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

We’re delighted to have Mike Berland, the CEO, and founder of Decode_M, joining us on the show today.

Mike is with us today to talk about data collection, analytics, and momentum.

About Mike

We currently live in a world that runs on data, and Mike holds the belief that everything is knowable, as long as you know where to look.

Mike is the former chair of the Gotham Chapter of the New York City Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), and he is a Commonwealth Scholar from the University of Massachusetts. He has worked with many leading brands, including Airbnb, Lyft, Nike, Microsoft, Facebook, Estée Lauder Companies, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball.

Mike has written three books. In 2009 he released a book that he co-authored with Doug Schoen, titled What Makes You Tick? How Successful People Do It and What You Can Learn from Them. Then, in 2005, he co-authored the number one bestseller, Fat-Burning Machine: The 12-Week Diet, with former Olympic triathlon coach Gale Bernhard. And he has now written a new book called Maximum Momentum: How to Build it and How to Keep It, which got released in January 2020.

Mike has two adult children, and he lives in Manhattan, New York, with his wife of more than twenty-five years.

About Decode_M

Decode_M is a research, analytics, and insights firm that decodes data into momentum for its clients. It is a fast-moving firm that arms its clients with the actionable information they need to make critical decisions.

As a team of passionate problem-solvers and data-driven storytellers, they use a diverse mix of data sets to identify the right answers and solutions so that their clients can take the right action immediately, with confidence.

Collecting & analyzing the right data is where the job starts for the Decode_M team. Strategy, activation, and how the data gets used is what they are all about.

Why Mike started Decode_M

Mike started Decode_M because he felt that there was another analytical tool needed in the data research and analytics space.

The most important question       

When he started his career as a pollster, Mike asked questions, and he received answers. However, the answers were always limited to the data set. And Mike explains that when you’re a pollster, the most important questions are usually the ones you did not ask. So when you get the data and analyze it, you often realize that there are many other things that you wish that you had asked.

Going beyond polling

Over time, more and more data started becoming available, so Mike wanted to go beyond polling. He wanted to start analyzing all the data that was out there, using a new approach, new concepts, and new tools.

New ways of gathering data fast

In the old days, Mike had to call people on the phone and ask them questions to obtain the data that he needed.

Now that he has a computer and cloud computing, he can process as much data as any top research lab in a matter of hours. And he can now also continuously go back to the social media data, or the behavioral data, rewrite the queries and keep building.

Completing a project

Before, with surveys, the project was complete once the report had been presented. Now, with Decode_M’s current analytics, the project is never really done because the data can continue to get mined.

Momentum   

Mike wrote a book called Maximum Momentum, with the idea that momentum is an amorphous word that may work in many different and varied contexts, and he wanted to quantify momentum.

The M-Factor

In physics, momentum equals mass times velocity. So Mike had to create the metrics from mass and velocity and then put them together to create what he calls the M-Factor.

Mike explains that the mass is the volume of conversation, and the velocity is the engagement and the sentiment.

How the market was getting things wrong

Mike thought that the market was getting things wrong because all the metrics for social media were volume metrics, as in how many likes or re-tweets they were getting, and he felt that none of that meant anything. Yet all his clients were asking for something that would go so fast that everyone would look at it.

Mike then realized that although people were looking for a mass metric, what they needed was a velocity metric. And, at the time, there were no metrics available to measure velocity.

Creating algorithms to examine velocity

Mike and his team had to write their algorithms to work out how velocity could be measured. So they used state-of-the-art natural language processing with sentiment analysis to create their velocity algorithms. They came up with the drivers of momentum, which were disruption, polarization, stickiness, and social impact, all of which had to be in the velocity to create momentum.

And that, ultimately, has been the key to their success.

Links:

Decode_M

Decode_M on LinkedIn

Decode_M on Twitter

Decode_M on Instagram  (@decode_momentum)

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Today, we’re excited to be interviewing Vivek Bhaskaran, who is the founder and CEO of QuestionPro. He's here today to share his experience bootstrapping QuestionPro.

About Vivek

Vivek grew up in India. After completing his primary education there, he left the country and moved to Russia, where he lived from 1995 to 1997. When he left Russia, he moved to the United States, and there, he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in Utah.

Founding QuestionPro

After obtaining his Bachelor’s Degree, Vivek moved to Seattle, and he started QuestionPro in 2005.

He has never raised any capital for the business from outside investors, and he has managed to build his company up by himself, slowly, over time.

What QuestioPro does

QuestionPro started as a survey platform, and currently, it serves as both a survey platform and as an experience management platform.

