, someone on the other end of our product or service that we’re, ultimately, selling, who benefits from that product or service.  I think in the All-Star Employee, in general, again regardless of the industry or the product or service, just develops an excitement and a passion for the work that they do that, ultimately, influences that customer. I always even think about the… Fortunately, or unfortunately, my girlfriend actually hates it when I do this, but I critique the service that I get at restaurants. It’s not because I’m trying to be critical of that particular person, but truly I’m looking at, “OK, does this person or does this company, does this restaurant or whatever it is, regardless of the service, do they understand the customer and are they seeking to fill the gaps for the customer, whether it be in service of whether it be in product?”  That’s something that I’ve always found the great employees separate from the good employees. It’s just an overall passion for the end-customer in mind.

The second thing, we’ve talked about a little bit, but it’s communication.  It’s knowing your audience: What do they need to know? How much do they need to know?  And, at the end of the day, especially as market researchers, we need to communicate and carry our message in a manner that is efficient, and active to deliver the point that we’re trying to make.  We talked about attention spans just a moment ago. I know we were talking about surveys, but attention spans are tight within the marketplace. We’ve got meetings we’ve got to run to. We only have a limited capacity of things that we can think about and process.  So I want to make sure that I’m delivering a concise, effective message that going to get the point across to my audience.

The last thing that I think is a characteristic of an All-Star Employee is prioritization.  My boss always tells me that with organization, we want to focus on the most important things that we know the least about.  So what I try and do with that, I try and use that as a filter in terms of keeping my eye on the most important things that are necessary to moving the business forward.

[35:35]

I have not heard it said exactly like that, but I love all three of those things.  So, we’ve added a new question to the discussion guide. I’m really excited about this really for two reasons:  One is I can’t wait to hear your answer to it. The second thing is I think it is actually something that we as people should actually have if we employ this thing, this that we’re going to be talking about momentarily, then it will help us as humans do just a little bit better or maybe, to your earlier point, help prioritize.  That is, “What is your motto?”

[36:18]

So, my motto – and I think about this all the time – I think about it in the workplace; I think about it in the personal space, but my motto is to, “Don’t focus on moving the pebbles at your feet when there are boulders that stand in the way of your journey.”  What I mean by that is there’s going to be low hanging fruit, if you will, or maybe small things that may distract you from ultimately what you’re trying to do. But we have to recognize there’s big barriers that stand in the way of us and our customers; there’s big problems that we have to solve.  Let’s spend our time and energy and mental capacity focusing on what those big barriers are. To get back to the motto, the big boulders – what are those? Let’s not spend the time moving those pebbles that are at our feet, but let’s really focus on addressing the boulders, addressing the big barriers that are standing between us and our customers.  Ultimately, as we’ve talked about several times, filling the gaps, filling the needs, filling the wants that our customers are, ultimately, expecting out of us in the products and in the services that we, ultimately, deliver.

[37:41]

That’s great, and it also has this implication like a day-to-day level where if…  Getting back to the service being bad at a restaurant, that’s such a pebble in context of potentially outsized issues – maybe self-awareness – that are holding an individual back.

[38:03]

That’s exactly right.  One thing I do just on a very practical level every single week, the very first thing that I do when I come into work on Mondays, is I develop a prioritization list.  I say, “What are the things that I need to get right this week?” I only have three slots that I can actually put something in. So I really have to prioritize the things that I need to get right.  Then I have a second section: “What are the things that I need to get done?” Then I can put three things in there as well. So, these things, I don’t need to spend as much mental capacity on. Yes, they need to get done; they are tasks that I need to complete, but at the end of the day, being right on those tasks are not nearly as crucial as those that go under my first bucket.  And then, beyond that, I’ve got an unlimited list of low priority tasks, items and projects and tasks that I just don’t need to spend nearly as much time on and that aren’t “mission critical” to the vision that we’re, ultimately, out to achieve.

[39:11]

My guest today has been Mitchell Atchison.  Thank you, Mitchell, for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast.

[39:17]

Absolutely, thank you so much.  I really appreciate it and really enjoyed our conversation.

[39:22]

Yeah, so did I.  And to all of you who are listening if you would please, please, please take the time to screenshot this episode, share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, the platform of your choice.  As always, your reviews are greatly appreciated. I hope you have a fantastic day! Thanks.

[39:44]

Stay tuned for this episode’s Tech Overview, featuring Chilmark Digital’s Barbara Alpert.  Hey, everybody, this is Jamin here with Barbara Alpert, who also goes by Bobbie for those interested.  She’s part of a company called Chilmark and, as our guest today, our actual first guest, on the Tech corner.  This is a piece of the Happy Market Research Podcast where we’re taking an early-stage company and introducing them to the marketplace.  So, Bobbie, thanks very much for being on the show.

[40:22]

OK, my pleasure, Jamin.  I don’t know if we are so much early stage, but we have an evolving technology.  So I think that’s still kind of an interesting way of looking at it because Chilmark Digital is actually a 12-year-old company.  It’s a tech company that creates video engagement and testing software that’s designed to help researchers and clients tell more compelling stories.  Our main product is called Resync. Some of the people out there might know it as Responsync, which was its original name. But now with everything being faster and more condensed for a lot of reasons, we have renamed it Resync.  It’s a media insights platform.

The company was actually born when work we were doing at the nexus of media and technology in a television production company we had, led to more opportunities with clients actually on the technology side.  That offered some interesting opportunities for us, and we changed our focus from producing to video to applying technology to help make it resonate more with people. A little note here just on where my partner, Lew, and I came from is we came out of the agency and research business.  So we have an interesting, somewhat eclectic, background. We approach research from the perspective of storytellers, and, as storytellers, we always want to know how audiences are affected by the video that they see and hear and, equally important, why the respond as they do, and now more and more with social media – how they express those feelings.  What has become clear to us over the years, working with a lot of clients with our platform, it’s not what you say – it’s what people hear. And there’s that little gap very frequently, and that’s the place that we do our magic because we find out what is responsible for what may be the difference between what people are putting out in their content and how audiences are receiving it.  We know how important it is to close that gap.

We also realized really from the first moment that we had to reflect the media world and consumer lifestyles authentically if we were going to get results that clients could act on.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to use twentieth century tools for twenty-first century media. This was also something that was very important to us. What defines and distinguishes Resync to us is both its relevance and its adaptability to a changing-media world.  Interestingly, when we started, TV was just TV. There was really no need to define it as linear TV because it was only one way. And you saw it the way people intended you to see it. Now people don’t just see media, they actively consume it, and they consume it in the form that they prefer.  One of the important things about Resync is that that platform was designed to account for these kinds of changes. So what we do with that platform is to integrate data on where response rises and falls on a moment-to-moment basis integrated with the feelings and attitudes that are driving it, and that’s all synced to video time.  So, what creates this integrated tapestry that gives you both a detailed and complete picture and one with all the nuances of the colors… And we’re on all devices. Importantly, and we also know uniquely, we can create authentic simulations of social media platforms and test content both across different platforms and within a given platform.  All the environments that people use to get their media, we can represent. The kind of result of that is that we test the way you run. So clients are getting a much more accurate picture of what is happening when they’re testing their content and why it’s happening, and, importantly, how that varies by where people are going to see that.

A lot of the work we have done has pointed out how important that is, and now it’s not just what you create but how you are going to distribute it that’s going to determine how people are going to respond to it.  And isn’t that what you want to find out in the first place?

[45:20]

So, going all the way back to the beginning, not a start-up at 12 years.  At what point, do you think, does a company stop being a start-up? I have been asking myself this question now for just a little while based on the conversation I had with Kristen Luck.

[45:36]

Oh, that’s interesting.  I heard from her the other day.  You know I think that you really hit on something.  I think that’s evolving too because you can go off in a lot of different directions.  I think from our perspective, having started off as a production company and having gotten that to a certain point and having actually nested our technology within that environment to begin with, you took that out and that was a start-up.  But this was not our first product. So, we go back to having a product that we began the company with, and we started with this product about eight years ago. Now, with things changing as dynamically as they are, I think you’re caught in a way constantly in start-up mode because it’s also we find ourselves in a lot of cases dealing with a lot of start-up companies because all the new stuff is coming out of the new, young companies.  You’re kind of in that mode of pressing the reset button very frequently, and that is challenging and exciting. I would say that in a way you never end that until you exit, until you exit. I guess you go from constantly starting and restarting to a good exit.

[47:08]

Maybe the point is at which time M&A becomes part of your narrative.  I’ve heard it framed in terms of revenue, longevity, etc. but like is Uber still a start-up.  I don’t know, but I think it was interesting that it was framed that way.

Measurement in context is something I’m hearing a lot of need around among brands.  Impact of ads if you’re getting ready to catch your train or whatever, get on the subway versus the context of “I’m on my leather chair with a cat in my lap and a fire at my feet.”  The context of the consumption as well as the platform is really important. Do you have a specific example of a project that you guys have worked on and delivered a great outcome for the customer?

[48:09]

It’s an interesting point that you raised about the context, Jamin, because we have found that there is an enormous difference in the response based on when and where people are seeing it.  It’s not just the programming content and the platform on which it’s delivered but. as you know, it can be very much the context in which they are seeing it. Because we’re on all the devices and there is a great deal of information that we can gather about how people are viewing it, we have seen that.  I think there are a number of tales to tell as far as context, but I’ll give you one example that was an across-platform study that we did. This was a case where there was a common set of ads that we tested in six different media environments, ranging from linear TV to TV from the web to an original network, YouTube channel, and three original YouTube channels:  Machinima, Maker Studios, and BuzzFeed.  The idea really was to say, “OK, how does the platform on which people see this affect how they respond to a common set of commercials?”  We held everything constant; in essence, we created programming for the YouTube channels so that it reflected the program time of a network, a half hour, comedy, and also that it was controlled for the program to advertising ratio.  What was really interesting was that there were big differences in both demographics by platform but also not just in terms of positive and negative response to the commercial but which elements of the commercial were most persuasive or most dissuasive in the various audience sectors. What that showed very, very clearly was that any advertiser who thinks they’re going to go out with a commercial and just distribute it the same way across all the platforms is making a huge mistake because there’s a huge impact in how people are responding to the surrounding content.  Really in a way, it’s how fast their clock is running also because there are the expectations on different platforms that you’re going to see content at a certain speed, certain kind of editing, and so on. There are a lot of complicating factors, but it also gives a tremendously rich pool of information to clients as to how to be able to recut and repurpose content to be able to take advantage and give it a longer life as well as connecting in a more compelling way with various audience segments. And that was done for network. The client in that case was the network, and challenge was really to see where do the commercials do best?  Is linear TV still king of the roost? Has it been overtaken? I can’t really reveal; all I can tell you is that the results were very clear and very actionable for advertisers wanting to take advantage of each medium and platform for its best results.

[52:08]

Barbara, if somebody wants to get in contact with you, how would they do that?

[52:11]

The office phone is 212-744-0213.  If somebody needs immediate attention, they can call my cell:  917-847-3165. Let me just also give you email then, which most people prefer: balpert@ChilmarkDigital.com.

[52:36]

Barbara, thanks so much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast.

[52:39]

Thank you so much, Jamin.  I enjoyed it enormously.

[52:46]

This episode is brought to you by Attest.  Attest is a powerful, easy-to-use SAS platform that connects businesses to over 100 million consumers in 80 countries on-demand in just a few clicks.  Ask your burning questions, select who you want to answer, view actual insights that help you grow your business. Join the hundreds of leading brands who already utilize the power of Attest’s scalable intelligence platform.  Contact Attest today at www.askattest.com/happymr or find the link in the episodes show notes.

Joaquim Bretcha is the International Director at Netquest, a quantitative technology platform with self-reported and digital behavioral tracking providing customer insights in 23 countries. Additionally, he is the recently elected ESOMAR President, Advisor to MindProber, Co-Founder of NGO Health US Nepal and speaker.

This episode is brought to you by G3 Translate. The G3 Translate team offers unparalleled expertise in foreign language translations for market researchers and insights professionals across the globe. Not only do we speak hundreds of languages, we are fluent in market research. For more information, please visit us at g3translate.com.

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Netquest

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[00:00]

On Episode 204 of the Happy Market Research Podcast, I’m interviewing Joaquim Bretcha, President of ESOMAR.  But first a word from our sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by G3 Translate.  The G3 Translate team offers unparalleled expertise in foreign language translations for market researchers and insight professionals across the globe.  Not only do they speak hundreds of languages, they are fluent in market research. For more information, please visit them at G3Translate.com.

[00:37]

Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast.  My guest today is Joaquim Bretcha, International Director at Netquest. Netquest is a quantitative technology platform with self-reported and digital behavioral tracking, providing customer insights in 23 countries.  Additionally, Joaquim is the recently elected ESOMAR President. He’s the advisor to MindProber, co-founder of NGO HealthusNepal, and speaker. Joaquim, thank you very much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast.  

[01:13]

Thank you, Jamin.  It’s my pleasure.

[01:15]

Tell us a little bit about where you grew up.  

[01:19]

Good.  I was born in Barcelona, and I was born in the late years of the Franco dictatorship.  At the time, Barcelona wasn’t the brilliant city that we know today. You must know that the Spanish Civil War in the 30s, 40 years of dictatorship dramatically cut the evolution of the traditionally prosperous Barcelona.  Very importantly, it shaped the mentality, and it became an undynamic mentality with a complex of inferiority towards Europe. But I was fortunate. I was born in a family that had overcome this closing of borders, both mental and physical.  For instance, my mother at the age of 18 went to U.K. as a babysitter, and she learned English when almost nobody spoke English at the time in Spain. My father, who is a doctor in engineering, after studies he went to Norway. So I was fortunate to be born in a family that always had this international approach.  Indeed, I was conceived in France. My father was working for a multi-national company, and he was expatriated in France. I was conceived there although born in Barcelona but they moved back to France where I spent my first two years of my life. It’s not that my French was from that period, I guess not, because then I had to study.  But it definitely created a mental framework for the family. So I can say that my childhood was a happy childhood in a large, educated family that never transmitted to us this complex of inferiority that was among the Spaniards when looking at Europe, at that time Western Europe.

I was a very curious boy.  I loved to read everything I could, being… Tin-Tin, my favorite comics.  I can tell at the age of 14, I had my first interchange with a French family.  So, the French guy came to my house, and I went to his in Paris and Normandy. I did the same at 17 with a guy from Connecticut.  So he came to our home, and I went to Connecticut for a month. This is something that my two other brothers also had. So I was fortunate enough to have these exchanges and this framework as a family.

As a teenager, I witnessed the entrance of Spain in the European Union in 1986, and this was a total transformation of the country and society.  Suddenly, we got connected to the European market, and the European trends started to reach us at the similar pace as the rest of European countries.  Indeed, the gap of products that we could find in our supermarkets, compared to the ones I could find in our neighbor, France, started to diminish. So it meant we were getting closer to Europe.  At that time, Spain was booming, and the country was receiving a lot of investment. But the fall of the Berlin wall occurred, and then suddenly Spain was not as attractive as it was those years. However, Spain had already been connected to Europe, and it really changed the mentality.  More concretely, more particularly, in l992, Barcelona held the Olympic Games, and it was a success. It really transformed the city and me, being in my early 20s, I was also. A nice way of looking at the world, and I am becoming proud of where we were living and what we were doing in Barcelona.  And it completely changed the mentality of my city and my country. We became international, completely international. So, this gives you the context of my childhood and where I was growing up.

[05:21]

I know that you are – and we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the podcast – you are connected with Catalan, right?

[05:28]

Yes, I am Catalan, yeah.

[05:31]

And there’s a lot relative to the uniqueness of that culture in the context of the larger EU.  Can you tell us a little bit about what’s that like and how that’s shaped your world view?

[05:46]

Yeah.  Of course, I cannot get into politics, but I just get into cultural aspect.  So, we have our own language and our own culture. Of course, it’s a little one.  Catalan is spoken and understood by – let’s say – 9 million people. So it’s a small language but very active, very active.  It has been preserved throughout many years. Culturally very active in all sorts of cultural fields. It was given me the opportunity of looking at the world from – let’s say – not from a very strong and dominant culture but from a little culture that is fighting for its preservation and striving this multi-diverse, multi-cultural world to be there on the stage.  So it gives me a sensitiveness to all sorts of realities. I’m not looking at the world from a very dominant perspective but from a way that I try to understand the culture of others, how others look at the world, and try to understand their position. So that’s why I love to be in contact with people coming from very strong cultures, very dominant countries and languages as well with all sorts of other origins.

[07:12]

At this point, I really want to pull this out because in a lot of ways, this is relevant to market research today.  Market research as… (I hear lots of different numbers between 40 and 70 billion dollars) but we know as an industry has been not growing in line with, at least not growing in line with GDPs.

[07:34]

No, actually, the last ESOMAR report is that what we understand as traditional market research accounts for 45 billion dollars and, if we enlarge the view and we get into the new scope of market research, it can be like 75 billion dollars.

[07:51]

And so then you broaden that to the utilization of consumer insights, which has just completely blown up over the decade.  Everyone from the intern to the CEO is conducting a survey – at least, it seems that way – given the democratization of access to the consumers through different tools like Survey Monkey or what have you.   So market research in a lot of ways is this very large industry and important industry, and yet we have to have that humble or that view of the marketplace at large to understand how we can fit in and empower and ensure that business decisions are being informed in a correct way.     

[08:45]

Yep, this is, I would say if not the biggest, one of the biggest challenges we are facing now:  In bringing the voice of the people, voice of the customer, in a proper way to the table and being conducted with the right methodologies and the rigor that it merits.

[09:04]

So, in 2000 you joined TNS as the Retail Services Director.  How in the world did you wind up in market research?

[09:14]

Yeah, I think I will join some of the answers you have had so far.  I guess I fell into market research by a natural fall. Since very young, I was always interested in society, in politics, in geography.  I was always interested in understanding the world and people. I’ve always been fascinated in learning new things, learning things about societies.  This is why I studied economics, led by this passion. In the university, I was much involved in a student association called AIESEC. It was a unique international association for students of economics.  I started to get involved into promoting international understanding, education, organizing conferences, and attending international conferences. So, this moved me to my first job; I was hired by the largest FMCG Spanish association.  I was responsible for organizing seminars, conferences; for taking Spanish managers to visit retailers in Europe and the U.S. to learn from those countries how retail was evolving and consumer patterns were evolving. So I became an expert in retail and the consumer understanding.  Then, from this expertise, I was hired by Carrefour, the big retailer to create the first category management department in Carrefour supermarkets. I stayed there for two years. And there was a merger, and I had to be moved to Madrid. I spent there some time. I had been married with Hollis Carelli, my wife.  I didn’t like the outcome of the new company. So, that’s when TNS came and they were looking for a retailer specialist. I had been in touch with them before. When I was at the first job I was mentioning, I was also purchasing research. And I had a relationship with them. I was always interested in trends, in society, in consumers.  And I was coming from being a retailer; so, I thought it was a nice move. And I got into TNS as the expert in retail end-shopper.

[11:26]

What was one of the more difficult or interesting, I should say – one of the more transitions moving into research for you?

[11:35]

Now when I recall it because I did this move twice; I did it again later.  I think the transition at the first moment was to cross the bridge from being a purchaser and the one that has the power and that has the money because I was a retailer.  So I was responsible for negotiating with manufacturers, and I was the one that was deciding what product was being sold on the shelves, and all this negotiation behind. Suddenly, I crossed the bridge and became a provider.  At that moment (I don’t know if now is the same) but at that moment, it was an important change. Being a provider and being a client, that is an important difference. I remember when I was a client, I could take the phone, call whoever it was and they would just show up in my office.  And when I was a client and I was taking the phone and trying to get those meetings and get relevant to clients. So that’s the difference. That’s the important difference at the moment. But of then on a change of that, I could get immersed into knowledge. So, when I was a retailer, it was a lot of management and Excel spreadsheets, analyzing revenues and profits and ROI and negotiating everything.  And then I could do the same but understanding the consumer, understanding from at that moment TNS Worldpanel data, so the consumption trends and so on. What I really got in love with was storytelling. I have discovered throughout the years that I’m a good storyteller. So, I discovered that and I became a quite successful presenter in conferences and speaker. I really enjoyed that way of building stories with data.

[13:43]

Storytelling has been…  I actually have been reflecting on this, and I’m going to be writing a post:  trends that will continue to gain momentum in 2019 both from a technology perspective and also as a skill-set perspective.  One of those trends that I’ve been picking up on from our guests and just observations on the marketplace is storytelling as a skill in the same way that math is skill.

[14:12]

It’s fundamental but it’s not just today.  I mean it comes from the most ancient times.  When you see the paintings in the caves, those people who were painting those buffaloes or those deer, they were storytelling; they were telling stories to their friends and families in the cave.  So it’s been forever and will be forever. We humans, we need this storytelling.

[14:35]

I like that analogy.  I’ve never heard anybody put it exactly like that before.  Of course, I’m thinking to myself that’s like the old school whiteboarding.   

[14:44]

All of us…  When you talk with your grandparents or other people or younger people, everybody likes to listen to stories and then you see that you reach much better to their inside.

[15:03]

Do you feel like we’re as an industry treating storytelling as more of a skill that is learnable and also sellable versus how we’ve done it historically?

[15:19]

I think we have to look at the origins of market research.  I think we have not been that good in showing off our skills, our capabilities, our strengths.  Some of the people that were good at that, for instance, consultants – they have very easily taken the stage on behalf of us.  We have the knowledge and the data, and we have the right people who know how to answer the appropriate questions and join the dots with the data.  So we have all the input to be the best storytellers – and the best storytellers in the world because we have the information and we know how to analyze and make sense of that information.  So we can be the best storytellers. So, from one side, yes, I agree: it’s a learnable skill. But also it comes from your DNA; I mean there are some people that are given and some people that are not so given.  But we have to push people because I think everybody is capable of telling stories. Some will be more graceful; some others will be less, but everybody is capable of telling a story with sense and purpose. I think we have to be less shy and let our creativity flow with the inputs we have.

[16:39]

Beautiful!  So, Netquest has seen…  I’ve been following Netquest really since you guys started or since the company started.  You’ve seen steady growth over years; you’ve been part of it and obviously before as well.  What are two keys of success that other executives and companies can learn from?

[17:00]

OK, I could mention many.  Of course, I wasn’t the founder of the company.  So I could mention many relating to the founder of the company.  I joined in 2009; so, it’s nine years already. I’ve seen all the expansion, and I’ve been part of this expansion during the last nine years.  I would pick two key points. One is the values and purpose, and the other one is perseverance. Values and purpose – we have defined our mission as a mission that we want to create a mirror of society, for society and promote values accordingly.  These values give us guidelines to behave in our daily basis. Particularly when critical decisions arise, it’s when values have a purpose. When particular decisions arise that you can go one side or the other side is when you set the values and say, “No, no.  We have this value. We have to have be current and consistent; so, let’s keep the decision within or according to the value. So we have all these values set in place, and it’s a kind of common culture.

Secondly, perseverance.  Netquest has been a pioneer.  It was born here in Barcelona when the Spanish market was not prepared.  It was created in 2001 as a survey platform for the Spanish market, an online survey platform.  It took some time to make it work. I wasn’t an easy path. In 2005, Netquest created the first digital access panel, and it was launched in a moment in which the Spanish market was not ready for that.  All the questions arose, and all the questions and difficulties were there. But it is a perseverant company and, in the end, we became the clear leaders of the market, and it allowed us to expand to first to LatAm and lately to some other countries like the U.S.  For instance, we have been evangelizing on the online mythology for many years when these markets were not mature like the Spanish market or the LatAm market – many, many years investing in evangelizing, showing how it can be done. We were also the first ones in getting the ISO quality stamp when dealing with samples.  Much before the GDPR and the strict rules regarding how to treat people, we already knew that we had to treat people with transparency and fairness in their system. Most recently, when in 2014 Netquest acquired the Dutch company Wakoopa, which is a company that developed software by which we can track what people do online and mobile, of course, with their consent.  This is the secret of the panel: always the consent and the good information of what they are doing with us. During these last four years we have as well been evangelizing on the digital passive measurement, publishing papers, news cases, handbooks or presenting at conferences in America, Europe, APAC. I personally have presented in North America, LatAm, Europe, and APAC and different cases of how we can track digital behavior of people, how it can be very beneficial for companies to understand the digital space.  So, I would say values and perseverance in the mission that we have.

[20:26]

Yeah, the values…  The word that I really like there is this mirror so that the view back on the person and then understanding if they’re a good fit is absolutely critical.  How have you applied that to your new role or how will you apply that to your new role at ESOMAR?

[20:49]

Well, for me values are very important, and I’m very glad that most lately ethics has come at the front of every discussion.  It’s been also pushed by legislation in a way, but today in this Big-Data world, I’m happy to see that more and more people are demanding to create an ethics framework to deal with the information and to deal with what we people give to the Big Data.  Aligned with the legislation and this demand, for me values and ethics are a must, and it’s something that, as professionals, we have to upstand because it is the way that we can have credibility in front of the stakeholders that we relate to. So, as professionals, as market researchers, ethics must be our main, let’s say, main asset to start with.

[21:44]

So, kind of piggybacking on one or two points:  purpose and perseverance. Perseverance: anytime someone says that word, I think about Ernest, I believe his last name is Shackleton.  Ernest Shackleton is a fairly well-known historical figure. He was the captain of a ship. Anyway, his family crest was “We Conquer through Perseverance.”  I think I’m getting that right. That has stuck with me, and I’ve heard this whatever, maybe two decades ago now. But that has stuck with me through my life.  It’s interesting a lot of people I believe, they give up before they get the payday. And I don’t necessarily mean the payday in a monetary way. It could be just emotional or investment with family and friends.  Thinking it’s about the long game where you have to play towards, not at a play-by-play. Obviously, we… Continuing the analogy, when we’re in the trenches or when we’re playing the game or whatever it is, every play’s important, it moves us down the field.  But we have to understand that we’re going to lose some. It’s about how we consistently show up and then execute every day, year after year, not just week after week, that winds up putting us in a dominant position.

[23:08]

But this is always a difficult moment to assess:  whether you have to persevere or whether you have stop and change your activity.  It’s always difficult to know what’s the right point, but it’s true. Perseverance is important.  By the way, I just checked and it’s Endurance, not Endeavor.

[23:28]

Ah, there it is – Endurance.  Yeah, yeah, endurance. That’s right.  That was the name of his ship. But then, having that view of perseverance, all of a sudden it starts informing your purpose and tying that back to you guys pioneering the ISO certification, which is really important to take the time out.  That’s not something that’s just easy, off-the-shelf. You just don’t write a check. There’s a lot of effort – time and treasure – that’s involved in that certification, especially, I’d imagine, in the early days, and being willing to make that investment because a lot of times there isn’t a direct ROI that’s measurable in the first quarter of that.  You’re thinking about, “OK, I’m going to make this investment, and that’s going to pay off over the next five years as we differentiate ourselves in the market of having this certification and proving that we’re putting our money where our mouth is, and we are quality and a brand that you can trust.”

[24:27]

Here there is a couple of lessons.  One is that because Netquest was not as mature market as U.S. or U.K., the online methodology took more time to be developed.  For instance, maybe in the U.S. and U.K., it was much faster to get nice money from scratch when offering an online sample. So, those companies were making money; so, they were very fast in developing whereas Netquest had a very slow pace, very slow pace.  So it helped the management and the founder to think very well what he wanted as an offer, how he wanted to build this offer. So it resulted that when, for instance, we had to do this ISO quality audit, most of the things that were required we already had them in place.  So our adaption was minimal because the bar had been set so high that we already had almost everything. And it’s been the same for the GDPR. Our transformation into being GDPR-compliant has been very easy because we were already there. We have been very consistent in keeping the bar as high as possible in terms of sample recruitment, sample treatment, and sample quality.

[25:52]

Alright, so you have a lot going on.  I think our listeners picked that up on the intro, right?  You were a council person at ESOMAR prior to your recent election as president. Advisor to MindProber, co-founder of NG0 HealthusNepal.  We should pull out really quick here and talk about your work there in Nepal. What is Health U.S.?

[26:20]

Health Us.

[26:21]

I keep saying U.S.  I apologize.

