Data Gurus Podcast | Insights on Business Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Market Research & Data Collection

Welcome to another informative episode of Data Gurus! Sima is excited to have Jason Telner join her on the show today!

Jason is a Senior User Researcher within the CIO organization at IBM. His primary purpose is to use various methods to improve the employees’ experience with the apps and tools they use and improve their overall workflow and work experiences.

Improving the lives of employees

Jason’s role at IBM focuses on improving the employees' lives in terms of their day-to-day productivity, how they relate to the company and the tools they provide. He does that using surveys, user interviews, and collecting data to see how that can improve the design of their entire experience.

A unified experience

At IBM, they feel that having a unified experience benefits the employees, and the company's response to things in the environment, like Covid or global crises. They have a website for employees to find information, figure things out around their careers, and have a more unified experience.

Jason’s journey

As an undergrad, Jason focused on neuroscience and cognitive behavior. He wanted to apply the theories he had learned, in terms of how people think, feel, and perceive information to everyday world problems. He considered industrial psychology and did an internship withHuman Systems, a company focused on optimizing human performance using military equipment, command and control, and transportation. Then he got involved in human factors, studied it in grad school, and worked on various projects around redesigning displays for traffic controllers- looking at night vision goggles and different perceptual distortions causing accidents.

Later, Jason applied his skills to the digital age of the internet and the user experience.

IBM

Jason has been with IBM for eight years. He has spent much of his time within the CIO, working on employee engagement and the day-to-day workflow of the employees.

Interesting projects

Jason has been working on some exciting projects at IBM. With one of them, they are trying to assess whether or not various project teams have the right capabilities and attitudes regarding user experience.

An assessment tool

Jason and his team created an assessment tool to help teams figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the project teams, pinpoint how they can improve, and recommend the training to equip them to do user research and user experience design.

Agile teams

Teams need to work in an agile way in terms of designing applications and software.

User research

User experience research is becoming vital to the overall product, so it must be injected into a design project early. Teams realize that if the user research gets done too late, it is hard to pull back.

Creating a digital assistant

Another project Jason is working on is creating a digital assistant to help employees in various realms with IT support and answer employee-related questions. They are building it on the information they get from doing user research and data.

IBM cares about its employees

IBM cares about its employees in various ways. It does that through its phone and online IT support and how they work when big crises, like Covid, happen.

UX and data science trends

Data science is a hot area. The areas of data science and user experience research are becoming increasingly more integrated as time passes because data does not always give the whole story. Data science and user experience research complement one another, so using them together will help to prevent blind spots.

The great resignation

The great resignation has made it easier for employees to find new opportunities.

Covid

Before Covid, many employees in the IT sector were already working remotely. Since Covid, many of those employees have switched roles and gotten recruited by companies outside their regions.

Working in-office versus working remotely

Younger people starting their careers are less likely to opt for working remotely because they prefer the face-to-face experience of working in-office. People with families, however, tend to prefer having the flexibility of working remotely.

The future

Jason sees his team moving towards more integrated skills, like data science and UX working together in tandem, in the future. He also sees more integrated work and multi-disciplinary teams working on all the products they do.

 

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Welcome to another fascinating episode of Data Gurus! Sima is happy to have Rick Kelly, the Chief Product Officer of Fuel Cycle, joining her on the show today!

In this episode, Rick explains how he got to where he is today and discusses Fuel Cycle’s unique approach of linking with multiple API partners to offer different capabilities for specific communities to utilize and positioning itself as the Salesforce for communities.

Bio:

Rick is currently the Chief Product Officer at Fuel Cycle, where he has worked since 2014. Before his tenure at Fuel Cycle, he worked at an early-stage health tech startup, taught political science, and worked in market research.

Outside of work, Rick volunteers with the bleeding disorders community and obsessively learns about food and cooking.

How Rick got to where he is in his career

Rick started his career in market research by accident. When he left grad school in 2009, the company he was going to work for went insolvent. So he got referred to a sample company and started working in market research. He left market research to spend a year teaching political science and then took some time off to travel to India, where he worked for a tech startup based in San Francisco. After moving back to the US in a hurry because his baby had a rare bleeding disorder, he emailed a former colleague and ended up working at Fuel Cycle.

The State of Communities

The State of Communities was the title of Rick's presentation at an IIEX Conference in April 2022. Fuel Cycle is known for its research communities, so they are interested in how those communities get used, different use cases, and what leads to the adoption of communities. They run a study each year amongst their research practitioners to better understand how they utilize their communities. That develops their content and informs their product development and where they invest on their platform.

