Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Michaela Mora, president of Relevant Insights

Find Michaela Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.relevantinsights.com

[00:02]

My guest today is Michaela Mora, President of Relevant Insights.  Those are my favorite kind of insights, by the way.  

[00:10]    

Yes, they are not any insights.  They are relevant.

[00:13]

I love that.  So, what do you think about the conference where Day 1 has ended at the NEXT Conference in Chicago?  Tell me what you think.    

[00:21]

Well, this is my first time coming to this conference.  This year I have been to several conferences, and I see some subjects coming up on a repeat.  It’s a lot about video and capturing data, more unstructured data and focus on tools at the same time figuring out how can we capture the full consumer or the full participant in many different areas.  And usually, the challenge of that is at the back-end. Many tools are very good at capturing the front-end. Then you go home and then you have to analyze.

[01:12]

Do the work.

[01:13]   

Yes.  And that’s where still...  I test a lot of tools and there’s still some time to go.   

[01:23]

Does one session stand out as your favorite?

[01:25]      

I really liked the one from “Who Murdered Advertising Effectiveness?”  Was a very good presentation, different style. 

[01:35]

“Who Murdered Advertising Effectiveness?”  That was a very sassy title, wasn’t it? 

[01:40]

Yes, it is.

[01:41] 

That was Lucy, the speaker.  She’s from Keen as Mustard, I believe.

[01:46]

Yes.  Actually, it is a way to tell the story, to discuss a subject about elements that are affecting our industry.  It’s about changing times, and who is behind the changes and how we’re all involved in that. And so, that was a different way of presenting and discussing market research issues.     

[02:12]

Tell me about Relevant Insights.  What do you guys do?

[02:14]

Well, we try to help clients to make profitable decisions.  It’s about finding the right questions so that we can come back and help the clients to make the decisions.  So we do both qualitative and quantitative, both in the more traditional research but also in the user experience, user research methods.

[02:41]  

Are seeing an increase in user experience?

[02:44]  

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.  There is these conversions between the customer experience field and the user experience.  They come from two different branches of research. The customer experience, for me, is just a renaming of the traditional customer loyalty, voice of the customer field. 

[03:02]

It totally feels like VoC, market research, yeah.

[03:05]  

Yeah, but the user research comes more from human factors.

[03:11]

Yep, products…  

[03:12]

Usability, interaction, ergonomics.  And in some companies, they are used interchangeably.  If you look at it as different focus on different areas of the customer journey, essentially...  Because the user experience right now has been mainly focused on how users are interacting whether on your website, your application but is going more towards the product and in a little more task base how you use that.  But that also has been an area where customer experience has come in like product testing, concept testing. So it’s a lot of mixed terms.     

[04:02]   

One of the things that I find really interesting is it feels like a lot of the work that is actually being done between by a market researcher, which is my background, and user experience is stuff like...  I mean in 2001 or 2002, I was on-site at Intuit in Mountain View, California. They had built usability labs, and we were doing eye-tracking and exercises where we would say,

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Lesley Rohrbaugh, director or research at Consumer Technology Association.

Find Lesley Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.cta.tech

[00:02

Lesley with CES.  Thanks for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast today.  

[00:07]    

Thanks for having me.

[00:08]

We are live at the NEXT Conference in Chicago.  What do you think about the show?

[00:12]

It’s amazing.  It’s so nice to be here with so many of our colleagues in the research community.  A lot of great turnout from all sides of the research community. So we have exhibitors here, and we have analysts on the corporate side, the non-profit side.  So it’s great to pick each other’s brains.

[00:28]

CES is a big deal.  I mean it’s the trade show of trade shows of trade shows, right, the mother ship.  But I hear that you guys have a track specific for research. 

[00:39]   

We do.  So, a few years ago, we started a research summit at the show that precedes the actual show days.  And we have a ton of participants there. We have multiple panels; we have speakers from big and small companies.  So we have startups and then we have the big, large corporations. But it’s attended by a few thousand people, and all we talk about for a few days is just research, research, research when it comes to technology.      

