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

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Sima is happy to have James Norman, the CEO and Founder of Pilotly, joining her today.

In this episode, James talks about his varied career and highlights the difficulties he experienced as a person of color, raising investment capital. He also discusses his initiatives to help black founders raise money for their businesses and explains how Pilotly came about and why Pilotly is such an important company for the United States.

James’s career trajectory

James started his career selling video games. After that, he spent some time selling car audio and then started his first “real” company, MJH Sound.com, in 1995 and sold car audio online. After running that business for about four years, James went to the University of Michigan and got a degree in electrical engineering.

Pivoting

James’s audio business pivoted during that time, and they started creating custom parts and building unique cars for vehicle manufacturers.

Custom cars for movies

Then, in 2005, James moved to LA and started building custom cars for movies like The Fast and the Furious.

Video streaming

In 2008, when the recession hit, James got into streaming video. After encountering several challenges, he realized that most people could not do what he was doing. So he shifted away from the failing auto industry and seized the opportunity to create a streamlined video streaming product.

A product planner

James also spent some time working as a product planner for Mitsubishi and then went back to doing his own thing.

New ways of raising money

When his friend started Dropbox, it opened James’s eyes to new ways of raising money for companies. Before that, he had no idea of what it would take to get enough capital together to scale a team and build an organization.

Ubi

James built Ubi, the first online electronic programming guide, and spent his time between 2008 and 2013 doing his best to convince people that nobody would have cable by 2020. Getting feedback from some high-level executives who shared his point of view encouraged James to keep on with what he was doing. He spent the next five or six years running Ubi and ran into many different problems during that time.

Becoming a shining star

In 2011, James applied for the NewMe program, designed to help people of color break into Silicon Valley. He got into the program, and that was his introduction to the San Francisco Bay Area. He was blown away by all the opportunities there, so he decided to stay on and become a shining star!

Software development

James spent a year working as a software developer for a publishing company and learned a lot about software structure. He also learned how toxic the development environment was because of people’s unconscious bias towards black people.

Communication 

James learned that as a CEO, you need to communicate effectively.

No investment capital

After putting a rock star team together, James started pitching his ideas to potential investors. Some investors told him that if he could get the content contracts they would give him the money he needed. Even though he managed to get several content contracts for an electronic sell-through model he developed for a subscription TV service, including one from Warner Brothers, nobody ever showed up with any investment capital.

Testing content and starting Pilotly

James learned the necessary processes from experienced experts and started Pilotly because he needed to test pilot his content effectively with the right audience.

Creating a program for investment

James and his team knew all the right people, but nobody wanted to give them any funding. So they created a program to put the best people of color in front of potential investors and decided to call the investors out if they were still not willing to give them any funding after that.

Transparent Collective

Transparent Collective is a program that represents women and founders of color and helps them get the resources they need to scale their companies.

Helping others

James feels that he is in a position to help other black founders raise money because he has walked that path often, so he can see and hear exactly what other black founders are seeing and hearing.

Why Pilotly is one of the most important companies 

Culture is the biggest export from the United States. Media transmits the culture, and Pilotly defines what media goes on television. That means that Pilotly is in control of the biggest and most important export in the United States. That is why Pilotly has the potential to become the be-all and end-all in understanding the human condition and how we receive and transmit media.

The future of Pilotly

The future of Pilotly is all about further expanding the use of their product within the organization.

Their focus is also on enhancing their norms, getting them to a more granular level, and developing their normative data internationally.

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Pilotly

Welcome to another fascinating and informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Sima is happy to have Jeremy King, the CEO and Founder of Attest, joining her on the show today!

In this episode, Jeremy talks about his unique career journey, discusses the genesis of Attest, and explains how Attest helps organizations use their existing data in better ways to make smarter decisions.

Jeremy’s journey

Jeremy started his career as a scientist. He worked in ecology, genetics, and what is now known as synthetic biology, focusing on mathematical models of reef fish behavior and proving how the entire underwater ecology is driven by sound. That was where his love for data, empiricism, following hypotheses, testing, and learning originated.

After that, Jeremy joined McKinsey and spent nine years traveling around the world helping big companies sort out problems that they could not solve for themselves.

