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

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

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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

LinkedIn

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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:

Twitter

Linkedin

Engagious

Dialsmith

FIND US ONLINE:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

---

[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:

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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.

My guest today is Dom Ricchetti, Senior Staff Research Lead at ServiceNow. Headquartered in Santa Clara California, ServiceNow is a software-as-a-service provider, providing technical management support to the IT operations of large corporations. Prior to ServiceNow, Dom has been leading research at many of today’s top companies including in Microsoft, Intuit, Millward Brown, Dell, and Gartner.   

FIND DOM ONLINE:

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 [01:01]

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 Dom Riccheti, Senior Staff Research Lead at ServiceNow. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, ServiceNow is a software-as-a-service provider, providing technical management support to the IT operations of large corporations. Prior to ServiceNow, Dom has been leading market research at many of today’s top companies, including Microsoft, Intuit, Miller Brown, Dell, and Gartner.

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

[02:01]

Thanks so much for having me, Jamin.

[02:04]

I’d like to start out with a little bit about ServiceNow.  This is a massive corporation, impressive growth, yet I don’t think a lot of our listenership have heard about it.  Can you tell us a little bit about ServiceNow?

[02:17]

Sure thing.  We’ve been very successful, and it’s been an interesting story.  We started out really being a small engineering company, developing a platform.  Out of that platform, trying to figure out selling it in enterprise how best to apply it.  The logical conclusion to start with was in IT service management. So, most people know when they have a problem with IT, they call up IT; they create a ticket.  You make a request, or you have a problem – there’s a ticket. Somebody’s assigned a ticket to work on it, and it gets passed around. People use a knowledge base, look up information about what’s going on, what kind of things worked in the past, how to we solve this problem.  That whole process of IT service management fit our platform very well because it’s geared towards assigning things, managing the workflow process, integrating with other software and information in the knowledge base behind it. So, that’s really matured over the years to be this awesome, workflow-integration platform underlying everything, and we’ve started to extend it to many other business processes.  Besides IT service tasks, we’ve extended it into IT operations, and IT management, like asset management and other uses for IT. Then into external customer service – you have the same kinds of issues: when a customer calls up about your product, needs help, has a request, just how to use it, or break/fix kind of things. That’s also a service desk management, facilities and field service – same kind of issues and processes where the workflow and integration really benefits those areas.  

Then an area we’re really excited about – it’s been growing fast – is in HR.  You think of problems that HR internally in a company is trying to support their employees on a wide variety of issues.  An interesting scenario that we delivered is on-boarding new employees. You get a new employee you have to set them up with their computer, desk space, access right to networks, get them signed up on workday, APP payroll, United Health Care benefits.  You’ve got all these processes you have to manage and take somebody through. Different people manage those tasks, integration with different software; so, that whole workflow can be automated on our platform.

[04:57]

Is a large part of the pitch to your customers improvement to operational efficiency that then impacts gross margin or another way of thinking about it would be the benefit be improvement to workers’ output quality or overall enjoyment

[05:21]

Yeah, that’s a tough question.  I guess I’d have to say it’s both.  I think where customers realize the value is, first of all, in efficiency.  We thought maybe artificial intelligence and virtual agents would help the service desk have fewer people; there’d be fewer agents needed to answer stuff because there’s usually the top 20% that comes up 80% of the time.  People need to reset their password and stuff like that. Most companies have some way to automate that and a lot of consumer products do, and you can go down that list. But really what we found is that our customers are finding they can process more requests and do more things; so, they could start applying the resources that they have into more areas that may be important in helping the whole business process move better.  Then it becomes more about improving the way the company works, improving people’s life at work.

[06:43]   

Yeah, and improving the overall customer experience, right?  That’s really interesting how your customer base is adopting the technology, and instead of shaving off large pieces of their departments, they’re reassigning those resources to create better customer experiences.  

[07:03]

Yeah, that’s right.  

[07:05]

Recently, you won a – I should say ServiceNow won a Forbes #1 most innovative company.  That is a very prestigious award. Can you talk to us a little bit about that award and what that means to the company?    

[07:21]

Yeah, that was just a tremendous success.  People really got pumped up about the recognition of it and the perspective.  We’ve been working a long time on just growing the business and the application of the platform.  We’re used by about 40% of global 2,000 companies; so, we’re well penetrated into large companies around the world.  But a lot of that is just in particular areas – maybe IT service management or maybe even they’ve adopted HR as a first application, and the expansion of the platform into helping their business processes across departments is a huge thing driving our growth, which has been at 35% – 40% been running along at that rate. But a key part of this has been just trying to get across our positioning and our value of what the platform can do in a lot of work with people like Gartner and Forrester.  Now we find that we’re recognized as the leader or, at least, a visionary in many different Gartner magic quadrants, which is where a lot of the IT departments go to the find out which vendor has got right stuff to help them with where they need to move with their company. I think it’s been an outcome of that understanding of the value and application of the platform that’s driven this number 1 most innovative company.

[09:07]

In April of last year, you got a new CEO, John Donahoe, who was the previous CEO of eBay.  He’s well known as a marketer and branding genius. With his appointment, is… how’s that impacting ServiceNow?  

[09:33]

Yeah, it was quite interesting.  Little aside: John and I started on the same day; so, I hope both of us are contributing how much stock has moved up.  [laughter] But it was an interesting move by the company. He’s our third CEO really, and another phase in terms of the company’s growth.  We’ve been growing so fast that the board and the company has recognized that we need different talents, leading the company for the next phase of what we’re doing.  So, with John coming in, we’ve put a lot more emphasis now on developing brand and marketing so that people will hear more about ServiceNow, know what that means, and what we do.  As well as just discipline in managing strategic decisions and our internal processes, we do a lot of running ServiceNow Now, we call it, so the Now platform. We use our own tools and our own… or the release.  We’re the first testers of the applications of things. And we’re a big enough company you can push and break stuff and understand how to apply it best. We learn a lot from that internally.

[11:07]

It’s really interesting to me that you are applying your public platform to your internal processes.  I personally found at Decipher that platform was birthed out of me needing to program surveys efficiently and then it becomes the preferred platform for, I call it, institutional or research-heavy companies.  The reason why is because we have this certain level and certain job function with a consistent type of deliverable. Everybody has shared pain points and, if you can automate… if you can apply technology to automate those processes, then you just inherently improve people’s lives.  It sounds like that’s exactly the application at a much, much larger scale, of course, that you guys have been successfully applying.

[12:06]

Yeah, that’s a great point.  I’m sure from that experience, you realize too what we see is that it’s the most intimate use of the product.  And you can get so deep with yourself, as a customer, that you could really understand what’s happening and how to improve things.  Yeah, we get some work actually. It’s been in HR department. It’s been interesting because we’ve done some work for our HR to understand our employees and what are the moments that matter in an employee’s experience at work.  How can we make their life better, evolve the things that affect an employee’s life? We’ve done work on both sides: we’ve done work with customers for HR product and work internally about how we can improve HR. And they overlap.  Some of the information on both sides is driving: well, what do we do in our HR, in our own HR, and what do we do for HR product for other companies?

[13:15]

Yeah, and that creates this beautiful connective tissue between product delivery, R & D, and sales.  So you’ve got this, in my opinion, this perfect eco-system of constant product improvements. And then you guys understanding, because you’re using the platform, the implications of those improvements and how they’re used, which then just informs everything else that the company does all the way up to or down to, depending on your view, the end-user or the customer.  So, prior to joining ServiceNow, you served for eight years as the Senior Vice-President of Radius Market Research. This is a very large market research firm based in New York. Why the pivot from the agency to the brand side?

[14:10]

That’s a good question.  Let me tell you a little bit about how I ended up there.  I guess I can just go into some of my background. It’s kind of unique in the diversity of different roles that I’ve had and how things have evolved.  I feel like I’ve been asked similar questions along the way in my career. [chuckles] I’ve been back and forth from tech, brand, and product side with different companies, brand companies – let’s just say – in different types of research agencies, including doing product and market research in different kinds of industry analysis.  I think seeing the world from those multiple sides in building a multi-disciplined education experience has worked great for me in my career. It is something that I would advocate for other people because I feel especially if you want to be a researcher, you should be broad; you should understand the different people in different departments who you work with, and how they might be looking at problems also helps you understand customers.  But, of course, there’s some areas you should probably be deep in; pick those based on your own talents and what the call is for you in your career opportunities. I started actually as an engineer, studying computer science, Although I did a lot of math, it was wasn’t the same kind of statistics you would normally learn to do market research, but it gave great perspective, I think, and it was easy to extend from that kind of STEM education.  I learned a lot about critical thinking, formulating and testing hypotheses, and thinking about problems as we do in research. In research we typically think of it… We’re designing an experiment to test a hypothesis and then prove it or disprove it and develop new insights from that – if not that hypothesis, what’s a new one? That’s what you try to do in both a lot of engineering and science roles as well as in research. So with that, I started working on microprocessors and personal computers and graphic workstations at Digital Equipment way back.  For those who remember and know the name [chuckles], they were the number 2 computer company in the world next to IBM. IBM brought about personal computer; Digital Equipment competed. Digital Equipment was also a leader in networking. They were one of the first companies to develop chips and low-cost what was ethernet at the time and then the internet was build on and their involvement in the internet and integrating that with the PC in the way you’d work with distributed computers. So it’s quite an interesting perspective, but digital equipment no longer exists.  What went wrong really? I learned there first-hand how some of the best technical solutions just don’t necessarily succeed in the marketplace. They aren’t solving a real valued problem for customers that makes it worthwhile. Otherwise, it’s a… you’re overbuilding, a lot of people would say, or maybe you aren’t applying it in the right way to what brings value to the market and will sell well and endure. With Digital Equipment, I actually moved out to Palo Alto, California, which was interesting. The group out there was developing Unix-based workstations and was seen as a little bit rogue in the company, but we were very plugged into Silicon Valley and seeing what was happening in the market.  I changed roles out there in realizing this with engineering roles to then do market and competitive analysis to start to look at more about how could we apply technologies better and guide the engineering teams to being more successful in what we delivered in the end for the product.