[01:06]

So, the application of technology to enable customer conversations sort of bent?  Is it user experience research, market research, kind of broad umbrella of just consumer points of view?  

[01:22]      

It’s a mix.  We also have B-to-B in there as well.  So, with technology, you have to be able to adopt it somehow, and what better way than to talk to companies in their space and see how they’re actually using things like voice, things like AI, robotics, all these different areas.  So it’s a mix of folks, and it’s really interesting to see the application of things like Artificial Intelligence being built into the data computerization and seeing how people are actually making these ideas come to life.    

[01:49]

I loved your talk this morning, especially as it related to smart devices.  The microwave is still frustrating to me because of all the stupid buttons on it.  

[01:58]

Right.

[01:59] 

And a microwave that actually can identify the objects, the items that are going in there, and then smartly uses that information to not burn the popcorn, as you aptly said, right?  Why don’t you give them sort of the highlights of your 30-minute chat? 

[02:14]

Yeah, sure.  So, obviously, 30 minutes is not long to talk about the entire 350+ billion-dollar technology world.  But some of the highlights include 5G: where we are? where we’re going? what it means? who’s driving it? which is really the industry as opposed to the consumer, which is a little bit different.  Additionally, we talked about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality: how that impacts both the consumer and research and insights. And then also things like healthcare technology. We touched on that a little bit.  There’s a lot going on in that space. But, overall, I think some of the underlying technologies that we see throughout all of these products include Artificial Intelligence and the real state of Artificial Intelligence and where we are.  Things are not necessarily just smart anymore; they’re intelligent. So, I think that’s an underlying theme we see in a lot of these products.   

[03:08]

That’s an interesting distinction that I have, probably moronically, never made before your talk.  This idea between smart and intelligent. Because one is more of information in action – it’s doing stuff with it and then forms and outcomes.  Going back to the smart or intelligent whatever, microwave,

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews John Tansey, director of business development at Dapresy.

Find John Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.dapresy.com

[00:02]

My guest today is John Tansey with Dapresy.  I still can’t say the name.

[00:08]    

Dapresy, Data Presentation Systems.

[00:12]

Dapresy.  I don’t know.  Anyway, I apologize.  

[00:15]

That’s OK.

[00:16]

Rudy has been on the show before.  I’ve been a big fan of your guys’ brand.  What is going on right now in the world of Dapresy?

[00:23]   

I’m still trying to figure this out because this is my second week on the job.  

[00:27]

Welcome.

[00:28]      

Thank you very much.  It’s exciting and, overall, joining, it’s clear to me they’re experiencing a lot of growth.  There’s a lot of hiring. We’re opening up a new office in Sarajevo.

[00:38]

Congratulations.  That’s huge.

[00:40]

A lot of it is sales and marketing.  And then we’re trying to figure out who’s going to do the work that we’re selling to.  So, there’s positions open for that as well.  

[00:48] 

How exciting.  I mean you guys offer industry-leading, customized data dashboards that pull data in.  I always thought of it as quite literally as a BI for insights. Is business evolved into a different direction or is that still the core competency?    

[01:07]

It’s still the core.  And the target has always been mid to large market research companies as well as enterprise but we now have a Do-It-Yourself option coming out, which is a much lower entry point in terms of cost.  So we’re going back to many of the people who maybe have been turned off in the past with this new offering going forward.  

[01:25]

So that is going to unlock a whole different set of customers, it sounds like.

[01:31]

Sure.

[01:31]  

What do they look like?  What are the personas? Do you know?

[01:35] 

Users of?  These are people who respond...  Well, the short answer is, “No, I don’t know.  I’m trying to figure this out.”  

[01:42]

I love it.

[01:44]  

You have owners buying it.  You know from smaller market research companies and analysts using it.  