Learning

Traveling to different countries and showing up at new businesses, sectors, and teams every one to three months helped Jeremy learn about businesses countries and cultures very quickly.

A trend

Jeremy became interested in the world of Attest because all the businesses he worked with spoke about being more data-driven and using their existing data in better ways to make smarter decisions. Using their internal data and existing customer data much more was a big trend.

Data about future customers

What was missing in almost all those businesses was data about the customers that they did not have yet. To overcome that gap businesses need to commission a market research project, look into social data, use existing customers as a proxy for future customers, or extrapolate the gut feel of experts to try new product launches.

Gut feelings

Unfortunately, 95% of all product launches fail, and most gut feelings are wrong.

Knowing more about the target customer 

Knowing more about the target customer is vital. But that was missing in every business and sector that Jeremy visited.

Getting the data

Where data is missing, businesses need to go out and get it, produce it, or find it because that is how they will ultimately win or lose.

The genesis of Attest

Jeremy thought there had to be a better way to do more market research for more people in more places more often. So he started thinking of ways to automate to make that market bigger, better, and easier for more people. That was how Attest was born.

Assessing target customers

Data and customers are at the heart of a business. So a lot more needs to be spent on assessing target customers and finding opportunities in unknown areas.

Making market research easier

When market research is easier to do, it creates opportunities for more to happen in more places for more people more often.

Different markets

Attest serves many different markets, so their challenge is to build one product and software suite for all the services, needs, buyer personas, and sectors.

Attest 

The simplicity, power, and quality of Attest set it apart from all other platforms in the industry.

A tailor-made experience

Attest aims to deliver an experience that does everything exactly how organizations want to do it. They will do that in a way that is neither overbearing nor scary.

Insights

Attest strives to show the obvious results and make it easy for organizations to see things they would not otherwise have seen. They enable organizations to communicate those insights internally, which helps them to work in new and more intuitive ways.

About Attest

Attest has its headquarters are in London, and they are big in New York. They also have some team members scattered in many different areas. The company is half commercial and half data science engineering and product design. Their client base is in Europe and the US, and they also have a growing mix of clients around the world. The organization is growing at a rate of about 99%, year on year.

 

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Attest

Welcome to another informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Today, Sima is happy to have Singe Deakins joining her on the show. Singe is the London-based CEO and Founder of CitizenMe.

In this episode, Singe shares his background and talks about how the ecosystem is changing and shifting data processing out to the edge. He also discusses how Citizen Me is combining economic impact with social value, bringing more civility to the internet, and helping people to manage their data and choose what they want to do with it.

Singe’s background

Singe has a background in digital innovation that goes back about two decades. He spent the early days of his career putting newspapers online and helping British Airways get their booking systems online. In about 2000, he started using multi-digital channels and using mobile at the center of everything.

Asia

He spent the next twelve years in Asia, based in Singapore, doing open internet work. He helped several hundred million individuals get on the internet with the platforms he was building up in the emerging market of telco systems.

The next problem to solve

After selling his last business to an American private equity company, Singe started looking for the next big problem he could solve. Looking at how the internet and the digital world were evolving, he realized that it should be about people, and the core transactional value would be about the data about the people.

An internet that works for everybody

It became clear to Singe that we need an internet that works for everybody. That is easy to imagine, but the actual mechanics could be disruptive and require an evolution from where the internet currently is.

An issue

One of Singe’s biggest issues has been working out how to govern across the internet in terms of data. He would like to find a way to get to where we all have rights regarding our data and how it gets used.

Consumers

Singe has been on a long journey of getting to understand how people interact with their data. Consumers understand much more now than they did before about what they are giving away with their data. We are moving into a different space around what people want and do not want with their data.

Ephemeral data

Ephemeral data digital tools give people a choice and help them manage how their data gets shared.

Sharing data

There is a big marketplace worth trillions of dollars exchanging everyone’s data all the time, but none of us can participate in it. By using their smartphones, people are constantly sharing huge amounts of their data without even realizing it.

Solving the issue

At CitizenMe, they are looking for the best ways to solve that issue. Their job is to represent citizens, help them manage their data, and find ways to do what they want with their data.