Over the last couple of years, the company has turned upmarket, and Vivek has identified three different areas that have added confidence to the business:

Consumer insights and market research

Customer experience

Surveys targeted towards employees

QuestionPro started initially as a survey platform. It then expanded into offering a survey toolset, and they have now also identified three buyer patterns within their ecosystem.

Vivek shares his experience of bootstrapping back in the early days

Vivek feels that he has been lucky in business. When he built QuestionPro, back in 2005, the term SEO had not yet been coined. So, as a software geek/hacker, Vivek created the QuestionPro platform, and he then started looking for ways to market it. He thought that the marketing of his platform would be easy. All he would have to do would be to become “number one” on Google.

SEO is an analytical exercise

Vivek points out that SEO is not a creative exercise, and that most people don’t seem to understand that it is analytical.

Vivek does not think that SEO is the right thing for marketing purposes. He believes that SEO should fall under the category of engineering, and it should work as an analytical exercise.

Getting to #1 on Google

Vivek thought that getting to number one on Google would not be too complicated if he were to adopt a trial-and-error mindset as a scientist would. That is what he did, and it worked!

So they got traffic inbound, they started selling, and they started making money. And Vivek came to realize that his business is intrinsically extremely viral.

A viral business

Vivek realized that his company is one of the few B2B platforms with a viral index. He understood that if he could get a customer who would send out a survey to a million people, it would be a good thing for his business.

Gaining value from his product

Vivek saw that for anyone to get value from his product, they would have to send it out, either to their employees or to their customers. And that would be a benefit to his business.

Why bootstrapping QuestionPro worked

The reason that Vivek was able to bootstrap QuestionPro, in the beginning, was because he did not need a lot of money to market it. And once he got started, he was able to keep the business operation going.

Living a good life and doing new things

Vivek explains that right now, he’s living the COVID life because he is waking up each day and doing whatever he feels like doing.

He is currently launching a podcast, and he is also coming up with new ideas for products.

Execution is everything

For Vivek, having the flexibility of coming up with new ideas is vital. However, it is the actual execution of the new ideas that counts for him. So much so, that he finds the final execution of an idea to be even more important than the idea itself.

Moving to Austin, Texas

Vivek started his business in Seattle, and he lived there for about ten years. He then moved the company to the San Francisco Bay Area in California. And at the beginning of 2020, he moved the company once again, this time, to Austin, Texas.

A fantastic team!

Vivek feels super blessed because he has a fantastic team, and many people will be surprised to discover that a large part of his remote sales team is based in India.

 

Links:

Vivek on LinkedIn

QuestionPro

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We’re delighted to have Tony Bevilacqua joining us today! Tony is the CEO and Founder of Cognitive3D, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

About the previous company that Tony founded

Cognitive3D is the second company that Tony has founded. His previous company was focused on revenue optimization, and it had a very heavy analytics back-end, so they made a lot of decisions which were based on collected data, and the company helped its clients build a better revenue optimization.

With his first company, Tony spent a lot of time working in the game space, and he had some early exposure to the Oculus DK1 and DK2. (The Oculus DK1 and DK2 were the very early development kits that Palmer Luckey created for the Oculus, which is a head-mounted display for virtual reality.)

Founding Cognitive3D

After selling his first company, Tony wanted to spin off and do something in the virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality space, so he ended up founding Cognitive3D late in 2015. From there, he started to construct a new way to visualize spatial outlooks.

The different definitions of virtual reality, and what they mean

Virtual Reality (VR) is when a user is wearing a head-mounted display that fully encompasses their field of view, and everything they see is computer-generated within the headset.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a pass-through experience where the user’s world is augmented. However, AR does not necessarily influence or overtake the user’s field of view.

Mixed Reality (MR) is when the user’s field of view is augmented with additional 3D items, objects, and experiences.

A headset can also be a great vehicle for data collection

Tony points out that if one thinks of the headset as a vehicle for data collection, it can provide a lot of great opportunities to understand both human behavior and human performance.

How Tony went about developing the new, cutting-edge technology

When Tony first encountered the capabilities of the new 3D technology, he saw it as a whole new opportunity to collect insights on how people interact. He understood games and entertainment well, and he was very excited about the potential that virtual reality held. He knew that by using it, he could build a product that could help game developers create even better content, so Cognitive3D started building out a platform for collecting spatial insights.

Taking his new product to the market

When Tony took his company's new product to market in 2016, he saw that plenty of game developers and entertainment companies were using it. And it was also being used for enterprise, with the two pre-dominant use cases being in consumer research, and training and simulation.