[01:51]

You think about like enterprise research or enterprise solutions used to be sold at an executive level.  These are like big bundled products, expensive, difficult to deploy. And now, like in modern context, it feels to me that any business that’s here as a technology-based business that doesn’t have a premium DIY (I don’t need to talk to anybody) offering in the next three years is going to have a big problem with growth.  You have to operate at that level. One of the things, I think, that SurveyMonkey has done a great job of over its whatever 15 years is exactly operating in that space. Like it fits like a CRM or SalesForce or MailChimp. I feels like a tool that I can just plug into my platform so that I can easily get to things. But, on the other side of it, I really believe you have to have the Do-It-For-Me option as well because, especially in insights, things can get complex; people can get busy.  And we’re happy to write checks to solve those problems.      

[02:52]

Sure, I think that works well for enterprise and people who, unlike you and I, did not grow up in this industry and did not work as a research analyst and kind of just need a reporting solution and somebody to do it for them.     

[03:05]   

Totally.

[03:06]

And the thing I love about the product is it’s designed for market researchers.  You mentioned Business Intelligence tools. You wrestle when you try and squeeze market research projects into those tools, but this is designed for people like us.

[03:20] 

Exactly, exactly.  All right, great.

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Ellen Kolstø, Design Principal at IBM Q. 

Find Ellen Online:

LinkedIn

Website: www.ibm.com/us-en

[00:02]

My guest today is Ellen.  Ellen’s been on the show before.  She’s with IBM Q, right?

[00:08]    

Well, yeah.  I’m actually now working in the quantum computing space.  I used to work on AI for two-and-a-half years, which is how I happen to be here, talking about AI.  

[00:17]

How did your talk go?  

[00:19]

It was great.  We had a lot of really interesting people in the room, a lot of discussion around “Are you ready for AI?”, “What does it involve?” in terms of having successful AI or AI that works reliably.  So we had a great discussion. 

[00:31]

That’s awesome.  This is my first time at the NEXT Conference.  Have you been here before?

[00:35]   

No, this is my first time too.

[00:37]

What do you think?

[00:38]      

Oh, I think it’s great.  I think that anytime you can get a bunch of market researchers together to talk about what’s going on, it’s super helpful.  And you learn something from what everyone else is doing. I took a bunch of mental notes even in my own session of people mentioning things.  So, yeah, it’s helpful.

[00:53]

It’s fun; that’s fun.  So, what are you seeing as...?  Were you able to participate in any of the earlier sessions?

[01:00]

[Sighs] No, I flew in late last night.

[01:01] 

That’s what I thought.

[01:02]

And then we were preparing for this morning’s presentation.  So, I learned a lot in my own session so far.

[01:11]

Ahh, that’s...  What’s your big takeaway?

[01:13]

That everyone is super excited about AI, but they don’t know how to get started.  

[01:19]  

Totally.

[01:19]  

And my view point on it is it’s the same sort of test-and-learn scenario of any part of market research:  take a small part of what you’re doing, test it out, figure out what you’re learning and move from there rather than trying to boil the ocean.  And I think that was what a lot of the people who tried it were talking about as well in the session.  

[01:43]

So, what is one practical way...  Can people engage with you or IBM to help in a similar way to like AWS?

[01:52]  

Uh, well, that’s a good question.  Uh, that’s a hard one for me to answer.

[02:00]

Are engagements usually...  Like when I think about IBM, you know this is enterprise-to-enterprise sort of like an engagement, right?  And that’s kind of like the sweet spot, I think, of why people turn to IBM in that kind of context.

[02:12]

Right.  I mean we have cloud services and we do have Watson on the cloud.  So you can..

[02:18]   

Oh Watson, yeah, right.  Exactly.

[02:20]

Yeah, you can access Software as a Service through IBM as well.  So you can engage in that way. I just wasn’t sure if you meant me personally, or...

[02:29]  

No, no, no, I’m sorry.  That was a bad question.    

[02:30]

I was like, “Well, you could, but that would be a LOT of people.”  

[02:33]

That would be a lot of people.

[02:34]

Uh, but you can actually use IBM’s products, but we create products in the space that help other people build models.  So the question is whether you want to build your own model or whether you want use a service that already has models built for you. 

[02:49]

Oh, got it.  That’s actually super interesting.

[02:51]

Yeah, it’s a decision to make for sure.

[02:55]  

Good.  Yeah, so, you’re flying out today?

[02:58]

I am.