[18:51]

Originally, you were a… started out on the engineering side.  What attracted you to Gartner? ‘Cause you’d spent a lot of time at Digital Equipment like twelve years.  Then to move to an insights function inside of Gartner twelve years later, that’s a BIG pivot.

[19:13]

Yeah, it was.  I think making this bit of a transition out in Palo Alto to looking more at…  looking at the market and doing competitive analysis and being part of the Silicon Valley world really opened my eyes to that.  And that’s what got me interested in moving to Gartner and more industry analyst roles. So I was at Gartner and then a little later after Dell too, I went back to Millward Brown, and Telequest Group as a VP of industry analysis.  So there I was starting to round out more disciplines in my career, more experience. At Dell, I was actually part of a strategic group underneath Finance. We were looking a mergers and acquisitions and other areas as Dell was developing…  as Dell was expanding in the server marketplace. I first joined them to do industry analysis about what was happening in the server market. Back then, it was more of just take a desktop PC, turn it on its side, put extra disks in it [chuckles], and you could build a server.  But Dell was up against Compaq and IBM, SunMicro Systems with Unix, and all other kinds of other players who had this great VAR network about being able to load and support applications and other things on a server to make it a more robust server, but Windows was great in driving…   There was particular areas of the market: the file and print servers [chuckles] That’s where you kept all your storage, right? And also Outlook and Exchange servers. So for mail, that was pretty much standardized. So it was easy for Dell to progressively start at the low end of standardization and push up levels of standardization and push more into the server market.  That’s what my analysis was showing, what we were looking in, what we started to drive. Then in the server markets, I was doing analysis of some of the shipments out there for Gartner Dataquest where I was working previously and IDC and found that at least half or more of the revenue to be made in the server market was about storage. So, that’s where Dell got into the partnership and initial work with network appliance and EMC (EMC now part of Dell in the end), made a lot of revenue and bit off bigger and bigger chunks of the server market.

But I also did more studying then too.  So this was the point in my career where instead of a typical MBA, I took Master’s courses in operations research.  I was extending out of engineering management roles and got into more marketing and finance. That breadth got me more exposed to statistical analysis, visualization, business communications, storytelling – put together more of the picture and understanding broader perspective of the business.  At Dell, it was very different in that it was driven more by the market and financial opportunities and trying to optimize finance and optimize efficiency of manufacturing, which was very different than my years at Digital Equipment, who is very technology-driven. That provided a different perspective.  At Dell, I worked on their initial submissions for the Malcolm Baldrige award, which is an extension out of Total Quality Management, in thinking about how in the end does product and manufacturing deliver for customers, solve problems for customers, and satisfy market requirements and needs. It was a real turn that kept happening in my career from engineering to understanding the market in being able to build skills that provided other perspectives on how to analyze markets and do research.

[24:04]

Yeah, I think one of things that I’ve learned…  Of course, you know this intuitively, but after you hear it…  Gosh, what is this? This is over 40 times for me interviewing people (actually closer to, gosh, over 50), sorry.  But is that this diversity of experience actually applies as tremendous amount of advantage to market research because it gives a more complete lense to the data for the researcher to then analyze and understand the consumer’s point of view.  And, secondarily, and maybe even more importantly, the ability to communicate that to the stakeholders effectively so that data then has change in the organization.

[24:49]

Yeah, that’s right.  In research, good practice is that you involve those different departments and get their perspectives.  So being able to relate to them, I think, is something that’s really important for a researcher. I found when I’ve done product innovation research, I came from a role where I was an engineer and was like, “Well, I understand this technology better than the customer.  What’s the customer really going to tell me about how to apply this technology?” Or, in things like artificial intelligence, there are discipline experts that understand that so well. They can engineer a great solution, but it comes back to how is that solving a problem for the customer.  How would you measure that you succeed on what you envision this technology’s going to do for a customer? Trying to understand that perspective in that it not only technically does things that they need but does them in a way that they can make use of it, that it’s intuitive, easy to use.

[26:06]

And then the ability to be able to connect that to an ROI…  Kristi Zuhlke of a company called KnowledgeHound out of Chicago, she was a guest on the show.   She actually talked about one of the tenets of Proctor & Gamble is every research project needs to have an ROI associated with it so that just connects the research with real business outcomes as opposed to more just fodder for a library wall.  

[26:37]

So, let me come back to answering your question about why I moved from Senior

Vice President at Radius to a tech company, being back on the brand side.  It’s my passion in developing and applying these techniques. I did a lot of it at Microsoft; they have a very large in-house, central market research organization; and at Intuit, they had a strong Six Sigma practice where you apply a lot of different research techniques to the end result.  Although I was very excited at working these things at Microsoft, I wanted to get more into the research techniques; so, I moved to a small research firm where we became part of Radius. That’s how I ended up a Senior VP at Radius. It was great that I was working with more business units than Microsoft, Google, Intel, and ServiceNow as well as some other smaller players, and I got my first exposure to ServiceNow, but also things outside of tech – so Starbucks, Nordstrom, REI, others in the Seattle area, and West Coast, where I had clients and could broaden that perspective of applying the techniques.  But in the end, ServiceNow – great company, great opportunity, and we’d been talking for a while; the stars aligned, and I saw that ServiceNow was really ready to start to put this discipline in place, mature their practice in research. It was a huge opportunity to leverage that back around, being able to apply and develop techniques to a technology company where we could try technical innovation. I’m loving it! [chuckles]

[28:44]

That’s awesome.  Congratulations. Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about some issues that are facing big brands like ServiceNow.  How is market research being used by these brands to address those issues?

[29:00]     

Yeah, it’s interesting in the industry, and you go to the conference events and stuff too, there’s so much focus on Do-It-Yourself research and the tools, like what you developed at Decipher.  Broader perspective of the tools out there have enabled a lot of Do-It-Yourself research. I was seeing this at Radius Global too that… where traditionally large research firms made a lot of money on doing tracking studies.  Tracking study is not necessarily reinvented. There’s a lot of execution. You want to have accuracy about the dashboard and great insights and interpretation out of it, but it’s something easy enough for companies to do internally with the tools.  There’s been a major shift; there’s key pieces of research process that are easy enough to execute internally. And we’re doing that at ServiceNow and encourage people to take advantage of those tools, you get very intimate with the whole research process.  But I think one of the issues is that – and not to say full custom research firms are all going away. I think they’re reinventing themselves around the things that are trickier research problems and things where it’s harder to execute yourself or that it will take more perspective to derive the insights.  So a partner in a research firm that could bring experience in a discipline like customer experience, research driving loyalty and satisfaction areas, and bring that expertise to partner with you is highly valuable.

[31:10]

Just piggybacking on what I’m hearing:  it sounds like the utilization of longitudinal studies – large trackers. I’ll say – is…  trackers are, in fact, going away, not ever altogether but at least in the current framework, right?  And they are being replaced. What do you see as replacing those trackers? What types of projects?

[31:34]

Yeah, right.  You see it in the research industry that the numbers are shifting the types of work that they’re doing.  I think more of that is coming in-house: it’s easy enough to execute yourself because if it’s longitudinal, it’s repetitive by nature.  But I think there’s something more fundamental that’s changing, and I hope researchers are learning as well as companies that… You still see a lot of management wants the dashboard.  What is our net promoter score? Or even developing better and broader KPIs, net promoter scores, and everything over the past two decades of it being around or so. It is not the end game.  But having KPIs about what needles are you trying to move and tracking them is something that’s important. There’s the old Total Quality Management adage that you can’t change what you can’t measure.  But you also have to know how to change it. And that’s where I think research is shifting and becoming more valuable is that, instead of putting so much money into large longitudinal trackers and making sure you have the nth degree of accuracy on that dashboard seeing it move all the time quarterly, whatever, it’s more about doing the diagnostics.  What’s driving those KPIs? Do we have this KPI exactly right? Do we really understand what this means when we’re measuring it?  Do we understand it from the customer’s perspective? Our target customers or as we expand our market to other prospects, do we understand what it means to them?  You know, the full scope of it and clarity around what that KPI is. I’m a big advocate of the quantitative statistical analysis. We see there’s a huge amount of customer behavioral data just because the systems are in place and then especially with the cloud solution anything online what customers are doing in social media or on your website you build this vast knowledge; so, you have a great amount of data to be able to build models and do statistical analysis about what’s really driving those KPIs and diagnostic work, both qualitative and quantitative, to dig into those, understanding what those big levers are and how you can move them is so much more valuable than the dashboard.  I’ve been at a couple places now: Intuit, and I did some other work with Google, where after you learn enough about the big levers and build confidence in what’s driving those top level KPIs and things you want to watch on the dashboard, you refocus your attention. It’s no longer so much about the dashboard but putting campaigns, initiatives in place that we focus on those big levers. And we’ve done the diagnoses, learned something unique, and often a competitive advantage, about the way the market works or, at least, how the market works in your space of what you’re trying to achieve strategically.

[35:48]

Right.  It’s kind of like…  I can’t believe that I keep going back to this interview, but it is so poignant, with Rogier Verhulst at LinkedIn:  the “now what” and “so what,” which is NOT found inside of the dashboard buy is entirely found in the post-analysis work that is done, whether that’s incorporating external transactional behavioral data or doing deep-dive qual or whatever.  Are you using qualitative, any unique qualitative tools right now outside of focus groups and traditional IDIs?

[36:27]

That’s a good question because we’re looking at them and trying to figuring out what to apply where.  Use a lot of traditional techniques, but what’s been interesting at ServiceNow too is that we’ve always had a very deep dialogue with customers.  So we have a lot of interaction CEO to CEO on down through all levels of people, great executive briefings and dialogue about implementing and applying the platform.  Those unstructured, often one on one or meeting kind of conversations more so than structured focus groups that you repeat, are very valuable but they’re not as easy to leverage for insights over time and across the company.  So having types of qualitative tools where you could record that stuff… You mentioned like Knowledge Hound and ways that you could integrate qualitative with quantitative with past research are key to maturing the process and in having more impact, other than the insights, making it more valuable.

