On this episode, host Sima Vasa leads a candid panel discussion on the state of data quality with four industry leaders: Dyna Boen, EVP/Managing Director of Escalent; Jon Kay, Principal Market Research Manager of Intuit; Bob Fawson, Co-Founder of Data Quality Co-Op; and Steven Snell, EVP, Head of Research of Rep Data. Together, they explore the growing challenges of fraud, trust and integrity in research, and the solutions needed to safeguard reliable insights.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Introduction.
03:26 Prospect panel data quality has declined sharply.
08:30 The industry faces a coordination problem in data quality.
11:42 Good-looking fraud now impacts up to a quarter of respondents.
18:20 Vendor tools differ greatly in detecting fraud and inattention.
24:28 Respondent experience is critical to achieving trustworthy results.
26:38 Brands cannot rely on flawed data for product launches or tracking.
31:02 Industry change is accelerating, creating both risk and opportunity.
32:54 Real progress begins when clients ask vendors the tough questions.
35:06 Data quality is a game of inches, not silver bullets.

Resources Mentioned:

Escalent | Website
Intuit | Website
Data Quality Co-Op | Website
Rep Data | Website

Thanks for listening to the “Data Gurus” podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech

On this episode, host Sima Vasa talks to David Allison, Founder of The Valuegraphics Research Company, about replacing ineffective demographic targeting with values-based segmentation. Drawing on over one million surveys across 180 countries, David explains why demographics have a 90% fail rate and how identifying what truly matters to people can increase effectiveness eightfold.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Introduction
05:03 The human brain decides solely based on values alignment.
06:36 One million surveys reveal 56 values driving human behavior.
09:21 Values are fixed for life and guide all decisions.
13:10 Demographic targeting carries a built‑in 90% fail rate.
14:33 Generational cohorts are far from homogeneous in reality.
16:03 Psychographics describe the past but fail to predict actions.
18:39 Values segmentation identifies the real triggers for engagement.
23:00 A “pink van” story illustrates values‑based recruiting success.
29:06 Values can reveal larger audiences than demographics suggest.
35:00 Values‑based targeting is eight times more effective.

Resources Mentioned:

The Valuegraphics Research Company | Website

Thanks for listening to the “Data Gurus” podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech

On this episode, host Sima Vasa talks to James Turner, Founder and CEO of Delineate, about redefining data collection and insight generation in today’s fast-paced market research landscape. James shares his journey from mining engineer to data mining expert and explains how Delineate bridges the gap between traditional research practices and agile, technology-driven approaches.

Key Takeaways:

(02:22) Started as a mining engineer before transitioning to data mining.

(07:47) Industry disruption in the 2010s drove significant changes.

(10:02) Speed, quality and cost efficiency reshape client research.

(12:16) Successful disruptors reshape categories with innovative, lasting ideas.

(14:31) Scaling innovation is tricky, even for large companies.

(16:57) Old survey designs create noise and reduce data quality.

(20:44) Human touch remains vital in interpreting client reporting.

(23:17) Situational research helps with product innovation and demand space.

(26:28) AI co-pilots are creating significant momentum in the research industry.

(29:56) Research now stands at the forefront of the data ecosystem.

Resources Mentioned:

Delineate Website

Thanks for listening to the Data Gurus podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech

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.

Links:
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Sima@Infinity-2.com
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Schlesinger Group

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!

LinkedIn

Twitter

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!

Sima is excited to share an encore episode she did with Menaka Gopinath, Lead of Social Intelligence and Communities at Ipsos, in which they sit down to discuss the use of social media in social intelligence to help answer business questions.

OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SPECTRUM
As the market has matured with social intelligence, there’s a lot of amazing things happening in the social intelligence realm for insights, but it’s not being leveraged as broadly it could be.

On the flip side, the people who are using social listening tools across the board in marketing and digital functions probably could be getting a lot more insight out of it.

The data is already available, but there’s so many ways to use it more strategically.

DEFINING SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
This can be many things to many people, but from the perspective of Ipsos, it’s about leveraging the datasets for insights.