Communities

Most of Fuel Cycle’s customers are brands, big enterprises, and licensing communities over the long term. In many cases, they put three-year-plus deals together to help their customers stay engaged with key audiences. So when they talk about Fuel Cycle, they take it beyond communities and call it the Market Research Cloud because they enable their customers to maintain a constant connection with their key audiences. They also help accelerate decision-making with their suite of solutions and integrated partner platforms.

Integrating with partners

Fuel cycle has a platform in a robust set of APIs that allows them to integrate with more than forty partners.

A developer platform

A decision got made to treat fuel Cycle as a developer platform. They decided to go API first and partner extensively to deliver broader functionality to high-demand researchers.

More research

Fuel Cycle believes that the world needs more research. They advocate for that.

Bad business decisions

Bad business decisions get made often. It usually happens because those decisions have neither been validated by customers nor prospective customers.

More efficient businesses

Businesses will run more efficiently if insights are made more accessible to decision-makers. That will also reduce the existing economic dead-weight loss in the world.

The world needs more research

The world needs more research. That means market research needs to scale beyond the insights department to be truly effective.

Use cases

Use cases are growing dramatically outside the core research persona.

Delivering value

Research practitioners do a challenging job. Rick believes that the best way to deliver value to an organization is to unchain some insights practices from the insights team and push more self-serve capabilities out to stakeholders.

Some of the challenges related to communities

A community is a program. So it has to be well run and maintained. If you use a community just to run surveys, you are probably over-investing in it. Communities need to be exercised, so they require a regular cadence of information. You also have to close the feedback loop and tell people how their information gets actioned on.

The most important thing for communities

The most important thing for communities is to feed and grow them steadily.

Successful customers

The customers of Fuel Cycle who tie communities into their business systems tend to be exceptionally successful.

Insights are more accessible

Insights are more accessible now, so more and more organizations are using them to make decisions.

Shipping containers

Growth in global trade exploded in the 1960s due to the introduction of shipping containers. Shipping containers standardized the packaging of goods and enabled ports to become more efficient. About 60% of all trade between countries today can be attributed to adopting a common shipping infrastructure (containers).

Standardization

The world needs more research, better decisions, and more decisions informed by consumer feedback. Standardization is ultimately like shipping containers because it is essential for obtaining the necessary volume and accuracy. That's why insights need to be more accessible.

Data use

Most effective organizations take measures to make data use acceptable.

Better decisions

Insights should be forward-looking and used to inform as many decisions as possible.

Motivation

There are three core anchors of motivation within research communities:

Utilitarian (financial incentives)

Community orientation and common interest

Brand impact

Communities evolve

Communities evolve, so the value proposition offered to participants has to get revisited often.

Things that should not get done in a community

Some things should not get done in a community. That is why Fuel Cycle has panel partners to enable research with customer audiences within a community and prospects in a panel.

 

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Fuel Cycle

Welcome to today’s illuminating episode of Data Gurus, recorded live at IIEX in Austin, Texas! Sima is happy to have Paul Gaudette, CEO of Dig Insights, joining her to talk about innovation!

There are many opportunities for innovation right now. However, founders of companies are concerned about failure because 80% of the 600,000 new products and CPG launched each year fail, and 50% of all new businesses fail by year three.

Dig Insights

Dig Insights is a consultancy that has been around for twelve years. They built their own innovation software to assist their clients with innovation exercises and navigating their life cycles. They provide their clients with a foundational understanding of the consumer or the market and fill the gaps across the innovation lifecycle with their platform and other research solutions.

Speed and agility

There is a lot of pressure for innovation to get out into the market and innovations to be the first ones out. But, sometimes, large organizations get stuck in the process. So speed and agility are critical.

Clients are taking more advantage of data

Clients are taking more advantage of data, including survey, sales, behavioral, and social data, to find ideas and opportunities for coming up with innovations.

Democratization of insights

One reason companies present at AIX is that democratization of their insights function is happening across their organization. So they want to empower their internal clients with technological solutions to enable them to research independently and speed up the innovation process.

Traditional companies versus smaller brands

Years ago, large companies had the advantage because they had the resources, budget, and knowledge to launch new products. Now, they have to compete with many smaller and more agile direct-to-consumer brands with a constant finger on the pulse of the consumer.

The stage-gate product development process

Most large organizations Paul deals with still subscribe to the stage-gate product development process, but they try to speed up the process and shorten the time it takes to get a new product to market.

Medium-sized companies

Medium-sized companies are now doing a lot of iterative innovation, getting constant feedback, and optimizing everything before going to market.

Equalizing the playing field

Lately, startups have also been asking if they can leverage the Dig Insights platform to do their research. That has equalized the playing field and made the competition for larger companies even more stringent.