[26:25]

Oh, no.  It’s exactly what I said when we were branding the NGO.  We were branding that I said, “Look, this can become confusing.  They said, “No, no, don’t worry,” they said. OK, now we have the proof.  [laughs] To tell a long story short: so I have this cousin that was born in Nepal.  He was adopted by one of my uncles. And he came not to Barcelona, but to a town near Barcelona.  He has become a doctor. And at the age of 18, even before, he asked his parents to get back to Nepal and met his original family because he knew he had been not stolen, but he was taken from his town by the rich guy of the town and he had the sense that his family did not know that he was not there.  Effectively, he went with his parents to Nepal at the age of 18; he met his father, that was still living and is still living and his sisters and brothers and it was a shock. So, he was determined to study medicine. So now he’s a doctor. And once he finished the medicine… He had been in this town, which is the most remote area of Nepal, the poorest one, every summer.  He has been saving money. He goes there, and he has been contributing to his original population, additional village, an area. One year and a half ago, I was here Netquest working and suddenly I received an email from him. It was sent to the whole family. It’s a big family. My mother’s family, it’s a big, big family, composed of eight brothers and sisters and all their descendants.  So, we’re very tight family; so, we’re very linked. So, he sent this email, saying, “Hey, I have opened up this solidarity fund-raising campaign. Could you help?” I called him and said, “What are you doing?” And he explained to me. I told him, “Look, we need to formalize it. We need to make it legal. We need to create a structure on that because… I love what you want to do but if you just open a fund-raising page, I think that this will not be that trustable.  So we need to create something that can be trustable.” So we did that. It was in summer 2017; we created the NGO. So it’s his father; one of his best friends that has also a sister, that had been adopted from Nepal, and myself, who are running the association. We started to get members. So far, we have created, the first, let’s say, modern pharmacy in the region. Remember it’s the most poor and remote region in Nepal. So, my cousin is there. He’s treating an average of 40 people per day.  He travels on foot because there are no such ways… I mean you cannot have a car, you cannot have a motorbike. He has to go on foot, and so he travels a perimeter of 60 kilometers, giving service to all villages. We have set up a team. It’s a pharmacy where we’re selling all the medicines. We’re getting money here in Spain, but it’s open to the world. So I open up… I open up the opportunity for people to donate in any part of the world.

[29:54]

And we will include a link to the website in the show notes.  

[30:02]

Oh, thank you.  And it’s very nice because…  Have you seen the movie Lion?  This Indian guy…  Have you seen that movie, Lion?

[30:09]

No, I’ve not.  

[30:12]

So, it’s an Indian guy that also is adopted in Australia.  Finally, he discovers his past. Because he can relate to some memories, he discovers where he comes from.  When he was telling the story, I said, “Look, Mark, you are like the lion, the Catalan lion. It’s the same.  We have discovered your origins, and now you are going there back, which is very hard, I can tell you. He is a doctor here in Barcelona, in the Barcelona region in Catalonia, and he has decided to be there.  Where people in Katmandu, doctors in Katmandu do not want to go there because life there is very hard; he has decided to settle there and help the community. He’s training people to help people. So it’s very, very nice; and even I have involved my kids as well in that initiative.  For instance, every time that he has been here and we have gone to an interview in television, on newspaper or radio, I bring my kids as well. Yesterday, for instance, the largest radio and newspaper in Catalonia published a piece of news about that. And it was nice because yesterday night I was with my elder kid and showed him and he said, “Wow, we did it!”  [laughs]

[31:30]

Ownership, I love that!  What a great view to be able to offer your children, just creating an attitude of gratefulness and thankfulness.  We are where we are, and we have the opportunity to help and contribute. At the end of the day, the roles, the lives could have completely been shifted the other way.  I don’t want to get too much into the whole philosophy or turn this into a weird conversation. But, as soon as we can pick our heads up and look at the rest of the world, we can really reframe our problems and our struggles in much more positive way, I believe.   

[32:16]

Yes, yes, we are in another league; we play another league, and you play in California, you play another league than I play.  And these countries play another league, yeah.

[32:22]

So, with all the things going on, why would you… what was your motivation for running president of ESOMAR?  

[32:30]

OK, that’s a nice question.  Well, running for president has been the evolution of my past four years as an ESOMAR council member.  I have been engaged… I have been participating in different activities. I have contributed to this promotion.  I have been feeling part of the team. And you know that when you better know an organization that is well-run, that is good, you feel more in love, and you feel more engaged; so, I think it was natural step for me to do because I was very much involved and I believe, I believe in the cause.  I would say that maybe the right question would be “What decided me to get into ESOMAR 2014 to the councils first time?” because I must admit at that moment, I didn’t have such a clear idea of what I was enrolling to. At that moment, it was nice; I was participating at this ESOMAR events and I was active there, but I didn’t really know much more about than that.  It took me one year to understand the implications of what ESOMAR activity is: the stakeholders, the variety of memberships, and the real role. It took me some time, but once I learned that I’ve been very much engaged, and I’m a very great promoter of ESOMAR. As I was saying, I believe in what ESOMAR is doing. I believe in what it does for the good of our profession and our industry.  I even say that if ESOMAR did not exist, it should have to be invented. I should have to be created. I have been traveling during these last four years across the market research world. I’ve been in many markets. And I was feeling mature. I was feeling mature to contribute. I was feeling mature to contribute with my vision, my experience, my knowledge, my networking, my energy. So, yeah, I felt it was the time, the appropriate time.  As I see that you appreciate very much the personal touch, I can tell you that running for an international position like this is a life-changing experience. I can tell you I have changed some things inside me thank to the process of running for this kind of election. It’s an experience that I fully recommend to everybody that can have an interest to service such an association.

[34:54]

So, obviously, you have a service-oriented heart, hence, the work with Nepal.  What would you see as one of the biggest learnings entering into this role? I’m actually citing here a YouTube interview that you had where you said, “The surprise I got once in council was how many things you don’t know.”  For me, that’s super-interesting because – I mean, listen – we’ve been doing this for a lot of years, right? And we’ve talked to a lot of people. We have a pretty wide view of the space.

[35:35]

Yeah, but in the end, you are focused on your activity, and you have some objectives to attain.  And you have budgets, and you have this pressure. And, suddenly, you get into an open space where there are many, many different stakeholders, many different actors, and you start to learn from them.  But, most precisely, as I was telling before, I knew ESOMAR mainly by the events, publications, and all this public sphere. Then I realized that the cornerstone of ESOMAR is its extraordinary capability to move the professionals of the industry to self-regulate, to create guidelines, and to stay ahead of legislation because we want to be better than what is expected from us.  For instance, I can tell last week… Last week we were in Amsterdam, and we had this meeting that there was current council plus a new council. And it’s very nice because when you see how the new members start to get the information that we are dealing with and the sort of stuff that we are discussing, all of them are surprised like, “Wow, it didn’t know that ESOMAR was doing as much and so many things and so important” – for instance like all the legislation aspect.  ESOMAR has had a key contribution, a key contribution in the GDPR law. The way it was drafted, it could be very harmful for the market research industry, market research companies. ESOMAR has played a key role in preserving our activity in Europe but also globally because the GDPR law is an inspiration for many other countries. ESOMAR pays much attention to all these moves that this legislation is having across the world. And the learnings that we are having in Europe can be transmitted to the rest of the countries of the world, and it’s something that we want to do because we must teach the legislator what we are doing.  We have to tell them that what we are doing is for a good purpose, that we’re very conscious of the value of the information that we are managing, and that we have to manage it in an ethical way, preserving all the standards. So ESOMAR is doing an exceptional role in teaching the legislator in the favor and the benefit of our activity. You know, kind of iceberg. You know ESOMAR by the events and publications and then get deeper and suddenly you start to discover a whole new world and say, “Wow! If there was not these people doing that, somebody should do that because it’s necessary”.

[38:23]

Yeah, it sounds like applying storytelling, master craft of storytelling on top of this activity would be something that would help the whole industry at large understand actual ramifications of, to your point, GDPR legislation or whatever is going to come down the pipe or is coming down the pipe right now that the rest of us are pretty much unaware of.

[38:45]

Yeah, but it’s again the problem…  It was very nice: last term we started discussing about how efficient ESOMAR is in communicating because there was some criticism:    “Oh, ESOMAR is not communicating properly. The message is not getting right. So we created an audit of the different touchpoints that a member of ESOMAR and a non-member of ESOMAR can get from ESOMAR.  And it’s amazing: I mean the amount of touchpoints that you can get from ESOMAR is impressive. But we live in a world in which attention is scarce, in a world in which we are all impacted by so many messages that it’s very difficult to get messages across.  But, if people could pay this attention to the important stuff, I can tell you that what ESOMAR is doing is very important.

[39:32]

So what is it that you’re hoping to get done as president?

[39:37]

My motto is that I want to reinforce the bridges across practices and geographies.  This would be a sentence to kind of compile everything. I believe that market research is now in a very exciting moment.  Well, you know: you’re constantly talking about that. The digitization of our society has brought a new approach to customers, consumers, citizen, whatever you might call it, understanding.  Today, we have an unparalleled access to understanding what consumers do, think, and feel. As you were saying, everyone can research today and, on top of that, the end-client or the purchaser of research is living its own transformation at a very fast pace.  So, these needs are constantly evolving, and require different responses. So, now, as you were saying before, the traditional market research has seen how the new market research or the digital technology-related insights have appeared. So as professionals, we need to properly manage this digital transformation.  We need to be smart enough to get the optimal symbiosis of traditional research, traditional practices, and those coming from the digital and analytics world. If you allow me, I always like to say that at a certain status ESOMAR could be perceived as a country club. I mean old members coming from the same background and status.   I think that today ESOMAR has to get closer to what they call the Star Wars Intergalactic Cantina, a place populated by humans, humanoids, robots, all sorts of species that contribute to the understanding of humans. Regarding my bridge across practices and my bridge across geographies is, as we were talking at the beginning of this interview…  The world is very big, and there are many realities, and every single market is different. Indeed, in the U.S., it isn’t the same; on the West Coast, East Coast, or the Mid of the country, but there are common traits. Of course, there are common traits but each market has its own peculiarities. I can tell you I’ve been traveling around the globe during these last years and I have seen excellent practices across the globe.  I’ve been attending the LatAm conference for the last five years, APAC for the last eight; I’ve been in U.S. and Europe and some other countries and they are excellent, excellent experiences. I do believe that we have to learn one from the other and increase the awareness and elevate our profession. Lastly, I like to be global and to be local, and I believe we need to reinforce the sense of community, the sense of belonging not only as ESOMAR but also as inside professionals.  As market research professionals, we need to have the sense of unity because it is the way we can – all of us – adapt to challenges that the digitalization of our society is bringing.

[42:52]

It’s going to be fun watching how this unfolds over the next four years.  I particularly like your connection with – I’ll call it – “middle class” is not the right way of saying it but it’s, basically, this flattening of importance, whether it’s U.S. or pick the country…Nepal.  Everybody has a voice; the voice IS important, and we need to understand it so that we can create policy that helps create, give us a better view ultimately of the industry and helps empower the companies, the brands to make good decisions.    

[43:40]

The market is very big, and there are opportunities everywhere.

[43:44]

So this podcast will have about 500, just over 500, insight professionals listen to it, hopefully more. Incidentally, if you haven’t been sharing it, please take time to share it on social.  

As you know, market researchers are full of opinions.  I think it’s pent up in us by the way because nobody asks our opinions.  As much as they do, we’re relaying the opinions of the customer. What is one question you would like the listeners of this podcast – Insight Nations – to answer?  

[44:15]

OK, I try to be provocative; so, my question would be “What is your personal contribution to improve, to elevate the status of our profession?

[44:25]

Perfect.  When this goes live, we’ll be posting this particular question on social.  So, I’m excited about seeing and the feedback and then also it’d be fun to write a little blog post.  Maybe, we’ll co-author that, addressing it.

So, my guest to today has been Joaquim Bretcha.  Sir, thank you very much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast.

[44:51]

Thank you, Jamin.  It’s been my pleasure.

[44:53]

As always, I appreciate your time and listening.  If you’d be willing, please leave us a review on whatever platform you’re using.  We would love it if you would share this podcast and let other insights professionals know about the great value of our guests.  Have a wonderful rest of your day!

[46:15]

Stay tuned for and HR tip from our previous guest, Mark Ziontz of Automated Insights.  

[45:23]

Passion, agility, and accountability.

First, you got to love what you do.  If you don’t, it’s a job. If you don’t, you’ll be there for a period of time.  I think at the end of the day, you really have to love what it is you’re doing and, by the way, that can extend to who you’re working with, who you’re working for, what is the culture.  But the most basic building block of that aspect is do you believe in the product? Do you believe in what the company does? Do you believe in the mission? I think people in our company get pretty excited about the fact that we help people understand their data, and they see that as a huge problem and they see that as something creating value.  So, I think our people have passion around that as they think it’s a big challenge, and it creates a tremendous amount of value. So that passion, I think, is just vital.

The second one I mentioned was agility, and I spoke on this earlier.  If you don’t like change, if you don’t like having to zig instead of zag sometimes, if you think everything is going to perfectly on your 3–5 year plan, good luck!  That’s not been my experience. I’m always suspect when somebody tells me, “This is my plan. From the beginning, we did it perfectly, and this was our outcome.” And I just smile and I’m polite.  When I look back on everything, many times we ended up in great places, but it certainly wasn’t a smooth road. There were bumps along the way,

And then finally, accountability.  I think it’s accountability to yourself, accountability to your colleagues, accountability to your customers.  And I think that if you have people that are accountable, it also affords you great freedom. It’s freedom for people to work remotely when they want to work remotely.  If they have something in the middle of the day with their kids and they’re going to get their deliverable out that evening, it enables that to happen. You can a trust-based organization when people are accountable.

[47:27]

For me, one of the most impactful parts of business is being passionate about adding value.  That value is added through the continuum of whatever it is that you’re doing. If it’s manufacturing, you could be on the line, but the value is the consistency and high quality of that work.  Additionally, and I think even more impactfully, if you are anybody inside of the company, applying your passion and care for the final delivery it is going to resonate and drive a positive culture.  And if there is a positive culture that exists, that exudes into the customer relationships.

I remember early on with RackSpace, I was customer no. 102, if you can believe that.  They launched with fanatical customer support. That word, “fanatical,” has gone through some iterations since that time.  But, in those days, the interpretation of “fanatical” was really like “This is what gets us out of bed in the morning,” is making sure that you are absolutely taken care of.  They weren’t leading with best, fastest, reliable, etc. All those underpinnings are there from a messaging perspective, but the lead was “fanatical” customer support. And I think that starts, from a customer journey perspective, not when you’re talking with the salesperson but it happens when the customer dials in or sends an email or fills out a web form or tries to find you online.  So passion around what it is you do, a love for that particular task is absolutely critical and, as you deliver on that, your career will advance.

I want to end on a brief story.  One of my best friends, Bobby, he came from Romania and, as a first generation, moved here when he was in seventh grade with his mother.  After graduating from college, got a job working at a box plant, a corrugated box plant. He was working in the assembly line. From there, he had an opportunity to advance his career and start supporting the… by doing janitorial work.  That kind of gave him a little bit of a side hustle opportunity. And he just kicked butt and did a great job, delivering on that part. He continued to advance, moved into accounting, eventually sales, and now he is the, if not one of the top salesmen, on the West Coast for corrugated boxes, which is a truck load of money.  In fact, he makes more money a year than I ever did [laughs] outside of selling businesses. The point is that if you’re passionate about where you’re putting your time and energy, then the by-product, the outcome of what you generate, it will be just 10x what your peers, what other people are applying and it will help propel you to the next thing. 

[50:29]

Thanks, everybody, for listening to today’s episode of the Happy Market Research Podcast.  An absolute privilege! We are honored that you would be willing to spend so much time with us.  I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Please, please, please share this episode on the platform of your choice.  If you would just tweet it or if you would take the time to post it on LinkedIn, it would mean the world to us.

[50:56]

This episode is brought to you by G3 Translate.  The G3 Translate team offers unparalleled expertise in foreign language translations for market researchers and insight professionals across the globe.  Not only do they speak hundreds of languages, they are fluent in market research. For more information, please visit them at G3Translate.com.

My guest today is Marian Anderson, Director at Microsoft. Microsoft Corporation a multinational technology company creates computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2013, Marian held senior research positions at Harris Interactive, PSB Research and GfK.

This episode is brought to you by Attest. Attest is a powerful, easy-to-use SaaS platform that connects businesses to over 100 million consumers in 80 countries on demand in just a few clicks. Ask your burning questions. Select who you want to answer. View actionable insights that help you grow your business. Join the hundreds of leading brands who already utilize the power of Attest’s scalable intelligence platform.

This Episode’s Sponsor: 

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Find Marian Online:

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[00:00]

On Episode 203 of the Happy Market Research Podcast, I’m chatting with Marian Anderson, Research Director of Microsoft.  But first a word from our sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by Attest.  Attest is the powerful, easy-to-use SAS platform that connects businesses to over one million consumers in 80 countries on demand in just a few clicks.  Ask your burning questions, select who you want to answer them, view actual insights that help you grow your business. Join the hundreds of leading brands who already utilize the power of Attest’s scalable, intelligent platform.  Contact Attest today at http://askattest.com/happymr or find the link in this episode’s show notes.

[00:57]

Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast.  My guest today is Marian Anderson, Director of Research at Microsoft. The Microsoft Corporation is a multi-national technology company that creates computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2013, Marian held senior research positions at Harrison Interactive, PSB Research, and GfK.  Marian, thanks so much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast with me today.

[01:25]

Thanks, Jamin.  Happy to be here.

[01:27]

Let’s talk a little bit about your backstory.  So, you graduated from University of Utah with a degree in political science.  How in the world did you wind up in market research?

[01:37]

Well, does anyone end up in research by….? [laughs]

[01:42]

I don’t think so.  Literally, I’ve had one person say that they were interested in research pre-graduation and that only happened….  And this is literally after 47 interviews… And that happened only months before their graduation. [laughs]

[01:59]

I don’t know that I know a single person.  That I find interesting in and of itself. Politics was it for me.  I was very, very interested in what motivated political behavior and political strategy.  I had the opportunity right out of undergrad to go work for Mark Penn and work on political messaging, doing political polling.  Honestly, I was interested in working in politics in any strategy regard. It happened to be polling that the opportunity presented itself, and that started my research career.  And I haven’t looked back. I was only involved in the political side for a couple of years before it became really clear to me that – at least working with Mark Penn, as a very young researcher, I got zero access to clients and high-level strategy on the political side, but he would let me loose on the corporate-strategy side.  It was, “Go figure it out. Go advise. Go get involved on the corporate. Go see what you can build.” So I moved over to the corporate-strategy side of research within my first couple of years and then consulted for many, many years. Harrison Interactive really focused on brand strategy and positioning research, which is kind of my first love in research, and it really is the same in political research.  That may be why I love it so much… is that building a brand is building a brand, whether or not you’re talking a political candidate or any given product out there. I was with Harrison Interactive a number of years and then I had the opportunity to build the Microsoft business on behalf of GfK. And I moved to Seattle at that point to build up that business… did that… and then moved over to Microsoft five years ago.

[03:58]

And it’s interesting too that…  I believe Mark Penn wound up as an executive at Microsoft at one point.

[04:02]

He did.  So not long ago…  I joined Microsoft in 2013; in 2014 or so, Mark Penn came to be co-CMO of Microsoft.  He did that for maybe 18 months; him and Tami Reller had this co-CMO job. I found it very strange then and still do that we had this co-CMO thing happening.  And it was very strange to have Mark Penn back in my world. Then he then moved on to become our Chief Strategy Officer; he did that for maybe a year. (I’m probably not getting my timelines quite right.)  And then he moved on. It was coming full circle in a way for me from starting my career to being pretty well established in my career and having Mark back.

[04:51]

As the month of January for us is rolling out in 2019, the topic is Customer Experience, which is a center point in the Microsoft Corporation.  My tenure with this brand, your brand, by the way, is very long, and it was literally back in the DOS days. And I still remember the very first version of Windows.  I can literally recall where I was sitting when I installed it. Microsoft has built a strong brand on Customer Experience. How is Microsoft using data specifically to help drive and deliver on that experience?

[05:29]

It’s been such an amazing evolution, even in the five years that I’ve been here.  The way that we have integrated data in ways that I don’t think we’d ever really done before.  Microsoft for a very long time by having smart people and building really good products and then simply our size and scale allowed momentum to go from there, of course, with the very strong vision of having a computer on every desk.  Even in the five years I’ve been at Microsoft, the focus on, not just customer experience, but really truly empathy for our customers and understanding what is happening for them and really becoming a company that is interested in operating on behalf of the customer as opposed to simply building something so that they can buy it.  It’s a really interesting cultural shift that of course has driven. It shows up every single day in the data space. In order to be customer-centric, in order to build customer experiences, of course, data comes in at every point. We do a lot more… So, market research, in particular, has grown substantially in the sense that we no longer are looking at one source of data almost ever; we are looking at many sources of data, usually to help drive strategies.  That means, of course, traditional, kind of qualitative or ethnographic methods. We tend to be very quant heavy here in terms of market research but now are bringing things in like internal telemetry – what people are actually doing on their machines. External kind of telemetry that we purchase so that we can understand what’s happening with competitors in terms of what customers are doing. Then we’re bringing in things like motivations we see show up in social research or what’s happening with revenue and how that’s tied to what people telling us how they feel about a certain thing.  We’re much better, for example, about not just measuring satisfaction, overall experience level with a given product, but at a micro-experience. “What was the satisfaction level of that thing you just did?” All of that has happened in the last five years. We really have evolved from an important source of customer data to an aggregator, if you will.

[07:51]

That’s multi-sourced really, isn’t it?  

[07:53]

It’s SO hard, and we’re learning and we’re…  It’s hard to do it at this scale and pace that is needed to drive the most important business decisions we have.  To be honest, that’s been such a privilege to be part of that journey at a company that is so… The amount of data at our finger tips is just unlike anything I’ve certainly ever been part of before.

[08:15]

The story of Microsoft is super-interesting, right?  I was actually in high school when Microsoft went public.  It had a really crazy ratio between millionaires and employees.  I want to say that it was about 1 to 5. I’m not positive about that.  That’s just what I recall. So, anyway, the point there being – it really was a product-market-fit story of there being this massive need and Microsoft being the dominant player to be able to meet it.  And then just…BOOM! To your point, let’s built stuff that we can then sell. Moving that mentality… if you saw it over time, sort of a degradation in the stock price of Microsoft with the new leadership and focus on the customer (empathy, as you said) all of a sudden really pushing that trajectory completely in the opposite direction with fantastic returns for shareholders by putting the customer in the center.  That shift… I’m really interested in. It’s one of the reasons that Reed Hastings has done so well at Netflix, having this customer-minded mentality as opposed to more of the unwillingness to change. I know you’ve been there for only five years, but has there been any practical steps that Microsoft has taken in order to install this shift or has it been more investment-based such as things like research?

[09:35]

Sure, it is investment-based, but that’s more of an outcome in the desire to have a voice in the room that is not the executive team, meaning the customer.  And there is much more openness to customers having alternative opinions, shall we say, than what the executive team might have thought coming into something.  So there’s a lot of discussion that happens where the question is “What is the need?” “What is the desire?” “What is the problem we’re solving?” Frankly, a lot of people being given permission to try things…  You know the X-box adaptive controller is a really good example of this. That was a small crack team of people who really believed that we needed an accessible option for gamers. They worked for several years, trying to drive that product.  They were given the permission and the space to figure that out. It was a “Absolutely, we’re going to go do this.” It was a small group of people given the permission to try and to fail and to try again. It’s been an absolute success story for us in terms of making sure we’re developing products that allow everyone to play and to game, to be part of the conversation.  I think really at its core it’s allowing all employees to have a voice that I don’t think was important before. In that, we’re gaining so much. In the employees having a voice, of course, customers come through, and there’s a demand for data and a demand for understanding what the customer experience is that’s never been present before, certainly not in my experience.

[11:16]

It’s interesting how when you’re in an executive-based decision versus a customer-based decision.  In one case, the first case, on the executive-based, the research (and this is really coming from my background, specifically in the 90s in primary research)… You’d have your business hypothesis that the research was supposed to “Is it true or not true?”  or get to. But, at the end of the day, it was really about “How can I make that true?” I’ve had more than a few examples in my career where I’ve had executives say, “No, it’s really important that the answer is blue or whatever.” You wind up crossing some tough ethical lines in that context as opposed to when you put the consumer in the middle of it.  Now, all of a sudden, you need a lot more data in order to triangulate their truth. Because just with social media being where it is now empowered in a large part with your corporation, you’ve got a major move from brands used to be who they say they are to now they are who their consumer says they are – and by the way – in real time. Sure as hell, better stop paying attention to your rear view mirror and start paying attention to what’s happening right in front of you.

[12:29]

Absolutely.  Do think there are decisions that get made that are based on a belief in the future that is not always based on research?  I think those are still important bets for us to make. When you’re thinking three or five years out and you’re really trying to extrapolate what customers can’t tell you today or can’t articulate for you today, those conversations are really important to make sure research informs but that there is a larger conversation happening with technical teams, with executive teams etc. about those longer-term, strategic decisions.  I think when it comes to shorter-term decisions, that’s where the feedback from customers really shines: How we should approach a given feature; how we should approach a set of messaging, pricing decisions, etc. even short-term portfolio decisions, brand-strategy decisions. What we’re going to do, for instance, with Skype versus teams in the Office portfolio. All those things use data and multiples of data in ways that just would not have happened five or ten years ago.

[13:38]

That’s a really important point, which is innovation rarely…  The Ford quote, right: “If I ask customers what they want, it would just be a better horse.”  That’s a 100% correct. It’d be a better version of DOS, not the transformation that Windows brought to the marketplace.  But, to your point, that innovation has to be grounded in where the consumer is. That’s one of things that we can learn from Steve Jobs when he launched the Newton, which you’re probably not old enough to remember.  But there was this sort of pre-iPhone product that entered the market (I want to say around ’92) and it was, basically, early into the digital assistant space. And it didn’t do very well at all because the market simply wasn’t ready for it.  So you need to have that bed of data in order to test the business hypotheses, which then, of course, you see in whatever – 2006 – the iPhone, of course, having tremendous success.

[14:37]

And you also need to be ready I think, as a company, to go ahead and watch things and try them and have failures in the market.  You see companies doing this consistently: the Newton’s a good example. We’ve certainly had examples; we’ve tried it and decided it didn’t work.  I think that’s part of the culture of technology and making sure we’re pushing forward. “Are consumers ready for this?” or, in our case, “commercial audiences, ready for this or not?”  And just taking a leap and launching something – there’s real value in that. Test and learn and at scale as well.

[15:12]

I like that.  So, that’s a great segue into my next question, which is really centered around voice assistance like Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana.  How do you see that space evolving and impacting customer experience?

[15:29]

I really see voice as just another channel, by which people interact with their laptops or their homes or in their cars.  It enables a layer of communication that is really helpful, but it is just that. It is a tool; it is not a tool, in my mind, different than typing or text.  For me, it fits into a portfolio “Ways we are going to communicate with the world around us.” In and of itself, I suppose that’s how a feel about it.

[16:04]

I think that’s true from the view of a way we interact with technology.  What’s interesting to me is the opportunities that exist inside of these personal assistants.  For me, the conversation is turning a lot more into Star Wars vs. Star Trek [laughs] where you’ve got Star Wars R2-D2 or C-3PO thing that is traveling with me whether that’s the mobile phone or desktop or whatever it is. That individual versus the Star Trek where it’s this sort of always on voice connection.  Adoption seems to be primarily centered around music and audio content versus more of the real power of it, which is business-based time saving. You know what I mean like scheduling meetings across two people: just like what we put together in doing this podcast. It DOES seem to me like there are lots of opportunities for betterment of life in time-saving benefits but it’s, to your point, more in the context of instead of typing, I’m saying the words as opposed to it being more of a platform.      

[17:10]

I don’t view it as a platform.  It certainly enables a lot of things; for instance, the AI behind so much of the voice stuff is no different than what would be required if I asked the same question via text.  It allows different… It’s a modality. I do think that there’s something about the real-time nature of it that is interesting. I find myself… For instance, I probably use Alexa a little bit differently maybe than some like I will ask her constantly to add things to my to-do list.  I’m at home, walking around. It’s a helpful way to get things out of my head. I find myself wanting to interact with her almost constantly. Like I’m on my way to work: “Oh, Alexa. Oops, Alexa’s not here right now.” You know.

[17:53]

Totally, totally.  Believe me I’m a week away from 48, and I get that creature-habit thing more than ever.  It feels like every year it’s a little harder to change. I even tried my hand at Snapchat for almost a year and a half, and I just have finally given up entirely.  It doesn’t feel organic to me, I guess, is how I’d put it. The one thing that’s also interesting: I had my daughter at the time, she was – I want to say 8. She’s now 11.  So, I bought her an iPhone, and we were on a drive together. I asked her about her best friends, and she said, “I have two best friends.” I said, “Oh, that’s cool. Who are they?”  “One is Hannah; the other is Siri.” Now, she’s a little bit of a witty child; I thought she was making a joke. But, as I was diving deeper in, she literally didn’t understand that when she’d called her friend Hannah and then she would call Siri, it was like one was a robot.  One was an AI based voice assistant. It was crazy for me processing that as a dad, thinking, “Holy, shit, there’s a big potential shift that could happen here. Is this a real human being or not?” Then to your point about now the overall opportunity to interact with that thing becomes all the time, doing all sorts of stuff for me, across different environments, whether I’m driving to work or whatever.  

[19:19]

That’s fascinating that’s how she thinks of Siri.