By the beginning of 2017, Tony had fully pivoted his company towards enterprise uses, focusing on consumer research, and training and simulation.

A study done with Kellogg’s

A while ago, Kellogg’s introduced a new product to the market. They wanted to understand the different placements of the product on the shelf and how they could potentially influence users to notice it.

So, Cognitive3D, working alongside with Accenture, Qualcomm, and InContext Solutions, built out a use case and scenario for them in the form of a two-cell study. The first cell was their traditional placements, and the second cell was in an alternate location that was suggested by the Cognitive 3D team, with the additional use of some signage.

In the study, they discovered that although users purchased more products from an eye-level location, they still managed to create enough sales and visibility for the new product, without cannibalizing the rest of the brand category, when they placed the new product at a lower location.

Tony explains that by placing the new product at a lower location, it left the premium display row open to generate sales in the way that it would normally do, and they also had the opportunity to introduce a new product.

Kellogg’s was able to create an eighteen percent lift in their brand sales by using the alternate insights collected from virtual reality and eye-tracking.

A qualitative approach, versus an aggregative approach

When Tony started his company, he began with a qualitative approach, using a 3D visualization platform to visualize how users interacted within the company’s content. This approach is helpful with training and simulation, for things like after-action reviews. It is also helpful with consumer research, for developing hypotheses.

The company also wanted to create more exacting insights from the data they were collecting, so they had to turn to some different methods and tools to reach their desired level of insight. They then introduced some new tools that would allow them to look at every single item within a 3D space, and provide the necessary insights on an aggregate basis. Tony explains that this approach is also somewhat quantitative because it gives an exact result, for a large number of sessions, for a particular item or group of items.

Researching

Many different CPG companies, particularly market research companies who are looking for solutions, and leverage for tool-augmented, and mixed-reality in their researching, have approached Cognitive3D.

They also do a lot of academic research for dozens of institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe. And they are often approached by brands that are looking to build insights to take to retailers.

Links:

Cognitive3D

Tony on LinkedIn

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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!

Ben Smithee is the CEO of The Smithee Group, a digital marketing agency based in New York City. On this episode, he sits with Sima Vasa to talk about what they do, how they do it, and how millennial research has affected the marketing sphere.

“I think there’s a new shift… marketing in the moment and not for the moment.” - Ben Smithee

Ben Smithee - The Smithee Group’s Pedigree

His full-service digital marketing agency focuses a lot on small-medium businesses but still serve large enterprise companies with intelligence and insights work. They work with luxury brands—the jewelry industry—, which as Ben says, is every marketer’s dream.

Their background is founded on research and analytics. With this history, they are able to take their learnings and understanding of how consumer behavior works and apply them in what they do.

Research-based Execution

Ben started his company with a big emphasis on execution and not just research. Of course, the two should go together. Effective decisions are made based on facts and figures instead of gut instinct and sometimes, politics.

“I would suggest any marketer… start in research because the fundamentals in learning: consumer insights, consumer behavior, solid research skills… it makes you so much more effective and efficient as a marketer.” - Ben Smithee

Assessments: Crux of Marketing

All of The Smithee Group’s endeavors begin with digital brand assessment. Before they launch any marketing campaign, they must first look at where the brand is and where it could potentially be. This also comes with understanding audience segmentation.

Back in the day, these assessments entail diving into and tweaking things targeting focus groups. But at present, marketers can run these tests and repeat and learn from them live on the field. This shift has come from knowing customer behavior and having the background necessary to make informed decisions.

“That's what I'm thankful for some of the background in millennial research which obviously led us to digital… and being that trusted partner.” - Ben Smithee

Quick links to connect with Ben Smithee:

Website - The Smithee Group

Twitter - The Smithee Group

Website - Ben Smithee

Twitter - Ben Smithee

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!

We’re very happy to welcome AJ Keirans, the Vice-President of Business Development at Disqo, as our guest for today!

AJ started at Disqo three months ago. Joining them was a logical decision for him because of where he is currently at in his career, and he is very proud of the unique and special work that they are doing.

Why Disqo is different

The business and events industry is changing and there has been a lot of consolidation taking place within the industry recently.

At Disqo, there are only a few areas of focus. They don’t utilize any exchanges as they prefer to use partners or river traffic. Also, the company remains its own asset and they don’t try to productize everything.

The majority of Disqo’s panel-asset is made up of US consumers, and all their discussions are transparent. And because the relationship that Disqo has with its panelists is focused on validating who the panelists are, and on quality and simplicity, it has been a very easy sell for AJ.