From a classic research sense, most clients are using a social listening tool and at the baseline they are listening to what people are saying about their brand, and may be listening to their core competitive set. From the purposes of Ipsos, this is not necessarily social intelligence, as much as it is social listening, which is still an important aspect of marketing.
How one uses the dataset to address a core set of business objectives from an insights perspective is at the heart of social intelligence.

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE AND USE CASES
Some of the core areas where a lot of Ipsos’ work is done is in market understanding and category landscape.

Understanding what your category looks like can be a difficult question to answer these days, so what social data can provide from a very consumer-centric perspective is how people are talking about the “need” or the “occasion”. You don’t have to start from the perspective of brands. This is a different way of approaching market landscape work.

Cultural trends and forecasting and foresight against what is bubbling up and what is worth focusing on versus what might just be a flash in the pan is another area where Ipsos is using social intelligence a lot.

APPROACH IN MARKET ENGAGEMENT
In the context of market landscape there are different ways of approach, as Menaka explains in a high-level overview.

This is ultimately driven by what consumers are organically saying about these brands in the social conversation.

Imagery is a critical part of the analysis, and video is an emerging area in terms of the technology capabilities for analyzing, but in terms of what is done with it is gaining in importance.

Contextual research is always presented along with custom research to help provide clients with a bigger picture of what the data represents.

Email me your thoughts!
Sima@Infinity-2.com
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Today, we’re excited to be airing an encore episode of an interview with 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:

1. Consumer insights and market research
2. Customer experience
3. 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

———————————–

Email me your thoughts!

Sima@infinity-2.com

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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!

Welcome to another informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Today, Sima shares the second part of the two-part series related to her recent opening session at SampleCon. The session was titled Future-Proofing Our Industry and covered a range of different topics.

For this episode, the focus is on the implications of the capital coming into the industry, user engagement, proving the process of user engagement, and some key lessons learned by the esteemed members of the panel, both personally and professionally, related to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The panel includes Patrick Comer, the CEO and Founder of Lucid, Bob Fawson, EVP of Business Strategy for Dynata, Mario Carrasco, the Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow, and Rebecca Brooks, the Founder, and CEO of Alter Agents.

The industry 
Over the last several years and even more over the last twenty months, the amount of capital coming into the market has increased. Mergers and acquisitions have also increased, and the ecosystem appears to have expanded. New digital players are enabling more insights, and there are new buying audiences within corporations.

The opportunities available for people today

Mario feels that we are sitting on some incredible data which has been overlooked by marketers for a long time. He does not think that the digital add-in industry has come to grips with how that will impact the world. He feels that the sample industry is poised to fill many of the data gaps that will occur in a post-cookie world.

Bob does not know how anyone in the future can be successful as a sales, brand, or operations manager without also being a bit of a data scientist. He feels that we have just seen the beginning of it because data is becoming harder to get, and more people are figuring out what data scientists do, and seeing the value of it.

Patrick feels that the industry is sitting on a gold mine because, as a collective group, we have first-party data and permission to ask questions every day. What got built over the years through data insights and surveys has suddenly become interesting to many other players.
Rebecca thinks that new money, new investors, and new ideas coming into the space is excellent for the industry. She is excited about having the opportunity to do something different, build differently, and think about things differently. Something else that came out of the pandemic for her was that many systems and traditional ways of doing things got exposed to be either flawed or broken.

Urgency 
Bob feels that we have moved into a space where there is more urgency. There is money coming into the research space. There is the opportunity, so we need to start treating the people who fuel our industry like human beings.

Staying nimble
Rebecca feels that companies holding onto the way things were or who try to put things back into the box will fail. Business leaders need to be nimble, open, and adaptive.

Machine learning
Bob thinks that we, as an industry, need to move towards machine learning. He feels that the new capital coming into the industry will facilitate that.

Res tech
Patrick feels that res tech plays beautifully into the direction in which things are moving. It all comes down to us holding our own in an environment where we are up against mar tech and ad tech. We need to attract talent and capital to the industry.

The value of res tech
The value of res tech is allowing people who do not understand our industry to feel like they do.

Supply
Supply is a hot topic right now because there appears to be a shortage of it. Investments scaled back when the pandemic started, and everyone resorted to purchasing on the various exchanges out there.

Helping
Rebecca’s approach to the supply problem is to come at it from the angle of looking for ways to help people.