[19:25]

Yeah.  She’s matured past that now, of course.  I mean it was 100% all in. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t real.  It took me a couple days to figure out how to have that conversation.

[19:38]

Right.  A conversation you never thought you’d have.  [laughs]

[19:41]

Right, exactly.  As you think about all these different sources of consumer insight – from social to transactional – how do you combine all of that?  Is the data stream feeding into a dashboard or is it in some proprietary BI?

[19:57]

Oh, gosh.  I wish there was one easy answer to that.

[19:59]

It’s just a lot of different data sources, right?  

[20:01]

Yes, and so, in some cases, we are fortunate enough to have customer data connected on an individual level.  We can see what people are doing, the revenue it’s generating. And then you use that to research that population.  That is a very rare case of… Actually, it’s one massive data set that we have that allows us to do that. And then on top of that, we build things like power BI and whatnot.  But having the connections at an individual level, it’s hard, and it is equally valuable. There seems to be a correlation between how difficult it is and the value it brings when it comes to merging these types of data.  And then, of course, we’re doing things journalistically as well. I think the rule is we never want to look at anything in isolation, not based on one piece of data. Where we can be more sophisticated about it, and I’ve gone in order (most sophisticated to least sophisticated)…  When it is simply bringing together two or three or four sources together kind of journalistically, that is far better and far more valuable.

[21:10]

When I think about…  I love this term; I’ve never heard this term before:  “journalistically.” There’s two parts of it, right – I guess there’s three.  You’ve got the sourcing; so, you’ve got all the disparate pieces of data. And then it’s got to get analyzed (magic happens there).  And then the story has to get told. That’s the other part. It’s a differentiation. Then I would put in the normal research camp. Is storytelling a big part of the focus?

[21:41]

Yeah, all that influence.  I don’t think you can influence truly without having a point of view told via story.  Storytelling is huge. Frankly, it’s one that we’re struggling with a little bit as we think about bringing all these sources of data together.  Like it is not enough to throw a dashboard together or rather, for the most important decisions that we’re really trying to be at the table for and influence, throwing a power BI on board and having the room look at it is not sufficient.

[22:13]

I think one of the terms I’ve heard, and I use a lot, is HI.  So, it’s that Human Intelligence. We’re going to see a bigger focus on that in an intentional way over the coming years as technology continues to automate different pieces and then also continues to give us more confusion or opportunities (is a better way of saying it) to see the consumer, whether it’s voice in real time or whatever, those consumer experiences.  What is one of the biggest challenges that internal researchers like you face and then how do you see or what do you wish agencies would do in order to help meet that need?

[22:50]

For me, indisputably, it is the combination of multiple data sources and decisions that need to get made at speed.  Frankly, trying to get a piece of research done quickly to make a decision, in say 48 hours is hard. Trying to get a piece of research done quickly and then layer in multiple other sources of data is exponentially harder.  We aspire to that; we want to be at the table where real-time decisions get made, and we’re able to be strong strategy consultants on those decisions. So it is just a constant pressure of “What’s the right data to bring into the table?”  “How do you bring it to the table?” “What’s the story?” And then agencies are frankly such critical partners and extensions of our team; without them, we just simply cannot be successful. And we really rely heavily, heavily on our partners to execute the research, to really get interested in the business problems with us.  Our partnerships are most successful is when our partners feel as invested the strategic decision as our FTE team does, and they’re in it, trying to figure out the right sources of data, bringing into the table brainstorming. The other thing that, I think, is really helpful is oftentimes when we’re working at speed like that, I find that creativity in how to solve a problem does not always emerge.  And I think that that’s a problem. So to the extent that our agencies can help us be creative in how we solve or answer questions, I think that’s something we’re always looking for in our partners.

[24:21]

To make decisions, it’s faster and faster, and that’s one of the neat things that we’ve all seen in the industry is that, through technology and power-data collection, anybody can do a survey now.  So the table stakes have really completely changed, leveled up for market research of being whatever it is that we need to be able to do and, of course, triangulating that point of consumer truth at scale is super-hard and we have to do it faster.  So that where I think that pattern recognition at the HI level becomes really important.

[24:58]

You know it’s interesting that anyone can do a survey.  I mean the tools are certainly there. For me, this is where the storytelling and understanding the “why” and really understanding that whoever your survey population is they can tell you so much and you need to derive so much from it.  You need to connect it to other things to really understand what’s driving the thing

[25:18]

One of things that we did not talk a lot about in 2017 on the Happy Market Research Podcast is the way the guests processed risk and were willing to take risks.  As I did a lot of reflecting and listening to the episodes, I think in 2018 part of the story needs to be risk tolerance, especially in the framework of research.  I would love if you would tell us about a time in your career where you had to take a specific risk and then sort of how you coped with the anxiety, if you had any at all, around that risk in order to take the chance, overcome it, and, hopefully, it has a positive outcome.  

[26:03]

Yeah, totally.  I think oftentimes in taking a risk, you just have to go in blindly believing that you can figure it out.  And if you have that belief, then ultimately something will get figured out; it may not be what you originally intended.  I remember very distinctly Chris Cap, our CMO, saying, “Figure out where we suck.” I had no idea where to start… I had no idea where to start.  So the first thing I did was we said we’d go figure it out; I wasn’t going to commit to how or when or whatever. It ended up being probably eighteen months of really hard analysis; many, many rounds of focus groups; and maybe three rounds of serious quantitative work before we figured out not only where we sucked but why we sucked and what we needed to do about it.  For me, the risk there was not promising I could do it and not promising it in any given time frame. It’s very easy for us as researchers certainly, whether you’re on the client side or the agency side, to say, “Yep, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it in this time frame.” In this case, I committed to it but without a time frame and 18 months later we had it and we had a campaign entirely written around a new audience and launched which is the AI campaign that you see on the internet.

[27:24]

There’s a degree of…  It sounds like two things. One is honesty/humility; and then the other piece of it is successful expectation-setting around that.  

[27:33]

That might be the most important.  The most important for any job ever is setting expectations appropriately.  Yeah, absolutely. There are other risks I could point to, but that one was…  I felt like my career was on the line. You know when the CMO says, “Find out where you suck,” and you don’t have an immediate answer…

[27:55]

Right, you had to come up with the answer.  [laughs]

[27:57]

Oh, yeah.  There was a lot of [unclear – overlapping voices]

[28:00]

It’s not great; it’s not great.  [laughs] I immediately start sweating in that scenario.

[28:07]

It’s also in retrospect…  I was confident we could figure it out, and I’m probably proudest of that particular journey, in part, because it was truly a beginning-to-end journey.  We did not know where we were going at the beginning; by the end, we had full creative launched. It was just an absolute privilege to be part of that. Many moments of sleepless nights for sure!

[28:34]

Right.  [laughs]  Totally. Sounds like a fun project, stressfully fun project.  So, talk to me a little bit about the three characteristics of an All-Star Employee from your career view.  I’m interested. It could be like at Microsoft or, if you feel like you’d rather talk about a different… if there’s different characteristics in different contexts, that’s fine too.  But what do you see as really the three core values or characteristics of somebody who’s going to be successful in their career.

[29:06]

So, I don’t think this is unique to Microsoft although it certainly applies to our team.  I think the first one is an inherent curiosity, just curious. I find that folks that are just constantly asking questions and trying to figure out why – whether or not that be around a customer or around any other given problem…  I think that that is an unteachable quality. Along with that comes sudden judgment on when to take that curiosity forward and when to stop. That would be the second thing. And then the third thing is a healthy sense of autonomy. “I’m going to go figure this thing out.”  Of course, that has to come with clarity of direction, and it has to come with some energy behind it from the leadership, etc. but autonomy to go figure things out. Again, curiosity sort of bounded by its action and then someone who’s willing to take those actions responsibly and appropriately and maybe even push a little bit beyond that.  Certainly, it an organization like Microsoft, any large organization, where hierarchy is just part of the daily thing, I find that people that are willing to push just a little past what’s hierarchically appropriate are far more effective than folks that are like, “Nope, that’s above my pay grade.” Having the ability to take those risks and say, “Yep, that’s not above my pay grade.  I’m here for a reason and I can do that.” Those are the people, I think, are great. I find that true every place I’ve ever worked.

[30:37]

I love that:  curiosity, judgment, autonomy/self-motivation; that’s really the engine, I think, that drives a successful outcome for a person’s career.  You need to operate successfully inside of the hierarchy of the organization, of course but, at the same time, you also need to have a culture of “Yes” among yourselves so that you can bleed into the starts and finishes of specific projects and workflows in order to really understand the output that you’re working on generating, for example.  

[31:13]

Exactly, exactly.  And sometimes you have to do that not in a culture of “Yes.”  You sometimes just have to believe in the thing you’re doing. And you cannot always look for that external validation; hopefully, you’ll get it.  But I think pushing forward and, in some cases, pushing past the hierarchy, even if you know you’re taking a risk in doing so, is often worth the risk.  Of course, doing it appropriately and within the bounds of being kind and polite about it.

[31:43]

Definitely wrapping things up in the context of appropriateness is super-important if you’re going to get heard but, at the same time, you got to take those risks.  

My guest today has been Marian Anderson, Director of Research at Microsoft.  Thank you so much for joining me today on Happy Market Research Podcast.

[32:01]

Thank you so much.  It was a pleasure.

[32:08]

Stay tuned for this episode’s CEO hack by Merrill Dubrow of M/A/R/C Research.

[32:14]

You’ve got to be self-aware, and you’ve got to be able to allow yourself to have self- evaluation and trust people around you.  I believe I’m never going to be the smartest guy in the room. I believe I’ve made the most of my skill set, and the reality is I can say, “Hey, I need to get better at ______.”  So the interesting thing – you mentioned my blog for ten years, which I did three times a week and I wrote every one except for a few guest writers. I’m not a great writer. I have good idea, but I don’t have great punctuation or grammar.  I was able to – through this self-aware, self-evaluation – understand that, know that, surround myself with people who could help me through that. They didn’t rewrite the stuff: they just made sure that it made sense. So for me, the #1 skill is self-awareness.  Give yourself the self-evaluation to know that, “Hey, I might not be great at finances or I might not be great at management or I might not be great at sales or I may not be great at something else.” And being able to surround yourself with the right people and also try to get better at something every day.

[33:22]

This point that Merrill brings out is, in my opinion, the most important hack or skill that you can develop as a leader, and that is be humble enough to recognize you have blind spots and bolster, surround yourself with people that can help see those blind those spots.  I would say that, if I’ve had any success in life, it’s because of this one principle. So, thinking about my relationship with Irvine Andreasen, the first co-founder of Decipher, also Jamie Plunkett and Kristin Luck, all three of those were strategic add-ons to Decipher that helped me as a leader to have a fuller, more complete picture of the marketplace.  We each consume and process and retain less than 3% of what actually transpires. That’s why having more views of that same environment or that same experience is really helpful because it helps triangulate what is actually happening, what is truth. I also point out that it isn’t enough just to have the visibility; you also have to have the will to accept that you don’t have the complete view.  It’s a subtle difference, but it is probably one of the biggest impacts if you can be open to adjusting your point of view, based on that external feedback. That quid pro quo can be a fundamental area of strength for you as you build your team because not only will it help you make the best possible business decisions, it’ll also garner trust and respect by your team and transparency, which will again sort of self-promote and police this culture of a complete view and a better answer, which creates a better business outcome.  

[35:30]

Thanks everybody for listening to today’s episode of the Happy Market Research Podcast.  An absolute privilege – we are honored that you would be willing to spend so much time with us.  I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Please, please, please share this episode on the platform of your choice.  If you would just tweet it or if you would take the time to post it on Linkin, it would mean the world to us.

[35:57]

This episode is brought to you by Attest.  Attest is a powerful, easy-to-use SAS platform that connects businesses to over one million consumers in 80 countries on-demand in just a few clicks.  Ask your burning questions, select who you want to answer them, view actual insights that help you grow your business. Join the hundreds of leading brands who already utilize the power of Attest’s scalable, intelligent platform.  Contact Attest today at http://askattest.com/happymr or find the link in this episode’s show notes.

My guests today are Ann Green, EVP, and Stephen DiMarco, Chief Digital Officer at Kantar North America Insights Division. Kantar is a multinational market research firm known for innovation. They actively manage Brand Z, which is an annual Top 100 Most Valuable Global brands ranking; and in 2015, announced a partnership with Snapchat to provide the first analysis of advertising effectiveness on the Snapchat platform.

FIND ANN AND STEPHEN ONLINE:

Linkedin: Ann/Stephen Kantar

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www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

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[00:00]

On Episode 201 of the Happy Market Research Podcast, I’m talking with the dynamic duo, Ann Green and Stephen DiMarco from Kantar. This is an exciting episode. We unpack customer experience from Kantar’s position, one of the leading insights professional companies in our industry.

But first a word from our sponsor.

[00:25]

Today’s episode is brought to you by GreenBook. The GreenBook directory helps you find marketing research suppliers, facilities, and consultants. Additionally, GreenBook helps modern marketing researchers understand industry trends via the Grid Report and the IIeX Global Conference Series. To find out more, please visit GreenBook online at GreenBook.org.

[00:48]

Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guests today are Ann Green EVP and Stephen DiMarco, Chief Digital Officer at Kantar North America, Insights Division. Kantar is a multi-national market research firm known for innovation. They actively manage BrandZ, which is an annual, top 100 most valuable global brands ranking, and in 2015 announced a partnership with Snapchat to provide the first analysis of advertising effectiveness on the Snapchat platform. Ann and Stephen, thank you very much for joining me today on the Happy Market Research Podcast.

[01:23]

Ann – Thank you.

Stephen – Thank you. Nice to be here.

[01:25]

Our chat is going to center around one of today’s hottest topics: customer experience. But before we dive in, I’d love to know a little bit about each one of your backgrounds.

[01:35]

Ann – [laughs] Well, I think it’s fair to say that no child grows up and actually says, “Mom, Dad, I want to go into the field of market research.” It was a bit of a fluke for me. I ended up at a liberal arts school where I studied marketing with a math minor. At the time, I really didn’t have a good sense of what I wanted to do and a saw an ad, an actual newspaper ad, for a position in the field of market research, and it just so happened I thought, “I can do this.” And the rest is history.

[02:08]

You know it’s funny. Several people that I’ve interviewed wound up in market research through an advertisement in the paper. For those who don’t know, that was the jobs listing for local opportunities.

[02:23]

Ann – Yes, yes, I have just revealed my age. [laughter]

[02:27]

Don’t worry. I’m ahead of you. That’s fine. So, Stephen, you managed marketing at Comedy Central FX, and you co-founded a startup during the height of the dot.com bubble. How in the world did you wind up in research?

[02:42]

Stephen – It’s funny. I don’t see myself in research, but I will tell you how I got into the role I’m in right now. Like Ann, I studied marketing in college and, when I wasn’t studying or doing other things that college kids do, I was actually a DJ for the campus radio station. So I’ve always had a strong interest in marketing and music. I started my career at a record label doing everything you can imagine and decided that, while I like music, the music industry isn’t for me. So I thought long and hard and really committed myself to marketing and helping marketers becoming better marketers. What better place to do that than a company who’s got a treasure trove of consumer data that you can use to make difficult decisions about all of the things that marketers need to, ranging from which consumers to target, how to engage them, how to measure ROI. I guess ultimately, I did wind up in a research role.

[03:43]

So, we’re going to talk about customer experience. We’ve gone through such an evolution over the last two decades of my career. What are two ways that Kantar is creating amazing experiences for your customers?

[03:58]

Ann – Well, we have the opportunity to work with most of the Fortune 500; so, we are working with folks the likes of Google, Facebook, McDonalds, Coke, American Express, Kaplan, you name it. There is an interesting common thread that is emerging: that they are very much looking for research companies to raise the bar, both in terms of the suppliers, the partnerships they work with as well as internally. And they’re raising the bar in terms of how they use research within the organization. We’ve really invested in two areas in changing up the experience that we provide. The first is around client engagement. So, we really work with marketers to understand what their pain points are, what their problems are. So we don’t work on a project or product basis. What we do is we really partner up with brands to understand and get underneath the hood in terms of what it is we need to solve for. And we invest in our own teams: we actually train them in terms of listening skills, in terms of discovery skills so that they can really feel confident in getting to that point of shared understanding of the problem in front of them.

I think the second way in which we’re changing up the experience is with delivery.

If you think about the delivery reports, they have legacy basis, data tables, or a power point report or, if you are lucky, so sort of dashboard. And that doesn’t necessarily get absorbed by the organization. That just become something that sits on somebody’s shelf or sits in a folder on their laptop. What we need to do and what we are doing is we are really investing in the delivery of our research and going beyond standard reports and providing our clients with workshops where all stakeholders come together and talk about what the findings are and, most importantly, what to do with them. How do we action them?

[06:04]

OK, so, the pain points is really interesting. The thesis that I entered into in September when I launched this podcast is that there is a growing divide between what marketing research at an agency level is delivering versus what the brands actually want. In many cases, – I’m thinking specifically about the interview with Stacey Walker at Adobe recently; she actually used that framework as well – you can’t just force this standard methodological approach anymore. Similarly, on the delivery side, it’s not about the report or the “thump factor,” which is again paper-based reports… thicker is better in the old days. But it’s about operating research in lockstep with the executives and at each point the decisions are being made. That’s one of the reasons why she believes that things like CX is growing far and away faster than traditional market research as a job function inside of brands.

[07:17]

Stephen – I think you’re absolutely right, Jamin. Adobe is actually another client of ours, and we’re doing some innovative work for them. So, it’s great for us to stop doing the type of research that’s backwards looking, may be interesting and sits in a bookcase somewhere, and much more interesting to partner with the client, co-create on what they’re looking for, provide the insights that they need at the moment and time that they need them so that they can generate a business decision that has an ROI. That’s kind of tongue-in-cheek why I said I don’t see myself as a market researcher; I see myself as a clever person who knows his way around data in the effort to make a business decision.

[08:04]

I love that. And then the final delivery… To your point, where we used to deliver cross-tabs and then power points and written reports in many cases to later dashboards being really the monitoring of the overall organizational health. Recently, I asked another (I can’t tell you who but another Insights leader) about dashboarding capabilities. Finally, I looked at him and I said, “Tell me what dashboard you actually used to make business decisions.” He was hard-pressed to come up with more than one; and that actually centered more around BI as opposed to consumer insights. It’s about the deliverable here is the benefit to the organization to make good decisions and actually have a positive ROI on research as opposed to being a cost center.

[09:03]

Stephen – Yeah, I talk about dashboards being three categories. One is “always on:” it’s up on your screen; you’re looking at it because you can’t live your life without it. One is “alert-based,” which is when something happens you get a text message or something to go check it out. Or the third is “ad hoc:” you go there when you need it and you enter in a search query and, hopefully, you get back what you need. Much better to be in the “always on” category; lucky if you’re in the “alert” category;” not good to be in the “ad hoc” category ‘cause that’s where most of them are.

[09:40]

That’s absolutely right, and that’s where the disruption is taking place, of course. So, how are brands using your research specifically effectively to empower their CX?

[09:53]

Stephen – Overall, I think if you look at brands and their perspective on customer experience, some brands really embrace it because they recognize, as consumers, our customer experience has changed: we’ve got different expectations based on mobile devices, based on on-demand services like Uber or Blue Apron. We just have an expectation that we can accomplish a task whenever we want, wherever we want. Smart brands are looking at that and saying, “OK, we need to really think about how we develop a customer experience that emulates that.”

So the first thing that I think brands are looking at doing is some really primary research around what are the needs, known and unmet needs, in the category so that they can really hone their value proposition. It’s really around kind of strategy research, trying to uncover the gem that allows them to develop a differentiated customer value proposition and then the operational plan to deliver on it. It’s really kind of re-creating, re-inventing the brand promise as a whole. So that’s the first thing that brands are doing. The second thing that brands are doing is what’s quite popular right now evidenced very clearly last week by the acquisition of Qualtrics, which is a CX platform, for eight billion dollars – that is eight billion –

[11:26]

On about a 400 million run rate, right? That’s what even more insane. [laughter] A 20X top-line revenue. And we know that Sample like there are some costs in that multiple that are still… they’re getting credit for, which just speaks to the overall market view of the value of this category.

[11:47]

Stephen – Yeah, it’s a very heated market. Eight billion dollars by SAP. What we’ve since learned is that Quatrics, Medallia, and Survey Monkey, who are all at different levels collecting customer information so that you can analyze and act on it, they’re all backed by Sequoia Ventures, which is a VC firm. I have to give credit to the partner team at Sequoia for their investment thesis that this software is, as service capability, is going to be really, really profitable. They made a great bet. Anyway, back to the story. Once brands have these CX platforms, whether it’s Medallia or Qualtrics, implemented, they have it always on feed of customer insights that they’re getting that they can use to understand as we rolled out this new brand promise and it’s taking effective in how we touch our customers, whether it’s through online interactions or retail interactions or, if it’s a car dealer, through their dealership or agency interactions, are we delivering on the brand promise at all points in time? It gives them real-time information feed about where they’re performing and where they’re underperforming to really continue to hone and advance their customer experience. It’s a soup-to-nuts approach to really re-engineering how people think about engaging with their customers around the brand promise and then delivering on it all the way through to purchase and post-service interaction.

[13:22]

What does that look like from a product… Is it really a combination of – I’ll call it – software that is the logistical element of the pulse of the customer and then, the human element obviously, on the deployment of those systems and then also the on-going recommendations?

[13:38]

Stephen – I mean you nailed it. It’s basically technology-enabled, data collection and dissemination through software as a service model. So companies will have a Qualtrics platform implemented for them and instrumented for them based on whatever business they’re in – whether it’s the hotel, airline, auto, retail, financial services – it works for any company that has customers; these platforms work. So, they’re instrumented similar to how a CRM system, SalesForce.com, ERP system – it’s a piece of enterprise software that you access through a portal. But, even though you’re collecting all of this information and it’s getting displayed through this portal on the website, you really still need a lot of professional services: you need help interpreting the data; you need help taking action on the data and making sure that your actions are generating ROI; you need help connecting more data into the CX system so that you can start to bring transaction data in, other first-party data, maybe you’ll bring in third-party data like weather data (So how is weather impacting customer experience at any different point in time?). It really is a piece of software that needs a lot of contextualization around it.

[15:02]

Ann – I think it’s really interesting though to think about customer experience in terms of why it has become such as important topic for marketers lately. And, Stephen, you had mentioned that really the customer experience is the way to deliver and bring to life the brand purpose. That has become such an important element because, financially, if you look at the economic trends, one of things that you find is that people are spending more on experiences than they are on things or products. So, financially, for marketers to grow, it makes sense for them to be spending a lot more time in understanding what that experience could be, what people’s expectations are, and how they can deliver against that experience in new and different ways. Just think about Delta: many years ago, Delta was simply a means to get from one place to another – it was a flight; now Delta has become an experience. It’s everything from your on-board services to being able to order a cocktail at the actual gate. So this is something that is very much financially driven and recognized as an area of importance to brands today.

[16:19]

It’s so interesting companies like Starbucks in a lot of ways built their whole company around this thesis, and it feels like we as an industry over the last year or two have really just started catching up with framing it in words and then figuring out what the terms of trade look like. I really like, Stephen, your framing of this like context of data. Traditionally from my experience, market research data (behavioral, transactional, whatever) usually sits in some silo and getting those things overlaid is immensely powerful but oftentimes, timing-prohibitive. So, the fact that you’re helping connect the dots through your set of solutions is really important. And I think the second part of it that’s really interesting is… (I’ve been hearing this term; It’s not a new term, but I’ve been hearing it said more lately.) HI or Human Intelligence versus AI or SAS or what have you. So, it’s about leveraging of the human expertise to overlay and help even create a deeper context of those insights so that they can move the business in the right direction.

[17:35]

Stephen – We’ve actually had success with both of those. We have a really excellent qualitative capability. Many, many, many people across North America, who have a strong background in qual., who will then help contextualize the data – again to use that phrase – that’s coming out of a Qualtrics or Medallia because, if you don’t, you’re just going to get a lot of behavioral data and you lose that human element; you lose the “why”; you lose really the kind of core idea that makes it an experience versus a transaction. But, at the same time, we have a really incredible analytics team, who does machine learning, neural nets and are just spectacular at that, which you’re not going to get out of a typical CX platform yet – they’re just not that advanced. So you really do need the two of those. You need that combination of human understanding but connected data, technology-powered analytics to get to that next level of insight that’s going to drive the differentiated customer experience.

[18:42]

Alright, so let’s take it down then to sort of brass tacks. If you were a brand manager at a startup CPG company (so, not Proctor & Gamble, per se), what types of research would you do in your first year, assuming you had a finite budget of a quarter million dollars?

[19:01]

Stephen – Was your comment “take it down”… Was that a reflection of me being on my soapbox too much? [laughter]

[19:08]

[laughter] Not at all.

[19:09]

Stephen – OK, good. I promise I won’t go up there again during the podcast but…

[19:14]

I liked it, I liked it. We all liked it.

[19:17]

Stephen – Sorry. Ann, the non-soapbox is yours.

[19:22]

Ann – [laughs] I think, taking it to a very practical level, one of the things I was just talking about was the change in terms of people’s expectations in terms of their experiences. Foundationally, marketers need to have a new understanding of people; they need to demonstrate that they really understand people. I think there’s an assumption because we have so much data, that we must have a good understanding of people. And that’s not necessarily the case. With data, what you have is observations; you have behaviors. But you also need to understand what people feel, what they think, how they live, what their personal pain points are, and what they want brands to solve for. So, in all honesty, where I would start is with something which is much more ethnographic in nature, much more segmentation-based to get to a foundational understanding of how I can establish a brand that really demonstrates it gets the consumer, it gets the customer.

[20:36]

Stephen – Your question… Is it not whether it’s P&G or startup CPG company, you can almost assume that most companies when it comes to research are doing kind of a zero-based budgeting approach. Another way of kind of framing your question is what’s the first thing you would spend research on if you were a brand manager, assuming that you had to argue for every other piece of research. And I could not agree more with Ann because that foundational segmentation research is going to pay dividends over years of time as more and more marketing programs are built off of those foundational insights. And those foundational insights are going to be the things that allow you to differentiate in the market in the first place. Doing an advertisement effectiveness study to demonstrate media ROI is important because you want to know did this piece of content distributed on this media platform have a greater return than another piece of content on another media platform. But there you’re still just kind of optimizing at the edges. What Ann is talking about is really kind of game-changing, foundational researches. If you do it right, then that first year budget of $250,000 is going to generate such valuable insights and actions that that $250,000 is going to turn into $500K the next year and into a million dollars the year after that, which is kind of like a self-funding research program, which is what we advise clients to try and do. And, if we’re not providing ROI on our research and our clients aren’t getting ROI out of the actions that we’re taking, they’re taking on our recommendations, then “Houston, we have a problem,” as they say.

[22:21]

I like that a lot, and I’ll misquote, of course, but “Data isn’t understanding; it is observation.” And you have to connect this to the human’s feelings, the consumer’s feelings, whether positive or negative or what have you, in order to get that full context of how the rest of the projects that you do and the inputs that you get to understand how they make sense and what they actually mean and what the organization should do.

So, there’s lots of new, fancy technologies. We’ve got to talk a little about that: AR, VR, so Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality; Voice whether it’s Google Home or Alexa. This all is impacting consumer experience. How will they impact research?

[23:12]

Stephen – That’s good. You said Alexa versus Google. Interesting. Now we know where your loyalty lies.

[23:17

I have both, FYI. [laughter]

[23:20]

Stephen – Good save, good save. It’s a really good question. These new technologies kind of play in two dimensions at the same time. Brands are using them to create new customer experiences. Using Alexa as an example, brands are building out skills or actions on (My Alexa just turned on as a said that; it’s now glowing blue.) They’re building out actions and skills that help kind of ingrain them in the voice-activated world. They’re not selling as much as they’re providing content that keeps them relevant. So, it’s happening in the consumer space; so, we need to figure out how to conduct research there. We’ve started to do that: we’ve been working on chatbots for a while. We have a chatbot that we use where we direct some of our respondents to go and people that we’re interviewing. We’ve actually built out a couple of pilots on my voice-controlled device that I’m not going to name right now lest it turn blue again. They’re information collection platforms for us. Right now, they’re information collection platforms; they have not become insights collection platforms. Part of it because the technology is different than writing a survey or analyzing a piece of customer data that might come in through a transaction log or website visitation. How you guide a consumer through a series of questions, it’s a whole new art form. I mean it is absolutely a new language, and the devices themselves are not always respondent to different dialects, to different brand names, to different product names. So we’re going through the process; it’s a learning process to use them as research mechanisms, and we’re figuring it out as we go.