What AJ likes about Disqo, and what makes him proud, is the way that the company has returned to focusing on quality and propriety.

The panelists that join Disqo

The panelists that join Disqo do so because they want to be there. And AJ believes that Disqo is a unique and scalable asset for them to have.

Focusing on one panel-asset 

At Disqo, they have only one panel-asset, and that’s where their focus lies. Having only one panel-asset allows them to have a uniform strategy for how they engage with their panelists, and for how their panelists are rewarded.

Low threshold

Disqo has a very low threshold. That is part of their validation and quality process, and it allows for a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Respect

Nobody is likely to get rich from taking surveys. However, when people feel that their time and their money are being respected, they tend to be more eager to participate, and they do so more actively.

What Disqo is doing with passive metering and with the tracking of consumer behavior

What Disqo has been doing with passive metering, and with the tracking of consumer behavior, has been a point of differentiation for AJ. He explains that their approach to passive metering, and the use of rich data, is a new way of thinking. It is also a first-party, and it is scalable.

Passive metering allows Disqo to track the behavior of consumers online, to see behind their walled gardens, to see the ads they are exposed to, and it enables them to be privy to consumers’ purchase behavior.

Passive metering can be done on a desktop as well as on mobile devices and it allows for a truly rich understanding of the consumer. This is very significant right now, with the way that consumer behavior is changing due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Transparency is key

The way that Disqo tracks consumer data is done transparently, and their passive metering software is installed without any cookies. Consumers choose to participate, so they can opt-in if they want to, and they are rewarded for doing so.

Consumers need to trust a brand to allow it to track their behavior, so transparency is the key here. Allowing consumers to control what is happening with their data, and engaging them in an opt-in, is ethical, and it is also very important in maintaining their trust.

Doing something unique

The way that Disqo is going about doing its passive metering is truly unique. Everything it does is above board, honest, and transparent. This is very important because people tend to question the validity of the data.

Covid reports 

For quite some time now, the Disqo team has been asking questions and using surveys, and digital behavior, to create Covid reports. They started tracking people’s behavior as early as February, and the reports are now available on the Disqo website.

Positioned for success

AJ is convinced that Disqo is perfectly positioned for success going forward because he knows that what they do, and the way they are trusted, is invaluable and cannot be built overnight.

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Book mentioned:

Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Disqo

Today, we’re excited to have Adam Breslawsky joining us! Adam is Managing Partner, and he’s also a member of Oberon’s management committee at Oberon Securities, which is a middle-market investment banking firm.

Adam is an investment banker by trade. He grew up and gained his early experience in product groups like mergers and acquisitions, and underwriting high-yield bonds, at large investment banks. Having worked with companies across the industry spectrum, he finds the current environment to be the most challenging operating environment for all kinds of companies. This is because there are very few industries that have been spared from the carnage that has affected an enormous number of companies, due to the pandemic.

Coming up with a game plan

At this point, the initial shock of the global pandemic has worn off, so people are now doing whatever they can to marshal their resources and come up with a game plan.

Providing a framework to help people navigate their next steps

The projected loss in the market research industry, as a result of the pandemic, is about nineteen billion dollars, worldwide. In today’s episode of Data Gurus, we will be providing a framework to help business owners think about how to operate their businesses, and how they can best navigate their next steps.

Businesses are losing money

Many businesses that were making a few million dollars on an annual basis before are now losing money.

Drawing credit

Some business owners, who are very responsible cash managers with access to a line of credit, and have been operating historically without any debt, are now deciding to draw their entire line of credit in cash, even though they might not need the money right away. They are doing this to ensure that the banks don’t shut down their lines of credit.

Different types of companies

Adam has noticed that the companies that were struggling before the pandemic are the types of companies that are now filing for bankruptcy. And some of the companies that are filing for bankruptcy now can be expected to liquidate, as opposed to restructuring.

Other companies have found ways to weather the storm, and the owners of those companies are focusing on strategic, long-term initiatives.

And there are also a lot of companies that are poised to become more successful than ever. So once we have turned the corner on the coronavirus pandemic, they will perform better than they have ever done before because they will be leaner, more flexible, and more focused.

Bankruptcy versus liquidation

Both business owners and investment bankers prefer to help businesses restructure outside of the bankruptcy process, rather than liquidating the businesses.

The companies that are going to weather the storm

The companies that are most likely to weather the coronavirus storm are the companies that were operating well enough before the pandemic. Those companies have been hunkering down, negotiating with their vendors, reducing their salaries, and cutting down on their expenses as much as possible.