[37:54]

With all of your hypergrowth that you’re experiencing at ServiceNow, what do see as the three characteristics of an All-Star employee?

[38:04]

At ServiceNow we say we listen, learn, and act.  That, I think, is a nice, short way of focusing on this aspect of listening to customers.  I think part of that is that researchers really need to let customers talk. Facilitate the feedback, but let them talk.  Listen beyond what you expect or what you’re looking for to hear. Something that I heard early on in my career and I like to use when drilling into things is to ask three “why’s.”  So when you ask “why,” somebody’s saying that, ask then two more times. Often they have the things they build on when they’re talking about it, but when you ask the third “why” you’ll get something unique, sometimes something unrelated.  But it gets them to open up and think more. Give them time to talk.

So, listen, learn, and act is the first thing.  I think the second thing is telling good customer stories.  There’s a saying of “Speak truth to power.” Internally, up the ladder at the company, telling good, honest stories about what customers’ situations are and how we can solve problems, how a competitors is solving the problems, or what’s happening in the market is essential to helping the organization understand the truth about what’s happening out there.  Pick your battles and build honesty and trust; be honest and build trust. But it’s about creating good contexts too for what you’re hearing. The third area is just getting that breadth of involvement across departments, leading participation, teaching things like Six Sigma practices, jobs to be done, outcome-driven innovation, how to apply different techniques.  We’ve done a lot of pricing studies. What is discreet choice modeling? Why is that best for doing pricing studies? How could we optimize the way we bundle package products? So teaching the organization how to better utilize the tools available, use the insights, create KPIs, and be clear about them, understand that you have to focus on the diagnostics besides just spending a lot of time watching that dashboard – is it moving or not?  It’s better if we spend the time and effort on the diagnostics; then we can understand how to change things and where to focus our work. That kind of leadership across departments to get them to participate and understand how the tools work in research and how to apply it, I think, is the key third thing that’s important to researches and employees at ServiceNow.

[41:23]

Yeah, so listen up Insights Nation and those of you that are looking to get employed in the market research space.  You’ve got to listen, learn, and act. It isn’t enough just to do one of two of those options. And that means you’ve got to be open-minded and check your biases at the door as much as possible.  And then the action – the feet to what you learn – is really important. The application to the business requires a business context of those insights. Then tell the customer story, and then lastly, lead participation.  That is critical.

My guest today has been Dom Riccheti, Senior Staff Research Lead at ServiceNow.  Thank you very much, Dom, for joining me on the Happy Market Research podcast.

[42:11]

It’s been great.  I enjoyed it so much.

[42:13]

And thank you, everyone, who’s been listening.  As always, our oxygen is your word-of-mouth referrals to this podcast.  Please give us your ratings. We love to hear from you. Have a wonderful rest of your day!

Today, my guest is Katrina Noelle, President of KNow Research, a qualitative consultancy based in San Francisco. Additionally, she is the co-Founder of Scoot Insights, a firm offering an agile qualitative methodology for decision-making. Katrina is an active member of QRCA which is the Qualitative Research Consultant Association, the Insights Association, Women In Research (WIRe) and ESOMAR. She is proud of KNow’s status as a certified woman owned business, and serves as a mentor through both WBE and WIRe’s mentorship programs.

FIND KATRINA ON SOCIAL:

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[00:48]

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. Today my guest is Katrina Noelle, President of KNow Research, a qualitative consultancy based in San Francisco.  Additionally, she is the co-founder of Scoot Insights, a firm offering an agile, qualitative methodology for decision-making. Katrina is an active member of QRCA, which is the Qualitative Research Consultant Association, the Insights Association, Women in Research, and SMR. She’s proud of KNow’s status as a certified woman-owned business and serves as a mentor through both WBE and WIRe’s mentorship programs.

Katrina, thanks very much for being on the Happy Market Research podcast with me today.   

[02:01]

Glad to be here.

[02:02]   

So, tell us a little bit about where you grew up and how you parents influenced your career.

[02:07]

Yeah, so I grew up in the Bay Area before it was the Bay Area that we know today.  It was more about Hayes and Fisherman’s Wharf and things like that. It was not the tech center that it is now.  But I think the biggest influence on where I ended up was the fact that my parents owned their own business. So, I grew up as the second child next to an audio-recording studio, which is still going strong.  The main thing that really influenced me was the fact that that is okay to start your own business and to start it pretty young; that it’s kind of a default option rather than a rare enterprise. So I started my business fairly young, based on that inferred approval of the small business.        

[03:01]

Did you parents have any specific hard times that you recall they went through with their small business?

[03:09]   

I think it is tough.  I mean they co-owned a business and ran a family together.  So there were some general negotiations, shall we say, that went on while I was growing up.  But I think that is an industry that changes very much with the times and has to. And a lot has happened with audio over the past few decades.  So, I think just seeing the constant need to stay ahead of the game and keep track of what new technology and expectations are… Their client base has changed radically over the last years.   So, just watching that constant need to be agile and to transform with your industry… It was a challenge, but it was also very informative to watch.

[03:56]

Yeah, that specific industry has gone through massive disruption.  And it sounds like they were able to traverse these periods of time successfully.  As you think back on their ability to work together to negotiate both successful family and then successful business, were there some key takeaways that you learned, some behaviors that you adopted?

[04:26]

Yeah, I think one of the most prevalent things was the agility about what was going to walk in the door and present itself may not be why you set up the business.  They started with very small-scale production jobs: people who wanted to record books on tape or their own CD, or things like that. And it morphed into corporations needing voice mail and other kind of needs from the voice perspective.  So, that’s kind of sat in my mind as based on what you do, who might need this. And who might need this isn’t someone you might think of as the most immediate connection. So I think that that’s really stuck with me, that you have a set of assets and a set of services that you provide and to think really broadly about how to offer that and where to offer that set of services.

[05:20]

So, growing up in an entrepreneurial family is pretty exciting, I would imagine, and then setting off ultimately to start your own business.  How did you find yourself in market research?

[05:32]

As anyone who’s starting off in market research knows, it’s very irritating when people say they fell into it.  I think these days you can intentionally fall a bit better. But, when I started out, it was definitely not anything I knew about in college; it was nothing that I knew to study or prepare for.  I found myself right out of college in a marketing department sort of by…. You know I had a communications degree; I guess that’s what you went and did. And fairly soon after starting work, I ended up being borrowed by the Insights Department to go take notes on a set of focus groups, and I begged my boss at the time because, honestly, I just wanted to take the trip, right?  I just wanted to be able to travel around. “Sure, whatever this focus group thing is, I’ll take notes.” And it was within a couple of days of observing that process that I thought, “Wait, hang on. This is what I want to do.” It was more about which end of stick you’re holding, right? Instead of telling people what they might want and need, really listening to them and providing that feedback and loop back into the company about what they actually wanted and needed from the brand.  It just sort of struck me in the middle of that trip, and I don’t think I’ve ever really looked back from that. It took me a long time to get into the industry. I was trying to figure out how to do that. I was working abroad at the time. It was a visa thing; it was a lot of different things at the time. So it took me much longer to be doing what I wanted to do than finding out that’s what I wanted to do.

[07:10]

That’s super interesting.  So, originally the motivation there was simply just to exposure of other areas.  So, travel was kind of the big, baited hook for you into qualitative research.

[07:24]

Yeah.  I mean thank God, right, because that is a lot of your life when you decide to get into this field; so, you do have to have a certain amount of love for new places and continually stay curious about meeting new people and new places because that’s a big part of the job still.

[07:40]

So, when you’ve done it as long as you’ve have, do you…  obviously… The second or third or fourth time to London is really exciting still, right?  But like the twentieth time or whatever time? [laughter] I’m not saying like it goes away, but the enthusiasm sort of…  Do you have that, still that connection and drive and love for that aspect of the business or is it turned a little bit more into the work/grind?

[08:10]

It’s difficult.  I definitely preach better than I practice on that front.  Junior folks on my team know I tell them we have a trip coming up.  “Do you have any friends in New York? ‘Cause you should probably pad it.”  I tell them to do that, and I end up taking a red-eye. So, I try not to lose the love and the interest in it.  I think what’s it’s turned into for me is more than seeing different cities. That’s kind of a different soapbox that I’ll get to in just a second.  But you end up going back to the same places over and over again, it does lose a little bit of the mystique, but what it doesn’t lose is the fact that you don’t live in a bubble.  So, especially being based in San Francisco and in the Bay Area, it’s very different than most places in the state or country or certainly world, right? So, I think just the fact that we as a profession are lucky enough to meet people from so many different places and hear input and thoughts and really considered observations on life from a really diverse set of people, that to me never gets old.  It doesn’t matter what plane you’re on to what city, the fact that your world is that broad continues to be a hugely exciting benefit.

[09:27]

How does that inform then the insights that you derive from the qualitative efforts?

[09:34]

For a long time, qualitative has insisted quite rightly to touch base with a few different markets for any study, right?  These days it’s turned into doing a lot of digital qualitative and getting people on webcams from all across the country to get that multifaceted viewpoint.  So how we’ve done it has changed but, I think that impetus to get as many viewpoints in the mix as possible, you need to broaden the set. We know we’re not quant; we know we can’t get you statistical significance about X-region or X-country, but we can certainly get you depth and that depth is eroded by the fact that, if you only get depth in one area, right?  The whole point of getting depth is to have it be a very broad set of depth. So, I’m sort of talking in like a meta-speak right now, but I do think it’s important to get as many voices heard as possible. And, of course, that varies by project. So, if your client has a few targeted audiences, that’s what you’re going to dive into. But you still need to make sure you have representation from all the facets of that audience, which brings me back to the soapbox I was alluding to earlier.  We do go to the same cities repeatedly. I mean I can’t tell you how many times in the last year I’ve been to L.A., Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Dallas; this is where we go repeatedly. But there’s a lot of us who are pushing to get to second tier markets, to get to markets that aren’t heard quite as often – not only from a fresh participant point of view but just a diversity of perspectives in the insights really.