The CitizenMe app

The CitizenMe app allows people to access the insights that already exist about them. It lets them generate their own insights, have a real-time opportunity to transact with those insights, and get paid for it.

Combining economic impact with social value

At CitizenMe, they currently have about 350,000 people on the app. People can either transact their data for cash or share it as a donation towards medical research.

Real-time

CitizenMe is fresh, participatory, and open in the way it works. It allows businesses to have real-time interactions and real-time digital conversations with their customers.

End game

CitizenMe.com is a working example of edge data (zero data and zero data tech). Their end game is to change how data gets handled on the internet, and their mission is to shift the data out to the edge and let people participate.

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CitizenMe

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Dara Gurus podcast!

Sima is excited to have Katie Gross as her guest for today’s podcast! Katie is the Chief Customer Officer at Suzy.

In this episode, Katie discusses her background. She also shares her secret to being a successful woman and talks about what Suzy is doing to help and empower companies.

Humble beginnings

Katie grew up in Plymouth, England. Her mother wanted Katie and her siblings to have everything she did not have, so she insisted that all her children had the best education possible.

Meeting different people

Katie met people from different places and different walks of life when she was at university. Being surrounded by smart and ambitious people opened her eyes to exciting new possibilities for the future.

Entering the market research space

Katie got into the market research space partly by choice and partly accidentally. She studied psychology and criminal justice at university and came out of that with an SPSS skill set. She joined a food and beverage company in the UK that dealt primarily with Italian private label products in UK grocery stores. Then she moved to London and worked for Mintel on their consultancy team.

Moving to sales

Katie started working for Mintel as a researcher and later moved into a sales position, which she loved. Having come from a similar role in market research, she was genuinely curious about what her clients were using and how they were doing things. That made it easy for her to come up with solutions to help her clients operate better, faster, and in a more educated way.

Staying in sales

Initially, Katie thought she would only stay in sales long enough to pay off her student debt. However, she remained there when she finally realized how much she loved being in a sales role.

A natural fit

At the time, sales was mostly a hybrid of selling to new companies and renewing current clients. Since then, sales in most companies have been separated into sales and customer success. So it felt like a natural fit for Katie to have managed a combination of sales and customer success teams throughout her journey.

Managing

Katie enjoys helping to shape and mold the people she manages. She also loves to see them succeed.

Moving to the USA

Ten years ago, Mintel opened a new division in the USA. So they asked Katie to move there.

A successful woman

Katie wants to be a strong leader for both men and women. Her secret to being a successful woman is not allowing herself to dwell on the negative and sexist comments and helping those around her to do the same.

At Suzy, there is a “Women at Suzy” group. The women also support each other.

Suzy

Suzy is different in that it owns a panel of its own. They are solving to eradicate the need for overlapping technologies in a fragmented market by moving everything into one place.

A platform

Suzy has created a platform where qualitative and quantitative can be integrated and run quickly and seamlessly with the same respondents.

Two kinds of teams

Some company’s teams are getting empowered on their new journey of agile research by having a playbook and being educated around their new kind of responsibility. The more cumbersome bits are getting automated, giving them more time to be creative. Other companies, however, tend to buy a tool like Suzy’s but do not know how to utilize it because they have never worked in an agile way before.

Empowering

Suzy is helping companies understand that they are there to help them automate and do things faster, and their tool will empower their teams rather than take away their roles and responsibilities.

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Suzy

Welcome to another interesting and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast!

Today, Sima is happy to have Richard Thornton joining her. Richard used to work at CINT, and he recently founded an advisory services business.

In this episode, Richard shares his career journey. He also talks about taking risks, his mindset, and his core beliefs. Stay tuned to hear more!

Richard’s journey

Richard studied Business and Marketing at university. After that, he joined a business that served hardware and software players in the imaging space, like Hewlett Packard, Xerox, and Canon. He worked as a research analyst, supporting a team delivering content and insights around subscription syndicated services. That exposed him to working with data. He saw the value that data-driven insights could bring to organizations and gained a toolkit that he utilized extensively later in his career.

After spending four years there, he moved on and became a consultant.