Candid
At Alter Agents, they are candid with their clients when talking about the issues they are having. They look for ways to create checks and systems to help their providers and then share that information to help them clean things up.

Overcoming the supply problem
A lot more transparency is required in the industry to overcome the problem of supply. Today, it is hard to find consumers who do not mind the process as it used to be before, so we need to expand the aperture and improve the surveys.

A good product
As a research agency, you need to have a good product and a good user experience to get samples and meet your revenue targets.
What the panel members learned from Covid-19, professionally or personally, to create long-lasting change in their lives

Rebecca
Rebecca learned to question everything that she and her company are doing. She no longer assumes that the way things get done is the right way.

Mario
As a leader, Mario has changed how he interacts with his staff. He learned the importance of getting to know them and asking how they and their families are doing.

Bob
Bob feels as if he has had a year-and-a-half of forced meditation. It is a gift he feels lucky to have had. He learned a lot and enjoyed having the opportunity to live a richer life, reach out to his colleagues, and empathize with them.

Patrick
Patrick learned that as a leader, he cannot always hold everything together. He discovered how to be more human and vulnerable. He also learned to trust and rely on his colleagues more.

Links:
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SampleCon

 

Welcome to another informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast!

Today, Sima shares the first part of a two-part series she created from the session she moderated at SampleCon, which took place in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. The session was titled Future-Proofing Our Industry and covered topics that included talent topics related to how people will return to work, supply topics, and market dynamics.

The panel includes Patrick Comer, the CEO and Founder of Lucid, Bob Fawson, EVP of Business Strategy for Dynata, Mario Carrasco, the Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow, and Rebecca Brooks, the Founder, and CEO of Alter Agents.

What work looks like for the next six to twelve months

Rebecca:
Alter Agents had an easy transition to working full-time remotely during the pandemic. Their staff also doubled during that time. They decided to allow their lease to lapse at the end of June 2021 and keep on working remotely. It has been challenging not to have the usual opportunities to interact and chat with colleagues. So Rebecca has scheduled time to meet with everybody one-on-one, once a month, to keep connected and talk about business or personal matters.

Overall, her staff is happy and working better than ever. Working from home has released them from some of the stress they were experiencing from being at work. They now communicate with one another fluidly via Slack.

Rebecca’s primary concern is upholding the company values and maintaining its culture.

Bob:
Bob feels a little concerned about onboarding and helping new team members find mentors and learn how to work in a professional environment. They have been pursuing a hybrid model, which was a shift for their company. Bob is not sure that anyone knows what their preference will be six months from now, but he is looking forward to that evolution.

Bob has enjoyed seeing how resilient people are. He hopes to end up with a little more balance between work and non-work life.

Mario:

When ThinkNow was founded back in 2010, working from home was a core tenet. They wanted to be a cloud-first company.
Their leadership works from their headquarters in Los Angeles, and they have sales staff around the country, project management teams in India, and development teams in Latin America. The hardest part of the pandemic was finding themselves unable to see their overseas employees at their annual or bi-annual gatherings. Although technology has helped, they still miss getting together in person and interacting.

They have taken the approach of opening their office and letting people come in when they want to. So far, that has been working well. About 70% of the employees go in two to three times a week, and the rest go every day.
They are looking at people from a holistic perspective, rather than only looking at them only from a work lens, to address some of the mental wear and tear after the pandemic.

Patrick:

Lucid is a global company, so they are constantly aware that the pandemic affects different parts of the world differently, and it is not over yet.

They have done their best to live up to their core value of compassion. The team went out of its way to offer help to Indian people and their families and assist them in staying connected and doing business. Patrick remembers having to remind their team in India that they could have extra days off if they or their families were sick.
Sharing an experience, and knowing that we are all innately very human at this time, has made Patrick a more empathetic person, and hopefully a more compassionate person too.
Connecting people

Bob

It was supportive of Bob’s company culture to see the offices in Europe or the Philippines take on the work that others could not. That connected people across cultures and across the legacy companies that make up Dynata. It has been a catalyst for a lot of expression of good within the company.

Moving forward 

Moving forward needs to be an organic process.