The mindset of the owners of those companies is evolving more rapidly than Adam has ever seen before. And they are often looking at raising some debt, as a reserve.

Qualifying for PPP (Paycheck Protection Program)

The Paycheck Protection Program involves a short application.

A company’s ability to qualify for PPP is based solely upon that company being able to demonstrate that their business has been negatively affected. And businesses also have to be small enough to qualify for PPP.

A great opportunity for some people

For some people, this is the first opportunity that they’ve had in more than a decade to acquire a business in a market that is more friendly to them, as buyers, than it is to sellers.

There are also fewer buyers now than there were before, so if someone expresses an interest in a company, it is certainly worthwhile, in the current economic climate, for the owner to pay attention to that.

Private equities

Private equity investors will usually invest through both good times and bad.

Generally speaking, the people that Adam has spoken to across the middle market continue to be active in terms of assessing opportunities. They continue to have tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars of dry powder that they are seeking to invest, cumulatively, into healthy middle-market businesses because it’s a buyers market for the first time in a very long time.

Mergers

This could be a good opportunity for companies to merge, however, the merging process could be risky, so Adam advises people to make use of a middle-man.

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Oberon Securities team

We’re very happy to have Adam Jolley joining us today.

Very soon, Adam will be starting with Survey Monkey, which will be a huge and exciting change for him.

Adam’s career path up to now has been an interesting one. He started in sales, for a small EMI market research company that had only six employees. After ten years in sales with EMI, he went into leadership and became the president of the company. That was a great achievement for Adam and it allowed him to learn a lot about all the other parts of the work that the company was doing.

What Adam loves about market research

As a market researcher, Adam was always very curious about everything that was going on. When he became the President of EMI, he was able to learn many new things, about the business side, how to communicate, how to manage employees, and even about the psychology of the business.

Throughout the time Adam spent at EMI, he continued to be driven by his insatiable curiosity about everything that was going on in the world.

What small businesses should be doing right now

Right now, as the pandemic is settling in, as the fear creeps in, and as people are starting to wonder what life will look like when it’s all finally over, Adam believes that entrepreneurs and small businesses need to be innovating.

Pivoting

The current situation with the global pandemic motivated Adam to pivot and start looking for something new. So he courageously went from being the president of an online sample company to a situation where almost all of his clients are full-service market research firms.

At Survey Monkey, a 400-million dollar publically-traded technology company, Adam is a salesperson selling market research, concept testing, ad testing, and automation, to brands.

Feeling fortunate

With all the change he’s been through, Adam still has the curiosity that came from market research. He is optimistic and he feels very lucky to have had a choice, so that he didn’t have to compromise himself or jump into any old job, just to get through the rest of the year.

Having been the president of a company was like a scarlet letter for Adam at job interviews. So he often didn’t even make it past the resume for many of the jobs he applied for. And the feedback that he got was always that those companies did not want a president coming in to shake things up at this time when everyone is unsure of what the future holds.

Now, he gets to fuel his passion, stimulate his curiosity, learn something new, and sell to a different group of people, during a time when many people are being laid off and some companies are not hiring anyone at all.

Adam’s goal

For Adam, what matters is having an end goal in sight, and planning for his career, even though he does know that it’s very easy to lose track of the journey when you’re focused on the destination.

It’s been a huge blessing for him to have had the opportunity to level and re-center himself around what he wants to do, and where his purpose lies.

Moving forward, Adam now feels that by innovating himself and having been set up for the rest of his career, he will be better suited to what life will be like at the end of the pandemic.

Living in the moment

Adam thinks that there are business lessons that we’re learning right now that can set us all up for a better future.

Although he likes to learn from the past and plan for the future, he lives in the present moment. And this moment is presenting a lot of opportunities for everyone to correct their course in both lifestyle and business. He points out that if we look into the past, or become nostalgic, we’re not going to grow, and that’s what is happening with the companies that are failing right now.

The song of the moment

Sima asked Adam to pick some songs that best describe for him a theme in our industry today.

The first song that Adam chose was I Just called To say I Love You by Stevie Wonder because it talks to him very directly about sales messaging and cold calling at this time.

His second song was Stronger Than Me by Amy Winehouse. He chose it because it reminds him of all the people in the industry who have been laid off at this time and how they all seen stronger than the leadership at this time.

The first song that Sima chose was Alright Alright by Darius Rucker because we’re all going through social distancing right now and the song reminds her that she has everything she needs, she feels fortunate to be okay at this time.