[25:27]

Ann – We care a lot about the nature of the experience changing and the nature of the desired customer experience changing. And I think it’s really important that these tools be used in a new way to engage our people because they are much more organic ways of engaging with them than we have had historically. They are very used to utilization of chatbots; whether or not they know they are chatbots or not, they are used to the nature of that interface. They are used to being able to use voice skills and ask for things or give information to their device. They are used to being able to do things more in the moment; so, imagine being able to use a voice device when somebody mentions a specific brand and having the ability to ask them questions about that brand. It’s going to become much more organic and natural and part of an understood experience for people than it ever has been before. It removes a lot of the artificiality that we’ve had in research historically.

[26:37]

Yeah, I think it’s interesting that voice framework is, obviously, the prequel to AR – Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality – although, obviously, there’s technology that’s centered around those things now, none of it is operating at scale and yet we have seen an opportunity to get closer to the consumer through voice. So, the consumption of content all of a sudden becomes passive. The way that I can interactive with my brand app or skill while I’m driving is completely different than it has been historically, whether it’s purchasing something – which I’ve actually done on this show on accident. I purchased some paper towels on the device that won’t be named. I also purchased some markers. The paper towels actually showed up; it was a different brand than I thought, which is a whole different thing. And then the markers… I cancelled that order because it was like a 3500-dollar order, and I think I bought all the markers in North America.

[27:42]

Ann – What you’re talking about there is an important variable that Stephen mentioned earlier is that we need to help marketers understand how to use these devices as part of their own marketing efforts and to use it as part of their own commerce initiatives. If you look at how these devices have completely transformed the commerce environment, how products are sold, it is hugely different. And the role that they play, and the path to purchase, whether or not it’s getting something on the shopping list or getting directions to the store or adding something into the cart, is a completely different experience. So there’s two components to this: one is about helping marketers enter this space wisely and really understand the expectations of this space and how it can be optimized. But then there is the second transformative component, which is “How do I use these techniques to do better research and to get better insights.”

[28:45]

I like your very practical example of a way to be able to do that. The other piece that’s interesting is the brand budget consideration. You think about an add-on service – I’ll call it just “surveying through voice brand experience” or what have you. That doesn’t fit squarely in the qualitative and quantitative bucket. Are you guys seeing brands becoming more adaptive to where they’re willing to spend through new technologies or approaches or more like qualitative at scale, which is kind of what we’re talking about?

[29:18]

Stephen – To be honest, I think it’s early days; so, brands are seeing it as experimental and not putting it into a type of bucket yet. They’re either going to put it into an experimental bucket or they’ve got a bucket called Voice, and it’s tied to someone on the marketing team or the strategy team that said, “We need a voice strategy. What’s the voice strategy for our brand?” And they run off and they try to do some stuff and come back to satisfy a question. It has not hit scale yet; so, it really hasn’t normalized yet. Ann, I don’t know what your sense is.

[30:01]

Ann – No, I totally agree. I think it is something that marketers are playing with, that brands are playing with on both fronts in terms of sort of the marketing commercial side for their own businesses as well as for the research side. But they are truly playing with it; they are not committed to this yet. But it relates very nicely to the idea of experience because they know that this will be part of their brand experience and “How do I manage that? What are my expectations?”

[30:31]

Stephen – It’s just not there yet. This is where I put my kind of marketing research “shmethodology” hat on. You have to worry about the distribution of the devices. And are they representative? And then all of the other issues around the language you need to speak to get insights that you could really rely on to take action on out of the call it qual, call it conversation, call it voice-activated survey, whatever it is. It’s like playing in a sandbox right now. We’re not anywhere ready to scale it in any way.

[31:07]

Ann – I think that one of the things that we found was really interesting was initial work we had done was that the device and the research had been trained based upon British English as opposed to American English and how that small seeming subtlety could actually really throw off the learning from these types of engagements. So we do have to be really smart and really disciplined as to how we engage in this space.

[31:37]

Stephen – Not to change the direction completely, but you started off by talking about AR, VR. I think Virtual Reality is an easier paradigm to get to work quicker because it’s replicating an in-person experience that people, while it’s virtual, people are familiar with what it’s like to walk down an aisle and then pick out a product off a shelf or interact by opening the door of a car. There’s nothing new there: it’s just that the technology required to do it is extremely expensive and complicated. What we’re talking about on the voice side the technology may not be as expensive or complicated, but the human interaction is entirely new. Sometimes it makes you scratch your head like: “How are we going to solve this one.”

[32:26]

The invisible customer journey is a big problem or will become a big problem for the brands that aren’t connecting at an emotional level so that when the consumers of the dish soap or whatever place their order in five years (I don’t know when that’s going to happen.), it better not be dish soap. What’s interesting is I know that Google and Amazon are buying a lot of the generic names. So generic paper towels are now owned by Amazon, I believe. So that all of a sudden puts squarely the purchase power in Amazon’s lap, which there is a million different ways – well, probably a half a dozen ways, they could monetize that – either through the CPG’s. You’re right it’s not at scale but it’s also something that brands need to be paying attention to because once it hits scale, it’s going to be really hard to be able to address.

[33:28]

Stephen – Well, this is what we talk about with our clients a lot, which is what we’re really going through is an incredible period of disruption. Basically, what worked yesterday and what works today may be almost as good is not going to work at all on the paradigm of tomorrow. We’re at the top of the proverbial S-curve and, if we spend dollars in time and energy advancing on the same path, we’re only going to go down the wrong side of the S-curve. We really need to jump onto a new curve. That’s where we’re counseling clients to spend as much money as they can on thinking about voice as one investing in machine learning as another, which is probably why the whole CX category, as a whole, is so hot right now because there is a lot of good information, insights, and data that’s coming in all the time that you can analyze.

[34:25]

You’ve given us a lot of value today. I’m really appreciative. This next question is your right hook opportunity. You could tell our audience maybe a little bit about what Kantar is offering right now that’s got you guys really excited.

[34:40]

Ann – Well, I would actually say related to what we’ve just been talking about: the work that we are doing in the field of Artificial Intelligence really excites. Now it also scares me a little bit because the area that we’re primarily applying Artificial Intelligence is in the space of creative; so, it’s a really interesting balance of art and science. And we talked before about the notion of Human Intelligence. This is a space where you can never leave the human element behind. You can never leave behind the idea of human-led storytelling. But what Artificial Intelligence is allowing us to do is to get more into a data-driven optimization space.

And we are focusing on three primary areas: one is the classification of creative. How can you get to better tagging of assets within creative to understand what the parameters you should operate in? What works better for your brands versus the competitor’s? What are some of the subtle cues that you can include in your creative to make it better?

The second is diagnostics. Being able to use natural language processing to better understand how people are interpreting the stories that we are telling them. Do they actually get the key themes? Going back to the conversation we were just having about voice devices, being able to get people to just talk about a piece of creative that they may have just seen so that connecting the visual experience with the voice experience and getting that understanding and that diagnostic of creative using Artificial Intelligence.

And then the third is prediction. Stephen had mentioned earlier we have this amazing analytics team, and what they are doing within the creative space is very impressive in terms of getting to a better understanding of predictabilities. So, what if you had an ad that did well in the United States, would it actually transfer to another market? Would you be able to use it intact in India? Or would you be able to adhere to or are you adhering to certain brand guidelines with your creative and not having to make that a manual process? So there’s a huge amount of efficiency that can be driven by better application of Artificial Intelligence in the creative process, but at the same time, we can’t lose that human element.

[37:22]

Stephen – I think Ann, as I always do, I think she’s absolutely spot-on. Then I have to add my oddball build on what she said. Rather than what products I’m excited about, I’ll talk about what capability I’m excited about that we’re trying to empower our clients with. The analogy that I would use is a juggler. Jamin, have you ever tried juggling?

[37:51]

I am embarrassed to say that I have tried on a number of occasions, usually lightly intoxicated, and always catastrophic outcome.

[38:01]

Stephen – You put yourself in the shoes of a marketer who can probably juggle one ball easily, if not too intoxicated, right? You throw in a second ball; it starts to stretch their brain a little bit. And then you throw in a third ball and all hell starts to break loose, right? I think it’s the move from the second ball to the third ball that gets people going. What I’m talking about – each of these balls are different factors influencing what marketing decisions they need to take and when in order to engage a customer and drive growth. Let’s just say you’re a barker who’s made it to three-ball juggling and then somebody throws in an apple. Now you’re going to say, “OK, I’ve figured out how to deal with the three balls but now I’ve got to figure out an apple. I’m going to take a bite out of that apple every time I do it.” That’s a whole new skill set. Then somebody throws in a bowling pin, and you’ve got to still keep it going. Then somebody throws in a meat cleaver. And then somebody throws in the flaming, running chainsaw, and yet as a marketer you’ve got to figure out how to keep all of things going in unison; you’ve got to manage in the short-term and the long-term; you’ve got to use qualitative data; you’ve got to use quantitative data; you’ve got to figure out how to leverage surveys; you’ve got to figure out how to leverage transactional data; you’ve got to manage privacy while driving personalization. It’s absolute mayhem for a marketer right now. I think that what I’m exciting about is we’re walking in their shoes because we’re feeling the same pressure. We’re empathetic about what they’re trying to accomplish and how hard it is to accomplish it. And we’ve got either the right set of capabilities internally or the right partnerships externally or the self-confidence to say, “We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re happy to try and learn it together with you to help marketers become really good jugglers and not have catastrophic consequences.”

[39:59]

Yeah, like losing arms and etc., etc., which is quite literally the picture of some real-life examples I’ve had trying to keep track of… I don’t even know what the word is. “Myriad” isn’t it, right? There’s just so much that a marketer has to pay attention to in order to be able to maximize the ROI on effort. And that’s a great application of AI where you’re addressing the creative because that’s the piece that’s the most difficult to separate in understanding those drivers, whether it’s video or elements of video or what have you.

[40:46]

My guests today, Anne Green, Stephen DiMarco, thank you very much for being on the Happy Market Research podcast.

[40:55]

Stephen – Jamin, thank you for having us. It was a great conversation.

Ann – thank you.

[41:01]

Stay tuned for this episode’s CEO hack brought to by Melanie Courtright of Research Now, SSI.

[41:08]

And even as an Executive now, one of the things I try to make sure I do is stay close to consumers. The best way to help our brands and clients be close to their consumers is by being close to consumers ourselves, spend time following their trends, knowing what devices they’re using. There’s nothing more important than just really understanding consumers if you want to help clients make decisions about them.

[41:31]

I absolutely love how she talks about one of the keys to success. And this is not just for CEOs. This is for everybody inside of an organization. We have got to add value to our customers and the only way we do that is to operate with the lens that they are operating in. And that is, we have to figure out who their customer is and get to know that customer because that provides the context of the insights that we deliver for them.

And thank you everyone who been tuning in. As always, if you are listening, like Shar, leave your feedback. It is a way that other insights professionals can find this podcast and take advantage of the knowledge. Have a great rest of your day!

On our last episode of this year, the Happy Market Research team shares what their biggest lessons were in 2018, their favorite episodes and more. We couldn’t be more thrilled with the outcome this year and can’t wait for you to listen to what we have in store for 2019.

Thank you to our listeners who continue to support us. We wish you a Happy New Year!

FIND US ONLINE

:www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

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[00:03]

Happy Market Research.  This is our last episode.  Today is December 28th.  So, this is our last episode.  People are nodding because we’re on audio, of course.  

[00:12] – William

Last episode of 2018.

[00:14]

What did I say?

[00:15] – William

Last episode.

[00:16]

Of 2018, thank you.  Good point, William. Big difference.

I thought it would be a lot of fun, closing us out to talk themes we recognize in the 50+ episodes that we did in 2018 and then talk to my awesome staff:  Chueyee, Chloe, and William on some of their learnings and take-aways. So without further ado, Chueyee.

[00:41] – Chueyee

Hi.  [laughter]

[00:46]

Let’s start out with a little bit…  I mean you didn’t come from market research, right?  You came out of school with a journalism degree. So, what was that like for you moving out from journalism into a marketing company, specifically Happy Market Research Podcast?  

[01:04]

Well, I didn’t even know market research existed when I was college or until I got this job.  So my first day here I was super confused, but then as we got more into interviewing market research professionals, and I started listening to more podcasts from Happy Market Research, I just started to get a little bit better understanding of what market researchers do.  

One great example that Jamin told us was Yoplait yogurt.  And after he told us the story about that, it was like “Wow, market researchers are super important especially for businesses.”  If you guys don’t know the story, Jamin told us that back in the day, Yoplait yogurt, their main color was green, but then they did some data research and they realized that, if they changed it to red, then they would get more sales.  Once they did, they actually did get more sales. So that was just like mind-blowing to me.

[02:10]

The mind-blowing part was specific to how data is used or what part of that was really impactful?

[02:18]

Just the fact that market research is so little but has such a big impact.  

[02:23]

Yeah, I think that’s true.  I mean market research is the tail that wags the dog.  So, when you think about the billions of dollars that are spent in marketing every year, globally, market research represents a very small fraction of that.  Maybe – I don’t know what rule of thumb is – I’ve always assumed it’s about 10%. The total global market research spend according to ESOMAR is around $70 billion, which is a big ass space.  But I do believe that proportionally we’re holding at that – much smaller relative to how much money is being spent across the board. The decisions that businesses are making… You referenced a study that I had participated in in the ‘90s that was very interesting for me because it was also probably one of my “Ah-hah” moments moving into market research of, while data is important and can be used for impacting consumers and their preferences, I think what’s been interesting over the last two decades from my view and of my career is how the internet has empowered consumers in a unique way.  So before brands literally were blind on what the consumer preference was outside of sales data, of course, which is a lagging indication, but now through the internet, there has been a direct access to the consumer to the brand through social media.

Last time I was on a United flight, I tweeted to United, “Hey, thanks” because I got some free refreshment, and then United tweeted back to me.  So that direct connection now is public and that has influence, positive or negative, on that brand. Conversely, of course, the guy that was ripped off the airplane on United… that had a lot of social media impact and negatively hurt the United brand.  

While market research as a discipline has been used to inform brands of consumer opinions, now brands have to broaden their scope beyond just traditional market research methods but yet still apply the same rigor in order to digest and understand the consumer.  It’s a neat phase; it’s a neat time.

So what was your favorite episode?

[04:40] – Chueyee

For sure, it has to be the one with Dina from Survata.  I was able to actually go to their office with Jamin and Alexandra, and we were able to see the office and meet Dina in person.  I felt like because I was able to go there that was also one of the reasons why it was my favorite episode. But my most favorite thing that she said like during the interview was how even though she is a CEO, she is still a human being and she still does take out the garbage; she does whatever other people would normally do.  Like just because you’re a CEO doesn’t mean you can’t do… I don’t know, printing paper or like stapling stuff. So I feel like because of that quote, it just stuck in my head. Especially in a startup company, you’re really all over the place. And, even though you do have a job description, you have to do more.

[05:37]

Yeah, and I think it’s the people that do more are the people that wind up succeeding ‘cause my theory is that they see the whole picture or at least a more complete view of the picture.  The small things are what impact the big outcomes in our lives. If you’re in a situation where… This is New Year’s resolution season; so, everybody’s coming up or most people are coming up with their three things that they’re going to change, right:  “not going to drink any more or less,” “I’m going to eat certain types foods,” “I’m going to stop smoking,” “I’m going to spend more time with my kids,” whatever those things are. And a lot of times the delta is “I’m eating badly and then I’m just magically going to stop eating badly or eat well,” using that example.  That’s always a recipe for failure. Recipes for success of sticking with habits are “I’m going to make incremental or small changes.” So, for example, instead of eating whatever I want at lunch, I’m always going to eat a salad. That’s my first discipline. It’s a little, tiny change. Or I’m going to drink a bunch of water in the morning or whatever it is, right?  It’s like doing pushups: no one can just go do a hundred pushups, starting right away; you probably can do ten or some number. But, if you exercise that muscle, create that discipline in your life, eventually you’ll be able to do 12, 20, and eventually 100 pushups, right? Connecting that, the corollary to business is we have… Happy Market Research is a great example.  As a startup, everything is important. And I don’t get to choose as the founder of the company, I don’t get to choose “Oh, I’m not going to set up the mics” ‘cause the mics have to get set up, right? So there’s this like lack of entitlement or humility that we all bring to the table. And at the end of the day, that is top-down always. So, if the CEO is sitting there saying, “I’m doing my very important role and job, and I’m not going to set up the mics,” then you’re going to have a big problem because everybody else is going to start looking at the things that they’re not going to do, right?  And we need to define ourselves as a “Yes” culture as opposed to a “It’s not my job” culture.

So, I am really interested in this Dina piece.  How much of the – it being your favorite episode – was because you were on site versus the content of the episode?

[08:10] – Chueyee

I think both because I was able to hear in person and then also hear through the podcast.  I think that helped a lot. And also I think it was her energy that she brought out while we were there.  She was just so excited and so passionate about everything that she was saying. I remember that she said that, “Even on Saturdays when I’m working now, I’m replying to emails.”  And that really stuck to me as well because I’m just like “Wow, she’s always on.”

[08:38]

Yeah, totally.  It’s like a lifestyle.  There’s this blend that’s happened in the last 10 years – or really 15 years – through the internet again.  Because you’re an “always on culture,” you have the ability of turning it on and off. Like William this morning coming in at 9:30 was no problem, right?  He got to spend time with family that he doesn’t normally, but at the same time he was able to communicate to us that information last night and on the weekends when he’s doing work.  So like there’s this blur between work and everything else where it’s kind of all fitting together. Or like me: I was cutting frickin’ wood yesterday with my dad, and then we do a video call – which is hilarious.  Yeah, totally. Always on: you have to have that mindset ‘cause again, if you get into the “I’m going to work from 9 to 5” mentality, that’s going to be a problem, I think, for people that are overachievers. That definitely works for other roles and mentalities.  I’m not judging. Not everybody always has to be in that role.  I think that people who are going to be in that highly successful category are going to be the ones that have that sort of “always on” framework.

[09:53] – Chueyee

Yes, I noticed ever since I got my first job in college, email is like checking social media to me and even on the weekend.   And if I don’t check my emails, it’s like I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Like I feel like something important is supposed to go on but I don’t know what’s happening.  

[10:11]

Alright.  So, let’s shift to Chloe.  

[10:14] – Chloe

Hi.  [laughter]

[10:18]

Chloe may be the shyest one of the bunch.

[10:20] – Chloe

Yeah, we can’t really have you see this picture, but we’re all standing around a tiny table and I just wish that everyone would turn around and not stare at me.  [laughter] But here I am.

[10:35]

So, you’re a master storyteller; you’re a master storyteller.  I mean seriously… My favorite social media post that I’ve ever seen in my entire life is literally your story of sneakers and first day as an intern, right?  That was such a well-said, well-articulated, told story of a person’s things that are meaningful and just kind of taking the ordinary and making it super relevant and interesting.  So maybe you could tell us the story about how you landed at Happy Market Research.

[11:14]

Yeah, it was such a coincidence, and also at the time, I felt like the stars really aligned for me.  In 2017, at the end of 2017, I graduated from college, and it was really a big journey to finding my first job.  I didn’t really have much experience, and I wasn’t getting a lot of interviews. But in August of this year, my mom sent me a Facebook event, and it was for this entrepreneurship talk in town that was close by.  And she said, “Chloe, you have to go to this.  You have to just get out there. You can’t be down; you can’t be depressed anymore.  You really just have to get out there and start meeting people. This is how people find jobs.”  And I was super reluctant to go because that’s way out of my comfort zone. I do like to go and be around people and meet people, but being around a bunch of new people was really scary to me.  But I decided to go anyway, and I showed up by myself. It was my very first networking event that I had ever been to. And Jamin happened to be one of the speakers. I didn’t really talk to anyone, but when I left that day, I thought, “OK, maybe, I could go to another one of these.”  A couple weeks later, I was scrolling through LinkedIn and I saw this post that someone had shared about a podcast. It looked really cool; it was a graphic for, I think it was, BuzzFeed – the interview that we did with BuzzFeed. And I was like, “Wow, that’s really cool. That seems like something that I would want to be a part of because I really do like video and maybe I can help them out in some way.  Then I saw that it had come from Jamin and his profile. I was like, “Hey, I remember him being a speaker at that event that I went to. Maybe there is some way that I can get in touch with him.” It was scary to me to kind of think about reaching out to him because I didn’t know him… I didn’t talk to him at all. And I talked to my mom, and I talked to my boyfriend. And they said, “No, you saw him. This is your in.  You could tell him that you saw him speak and that you really liked him. And I thought, “OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to let go of my fears and do something because I need this. This is something that I really want.” I wrote an email; well, not an email – I actually contacted him through LinkedIn. And he responded to me. We had some communication issues to where I couldn’t get a hold of him. And the funny thing is Jamin was a really hard person to get a hold of.  I mean he’s a CEO; so, of course, he had a lot of things going on. But he made me chase him, and that was something that I was afraid to do because I was afraid of the rejection. And my mom said, “So, you’re just going to give up.” I think it was after a week of trying to get in touch with him and finally meet him. “You’re just going to give up.” I said, “Well, I don’t think that it’s for me. Obviously, the universe is giving me a sign that this isn’t for me. So I just got to move on; I got to find something else that is meant for me.”  And she was like, “OK, but I really think you should try one more time.” My boyfriend said, “No, you’ve come this far. He’s reached out to you three times. You have nothing to lose by trying one more time.” And it was actually through him and one of his co-workers that we got connected. Luckily, that was Jamin’s right-hand man at Focus Vision. That was what kind of sealed the deal but also just being really persistent. I did actually send him a text too to say, “Hey, you know I really want to do this. Can we meet?” So the combination of reaching out to him through text and having that connection through my boyfriend was what got me into this position.  So, I started out as an intern working for free, kind of paying my dues. And that’s how I became an employee. I think it was a great thing for me just because I would have given up. I think everything else before this point, I would have said, “It’s not for me” – just like I said with this. But sometimes you just got to push harder and be more persistent: that’s how great things happen.

[15:55]

100%.  [laughter]  The thing that stood out to me is as I was listening to you talk is… There’s two things actually:  one is fear. Fear of putting yourself out there is, I believe, the biggest inhibitor of success in the early stages of your career and, even to, I believe, a greater extent, in the later stages of your career.  Let me explain why: In the later stages of your career, you presumably have already done something; so, there’s a measuring stick of success, and the market looks at you and says, “OK, is it going to be bigger?”  It’s just expectation. If it’s bigger, then you win; if it’s not bigger, then you lose, right? So the fear that I had in starting Happy Market Research – ‘cause it took me, I want to say, three months to (pardon my French) sack up and start the podcast because I’m thinking to myself, “OK, what I’ve done in the past is meaningful; it’s still impacting the industry and growing and doing well.”  Starting a podcast doesn’t seem like the natural step forward. Intuitively, I’d be working with a Egon Zehnder and getting another CEO job for some software blah, blah. So, you know what I’m saying? It was a big dose, I guess, of just faith that everything is going to work out, and like you said, universe… whatever you believe in, that if you do step out, then it’s going to be OK. What’s the worst thing that could happen?  I mean literally what’s the worst thing that could happen? Somebody could tell you, “No,” or people could look at you and judge you. Well, the worst thing that could happen is you not take that step and not subsequently have the opportunities that are presented to you. Kind of like Chueyee was talking about in hers about this “Everybody does everything” mentality or this “Yes”-culture mentality… As soon as you start creating frameworks or “No’s” or limiters for yourself because of fear, then you immediately… you immediately set a ceiling on yourself that is unrealistic.  

I think if there’s one lesson that I hope everybody that’s listened to this podcast or paid attention to any of the social media posts that we’ve done or interacted with us on an individual level or in a public environment…  the one thing I would say is that we are our own limiter. We are the person, the individual, the being that creates the ceiling for ourselves and what sort of success looks like and what we can achieve. The sooner that you can break those ceilings and say, “I can be whatever you see as successful,” the next question then is “How do I achieve that?”  And the good news is there’s already an Oprah. So, what’s her journey look like? How do I reverse engineer that, assuming that’s like the go-to whatever your framework is. And then you start moving in that direction. Chances are the direction that we go isn’t where we end. I’ll tell you that for sure at almost 48 years old. But I will tell you that the more that you exercise those muscles of just stepping out and not being afraid, then the higher the probability is that you’ll achieve great things and have broader influence or have a happier life, better time with your kids, better time with your spouse, whatever it is that you’re into.

So tell me about your favorite episode?  

[19:27] – Chloe    

Well, having said all of this, that kind of leads into two different episodes that we recorded:  one of them with Marc Zionts and the other with Nancy Hernon. Those were two of my absolute favorites.  One thing that Marc Zionts said that really stood out to me was something that he looks for in people is that sense of resilience.  You have to be resilient and determined because sometimes things aren’t going to go your way, and when you’re at rock bottom, you have to know that things aren’t going to stay that way forever.  For me, with the whole job search thing, that really was like it was really bad at the time; it felt bad and it felt like it was the worst part of my life or whatever the case was, but at the end of the day, I knew at some point things would get brighter and things would get better and they did.  Also, with Nancy Hernon, when she was telling her story about her moving to New York and just getting up and going, she said, “Why not? What can I lose?” She always asks herself, “Let’s just do it. Let’s just see what happens.” Rather than the fear, “Oh, no, everything could go all wrong,” it’s a much better way to look at it as what could happen.  It’s worse for you to have that regret of not knowing what could have happened. I think those are just things that you can apply to your life in every way.

[21:00]

Right, the regret being the biggest problem.  At the end of life (we’ve all seen the studies that have been done over time, the interviews with people in old folks’ homes), there’s only one problem there:  it’s the things that they didn’t try; it’s the things that they didn’t step out with and just say, “I’m going to give this a shot. I wish I spent more time doing whatever it was.”  Well, we just have to step up and recognize that we are in charge of our time right now, and if I’m going to choose to play whatever it is ten hours a day of the trending videogame versus ten hours a day of building a personal brand or with my kids or whatever…  You just have to own those subsequent outcomes. I know some very successful people, financially successful people that are absolutely miserable now with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, and their kids won’t talk to them because they made choices. And, if you talk to them about what they wish they had, it isn’t hundreds of millions of dollars; it is meaningful relationships with their family.  So, we need to own the outcomes, which means we need to own the inputs and not operate like victims or “Oh, I just have to spend more time at business. I just have to, have to….” No, you don’t; you get to choose your own path. The other story that kind of piggybacked on that one was Robert Porter, right? It’s pretty impactful.

So, William, let’s shift gears with you.  What was your favorite episode?

[22:25] – William

Oh, you’re switching it up on me, OK.  Favorite episode? I think it is Robert Porter, and the reason I say that is because he out of everybody on the podcast opened up, I think, on a personal level more than anybody else did.  Seeing somebody who is very successful in business, very successful, just be that vulnerable and open about his life and the things he’s experienced and had to persevere through was just really eye-opening ‘cause those are the things where on social media and just in public, everybody puts their best foot forward and you see one side of things.  You could look at his LinkedIn profile and think, “Oh, man, this guy has never had anything bad go on in his entire life.” But then you hear his story and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, you had to deal with that and that and that!” And it’s really incredible.

[23:25]

And, of course, the story that William is referencing is one where Robert Porter and his sibling were abandoned by his mother at an airport and then moved into the system at that point.  Subsequently, of course, he’s built a very successful business, just rocking it financially as well as impacting market research. So, very, very successful life outcome for him.

[23:57] – William

And then from there he had the merger that he was trying to do, that he successfully did.  And during that, his wife had this severe health episode. Fortunately, he had surrounded himself with good teammates and people in his life that could support him through that.  It just really speaks to the importance of building a solid team of people you can trust and having a solid network professionally.

[24:25]

So, you have worked for me before Happy Market Research started just to build some Instagram action, I’d say, and try to figure out that pop form.  Then, of course, moving into a full-time role at Happy MR. What has it been like for you, coming out of school recently, entrepreneurial focused, into a start-up?

[24:51]

Well, it’s been absolutely incredible.  I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunities with Happy Market Research and Jamin that I’ve had.  Having majored in entrepreneurship, seeing it first-hand, practical, being executed is totally different than what you learn in school.  It’s just really cool to see Jamin, who’s a seasoned entrepreneur, starting a business from scratch and getting to be here on the ground floor, seeing things unfold.  It really is changing my perspective on what it’s like to start a business. In a lot of ways, it makes it feel more realistic for me in the future. I’m like, “OK, yeah, now that I know that, I can do that.”  I can definitely see myself doing this in the future, but it also made me realize how currently unprepared I am to start a business.

[25:48]

I think you’re always unprepared.  It’s like being a parent. There’s no manual:  you just have to go through the process. I want to piggyback though on the point that you made about the difference between school and real life.  Where is the delta there? The gap between education and the practicalness of entrepreneurship?

[26:06] – William

They don’t teach you really how to be an employee in your business.  They don’t teach you even if you’re self-employed. They don’t teach you the day-to-day operational things that you need to do to successfully execute a start-up.  They teach you all of the HR compliance. They teach you all of the taxes…

[26:28]

Financial…

[26:30] – William

…Everything like that.  Entrepreneurship gets really nitty gritty with what you learn about business – different than management or accounting does.  But even still you don’t learn the really important, hands-on hard skills that you need to have to be a good employee in a start-up.  