[11:18]

Yeah, totally.  There is definitely… I call the triple A teams, right?  The markets that tend to get neglected are the ones. But some good-sized populations have triple A ball teams like the one I am in right now – Fresno.  You got a million people that are in the center part of California, and they could not look more different than everybody else in the state: varying shades in some cases.  So you wind up… Go ahead.

[11:46]

I was going to say…  So, in those cases, actually we have done a couple of studies this year that have been in two markets:  San Francisco and Sacramento. It sounds kind of funny, but it’s very true. It’s very true that that’s two separate markets.  And, if you have a client whose travel budget…they still want to do in person, but they don’t have a huge travel budget; you have to think creatively like that.

[12:08]   

100%.  So, one of things that you had brought up a little bit ago is this general notion of pulling truth out of the groups.  My boss taught me this kind of saying (He certainly didn’t invent this; it’s been around forever), “Do what I want, not what I say.”  And that’s a big part… I mean I feel like that’s the crux of effective research, is intuiting what exactly the person really desires as opposed to trying to build the building based on the schematic that they verbally try to communicate, right?  So, how do you pull that out? Are there tips in your interviewing that you can give our listeners on ways that you’re able to kind of get to what the person is intending to say as opposed to just the quote?

[13:04]

Yeah, it’s a very hard thing to put like five tips to hear what they’re really saying.  That’s a hard article to write. A lot of it is very intuitive, right? It’s listening empathically and being intuitive.  

[13:17]

I just have to say that is the best SEO hook we could ever come up with.  [laughter]

[13:22]

Right?  Yes. Effective interviewing in five minutes.  I mean it’s just difficult. You have to get into it.  There’s a reason why clients ask what your moderation experience is and what kind of brands you’ve worked on and what kind of insights you’ve drawn because it takes practice.  There’s certain people who definitely come to it with a more innate ability to listen for the truth behind the words, right? I usually say it’s a process of being with the person.  Obviously, this is easier to do one-on-one than in a group, but it’s still possible to be in the moment, to be with whoever is telling you what they’re telling you. And if you are truly not worrying about your rapport or not worrying about your client behind the glass or… and have your discussion guide down so that you don’t have to refer to it by the letter, and you’re able to just communicate and say and be there with them, you’re going to be a lot further towards that goal.  The other thing we do which is actually much more of a tactic is once that discussion guide – the sort of formal interview guide to make sure that the client knows that you’re going to ask about all the important points is written – we then write a check list. So we say, “Okay. After this hour, I need to have understood these ten things from this person’s point of view. No matter what the questions are, how they are written, in what order they are – I need to walk out of this room with those ten answers.”  And that really sets your mind to listen, to understand them rather than to go through a set of bullet points in a “guide.” You just need to make sure you understand that many things about that person. And then you sit down with the next person; you understand that many things about them. So that’s as much process as we put around that.

[15:10]

I think that’s great, and then you move towards that empathy and pattern recognition, right?  In a lot of ways, as you’ve already said, interviewers or qualitative researchers in general are naturally intuitive.  With your team, are you cultivating that EQ?

[15:34]

Yes, I think it’s very hard to teach if it’s missing at all.  And I don’t, honestly, think very many people get involved in qualitative research if they don’t have a degree of EQ.  If they are not emotional, empathetic listeners to begin with, there’s frankly not a lot of interest to get into the profession, right?  You have to be passionate about it; you have to be curious about people; and you have to want to listen to them. It’s sort of entry level into qualitative.  If you don’t, then you can just do something else. It’s a lot of self-selecting: “This is what interests me. This is why I’m in the industry. Okay, now I need to know how to do it well because I have the interest in it.”  But maybe honing the skill is more necessary at that point. We practice a lot on each other. We’ll sit down; if someone is training, we pick another team member and have them run through that interview. We do observations so that a junior moderator will always watch a more senior moderator and sort of see how that process works, how it’s pulled off the paper because I think it’s very tempting to stick to the paper – it’s very tempting to stick to the guide.   But a lot of those insights aren’t going to come unless you can get off script, so to say, and run that conversation. So it’s a lot of practice partnering up, learning from each other that has to happen. There’s not a lot of remote “sit and read this,” “watch this course” that will really help you do it in the moment.

[17:09]

I really just complete transparency…  I really struggle with that or struggled even more so – I still do – but it’s been a journey having these conversations.  I critique myself afterwards. So, of course, have to listen to the damn episode multiple times; by the end of it, I feel like I need counseling.  [laughter] I’m a very bad self-critic, but the thing that I keep coming back to, as I self-audit, is this ask open-ended questions and don’t step on the points.  You can get better at the craft, but it takes a truck load of willingness to look, to develop self-awareness, I guess, and be willing to separate your ego from the opportunity for improvement.  

[18:07]   

It’s true and that’s a big part of this “one mouth, two ears” kind of ratio that goes on because you cannot be a moderator with an ego.  No one is there is hear you. The client is not paying to hear your wise statements or poetic turns of phrase. They’re here to hear the participants.  You’re really a conduit: you’re trying to bring something out of another person. And I think that is really key. I think that a lot of people think you have to be an extrovert, and you have to be a showman.  There’s a little bit of that to this. It’s very much not. Some of the best moderators that I’ve worked with check themselves at the door. This is really about the person in the room with you.

[18:56]

Right.  That’s exactly the picture that the customer is paying for:  what is the view of the respondent? In 2003, you got certified from the Burke Institute for qualitative market research facilitator training program.  How important do you see continuing education in a modern context now with Lynda.com and all these different online tutorials, etc., etc., versus more of the institutional way of self-improvement?   

[19:29]

To be honest, the main reason I went and got my certificate is because I had been banging my head on the wall for a little while, trying to get someone to train me

in-house and I finally… There were a series of corporate maneuvers that left me between departments continually.  I was a little bit of a mess when I was a younger researcher. And I said, “Forget this! I’m just going to go save up and get myself trained and then I’ll be legit.”  I talk to my younger self quite frequently, amazed at the kind of ego behind that particular maneuver. I recommend a lot of people to start off with an agency, and preferably a smaller one, that will let you do a lot of the work to learn on the job rather than thinking a certificate course in two weeks is really going to get where you need to be.  That said, I had an amazing training at Burke. I still remember poignantly quite a lot of the lessons and try to teach a lot of the lessons from that course. So I think that the robust training institutions are very appropriate if you’re interested in going out on your own, if you’re starting from scratch, if you don’t have a way to be mentored or learn within your organization and you really want to just dedicate a week or two to this process – invaluable.   

I think in an ongoing sense, it’s slightly different.  And you do want to kind of learn one thing at a time. The industry has changed so rapidly and grown in so many directions at once, it’s very hard to wrap your head around everything you “should be learning and doing at any given point.”  So I think the bite-size trainings now are so helpful: if you can just concentrate on a workshop, a day session, one webinar, and actually make sure you practice something from it within that week and sort of take a bite out of everything and decide what you want to get further into.  There are so many buzz words, and there are so many things you could be chasing after, you almost have to learn a little bit about something to understand, “Okay. Is this what myself or my firm wants to go tackle or is this something I just need to know enough about to have a conversation about and identify why we do something a little bit differently or a little bit not on that track?”  That’s a roundabout way of answering that question, but I think I might have gotten there.

[22:01]

Yeah, no, you definitely got there in a couple of different ways that is very valuable.  You’d mentioned earlier about qualitative tools. There’s been such a transition over the last 20 years in the creation and adoption of qualitative technology that’s just speeding things up, right?  And then on top of it, you’re seeing through sentiment analysis or face recognition or “you pick the thing,” a rise in qualitative scale, which is finally giving qualitative the scope to have a big enough base to say this might be representative of a sample.  Are you employing…. What qualitative technologies have you been using and how are seeing that evolve over the next couple years?

[22:59]

Yeah, that’s a big question.  I remember – it wasn’t that long ago – in 2014 or 2015, I think, I presented a very brief PowerPoint presentation of the tools you need to know.  And somebody asked me last year if I could update that. “No, I can’t anymore. Sorry.” There’s such perfusion; there’s such a perfusion of tools that are not only built for us but that we can use.  And I think that’s a lot of the difference. A lot of it is there are a lot of tools that are both purpose-built for the industry or you can tweak them so that they can be used by the industry. If you look at that in aggregate, it’s too much for any one firm to really get a hold of.  I think for our business, we try to make sure we have a set of tools that allow us to do synchronous, remote qualitative. So, anything where anyone is being interviewed somewhere where we are not physically, we need a set of tools to help us do that. Then we need a set of tools to help us moderate asynchronously:  so, if anyone is doing diaries or shopping or bulletin boards or any of that – it’s remote and we’re not there – we need a set of tools to do that. The third set you need are a set of tools if you’re there in person because you’re not enough these days. You need some tools bolstering that, recording it, getting all of that ready to be delivered to your client.  So those are the three buckets that we think of.

So we’re a smaller agency; we want to make sure we keep a lot of that capability

in-house and sort of judiciously bring in vendors and partners when we need them.  What we have not stepped into is forming a set of tools of our own to tackle some of the things you’ve mentioned, like text analytics or eye-tracking or things like that.  There companies that do that well. And if there needs to be a partnership… or our client asks us for something specific, we will pull them in and we will work with preferred partners.  I think you definitely need to make a decision what you’re going to keep close (develop your own guidelines, methods, tools, and relationships for) and what you’re going to treat as a partnership.  I think in a lot of boutique or smaller providers are just not in the place to be able to offer everything internally. And I think that’s okay if you’re upfront about it and you say, “These are our methods and techniques.  And for what you’re asking for, we have an amazing partner who does X. And so we’re going to put our pieces together and give you exactly what you need and work in tandem to do so.” And I haven’t found a lot of clients who are not okay with that kind of solution.  