The second song Sima picked was one she listens to, to get her head together whenever she feels out of control, or if she needs a boost of energy. She chose This Is My Fight Song by Rachel Platten.

Some wonderful things

Some truly wonderful things have come out of this current pandemic situation. People have been kind and generous and they have been offering one another care and support. And business is no longer only about money-making.

And we’re also learning not to take essential workers, like teachers, for granted anymore.

Adam’s podcast

Adam’s podcast is called The Ride, and it is the research and innovation discussion exchange, focused on the innovative things that are happening in the world. It is with Adam, and Adam Dietrich, who has an analytical mind and is a genius with political polling.

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Adam’s podcast- The Ride

Today, Jacqueline Rosales, the Chief Operating Officer of SoapboxSample, joins Sima to talk about market research, entrepreneurship, COVID-19 research, and cannabis.

Jacqueline heads up multiple research divisions at the ISA Group, including SoapboxSample and icanmakeitbetter.   

SoapboxSample recently celebrated eight years. About three or four years ago, they made a strategic decision to acquire icanmakeitbetter because their focus was on digital agility and that could help Soapbox to stay flexible, nimble, and at the forefront as it continued to grow.

Some background  

In 2012, Jacqueline was asked to join the ISA Group to build a panel company. It seemed a little odd, as she had done that several years before. But what it came down to was that there were certain areas of business that still could not be covered by either traditional or new methodologies. So they decided to position themselves online with the idea of evolving into the digital space and entering the business of legally buying and selling people.

Working with academic researchers and scientists

Since the onset of COVID-19, Jacqueline has been working with academic researchers and scientists. She’s shared with them the history and evolution of market research and the consumer industry, and she’s also explained to them how the industry engages with people electronically, digitally, and telephonically. That’s where Soapbox shines because they do all three. And that put them in a very good position, two years ago, to go all-in on cannabis.

Current research

This has been a very interesting time for Jacqueline. Currently, even though Soapbox still has its typical clients, they are working mainly on cannabis and Covid-related research.

What Jacqueline is enjoying

One of the things that Jacqueline is enjoying right now is working on projects that would otherwise seem very challenging. Although these projects are still a challenge, she’s been finding that everyone is now on an equal playing field because the walls between client and partner have come down. So now they are all simply partners.

Looking at things from the data collection perspective

All the collected data forms the foundation for research. So Soapbox now has the brands, the universities, and even the big media organizations knocking on their door and asking for advice about how to collect data.

Collecting data for Covid research

Soapbox has done a lot of traditional-style Covid research, and that positioned them to move into some antibody testing research.

Also, some academic researchers needed to get a representative population of the LA County, which is very diverse, but they didn’t know how to reach everyone, so they asked Soapbox to assist them in reaching all of the various groups within the LA population.

The trick was that they needed to get people to show up at a testing site where they could drive through and have a finger-prick-based antibody test. So Soapbox had to build a system that allowed them to go through that entire process.

Significant media coverage

People got wind of what was happening with the antibody research, so after Soapbox’s pilot was released, they got some very significant local and national media coverage.

As a result, people started writing to Jacqueline and telling her their stories.

An interesting process  

Collecting data for Covid research has been a very interesting process. Soapbox was in the right place at the right time, and their nimbleness was very important in allowing them to collect the data for the Covid research.

They were able to take the information that they had, apply it to something different, and then do with it what they already knew how to do.

Getting approval

Every single step in the process has required approval from the IRB. If even a single word in a survey is changed, it has to go back and be approved once again. And Jacqueline’s entire team had to take courses on human factors research.

Pivoting

Pivoting is essential now. Some people, however, are just waiting for things to go back to what they know, and that scares Jacqueline because she’s afraid that some of the very good players in the market research space will no longer be there, going forward.

Doing impactful work

Doing the antibody research has singularly been the most important, impactful, and exciting work that Jacqueline has ever done in her life!

Ever since the media got wind of what they were doing, and they were all over the news, life has not been the same again for Jacqueline and her team.

People’s responses

Jacqueline has been closely watching the responses of people and she’s been very careful not to get caught up in any internet arguments. Because the world is very polarized right now, people are emotional, and the media is putting out very different reports from the same data.

Jacqueline is aware that she and her team are now very well regarded and also extremely hated for the work that they’ve been doing because people have such divergent points of view.

Jacqueline’s current challenge

The challenge that Jacqueline and her team now face is how to get all their information and experience out of their heads and into the world.

They realize that they will have to take a step back while still moving forward to package all the information and to help people faster.