[26:47]

By employee, you’re referencing both the people that you hire as entrepreneurs as well as the entrepreneurs themselves, right?

[26:53]

Exactly, yeah, ‘cause even when I was… I briefly flirted with having a consultancy over summer.  I had two months of success, but I wasn’t sure if I could keep the pipeline up. I just know that…  They don’t teach you how to make sales in entrepreneurship (that’s the big one); they don’t teach you how to sell.  They teach you how to figure out if you have a good business idea, a good value prop, but they don’t teach you how to actually sell the thing to people.   

[27:20]

That’s totally true.  There are a lot of salespeople that start businesses, myself included, and…  I think one of the limiters is… (This is a double negative, so I’ll rephrase it.)  They’re a good salesperson, but they don’t recognize that they’re not a good CEO. So what I mean is they’re a good salesperson, but they’re not a good CEO; however, they don’t know that about themselves.  Just because they were good in the early days means that they need to push through to the later stages of a company. I would say that, if I could teach a course at the undergrad level, it would probably be on entrepreneurship, self-awareness.  It would be a lot about understanding yourself constantly – not just from a Myers-Briggs 1 and done. But learn to listen to yourself, learn to see yourself.

[28:10] – William

Be self-critical.

[28:11]

Be self-critical, not in a negative…  constructive. And not in a way where you’re always thinking about, “Oh, I wish I would have done this better or that better or this better.”  I think that can be poison. But you need to see yourself through the eyes of whether it’s the employees or the market or the customer, or what have you.

[28:30] – William

Having perspective.

[28:31]   

Totally.  And that will really help round out for entrepreneurs where you are strong and where you’re weak and then apply humility to exactly those points so that you can bow out at the right time of the business’s growth, so that you do maximize your outcome at the end of the day.

[28:51]

That would be a really awesome course.

[28:53]

I think so too, actually, yeah.  So, 2018 is in the bag… the biggest lesson you learned?

[28:59] – Chloe

So the first thing that comes to mind especially with my story and my journey – my biggest lesson of 2018 is just to get out of your comfort zone even if it’s just a little bit because you never know where that can take you.  And I’m a super shy person, but my team… I’m so glad to be working alongside them because they’ve kind of shown me too that being silly and being fun and doing things that you wouldn’t normally do, that’s just what makes life great.  So I thank all of you for letting me join your team.

[29:36] – William

We thank you for being part of our team.

[29:38]

Alright, who’s next?  Biggest lesson learned?

[29:41] – Chueyee

Well, I really didn’t think about this a lot, but one of things that popped up is probably to always be prepared and expect the unexpected.

[29:50] – William

Always have a notebook.

[29:51] – Chueyee

Oh, my God, I don’t have one right now, but I usually do.  I’m usually the typewriter and the notetaker in our group.

[29:57]

So preparation is vital.  I can’t remember who it was – maybe William – that said that always bring a pen and paper to a meeting.  My favorite example of that was a co-pitch to a company. (I won’t tell you who it was with, but the guy is still in the industry.)  The company we were pitching was Honda – so this small, little firm, right? It was for hundreds of thousands of dollars of research annually or completes, I should say, annually.  So I really wanted this business. I came; I brought a guy with me. (I don’t remember who it was now). I had my notebook, my pad; I had done my research; I knew who we were meeting with, etc., etc.  The other guy comes in a little bit more like a cowboy and then about three minutes before the meeting he says, “Hey, man.” So he saw that I was prepared: I had a paper and whatever. He says, “Hey, can I borrow a piece of paper?”  So I tear out a piece of paper from my notebook, give it to him. He says, “Oh, yeah, I forgot my pen. Do you have a pen?” I look around, “No, I’m sorry. I only brought one pen.” And I turn around and look, and there’s a magic marker on the white board, right?  So, “Dude, here you go.” I swear to God he took notes with Honda executives in the room, using a f**ing magic marker on a piece of paper. All I was thinking was, “I bet it’s bleeding through and going to stain the table.” Is it “bring your kids to work” work day?  I don’t know. I was super pissed. Obviously, we lost the business. We opted out as soon as he brought up the magic marker.

Preparation is vital.  You can’t have successful, as you’re describing it, B.S.; you can’t have improvisation successfully applied to a business UNLESS you have the framework or the preparation that’s gone into it, right?  We don’t exactly know what’s going to happen… I’ll pick on PeerSpectrum, our marketing services customer, when we’re in a meeting yesterday, one of the executives said, “Well, what is our strategy or plan around us sharing and commenting on other people’s content, right?”  That’s a really good question, and I off-the-cuff come up with an answer. The view on that could be “Yes,” or the view is “He’s done this a lot and built an audience successfully with – whatever it is – 22,000 people on LinkedIn and many Fortune executives. So maybe he actually has that framework and understands how to be able to apply it.”  See what I mean? So I think earlier in your career, you definitely need to have the preparation side of it, and then, as you get better at the pattern recognition and have some success, you still have to have the humility of preparation. And that’s the piece that I think that we fall down on. Like that meeting would have completely failed had you not, and briefed the team ahead of time, on the things that we needed to do in order to be successful, right?  When I think about… (I’m going to ask you guys this question really quick.) One of the questions we had for most of our interviews in 2018 was Top Three Characteristics of an All-Star Employee. What was one of those characteristics that you felt was consistently said, brought up, or fairly consistently brought up by the guests and how did that impact you?

[33:11] – Chloe

I think it would be having an employee who is willing to change along with the company.  I think that stuck with me the most ‘cause I started this job at Happy Market Research in late July, and I was hired to do videos.  And now I’m mainly working with clients and marketing; so, I had to shift my job position to where our company is going. When we first started, we just were basically a podcast company and did podcasts about market research.  We had two different podcasts: MRX News and Happy Market Research. And now we’re dying down on Happy Market Research and next year we’re going to go to about two a month. Now we’re going to focus more on clients, and we also want to do more podcasts like at conferences.  So like that’s kind of what we’re leaning toward. But again, the number 1 thing I noticed that is you have to change along with your company. If you don’t, you’re just going to be stuck.

[34:14]

Totally.  You’ll be stuck without a job.  [laughter] It kind of gets down to – and that’s just talking about employee-fit or company-fit – the self-awareness of “Do I want to work at a 9 to 5 where I’m doing the same thing?”  There’s a lot of people who do and are really happy doing it. So we’re not judging that view, but if you’re going to work at a start-up or, I would say, even at a more or less progressive business, then it’s probably the case that you’re going to need to be adaptable to meet the needs of the organization because in war time – that’s when you have war time promotions…  that’s the other piece, the upside opportunity, right? Executives, even in a… I managed a 400-person business. I’m not saying that that’s a big business, but it’s a lot of employees globally, but I still knew the people that were overachieving even in that framework where most of the employees weren’t located locally where I was based. I was still spending time with them; I was trying to get to locations.  But I always knew who was overachieving in those offices, and I also knew who wasn’t achieving, right? And then when there were opportunities for advancement, Boom! – that’s really easy. And, conversely, when you’re having to cut staff because of underperformance for whatever reason by a market or at a company level or at a global level, that becomes pretty easy too. Alright, William.

[35:38] – William

I think for me it was the ownership mentality of employees thinking like the CEO thinks.  I think that we have the opportunity to do that a lot here at Happy Market Research because there’s four of us.  Sometimes decisions need to get made. We have a culture here I think you really empower us to make those types of decisions.  I think it’s really key for all employees to have that ownership mentality because if you’re thinking the way that your CEO does or the C suite thinks or shareholders think – whoever it is, you’re aligning your purpose and your daily operations in the business with kind of the end goal of the business, which is driving shareholder value, driving profit, driving revenue.  If you have that approach every day when you go into work of “What are the things I can do to really add value to the business,” then you’re obviously going to be the frontrunner for any promotions or raises or anything, bonuses anything like that.

[36:44] – Chloe

I think I just have to agree with Chueyee in the words of March Zionts:  agility is really a key characteristic that an employee should have because it’s true especially working in a start-up.  You do have to be OK with change because from one day to the next your direction can change. And you just have to ride with it.  Life is changing all the time too, and if you can’t accept that, you’re just going to get swallowed by the waves.

[37:17]

Yeah, from your mouth to every brand’s ears.  Social media, if anything, has illustrated the importance of attention for companies and the willingness to apply their resources towards touching generations in that space where the generations are going.  And that’s why I keep referencing the Edwin Wong interview with BuzzFeed in most of my conversations. I love the Facebook group they have on food. What is it 23 million? It’s understated. Maybe it’s 200 million?  

[37:53] – Chloe

Probably around that.

[37:54]

I think it’s 200 million.  I think it’s around 200 to 300 million people who are part of that Facebook group.  And when Edwin brought it up on the podcast, he said the reason that has been so successful and one of the, if not the largest Facebook group, is because BuzzFeed has a culture of going where the people are and talking about what the people want to talk about.  So it isn’t about BuzzFeed: it’s about the market. And as soon as you apply that mentality to what you do as an employee or as a husband or as a whatever (boyfriend or girlfriend), I’m just approaching from the male view, but you get the point. Then you immediately, I believe, start finding success in those relationships.  

Well, I think that’s a wrap for 2018.  You guys, thank you so much. It has been an honor to work with you this year.  I’m excited to see what 2019 brings. Like Chueyee said, we’ll be doing two podcasts every month: one will be with a brand; the other will be with an agency.  So we’re kicking off January with Kantar and Microsoft, talking about customer success and customer experience, how companies are leveraging technology and research to create excellent, amazing customer experiences, and how brands are applying that technology to the decision-making of their day-to-day operations.  

So that’s it from me, Jamin, 2018.

[39:24] – William

William, 2018.

[39:27]

What do we go out on?

[39:29] – Chloe

Hey, Happy Market Research here, wishing you a great New Year and that’s that.  [laughter]

[39:35] – William

Bye, Happy Market Research here.

[39:37] – Chueyee

Bye!

My guest today is David Paull, CEO of Engagious & Dialsmith.  Engagious and Dialsmith is a consultancy that leverages a proprietary technology solution to help companies craft and refine high-stakes messages and content.   Additionally, David started the Engagious Podcast where he connects many disciplines like Comedy and Astrophysics to help create a more complete set of skills for Insights Professionals.

FIND DAVID ONLINE:

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Engagious

Dialsmith

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

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[00:30]

Over the last decade the market research industry has been disrupted.  Our largest agencies are struggling to keep up as their customers turn to newer, faster and cheaper data sources. Now we are on the edge of yet another major market shift. Now is the time for us to reassert ourselves as the rudder of the brands we love. Thank you for tuning in to the Happy Market Research Podcast where we are charting the path for the future of market researchers and businesses. Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast.  Today my guest today is David Paull, CEO of Engagious and Dialsmith. Engagious and Dialsmith is a consultancy that leverages a proprietary technology solution to help companies craft and refine high-stakes messages and content. Additionally, David started the Engagious podcast where he connects with many disciplines like comedy and astrophysics to help create a more complete skill set for us insights professionals.

David, thanks very much for being on the Happy Market Research podcast.   

[01:35]

Jamin, thanks so much for having me.  

[01:38]

So it’s an honor to…  I think you may have one of the original podcasts centric to market research, at least from my recollection.  Is that consistent with yours?

[01:48]

Yeah, I think we kicked off pretty early when we launched ours in 2018.  I believe the Insights Association was doing their Audible Insights podcast; I believe it started shortly before then.  Might have been around that time. And certainly apologize to anyone who has been doing it longer, but certainly in the early days of it when we started early 2018.  

[02:15]

Well, if people listen to this and have been doing it longer know of shows that have been doing it longer, we would love to connect with them, both David and myself; so, please put them on our radar.  We will humbly submit our error and also love to have the conversation and learn from the godfathers in the space.

[02:33]

Absolutely.

[02:34]   

So, listen, man, I wanted to talk a little bit about your background before we jump into some other topics.  You have a strong background in technology and, interestingly enough, also sales. And then you founded Dialsmith in 2009.  That was an interesting point, right? Economically speaking, the U.S. was, I would say, in turmoil still from the Great Recession.  What gave you the confidence and inspiration to step out and start your own company?

[03:04]

That’s a good question.  It was really a matter of necessity more than anything.  My background is technology and sales. I didn’t start out in the market research space though I’ve been in it now for going on 20 years.  On the Dialsmith side of our business, our core technology are the perception analyzer dials that everyone in research knows from dial testing of TV pilots, presidential debates, and things like that.  Back in the 2000s, we were a division of Market Strategies, a large market research firm. It was during that time of the recession in 2009 when there were a number of smaller divisions of that company and really of others that didn’t really fit within those organizations anymore especially during that time.  So it became an opportunity for us to spin off what’s now called Dialsmith, a stand-alone business. The timing worked out really well for us because we were a small company, but as soon we got out from under a larger corporation, we were able to function is a very healthy, very profitable way as a pretty small business at the time.  We’ve certainly grown since. But we’ve had the good fortune of being profitable since the day we started, December 1, 2009: fully self-funded all along the way and have grown organically and bootstrapped all along the way. All in all, it worked out for us, but it was definitely a bit of a sketchy time.

[04:48]

Yeah, no kidding.  When you think about some of the challenges centric to operating a division of much larger organization like you did, for you to be able to step out and then be captain of your ship or master of your destiny or whatever you want to say, that had to be remarkably freeing.  

[05:06]

It was freeing and it was, of course, terrifying as well.  You’ve been in the exact same boat of starting and running your own company really from the ground up.  For me, anytime I tell this story I call it the perfect start-up because Market Strategies was a great place for us to be, and they were also an incredible partner for me when spinning off Dialsmith.  They helped me get on my feet and get the business started. We started Dialsmith with a pre-existing customer base, a pre-existing product line, and employees. So one day we switched off the light and went home, and the next morning we turned on the lights as Dialsmith, and it was business as usual.  Then we set our path for growth over the years. We had a really good, early footing. We have a great staff, many of whom are still with us today, and they were with me for the 10, even 15, years prior. Really it all comes down to the people regardless of the economic climate.

[06:18]

What was the impetus for the spin-off?  Was it is driven by the executive team? Or were guys pushing it up?  I don’t want to say a skunk works. Were you guys kind of driving that idea up to the executive team?

[06:34]

No, it came down from the executive team.  It was during the recession. I think it was really just a function of how they wanted to structure the company, going forward.  And we were a bit of a skunk works division: much smaller, kind of off to the side. I think strategically for them it was just the right time to jettison a business like that.  As you know from bigger companies, we were a relatively small division, operating in a large organization with larger corporate allocation and higher overhead, which made it challenging for us financially as a division.  As soon as we got off on our own and we were able to be structured as a pretty small team with much lower rent and weren’t carrying the allocation that goes along with a bigger company (‘cause that’s what bigger companies need to function)… We had to pull our weight.  As soon as we got out from under that, then the economics of the business instantly started to make sense. I think that Market Strategies knew that was going to happen, which is why they encouraged me and supported me through that whole transition.

[07:43]

How was the customer view going through that?  Moving out of the large and then into the smaller boutique in 2009?  Was there a concern among the customers that you were servicing around overall ability to consistently deliver quality?  And the second part of it is, from a sales and marketing view, how did the market see that?

[08:07]  

That’s a good question.  We really didn’t experience any customer push-back.  We were really diligent about the way we explained and positioned what we were doing.  As I mentioned, because we took the product line with us (we acquired all the IP – that came with us) and almost all of the staff came along, we were able to very accurately assure our customers that it’s business as usual…  you’re dealing with the same people and your getting same products and same service… You’re getting it under a new company name (really more or less was the only change to them). If anything, we picked up a little bit of positive press around that, but there was no negativity, no push-back; we didn’t lose any customers from it.  So the whole experience was positive.

[09:04]

Yeah, you’re right.  That’s like the absolute best.  That’s like a start-up in a box, right?  

[09:12]

Yeah, well, that’s the style of entrepreneur I am.  I’m not a major risk taker. I’ve known since I was a teenager that I wanted to own and run my own business.  I remember being a teenager sitting… I was younger than a teenager; I was pre-teen, sitting at the dining room table; and my father, who was also in business his whole career…  I remember he had his paper spreadsheet book – his spiral-bound, paper spreadsheet book (pre-computers, pre-Excel) – and he was using a very sharpened pencil to write all of his numbers into all of the cells on this spreadsheet.  That’s my first memory of business, and I remember just becoming fascinated with it. All through high school and college and everything was all different types of sales for me, sales and marketing. So I’ve always known that that’s the direction I was going to go in.  But I’m not a major risk taker; I’m not a grind-it-out-and-hustle kind of guy. I’m more succumbed to the feeling that businesses can be run in a healthy, productive way where everybody comes to work, does good work, but then also gets to enjoy going home and being with their families and enjoying their free time.  

So, this is the kind of business where we didn’t have to start it out under ridiculous pressure.  Because we had a good staff and a good products and great customers, we were able to just keep steady.  And it’s really been steady as she goes in the nine years since we started.

[10:46]

Yeah, well, congratulations on your success.  I love that story. I also liked the… I had forgotten this, but you resurrected the memory for me.  My grandfather used to trade stocks, right? So Sunday we’d get the paper, which would have the report on how the stocks were performing.  He’d then take that… I forget how many stocks he was monitoring, but it was a lot. I would say around 25 to 30 stocks. He would enter by hand each one of their prices into a ledger and then graph them on graph paper.  Then, after he had an adequate sample size, he would start making decisions on where he wanted to place his bets. It was completely different: I mean, talk about an analogue, an analogue world compared to how I’m tracking stocks now.  It’s been a fun transition. But I’ll tell you this: there was a connection you had with the data doing it that way that I think in a lot of ways can get overlooked, given how easy everything is nowadays.

[11:46]

Yeah, really, it’s funny ‘cause I don’t have that many memories from back in those days at all, but there’s something indelible about that one moment:  walking over to him and sitting down next to him and having never seen that giant spreadsheet before, I remember him explaining to me what it is, and how he was setting it up; he had his calculator out, doing all the math.  It wasn’t that long ago. Yeah, that was all data-based work and how he was managing the companies that he was running at the time.

[12:19]

So, let’s shift gears.  Let’s talk about podcasting.  Obviously, I’m highly passionate about this particular subject.  How long have you been listening to podcasts?

[12:29]

I’ve been listening for a pretty long time.  I’d have to say maybe five years or so. Got into them as really as something that I could do at the gym, something that I could listen to that was just more interesting than the same old music all the time.  Fortunately, I never had to drive a ton; so, I don’t listen a lot in the car. But I download them for flights, and I listen to them at the gym. It’s probably been going on about five years or so.

[13:00]   

Do you have any podcast that were that were inspirational for you in starting the Engagious podcast?

[13:07]

Maybe it’s a little cliché to say but you know what…  Ahh, ahh… Tim, ahh… His name has escaped me. Four-hour work week.  Tim.

[13:21]

Oh, ahh…  Oh, my gosh, really, come on.  All I can think of is Tim Allen.  Alright, hold on. I don’t know. It is pretty funny that I can’t…  Ferriss, Tim Ferriss. How did we not think of that?

[13:37]

Oh, my goodness!  I feel so silly. Of course!  It may be cliché to say ‘cause he’s clearly one of the largest out there, but what he’s been able to put together between a combination of long-form interviews that he then, of course, cuts down into shorter form discussions…  but then also stand-alone episodes where he picks a topic and talks about it himself, which we haven’t gotten into too much on our podcast yet. But that also has interested me. I just want to be sure that I’m covering topics where I have the authority to be of value to people as opposed to purely the value of our guests, who, I think, are far more impressive than me, which is why doing everything so far for us…  Interview-based and guest-based is what we’ve done. But I kind of look to Tim as one of the guiding lights of how to do and build an effective podcast.

Another big name one is Gary Vaynerchuk.  Gary Vaynerchuk does really with all of his media but especially what he does with his podcasts where a lot of them are done as video-recorded interviews.  So he’ll set up a camera across the table and they’ll do it as video and audio. But more and more they’re also doing audio. What he taught me – and it’s one of the things that I try to do with ours – is he taught me to look outside the bubble and to not just talk to people within our industry, but to look outside our industry to see what we can learn from others that we can then apply to what we do.  So, in the intro you mentioned I’ve interviewed comedians, and I’ve interviewed astrophysicists. That was really all by design. The main focus of our podcast is how to engage an audience. And when you think of a comedian, who has to get up on stage and make people laugh on command for seven minutes, is a pretty daunting thing to have to do, but you have to know how to control and engage an audience. We’ve tried to look far and wide for just different disciplines that we can learn from.

[15:56]

I really like how you structure your podcasts.  What evolution have you gone through? What key learnings have you applied over the ten episodes that you’ve done this year?

[16:08]

Well, I like to think I’ve gotten better.  When I go back and listen to the first few, I personally cringe.  I know all of the things that I didn’t know then that I know now. We try to make them – this probably sounds silly – we try to make them very listenable.  What we started doing after the first few episodes when we released them is we started putting a teaser at the front where we take a more compelling clip and put that right at the front before any intro or any music or anything because that’s like the subject line of an email; that’s the hook that’s hopefully going to get people to want to listen.  We try to keep the intro really brief and just get right into the meat of the discussion. We’ve been playing with different lengths as well. We talk about Tim Ferriss before, and his interviews will often run to 90 minutes to 2 hours. I’ve never done anything anywhere near that. We started out a little bit longer at about 45-50 minutes. I think we had trouble keeping listeners that long; so, we started shortening them down.  Now I shoot for around 30 minutes; some of them I deliberately structure closer to 20 minutes. So, those are really the things I’ve learned is how to structure them, how to get people hooked early, and then how to give them just the right amount of time where they’ll want to listen to the whole thing and we won’t lose their attention.

[17:35]

It’s really tricky trying to find this balance.  I think one of things I’ve noticed is if you go to a professionally structured piece of content like serial, for example, they’re very good in that they always feel the same:  length-wise, structure-, content-wise, etc. But then if you look at like a Gary V. or Gary Vaynerchuk structure, sometimes, to your point, he’s pulling just a highlight reel from the last whatever two months worth of content; other times it could be a keynote; and then other times it could be just a staff meeting that might last only ten minutes.  So you have this massive variability. I have found that one of my biggest frustration points is that I cannot track when listener drop-off occurs, right?

I tell you what, man, if this whole market research thing doesn’t work out, somebody’s got to solve that problem of content management on podcasts so that we can just get that somehow close the loop on things like new listeners, attrition, repeat, etc.  

[18:42]

Yeah, we’ve had that exact same conversation here, and it’s the one thing that makes us pull our hair out.  We know how many “downloads” we get, but we have no way to know how much people are listening. You know in our world of research, especially the work that we do where we’re tracking feedback to TV pilots and advertisements, and radio content second-by-second, that’s the world that I live in.  I want to know if there’s a trend of where I’m losing people in a podcast. And is there something about the way I’ve structured it that forces people to tune out or that’s keeping them to the end or they’re bouncing where they’re listening to the first thirty seconds and then they’re out. If there’s something out there that I’m not aware of, I’d love to know what it is, but I agree with you that’s a big thing that we’re missing as well.

[19:36]

This is probably boring the rest of the audience but a little bit more inside baseball.  I was meeting recently with the senior director of Audience Insights of NPR. He oversees podcast data as well, and you know that they have their own app and player.  So they can track all the things that you and I wish we could track. So I was talking to him about trying to get a sense of where the drop-off… and then wondering if they had found a surrogate for things like new listeners.  All the data research they had done trying to extrapolate on their own app to their broader iTunes, iHeartRadio, whatever, GooglePlay. They say it just falls apart; so, there just isn’t currently a solution that they’ve found.  I think that they’ve probably got the pockets for it, right to figure it out… that can track that piece but somebody’s going to be a billionaire when they can solve that problem.

[20:39]

That’s the next start-up idea then.  And if someone else doesn’t do it and we get frustrated enough, we just might do it ourselves.

[20:47]

There you go.  That’s awesome.  So, I think it was December 3rd you started of 2018. Talk to me about the role of personal brand and how that’s helped or maybe even gotten in the way of your business.

[21:06]

You know for us we haven’t focused too tremendously on personal brands in either division of our company, Dialsmith or Engagious.  We really try to make sure that it’s the companies that shine through and that we don’t tie the businesses to any one person or any couple of people.  So, I do host the podcast, and I’m doing more speaking now as well as my business partner, who heads up the research side of business more on the consulting side, and he’s an excellent speaker as well.  But we really try to focus more on the brand of the business, and managing two different brands is tricky. That’s been another bit of our challenge for the last year. We’re having fun doing it, but definitely some sticky moments in how to do that effectively.  So, really what I want to do is I want to establish trust; I want people to know that when they hear my name, that they can rely on what they’re going to hear; it’s going to be valuable to them. I’m obsessed with feeling like I’m delivering value and not wasting people’s time.  I think that’s the greatest disservice is if somebody was nice enough to give me a little bit of their time and listen to or either what I have to say or what I bring to them through a podcast or something, and then they feel like it wasn’t worth their time. That’s just tragic. You know really it’s trust and reliability that’s most important to me from just a personal reputation standpoint, but we focus a lot more on the company brands than we do on any individuals.

[22:48]

Do you think there’s going to be – for podcasts at least spawned this year in the market research industry, which is a pretty small industry, in general – do you think there’s going to be more podcasts that come up going into 2019 and looking forward to 2020?

[23:05]

My gut tells me that there probably will be.  The beauty of podcasting is that there’s a low barrier to entry even if you want to make sure that you do it well.  You know a good quality microphone is not that expensive and using online tools like you and I both do to record that are anywhere from free to a few bucks.  It really comes down to, “Do you have an editorial point of view?” and “Can you drive a discussion in a way that’s going to make people interested to listen?”  But the barrier to entry is very low. You don’t have to be setting up a video rig with a lot of lights; you don’t have to be uncomfortable being in front of a video camera; you don’t have to do anything on the street like man-on-the-street kind of stuff.  So I do think we’re going to see more and more of it.

The biggest trick really is diligence.  Getting started, doing a couple of episodes – that’s the easy part.  Then you realize that, if you really want to build an audience, you have to be consistent; you have to put out content regularly, and it has to measure up – it has to be valuable enough.  We’re in a cadence right now where we put out an episode every two weeks. We have enough content; we could do weekly – we just want to give ourselves enough time to let each episode breathe out in the market and be able to promote it enough so that we don’t step on one episode after another.  Our consistency right now is where we’re on every two-week-cadence. We’ll see if going into 2019 if we decide to alter that at all. I’m not sure. How often do you guys put out episodes?

[24:38]

My focus this year was figuring out how the hell to podcast.  So, the best way for me to do that was to just create as many episodes as I could.  So that was the whole meta for 2018. Kind of like your journey, when I started out, it was catastrophic.  And, fortunately, you learn through failure and you learn through success as well. We’ve gotten better and better.  We’re moving from a twice weekly to every two- week structure in 2019. My gut is telling… We’re going to do different like on-site (and this is something that you’ve done as well very effectively, I might add.) on-site interviews – that sort of thing.  I don’t know… it’s interesting ‘cause… It takes a lot of time; that’s the big problem, right? It isn’t the hardware or the software investment: it’s the focus investment. So that’s the piece that, I think, companies need to think about when they’re considering the trade-off of “Should I do it? Should I not?”  It’s very much like a trade show. The trade show itself takes time, but the prep and the trade show creative, etc. And then the post- is also… You’ve got to be committed to all three aspects of it and not just having salespeople show up and stay at a nice place. For us the big piece of learning is that (at least, we think) what the audience wants is deeper, more context, deeper conversations, more context, a few more segments.  So we’re going to move into… Next year we’ll have two different additional segments: one’s going to be HR tips and tricks for increasing overall engagement or managing up or whatever. And then we’re also going to have some technology and research tips and tricks and trends segments. So we’re breaking it up a little bit, probably going to a longer show format. Right now we’re about 20 to 30 minutes. I think we’ll probably be around 35-ish minutes with the additional segments and then adding a couple more voices in there.  I think it’d be interesting too. What do you think about… What do you think about the role of webinars and podcasts? Do you think there’s some tension that’s developing there?

[27:00]

I haven’t seen tension.  I find webinars tend to be more informative and instructive, and podcasts tend to be more informational and conversational.  We still do both, but we have a pretty natural delineation between when we want to educate versus when we want to inform. And that’s where we tend to lean more toward webinars when we want to educate.  Clearly, if you want to demonstrate something, drive an important point home, and then for podcasts we come up with our content calendar for what we think will be interesting, or things that will group well together.  We try to be informative but also make sure that there are some key take-aways. My hope is that after every episode, someone can go to work tomorrow and apply something that they got directly out of that episode and then over time I hope that it continues to unfold for them.  And they can continue to apply things as time goes by.