[25:47]

How are you handling the…?  (I call it the “note under the door.”)  You know what I’m talking about, right? So, for those that don’t, the customer oftentimes sitting behind the glass will want to have communication or say in the direction of the dialog.  And so there’s a variety of different ways (all of them obtrusive) to pass that note. How are you handling that? Is there like a technology hack that you’re using nowadays or…?

[26:15]

I’m laughing because a very, very dear client of mine last week said, “Now, remind me, Katrina…  Can I text you?” And, apparently, I gave her a look that meant, “No.” [laughter] She’s like, “I’m sorry I must be thinking of someone else.”  because you’re right: it is one of the most distracting things. Not only does it remind participants that someone is watching them, right, which you’re trying to kind of dissuade them from remembering, but often it is something that you’re getting to or haven’t quite circled back to, or used those words, or something like that.  But, on the other hand, we work in a business where we’re third parties; we don’t know people’s business as well as they do. And sometimes those notes are really essential because we have gone down a path that maybe they can’t execute on or we’re brainstorming in an area that they know this product is not going to reach into. And, while it may be interesting for us – “Ah, it’s interesting that people want this,” that is not where we need to be discussing.  So it’s important to have a way to get a note under the door definitely. What we tend to say is we, in our guides, we create break points. We give our participants something to do, something to work on, some sort of worksheet, or just something without looking at their watches, right? And the client then knows, okay, at these two or three points, she’ll come back here and talk to us. So there’s just a reassurance of, “My moderator will come back and check in with me,” maybe it becomes a little less dire to put the note under the door in the moment.  And we try to create those with subject-change points so that anything that did not get covered in subject A, there’s a time to discuss that and ask those questions before you move on to subject B. Now this is similar when you’re doing something remotely in chat boxes to the moderator; we try to keep that same cadence. It’s much easier for people to put a note through the door when all they have to do is chat in a message box. But we try to keep that same rhythm in place. And also set a cadence whenever we’re doing anything asynchronously of saying “Send me your notes from Day 1.”  “Did everybody read Day 1 responses?” “Okay, feedback on that?” And give them a moment to send their notes so that we can integrate it and make it as fluid as possible.

[28:42]

So, how are companies (your clients, specifically) using qualitative research today?  And is it different from when you first started.

[28:52]

Yeah, I think it’s more entwined with other things they’re doing, which is a very good thing.  The worlds of qual and quant, like you just mentioned a few minutes ago, are getting closer. And, honestly, at the end of the day, the client wants insights.  It’s not about, “Did this come out of a focus group?” “Or did this come back in a customer satisfaction survey?” or “Did we hear this on Twitter?” They just want to know.  I think the integration or the fact that a lot different reports from a lot of different sources are being compiled together on the client side is happening much more – there’s more data sources.  But there’s also more emphasis on seeing it all under the same roof, which is great. But it also means that, as a qualitative supplier, we need spend a lot of time telling people what else are you doing, where’s this going, what is this getting pulled together with, laddering up to, supporting because we know we’re a bookend business.  Sometimes we’re the meat, but often there’s a big, juicy survey or some other kind of component of the work being done and we ARE in the business of complementing it and supporting it, And so it just means a bigger conversation about what the full scope of work is and what role our pieces are playing in it so that we can then create deliverables that can sync up with the other things being done on the client side.  

[30:25]

Are you seeing a shift in spend in qualitative over the last whatever it’s been… in your career?  In other words, are more dollars being sent this direction?

[30:38]

On a macro-level, I’m probably not the person to answer that, but in our experience, what we’ve seen is that if you are going to do “full-scale, traditional qualitative,” that’s happening less frequently and with a higher price tag because I think a lot of people are able to do quicker usability studies or customer-journey work or use their own tools, do DIY, mine their communities.  So some of the smaller-scale projects in qualitative are, we’ve noticed, being done in-house. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but we’ve seen that increase over the last few years.

[31:27]

So, small amount…  I want to make sure I understand.  So, it sounded like you said or what I heard you say is smaller projects are being… are more likely to be done in-house versus through an agency whereas larger ones are going to have a larger price tag but those are going to be partnered.  

[31:42]

Well, that was more concise, yes.  [laughter]

[31:45]

I just wanted to make sure I grabbed that one.  Obviously, you said I just… You know it’s an important distinction because we’re seeing the same thing on the quant side, right?  The flurry of DIY tools, whether it’s from Survey Monkey to “you pick the platform”… people are now empowered (I’ve been saying this for a couple years) from the intern to the CEO, they’re all doing surveys.  But when it comes to… it’s either… there’s a CYA element or it’s this really important project and it’s going to have a lot of eyeballs on it. That’s when you’re more likely to get the outsource scenario being conducted whether it’s through Ipsos or whatever.      

[32:34]   

I wonder…  I mean you guys probably have these similar conversations in quant where you say, “What do you not know?  So, what are you not getting?” because most clients now are getting something. There is a feedback loop. They’re using it.  When I started, it was like, “Oh, my God, how do we talk to our customers? Show us the light.” Now, there are so many processes in place to be able to collect data.  So, it’s like, “Okay, what are you not getting? What can we supplement?” It’s kind of hard to get lapsed users to organically talk to you or a new market segment or talk about a product that you haven’t released yet ‘cause no one can give you that data right now unless you push it out as a specific project.  So, I think it’s having that kind of conversation; it’s acknowledging how much is done in-house. And it’s not something to fight. It’s something to understand and say, “This is great because I am starting a step ahead of where I would have if you didn’t do this ‘cause now we can go after something really juicy.”  

[33:35]

But in the quant realm, there’s these longitudinal studies, which are large and whatever, and then there’s more ad hoc, right?  So, there’s budget considerations that are done on an annualized basis for longitudinal studies and then there’s, “Oh, we need to do this project because this executive wants an answer,” which are much more ad hoc in nature.  Does qualitative follow the same budget guidelines?

[33:58]

Yeah, so our equivalent to that would be ongoing communities versus ad hoc projects.  A lot of our clients do. And that’s to be determined if that’s done in-house or through a vendor, through a supplier.  But it’s a very good idea to get a group of people at your disposal to answer questions. And sometimes that can be a qual/quant situation, right?  You can still ask that panel of people survey questions, but it’s really nice to be able to throw a qualitative conversation in the mix every once in a while.  And we actually then partner a lot with our clients who have those communities set up to say, “Great! You have a community. Can we recruit out of that? Can we do these ad hoc projects actually from your long-term community?”  I think it’s again kind of playing around with the methods and playing around with the options to see what you can use. In my experience, a lot of those qualitative communities are run in-house on the client side, but there’s a number of people that I know (and we’ve done this with a couple clients in the past year) to have a small-scale, qualitative community, purpose-built for them.  It is usually to track something specific. “We’re going to change our marketing messages in the next six months. Let’s get this community involved to talk to us along the way. We’re rolling out in this new market. Let’s go find people in that market and have them communicate with us qualitatively while we do it.” So it’s longer term, but it’s often more specific.

[35:36]

So, how are you recruiting the people and then are you recruiting them to an Excel database or is there some sophisticated technology there?

[35:44]

Yeah, we usually use a platform.  It definitely depends on the needs of the study.  There’s a lot of great options out there, and it definitely depends on what you need it to do, but we definitely need a repository of some kind.  Now, recruiting can happen a couple of different ways: what we’re doing a lot more of is intercept recruiting. We have a lot of retail clients and, if we can get permission to be in stores or in shopping areas for them, we often recruit live.  It’s something we’ve been pushing a lot in current years to kind of do a lot of recruiting that way. Not mall intercepts with a clip board – we try to not come across like that. It’s more about finding people where they are in the moment to talk about that topic.  So, if they’re holding a bag, they kind of qualify, right? So you have a little less worry about fit and accuracy. “Do they really buy from this place?” “Are they really involved in the brand?” If they walk out of the store with a bag, you’re probably likely to get somebody who’s a “real” customer and most likely fresh from a market research perspective.  So we do a lot of that to build communities. We have to get trickier when it’s something that you can’t do out in public or it’s a different topic or it’s a different client, where it makes that less relevant. We can do pop-up booths where we entice people to come in with some sort of incentive to give some sort of feedback on a topic and then say, “Are you interested in doing another research activity or getting involved in the community?”  And then we work with a lot of client lists to do that as well. So there are a number of different ways of populating and then, I should say, the other important part of that is refreshing because not everybody who starts is going to be there with you six months later. So, of course, you have to continually refresh. But the platform itself really depends on how robust it’s going to be. Is it just somewhere that you have to send out a couple questions? Or people needing to record videos?  Are they needing to perform shopping exercises? Do you want them to do card sorts or creative activities? So, we have about three or four go-to platforms and pick depending on what we think that community is going to need to do on it.

[38:04]

So, what are you offering right now that is finding traction among your clients that you’d like our listenership to know about.

[38:12]

Honestly, the pop-up recruiting is really helping people.  Clients are kind of loving the fact that these are authentic people found in the moment whether it’s pop up or within a specific store. We’re really enjoying being able to offer that with almost the same turnaround time if not shorter than going out to panels.  So we’re a big fan of that approach. The other thing that we’ve been doing is trying to take our deliverables up to the next level in a few different ways. Most recently, we’ve been partnering with Nimble MR and doing podcast or audio reports. So, you asked me before if I was a podcast listener:  Yes, and apparently a producer if you call an audio report a podcast. But any of those kinds of things that either increase the quality of the data in or increase the engagement with the deliverable that comes out of the process. We’re really kind of concentrating in those two areas these days.

