Welcome to the MRMW NA 2019 Conference Series. Recorded live in Cincinnati, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Niklas Anzinger, Commercial Lead of Strategic Insights at Dalia Research.
Contact Niklas Online:
Niklas.Anzinger@DaliaResearch.com
[00:00]
Niklas Anzinger, Dalia Research – fantastic presentation he gave at MRMW. This piece is super interesting to me because he talks about the importance of companies brands connecting at a niche level, or even more specific to an individual. The better they can understand the customer, what resonates with them at the individual level, the higher that content is tailored, not in a creepy way, but the higher that content is touching the needs that I have and my emotional strings, the better it is going to be able to deliver on its brand promise. And Dalia has a really interesting, both as a private market research firm, the supportive systems around it and also the proprietary mobile technology that enables this type of individualized research at scale. Hope you enjoy.
[00:54]
My guest today is Niklas. Niklas, pronounce your last name again for me please.
[00:59]
Anzinger.
[01:00]
Happy Market Research Podcast. You’re with Dalia Research. Thanks for being on the show.
[01:05]
Thanks for having me.
[01:06]
We’re live at MRMW today. This is the first day. When do you speak?
[01:12]
I spoke.
[01:13]
You spoke already.
[01:13]
Yeah, I spoke already.
[01:14]
How did that go?
[01:15]
It went really good. So, you always know by the number of questions that people ask, also by the quality of questions that people ask. And we had a lot of people coming over to the booth right after. I gave a similar talk one-and-a-half years ago, and there I got very little feedback. So, I’m hoping that shows that I’ve improved.
[01:33]
Yeah, for sure. Tell us about your presentation.
[01:36]
So, I was talking about a method to achieve precision for research results at scale. So, we’re using (and I’m talking mostly above quantitative research) traditional methods such as quota sampling to estimate, for example, the brand perception. And I gave the example of Heineken that had a marketing campaign that was supposed to reach millennials, and it didn’t go really well. This is not satisfying for researchers. So, we wanted to know how can we achieve what we want with the campaign. And I’m talking how a new statistical method called MRP is helping to measure much more precisely and what people think of a brand over time.
[02:26]
So, give me a specific example, like a project that is a highlight for you.
[02:33]
So, I was talking about this example. So, imagine that you are Heineken and want your marketing campaign to reach millennials but not only millennials, a very specific type of millennials. They should also play soccer and sort of be digital natives.
[02:47]
Very niche audience.
[02:48]
Exactly. So, the problem is when you do traditional research, you do a large survey with a 1,000 people but you only have like 20 people that fit the exact profile. So, from the answers from these 20 people, you can’t really say how well your campaign worked because, statistically speaking, these results aren’t very relevant; they’re highly prone to error. So what we did we used the alternative method to show how this specific subgroup was receptive to the marketing campaign of Heineken.
[03:24]
Ah, that’s fascinating. I think winning inside of the niches is becoming more and more important, yet marketing research, I think, in general is still operating at the kind of quant, big-scale point of view. But, as brands are focusing, to your point, on highly customized communications to constituents that are relevant… So this is not broad brush; it’s got to be like on point to what I care about. Then you’re really going to find…
[03:58]
I mean you see it everywhere in consumer industries and FMCG that you have small and nimble brands that grow very fast because they’re able to do highly specific targeting in their marketing. So, if you’re a Warby Parker or a Casper or if you have a new foods or drinks brand, you could grow very, very fast with highly specific targeting. So the big brands, they want to catch up with that, and they want to do more marketing that’s more specific towards certain audiences. But in order to be able to do that, to measure if they are talking to the right audience, the right kind of people and see how effective their advertising and their marketing is, they need to consider other approaches to research.
[04:37]
So, tell me a little bit about companies… What does engagement with you look like? Talk to us a little bit about what is the framework. How does that work? Is it a survey-based? Is it…
[04:49]
So, we might be a little bit unusual. So, we combine two pieces: one we connect with billions of people through tens of thousands of apps and mobile websites, more than 100 countries. So, we have the sampling part. But we also generate insights that help drive human progress. So, what we do is we do the primary research for a company. We do the survey; we do the research design and we heavily consult in doing that. My approach is to make the service shorter, to make it mobile-friendly, to make respondents engaged. Go away from 25-minute surveys; go to 5-to-10-minutes. And then what we do is we help the client automate the process. So we’re not going in there and saying, “We’re your agency, and we give you power stats and recommendations.” Instead, we automatize the process; give our clients dashboards that they and their stakeholders, especially higher management, can easily access and see the results of what’s been going on for the past years on one page. So, just to give you an example. We were replacing a big agency brand tracking for a big technology company and they had the problem that you have the PowerPoint battles all the time in different countries with many different stakeholders. You had different methodologies: face-to-face here, telephone here; this kind of online there. So we streamlined it into one solution where they’re now tracking 30 countries partly on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis. And the results are automatically fed into the dashboards that updates every time there’s new data and new insights from it, and it shows it to all the stakeholders that log into the platform.
[06:33]
I love that! That is beautiful! This consolidated point of view, I think, is also really important. Are there other market research companies or technology companies in our space that you think could be partners that you’re seeing, like there’s opportunities to co-create, delivering better value to brands?
[06:58]
Absolutely. I’m quite talking openly to anyone. I’m also recommending my clients another vendor if we’re not able to give the best solution. I think we all need to work together to effectively use technology to help these friends get better insights. And I have a very collaborative approach to that. We have been partnering with all sorts of other vendors along the value chains on the mobile technology side, on the sampling side, on the dashboards, insights-creation side. We’re open to everything just to get the best solution for the client.
[07:33]
I love that! Yeah, you put the customer in the middle, and you always win. As long as you add value, it’s karma. It just comes back. It just comes back. It’s funny how it works. Niklas, if somebody wants to get in contact with you, how would they do that?
[07:46]
You can just write me an email: Niklas with a “k”, Niklasanzinger@daliaresearch.com or you can find on our website, you’ll also find a contact page, and you can get in touch with me directly.
[07:59]
My guest today has been Niklas Anzinger, Dalia Research. Happy Market Research Podcast, we’re live at MRMW. Actually, I’ve got to ask you one more question, sir. Besides your talk, what is like one of the talks you’ve been looking forward to the most from MRMW?
[08:16]
Actually, I was actually looking most forward to the introduction from Proctor & Gamble. I think that really set the tone and set the stage. One of the key insights that I always trying to promote… Like everyone is talking about technology but it’s really the human insights and using technology to make that more efficient that is driving progress in this kind of space and it is looking at the problem solution diagnostic, instead of using technology to find problems. So I think that talk was really great and set the stage for further discussion.
[08:49]
Fantastic. I couldn’t agree more. Niklas, thanks for being on the show today.
[08:54]
Thanks so much.
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