[28:06]

So really quick, put you on the spot:  What is one of the favorite things that you’ve taken away from your podcast

[28:11]

For me personally, it’s made me better at conversations.  It’s funny because as much as I’ve been in sales my whole career, I’m still pretty introverted.  I’m the person when I go to a conference, I’m not comfortable walking up to a group of people and just inserting myself and starting to talk.  Even though sales is my background, that’s just not the way I operate. It’s made me more comfortable having conversations on the fly because while I do script out the interviews a little bit with topics I want to cover, I try to let the conversations flow organically.  For me, that’s spilled over beyond the podcast just into how I communicate with people in general.

[29:00]

Shifting gears, a few of our guests…  (We’ve done this game, and I’m really starting to like it.)  This isn’t going to be a mainstay, but it’ll probably close out 2018, and then we’ll revisit it here in a couple of years.  I originally started it with one of our guests, Stacey Walker, the head of Insights at Adobe. It’s just sort of caught on, I guess, since there.  So here we go. If you are a VC who is investing in future technologies for market research… Let’s say that you have 10 David bucks. (It’s like the new virtual coin, right?  Everybody’s using it; it’s very popular.) So you have eight different options on where you can invest. You can distribute your 10 David bucks however you want across these options. The first one is virtual reality; the second one is augmented reality; then we have qualitative at scale, and that can be any sort of  qualitative at scale video, an LP whatever; Voice – so think about like Alex, Google Home; big data; traditional trackers; blockchain; and, I’m going to call it human intelligence or consulting. How would you distribute your 10 David bucks for a maximum ROI in five years?

[30:20]

Alright, that’s an interesting game to play.  Let’s see… The ones that jump out at me the most…  We can boil it down a little bit more from there.

VR, certainly – it is a little bit slower to ramp up than maybe some people thought it would, but it’s a huge culture shift for people who have to consume content, at least currently, inside of goggles.  But the potential there is off the charts. If we’re speaking especially about market research, specifically there are things you can do in VR that would have been impossible or incredibly expensive to do otherwise.  So we’d definitely put some there.

I think AR has tremendous possibilities as well when you can put people in these environments or put things in front of people that would be virtually impossible to do otherwise.  VR, AR – I would absolutely invest in.

I think Voice…  Voice is huge. Speaking specifically about market research, maybe not as much about just in the industry in general as you look at what Alexa and Google Home are doing.  So, specifically for market research, I might not put too much in voice, but I do think in general Voice is huge.

Qual at scale, especially since you mention video – absolutely, without a doubt, especially you look at what the likes of Voxpopme and others are doing.  I think that’s a big one. So, VR, AR, Qual at scale.

Then I would put the rest into number 8, human intelligence.  I just don’t think that we can afford to take the human element out of everything that we need to do.  Machines are great at telling you what people think; there’s not so great at telling you “why.” And you didn’t have AI on your list.  AI probably belongs in this conversation as well. That will certainly begin to help us automatically understand the “why,” but I don’t think you can beat the human intelligence when it comes to converting “what” into “why.”  And ultimately, “why” is what matters.

[32:35]

Yeah, my very first brand interview was with Rogier Verhuls at LinkedIn.  And he had this great quote that I’ve referenced a lot: “Research has to be about the ‘So what’ and ‘Now what,’ ”  It’s really kind of tethering it back to this concept of ROI and then contextualizing the data or the insights so that the executive knows what in the heck it means relative to the decision.  

[33:01]

Yeah, absolutely.  In the end, that’s all that matters, and that’s where human intelligence always comes into play for me.  

[33:09]

I’m a big believer in Voice having a material impact on our industry especially as it impacts our customers.  My thesis is that… (Like you, I think we’re similar in age; we remember the pre-internet days, right?) My thesis is that if you can remember the 90s where this internet was a sort of thing.  You really didn’t have a… didn’t know what to do with it. And then it evolved to be, obviously, one of the backbones, actually probably the backbone of information… is the backbone of information.  Today it’s actually replaced the father-child relationship in many ways to find out how to get something done. Then you think about the iPod and then later the iPhone. The initial use case for the iPhone was music, and you could do talking stuff.  And that was kind of the initial phases in 2006 and 2007. Voice right now is functioning a lot in the same sort of narrative. My hunch is that Voice, because it is passive in the way that we interact with it (We can do other stuff like drive or work out at the gym as you said)…  It starts getting really interesting because the opportunity for us as researchers to intercept and get feedback – whether it’s a post-utilization of a skill or app – gets really powerful ‘cause you can get that feedback in real time. Along with it comes things like sentiment, obviously natural language processing, etc.  But I haven’t seen market research, and I know again this is early days. I just think that once it hits, it’s going to be at scale quick and too late for brands to start paying attention or adjusting their strategies around it.

[35:06]

It’s a lot like what has happened with video.  I think video has really started to take root especially with regards to gathering feedback.  Voice is actually trailing a bit because with video you can see people’s expressions and you can read their faces and learn so much more than just voice, but like we were talking about with podcasts earlier, voice is so much more ubiquitous.  And you can do it anywhere, and you don’t worry about what do you look like or “Where am I?” or “What’s around me?” I think it’s interesting to see what’ll be to come.

[35:44]

Yeah, for sure, because voice has this – to your point – has this uniqueness of getting as close as you can, before we can do mind reading, to giving feedback to the experience because it’s passive.  You can keep both hands on your shopping cart while you’re pushing your kids and looking for groceries at Walmart and then still give feedback. There’s not another way to be able to garner that feedback other than voice.  Who knows how the big boys are going to…? I know that Neilson has recently started adding it into their reports, their quarterly reports, and there are a few other companies that are rattling sabers about it. But it’ll be interesting to see how 2019 shakes out and if voice becomes a centerpiece for the new tech companies that evolve or existing large companies that create units around it or product solutions around it.

[36:42]

Yeah, absolutely, I agree.

[36:44]

I am curious about the two-brand strategy:  Engagious and Dialsmith. Is there a rationale to try and combine those?  Or is it Google and Yahoo? Or, I’m sorry… Or is it Google and YouTube, is what I meant, sorry.

[37:00]

In some cases, we serve two different kinds of clients, and in other cases, we overlap.  So, Dialsmith was the original business, and we’re often hired by other research firms or large research divisions within large companies.  Then, Engagious being more of a consultancy, we are not generally competing against Dialsmith clients. We were pretty deliberate about not wanting to do that.  Because Engagious is so kind of laser-focused on communications, messaging, storytelling, we don’t find that we compete very often, which is important to us. But we do want the market to know that Dialsmith does what does with regard to dial testing tools in person, online, mobile, and then Engagious is all about engaging audiences with content and messages and stories.  So we deliberately kept the brands pretty separate so far in the market, and, while we do cross-pollinate a little bit and we don’t make any secrets about it (I’m talking about it openly right now.), we just find through our marketing activities it’s cleaner to keep the two separate because we do tend to serve different areas of the market.

[38:29]

I like that a lot.  I think that the clarity around brand creates this opportunity to punch through on what the products are as opposed to potentially getting enveloped in a larger brand, creating some confusion around what the product or solutions are that you’re bringing to market and how customers are relate to you.

[38:50]

Yeah, it can get really muddy.  I just imagine if we tried to set up a combined Engagious & Dialsmith website.  I think the task would drive me crazy. Dialsmith could certainly be thought of as a technology division of Engagious as a consultancy, but they’re both really niche and on the smaller side generally speaking.  Having them each stand alone on their on two feet with their own brands and their own messaging seems to be the right strategy for now, and we’ll see what the future holds.

[39:26]

So, David, tell us a little bit about what it is your company is offering now and what’s finding purchase in the marketplace.

[39:37]

What we’re offering now is we’ve definitely capitalized on the storytelling trend and especially storytelling related to market research, whether it’s telling stories with data or through data visualization or using narrative as a way to communicate as opposed to just bullet points or taking people some kind of an outline or an overview. So a lot of what we’re building through Engagious are these frameworks that can be used to take all kinds of communications and put those into more of a storytelling-type of narrative so that you can take people on a journey; you can pull those emotional levers when necessary in order to communicate a story and in order to try to influence, you know, and move a market in one direction or another.  At least on the Engagious side of the business, that’s been our big focus for this year. I think a lot of that’ll continue going into next year as well.

[40:44]

My guest today has been David Paull, CEO of Engagious and Dialsmith.  David, thanks very much for joining me today on the Happy Market Research podcast.   

[40:51]

Jamin, it’s been my pleasure.  Thanks so much for having me.

[40:53]

And thank you everyone who’s been tuning in.  As always you can subscribe on the platform of your choice.  I particularly listen to iTunes reviews. Love them, share them, take the time.  It is how we spread the word about and get fantastic guests like David Paull. Thanks very much and have a great rest of your day.  

Happy Holidays from all of us at Happy Market Research! We are so thankful for all of our listeners and those who have supported us on this journey this year. Without you, none of this would be possible. Happy Market Research is heading into 2019 with so much gratitude, joy and excitement for what is to come.

Here is a bonus episode featuring Anne Beall of Beall Research. She recently shared a story and a lesson that she learned during this holiday season. We wanted to share it with you in hopes that it will touch you like it did us!

Enjoy!

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

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[00:00]  

Happy Holidays, everybody, from all of us at Happy Market Research.  Thanks so much for making 2018 such a great and exciting year. To all of our guests, to all of people who have been providing feedback, referrals…  It has been fantastic. I wanted to go out this year with this one great story that recently happened with Ann Beall of Beall Research. I hope you enjoy this story and appreciate you going to 2019 with a tremendous amount of thankfulness.  Have a great rest of your year.

[00:31]  

And I have to say I’m not that keen about Christmas.  I mean I don’t really love the holiday. I find it pretty commercialized.  I don’t really like getting gifts for people. I mean sometimes I get it right, but a lot of the times it’s really hard picking out gifts for other people.  And I feel bad when people give me gifts: I don’t really need anything, and you know.

I don’t really love the holidays and, to tell you the truth, I have a lot of sort of bitter memories.  I didn’t even put up a Christmas tree last year. And the holidays remind me of people who are no longer in my life, people who have passed on.  And there’s some nostalgia around it.

But, for some reason, I said to him, “OK, let’s go downstairs.”  I actually have a fake Christmas tree and we have decorations in the storage room, which is in the very back of my home.  When we got to the storage room, we smelled smoke. We thought maybe someone was burning leaves in the backyard, but we went outside and there was nobody burning leaves back there.  So, we went back inside and wondered whether the storage unit was on fire, and it was not. And that’s when we realized one of the condos above us was on fire. I live in a three-flat.  

For some reason, we didn’t panic.  He called 911. And, at that point, I started looking for the cats.  I have three. I have a black cat named Serena, who’s 18 years old, and she does not like to be picked up.  I chased her around the bedroom and finally got her in the cat carrier. I have another cat, who is a feral cat, and she really doesn’t like to be picked up.  I chased her all around the house, and I finally got her into a cat carrier. But I have third cat, who’s a foster cat, who isn’t normally living at my house, who I was watching for somebody.  I didn’t have a cat carrier, and no way to get the cat out safely. So I left the cat behind.

We ended up going outside with the cats – my partner and I standing there, watching my house.  And the firemen arrived: three big trucks, 20 firemen. They busted down doors. There was nobody in the building but my partner and I.  They busted down doors; they had hoses going up in front of the house and back of the house; they had a ladder going up to the roof. And they contained the fire, I thought.  I basically was watching and watching and watching. They don’t give you any information, but I’m praying and hoping this fire does not go downstairs to my unit.

And I’m thinking about my cat, my foster cat. “Oh, my gosh, I hope he’s going to be safe.”  And then I’m thinking about all the other things in my home that can never be replaced: my dad’s letters to me when I was in college; my grandfather’s letters to me when I was a child.  All these things would be gone in an instant. But mostly, I was thinking about the cat.

They did contain the fire, and it took out the entire wall of the third-floor condo unit.  It started spreading when we, luckily for some reason, discovered it. The condo on the third floor is uninhabitable due to fire, smoke, and water damage.  The condo above me is uninhabitable due to water damage. I had a little bit of water damage, but my place can be lived in. It needs a little bit of work.

But I got back into my home.  My cats were all fine; they were a little shaken up.  And I started thinking about that Christmas tree that I wanted to decorate, which I really wanted to decorate more than anything this year as a result of the fact that this Christmas I was given the most amazing gift ever – my home and my partner, and my cats were all safe after a tremendous, tremendous fire.  And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

[04:47]   

Ann, thank you so much for sharing that story.  That was fantastic, and a great way to bring in the holidays.  

[04:56]

It’s a good one, huh?  

[04:58]  

It’s super good.  That’s super good.  [laughter] Oh, my gosh.  The appreciation and thankfulness.  I tell you what: that is all of us going into 2019.  This is going to be a perfect snippet of the last episode for Happy Market Research 2018.  So, thank you so much for sharing that.

[05:18]

Oh, you’re so welcome.  You’re so welcome. And count your blessings, really.

Today, my guest is Bob Lederer, owner of RFL Communications. RFL Communications is dedicated to being a thought leader in the market research industry through distributing video content.

Prior to starting RFL Communications, Bob has worked in the market research industry both on the brand and agency side. He founded his own firm in 1997 and has been providing valuable perspectives on the industry ever since.

FIND BOB ONLINE:

Linkedin

Youtube

Twitter

RFL Communications

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

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[00:36]

Over the last decade the market research industry has been disrupted.  Our largest agencies are struggling to keep up as their customers turn to newer, faster and cheaper data sources. Now we are on the edge of yet another major

market shift. Now is the time for us to reassert ourselves as the rudder of the brands we love. Thank you for tuning in to the Happy Market Research Podcast where we are charting the path for the future of market researchers and businesses. Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. Today my guest is Bob Lederer, owner of RFL Communications. RFL Communications is dedicated to being a thought leader in the market research industry. Prior to starting RFL Communications, Bob has worked in the market research industry both on the brand and agency side. He founded his own firm in 1997, and has been providing valuable perspectives on the industry ever since. Bob, thank you very much being on the Happy Market Research Podcast!

So one of our core questions, and it has been drawn really by the audience interest is how did your parents wind up impacting who you are today and ultimately the success that you have had?

[1:49]

My parents are both European. My mother is a survivor of the holocaust of Auschwitz. And she survived the end of the war. They had her come out of a concentration camp and put her on a death march, which she survived. She weighed 57 pounds when she was freed by the Russians. I think it was somewhere in Poland. She spent some time in Sweden, a year recovering from what had happened to her, and then she had the option of going anywhere in the world and she came to the United States, met my father in 1946. They were married in 1948. And I was born in 1952. And they both had a very, very profound impact on me. You do not really think about it at the time. My father had his own business from the late 1950’s until the early 1980’s when he finally sold it and retired. My mom was always a housewife, very European in that way, but they both affected me because they both stressed to me ethics: doing the right thing personally and professionally. And one of the things that my dad stressed to me was to be an independent thinker, and to not follow the crowd or what everybody else was insisting that should be done. His phrase that I will always recall is: “Don’t become part of the rabble. Don’t just do what everybody else is doing. Think, and critically think, and look at what is really happening. You can make a decision about stuff.” And that has helped me both professionally and personally in my life.

[3:40]

It is really interesting to have the holocaust in your story.  And then connecting that to the importance of critical thinking from your father. Of course, that makes perfect sense.

[3:52]

It also makes sense because my mother always said to me: “It can happen here”, which was her way of saying “Yes, Jews can be singled out in the United States just like they have been or were in Germany”. My father had come from Austria after he had left after Germany took over Austria. So he was lucky enough to escape and not have to go through the camps. But my parents emphasized to me the importance of being aware of what is going on around you at all times so that you can protect yourself and your family. And without getting political, in times like this I am indebted to them -they both passed away – for helping me understand to pay attention to all sorts of things going on sociologically and politically and all the ways.

[4:53]

It sounds like in a lot of ways you had to become a student of humankind in order to identify those patterns, perhaps even ahead of time. I am thinking of your father who had… fortunate enough to escape that. I don’t have a point of reference but did that have an impact on you choosing research?

[5:23]

Good question. I don’t think so but I was always inquisitive about why things happened. And that came from my father too. He said: “Think about what is going on and why it is going on.” For simple as everyday tasks, such as things that you do in your career. And he tried to trick me into becoming an actuary, and I was pretty good in math but not quite good enough for that. And I was very good at writing, I always had a skill. Every course in college where I could write papers instead of take tests, so that always came naturally for me. You know, I wanted to be a sports caster when I was a teenager. And I remember in college that I came home in the middle of my junior year, and we all went out to dinner, and I said: “Dad, I know what I want to do.” And he said: “And what do you want to do?” And I said: “I want to be a sports caster.” And he said: “No, seriously, what do you want to with your life?” He then said to me famously, it is a put down, but he said: “You know, you have a face for radio.” Ha! So I have told that to people over the years. But when I started Business Daily Report in 2012, and he died in 2012, I think in some way psychologically it was my way to show my dad that I could be successful in front of the camera and not just in front of a microphone, and I truly enjoy doing that whenever I can.

One of the things that I am looking forward to is come out with my new book: “Beyond Broadway Joe” and have the opportunity of both on radio and television to talk about it with people.

[7:27]

It is funny how our fathers inform our view on ourselves and in a lot of ways, speaking for myself, that has caused me to control some of my outcomes, or rather actions, in order to prove them wrong. So you started doing Skype interviews, right?

[7:47]

Yeah, the idea frankly was that back then, and even today, there weren’t that many podcasts back in 2012 when I started this. There were some but that did not appeal to me. The major news distribution method that we had on those days was we have today, and that was a couple of UK-based email research news delivery service. I was fortunate. My daughter had just gotten married to a guy with great IT skills. We were talking and he said: “I know that you want to do something media wise, and I would like to help you. What can I do to help you?” And I told him: “I would like to explore the idea of doing a regular video news report”. Back then, I was thinking in very grandiose terms and that it might even run 30 minutes a day or something like that. And pretty clearly that became pretty obviously not doable. But we hounded down and said: “Let’s see what we can do for maybe 5 or 10 minutes.” And he helped put together what we have today.

[9:04]

That is awesome! That all happens remotely, right? Or is it a proximity thing? Is he working in your office?

[9:12]

No, no, no. I am in Chicago, and he is in Israel.

[9:14]

Wow! That is so neat.

[9:18]

You can imagine the sense of relief that I had because you probably have the same thing that once you have got the program in the can, as they say, you just turn it over to a very adept technical person and they make you look good or sound good.

[9:37]

How has that ride been for you? Having been there… I am not going to say in the early days because that was 2006 or 2007 but when it starts hitting saturation and then riding it through, have you seen market researchers on YouTube increase, stay the same, decrease?

[9:58]

I will talk about it in terms of our audience. Our audience for the first 4.5 years was pretty consistence, and it was consistent of 150 views of every video we put out. We have always been doing 4 videos a week, Monday through Thursday. Something happened with Google, which owns YouTube, in the middle of our fifth year. They changed the algorithm. And they did so because they were trying to crack down on a lot of YouTube sites that were claiming hundreds of thousands of views a day, probably by putting a lot of very pretty dancing girls on the screen and having somebody sit in front of them and talk about anything. Who cared what they were talking about? But literally they were trying to crack down on that. And they were trying to do away with all kinds of mechanical manipulations of the viewer count because it is very easy –I don’t really understand how, but it is very easy to manipulate it by just having bots keep hitting the viewing button over and over again. So what happened affected us. I noticed that we had something like 82 views. And went out to lunch and came back around 12:30/1:00 pm, the number of views had jumped down from 82 to 58. So a couple of hours after that, it was down in the 40s. Now something obviously was really very wrong so I had my associate contact Google. You cannot get them on the phone but you can get them in a chat room. So we were joined in a chat room by several small video operations like our own, and we all had the same complaint! You are literally knocking down our number of views! What in the world is going on? And they explained to us what I just explained to you. And we said: “Yeah, but you are killing us? Why are you even applying that algorithm to us?” And they said: “We really don’t have any choice.” And in the end it came down to the fact, as they said to us, “You guys are just really small potatoes for us to really worry about in any way, shape or form.” So we were kind of screwed. Because we could never could claim thousands of views on our video but we could claim 150 to 200 a day, and it was valid, and we were getting good quality people. These were not low people on the totem pole in research but were pretty good research executives both on the clients and suppliers side.  And we struggled through the end 2016 and into 2017 with exactly what we should do and how we should do it. And this year we have come up with a little bit different formula: we streamline our process. Our videos are much shorter. I have done away from my one-on-one interviews with people, and instead I have been invited people to do two-minute long commentaries about subject matter that I agree with them that was important enough, different enough, innovative enough, that deserved to have the attention of the research audience. And our views have gone up this year. We are probably are at the 100-125 level because the quality of what we are presenting is I think somewhat more in tune with what the people out there are expecting. But even that is a real challenge every day, Jamin, because I tell people that the market research industry is about 3 miles wide and about 1 inch thick. And by that I mean, you have people interested in television research that could not care less about scanner data. The people in scanner data could not care less about television research. People in television research could not care less about online communities. The people in online communities could not care about on and on and on. So it is a real task every day to find a subject matter that attracts a large enough audience to really maintain some credible numbers. But I think that we are making some progress there.

[14:31]

That’s great! I think that part of it… and I agree with your assertion that we are as researchers fundamentally Jacks of all trade, masters of none, in some ways and in another ways right where we get really, really deep and whatever it is our thing that we really care about, whether it’s add testing or whatever, and then forget about the space around us. But when you think about the commonality across the hundreds of interviews that you have done, what stands out for you over the last 6 years, 7 years?

[15:15]

The words that immediately come to mind are: “innovation”, “breakthrough”, truly presenting something that is state of the art, and that is not generally known a great deal about by a lot of people. And my barometer, my thermostat basically is myself. So if I don’t have any idea about what they are telling me that they have now developed, then I assume the audience doesn’t either. Because most people in our industry, which is probably 95% of them, are so busy and so focused on their specific area of responsibility that they don’t really have the time, they probably have the interest, but they do not have the time to really absorb what is going on in another area of research that ultimately may very well impact their research and their careers.  

[16:17]

Earlier today I had an interview with Frederic-Charles Petit, who of course you know is the CEO of Toluna. He had mentioned that it is really incumbent upon market researchers in the industry to present ourselves to the next generation so that they choose us as a career.

[16:41]

I am not sure I am answering your question precisely but I would tell you that I could not agree more with what Frederic-Charles told you.

I have been on a very quiet but very stern mission for the last five years with the industry, and frankly they are not listening to me. We are completely missing opportunity after opportunity to attract young super talented, inquisitive research types. In my almost 25 years in the industry, I think I have met 3 or 4 people who actually told me that when they were growing up, they wanted to be in research. Almost all of us, and I am in that grouping, we kind of fell into the research industry. And for many people, it happened because it ended up being their first job and they liked what they were doing. But I maintain that we should be reaching out to people as early as high school because young students are interested in all the basic things that go into research: anthropology and sociology, statistics, online capabilities, and graphics, and all kinds of things that really can lead to a research career. And the last six years, without fail, among the most available jobs to recent college graduates has been Market Research Analyst, paying from what I have seen on average 50,000-60,000 dollars a year. That is a hell of a lot of money for a just graduated college senior! Their eyes probably grow very wide unless they come from a millionaire family. And I proposed to the associations; I have talked to almost all the heads of the associations and mentioned this and said: “Look, there is got to be a program I can set up. I know where we can build a curriculum from and we ought to be introducing it locally through research agencies and even through client research departments. Again, all in a localized basis to the universities and colleges. At the very least, trying to create a Market Research 101, and then shortly thereafter a Market Research minor, and ultimately, a Market Research major.” And I think we would be doing ourselves such tremendous benefit because we would be attracting some of the most talented young people out there who otherwise might not even consider because it is just not on the radar screen.

[19:52]

Love that framing. I completely agree. It is almost like maybe the partnership has to happen with Georgia or Michigan that are becoming a broader networking opportunity or pipelines for those universities with those specialty programs.

[20:14]

Michigan State has basically the curriculum that you need to establish and the books that they use at the graduate level right now. But you need to have the arms and the legs locally. For instance, here in Chicago, you would need somebody to go visit the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Loyola University and University of Chicago and all of the community colleges, etc. It has to be done at the local basis. And the research agencies and other entities whose lifeblood is research do exist that could do the reach-out and do the encouragement. And they could all, at the same time, and I think this is very key, offer the inducement that the top kids each year would have a guaranteed summer job internship at a research agency or at a client research department and such. And just imagine the impact that we could have across the country where you would have thousands of kids ready to enter market research as a career, and we would have the pickings of the best of them.

[21:31]

Yeah. I am thinking about reaching certain economies such as where I am based, a resident California, which is well above average and has about 8% of unemployment, or Detroit. When you pick these markets where there is lack of opportunity at a high school level, people are already thinking: “Okay, so how do I make money as soon as I graduate?” So you are really talking about a trade school aspect that could be introduced into that curriculum in lieu of PE or whatever, a much more educated or active part of our economy that is centric to this, what I believe is, the rudder of a brand, which is market research.

[22:14]

Agreed. So if you want to join me in trying to push this, I think it would be a great enterprise to be involved with. And I think we could get the industry to follow along if we would just get enough people who would be enthusiast about it.

[22:33]

There is a local entrepreneurship school here in Fresno called Patiño School of Entrepreneurship. It is a high school. It is completely free, open enrollment. The student body is massively diverse so it is not at all what you would normally think of a school like this. I am starting to do the podcast onsite… when is the first one? It has not been scheduled but it is this month, right? It is in September. We are going to start doing it once a month. I am going to be interviewing the students. So what I am going to do, Bob, based on this feedback, is incorporate a set of questions about market research just to gage overall interest. So that will be part of the public domain from a visibility perspective, and I think separately it would be interesting to see if we can plant a flag to help raise awareness in this space.

[23:24]

The idea also frankly came through the annual University Research Award that GFK had instituted five or six years ago, and I believe it is still in effect. What they do is that they have a competition. And any college or university with a research program of some sort is eligible to do a research project. They get some guidance from people at GFK, and at the end of the project, there is a competition and GFK picks a winner. And for four or five years in a row, I have talked to the winners. And the winners all told me that they had no idea what research was about before they did this project. All of them they came with very different interests, such as I laid out a few minutes ago, whether it was statistics or online research or anthropology or that sort of thing, and yet almost without fail, the four or five team members said that they wanted to go into research as a career as a result of their exposure to it. So that is really where I think we can make the greatest point about the potential for this idea.

[24:49]

Speaking of insights, so how do you use data to drive your organization forward?

[25:00]

Honestly, not very much. Ha! We are not data-oriented because we are very small. We don’t have a lot opportunity to look at things… Our data, our metrics are basically looking at our videos, looking at the reaction response we get for the newsletters that we put out. For instance, we put out now for the third or fourth year what we call “RFL global top 50”, which is our listing of top research-related organizations in the world. It was specifically designed to take on the gold top 50, that is an industry staple, and we have made some nice progress in doing that. But we don’t really get too involved in the data, because there really isn’t that much for us to do, and we only have a two or three person operation so we cannot really afford to get too enmeshed in.

[25:57]

We are similar, right? I only actually have one KPI, which is number of daily downloads, and that is the only thing that we care about. We have just started our journey but as we are learning and failing and winning and learning, we are going through these cycles. One of the things that has been interesting is how we utilize social media. At an organic level, not at a paying level, although you could apply this to paid, we just don’t have the budgets yet for the paid. Ha! So…

[26:37]

Neither do we, although I get a phone call every two or three weeks saying that they can improve my viewership. It will only cost me 30,000 dollars a month to move me up from number 5,000 to number maybe 250. And I say: “Really? Do you think that is a wise investment on my part?”

[26:57]

I love that. So are you using other… How have you used other social media platforms to help drive awareness of your YouTube channel?

[27:09]

We have followers on Twitter. We have followers on Facebook. I have over 4,000 connections on LinkedIn. We message out to those people every day. We also use a system called Hootsuite to spread as virally as we can our Facebook and our Twitter messages about what is the content on the video today, or just to send out some messages about. For instance, there is a big news item like the day that the Ipsos-GFK deal came out a few months ago. I actually put a Tweet about the fact that it had occurred because nobody else seemed to be picking it up. We just try to make use of social media that way. And it has its benefits. What we have really learned is that if you put at something out at nine o’clock in the morning and the target will be pretty large, and does not see it until three o’clock in the afternoon, or does not get around to check it at three o’clock in the afternoon, chances are they won’t see it. We do send out the same message a couple of times a day. And that actually irritates people but there is nothing we can do much about that.

[28:20]

Yes, I think the choke point is exactly what you just said. Every single social media platform is inundated whether it is through paid advertising or just your normal channel activity basically. I think I follow, I don’t really know the exact number of people on Twitter, but let’s say it’s between 300 and 600. But that is a lot of tweets! And then on top of it, you add in other stuff. It is highly unlikely, unless you are retweeting your things that I am going to have the opportunity to interact with you so… But then you walk this balance of how much do you choke a channel because there is this tipping point of just becoming obnoxious. We are having that discussion right now in terms of is Instagram a relevant platform for Happy Market Research. Have you played much with, whether it is Instagram or Facebook, on that front to help drive awareness? I know that there is the Market Research Rocks Hell Yeah Facebook group. Has that been effective for you?