Entering the market research industry

In 2003, Richard fell into the market research industry by chance after being offered a position with Channel Surveys. He was fortunate to enter the industry just in time to ride the new wave of online data collection and digital insights. He was eventually put into the position of European Co-Managing Director, managing more than 300 employees in Europe. He left in 2008 when the business got sold to Microsoft.

Joining CINT

In 2009, Richard joined CINT, a Swedish-based technology company that was way ahead of its time. That was the start of a journey that took him out of his comfort zone and lasted for the next twelve years.

Going public

Richard was fortunate to be part of the leadership team at CINT that eventually took the business public in February 2021.

Leaving 

Richard left CINT in 2021 after the business had gone public.

People-driven

Richard has always been people-driven in his decision-making. He felt driven to meet his mentors in the process of evaluating opportunities that came his way.

Taking a risk

Richard has a good appetite for risk with his work and making investments. After making sure that the business model was sound, he always followed his gut feelings when new opportunities came his way.

What leaving CINT felt like

It was tough for Richard to leave CINT, but it felt a little easier because it was a planned move. He gave up a lot when he left, and that required a massive mental adjustment. Although he is still grappling with those adjustments to some extent, he has no regrets about his decision to leave.

Re-learning

Now, Richard feels as if he has gone from a teacher to a student again because he has to re-learn a new craft. It is humbling but healthy because it keeps him grounded. It has also given him a fresh perspective.

Mindset

You get to feel needed, wanted, and valuable when you’re part of a growing organization. Richard misses feeling that way, so he had to adjust his mindset after leaving CINT.

Choice

Richard is grateful to be in a financial position that gives him a choice. Right now, he is considering what the best choice should be.

A portfolio approach

Richard always wanted to build a portfolio approach to work. That means that he has had to move into advisory roles. He intends to get onto the boards of some tech-led or enabled businesses and combine that with some angel investing.

How Richard is spending his time

Richard has been networking and looking for opportunities. He has built up a portfolio of businesses that he is advising. They are mostly founder-led and tech-enabled or SaaS businesses. He has taken a seat on the board of most of them and invested in some. He is bringing commercial excellence to the table and helping the founders scale.

Diversity

Richard loves the diversity of working with different businesses and being inspired by the founders and leadership teams.

Driving diversity

Richard is a supporter of driving better representation and diversity in the industry. He is proud that more than half of his portfolio consists of women-led tech businesses!

Core beliefs

Richard has learned to put himself first. He knows that his family and loved ones benefit from that, too, because he has a more positive mindset.

He also strives to be nice as well as successful. He feels that it is vital to be empathetic and respectful and do things the right way on his journey to success.

He has also learned not to underplay timing and luck in his career.

Empathy

Since the pandemic, Richard has realized how important it is to support others and have empathy.

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Dynata

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast!

Sima is delighted to have Lisa Wilding Brown, the CEO of Innovate MR, joining her today as her guest for the podcast. In this episode, Lisa talks about her journey to becoming a CEO, building confidence, the importance of role models and culture, and what the future holds for market research.

Lisa’s journey

Like many others, Lisa had no intention of getting into market research. After accidentally falling into the industry almost twenty years ago, she quickly got hooked! She started as a project manager of an online research team and then moved over to the panel team, where she worked closely with the survey methodology team researching research. She got to know a lot about methodological implications and learned how to do things the right way.

In 2009, she moved to uSamp. Moving from a large global traditional research firm to a tech startup with only a few employees was an uncomfortable change.

In 2014, Lisa joined Innovate MR when the company was still in the startup phase. Now, the company has more than 150 employees in multiple offices worldwide.

Inspired by her colleagues

Looking back at her journey to becoming CEO, Lisa gives credit to the network of friends and colleagues she has met through WIRexec who inspired and invigorated her so many years ago.

Little things

Over time, Lisa started doing little things to get everyone to know her brand and who she was and become more involved in the industry. That helped pave the way to her becoming a leader and the CEO of a business.

Role models

It is vital to have excellent role models. Unfortunately, women do not have as many role models.