Customer-centricity

Most companies recognize that they need to talk to a younger consumer base. They have to be quick in their approach and get feedback fast. They need a way to solicit information quickly, easily, and confidently, so they are looking for innovative, fun, and robust solutions that are agile, engaging, and have a great user experience.

Consumer product failures

Consumer product failures tend to occur when companies start without a strategy. Or when they do not know what they want to achieve or for whom their innovation is. To overcome that, they need to use specific methodologies to get feedback from a broad audience.

On the flip side

Some clients want to talk to a very niched customer profile, so they tend to miss potential opportunities outside of that profile.

Avoiding problems

To avoid those problems, understand who your innovation is for, think broadly, and plan. The market is changing rapidly, so it is vital to think ahead and consider whether your idea will still be relevant in six months or even a year from now.

Upsiide

Dig Insights has built a platform called Upsiide to help its clients assess innovations quickly and intuitively. It started as a simple way to test ideas. They used the technology of swiping and trade-offs and turned it into a test for innovations. Then it evolved into a DIY innovation platform that clients can utilize independently. Dig Insights has also productized elements of the platform to service its clients while using it. One of their global clients has already tested 4,000 ideas in the last year!

Alcohol companies

Many niche opportunities get identified in the Upsiide platform. That suits alcohol companies because they look for incremental wins and not necessarily major wins.

Don’t reject an idea outright 

Do not reject an idea outright if it gets a bad score. Find out what is driving the score, and see if there is any unidentified passion around the idea that might gain momentum if it were to get launched.

Not all ideas are gold

On the flip side, not all ideas are gold. Even if you have a great idea that people love, it could still be a problem if they do not choose it when it gets compared with something else.

The best approach 

Choose an approach that will help you understand whether or not your idea will be successful against those with whom you are looking to compete.

Find the right group to focus on

Find the group where your idea does very well, and focus on it.

KPIs

KPIs cannot work across a variety of innovations. A more tailored approach is necessary for innovations with different purposes. If KPIs are done correctly and communicated clearly, a test can get done internally to see if the results fulfill their criteria on a KPI.

Methodologies

Some people tend to go overboard with surveys and methodologies when testing an idea. A full-blown concept is not always necessary for a simple idea. Sometimes a simple and easy-to-understand approach will work just as well.

An analytics tool

Dig Insights built its analytics tools internally. The company’s analysts and managers use it to get data visualizations and understand the analytics to analyze the information. It works well and prevents bottle-necks from forming with their analytics team.

A standardized approach

Dig Insights’ clients want a standardized approach. Many people trying to standardize things across their organizations have approached the company for help.

The future

Paul is excited to see what the next few years hold for the industry! He is also excited for the startup brands with new products that are now able to do research and are keeping the large organizations on their toes!

 

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Dig Insights

Welcome to another informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is excited to have Veena Giridhar Gopal, the Co-founder, and CEO of Salesbeat, joining her on the show today!

Salesbeat started in March 2019, and when Covid hit early in 2020, Veena and her partner pivoted the business.

About Salesbeat

Salesbeat has software that processes many different data points, including sales data from supermarkets and external data points, like weather forecasts, to predict how much a supermarket will sell any product for a specific period in the future. The purpose is to eliminate sales losses due to under or overstocking.

Overstocking 

Overstocking has become a big issue since Covid because people have changed how they live. So supermarkets are buying the wrong stocks.

Too much stock

Veena has worked for companies in the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) industry since 2007, so she knows the area well. She has also been in FMCG sales. So she knew that when Covid happened in March 2020, and people started buying things and stockpiling, it would cause a blip in historical sales numbers the following year. Supermarkets would then place their orders based on those numbers and end up with too much stock.

Big losses

A problem already existed due to climate change, so beverage companies and personal care companies would not know how much stock to order for some weather conditions, like heat waves. The industry lost up to 30% of its total revenue annually because nobody tracked the lost sales.

Recent studies

Recent studies show that lost sales increased due to supply chain issues.

What they do at Salesbeat

On a live basis, Salesbeat looks at how much stock is in the warehouse and whether orders get done regularly. They calculate in theory if orders get issued when they run out of stock. They also look for reasons if they have not placed the orders or made the sales.

Factors considered in the Salesbeat model

In the Salesbeat pitch, they say that they look at both micro and macro factors.

Macro factors

Macro factors include things like demographics. 

Certain items do very well on promotions in middle or lower class areas, whereas they could cause money losses in affluent areas. The same thing applies to people from different backgrounds or ethnic groups. Salesbeat looks at those factors and others to advise supermarkets on what and how much to stock.

Micro factors

The micro factors they look at include social media. Although influencers increase sales, when regular people rave about a product, and it goes viral, there is even more of an uplift in sales.