[29:27]

Instagram, I don’t think so. Facebook, yes, to some degree. I have actually found it very successful in promoting my book. But we use Facebook every day, we use Twitter every day, and it just depends on how and when you reach the audience. We know there are people out there that are interested in what we have to say but it is a matter of getting them at the right time because I don’t really check my own Twitter or Facebook feed for business all that often during the day because if I do, I will spend half an hour or an hour doing that and that is not an effective use of my time.

[30:08]

Interesting. So let’s dive right in then, to the book “Beyond Broadway Joe: The Super Bowl TEAM That Changed Football”. So what was the inspiration for the book?

[30:20]

I grew up in New York City in the 1960’s. I was a New York Met’s fan in 1963, their second year. And I just got interested in baseball. The baseball season ended, and one Saturday night I turned on the radio and low and behold I am hearing a football game, and the announcer is one of the Mets announcers so I started to listen carefully, and knew nothing about football. And I really got into the New York Jets. Joe Namath joined the team, and everybody knows that in 1965. Everybody knows who he is. Namath starts to do some amazing things. The Jets have some skilled players in a number of positions but all we basically heard about, living in New York and reading the papers every day, was what did Joe Namath say, what did Weeb Ewbank say. We did not know or read too much about the other players because there was actually intense interest in Joe Namath.

Over the years I’ve thought many times about writing a book about that team. There had been innumerable number of books written about the Jets and Joe Namath, and how Joe Namath won that game. And there is no doubt about the fact that Joe Namath was the difference maker. He really was a super-star that day but over the years, everybody else on that team –and there were 44 other guys who put on that uniforms that year, and almost without exception every one of those guys faded into anonymity. That did not sit well with me. And about four years ago, I was sitting watching a re-play of Super Bowl 3 with my two teenage sons and one of them asked me: “Who is this guy 81 on defense?” And I told him who he was. And “Who is this 75 on offense?” And I told my other son who that was. And my wife walked down the steps and said: “What are you watching?” We told her. And she said: “You know, you have always talked about writing a book about that team. When are you going to do it?” And I looked at her and I said: “I have never had the right angle on this because I can’t write another book about Joe Namath. There is no market for it.” And she said: “What are you going to do?” And I said: “You know, Charley and Mikey –my two sons, have just given me the idea of how and why I am going to write this book. The book is going to be about everybody else on the team who did not have the name Joe Namath at the back of their uniform.”

[32:52]

That is really cool! And with media stars like Gary Vaynerchuk increasing visibility on the Jets, it seems like there is an opportunity to be able to perhaps create some sort of partnerships to help lever the market into seeing your book and having the opportunity to buy it. I am not a sports guy incidentally, I do not follow any… I don’t even do fantasy… I don’t play sports video games. I do not do anything on the sports side so unfortunately I do not have a lot of connection but I tell you, I have now pre-ordered it, I guess.  Congratulations on your book! It is on Amazon for pre-order I believe, is that correct

[33:33]

Yes, it is. You can get it at Barnes and Noble, you can get it on Amazon. It is now on the book stores. They actually released it yesterday but there is another angle to this that I think is very relevant. I had to use a lot of research skills to do this book. And I did not even think about it at the time but I did 70 or 80 IDIs and a number of other skills that I had to really put to use in order to do the interviews and track people down, and all sorts of things. And I am actually going to be talking about the research elements that I had to incorporate in order to use this book at a couple of conferences this fall.

[34:14]

That is such an interesting point that you are making, Bob. And that is the crossover of a skill that you gain as a market researcher. I believe specifically on the qualitative side but it certainly translates into the quant side as well into other things like sales. I will give you a great example: I just had lunch with a customer today, and they were asking me about… they have a very high close rate but they only own a small fraction of a specific market. So I asked: “Who is winning?” So they told me who’s winning, and I asked do they know who their customers are. They were able to access it at a municipality level, so it is public information, and they actually know when one of the competitors closes a new account and who that new account is the day it closes.  And I said: It’s really easy, you go pay that person 60 bucks and you ask them about their customer journey to identify where the channels are that you are not currently penetrating, and then you reverse the sales process and start getting in front of that new market. And they were like ”You are so smart!” And I am thinking: “No, I am just 20 years in market research, trying to learn how people think and reverse engineer success.”

[35:35]

I will give you the biggest research attribute that I did not really have to apply but it is the most relevant thing of this book from a research perspective, and it came from my wife, who does not really understand all that much about what I do for a living. She said that she was talking about this out loud a couple of months ago: “Don’t you talk about new product success and failure all the time?” And I said: “Yeah.” She said: “Aren’t the Jets a classic example of a great new product success?” And I said: “Wow, yeah. This was a franchise that was bankrupt. The Jets were worth $6 million before Super Bowl 3 started. The next day, after they won, they were valued at $16 million. The latest estimate that I saw from last year was $2.75 billion.

[36:34]

My guest today has been Bob Lederer, the owner of Research Business Daily Report. Bob, thank you very much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast.

[36:44]

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Thank you very much for allowing me to talk about my book, which as you mentioned is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore.

Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Adam Jolley, EVP Business Development at EMI Online Research Solutions and Market Research Influencer.   EMI Research Solutions is a leading provider of online sample for surveys.   Adam has a long tenure at EMI and has one of the earliest market research podcasts with 37 episodes starting in Jan 15, 2018, the Intellicast Podcast.

FIND ADAM ONLINE:

Linkedin

Intellicast Podcast

EMI Research

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

---

[00:22]

Over the last decade the market research industry has been disrupted.  Our largest agencies are struggling to keep up as their customers turn to newer, faster and cheaper data sources. Now we are on the edge of yet another major

market shift. Now is the time for us to reassert ourselves as the rudder of the brands we love. Thank you for tuning in to the Happy Market Research Podcast where we are charting the path for the future of market researchers and businesses. Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. Today my guest is Adam Jolley, EVP business development at EMI Online Research Solutions and market research influencer. EMI Research Solutions is a leading provider of online sample for surveys. Adam has a long tenure at EMI and has one of the earliest market research podcasts with 37 episodes starting in January 15, 2018 –the Intellicast podcast. And he was also instrumental in me deciding to start the Happy Market Research Podcast. Adam, thanks very much for joining me today.

[1:25]

I am super excited. Thanks for having me. This is one of those things where you listen to the podcast and you think: “I will never be on somebody else’s, I will never be on yours.” So it is a little bit thrilling for me. I love it!

[1:37]

That is so funny. This is cross-over week for me. I was on Siemens earlier.

[1:45]

Ha! Oh, that is good! That is great!

[1:46]

So funny! Anyway… Hey, man! First off, a big shout-out to your podcast! Thank you so much for…

[1:51]

Thanks!

[1:52]

…what you are doing there. It is a great source of information, and it honestly just keeps my brain occupied during part of my commute so anyway, thanks for that!

[2:05]

That is great to hear because I think, and you probably think the same thing about yours, is that you do not really know what the expectations are and where you are going to go. From when I was first starting that out, figuring out why we were doing it and who we would do it for and listen, things evolved. And that is great to hear! That is the goal! That is why I listen to podcasts! On your commute. You are by yourself and you might as well just listen to something that at least instead of the same three songs over and over again.

[2:34]

Oh, yeah, totally! Right? My guilty pleasures are… we have about an acre, and we do some farming there. Well, we have one acre that we farm but we live in two acres. So I have been doing tractor work on the weekends. So that is what I do, headphones on, and I also have about thirty minute commute each way so it is a great opportunity to listen. Sometimes I get so involved in the podcast, I would sit outside of my house waiting for the episode before going in, which is insane!

[3:09]

Same thing! The driveway time is a good time!

[3:10]

The driveway time! Yeah! That is the thing! Who knew? Maybe that is the KPI to see if you have a good podcast or not –what is your driveway time?

[3:18]

Right! That’s good!

[3:20]

All right. So from 2003 to 2007, you were getting your Bachelor’s in Marketing at Northern Kentucky University. You were also working as a Fundraising Recruitment Manager at Sports Service Cincinnati Reds. So how in the world did you wind up in Market Research?

[3:39]

How did I…? The biggest thing is that I had a professor that really guided me. One thing that I leave out there, and I purposely leave out there, or change or edit or anything, is that I actually started college in 2000. My college story is probably my parents’ biggest nightmare. To me, it is the greatest story because I was in my undergrad forever! I was figuring out life. That is how I can put it. I started out in college and majored in everything. I switched majors all the time, I was just floating through worlds for a while. I really wanted to be a geologist. I was really into rocks and density checks. I was super into it! And then I transferred from Eastern Kentucky to Northern Kentucky University. And I started over. Obviously, since I was just bouncing from major to major, I did not have anything that came up and started over. And I really made a connection with a professor that was in marketing here. And one thing:  Northern Kentucky is probably 20 minutes away from Cincinnati. And Cincinnati has that PAG cover so a lot of people in recruiting they go to Northern Kentucky and start hearing some things. So in town we have Directions, a huge Nielsen office, Market Vision, Burke, a ton of primary custom market research companies. And you would have a little system where they would try to place students. My professor at that time became a mentor to me. He would ask me: “Why have you been in college for so long?” “What do you want to do with your life?” That type of thing. I was working… When you are 20 years old, it sounds really cool to say that you are working at baseball team. So there was a contentment in where I was in life. But there was definitely a ceiling in place also. And so he would say: “Don’t you expect more?” “Don’t you want to do more?” Look at research. Look at what you are doing in research. That caught on to me because I was pretty good at math, pretty good at statistics, pretty good in those type of things but I knew that I could sell. One of the things about being in college for so long is that you start to develop personal communication type of skills.

[6:03]

Totally!

[6:04]

So I remember that it all came down to not knowing what I was going to do at graduation. We had a speed networking event with all the market research firms here in town. I remember Randy Brooks who started Directions, who was the keynote speaker. And it fired me up and gave me some encouragement. I was going around the tables, and I started thinking… “How am I going to do this? Am I an Analyst? Or maybe am I an employee 1800 at Burke?” That type of talking through. And I ran into Mike Holmes, who started EMI, and Aaron Walton, who was at EMI for 12 years. Aaron is a little older than me, and we started talking and had a connection. He said it was a lot of market research but also other business things as well, such as selling and business acumen. You might be a good fit. Honestly, he was a guy that was a year older than me, and he was driving a Saab at the time.

[7:10]

Wow!

[7:11]

And I was like “Oh my! This could be me!”

[7:12]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[7:13]

So I graduated on Friday and started on Monday. It was great! I think I was employee 6 at EMI. And it was something that I just gravitated to it, and I was fascinated by research. I was fascinated by the outcomes of things. I think everyone tries to find their passion in market research when they start. So for me, it was… I started in ’07, and I started in some primaries for the ‘08 election. So it was that real life application. We were proving samples for polling companies and to see “Howard Dean wins Vermont”. And I was like “Oh my gosh!” I just started seeing things happen, real life implications of what my work was, and that was my buy-in. And that is when I knew. I love the industry, and I could see how my daily work was having an impact on everything around us, whether it was the economy or polling or consumer electronic type of company. And I fell in love! I was in!

[8:18]

Back when polling was getting it right.

[8:25]

Right, back when people respected polling. Ha! Those were the days!

[8:28]

Still a huge influential industry but it has been interesting to see how it has been struggling more, more and more to nail the outcome.

[8:41]

The polling industry needs like a PR refurbishing company.

[8:42]

Totally!

[8:43]

And maybe explain to people what margin of error is. And maybe not call people. That’s a whole other thing. The whole industry just needs a whole rebranding, I feel.

[8:56]

Yes, I think that they will always be a big industry, right? But it is under so much scrutiny, and for the right reasons. Because as you said, you can just say: “Hey! This guy is red!” And then you go outside and… crap!

[9:11]

Right. Right.

[9:12]

You don’t get to do it too many times in a row anyway.

[9:16]

Right. I am with you.

[9:17]

Let’s talk about your podcast!

[9:19]

Yeah.

[9:20]

Intellicast Podcast. You started right at the gate this year, is that correct? 2018?

[9:25]

Yeah.

[9:28]

A lot of episodes. Thirty-seven episodes. Why in the world did you guys spend so much… I mean, this is a big time commitment. I do not think people really recognize the investment it is. So why did you guys decide to do it?

[9:40]

I started… Actually I think I bought all the equipment at the end of October last year. I had been at EMI for 11 years. And with just the 10-year mark, I started going through some things, maybe like a third life crisis? I do not know. Ha! I go back, and I started to post more things on LinkedIn, I wrote more in LinkedIn. And I started to think like “I have been ten years in this business, and I am, a sales person.” Sometimes when you are a sales expert in an industry, no matter where you are, you are a blank canvas because you have to be somebody for this client, somebody for that client. And I wanted to try to build something. I wanted to be somebody, the person that I was after 5pm. And my boss recognized that. And he asked me: “What if you starting doing some podcasts?” And I said: “Yeah, that would be great” And that is what I did. I bought the equipment, and it just sat; it sat in my drawer for months. I needed a kick to start doing it. And finally, I said: “Let’s just record one, and see how it goes”. I grabbed Brian Lamar, who is our insights guy here. He is a clown in the most endearing term. He is somebody who is always there to entertain and is always looking for some kind of engagement with his audience. So I knew he would be perfect for it. He is also very smart, and has 30 years in the industry. Without him, if I would have started the podcast myself, which was the initial plan, or if I did not have him there to be an accountability partner, my initial plan was if I ever record it, maybe I will do three or four until people stop asking me “When is the next one coming out?” And it goes away. But he keeps me focused. Our marketing guy makes things easy for us as well, and always has things on our calendar. He gives us topics. He is always scouting the MR news and to see what to talk about. And he keeps us on track as far as timings and everything. As far as editing, he does all that. So it really is starting to become the easy way.
The first steps are always the hardest, and sometimes you need someone to push you off the cliff to take that first step. And those two did it for me and did it for the podcast.

[12:11]

How was it impacted your personal brand?

[12:14]

Greatly. That is one of things from our podcast that is so different from… and why I wanted to be different. That is, I wanted it to be like a real person. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier, when you are a sales person in the industry, an influencer, and you have some experience in conferences and things like that, it is hard to walk that line between the “I have to be this, and I have to stand who I am and this is who I need to be to make a revenue, to sell something to be prosperous in this industry” and then “who I really am”. It is great if those two people are close to each other. If there is not a huge polarized thing but being ourselves… you know, you talk about sports yourself. We do the Mount Rushmore thing here as a joke because I rank everything in life. If we are sitting together and someone says: “This song is great.” I would say: “Yes, this is my number 14 favorite song of all time”. Ha! I am always thinking about ranking things. So we do things like that. It has really grounded me, it has helped my personal brand. It has helped me feel more comfortable about who I am and try to marry, for a panel shake, the beta-b responded me and the consumer responded me. It has helped me balance life a little more

[13:59]

What was one of the most difficult parts of your first five episodes, since you are into ranking things, right? What was the most difficult thing in those early days?

[14:04]

Yeah.

[14:13]

What was the thing that really surprised you as really hard?

[14:15]

There is a balance sometimes in… you never want to make anybody mad. So it is tough sometimes to talk about a company did this, and to say if this is a good or bad decision or what type of impact we have. Undoubtedly everyone is everyone’s client, and everyone is everyone’s vendor. So you don’t want to say anything that sparks something. And at the same time we walk the line pretty well. But it has been hard what is EMI’s stands on something. I have yet to get a call from a sales person and say: “Hey! You bad mouthed my client. You’ll never spend money with us again”.

[14:45]

Right.

[14:46]

It is always kind of a danger. Because we are hard on some people. And sometimes we talk about the blockchain of some people and some people say “blockchain is this” or “blockchain is that”. Or “programmatic sampling is this” or “programmatic sampling is that”. You can really come really close. And there has definitely been some deleted segments of things we talked about.

[15:12]

We also have some deleted segments as well, just for full transparency.

[15:13]

Right. But that has been a part that has been very difficult but you start to equal things out, a little bit. It is getting easier and easier.

[15:25]

Yeah, I do find a flow… I got to tell you one of the things that was really hard for me was listening to my podcast.

[15:35]

Yes, that’s true. I really hated the sound voice of my voice. So that was hard. And I would notice… I go back and listen to the first twenty, and I said “uhm” a lot, and I can’t stand it.

[15:51]

You just want to turn yours off! Ha!

[15:52]

And I say: “What are you doing? Why are you talking like that? Why do you sound like that? That is not how I naturally speak.” And I would use words I have never used before, I don’t know who this is. Nobody talks like that. And you speak into a void like we are doing right now, just you and I. And then I think: “Oh no, there is other people listening to this! What are they going to think when they listen to this?” Thing like that. To this day, Brian has never listened to a podcast. He has never listened to one of our podcasts before.

[16:30]

Are you serious?

[16:31]

Never asked. He leaves the room, we put it on over the office system here, and he goes to the one room that does not have a speaker in it and works from there when it is on.

[16:43]

Ha!

[16:44]

He has never listened to us before. At the same time, it is also embarrassing… I would be… I went on vacation with my family a while back, and my Bluetooth would kick in and my wife would catch me listening to my podcast, and that is the most embarrassing… She says: “Oh so you just drive around so you can hear yourself talking, great! Look at you!”

[17:04]

Totally, totally! You will appreciate this: I was watching some YouTube content where it is basically just me talking to a camera. And I hooked up YouTube to our TV last night, and it had my account detail and the most recent video watched was me talking to myself so it was this miraculously narcissistic view.

[17:35]

Sure. Right. It is true. It’s good.

[17:37]

But I hate it. I would rather watch another view. It is hard for me not to go to a negative place and be overcritical. But then when I go and listen to other podcasters, who I really like, and if you can apply that same lens to them, I think it would be the same sort of thing. So I think the biggest lesson for me is: “Give yourself some grace and know that you are not going to do it great and embrace the “suck” part of the early days and just keep learning and do it a little bit better.”

[18:26]

Yes, embrace the “suck” part is a really good way to look at it. And keep learning from it. I was at a Wire event the other day. And somebody came up to me and said: “I really love the podcast”. And you say thank you but in my first part, I really wanted to dive in and ask “What am I doing wrong?” “Do you listen…?” “How are we…?” And try to get the feedback on it. But yes, a little bit more grace would go a long way.

[18:44]

That is right, that is right. I have a game prepared for us today. We all know that digital coin is the currency of the future, or at least, that is what people is telling me.

[18:57]

Yes. That is what everybody says, yeah.

[18:58]

So here we go. OK, so you are a VC, that is, a venture capitalist, and you are looking to invest in future tech for market research. You have 10 Adam bucks. Adam bucks, by the way, are the coin of choice for this future world of ours.

[19:15]

Got it. Love it!

[19:16]

You have seven options. The first one is virtual reality, or VR, the second one is augmented reality, AR. Qualitative Scale is the third one. The fourth category is voice. The fifth is big data. Sixth is traditional trackers. Seventh is blockchain.

So we have seven things. Relatively quick, your objective is to maximize your shareholder return in a five year period starting from today. So we are in 2018, so whatever that is, 2023, 2024. And you want to invest your 10 Adam bucks by either putting them all in one of these seven categories or you can distribute them around. So it is VR, AR, qualitative scale, voice, big data, traditional trackers and blockchain. Where would you make your investments?

[20:21]

I would only invest in four of them. And my thought process here is that they are all connected. Some of these things… To me, VR, AR, and to an extent big data, almost seem like end games to me in our industry. And what I mean by that is that if we were really to invest them and get the most out of them, if we had more machine learning type, and AI, then you start to eliminate a little bit more of the human element of it, which is a huge… As much as it is in the math industry it’s definitely a human industry as well… and learning the behaviors. So I wonder if I were to invest in that, I feel that there is a ceiling. It is almost to an end game where the returns would not be as great. I definitely feel that the money is going to be huge. But as far as the returns on it, especially if it goes beyond five years, I think it would be good for three, maybe five years but then it is going to plateau out. So that is how I feel about those. But the one I would not give any money to is traditional trackers.

[21:34]

Man, you just cut them off at the knees!

[21:37]

Yeah. And I will say that as a sample company who does a lot of traditional trackers and loves them and loves the revenue from them. And please gives us more and it is the best! But at the same time it does not make a ton of business sense in the way things are progressing in a couple of different layers, I think there is the traditional idea of pulse type thing where it is almost spending the money to make the money. And I don’t know if enough change is happening in the market or any kind of influence whatever the context is where you constantly need to be measuring something over and over again. And I do not think… I think if people really looked at it, and looked at the results until you have a huge shift, until you change the scope of things… I mean, how many times do you do that in a year on a product? And why would you need to measure that monthly if you are only doing that twice a year? It has been a cash cow for sample companies of full service market research firms but I think that full service market research firms may be feeling the heat of having that type of cash cow, and relying on something like that to bring a lot in. And along with that, I had this idea that the market research industry is a year or two behind everybody else, or behind society.

So if you think about it, everyone starts using mobile and tablets, you are never on your desktop, and a year or two later, we talking about how to get mobile surveys. And then, everyone is talking about DIY, and you’re watching HGTV and you are redoing the backsplash at your house and then, we’re coming out with DIY dashboards for programming, field work, anything. And right now, our industry is really into trackers and maybe some big data and these huge monstrous projects but society seems to be making a shift towards more like a craft type: craft bourbon, craft beers, buy local, all these smaller scale where you get so much more richness out of whatever you are consuming. I think research could make that shift as well.  That is why I put 5 Adam buck towards Qualitative Scale because even I really feel that as much as it might seem like taking a step backwards, the richer the data we can have the more in tune we are with our actual customers. The idea of grabbing an entire community or getting everybody is… there is so many different choices whether it is media, products… I think that a more craft approach to things, small batch type approach is something that I think it is really going to take off in our industry in the next few years.

[24:21]

That is super interesting! In your business… your whole business is predicated around completes. Quantitative does a lot less of completes than qualitative. Are you seeing an influx of qualitative companies looking for digital sample?

[24:41]

A little bit. Or just trying to find people more. I am seeing smaller quant studies. And when we are doing quant studies, what can we do with quant studies, what can we append to it? Can we do phone follow-ups? Would people be willing to join the community afterwards? So trying to get more and incorporate more qual into it.  Some of the bigger companies as far as noise in the industry, companies like Schleshinger are starting to grow the quant aspect and put qual into it. Companies like 2020 that are developing software and are taking things like iModerate, which is getting dusty and make that something more. Qualitative companies are getting really innovative in how they are doing things, along with the huge boom a couple of years ago in M-Rock and C Space and things like that. So I think that qual is rebounding a little bit. It has been slow because all the money seems to be in quant. And quant sample suppliers are the loudest voices in the room a lot of times.

[25:48]

Because they have the biggest budgets, right?

[25:49]

Right. And they sponsor everything. But I definitely feel that qual is something that can grow a lot.

[25:26]

What is interesting is that when you pull it back, at the end of the day, if we have a small company with five or six customers, I can talk to each one of my customers monthly, and know how the company is progressing, how I am doing, and my company is delivering, etc. As the company scales, it becomes necessary to do a survey. It is a surrogate conversation. What qualitative is doing is through machine learning AIs is enabling a true conversation to happen but analyzed at scale.

[26:35]

It is very similar to why I think that those trackers are going to go away, right? I was looking at the example of the biggest TV shows ever watched. The M*A*S*H finale got 85,000,000 or something. It was unbelievable.

[26:46]

Totally!

[26:47]

Seventy percent of the country was watching the M*A*S*H finale. But at the same time, there were four channels and what else are you doing, right?

[26:56]

Right.

[26:57]

And there was no Internet. So now people would say that NFL ratings are down. And I say: “Yeah, the NFL ratings are down but there is also 1,000 channels, and we have the Internet. Movies are better than they have ever been. TV is better. You can watch things on Hulu, Amazon, Netflix. There is other types of sports. There is e-sports. Along with those 1,000 channels there are another 40 TV sport channels you can watch. So the options are so much greater. This idea that everyone is going to watch the NFL, and everyone needs to be surveyed and we need to go this broad, that is just not reality any more.

I think brands need to think about it the same way. We need to know our total universe, we need to reach out to everybody so we can sell everybody this type of speaker or whatever. But no, you need to sell to your group. You need to know what your loyal is, what your fans are, what your key demographic is and how to do those. Get rich conversations and qual with them, and that is what ultimately is going to make the most money as a company. We are finally starting to realize that a little bit.

[28:00]

Yeah, it is interesting… piggybacking on your NFL point, while viewership might be down, you look at trends in fantasy football.

[28:09]

Yeah!

[28:10]

…which are significantly up. So overall engagement is up but it is just… that getting back to your small batch analogy early on, the consumer has the choices so that they can actually detail and control and tailor their entertainment experiences.

[27:46]

Right! I agree. To me, one rub in all of this is less money initially. So for somebody like me to say that craft research is a big thing and qual, that does not make sense for us now but that is the thing that I urge us to do here, and I urge all companies to do. People are starting to do a little bit more of this. You have to diversify yourself a little bit. You have to diversify your revenue streams. You have to think about how do we adapt from where we are going instead of being stuck to where we are. That is kind of scary in this industry sometimes but we are blessed also to have a lot of disruptors in this industry.

So I put 5 dollars for my qual, a dollar each for VR & AR and I put three dollars for blockchain because that is the disrupt word of right now, of how things are. We are blessed to have disruptors in this industry like Patrick Comer or what the blockchain people are starting to do now. Granted they might say that they are going to put the panel industry out of business, which might be too much of a disruption but disruptors push you to do different things. So why I believe in blockchain and why would I put the investment because it is just too much of a one plus one has to equal two. If I believe that qual scale is going to give me richer data and going to get me more engagement of my respondents, and then of my customers, I have to believe that if I could have them linked and collect passive data, if I am able to append more data, there has to be some kind of sovereign identity to get paid their worth for their beliefs. If there is more security there because of blockchain technology and how that works, it has to be… people use the term “proof of concept” a lot of times in investing. Right now it is just a logic proof of concept with blockchain for me in that if we don’t screw it up, the basic building blocks of it all add up to where it has to make the industry better.

[30:32]

I really feel like blockchain, at least in my understanding of the technology, is being thrown away in a way like AR or VR…

[30:41]

Yeah.

[30:42]

…but it is a lot different than that. It is much more like online surveys were to phone or in-mall intercept. It is more of a technology empowerment thing as opposed to a new thing, right? It just enables better sample. It feels like it is not a new dollar that they are brand is coming up in order to fund a blockchain firm for their research. It is the same dollar for just a sample. It is just a sample blockchain enabled.

[31:09]

I agree with you. I have actually talked with Cyma about this. What we’re talking about what does that look like. But I think it does if you are doing it right. And if you are incentivizing the people right that you have the chance to… Sometimes in this industry it seems that it is just the same USD5 billion every single year, and we are just dividing it differently or whatever. But I think that you have an opportunity to gain a lot of market share. The sample industry can be so broken right now. Every year there is 4 or 5 “Here is the secret the industry does not want you to know about a sample!” Somebody always comes out with something like that! Ha! This gives us the opportunity to eliminate those arguments a little bit. And I think in the long run maybe get a little bit more, and then evolve a little bit more. So I have always thought if I am on blockchain, I can connect my Facebook, my Amazon, and maybe I connect my nest in my house or my progressive car things where… I do a survey for a gym, and they ask “How many times do you go to the gym?” And I go three times a week. And they go: “Huh. Your car says you go twice a week.” Ha! Something like that… Maybe we can get a little bit more honest and the better sample companies can make more money.

[32:42]

And new revenue.

[32:43]

Oh yes!

[32:45]

I had never considered that but that is… It’s funny because we are talking about blockchain right now and of course, gosh, in 2018 IIeX it is all about blockchain in Atlanta. And it just continues to be the buzz word. I just sat there listening to the presentations thinking to myself: “Man! We are still asking gender at every survey.”

[33:06]

Right.

[33:07]

Right? You know what I am saying? So it feels to me that there is a lot of fundamental issues that we need to consider when we are thinking about sourcing sample. How? Anyway,…

[33:21]

In a non-capitalistic environment, you have got a solo ID for every respondent regardless of panel. And you can append like the basics to everything. That was huge!

[33:36]

Huge!

[33:37]

For some reason, sample suppliers are all guilty of it. We sell that as almost like a premium! Ha!

[33:44]

Right.

[33:46]

It’s foolish. We should not be selling ourselves on targeting ability. Maybe we should sell ourselves on how easy it is to work with us. Maybe like pricing, service, dashboard, visuals, those type of things instead of “this is our stuff”. All that can almost be the same, like a grocery store.

[34:10]

That is an interesting world you are painting. That is super interesting! Of course, nobody wants to hear that because you immediately move into, to some degree, a commodity. I will argue strongly that brands and buyers are thrilled to pay for higher level of service and ease of views. Just that overall confidence to the researcher is what they care about. And I still argue or believe that the value of research at the end of the day boils down to how good that respondent is.

[34:36]

Right.