Building confidence

While growing up, Lisa never even considered that she might become the CEO of a business. Like many others, she had insecurities and a fear of failure, so she focused on building her confidence.

Encouragement

Lisa encourages everyone to focus on the present moment, have new experiences, leverage opportunities, build their skill sets, and gain new levels of expertise.

Being the CEO

Lisa has a level of empathy that her team appreciates, and she feels that she is accessible to everyone. She feels confident that she will be successful in her role as the CEO because she knows the inner workings of the business and has a great relationship with her team. She hopes to inspire other young women and young professionals in the research space.

Culture

As companies grow, they should not lose sight of the dynamic and culture they enjoyed when they were small companies. Lisa is fiercely protective of her company’s culture.

Disruption

There has recently been a lot of disruption in the sample space. That allows for scale, growth, and efficiency in the future.

Brands are shifting

Brands are becoming more hands-on, and they are working with different, less traditional providers.

The future of market research

Although Lisa does not think that traditional market research will ever go away, she feels that surveys will reduce in the future, and we will see many more short micro-burst surveys.

Stats and data

Stats and data are becoming part of the mainstream. The uncertainty of the pandemic reinforced the need for data, so the average person now appreciates data a lot more than they did before the pandemic started.

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Dynata

Welcome to another interesting and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast!

Sima is excited to have Bob Fawson, the EVP of Business Strategy at Dynata, joining her today. In this episode, Bob and Sima cover several hot topics related to challenges within the industry around data and sampling.

Bob Fawson’s background

Bob has an academic background. Before getting his Ph.D., he decided to take a break for a while and work. So Bob applied for a sales job at a research company. He enjoyed the experience, and after a short time, he and a few others in the research company started a panel business. They grew the business. It merged with SSI, which merged with another company to later become Dynata. Bob has played various interesting and fun roles in the company over the years, from sales and operations to research science. Most of his career has been in building and maintaining Dynata’s supply.

What’s driving the data and sampling segment of the industry? 

Several things are driving the data and sampling segment of the industry. One factor is the increasing quest to measure and manage data quality. Inextricably tied to that is the user experience, and modernizing what we do in the insights industry to attract and retain participants better. Another factor is finding and retaining the right talent to do those things.

An opportunity

A lot of new talent is coming into the insights space. That is creating an opportunity for those within the space to learn from those people, grow, and change the way they think about how research gets executed.

An interesting analogy 

We tend to see a single price for each make and model in the used car market and little differentiation in terms of how cars get sold. That is because it is difficult for buyers to evaluate the quality of a used car before buying it. It is also difficult for the seller to communicate quality credibly before a sale. That lack of information drives a market where the items get sold based on the average quality at an average market price.

Lemon markets

In many lemon markets, we see commodity pricing (as with sugar or grain) or decreasing quality and decreasing prices as the market finds equilibrium. Bob thinks that the same thing has happened in many data markets.

Reputation

Reputation is a primary way for lemon markets to become more efficient.

The drivers of quality

Although it is hard to define quality within the insights space, a quality survey needs three elements:

Identity validation.

The collected data must accurately reflect what is studied.

Good in-survey behavior. (The respondents need to have a high level of participation and trust.)

Grids

Even though researchers love grids because they are structured and provide structured data, grids tend to drive more disengagement than anything else.

Quality data

Researchers should remember that they are dealing with real people on the other side of the research process. That’s why they need to take the time to think through the simple steps of putting questionnaires in front of people, to get the quality data they require.

Why do people participate?

People tend to participate in surveys because they have an innate desire to share. They also participate to get a reward of some kind.

Improving the research industry    

There is better engagement when the topic is well-matched to the audience. So to benefit from people’s innate desire to share, researchers need to do a better job of profiling qualifying people into their surveys. Researchers will also benefit from gaining more trust from consumers and motivating them to become panelists and share.

Recruitment

Bob feels that the research industry faces more of a challenge with retention than with recruitment. Data breaches with big companies like Google and Facebook have fostered a tremendous lack of trust. So, researchers need to follow through with a good experience after engaging consumers if they want the engagement to stick and be productive.