[39:24]   

So, I’ve got to go back to this whole like…  the trend thing that, you’ve really got me interested in this.  The theme that I’ve heard 50% of the time among the 36-38 people I’ve interviewed so far is consistently the human story is what resonates inside the organization that moves it to change, but it has to have the quantitative data behind it.  Are you seeing a closer tie with qualitative and quantitative, or are you seeing them still as the disparate bookends?

[40:05]

It’s tough.  To some degree, they are different animals in terms of how you conduct the research, but I think where they cross more now and where they need to be more integrated in how you feedback… how you read out on that.  So, I think what I’m finding is a much more entwined presentation of qual and quant or synthesis of the data all along the way and in the reporting deliverables where a few years ago I wasn’t seeing that as much. As a qual provider, you were lucky to be shown the quant report at some point like if you managed to get an email by mistake or something.  There was no withholding about it; it’s just like was not seen as necessary for what you were doing. It’s like here’s basically what we learned in the quant; now, let’s go do some qual. Now, we do a lot of persona development and do that very closely with a quantitative partner so that it’s almost like this entwined process where we learn from each other along the way; we recruit the qual participants from the quant survey that built the personas and it’s all very…  it’s all synthesized. And I think that’s what I’m seeing more of and so the result is this synthesized piece of information where the client gets things from both sources at once. But it is a bit tricky. The field work definitely has different processes and procedures, and that has stayed separate in most of the work I’ve done to date.

[41:44]

My guest today has been Katrina Noelle, president of KNow Research and co-founder of Scoot Insights.  Katrina, thanks very much for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast today.

[41:57]

Thanks for having me.

[41:58]

And thank you everyone who’s been liking our podcasts and providing feedback on Apple Tunes and Google Play.  Special thanks to RonerForever; he said or she said, “This is a must-listen-to podcast for anyone interested in quantitative projects.”  I got to tell you I think we just added a qual to the equation. Hope you guys found value. Please share episodes. Have a great rest of your day!

Today, my guest is Nancy Hernon, CEO & Co-founder of G3 Translate and an official Member of Forbes New York Business Council. G3 Translate is a translation and transcription resource for the market research industry offering access to today’s top translation professionals and the very latest translation software platforms.

Prior to founding G3 Translate, Nancy has spent most of her career in the translation space.

FIND NANCY ONLINE:

https://g3translate.com/

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[00:58]

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 Nancy Hernon, CEO and co-founder of G3 Translate, and an official member of the Forbes New York Business Council.  G3 Translate is a transcription and translation resource for the market research industry offering access to today’s top translation professionals and the very latest in translation and transcription software.  Prior to founding G3 Translate, Nancy has spent most of her career in the translation space.

Nancy, thank you very much for being on the Happy Market Research podcast with me today.   

[02:02]

Hi, Jamin.  Thank you for having me on.  

[02:04]

So, tell us a little bit about where you grew up and how your parents influenced your career.

[02:12]

Certainly.  Well, I grew up in a small town in northeastern Ohio, kind of midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh.  So it was a town divided between the Browns and the Steelers. I grew up with my mom, and she actually influenced me by constantly pushing that I needed to be independent and that I should definitely go for my dreams and never hold back.  And when I was 16 years old, I went to her and said, “Listen, Mom, you’re always telling me to be independent; so, I want to go live abroad for a year in a totally foreign country with total strangers. And you have to let me go.” She was not too happy about that level of independence.  But in the end, I convinced her, and she let me move to Germany. And that kind of changed my whole path in life. It really opened me up and broadened my perspective and helped me to get on the path that I’m on now with the translation business. Living in a foreign country was great. 

[03:21]

As a parent, I’d imagine that would be terrifying if your child came to you with that same sort of request.    

[03:28]

You know I think about it a lot, and it’s actually not.  I would love it if my kid would do the same. I really do hope she follows in my footsteps and is just as headstrong as me and demands to get her way.  Actually, I’m kind of praying that she wants to go to Germany although she’s really super-interested in Spanish for some reason right now. So [laughs] she might be ending up in Spain or Mexico.  But now I love it. I think that we live in a global society, and it’s really important to understand other cultures and to learn about it and not to just be stuck in your own little bubble.     

[04:05]   

Now I’ve talked about this a number of times with respect to some of the other CEOs that we’ve had.  And, when you start operating at a global level, one of the things that becomes really apparent is that the people that are heading those companies often times have grown up with some level of significant experience, I would say, abroad.     

[04:31]

Oh, yeah.  My family was a little bit skewed and weird because my mom and dad split up when I was just a little one.  And we moved to the Netherlands when I was two and were there for about two years. And she was with a Dutchman.  They never married, but they were together for the rest of her life. So I grew up with a Dutch “stepdad” partially in the Netherlands and back in Ohio. And my father was from Austria; so, I had that influence of the Arnold Schwarzenegger-style German.  And I loved going abroad, and we would go abroad for vacations when I was a little girl. Then on a whim, I decided to go to school like university in Germany, which was a real eye-opening experience from being an exchange student to actually going and trying to “immigrate” to go to school there.  So, yeah, I think it’s important to have that experience and understand that there are other cultures and there are other ways of thinking and doing things. It does shape you, and it changes you and helps you to see the world in a different perspective and step outside of your own personal box to look at things and really observe.      

[05:59]

What was one of the biggest attractions to Germany for you?

[06:04]

It’s so funny.  I’m like such a spontaneous person.  I chose Germany because there was a German girl that I became good friends with, who was an exchange student in my high school.  And also, my high school happened to offer German as a class. It wasn’t because of my father, strangely enough. It was just a random like, “Hey, you should do this.”  I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I think I will.” I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life that way. I guess a happy “falling into place,” “being in the right place at the right time” kind of thing.          

[06:36]

Do you find that the decisions that you make in that mindset are often times more right or do you second-guess them?

[06:44]

Definitely.  I went to Germany when I was in college in the U.S.  I went on vacation over the summer to visit some friends.  And I decided to check out some of the universities over there, and I wasn’t really sure what to do.  And my friend handed me a coin, and he said, “Listen, if it’s heads, you’re going to come back and attend the university; if it’s tails, you go home and just finish your education in the States.”  And I flipped the coin; I’m like, “OK. Whatever happens – this is what I’m doing.” And it ended up I was going back to Germany. So I went home from vacation and said to my mom, “Listen, I’m moving; I’m going to go live in Germany; I’m going to go to university there.  And, hey, guess what? It’s a lot cheaper; so, you should be happy.” And she’s like, “Yeah, it’s like four thousand miles away. I’m not too happy.” I’m like, “Well, you know [laughter] this is the way it goes.”

The same I ended up in New York City like literally.  My mother had passed away, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to go back to Europe or not.  I didn’t want that “Oh, poor girl,” you know, like the pity thing. So I thought, as I’m driving down the highway back home from the funeral, I see a sign “New York City 396 miles.”  And I said, “You know what?  Nobody’s going to care about me losing my mom and my dad and all these people in my life and being the ‘orphan child.’  I think I’m going to move to New York City and see what happens.” And my friends are like, “Oh, you’re just crazy. You’re grieving; you’re just sad.  You’ve lost so much so quickly.” And I’m like, “No, no, I think I’m going to do it.” And I got home, went online, started applying for jobs, looking at apartments, calling realtors.  A couple of months later, there I was – walking into my first translation project management job in New York City. And nobody cared that I was that little orphan girl. And I kind of got lost in the crowds and really found my place in life.      

[08:37]

What’s interesting to me about that is the independent spirit but also the ownership of where you are.  Your lense isn’t one of victim but one of opportunity and “This is my life, making decisions. Bad things are going to happen, but it’s not going to be the defining moment for me.  I’m making my own way.”

[09:03]

Definitely, definitely.  When you realize there’s no one you have to prove anything to but yourself, I think it really alters your state of mind and your decision-making process somewhat.  So I can be more impulsive and more a little crazy. When I say, on the turn of a dime, I’m going to move to Europe; I’m going to move to New York. I’m going to do this; I’m going to start a company.”  Why not?  What can I lose?  I think going in with that thought of “Let’s just do it and see what happens” rather than the fear of, “Oh, no.  Everything could go wrong” is a much better way to look at it.

[09:45]

So, the “Why not?” – that is going to be the title for this episode, I think.  I love that framing. When you strip away the expectations from others and even the expectations that we put on ourselves, then it starts opening up a whole different…  Like I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me and said, “Jamin, when are you going to do the next big thing?” And I’m just completely blind to trying to compare what I’ve done in the past to what I’m doing now or what I’ll do in the future.  I could just give two bad words to that expectations that other people might… As soon as you can step into that view of “Yeah, why not? Who cares?”… Listen, I lived through that whole 2001 dot com crash as a business owner and then 2007 and 2008 as well in the U.S. economy.  In both instances, I had to move to an apartment from a house because my personal income was basically non-existent during those years, right? And I just didn’t care. [laughter] And it’s so liberating. So, that’s my rant.

[11:08]  

It is!  No, you’re totally right.  It is. It’s freeing to just go like “OK, I’m going to try this.  Let’s see, you know, what’s going to happen.” What’s the worst thing that could happen?

[11:18]

Totally, and you know what?  I’ve already done that: I’ve lived hand-to-mouth.  Who cares? We can always survive. My wife has that same sort of view.  She lived in Spain right after college for several years and has that free spirit.  It helped that she’s fluent in Spanish. It’s nice you find your soul mate if you can both be aligned with that expectation of “Yeah, you know what?  It’s not the things that we have or living up to the expectations of others; as long as we’re providing enough, then everything is going to be OK. That’s a really dynamic, powerful combination.

[12:04]

I totally agree; I totally agree 100%.  Call me crazy but I think the universe gives you what you need.  

[12:12]

Hmm, 100%.