[02:59]

Are you really?

[03:00]

I’ve got client meetings tomorrow.  So, it’s like no rest for the weary.

[03:04]

No rest for the wicked.  I think is how that goes.  

[03:05]

I know the wicked.

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews David Paull, CEO of Engagious.

Find David Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.engagious.com

[00:02]

David Paull, Engagious.

[00:04]    

Yes, sir.  Great to see you.

[00:06]

One of the leading podcasts in the market research space.  What do you think of all the lists for podcasts that’s been popping up?  

[00:14]

Well, I think it’s great that the industry is taking notice and wanting to share it.  I’m certainly gratified by the ones that we make it on. You know you sit in…  

[00:22]

Which is all of them.

[00:23]   

Well, thank you.  Likewise, for you.  I’m always in good company.  You know you sit in a room with a microphone and you talk into it.  And you hope that on the other end somewhere, someone is going to listen.  And to this day, podcast analytics are still not great.  

[00:38]

They’re terrible.

[00:38]      

So it’s hard to know if people are listening.  It’s even harder to know how long they’re listening.  I don’t care if someone starts it. I want to know if they get past 30 seconds.  Are they actually sticking with it so that I know there’s value in the work we’re doing?  

[00:52]

On your platform, are you able to deduce if they actually listen at all?  All I’m getting is downloads.  

[00:56]

Yeah, it’s really just download.  We also put them on YouTube, and YouTube will tell us if we get a view.  But they count a view after 30 seconds, which doesn’t do me..

[01:05] 

Yeah, totally.  How’s your YouTube?  So, this is one of things that actually I’m doing right now.  It started last week. We’re taking all of our backlog of audio, and we’re then converting it into YouTube.  Are you doing that?

[01:20]

Yeah, we’ve done that from Day 1.  We create a video version, and for most of them, when I’m not recording video, it’s just a head shot over a... 

[01:28]

Something moving.

[01:29]

Yeah, something moving.  But we do get... YouTube is the No.2 search engine in the world.  So it only makes sense to have your content there. And we are starting to do more and more video interviews, either in person or over Zoom or something.  So those fit really nicely on YouTube as well.  

[01:49] 

That’s awesome.  So, you are using Zoom.  I’m actually thinking about converting over to Zoom for the interviews as opposed to...  I have a special like fancy-pants app that gets rid of latency issues, but it doesn’t do video.  

[02:04]  

Right, right.  And so, Zoom, I will tell you, nothing’s perfect, right?  So, Zoom is a great application. The video quality is pretty good.  Sometimes the audio will actually be slightly out of syn with the video.  There’s latency on the audio. Now, the fix for that, of course, is when I bring it into final cut to edit it, I just break off the audio file and I move it a few half-seconds one way or the other and everything synches back up.  So there’s work-arounds. It’s a little bit of a hassle, but...   

[02:34]

But the good news is that it doesn’t sound like it’s an elongated... 

[02:38]  

It doesn’t get progressively worse, yeah.  It seems to just be off a little bit.  

[02:43]

Favorite guest so far this year.  Who is it?  

[02:47]

Favorite guest so far this year.   

[02:50]

We love them all, we love them all.

[02:51]

It’s an episode I haven’t even released yet.  He’s a graphic designer out of Portland named Aaron Draplin.  He’s done work for Nike. He’s a prominent speaker in the graphic design world as well.  He’s a larger-than-life character. He told me some incredibly funny stories as well as some really useful tips.  We’re probably not going to release that until later in the year. So, that’s a little anti-climactic.

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews David Almy, CEO of Insights Association.

Find David Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.insightsassociation.org

[00:02]

Hi, this is Jamin.  You’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast.  David Almy is the guest today. I am going to play our conversation with you.  We kind of picked up at a neat spot, I think, talking about trends in the space, how insights are becoming a cornerstone of success for modern businesses.  Enjoy.

[00:23]   

Well, from ’82 to ’84, I wrote an article called Business Aviation – The Fortune 500, which was a correlation of the use of business aircraft to financial performance.  

[00:39]

That’s fascinating.  