Doing better with the drivers of the user experience

Providing a good user experience is vital! With user experience research, Bob has discovered that to engage respondents better, everything from the questions asked to how the profiling and audience targeting get done to the introduction and positioning of rewards matters tremendously.

Solving for the lemon market

Bob does not think that the research industry can regulate itself out of the lemon market. He feels that the only way to solve that dynamic is if the industry becomes considerably more transparent.

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Dynata

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Today, Sima shares Part 1 of Investing in Research, a panel discussion about agencies from the recent WIRe (Women in Research) Conference.

In this discussion hosted by Nikki Lavoie, experts Sima Vasa, Sherry Fox, and Elaine Riddel talk about one of the prominent myths currently circulating in the insights industry. According to that myth, only tech and SaaS-based companies receive investment funding.

The panel of experts will explain why that myth is untrue and clarify how service-based companies can begin to access investment funding if they wish to do so.

The experts 

Sherry Fox is a career Global Insights Strategist focused on health care. She is well-versed in strategic brand development and regulatory environments. Sherry is an industry expert and futuristic thinker who can facilitate collaborations leading to the growth and acquisition of service companies. She has also founded future health strategies to leverage the intersection of data, insights, and technology.

Sima Vasa is a multi-faceted business leader in the market research and analytics space with a broad range of expertise from P&L management, operations, business development, marketing, entrepreneurship, and investment banking. Currently, Sima focuses on advising clients on overall business strategy, valuation of strategic options, and execution of investment banking mandates through Oberon Securities, a middle-market-focused investment banking firm.

Elaine Riddel is a growth activist who believes that breakthrough potential exists in every company. She unlocks potential by anticipating market changes that will influence client priorities and then building organizational confidence to deliver new value. As A CEO, she transformed mature, stagnant, global insights firms into scalable market leaders that consistently out-performed the market over fifteen years. Her playbook is the foundation for her growth advisories, serving founders, CEOs, and PE firms. Elaine is currently an MD with Oaklins Da Silva and Phillips, a leading investment bank for marketing and media services.

Why is there the myth that service-based companies cannot get funding?

Sima believes that service-based companies can get investment capital if they want it. It is all about the valuation of a service-based company, compared with a more Saas or tech-enabled company. Investors want to invest in good, financially sound companies that provide their clients with a strong value and serve their markets well. So the question is really around the value of the company.

Elaine thinks that everything has its time. Automating much of the back office and the DIY will result in better, faster, and cheaper kinds of foundational services. We are moving into a time where more people with more advanced decision-making capabilities are needed to advise clients.

Sherry believes that even with the arrival of big data and AI being used more in the insights industry, people are still necessary to deliver the insights to the pointer lane because you cannot rely on the data to explain why something is true. That is why service-based companies are needed more than ever right now to interpret the data.

Having insights translated into action

Elaine thinks that some service-based companies will stand out in terms of their areas of expertise because clients are looking for the expertise to translate insights into action with confidence in real-time.

Opportunities

Service-based companies should look for opportunities to syndicate or create multi-client services- on a subscription basis.

Reducing investor risk

Service-based companies need to reassure their investors that enough is being done to reduce the risk.

Becoming trusted advisors

Market research agencies should position themselves as strategic partners and collaborators with their clients to become their trusted advisors.

Actionability

Actionability is the key to creating value for service-based companies.

Reputation

Having a good reputation is a vital piece for companies looking for investors.

Visibility

Getting out there, being visible, and getting known is vital for winning business and finding investors.

A plan 

Having a plan for the future demonstrates your value to potential investors.

Collaboration

Finding investors becomes easier for companies that get known for their collaborative style.

What CEOs and executives should consider before seeking investor funding

Be aligned with your current partners and know why you are seeking investors. Consider why now is a good time to do it. Also, understand that there will be a trade-off with your new investor partners. Make sure they align with your core values.

Driving growth

If you have a strong brand coupled with a great team and a vision you can use investment capital to build your business through inorganic growth.

When you are ready for investment

When you decide to look for investment, be ready to exchange business equity for capital to invest in your business. The first step is to meet with a professional advisor to help you think things through and get ready to go to market.