The labor market
The labor market is more competitive than ever right now. One of Dynata’s key moves was deciding to move out of a geographic focus on labor and using a nationwide tier. In the middle of Covid, they leveled up many people’s salaries to have a competitive salary rate for the country because geography no longer matters.

Diversity and inclusion
Mario’s company does not do diversity and inclusion. ThinkNow is a mission-based company, however. Their mission is to ensure that historically overlooked voices get represented in research from either a sample or a full-service perspective. Having that clear mission has helped them attract and retain diverse talent.

A turning point
Rebecca’s company experienced an internal turning point after the murder of George Floyd. It prompted them to reconsider their role. So they gave everyone in the company $1,000 to put towards any charity. That spawned a JEDI (Justice Equality Diversity and Inclusion) Team in the company. The members decided to find the best way to ask questions about ethnicity and gender and ensure they reach diverse audiences. Beyond that, the company also took the initiative to play a more proactive role in diversifying its staff. Part of the JEDI mission is to keep on looking for things that the company can do better. As a company, they are doing their best to look inwards and fix themselves.

A catalyst
The murder of George Floyd was a catalyst for Dynata to have internal dialogues across cultures and countries, become more intentional about what they wanted to do inside the company, and have the focus and determination to execute their plans. They even brought in experts to moderate their dialogues.

Sampling
Most sampling gets done in a one-size-fits-all way. The whole industry can aim to be more of a force for good by becoming more proactive and empathetic, rethinking how to do sampling, and providing better representational data.

Several opportunities
The sample industry can change how their customers think about everything from gender to ethnicity to education by changing and reframing their profiling questions.

Defining the profiling
We have the opportunity right now to define the profiling used by this country and others to look at who all the people are and how to engage with them.

Insights In Color
Insights In Color has released standards and demographic questions for screeners to download.

Now is the time
The pandemic has changed how we live our lives and consume products. If we are to make more inclusive updates, we have to do it now. Because as we move out of the pandemic, we have the unique opportunity to be more inclusive as an industry and update how we ask questions.

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SampleCon

 

Welcome to another exciting and informative episode of the Data Gurus podcast! Sima is excited to have Mike Stevens, the Founder of Insight Platforms, as her guest for today’s show.  Mike is joining Sima today to talk about his company, Insight Platforms, and discuss the changes happening in the data and insights space.

About Insight Platforms
Insight Platforms was originated as a directory of platforms for insights, software, and data tools, across the spectrum of market research, UX research, CX research, and analytics.

The Genesis of Insight Platforms
Mike has always worked in the intersection between insight, marketing strategy, and technology. The genesis of Insight Platforms was Mike’s consulting business, where he did lots of advisory work around digital transformation. A surprising number of new startups were happening in that space, so he built a directory.

Mike’s background
In the late 1990s, Mike started his career working in a niche boutique marketing strategy consulting business, helping people create strategies for getting into new markets. He worked for several other consultancies after that. He then spent a few years working with a Canadian software business formerly known as Vision Critical and later rebranded to Alida. After leaving that company a few years ago, he set up on his own as an independent consultant.

Pressure
Enterprise insight market research teams have been under various kinds of pressures. They have been pressured to work faster, be more agile, and have more influence, and there has also been a gradual erosion of who owns the knowledge about the customers.
A data science component
Much of Mike’s initial client base were teams looking to upskill, harness technology, change the skills mix in their teams, and bring a data science component into their primary research skill base. They also wanted to adapt their operating models to be continuous providers of data and insights.

Three sides to the market
There are three sides to the market: They are enterprise buyers, service providers and agencies, and technology providers with whom agencies and enterprise clients will have relationships.

The changing landscape
Technology companies need help with their go-to-market strategies and expansion. Agencies also need help with figuring out what their likely proposition will be within the changing landscape. That creates fertile ground for strategy consulting, which is both interesting and rewarding.

Embracing change
Mike enjoys working with teams who are keen to embrace change and want genuine help to get there.

The new insight model
Although there is a lot of fear and discomfort in any rapidly-changing market, things are starting to shape up right now in the area of new insight models. There are a lot of opportunities available for those who want them.

Abundance
We are generating an abundance of data currently across many mechanisms, consumer groups, and locations. As a result, some of the challenges in this exponential age will be about processing abundance rather than scarcity.