Weather patterns

Weather patterns have been unusual recently. That can upset retailers purchasing decisions. To fix it, Salesbeat looks at daily weather forecasts for the next few weeks and makes predictions based on that.

Supermarkets 

Supermarkets need the service provided by Salesbeat a lot more than brands do. So they now offer their service to supermarkets.

Two different views

Salesbeat provides two views: They have an automated system for sending orders to supermarket suppliers, and they also offer brands a view of similar data but in a different format. They tell brands which orders to expect from a supermarket at any point so they can plan their inventories properly.

An early adopter program

They are busy setting up an early adopter program for major supermarkets to try their solution out.

How Salesbeat differs from other supply chain solutions

Other supply chain solutions differ from that of Salesbeat in that they do not take the daily weather forecasts or social media into account. Also, other supply chain solutions do their forecasts at a national account level rather than looking at specific stores.

Online shopping

Veena has noticed that e-commerce sales increase when the weather is cold and rainy. People also tend to do bigger shops when they know their purchases will get delivered.

The future

Salesbeat currently focuses on the retail launch of its product. After the launch, the roadmap for the future of the company will be about setting up a version of their product for collaborative use.

Entrepreneurship

Before starting her company, Veena heard that entrepreneurship was very tough and stressful. She loves being an entrepreneur, however! She has found the stress much more manageable than working for someone else.

Bio:

Veena is the co-founder & CEO of Salesbeat. She is from India and now lives in London, UK. She has previously lived in Gaborone, Botswana, and Fontainebleau, France. She is an accountant by qualification and has an MBA from INSEAD. Veena has worked in advisory (clients included retailers & FMCG distributors) as well as in a range of roles in the packaged Food & Beverage industry. She has 20+ years of experience and has worked across finance, strategy, corporate development, and sales at companies like PepsiCo & Diageo.

Outside of work, she enjoys the outdoors and is an avid scuba diver and hiker. She also enjoys painting and has successfully exhibited her art in Gaborone, Botswana, and London, UK. Her most recent exhibition explored matriarchy and matriarchal tribes around the world. Her art can be found on her Instagram account - @veenaspaintbrush

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Veena Giridhar on LinkedIn

Salesbeat on LinkedIn

Veena Giridhar on Twitter

Salesbeat on Twitter

Welcome to another interesting and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is happy to have Adam Jolley, the EVP and General Manager of Americas for Paradigm Sample, joining her today to talk about how leadership has changed due to how the world has changed over the last two years.

Adam’s background

It was a shock for everyone when the pandemic hit. It was also a big shock to Adam’s career because he had quit his thirteen-year job as President of a stable company a few months before. At the time, he was navigating what to do for a career. He was also considering whether to get into leadership or be an individual contributor.

Having to change

If Adam had started with Paradigm immediately after quitting his old job, nothing would have changed, and he would not have gotten any better at what he did. Due to all the changes, including the influence of the change in the mindset of the employees, he had to change how he did everything.

A routine

Adam feels that before the pandemic, most people were in a routine. They were doing the same job repetitively, so they started getting lazy. People started becoming replaceable, and products became widgets and started becoming commoditized.

Competition for your people

Before, people had to think about competition in terms of market and product. Now, there is competition for people.

Sales

It is no longer possible to have a playbook for sales. Currently, there is no one way to manage, sell, or communicate with everybody because that would be limiting.

An opportunity for leaders

All the changes have created an opportunity for leaders to personalize their message and motivate their people to show up for work.

Customizing leadership

When everyone started working remotely and communicating via Zoom, people learned more about each other. That helped Adam to customize his approach to leadership.

How Adam changed personally after the pandemic

Adam stopped looking at what had happened and what was happening that day when making decisions. He was forced to think differently about his goals, and he developed an emotional attachment to his job beyond the paycheck, insurance, and other benefits.

Teamwork

Adam was never a big believer in teamwork before. That has changed because everyone has gone through a hard time and a change together, and everyone needs acceptance.

Branding

With the change in leadership, there is more emphasis on branding. There is also more emphasis on companies because so much has changed.

Personal branding

Many leaders focus on their personal brand outside of the company. However, personal branding is just as important internally as it is externally.

Have your house in order

The most important part of a business is making sure you have your own house in order before putting anything out there.

Leadership and embracing innovation

It is scary for people to innovate and have foresight, especially when things are going well. However, to move forward, innovation needs to be company-wide. Everyone, including the sales team, needs to be thinking about where things are going and what comes next.

A tough balance

Even though it is tough to balance, leaders need to bring their people along throughout the innovation process.

A fine line

There is a fine line between taking market feedback, input from sales, input from marketing, and input from people building products, rationalizing what is important, why it is important, and getting everyone to agree about those decisions.