Take time 

It is worth taking the time to go through a proper process and prepare. That will help you gain confidence, allow you to showcase your business in the best light, and run a competitive process so that you can get the best options.

The best way to use funding capital

Use your capital on innovation solutions, marketing, and sales, to drive your business forward and grow it.

Enhancing customer experiences

Bringing data, insights, and technology together will help in creating an enhanced customer experience. That will attract investment in your company.

Think with the client in mind

Think with the client in mind. Consider the gaps you can see in the marketplace, do some research on your client base and the client community at large, and then find ways to solve their needs.

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Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast! Sima is excited to have Ted Pulsifer, the Executive Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at the Schlesinger Group, as her guest for today’s show. In this episode, Ted talks to Sima about his career, his panel discussion at SampleCon, asking the right questions, and incentivizing people to do research surveys.

Ted’s career journey

Ted’s started his career in the technology space, working for large companies like General Electric and AOL, and then he spent a year working in the wine business. After that, he was recruited into market research by a company called Peanut Labs that did a lot of real-time sampling through applications on Facebook. He was later part of an acquisition into the company now known as Dynata, after which he moved to Federated Sample, now known as Lucid. In 2014, he joined Market Cube as a partner. They successfully exited and sold the business to Schlesinger early in 2020.

Advantages

Ted experienced many advantages to being part of a fifty-year-old organization with clients everywhere. He enjoyed applying many of the products and the technology they built and learned from at Market Cube into the Schlesinger Group.

Time to sell

Ted and his partners decided to sell Market Cube because it was performing well, the metrics were in line, and selling the business then felt natural to all four partners. Ted also thought that it was the right time for him to broaden out and move on.

Migrating to online

There were some challenging moments in 2020 for Schlesinger’s staff, employees, and respondents. However, online work scales and tends to force change. So Schlesinger did well within the legacy Market Cube business, which is now part of Schlesinger, and Schlesinger Quantitative Solutions because they had many people who might have done in-person research before migrating to online.

Larger focus groups

In-person focus groups are an extension of the hospitality business. So, like many hotels, resorts, and airlines, Schlesinger had to close that side and make some hard decisions. Fortunately, the digital qualitative platform that Schlesinger acquired from Market Cube was strong and growing, so it boosted the business.

Leveraging technology

Although nobody knows what November 2021 or January 2022 will look like, Ted feels that leveraging technology to add scale and save money will stick with their clients.

SampleCon

Ted enjoyed the emotional side and the human aspect of being able to attend the recent SampleCon in-person. He loves that every year SampleCon takes place in a different city with different content and a different set of users. He learned a lot there and was happy to have the opportunity to narrate a panel about how traditional techniques are merging and talk about qualitative research more largely on stage.

The key themes

The key themes that came out of Ted’s panel discussion at SampleCon related to his belief that traditional quantitative and qualitative are very appropriate methodologies that will remain. He feels that research will continue getting done in the way it has.

His goal

His goal was to keep an eye on new things emerging that should not be ignored and spend time exploring those ideas.

One of Ted’s favorite things to do

One of Ted’s favorite things to do is to look at the reports from clients and brands and the people that expose him to global clients each quarter and see the changes in those buying from him. He also likes to see that new companies that did not exist two or three years ago that are purchasing his research are doing interesting things.

Ted’s article

Ted has recently posted an article called Selecting a Sample Partner with Confidence. The idea behind it is to explain the questions people should ask that they might not know to ask.

Incentives

People want to have a choice of incentives in return for completing surveys. Ted’s company incentivizes people for updating their profiles and attempting surveys.

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Ted’s Bio:

Ted Pulsifer is a senior leader of Schlesinger Groups’ client solutions team, driving the continuous evolution of our integrated services. He joined Schlesinger Group in 2020 when Market Cube, of which he was an owner-partner, was acquired by the Group.

Ted cultivates strategic partnerships for Schlesinger Group and brings over twenty years of executive and sales leadership and client engagement experience. He is an expert in our online quantitative solutions and, in particular, for new capabilities including programmatic sample, DIY purchasing tools, and custom insight tools, which empower faster and more creative data collection globally with best-in-class expertise, technology, and services

Ted began his marketing research journey at Peanut Labs/Dynata before serving as Regional Vice President for Lucid. As a Principal at Market Cube, Ted architected and managed the sales organization that helped power the company’s rapid growth and brand loyalty.