[00:42]

Yeah, and so, and it looked at the Fortune 500 and said that if you owned a business jet, for instance, how’d you do.  And I did it for three years times 500 companies, and big surprise to you probably is that there was a correlation between performance and business-jet ownership. 

[01:00]

Wow!

[01:01]   

Now, the great question then is whether or not it was causal or...

[01:05]

Always the question

[01:06]      

…or otherwise.  Having done that 82’ to 84’, very long time ago, you come here and you listen to your commen

[01:15]

Throw that thing out there.

[01:16]

And I have never seen any of that correlation study in this industry.

[01:23] 

Why is that?

[01:24]

Because this industry is not as evolved, not as mature (a funny word to use) as the business-jet industry, which has been around for 60, 70 years bigger 

[01:37]

Before…

[01:37]

Yeah, yeah.  So it’s an evolution of the industry’s group-think, if you will.  So, you announced to me this morning Watermark. And I’m going like, “Holy crap!”  This is exactly what I need, been looking for and did 38 years ago or whatever it is.

[01:57]  

Totally.

[01:57]  

And I went to look for it and couldn’t find it.  So you’ve got to tell me where do find it.

[02:02]

I’ll give it to you.  I have it on my desktop, well, laptop.

[02:06]  

OK, good.  It’s a keen interest, and I think particularly when you looked at the Insights Association, our mandate is economic development, is what it is.  It’s a not-for-profit 501C6.

[02:20]

That’s interesting you say that.  I did not know that.  

[02:22]

Yeah, that’s what we’re here to do.  Per the IRS, that’s our reason for being, is the growth of the industry.  And it’s a lovely term in the IRS regs, but our mandate is the growth of the industry from we draw our members.  That’s different than the growth of our members because it’s broader, bigger than that. And I’ve always loved that turn of phrase, you know.  So, come back to your Watermark, I’d really love to see that study and probably, if they want to do it again, participate in it somehow, support it ‘cause that’s... 

[03:01]   

Yeah, I’ve just been in Twitter conversations with one of their principals.  I can’t remember her name offhand but, yeah, I’ll do whatever I can to help connect.  

[03:14]

Yeah, that’d be great, that’d be great.  

[03:16]  

For sure.  I mean it’s a big deal, and it’s a great paper, I think.

[03:22]

It is a big deal, and it’s one that I kind of know in a different life.

[03:26]

Yeah, totally, it’s funny that we haven’t been driving that conversation though, to your point.  And I think that that’s systemic, or it’s endemic – anyways, it’s one of the “demics” – where we have had this like stuck-in-time framework.  And, if you pull back, you can see that... I started my research career in ’96. Market research was its thing in a department inside of a large corporation.  And then, tools came around. Remember Confirmit launched one of the first ...

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting.

Find Brianna Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.sylverconsulting.com

[00:02]

We are live at the NEXT Conference.  Here’s an interview I was able to pull off with Brianna Sylver with Sylver Consulting.  Enjoy.

[00:11]   

Congratulations on a great talk because at lunch I had a table of...  I was sitting at a table of six other people, me and… seven. I asked them their favorite moment of the day, and they all unanimously agreed that it was the Storytelling Workshop.    

[00:25]

Oh, that’s fantastic to hear.  

[00:27]

Yeah, swear to God.  Yeah, swear to God. Anyway, and then they talked about it for a good five to ten minutes afterwards.  It definitely hit a chord. Is that something you’re seeing in the space? Like, we need better storytelling.  

[00:40]

Definitely, I think we need better storytelling.  And I think... part of the reason why this talk exists is because I feel like a lot of the stuff that you hear about storytelling today is like it’s sort of very 10,000-foot surface level as far as how to do it.  And this particular framework really gets into the nitty-gritty as far as how to structure a story and what is the purpose and why you’re telling the story. Who are you telling the story to? How do you connect with them?  How do you communicate? So it goes through all the of four steps associated with that. But it makes me super happy to hear that because you know sometimes you’re talking and you’re like...    

[01:18] 

What’s happening?

[01:19]

Yeah, like are people resonating with this?  Are they not resonating? So I wasn’t quite sure.  It’s pure delight right now.  