Culture

An interesting problem for leaders is when they see a company they would like to acquire, but it will not pass the road test for the executive team. Adam believes that is partly due to leaders misunderstanding what culture truly is.

Data-driven gambles

Adam’s company has taken on the culture of taking data-driven gambles. Before starting a new product or going after a new client, they do their due diligence. So they know whether or not it stands a good chance of working.

Diversity

Diversity is a big part of leadership, and it is vital for growth.

The Second Mountain

Adam’s thoughts about leadership have been influenced by the book The Second Mountain. The book is about spending the first part of your career building yourself up to a place and the second part of your career bringing others up to where you are.

The next wave

Adam spent his first year getting core foundational salespeople who know their job and what they are doing. The next mountain will be about getting more sales opportunities, having accountability partners, thinking about getting people who have not worked for another sample company or in fieldwork, and how to get people excited about market research.

 

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Paradigm Sample

 

Books mentioned

The Second Mountain by David Brooks

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is happy to have Adam Baker and Majeed Saheb-Zadha joining her today.

Indico Labs is a data-visualization business and product. They are based in London and have clients across the globe. Majeed is the Founder and CEO, and Adam is the CSO.

In this episode, Majeed and Adam talk about their startup journey and discuss the pain points Indico Labs addresses in the marketplace.

The pain points addressed by Indico Labs

Indico Labs was born as a result of two main forces. The first was a push from the industry to deliver results and insights faster. The second was that the industry has become saturated with data. So researchers did not have the time to interpret it quickly enough to create something deliverable for the client. Indico Labs essentially create a data presentation product that streamlines the process of generating reports. That enables the researchers to interpret the reports quickly, create the visuals, and deliver them to the end client faster.

Majeed’s story

Before starting Indico Labs, Majeed worked in the Technical Operations Department of YouGov, an end-to-end market research company. Essentially, his job was to address ways to deliver and interpret results faster. The Technical Operations team addressed every part of the company’s workflow and found an obvious bottleneck when it came to the reporting element of the business. They identified that as the main pain point in the entire workflow.

A code-based solution

Majeed then designed a code-based solution that allowed him to deliver reports to the researchers much faster. He and his team at YouGov managed to save about 80% of the time it took for senior researchers to do data entry.

An online product

Majeed wanted to give the researchers the power to build PowerPoint decks using data they had already. So he quit his job at YouGov and created an online product that automated the production of data presentations. He wanted to satisfy the needs of tech-enabled products to integrate with his solution and the needs of traditional market research agencies. He launched the product in 2019.

After building his prototype, Majeed asked Adam to join him.

Adam’s story

Adam left YouGov in 2017 and spent a few years doing consultancy work at other market research agencies. Everywhere he went, a lot of time got wasted on the reporting. Then, Majeed contacted him in 2019 to show him the tool he was creating. Adam was blown away by it and wished he had had it ten years earlier! Since then, they have developed that tool even further.

Marketing

Since day one, there has been a lot of interest in their product from big and small organizations globally. They have spent almost nothing on marketing.

Success

They have been finding a lot of success with small to medium-sized fast-growing market research agencies that need a way to compete with some of the big players in the market.

The sweet spot

Adam has been selling, and Majeed has focused on the product side. It took them a year to realize that their sweet spot lies with smaller agencies that don’t have an in-house development team or the money to spend on building in-house solutions.

Growing and learning

Since starting Indico Labs, Adam and Majeet have developed a lot of resilience. They have done many demos, and they have been learning how to close clients by focusing on the right questions to ask to ascertain whether or not their product will be useful to them. They have also learned to use time-saving marketing tools.

Majeed’s advice 

Majeed advises people to focus on the customers who are happy with what they have right now and sell what they currently have.

Funding features

If a client asks for a feature you do not already have, ask them to fund its development. They have had clients funding many of their features in the early days.

Celebrate the wins

It is important to celebrate your wins and impact on your clients. It feels good when all your hard work starts to pay off, and you hear what your software means to your clients!

Investments

Currently, Majeed and Adam are raising a million dollars to help grow their business over the next year. They will put the money into a new product they are building and expanding their team. They still have two months to go. So far, they have secured about 40% of their goal amount.

 

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Majeed Saheb-Zadha on LinkedIn

Adam Baker on LinkedIn

Welcome to today’s insightful episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is happy to have Anne Beall, the CEO, and Founder of Beall Research, joining her today!

Anne is a research expert and an author. She has been in the market research industry for over twenty-five years. In this episode, she shares her background, talks about her journey in the world of market research, and explains how emotions influence purchasing.

Market research

Anne got into the market research industry right after graduate school. Soon after, she got recruited to the Boston Consulting Group, where she spent several years in their Chicago office as the head of the market research function.