Ted holds a BA in Economics from the University of Colorado. Ted is based in Mt. Pleasant, SC. He is an ESOMAR member and served as Director at Large for the Insights Association’s Southeast Chapter from 2016-2020. When not working, Ted can be found hunting for unusual wines, traveling, or on the water with his family in Charleston, SC.

Schlesinger Group: Company Background

For over half a century, we’ve been continually perfecting the art and science of qualitative and quantitative data collection and our research services.

Put simply, we provide answers to your important business questions through practices of partnership, quality and service excellence, powered by an expert team with a genuine passion for research.

And as the world transforms, we reach for new heights, redefining our services beyond our clients’ expectations.

You Need Insights. We Have Solutions.

In a world of markets experiencing massive disruption and evolution, gathering reliable and compelling data for deeper insights is paramount for brand success. Working in partnership with you, Schlesinger Group goes further than high-precision data collection to enable better insights.

Today, Sima is excited to bring you an encore episode in which she has a conversation with Mario Carrasco. Enjoy the show!

Multi-cultural research, strategy, and understanding is what Sima and Mario Carrasco, Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow Research, chat about on today’s podcast.

Mario worked in the early days of digital marketing, building online communities for MSN Latino, and didn’t know what a research panel was until researching it for a job interview for a closer-to-home job. He got his start in market research building what became the first national representative panels at Garcia Research.

As research numbers started pointing to the US becoming a minority-majority country in the near future, Mario realized there was a need for a market research company to be focused on multi-cultural consumers, and this is how his ThinkNow Research came about.

Mario is also the newest Board Member to join the SampleCon team!

HISPANIC MARKET RESEARCH, THEN AND NOW

In the early days of market research, particularly Hispanic research, companies were hesitant to use emerging technologies. Back then it was online, and now it’s mobile.

Mario has since learned that multi-cultural consumers, especially Hispanic consumers, are super tech savvy, and applying all these innovative technologies to multi-cultural consumers has been his company’s ethos.

DEFINING MULTI-CULTURE

At the basic level of a potentially contentious conversation, it is consumers who are not non-Hispanic white, and traditionally that segmented into Hispanic, African American, and Asian, which are the largest cohorts of multi-cultural consumers in the US. These 3 groups comprise 40% of the US population, and is expected to grow.

As a nation, non-Hispanic white birth numbers are down, and what drives the increase in multi-cultural population growth is US Hispanic births and Asian immigration.

As the country is changing demographically, ThinkNow Research is dedicated to helping other companies interpret these fundamental changes from a marketing and purchasing standpoint.

MISCONCEPTION OF ACCULTURATION

It’s interesting to see which cultural values that 1st and 2nd gen Latinos and Asians pick and choose.

There’s a misconception in acculturation in the marketing industry that the longer you’re in the US, the more “American” you become, as if it’s a linear model.

Yes, you are integrating some aspects of the culture, but there are some things about your home culture (or your parents or grandparents culture) that is retained over time. It’s more like a bidimensionality that is happening.

BIDIMENSIONALITY IDENTITY MEASURE

Mario’s company has done some work for The Journal for Cultural Marketing, where they developed a Bidimensional Identity Measure.

It essentially combines two scales, the American Identity Measure and the Ethnic Identity Measure. There are 15 total questions, and what they have discovered is that depending on your ethnicity, you’re going to be scoring differently across these different measures, as opposed to acculturation which assumes a linear progression the longer you’re in the US.

We should really be looking at what aspects of culture we’re retaining, in terms of home culture and what aspects we’re integrating from American culture.

THE DO'S AND DON'TS OF MULTI-CULTURAL MARKETING

Don’t generalize.

Do your research beforehand, figure out who your consumer is and delve even deeper by defining that consumer within a subset.

Sima loves to hear from her listeners with input, questions, suggestions and just to connect! You can find her at the links below!

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Sima is passionate about data and loves to share, learn and help others that share that passion. If you love data as much as her, subscribe on iTunes and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!