[34:37]

And by creating this race to the bottom, in order to maximize the margin, as an industry we are really doing ourselves a significant disservice. And that is where we need to start looking at things, like incentivizing levels to respondent so that they give a shit when they are taking a survey.

[34:52]

I am with you. And that is a huge part… If sample is a commodity is because we made ourselves that way. There is no one else to point the finger to but ourselves, and commodity is not necessarily a bad word. But if you are looking at margin percentages, looking at those kinds of return, then that can be a taboo. And the more VC that gets into the panel industry, that is why people are not rushing to say the word “commodity” all the time. Ha!

[35:21]

Yeah, right? But if you look at the opportunity for differentiation, and using your example of the grocery stores, thinking of Whole Foods versus Food Max, you do have big opportunities, I think, to win in both markets. You could be can be Food Max, I don’t know how national that brand is…

[35:45]

Yeah, like a big box grocery type of thing.

[35:48]

…exactly! You can win there as one thing but then you can win even if you are a boutique type Whole Foods, on the same side.

[35:51]

Right. And people are progressing. You look at where Lucid started and what their dashboard looked like to where they are now or what Pure Spectrum has done in the programmatic side, to make it easier visualizing for what you can get anywhere. Innovates, their new thing is great too: they have great visualization, great demographics, what things look like. So we are starting to diversify in different ways but the sample is not there where we should diversify, you know?

[36:15]

Right. So interesting! All right, so we got to shift gears a little bit and talk about Qualtrics. That is… two weeks ago or three weeks ago they announced their S1, that they were going public rather, and then right before they went public, of course, SAP bought them for a bunch of money. Tell me from your view what are the three things that Qualtrics did that we as research community or Insights nation can learn from?

[36:43]

The first one to me is that they sold. And why I say that is that there is this disease of too much sometimes that we have in life where you think: “I can do this”, “I can do this” or “I can do this”, and you start pushing yourself in your bandwidth capacity. I think that where Qualtrics started as say a software company to a programming company to then getting into consumer experiences where you can basically do an entire research project on it. And then, last year getting into… it almost felt like they were pushing a CRM. I left Qualtrics thinking that they are going to go after Salesforce. So it became so broad and they were doing so many different  things that I think that if they were to file for their IPO and they would just get a lot of money, I think that could have grown more to your Jack of all trades like a master of none. By selling, I think, now they get a focus. SAP has a lot of different arms that Qualtrics could specialize in just maybe that consumer experience, maybe its part of market research and not the whole kit and kaboodle type of thing. So I think that it is great to be ambitious. Everyone should be ambitious. You should follow and do everything you can but at the same time, I think this, selling when they did really allowed Qualtrics to have a name, to have an identity and definition that would make them more profitable in the future, and if they were to keep going and conquer the world, or try to conquer the world, like death by a thousand cuts type of thing.

[38:19]

Got it. So focus is one of the things that benefitted from them selling. That is interesting. I had not considered that but that has a lot of truth. Any other things that you think we could pull from?

[38:28]

I think the greatest trick that Qualtrics has ever pulled is how they get into their customers: going to universities, giving them the software. To someone who is graduating from college to walk out with some kind of Qualtrics certification that may be just a piece of paper in the past but then they go to a job and they say: “Oh! I am Qualtrics Certified.” What the hell is that? “Well, let me show you”. And then, they have it. And then, they maybe to another jobs. So they start at such a young point in the researcher career by introducing their product that it is magic. It is a genius idea to start that young. If you ever go to a job fair or you walk through a community and you get all these cards on your door and then say “My first reflection of this community is that I am going to order from this pizza place all the time.” And Qualtrics did that. They were the first to market for a lot of researchers. And I think it is genius. No one has done it yet after that –which is crazy to me, or since then. I don’t know what you would do now to have the same kind of impact but I think it is super smart and it is something that we can all learn from.

[39:42]

Yeah, and you cannot get rid of them. It is interesting that they were the only ones pitching to colleges, and the contracts that they signed were actually profitable. They were not giving it away at least not in the later stages, after the first few years. And then, they are multi-year. So it literally… once an institution like a university has installed the platform, you know, to do all the training, it is impossible to get rid of that incumbent unless they just go out of business.

[40:13]

Yes, I agree.

[40:14]

I can quantify that with my personal experience. I am on two different boards, at my local college, Fresno State. I offered a free license to the campus, and they never gave me the free license, they are choosing to spend the money on Qualtrics because they are already in there. So unless we start in the high schools…

[40:39]

Right. Just keep going younger!

[40:40]

That’s right! That ship hass sailed! It is hard to get that institutional shift unless you move into a niche offering… We’ll see what SAP.

[40:50]

Right. The last thing that they have done that we could all learn from, and people kind of do this but it is sometimes a hit or miss, is a universal identity bridging their product to who they are. What I mean by that is that we are a customer experience app so we are going to call our conference the “experience summit”. Everything is going to be “experience”, whether you are a customer’s experience, how you measure the experiences, those types of things, and then they start making that be part of their identity as well. They give everybody there $1,500 to have an “experience”. When you are at the Qualtrics Conference, you can find somebody and say that you want to have an “experience” there, you want to meet a certain speaker, you want to do this while you are in Salt Lake, something like that. They are very true to their brand, 100% in that realm and that marries with their product. It is hard for a lot of people in our industry to do that but they have done it really well where when I think of “experience” –maybe I have been brainwashed, but when I think of the word “experience”, I think of the “X” logo that they use all the time. That is really good branding from their side.

[42:05]

Yes, it was interesting how they moved through. I think that our story, piggybacking on it a little bit, they actually tried to get into the market research space at the beginning but they could not get penetration so that is why they winded up defaulting to these schools.

[42:16]

Right.

[42:17]

One of their first products, actually I think it was their first product that they had was this thing called the “360 review”, which is where you would throw up a survey, have all your peers, and your friends and family complete it, and then it gives you this spider web graph of how you rate yourself relative to them on a variety of attributes. So it is just this idea of self-awareness sort of opportunity. Well, it is a requirement in almost every business in the US.

[42:43]

Right.

[43:44]

And it was really easy to productize. The survey is always the same. The inputs are always the same.  And the outputs are always the same. So you could build a dashboard, right?

[42:53]

Right!

[42:54]

And you could build a workflow. And that kind of was their model the whole way through. It was creating these products that would be easily understood and applied and then, just expanding. I think that recently they announced 26 or so specific use cases that had completely customized input surveys and process management and then, dashboarding and reports, all centric to that particular business question wrapped around the methodology. So it is a really interesting use case, I think, about the Who Wins, the old school radio set (they did not have any instructions) or the Lego set that comes with the Death Star.

[43:44]

I agree.

[43:45]

So tell us, what can we look forward to, we’re at the end of 2018.. What can we look forward from the Intellicast Podcast moving into 2019?

[43:54]

Moving into next year, I really want us to do more interviews and not interviews… My biggest interview is a lot like yours, I love hearing the origins’ story of people. I want to hear how you got into market research –that type of story, because almost everyone that you ask in market research when you ask they say the fell back into it and then they go backwards. But at the same time it is an industry that is driven so much by behavior, and it really is a passion that everyone has. Those passions vary and they go in different directions. But to me, the more we can do to learn about how people got in the industry, the more we can do to recruit more people in the industry. And I think that is always a good thing. I want people to experience what I have gotten from this industry. I want people to feel this purpose I have gotten from this industry. And that sounds super hokey, and there are probably a lot of eyes rolling right now when I said that. But I just know that when you are in school, when you are trying to figure things out, you don’t say the word “purpose” a lot of times but you are looking for what your place is. To me, market research gave me that so I am super passionate about it. So if I can share more origins stories or I can hear more of why people got in the industry or why they stayed in the industry, how they fell in the industry, and things like that, that is my focus for next year. And at the same time, my goal with the podcast, I said this from the beginning, I love when there are times when we sell. Somebody would ask me: “What is the perfect group to bring to a sales presentation?” There is always a super passionate person, who thinks you have the best product out there, there is a number 1 sales guy, then there is probably a project manager or your insights person, who is all numbers, these are all numbers; then there is the normal person in the room, and they are the person that will give you a wink or point their finger at you once or twice and always smile if you don’t get something and then say: “Guys, can we stop?”, and gives you time to think that through and say “What do you mean by that?” “Expand on that”, those types of things – the person who is not thinking about market research from sun up to sun down, I want to be that normal person. That is who I want it to be. I want our podcast to be like the level-headed wink-nod finger gun of the podcast industry, and if we can do that, I think that we will be pretty happy.

[46:23]

My guest today has been Adam Jolley, EVP of Business Development at EMI Online Research Solutions and market research influencer, host of the Intellicast Podcast. Thank you very much, Adam, for joining me today.

[46:35]

Thank you so much for having me.

[46:36]

And thank you everyone who is listening as always. I greatly value your input and reviews in whatever platform you are consuming this content. Please feel free to reach out to me directly @jaminbrazil of the platform of your choice.

Today, my guest is Fiona Blades, President and CEO – that’s Chief Experience Officer – at MESH Experience. MESH specializes in identifying how your brand is experienced by your customers.

Prior to founding MESH, Fiona has experience as a marketer on pet food, and planning director in a variety of agencies, such as Leo Burnett.

FIND FIONA ONLINE:

Linkedin

MESH Experience

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media:

@happymrxp

LinkedIn

---

[00:34]

Over the last decade the market research industry has been disrupted.  Our largest agencies are struggling to keep up as their customers turn to newer, faster and cheaper data sources. Now we are on the edge of yet another major market shift. Now is the time for us to reassert ourselves as the rudder of the brands we love. Thank you for tuning in to the Happy Market Research Podcast where we are charting the path for the future of market researchers and businesses. Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. Today my guest is Fiona Blades, President and CEO, that is, Chief Experience Officer of MESH Experience. MESH specializes in identifying how your brand is experienced by your customers. Prior to her time at MESH, Fiona has worked at several agencies, including Leo Burnett. Fiona, thanks very much for joining us at the Happy Market Research Podcast today!

[1:32]

My pleasure! I am delighted to be on it!

[1:34]

So today you are in New York City. Your accent suggests that perhaps you came from someplace else. Could you tell us a little bit about your childhood and your journey towards market research?

[1:44]

Of course, I would be delighted! And yes, my accent is a little bit of a give-away. I started in the UK, and it is interesting that you actually asked me how I started in life because although I was working in London for my whole career before I moved to New York, I actually come from the North of England. My parents live near Manchester, in Cheshire. So that was where I grew up when I was young. It is very friendly, it is very different, and many people would not know that I actually come from the North because my accent sounds like a Southern UK person.

[2:29]

That is awesome! So what do your parents do?

[2:30]

It was interesting that you asked that question because actually when I set up MESH, I said: “How on earth could I have set up this agency? What led me? What was in my genes to get here?” And then I thought about it, and my father was an engineer, and he actually owned a business. So I thought that maybe that was part of was what led me to where I am now. And in particular, he had something called a molding graving business. So he put the textures or the designs on to plastics that might go on to cars, for example. He invented processes, and I thought back about that. And I thought “I wonder whether he was good at inventing processes and whether that led me to think about how I can come up with a new process for market research to capture people’s experiences in real time. So that was my father. And then on the other side, my mother had a nightclub. She owned an Indie nightclub in Manchester for over twenty years during the period when it was called “Madchester”. So that was the Oasis period and those kind of songs, and I think that what I really got from my mother… when I went to her club and I did only go once because obviously that was her place, it was just an experience for me because I saw the teamwork, I saw how members of the staff felt that it was their club, and they showed me around, and they worked so efficiently, and I just hoped that one day I would be able to have a company where people bonded so well together and were all doing something that they loved. So I think I got something very different out of both of my parents.

[4:19]

Was your mother particularly outgoing? I would imagine in that environment that would be helpful?

[4:22]

She was outgoing but what was funny… she never let on that it was her club. So she was on the door taking the money in. She was over 50 before she started the club so she never had her name come publicly associated with it, which was very interesting. She was more like the person who was doing the business side, making sure everything ran smoothly, making sure all the staff was there, that the licensing was in place. And then, she had other people, she had a manager who would be helping with the promoting and the marketing, making sure the right DJs were there, so obviously it was part of a team. Yes, she was outgoing, but no, she was not the public face of a Manchester nightclub during a period where there clearly a lot crime and difficulty so it was a very unusual position for a woman of her age to be an owner and there every night at a nightclub.

[5:28]

That is fascinating! The fearlessness of being at the door the person that takes the money. I mean, you are also dealing or at least being exposed to people that may not want a service, in which case they got to find another place to go, which can be a difficult conversation, I would imagine.

[5:45]

I think so but she had somebody who was a doorman for over twenty years, Theo. And I think everybody thought the club was his. And he was big because he was the bouncer but what was funny was that at the end of the evening there were literally carrier bags of cash and Theo would carry these bags out to the car with my mother, and I think that people thought that my mother was a little old woman so they did not know she had a car stashed with cash.

[6:24]

That’s hilarious! That’s hilarious! That’s a great visual, especially at 3:00 or 4:00am, I can imagine, in the morning. Anyway, the connection that is interesting for me, and you have already pointed this out, is that process-oriented mentality both of your parents had and then ultimately installed in you. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what the impetus was for you starting MESH Experience.

[6:46]

Well, the impetus in many ways was because I was working as a Planning Director at Claydon Heeley, and I had account planning people reporting into me, coming up with creative ideas that propositioned that they then worked the creatives and also the data team that were analyzing the data. And one of our clients was Mercedes-Benz, and I knew it was not just the TV ad that made somebody buy a Mercedes-Benz, it was looking online, it was seeing your neighbor’s car and thinking: ”Wow, I think I want to know a bit more about that car”. It could have been seeing top gear, and seeing a car that was featured on that. And I just thought that we needed a way to understand every different experience that someone was having with the brand in order so that we could know which experiences we needed more of and which we needed to get rid of. And there wasn’t anything. I think you mentioned fearless in relation to my mother, and I think that is partly true for me. If I had known about market research, I would have known that you cannot do on a mobile phone using text messaging but I did not know that in 2005. I just thought: “Well, you can use a mobile phone to collect data, and I had data people reporting in. And why can’t you use SMS?” And so from that I developed an approach, which we called “real time experience tracking” in order to actually find out those experiences people were having with brands. In many ways it was a little bit like a CRM program. So coming from a direct marketing and agency background, I knew that first of all, you sent one letter, then an email, then you had a phone call, all these different things you had to keep people engaged. And in a way I suppose that influenced the process because I wanted people to tell us about what it was like when they saw the TV ad but then they saw a poster, then they might have had a conversation, then they looked online, so I wanted them to tell us all these experiences as they were having them and to keep them engaged in the process. So I think there were some parts of what I have done in my previous role that really helped develop that process

[9:10]

Yeah, the real life application or need. There is this amazing brilliance with being blind to the barriers. This has come up with a few others entrepreneurs that I have had on the show, the not knowing that you could not do it or the industry had said that you could not do it, and they wind up actually executing it particularly well and creating a point of differentiation in the market. The point about measuring the impact on every step of the user journey, I’ll put “every” in quotation marks because that’s tricky but at least on the point of exposure, that is something Amazon, of course, has capitalized on particularly well and continues to exploit –and I do not mean that in… you know what I mean, to continue the leverage for the benefit. Are you seeing your work starting to move more and more in that positioning? In other words, evening the playing field against the digital giants.

[10:03]

I think things have changed so much since we set up the agency in 2006, and it’s absolutely fascinating, and I love the direction that things are going in. If you think about it, in 2006, when we first set up in January, there was no Twitter, for example. We were not really talking as an industry about social media and social media listening. Now there is just a wealth of digital data that we can mine, that is in real time, that gives us information about people’s behavior. And for me, that’s all about real time data. And that is where I came from when I was thinking about MESH and real time experience tracking.

I supposed what we have done over the twelve years is we really understand our data set and from that we have been able to create models, so we have an experience model, we have a manifesto for experience-driven marketing. So we created that as well. And we find that looking through the customers’ eyes in the way we do, and the data is self-reported, so it is not the same as some of the passive data collection, and I really like passive data collection but it is not quite the same. But it does pick up every touch point, and maybe some of the digital touch points we are not getting, some of the real time, in-person touch points it might be missing on, but this almost provides the glue through which you can at least look at all of these different data resources and make sense of them. So one question we often ask Marketing Directors is: “Can you draw a pie chart of where you are spending money for your brand?” And of course, they can draw that pie chart. That is really easy. But then we say: “Now draw pie chart of how people are experiencing your brand.” And that is much more difficult because what percentage of those experiences are seeing a TV ad? What percentage are drinking the product? What percentage are seeing somebody else drink the product? Or seen it on a shelf in the supermarket or at home? And that is much more difficult but that is the pie chart that our data can draw for Marketing Directors.

[12:28]

There are two things there that stand out to me. But one is, before 2006, or 2007 really, which is the whole mobile phenomenon, brand and social phenomenon, brands used to be who they said they were and now they really are who the customers say they are given the socialization of that and influence of those comments. In fact, we are going through a remodel on our house right now, and my wife is literally looking at Yelp reviews as the number one way to identify who are going to source different projects with. And it is quite a bit of different vendors that we are going through right now just through that process. And a few of the vendors that we winded up saying no to had really high reviews. However, the referral was to somebody else, who just simply did not manage against that. They do not care about social, and they are just stuck with two people that said something negative about that experience. The impetus now is on the brands to actually measure that experience. Because as soon as the person this really connects, positive or negative, then they have the means by which to influence everybody else’s view of that brand.

[13:44]

Even when we started, I had got a vision of what I called brand dialogue at the time. And very early on in 2007, we were very lucky to work with Unilever for Axe, the male body spray. And I remembered there, we were picking up a campaign that they were running called “Boom, chicka wah-wah”, which was a great campaign. They wanted to see how quickly that catchphrase could catch on. And what we could see in the feedback that people were giving to us was that they were playing with it. I remember one photograph on Facebook where someone put their status as feeling very “boom, chicka wah-wah today”. And those kinds of things really made me think… I love to be able to be in a situation where a brand can be responding quickly and picking up on the consumer conversation and taking that along. And in twelve years, we are now much closer that.

[14:46]

100%! The other thing that starts standing out to me is how the user’s journey has evolved. Prior to online, which I am old enough to know really, really well, there was a set architecture where brands could spend ad dollars (TV, radio, billboards, etc.) and then as we know, the Internet added another channel, social adding another channel. As you look forward to voice, how are you seeing that play out from a user journey perspective and that ultimately rolling up to your brands?

[15:21]

I think voice is fascinating, and I mustn’t mention the “A” word or we’ll get stuck happening here like blinds closing and lights going on. As far as we are concerned with our particular methodology, so the core one we use and we do have a number of other that we work with as well, we ask people to tell us whenever they see, hear or experience anything, so we pick up any touch points whether that is voice or not. Sometimes, for example, we know… we have a big retail banking study in the UK. There you can see an experience could have been that somebody has been chatting online about their bank account. Whether or not they are chatting to a chat box or a real person, sometimes that is difficult to know but I suspect that they do not know either. But certainly I think voice is just a whole new exciting dimension of data.

[16:21]

I read a statistic recently from Purina, which does lot of things one of them being dog food or pet food. The statistics was that their projects are that about 50% of their revenue will be purchased through digital assistance like the A word or Google Home or whatever over the next five years. That statistic for me really speaks volumes in the importance of nailing the consumer connection over that period of time because once people move to “Alexa, order paper towels” from a purchase perspective… Oh sorry, “Alexa, stop!” I think I just ordered a bunch of paper towels. So you wind up in this tough situation where purchase choice is being controlled obviously at the user level but the user is not processing the connection of the name of that brand with the product in the way that we do with Kleenex, right. If I was a major brand right now, I would be thinking: “What does that user journey look like?” “What is the experience look like?” And then “How is it going to map once 50% of my revenue moves to a voiced-based purchase journey?”

[17:43]

Again, I think that you are absolutely right with that. In fact, I started my career on pet food. I was a Marketing Manager on dog food on brands called Winalot and Bonio and Shapes and Winalot Prime in the UK many years ago, and it was such a different world then. We created a 60 second ad. It was the first 60 second award winning IPA support winning ad for dog food at the time, and now, look at how things have changed. Obviously, particularly with something like pet food is heavy, so you do not want to be lugging it around, you want it delivered. The whole user journey is going to be different. With something like dog food as well, of course, you’ve got the purchaser and you have got the dog. So you got a whole load of other dynamics going on, which I think is very interesting. And a lot around the emotional relationship so there may be something to do with the purchase experience and the choice of dog food that relates to that relationship so you will need to find moments where you can change behavior because quite often things are habitual and they happen over and over again. But let’s say the dog is ill, that is a good opportunity to change. What is going to happen then? Where is somebody going to go? What are they going to look at online, and how can your brand influence? So I think that there are going to be lots of different purchase journeys that we are going to see.

[19:29]

Yeah, I would love to spend… I know you have a call in an hour so I am not going to spend three hours talking about this subject but the way you just said it is super interesting to me. The reason why is because the consumer journey is exponentially changing, year over year over year, as technology is disrupting or redefining that journey. You can see the rise and I am not going to say “fall” but the “move away” from Snapchat, as an example. The “all in” and then “all out”. And that environment and the context of the platform changes how the brand needs to position itself in order to be relevant and interesting to that population. And to your point, there are only few inflection points that impact behavioral change in a consumer purchase pattern, and you have got to be relevant there, so then you have to think about “Alright, how am I influencing that journey and a big part of that is where are they finding the information that informs, that pulls the value or puts the value forward to them and you need to be that as a brand, you need to be that single source or as much as you certainly can be. Anyway, I think a very interesting subject to talk about.

[20:48]

Absolutely, and another thing, actually that almost the flip side of what we have been discussing, is retail bricks and mortar and the move from being transactional to experiential. There is going to be loads more, of course, that will be done online but from all that we have done over the years we know that human interaction touchpoints are the ones that have the most impact. And when people are living the brand and experiencing it so if we think of pop-ups, like the Magnum Pleasure Store, those have such a big impact on the people that go and on the news that spreads! And I think we will find more creative experiential retail environments in order to attract people into them and then the convenience shopping will obviously be more digital focused.

[21:58]

So you are a successful entrepreneur. I am an entrepreneur. I have been for the last almost two decades. We both know… Anybody who has been doing this for any period of time knows that there are highs and lows. Would you tell us a little bit about one of the largest challenges that you experience starting and building your company and then how you addressed it?

[22:07]

There was a moment during the recession, 2008-2009, that was particularly challenging. We started in 2006. Let’s remember that I had that blissful ignorance and thought that I could set this up. And all of the sudden the economy changed. We had only just set up an office in Singapore and privately funded business that we had, many clients that we had, particularly in China, and we were able to service Europe and the States out of our London office but we could not really service Asia out of London. So we thought “We’ll go to Singapore”. As soon as we set up the Singapore office, I remember that we had been at the Market Research Society Annual Awards event in 2008, and we won more awards than any other agency. We were only 2 years old. This was so exciting for us. We were looking into the new year, and all these clients had said that they were going to be working for us, and we got these campaigns and literally January came and every single client got back to us and said: “I am so sorry, our budgets have been cut, our campaign is moving, we are not going to be doing anything.” We literally had nothing coming in in January, nothing coming in in February, a time of not coming in in March. And I had to get hold of our Managing Director in Singapore and say “We cannot send any more money out to you. Can you just get back to me and let me know what to do?”  And the next day he phoned, and he said “Right. Okay. I have looked at this, and I can half our costs.” And I nearly feel off my chair. I did not know how, what they were going to do to half their costs. And I said “I am all ears. Tell me, tell me what you could do.” He said: “We are going to move to Thailand.” And I said “Right. Okay.” He said “Not forever but we are going to move now to Thailand.” And that is what they did. So I suppose that I have learned from others. I would have not come up with that idea myself but I am delighted to say that although that particular person left MESH afterwards, today we are still working with him as a Consultant in that region. I think it is really about being tenacious and listening to other people. Because other people have got great ideas and expertise to bring.

[25:01]

And the point you made about that you still have a relationship with that individual, who helped you navigate that very difficult point in time, that’s key, right? Because that is exactly your DNA, even expressed in how your customer’s customers or the customers of the brands need to and want to interact. Is it Casper? I might be mistaken on the brand but there is a digital mattress brand that is opening stores, obviously Warby-Parker, which we all have heard about, moving from exclusively online to opening up brick and mortar. So you definitely have a success at a digital level not being enough and needing to then enable the customer to have this full immersive experience in order to maintain that relationship.

[25:48]

We believe that experiences needs to go into everything that we do. So obviously we are understanding clients, the brand experiences that the customers are having. But most of us have experience in our titles and that is because we want to ensure that our clients have great experiences working with us. That our participants in our studies are – we never call them respondents because we want them to have a good experience – we want our partners to have a good experience. This is an ecosystem, and we really believe that it is important to walk the walk and talk the talk as well. We need to be thinking about the touchpoints we have with our partners and try to make great experiences rather than negative ones.

[26:43]

So what do you see as the characteristics of an all-star employee? What do you look for, and what do you seek to install in your team?

[27:00]

The first thing is a “can do” spirit. If you are coming into the smaller, more entrepreneurial business, you need somebody that loves that, that they want to do things, and they got that “can do spirit”. They also need to be creative problem solvers as well because you just don’t know what is going to happen. We talked about the radical transformation that has gone on over the last twelve years so you need someone who can think about problems creatively. And I think the third thing is an empathetic team-player. I see the difference between when a team is working well and when it is functioning less well. And it is always about the team work. You can have the greatest people but how can you make them gel? So having somebody who is the good team-player, who is empathetic and understands other people and can work out how they excel with everybody else, I think is really important.

[28:05]

Do you have a specific example of someone on your team that may have exhibited that and if so, a time when they did?

[28:15]

Yes, our Regional Lead in Sao Paolo, Marcello Garritano. He is a great example, I think, of this. He started working at MESH in the UK. He then set up the office in Brazil. There were tough times in Brazil as well, and we had to shut down the office. We then won a major pitch, and we reopened it again very, very quickly. And all the time he was resilient, he was able to build a fantastic team. And he has some of the most diverse pieces of business going through his office. I was there last week, and there are many, many different types of things, not just our real time experience tracking but for some clients is purely working as consultants, using their data, coming up with new tools for them, and he often is given a global project because of his ability to manage a great team.

[29:30]

So as a successful entrepreneur who has weathered more than a few storms, what do you see as one of your keys to success?

[29:40]

I think that if we are talking about it attitudingly, I would say is energy, optimism and resilience. In a way, I almost think that if you knew what it was going to be like having a business you probably would have not set one up. So you have got to really love it. And I think you need your own purpose. So for MESH we have set something, which is about “helping to create and measure experiences that grow brands, people, and society”. And that bit of society is important to me. There has to be a reason why you are doing something. I think that having a sense of what you are really trying to achieve is important, and keeps you going and keeps you motivated.

[30:36]

One of my favorite tweets of all time actually says: “If a company does not have a vision, they are just wandering around.” And you are exactly right.  You got to have a reason why. So operating at sort of that, ten or thirty thousand feet, maybe higher, what are your views of seeing as a trend in the marketing and marketing research space?

[31:08]

Well, we talked about some of those trends but one that I am really pleased about is that experience is coming of age. So again maybe ten to twelve years ago I don’t remember being talked about as much but now it feels as though everybody is talking about it. And I was really delighted to see in an article a little while ago in Harvard Business Review, where the authors that included Keith Weed from Unilever were talking about how share of voice and share of all would not be key metrics of the future, it would be share of experience. I feel delighted that we are here at this time, because I think that there is a time and a place, and now it does feel as though people are really valuing experience.

[32:01]

I mean, it is so far beyond anything else really, right? One technology company, I cannot divulge who they are, they have not been on the podcast just fyi –although I am going to fix that, they have 5 internal full-time market researchers and they have over 40 and growing UX researchers. So that user experience is driving, driving, driving a lot of the decisions that are being made throughout the organization, honestly.   

[32:37]

I agree. Yes.

[33:43]

So what is MESH offering right now that is being adopted and finding a lot of traction inside the market place?

[32:48]

Well, I think it is the ability to be able to measure these experiences. I think that is where we are really finding traction with. The data is collected as we talked about before but that is something that when clients see it because it includes quantitative metrics –so you can draw that lovely pie chart and you can see exactly how people are experiencing the brand, but then you can really dig down and you can see which are the positive experiences. And we now that a positive experience has three times the impact of a neutral one or a brand consideration. So that is really important to look at that. And you can see that for yourself and for your competitors. So you can immediately start to see where there is white space, what you can do, if there are some negative experiences, how you can fix then. That is what we have been finding. That the data itself, once the clients try it, that they get hooked on it because they really want to see what people’s experiences are and they are qualitative comments and photos as well. So if you know that for example, posts are performing very strongly, you can see exactly why people are saying that.

[34:09]

My guest today has been Fiona Blades, CEO of MESH Experience. Fiona, thank you very much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast with me.

[34:14]

Thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure discussing this with you.