The cannabis world

Soapbox started with cannabis at the end of 2015. Jacqueline had contracted a condition called CRPS as a result of an accident that year, and her doctors and specialists were nervous about the amount of medication she was taking. So they suggested medical cannabis to help her with her pain management and with the reduction of her related medication.

The cannabis treatment was successful and she became very passionate about it as a result. She believed in it and, as an entrepreneur, she also realized that it could be very important in the research industry, and she had the opportunity to become a trailblazer. A little more than two years ago, she and her team went all-in with it.

Now, two years later, although they initially experienced some resistance from stakeholders, they are still very involved and they have some key brands and ancillary business from that category. Cannabis is now considered an essential business.

Soapbox partnered with UCLA Law School and together, they produced an 80-page document on best practices and rules for researching with cannabis.

Jacqueline believes that going forward, the cannabis category will touch consumers every day, in many different ways.

______________

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Jacqueline’s info:

SoapboxSample

icanmakeitbetter

ISA

LRW Group

Dan Foreman joins Sima for today’s episode, to talk about his journey, as an entrepreneur, into market research. He is currently involved with the Zappy Store, Course 5i, Borderless Access, Dalia, Bakamo Social, Veylinx, MindProber, and Haystack.  

Dan consciously chose to join the market research industry when he was midway through university. He was doing a degree in psychology at the time, and he liked what he had seen in a presentation given at the university by someone from a market research company. 

In his final year, Dan interviewed for many different jobs. He was offered several positions, three of which were in market research. 

He chose the highest paid, most exciting job, with Research International, which was the largest customer research agency in the world at the time. He worked in their Drinks and Leisure Division, which was a lot of fun, and his first clients were Guinness and Alton Towers. 

Climbing the ladder

Dan spent some time in research and he also worked at a marketing agency, called Added Value, which became Kantar Added Value, and is now Kantar Consulting. He then worked, client-side, at Kimberly-Clark. After that, he went into management consultancy, and then into advertising. 

He joined Focus Vision when they were expanding outside of the US, as their first non-American employee. The business then saw extremely rapid growth, and about eighteen months later, it was sold to Schroder Ventures, and it changed from a family-owned business to a private entity. 

Taking the entrepreneurial route

Dan later started going down the entrepreneurial route. And he got involved with several different companies with lots of interesting applications to modernize the world of market research.

The three types of businesses that Dan is involved with

Dan got involved with three different types of companies. 

With some of them, he got involved right from the outset, at the startup. 

Other companies were already going and they had some revenue, but they were struggling to scale, so they needed expert help in navigating the market and figuring out their product/market fit. 

With these two types of companies, there is always an investment relationship.

The final group consists of companies that were already very well established but they had hit a plateau, so they required some fresh thinking about the business. With this group, Dan’s role is typically advisory, as these companies are looking for support and not necessarily investment.

The way that Dan connects with organizations

Dan has a very clear picture of the kind of organizations that he wants to get involved with, and of the kind of future market research that he would like to help craft. He actively seeks out businesses in these areas.

He also has many people asking him for support or an exploratory conversation about their business. 

Occasionally, he has come across completely opportunistic situations, with which he has done his best to connect the dots, bring them into the industry, and make them successful.

Some of the themes Dan considers

Recently, Dan took a position with a language technology firm. This is something he has been actively looking for, for years, because he is aware of the huge amount of opportunity that exists around all the unstructured data there, which has become even more complex and varied with the addition of videos and images. 

He is also interested in anything that enhances the understanding of the brain, and anything related to emotions and behavioral-based measurement.  

Dan is interested in anything which advances his reach, so the more brains that he can access around the world the better it is for him.

Is data the new oil?

Dan has an interest in anything which truly captures the value of data. 

Data is said to be the new oil. And if data is indeed the new oil, Dan believes that he and his people should be the richest in the world as they have access to what’s in people’s brains, hearts, and guts. And there is so much that can be done with all that information.

Dan’s perspective on data

Dan does not believe that data is the new oil because oil’s value lies in its scarcity, and data is available in abundance. And Dan knows that the data that he provides only has value when it is meshed and merged with all kinds of other data. 

Dan and many CIOs and CTOs are wrestling with how to blend all the available data, and how to effectively find navigating data as easy as going onto Google.  

Dan suspects that there are people in the background, working on ways that data can be integrated in a meaningful way, as a genuine system. Although it could take a long time to get there, he is confident that it will happen.

Gleaning insights from data

There have been some incredible discussions around the use of data since the onset of COVID-19. And all the available data can be integrated into many different models of understanding.