[01:25]      

Yeah, yeah, seriously that’s absolutely the truth too.  Anyway, it was good; it was really good, really valuable.  Another thing that I think you’ll find interesting is... So, I’ve done about 140 episodes, which is to say I’ve talked a lot.  I always ask, “What is your biggest problem?” in a full interview. Inevitably – I would say 7 out of 10 times – storytelling is the big problem, like a lack of storytelling inside of the organization, which then connects... effects change or empowers the insight or extends the power of the insight to effect change.  Really, the quality of the story as opposed to the degree of quality of the research, which is a little bit counterintuitive, is in a lot of ways the missing ingredient from a brand point of view.          

[02:25]

I would 100% agree.  it’s interesting because I came to the market research industry by way of design.  So, I’m actually a graphic designer initially, and then I have a master’s degree in Human Centered Communication Design and Design Strategy.  And part of the value of design is sort of taking a human-centered design approach is in your ability to visualize the vision, and a big piece of that is storytelling.  And so, that’s always been just sort of my framework for how I approach my work. And so, when I started to bring in more of the market research side, which I did purposely because I think sometimes the insights gathering from a design perspective at least from a method and even frankly from a quality perspective sometimes can be a little lacking or flat...  And so, I found that the market research side of the equation really helped to create robustness that was needed truly I think to make really solid decisions. But now bringing in these two pieces of like, I would say that the market research is kind of the “What,” and the design is the possibilities for what that could mean.  

[03:38]

Oh, interesting.

[03:38] 

And then the other aspect of our business brings a strategy and that’s kind of like,

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Anne Beall, CEO of Beall Research.

Find Anne Online:

LinkedIn

Website: http://beallrt.com

[00:02]

My guest today is Anne Beall, Beall Research.  She’s been on the show a couple of times. We are live today at the NEXT Conference in Chicago.  Anne, welcome to the show.

[00:10]    

Thanks so much for having me.  So nice to see you.  

[00:13]

Yeah, nice to see you too.  So, I’ve never been to the NEXT Conference.  I assume you have ‘cause it’s in Chicago.  

[00:16]

I haven’t either.  It’s fabulous, isn’t it?  

[00:18]

I actually really like it.  It’s a smaller show. They have another show, Converge, in L.A.  I really think you should attend, at least as an attendee. I don’t even know if they do exhibit floor.  Last year was the first year. Like this one, it has just a... It’s chock full of great brands. So, good attendees…   

[00:38]   

Great speakers.

[00:39]

Fantastic speakers!  Yeah, totally. And you’re speaking later on today.  

[00:42]      

I am.

[00:43]

Tell us what you’re talking about.

[00:44]

I am talking about the role of emotions in purchasing.  So, we’ve actually done some really exciting research on which emotions lead to purchasing, which emotions lead to re-purchasing, and which emotions lead to brands getting recommended or not.  

[01:00] 

The actionability of that.  So, understanding as a brand understands their consumer and what’s winning in the marketplace, it sounds like what you’re really offering is helping them connect the dots to the emotional outcome of that consumption or purchase or however you want to think about it. 

[01:18]

So, we are increasingly of the opinion that people don’t think their way through the marketplace; they feel their way through it.

[01:25]

Totally.  I do.

[01:26]

Yes, me too.  And the brands that we engage with are the brands that give us a positive emotional response.  And the brands we really engage with give us a really positive emotional response. Apple would be a good example of one.  

[01:37]  

And Coke for me is like...  I like Coke. Actually, I don’t like Coke.  This is funny. I buy Coke when I’m not feeling good.  It’s such a weird assumption behavior. 

[01:47]  

It makes you feel better though, doesn’t it?  Comforts you. And Coke is, actually, a good example.  That’s actually a brand we reference in my talk in terms of a brand that’s actually driven a lot of emotional connection with consumers.  And if they had access to my model, which I think they must have at some point done that... 

[02:06]

Hint, hint, those who are listening from Coke.

[02:08]  

They have used those principles that we’ve uncovered extremely effectively.  