New data sources
There are currently many new and different types of data sources. The various starting points will result in different takes on the data and insights business.

An interesting trend
A trend is that more people are getting more hands-on with research and insights data. A lot of decision-making is currently due to customer-driven data.

A layered approach
The craft of understanding methodology and putting data into the correct perspective has now become one layer within a multi-layered approach to analyzing data.

An evolutionary process
The data industry is undergoing an evolutionary process. The different layers should become more clarified over the next ten to fifteen years.

Different categories
Mike distilled the complexity that he saw initially into about thirty different categories of software and data tools. It became apparent to him, however, that that was insufficient for the breadth and complexity of the data, and people also needed a more granular system. So Insight Platforms now has 350 different categories.

Insight Platforms
Insight Platforms is currently doing a lot of work in language processing. They are also busy with customer experience analytics tools, which cover digital behavior and an analysis of what people are saying in their feedback to call centers and reviews. They are building tools to monitor the main themes, topics, and sentiments over time.

UX research
There has recently been an explosion of research management and research repository tools for UX research.

Automated testing solutions 
The adoption of automated testing solutions is still relatively in its infancy. Some big companies, like Pepsi, have automated much of their testing. But many companies are still edging their way towards more efficient and automated ways of doing things and have a long way to go.

Three pillars
There are three pillars to how Mike’s business operates. They are the directory business, events, and learning.

The learning pillar
Their ambition with the learning pillar is to build it out to have a good selection of highly specialized courses available for the digital insights business, on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, or Coursera.

Trackers
Mike has always been amazed at how much money and how much budget share gets spent on trackers. He has been horrified at the lack of meaningful movement from quarter to quarter in some ways that trackers got set up. However, he does see a future in continuous data and insight into brand performance.

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Insight Platforms

Welcome to Part Two of an exciting two-part series on the future of work. Today, Sima continues her conversation with Kelly Monahan, the Thought Leadership Research Principal Director at Accenture Research. In this episode, Kelly and Sima discuss the different models that companies are considering, to bring people back into the office, create hybrid models, or go completely remote.

Going back to the traditional model
Some employers think they might encourage their employees to go back to the traditional model by compensating them with higher pay. Others are considering paying their employees less if they do not return to the office.

A rational economic move
Incentivizing people to work in less than preferred conditions was a rational economic move that was popular in the late 1970s. Henry Ford was a master of that tactic.

In the short term
In the short term, there will be a segment prepared to work in terms of an incentive to maintain an old paradigm.

In the long run
In the long run, however, it will not work. Incentivizing people to work in less than preferred conditions is a dangerous strategy because once the financial incentive reaches a certain amount, people’s motivation for work drops dramatically. They will start seeking out situations where they feel dignified and can have meaningful engagements with their coworkers.

The leadership experience
It is all about the leadership experience. Under poor leadership, people will leave eventually, regardless of how much they earn, because it compromises their ability to be human.

Industrial and organizational psychology
Kelly has been studying the future of work for the last seven years. It frustrates her to see how little industrial and organizational psychology and behavioral science gets brought into leadership decision-making and boardrooms.

Understanding more 
Kelly feels that if we understood more about how people behave, what incentivizes them, and what matters to them, we would have very different organizations today.

An old model
Our philosophical assumptions in the business realm have not become updated. The focus in MBA business administration and how people get taught to lead in organizations is based on four principles: planning, organizing, directing, and leading resources. That is an old model that no longer works today.

In the past
Even in the past, those four principles did not create an ideal model. The labor strikes back in the 1920s and 1930s prove that. The government outlawed Frederick Taylor’s way of doing business because it was considered a dehumanized method. Yet, today, our MBA programs are still anchored in that method.

New leaders
Some new leaders are doing things very differently from what they have inherited and learned. They have decided to work more humanly, even though it becomes more difficult as a business scales.

For a business to scale
The further you get from your employee population, the harder it is to have human kindness, compassion, and dignity because those qualities become transactional for a business to scale.
The question we need to ask
In the future of work, we need to ask ourselves what our success metric will be.