What frustrates Dan, however, is that countries are not consistently sharing their data. And every country and every company is in a race to find a vaccine, so there’s a lot of inconsistency around the way that the data is being shared. 

Hopefully, there will be no further loss of lives due to data being withheld.

The effects of the current situation

There are both positives and drawbacks to the current situation with COVID-19. 

One of the positives is that Dan’s marketing budget has changed dramatically. They’re no longer flying people to different places or spending money on hotels and exhibiting. So the budget falls straight to the bottom line unless the company is exploring some of the digital communication that it did not have the budget, the inclination, or the time for, previously.

On the down-side, Dan is big on in-person conversations, particularly when it comes to deal-making. And that can’t happen at the moment, so these things have had to pause for the next few months. 

This can be very frustrating and mentally draining. 

 __________________________

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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!

Dan’s info:

Dan’s LinkedIn Profile - linkedin.com/in/dforeman

zappistore.com  (ZappiStore)

daliaresearch.com/home/  (Dalia)

hatted.co.uk/  (Hatted)

www.bakamosocial.com (Bakamo Social)

Twitter - TEDx_RTW

David Dixon and Pete Cain join Sima in today’s episode to discuss marketing analytics and econometric modeling. 

David Dixon is the Managing Partner of Marketscience. Before launching Truesight (now named Marketscience), David was global CEO and managing partner of Ninah Consulting.

Pete Cain is the Executive Partner of Marketscience. Prior to the Marketscience merger with Truesight, Peter was the sole founder and CEO of Marketscience, which he established in 2012 with the goal of blending academic, commercially relevant analytics and strategic advice for business. 

David and Peter each have more than twenty years of experience in the marketing industry, with David focusing on marketing analytics, management consulting, and organizational leadership, while Pete’s expertise includes commercial and academic experience in economics and marketing science designing econometric business solutions for blue-chip companies and organizations.

Marketscience provides custom application of the latest statistical and econometric techniques to inform marketing investment decisions and engages the organization through training and hands-on support. Marketscience offers various service models, such as Whether you are Do-it-yourself (DIY), Do-it-for-me (DIFM), or Do-it-with-me (DIWM). They not only measure ROI but help the client by managing and understanding it.

Marketing Analytics 

Marketing is about economics, and about how consumers behave. If you think about marketing analytics as the subject, it is the economics of human behavior.

The benefit of having worked 12 years in the media agencies has given David a unique perspective of the end-user, and how marketing decisions are made in the absence of analytics.

Marketing Attribution

Once Marketscience has an understanding of the consumer consumption point of view, then they can figure out how best to market it, arriving at the decision from an economic perspective.

Consumer behavior has become a lot more complex and sophisticated over the last twenty years, when the more you charged, the higher the price, and the less volume you sell. Today, marketing works to shift those demand curves and shift people’s perception of pricing, sometimes to obscure pricing or make them less sensitive to it. Therefore, the way consumer behavior is measured has also become a lot more complex and sophisticated.

Intel Case Study

Looking to reduce budgets, the CFO of Intel brought in Marketscience. Marketscience ran the models, and what they found was that long-term drivers tend to be more perceptual things that are what consumers are thinking, versus the economy, because people act on what they think. 

They were looking to understand how the perception of Intel as a technology leader was changing, and how it was changing by different kinds of important customer segments.

These models reveal opportunities to build a stronger brand and leverage brand investments and to reduce short-term investments because you have a stronger brand. When you have a stronger baseline that makes all of your short-term dollars work harder. 

The Future of Transparency 

Both David and Pete agree that things are getting better as organizations try to bring more transparency in the day-to-day trading of digital media. There is much more awareness now, especially with the current COVID-19 event as more people are spending time at home. 

We will likely have to wait months or years to fully understand how this event has shaped the economy.

With our families in proximity, this could shift even more perceptions about the marketing environment and make stronger demands on brands to be more responsible and responsive. 

David states that as economists, rather than econometricians, it’s vital to think on how this is going to impact the hearts and minds of people and the supply chains, and how this will all come together to shape the economy going forward. 

What they often see these days is they get results from suppliers, but they need to explain them to their stakeholders with sufficient detail to gain credibility, according to Pete. 

Clients can take the software that Marketscience builds and see where the parameters come from. They can also see where the decomposition comes from, where their response comes from,  and know that that is the genesis of the intelliwork. Thus, stakeholders can believe what they’re seeing because they see precisely where the results came from.

Go forward and keep experimentation in mind. Use model insights, try to apply them, and remodel and continue to evolve your level of understanding through this process.

________________________

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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!

Marketscience

Twitter - @marketscience_