Beall Research

Anne had lots of ideas but did not have a platform on which to execute them, so she started her own small research firm, Beall Research, nineteen years ago. She started the business alone and then brought eight employees on board.

What Anne loves about research

Anne loves the breadth of the studies her company does. She also loves not knowing how things will work out. She enjoys helping companies figure out what they can do differently and how they could be better.

Selling

Anne’s company is small because she did not want a sales function that pushed the work onto someone else after a sale. She believes that you cannot sell research if you cannot do it, so she wants her senior people to do rather than sell.

A strong pipeline

For Anne, having a strong pipeline comes from reaching out to people, connecting with them, and filling them in on her latest research.

A specialty

Beall Research specializes in how emotions influence purchasing, and they have funded studies to become smarter in that area. They study the internal experience of emotion. Particularly the emotions people feel in relation to brands and how those emotions lead them to purchase the same brand repeatedly.

Two parts

There are two parts to how people’s emotions influence their purchasing decisions. The first part is whether their immediate emotional response to a brand is positive, negative, or neutral. The second part is how much they emotionally identify with a brand. Those two parts go together to create a strong connection.

A frustration

All humans have some kind of emotional response to different things- even tires! It frustrates Anne when brands fail to take advantage of that, and people have a neutral response when brands could easily have created an emotional response.

Memories

The first thing people tend to think about when they think of certain brands is a memory of family and friends.

Strategic Market Research

When business came to a halt in 2007-2008, Anne decided to write a book to keep her sane and give her something to do. She wrote and published the book Strategic Market Research as a marketing piece, and it became an unexpected success. It has been called one of the best books on market research. It gets used in colleges and universities and currently sells about two copies a day on Amazon.

Writing other books

Since then, Anne has written several other books on various topics. She is currently writing her eleventh book on how emotions influence purchasing decisions.

Start writing

Anne encourages anyone considering being an author to do it! It is a lot easier to publish a book now than ever before.

 

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Beall Research

Book: Strategic Market Research: A Guide to Conducting Research that Drives Businesses by Anne Beall

Welcome to another helpful and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is excited to have Ed Keller joining her today. Ed is a leading expert in word-of-mouth marketing and social media analytics. He is the Co-founder of Keller Fay Group, the former CEO of Engagement Labs, and the author of the book, The Influentials.

Ed is passionate about word-of-mouth marketing because it makes a huge difference! It is critical to how brands grow and how consumers make decisions about products and the services they buy. In this episode, Ed talks about word of mouth marketing, explains why he is so passionate about it and discusses its effectiveness as a marketing tool.

Intuitive belief 

Many businesses intuitively believe in word-of-mouth marketing but do not fully understand what to do about it or how to use it to grow their business.

Ed’s book

Almost twenty years ago, Ed wrote a book called The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy. He was the CEO of RoperASW, a large market research firm, at the time. Malcolm Gladwell had just written The Tipping Point, and Roper had an extensive database about the people that typified what Gladwell was talking about. So they put all the data together in the book.

The Keller Fay Group

After writing the book, Ed met many budding entrepreneurs in the early stages of social listening. He enjoyed the space and wanted to jump into it as an entrepreneur. So he and a colleague started the Keller Fay Group to become the measurement standard for offline word of mouth.

What is word-of-mouth marketing?

Word of mouth can be technology-driven or with person-to-person small group interactions.

Offline word of mouth happens when people talk face-to-face, over the phone, on a Zoom chat, texting, or IMing. It occurs when people seek advice or want to share an experience with friends and family.

Social media and writing reviews are also forms of word of mouth.

How important is word of mouth?

Word of mouth can explain between thirty and forty percent of purchase decisions. It is not as high as that in fast-moving consumer goods, however.

Covid

During Covid, word of mouth became even more important to people as they needed new products, and new ways of buying came onto the market.

AT&T Mobility

AT&T Mobility was one of their first clients to model with word of mouth data. Word of mouth came in as a close second to paid advertising as a determinant of new subscribers. That was the first time that Ed and his partner had concrete evidence of something they intuitively believed important.

An important factor

After that, they started modeling word of mouth against many different categories. In every case, it proved to be an important factor. It also has an important relationship to the effectiveness of paid advertising.

Research

Their research found that Americans have about ten word of mouth conversations offline, about brands, per day.

Word of mouth marketing

People think about word-of-mouth marketing in several different ways. Word-of-mouth marketing agencies recruit people who love talking about brands and are willing to try new products and share their experiences. In other cases, people are doing different types of experiential marketing, hoping that people will end up energized by the experience and talk about it with others. There are also a growing number of companies thinking about creating earned media with their advertising.