[12:13]

You can say it’s a higher power; you can say it’s your guardian angel.  But I know there were times in my life when I was like, “Oh, man. This bad.  How am I ever going to get out from under this?” And something would happen, some little thing, some event, some random distribution check from an old stock that I inherited would come in the mail.  It was like, “OK, alright, we’re still moving. Let’s go; let’s keep on. Just get up – Dust off and – Move forward.”

[12:40]

I totally love that.  And then on the flip side when you think about the upside opportunities that we’ve missed…  One example for me is I bought Yahoo when it IPOed.

[12:53]

Oh, wow.

[12:54]

Yeah, yeah, I was very excited.  And the stock actually didn’t do anything for about four to five months.  Wall Street just didn’t know what to do with the internet, with the dot com. Finally, I sold the shares.  Well, I swear it was like set on a trigger. As soon as Jamin sells the shares, let’s start skyrocketing. [laughter]  So, my stupid brother-in-law at the time would at Christmas time every year, he would calculate how much those were worth, right?  It was like some obscene amount of money. But I think to myself, if that would have hit, it would have completely dictated a different direction for my life.  And I’m just so thankful with where I am right now. In the way that sometimes bad things happen and in the way that sometimes good things happen in our lives or even misses…  Not judging them but just reacting to them and living the life that we want to live…

[13:52]   

Definitely, definitely.  I always call that the sliding-door perspective:  you go through one side you end up somewhere totally different.  And the other side, you end up on the path you’re on right now.

[14:02]

Well said.  Alright, so let’s talk a little bit about New York City, get a job in a translation company, in those early days.  Did you know that you were going to be a business owner straight away?

[14:16]

You know what?  No, I didn’t. I was in this job and working pretty happily for a very large translation company.  I think you’ve all probably heard of it – Transperfect. It’s funny because I’m one of those people who needs a lot of change to keep excited about something.  So I started in one role and then I’m like, “Let me go to another role. Let me go to another role.” And I ended up working hand-in-hand with the CEO there and learning a lot about the business.  And it was really interesting and exciting, and I watched it grow. And it was very cool, but at that time I wasn’t ready yet to do anything on my own. So I decided to switch to a smaller company to see how that worked.  Had left there, gone to a smaller agency and that’s where I learned about market research. And at that agency, I started working in the research space, and I met all these people. And the company was kind of a shotgun-approach style, like they did work for every different kind of segment.  It wasn’t just research: it was like pharma; it was like big brands, internet companies. You name it, and they translated it.

But these researchers really struck a chord with me.  I remember going to this conference in Texas, and it was for medical devices.  And the girl I had gone with to the conference knew Jami Pulley. And she said, “Hey, let’s go have dinner with this girl.  You know she’s really cool. She’s a market researcher.” I’m like, “Oh, I’ve been working with this a little bit.” And I met her, and she was just so cool and so sweet, and I started to get to know more people in the industry.  And I said, “You know this is a totally different language.” What they’re doing… they’re not just translating into words. It’s not a manual; it’s not a how-to; it’s not like a website. It’s really looking at people’s emotions and trying to get a feel for why they make these decisions to buy this or to vote for that.  It came to me that this is something that is not really super-well serviced. At another conference with a bunch of boring medical device people again, who were not nearly as fun or interesting as the researchers, I was talking to John Labati about this. I was like, “You know it would be so cool to have a company that just did research ‘cause look at us we’re standing here for a week.  Not one person has visited our booth. These medical device people don’t care about us. They don’t want to talk to us. Why are we spinning our wheels with this? Why are we trying to do everything and be everything to everybody when we could be just the best thing for one group?” And he’s like, “Yeah, that’s really cool, you know. We should talk more.” And over the course of that week, we formed the idea to do G3 and it was then a matter of putting together a business plan and putting together some numbers and finding some partners to invest in us.  And that’s kind of how it was born.

[17:23]

This key of focus, I think, is so important.  A lot of entrepreneurs will, myself included, spend a lot of time, chasing whatever is right in front of us.  I don’t exactly know what the motivators are there, but the more we hunker down and focus and really nail the niche, then I’ve seen a correlation with that to success.       

[17:48]

Definitely, definitely.  Well, back then there weren’t a lot of niche agencies:  everybody was doing everything. And it’s like, “Why?” “Why do you want to be OK at a little bit of everything instead of being an expert at one thing?”  And now, obviously, things have shifted; the paradigms have changed. And a lot of different agencies are kind of going that route. But back then, it was either you were a single language vendor and specialized in that language or you were a multi-language vendor, and you did everything for everybody.  I think it’s not just about speaking the foreign language: it’s about speaking the lingo. There’s a language to what you do; there’s a language to the research; there’s a language to the data collection that isn’t necessarily intuitive.

[18:35]

Yeah, 100%.  It’s such a great point.  Even though we speak English, even if you’re in marketing, if you move into market research, there is definitely a nomenclature, the way things are framed, etc. that exists.  But then a level under that is the treatment of data whether you’re qualitative or quantitative, right? There’s nuances (I would say more than nuances; there’s just like complete frameworks) that have to be understood if you’re going to operate in those areas successfully.  And that’s one of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered with translation… is we’ll ask a question, and it gets translated in 19 languages or whatever. And the translation to the other languages often times isn’t back translated. When we skip that step, we have wound up in trouble, especially if the client has offices in that area and there are native speakers that wind up reading the questions.  Thinking about one specific project that I had with BRS out of Menlo Park. (This goes way back.) And we didn’t back translate, and it was in Japanese. Oh, my gosh, it was just catastrophic! Anyways, are companies spending the time on the back-translation still or is that a step that is starting to move away?

[20:02]

It depends on the company; it depends on their internal processes.  I find a lot of companies don’t have time to backtranslate, and it’s OK.  The way we do things at our company is we do a three-step process: so we’re translating; we’re editing; and we’re proofreading.  So we already have three sets of eyes looking at it. By the time it’s got through that third set of eyes, it should be pretty perfect.  And then, if a client reviewer comes on line and decides, “OK, we want to change it because this is our internal language or this is how we want to say this,” that’s a collaborative effort, and it works pretty well.  But you mentioned Japan specifically. And that’s funny because we like to get the buy-in from the very beginning on Japanese. It’s a cultural thing. In Japan, if I asked you, “Jamin, I need you to look at this. Can you tell me what you think?”  If you didn’t give me that document back with a lot of red lines, I would feel like you didn’t do your job, then you would lose face.

[20:58]

Right.

[21:00]

So what we do for that is we try to get those reviewers on with the translators, do a little sample in the beginning, have them chat it out, talk to each other.  Then you find a lot less red lines in the back end when they’re reviewing it after all the translations are done.

[21:15]

Where was that gem 20 years ago?  Now that you say that it’s like a veil has been lifted up.  [laughter] It makes perfect sense. That’s so funny. Anyway, that was probably one of the hardest projects I ever worked on.  In fact, it was so bad I drove four hours to meet with the client and we had two days, literally two days, where we shipped in food and worked just straight – 16 plus hours a day with their constituents in Japan.  Boy, [laughter] it was such a problem, but culturally you’re right. So, that’s the other piece of it super interesting. Language is, by definition, culture and so you’re setting that framework for… they’re just words, but the reality is there’s a lot of like how I interact with the language that can be, depending on the culture obviously, be considered.

[22:19]

Definitely, definitely.  How we process things is very different across cultures.  We’re all just people. A lot of people just make the assumption, well, we live in a western society; the French live in a western society as do the Germans and the Brits.  But the way we look at things, the way we rate things is very, very different. In one culture – and hopefully I’m not wrong here, I’m sure I’ll get a lot of comments – but I believe it’s in Spain where they tend to be a little nicer and rate things higher (maybe it was Brazil) just because that’s their positive spin on life.  On a scale of 1 – 5, they’re going to choose the 5 much more often than a German who might actually think it’s a great product but they’re just going really “Oh, well, there’s one little thing, so I’m going to give it a 4.” It’s funny: we do, we see the world in a different way. Even though we may feel similarly, the way that we express it, it’s going to be different if that makes any sense.  

[23:24]

Yeah, it makes perfect sense.  One of the co-founders of Decipher, Irving Andreasen, we went to this nice restaurant.  He said, he tells me, “The soup is the best soup I’ve ever had in my entire life.” And he’s a bit of a foodie.  And the waiter came over with traditional American, right? and says, “How’s your food?” And he looked at him and goes, “It’s satisfactory.”  [laughter] And, so he didn’t mean it like in a bad way. The waiter was literally trying to decide, “Should I discount the meals or…?” For him, it was this insult.         

[24:03]

Yeah, totally.

[24:04]

Completely lost in translation as it were.  

[24:07]

It’s so true.  It’s so true. It’s so funny how that works.  I remember moving when I was a kid and living there in university.  Yeah, I made quite a few cultural snafus with my American ways. Yeah, I just didn’t get it at the time, and it took me a while to learn the culture.  And I think, again, like with the translation element, you have to understand the culture and who you’re talking to because there is a very different way of communicating.  I lived in northern Germany, and they tend to be a little bit colder and more standoffish. I hate to stereotype, but stereotypes are there for a reason…sometimes. I remember the first six months, going to school, nobody talked to me.  They didn’t know who I was, and they didn’t know I was a foreigner because I was scared to open my mouth and sound stupid because my German was mediocre. Then I busted out of my shell one day and was this gregarious like, “Oh, I love…  This is so great. Blah, blah, blah” “Oh, my God, you’re an American!” [laughter]

[25:16]

You’ve been an American – a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  

[25:20]

“Look at this girl!  She just crazy; she’s just so… very vociferous!  Not reserved.” It was pretty funny. Once did make some friends and they opened up, I found them to be the warmest people, the most loyal people in the world.  I know I could call on any single one of them for anything at any time. And it’s funny, but looking from outside, I thought, “Oh, man, these people are cold. They hate me; they’re never going to like me.”  And now, after time, it’s just a matter of them warming up to you and you understanding how they communicate. I feel pretty confident now when I go to Germany. It’s all good. [laughter]

[26:05]   

That’s awesome.  So, as a seasoned entrepreneur, we know that sometimes the roller coaster goes up, and sometimes it goes down.  What has been one of your biggest challenges that you’ve faced?