[02:12]

Got it.  That’s really cool stuff.  

[02:14]

Yeah, it’s really great.

[02:16]   

You’re also exhibiting at...  Does Beall Research exhibit a lot?   

[02:20]

We, actually, have never exhibited.  This is our very first time. So we have brought the crew out.  We are, as you know, located in Chicago. So it’s a little bit easier to have my staff here and fabulous colleagues.  And we’re also showing our books that we have written. We have a new book called Reading the Hidden Communications around You, a guide to reading the non-verbal communications of your colleagues and customers.  Body language, so to speak, and other books. As you all know, we do publish a fair bit in the firm.   

[02:51]  

Awesome.  Yeah, you guys, about two a year is what I’m seeing as the average for a decade.  

[03:00]

Not quite that many, but.

[03:01]

Not quite?

[03:01]

…we’re glad that you think so.  

[03:03]

The last book was really interesting.  I read that.

My guest today is Estrella Lopez-Brea, Global Head of Consumer Connections at Cereal Partners Worldwide. Established in 1991, Cereal Partners Worldwide is a joint venture between General Mills and Nestlé to produce breakfast cereals. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and markets cereals in more than 130 countries.

Prior to joining Cereal Partners Worldwide, Estrella was the Knowledge & Insights Senior Analyst for Coca-Cola where she guided the BU’s decision making processes and development of the Coke Masterbrand strategy and their innovation pipeline.

Find Estrella Online:

LinkedIn

Website: https://www.nestle-cereals.com/global/en

Find Us Online:

www.happymr.com

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

This Episode’s Sponsor: 

This episode is brought to you by G3 Translate. The G3 Translate team offers unparalleled expertise in foreign language translations for market researchers and insight professionals across the globe. Not only do they speak hundreds of languages, they are fluent in market research. For more information, please visit them at G3Translate.com.

[00:00]

On Episode 220, I'm interviewing Estrella Lopez Brea, Global Head of Consumer Connections of Cereal Partners Worldwide. But first, a word from our sponsor.

[00:09]

We'll take just a moment and thank G3 Translate. They have been a very valuable partner for Happy Market Research podcast, and the work that we have been doing here. I greatly appreciate it. They transcribe each one of our interviews, which range from 20 to 40 minutes, for free for us. It is a humongous benefit because it improves overall accessibility of the content that we are creating jointly with the research community. They have a unique approach. They are able to turn things around within 24 hours. I am very, very grateful for G3 Translate, and I hope that you will consider them for your next translation company project. Take the time. Go ahead and go on social media. You can find them, simply Google “G3 Translate”. That's the number “3” and you will find the website as well as on LinkedIn. It would mean literally the world to me if you take the time to do that. Thanks so much.

[01:07]

Hi, I'm Jamie Brazil, and you're listening to the Happy Market Research podcast. My guest today is Estrella Lopez Brea.

[01:16]

Correct.

[01:17]

Yay! Global Head of Consumer Connections at Cereal Partners Worldwide. Established in 1991, Cereal Partners Worldwide is a joint venture between General Mills and Nestle to produce breakfast cereals. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and market cereals to more than 130 countries. Prior to joining Cereal Partners Worldwide, Estrella was the Knowledge and Insights Senior Analyst at Coca-Cola, where she guided the business units, decision-making process and development of Coke’s master brand strategy and their innovation pipeline. Estrella, thank you so much for being on the Happy Market Research podcast today.

[01:54]

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

[01:59]

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

[02:06]

Okay, so I am originally from Madrid, from Spain, but I live in Lausen, in Switzerland. I have two kids, in case that is interesting. I have two kids, and they are starting to approach the dangerous zone of being a teenager. Particularly about my parents, they are now retired, but they have been very, very active all their life. My father is a lawyer, and my mom, she had passion for HR so she was a HR Director; very busy people, very focused on their carriers, but at the same time very focused on their children. I have three brothers too. Well, that has influenced my career. That's interesting because they both taught me different values. And I think it's coming also from what they did for a living and that influenced certainly my carrier path and my choice to do consumer insights.

My dad,