Helping brands quantify the amount of word of mouth lift

Much of the work Ed has done over the years was about helping brands to quantify the amount of word-of-mouth lift they got from their advertising campaigns.

Increased offline word of mouth

The massive rise in social media has increased the amount of offline word of mouth. There appears to be an interaction effect between digital media and offline due to the growing impact of digital media as the number one driver of offline word of mouth.

No correlation

They learned that there is no correlation between offline and online trends in word of mouth for brands. From a marketing point of view, it is vital to understand that social media is not a reflection of what is happening offline.

Consulting

Ed is now doing consulting for data and technology companies. He is also actively engaged in advisory boards and boards of directors, including the Suzy Advisory Board.

The future

Ed intends to do some writing on nano-influencers because that is an area of personal and professional interest.

 

Bio:

Ed Keller is one of the foremost experts in consumer insights and word-of-mouth marketing. As both an entrepreneur and a top exec in leading insights agencies, he has built and sold businesses, launched data and insights products, acquired and integrated businesses, managed global teams, and worked with many of the world’s leading brands.

Ed has been called “one of the most recognized names in word of mouth” and was inducted into the Word of Mouth Marketing Hall of Fame in 2014 as well as the Market Research Council Hall of Fame in 2020. The publication of his book, The Influentials, has been called the "seminal moment in the development of word of mouth." His second book, The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace, was named the Best Book in Marketing for 2013 by the AMA.

He is a leader and innovator in word of mouth measurement, analytics, and strategy as well as word of mouth marketing, influencer marketing, social media analytics, and consumer insights. His work has earned numerous awards as well as two patents. His clients include many of the largest and most sophisticated marketing organizations in the world across a range of sectors, including Netflix, Hulu, Twitter, Pepsi, AT&T, Microsoft, Progressive, ViacomCBS, and MetLife among others.

After selling the Keller Fay Group and remaining on as CEO of Engagement Labs, Ed led the development of TotalSocial, a unique platform with a patented methodology that integrates measurement of both offline WOM and social media conversation about brands, with analytics to link the results to business outcomes such as sales, brand health, and media amplification.

Before starting his company, Ed was CEO of RoperASW and then of NOP World Consumer (part of NOP World, a global top 10 market research agency), where he led a multinational team that served blue-chip clients with research products and solutions covering consumer trends, brand health, customer satisfaction, advertising performance, and public opinion/public affairs. He was instrumental in the sale of Roper Starch Worldwide to NOP and then the sale of NOP to GfK.

Ed was the first Chairman of the Board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and has served on the Board of the Advertising Research Foundation and of BazaarVoice. He is a Past President of the Market Research Council and a member of the Annenberg School’s Alumni Advisory Board.

Ed is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned his MA in Communications from the Annenberg School for Communication.

 

Links:

Connect with Ed:

www.Keller-advisory.com

Ed Keller on LinkedIn

 

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Books mentioned:

The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy by Edward B Keller

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Welcome to another informative and inspiring episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is excited to have Rob Volpe joining her today. Rob is the CEO of the insights and strategy consultancy, Ignite 360.

In this episode, Rob talks about his career path and shares what he did to get to where he is today. He also talks about his book, Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time, and he explains what empathy is all about.

Rob’s career path

Rob went to Syracuse University. He wanted to be a television network programming executive, so he moved to LA. He found a job as a legal secretary and then moved into business affairs. He enjoyed looking at marketing campaigns for movies, which led him to explore the world of marketing. So he took a marketing class at UCLA Extension and got into marketing in 1995. He did not know that market research existed then, so he started working for a PR firm, doing PR and event marketing. After that, he did various other jobs until someone he met said she was looking to hire someone with his experience. So he went for the necessary training, and a month later, he started his career in insights. He worked with his friend for several years until eleven years ago, when he decided to go out on his own and start Ignite 360.

Clues

In the years before he started Ignite 360, many clues directed Rob toward that path he needed to follow. It took several years, but he finally got there!

Empathy

Empathy has always been Rob’s superpower. When a study came out, showing that the university students starting in 2001 had 40% less empathy than students between 1979 and the end of the 1990s, Rob knew that our society was in trouble. He recognized that empathy was common to qualitative researchers. So when he started Ignite 360, he played up the empathetic connection and made sure that his clients understood and connected with who their consumers were. Through that, he learned about the barriers to empathy and began identifying ways to overcome them.

Intuition

Rob is intrigued with intuition and people’s ability to ignore it. He found in work situations that people have way more successful outcomes when they tie their gut into the numbers.

Reconnecting

In 2016, Rob did a presentation to university students. He wanted them to become aware of empathy and reconnect with it, so he spoke about empathy and told stories to give examples of what he meant. The audience was rapt and loved his stories! Then Rob realized that was what he needed to write about, and he started writing his book.