[26:16]

For us at G3, one of the biggest challenges is talent.  As a small company, it’s hard like when you’re first starting out, people are like, “Oh, they’re just starting out.  They might not be here. We don’t want to work there. They might shut their doors like in a minute.” So getting those first project managers on board, to trust, to know that we’re good and that we’re going to be here and they’re not going to be out of a job next day was hard.  And then again because again we’re a small business, every time a team member would get on board, we’d be like rolling and everything is great and we’re like, “This is the best team ever. We’ve got this awesome balance.” “Oh, well, I’m going to go back to school.” or “Oh, I want to move back to France.”  or “I want to get married and not work anymore.” Oh, man, that was always so, so painful trying to fill those gaps once you had it built. It feels like we’re constantly upgrading and updating. And that to me is challenging because, as much as I like to make changes and decisions on the turn of a dime, I also can be very much routine in my day-to-day.  And getting new people in and getting to know them, I find that challenging. Getting them up to speed on what we do and how we do it and why we do it… So, that’s been tough: like finding the right people and getting them into the team and then rolling with the punches when they decide to do something new.   

[27:45]

My view on business is that the team is the most important asset of an organization, and it’s interesting how we treat it (and we have to, I realize that) but we treat it like a cost center as it relates with the financial view of the business.  And it does cost money; so, I’m obviously not an idiot. But it’s the asset; I mean it’s the thing that enables us to… It’s the part of the company that enables us to be able to consistently deliver excellent experiences for customers.

[28:16]

Definitely, definitely.

[28:18]

Like you’re saying, the seeding of that team and then the ongoing maintenance of it, growth, etc. that happens at a personal level and at a company level is something that takes a ton of intentionality.  And, as there’s transitions, it can be… it can really set you back as a business owner.

[28:40]

Definitely, definitely.  In the very beginning, we had a team of three people and then me and John; so, we were five.  One decided to go back to college. I’m like, “Oh, my God, we’re never going to survive this. What are we going to do?”  ‘Cause everybody was friends; we all got along. Going out to happy hour after work was definitely a thing. And then all of a sudden, our family was like breaking up.  It was really heartbreaking and hard. But we learned from it and we grew. It was fine in the end, but you become attached to these people in your life. And I think it’s important to have those interpersonal relationships on your team because you’re spending so much of your day with them.  So much of your life is spent in the office or at work or talking on the phone to these people. And, if you don’t like them, then what are you doing? Something’s wrong. I think having a strong team is really, really important. And having the right personalities…

[29:44]

So, what do you see as core characteristics of all-star employees?

[29:50]

Well, let’s see, it depends on the business, but for our business, I think most important is having that cultural experience in life and understanding that the small town that you grew up in is not the end-all, be-all of society.  But, also being a team player is also really important to us. I know that sounds cliché, but we all wear so many hats and play so many different roles. Because we’re a small business, we have to be able to do a lot of different things and to help each other out and to fill in the gaps where one person is not able to do something, the other person can jump in and help out.  So, that team-player like “we’re all here in this together” thing is really important. I think the lone-wolf type on our team wouldn’t work because it’s a very collaborative thing, what we’re doing here. And having the feedback and the passing of the knowledge and the training each other is really key so that we can all be well-rounded and give our clients what they need and meet all the demands because it is a very demanding business.  Research is very fast paced, and you can’t afford to fall down. You have to keep going, and having your team have your back is what makes that possible. So I think those are the two things that are most important to our company.

[31:23]

There’s been a ton of investment by the large internet companies – Google, AWS, Amazon, services and others – in the area of both transcription and translation.  I remember when the iPhone launched visual voicemail; I had no idea of what to expect. And then – boom… there is it. How are you seeing those… Are you seeing those as complementary or competitive to your business?  And what do you think the next couple of years holds as it relates with translation and transcription?

[32:01]

As far as translation goes, I think it’s super exciting.  I remember sitting in a room years and years ago with a group that focuses on the automation of translation and the different types of forms in which it has evolved from.  I think that the use of the neural networks and AI is going to definitely be a big game changer probably not even five years out, probably less. I know Amazon (or maybe it was Google) had claimed parity with Chinese to English, which is pretty amazing, but for some reason, Chinese works really, really well with those networks as far as translating pretty accurately.  For what we do in particular, I think it’s complementary because again research language isn’t a manual; it’s not a legal contract: it’s something that’s looking for emotion. And as close as these artificially intelligent machines may be to understanding and mimicking emotion, they don’t feel, at least not yet. And I don’t know that they’ll ever feel the same way that we do.  So, I think that, while it will help speed up the process by providing initial translations, we’re always going to have to have someone reading it for culture, reading it for nuance, reading for the subtext, the feeling, that’s underneath the underlying words and editing that. So, are we going to be out of business? No. Are the companies who translate the documentation for Ford cars?  Maybe. But I think for what we do, it’s an exciting, innovative way of getting things done quicker, probably cheaper, and just complementary to what we already do.

And the same for transcription:  they’re always going to need a little bit of massaging here and there, I think.  But the transcriptions are pretty scary. [laughter] On the translation side, I’m more confident; on the transcription side, it’s pretty scary how accurate it can be.  But I think right now it’s not there yet; in a couple of years, it may well be pretty darn close, but I think the human touch is still going to be needed.

[34:17]

So, we had a couple of questions on Linkin I just wanted to ask.  

[34:22]

Sure.

[34:22]

One is how is your API integration coming along?  This is from Erinn Taylor, the CPO of Critical Mix.   

[34:30]

Oh, I know Erinn.  He’s great. Our API…  So, we have two different types of API that we offer to our clients.  Obviously, they’re just connectors; so, it’s a plug, and it has to be customized for the end user.  We have that ready. If he wants to talk to me, tell him to give me a call about it. [laughter] We have that, and we also have a portal that a lot of our clients prefer because they don’t want to do the customization work for the API.  So they log into our portal, submit, and track stuff, and do billing and all that through there. So we have a couple of different paths that you can take to reach us with your needs.

[35:10]

You also had a couple of shout-outs.  Bailey Buchanan, a few others: “Really excited about this interview dropping.”  You have to check out that LinkedIn thread.

[35:21]

Definitely, definitely.  Bailey’s awesome. She is this amazing supporter of Women in Research, which I also support and love.  I think it’s a super great organization, helping women to help each other out in this industry. It’s not applicable to you but to all the girl listeners out there, they should definitely look into it.  It’s a great, great group of people.

[35:42]

Well, I will say when Kristin Luck started Women in Research, she did that inside of Decipher.  Jamie Plunkett and myself were big advocates of that specific initiative. So, both in terms of supporting it financially as well as from an infrastructure perspective…

[36:59]   

Nice.

[36:00]

So, yeah, we’re 100% on that.  Diversity is this interesting….  So we’re calendarizing our podcast drops going into 2019.  I don’t know what the themes are going to be. Anyway, as we’re going through that process, all of a sudden, things like Black History month…  I’m thinking, “Gosh, that’s interesting.” When I think about the African American leaders in America in market research and incorporating their voice intentionally because one of things that I’ve learned from Kristin is the importance of diversity for improving financial outcomes, right?…   No matter what your lenses is, just operate there at a baseline and improve your outcomes by having a more full view of the market and the competitive set and where you’re winning and where you’re struggling. That’s just key.

[37:00]

Absolutely, absolutely.  Not to be too competitive with the other guys out there, but I think about a year ago, there was an article saying that women CEOs are more profitable than their male counterparts, like the businesses are more profitable since they take things from a different perspective.  

[37:19]

Yeah, totally.  I mean I haven’t seen the statistics.  I have heard them. I haven’t done validation against them, but just across the board, there’s so much benefit among women-run organizations.  And, of course, we can point to other ones as well. But the broader point, I think, is so important, which is we need to have an attitude of inclusion – intentional inclusion ‘cause sometimes that’s hard because the benches aren’t particularly deep for whatever reason.  And what’s interesting about market research is actually minorities and women specifically are so dominant. From a numbers perspective… Think about the org chart where most of the people are sitting but, as you go up the org chart, there does seem to be lack of women leadership in those veins.  But the work that you’re doing with Women in Research and, obviously, being a successful entrepreneur, is certainly helping solve that problem.

[38:21]

Here’s hoping, definitely.  Thank you.

[38:22]

So, what are you guys offering right now at G3 Translate that Insights Nation can take advantage of?

[38:29]

So, Insights Nation, we have some introductory offers if you would like to work with us.  Send us over your information and what you’re looking for, and we will give you a special discount.

[38:42]

That’s huge!

[38:43]

We’ll definitely take some off for you to give back a little bit to the listeners.  

[38:48]

Love it!  So, Insights Nation, this is a great opportunity for you to experience some value as a listener of Happy Market Research.  I’m going to start using the show, trying to be a little bit more intentional. I’ve been surprised that people haven’t been a little bit more intentional that have been on the show.  I think there’s always fear of asking, but we are in business after all, right? And this is a great platform for you to be able to take advantage of offering value to the audience. So thank you for that.  If people do, Nancy, want to get in contact with you, to hear more about the special offer, how would they do that?

[39:29]

They can either contact me at nancy@g3translate.com or just visit our website G3Translate.com or link with me on LinkedIn, Nancy Hernon.  Those are my main methods of contact.

[39:47]

My guest today has been Nancy Hernon, CEO and co-founder of G3 Translate.  Nancy, thank you so much for being on the Happy Market Research podcast.

[39:55]

Thank you, Jamin.  It was a pleasure.

[39:57]

And thank you, everyone who has listening.  As always, greatly appreciate the reviews on Apple iTunes and Google Play specifically, oh as well as Spotify.  That audience is growing as well. So keep those coming. It helps other people like you find value and improve market research.  Have a great day!