Rob’s book, Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time

In his book, Rob uses stories to help people understand empathy. He did that so that people could bring empathy in whenever they needed to, either in their personal lives or professionally.

Writing a book

He points out to anyone considering writing a book that his first draft looked nothing like the finished book. So, if you want to write a book, just start and keep on going, even when you stumble.

The difference between cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and sympathy

Sympathy is about feeling for someone, and empathy is about feeling with someone.

We are all born with the ability to empathize, and there are distinct types of empathy. Studies have shown that different types of empathy light up different parts of the brain. Feeling the feelings of others is known as emotional empathy, and seeing other peoples’ points of view is cognitive empathy.

Sympathy often tends to link into judgment or pity, and it could create a power dynamic.

The 5 steps Rob uses to coach his clients

Dismantle your judgment

Ask good (broad, open, and exploratory) questions

Active listening (It often involves using your intuition)

Integrate into understanding (Making sense of when things are different)

Using solution imagination

 

Links:

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Ignite 360

Rob Volpe on LinkedIn

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Today, Sima is happy to have Tiama Hanson-Drury, the Chief Product Officer of Minna Technologies, joining her!

For Tiama, a product is all about understanding customer pain and solving it in a way that works well for her business. In this episode, she talks about her journey and explains how she discovered her sweet spot and reached the point in her career where she is right now. She also dives into product development, monetizing a product, reducing uncertainty around a new product, and best practices.

Tiama’s journey

After graduating from college, Tiama planned to spend two years in a small business and two years in a medium business, followed by two years in a large business. Then she planned to go back to college to get her Ph.D. After that, she wanted to become an executive coach and work with CEOs because she loves business. She spent two years working for a wine business and then moved on to a fast-growing tech company called Global Market Insight (GMI). She stayed there a lot longer than two years because she kept asking for promotion opportunities and getting them. That led her to her current career in product development.

Making a move

After working at GMI for six years, the company got acquired by WPP Kantar, and Tiama began to consider making a move. She wanted to make informed decisions based not only on what someone had said but also on what they had done, and she wanted to have all that data in one place.

Building a product

Then Tiama started working with the company’s chief scientist, a data science team, and a marketing team, and they built a product.

Monetizing a product

More and more clients started asking for the product. Tiama realized that if something was built for multiple people with multiple perspectives, and it was built to be repeatable and scalable, it could be monetized. Because after the first sale, the gross margin on all the other sales is much better.

Moving into the product space

Tiama told the CCO and the company’s new CMO that she was interested in the new discipline and asked if there was anything she could do in that line or else she might consider leaving to do it. So they gave her a chance to move into the product space. She started in product marketing because she had a degree in communications. Since then, she has constantly been moving from one product to another.

Product

For Tiama, a software product is about understanding customer pain and knowing that they, as a business, can solve it in a way that also works for the business.

Invest now for a return later

People in service businesses considering experimenting with a product line need to understand the reality of launching their new product. 95% of new products fail, so they have to be willing to invest now for a return in a year to eighteen months.

Reducing uncertainty around the success of a new product

Gaining insights, doing market and customer research, reading white papers that support trends around what you want to do, and knowing that you have realistic expectations and the DNA to do it, will help reduce uncertainty around launching a new product.

Best practices

As an industry, we need to look into adjacent areas to see what we can learn about building a product. Many product leaders within the industry know that. They also understand the practice of building a product for one persona at a time.

Think about using best practices, and learn from those who have built products well.

Three fundamental parts 

For Tiama, a product has three fundamental parts:

Discovery

Delivery

Optimization

Don’t sell vaporware

You have only one chance to make a first impression. That's why you should never over-promise or under-deliver.

Bringing a client into the co-creation

It takes a skilled navigator to bring a client into the co-creation of a product. Do it in the discovery stage. Ask your client about their pains. Ask them whether they would value the solution you have in mind and what they would consider a fair price to pay for it. Remember that you need to work with the right person and the right set of targets and a strategic way to guide that kind of conversation.

Minna technologies

Minna Technologies helps people manage their subscriptions. They are driven by the two biggest jobs in that space- making consumers aware that they have subscriptions and the ability to cancel them. Their software product serves both of those needs. They sell it to banks.

WIRe Accelerate

The Accelerate program has been dedicated to helping women accelerate in their careers. Tiama is the product owner within the WIRe community, and she has a super product team behind her. The program was designed by women and built to provide inclusive content structured specifically for women. It will work for anyone from C-suite level down to entry-level. It has been a phenomenal success!

 

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Minna Technologies

WIRe Accelerate

 

Books mentioned:

Monetizing Innovation