A new leadership playbook
In the future of the digital economy, hypergrowth, innovation, creativity, and creating environments where people can do things differently will scale. That will require a new leadership playbook.

The digital economy
A digital economy requires a complete change in the skill sets that people have. So we need to create long runways in our organizations to do that without leaving anyone behind.
Creating value
In today’s digital economy, people and organizations need to be as intelligent as possible to create value. To get to intelligence, organizations will have to invest in research and development, innovation, and upskilling programs.

Reframing education systems
Children should learn how to be curious. They also need to learn to be okay with failing and how to bounce back with new ideas.

Balance
The transparency and visibility of digital platforms create more balance in terms of corporate and employee engagement.

What leaders should think about
When it comes to the future of work, leaders should think about choice and flexibility and what they look like and mean. Leaders should also think about creating the right environment, having the right resources for people to learn and upskill to digital skill-sets, and how to use technology to bring more dignity to people’s jobs. To do that, leaders will need to develop more kindness and compassion in the way they lead.

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Accenture
Kelly on LinkedIn
Kelly on Twitter

Welcome to the first part of an exciting two-part series on the future of work. Sima is happy to have Kelly Monahan, the Global Lead Talent Researcher/ Principle Director at Accenture, joining her as the guest for the series.

Research on the future of work
Accenture took an in-depth look at the future of work. They wanted to understand what people need and feel today. So they went out and looked at more than 9300 global workers across ten different industries and ten different countries to represent a global workforce.

Similar sentiments
They had within their data set 70% workers and 30% leadership. So they could make some comparisons. They found that most people, workers and leaders alike, had similar sentiments.

Predicting
They wanted to predict what was causing people to feel a certain way or make them want to go back on site.

How people are feeling about work
Some people were optimistic and energized, but the majority were somewhere in the middle and or negative.

Disgruntled people
A third of the people felt disgruntled. When thinking about the future of work, they were pessimistic, tired, and burned out. They experienced micro-aggressions and felt fatigued.

Going through the motions
About 30% of people said that they were simply going through the motions of life. They were feeling neither negative nor positive. They were unsure and waiting to see how the leadership would make their key decisions about people returning to work before making a true sentiment on how they feel.

Optimistic 
About 42% are thriving, optimistic, and energized.

Researchers
Researchers want to know what is going on underneath to cause those differences in sentiment.

Life enhancement
When looking at mental health scores, Accenture looks at a concept called Life Enhancement which is about whether your work is adding to your life or taking away from it.

Net Better Off
Net Better Off is a concept that determines whether or not your job is leaving you better off than most other humans in terms of dignity and money in your pocket.

Generational differences
From a generational perspective, they saw a statistically significant difference with the young people. Gen-Z is struggling the most with mental health, and they tend to be more pessimistic about their future than the other generations. Gen-Xers are also struggling with their mental health, and like Gen-Zers, are unsure about the concepts of Life Enhancement and Net Better Off.

Baby Boomers
Baby Boomers, however, tend to be pretty optimistic and have adapted well to the new world of work.

Millennials
Millennials are still fairly optimistic about work and their ability to create change and adapt to the hybrid world.

Key moments
The key moments in people’s lives tend to impact their expectations and the way they view work.

Gen-Z
Gen-Zers tend to be hungry for social connections. They feel a need to leave their parental home, grow up, learn to understand things and be mentored. They need in-person interaction to do that.

The physical world of work

Both millennials and Gen-Z are looking to experience the physical world of work.
Work as an experience Gen-Zers tend to view work as an experience, not just a transactional operation to support life. They want their work to contribute to their life. They tend to view their work and personal identities as one thing, rather than having separate professional and personal identities. So they want to see the companies they work for representing their personal values and ethics.

C-Suite companies
There has been a profound shift with C-suite leaders. CEOs now tend to feel a need to comment on societal issues.
Important issues for those who work for C-suite companies have become what a company believes in, how it helps society, and its morality, ethics, and values.

Corporations cannot hide
Corporations cannot hide any longer because they are now interacting on platforms where all their comments are visible. The separation between people’s personal and professional lives has also become less clear as a result.

Complexity
Never before has there been so much complexity for researchers around how people view and treat each other in the workplace.

Eighteen months ago
According to the data, eighteen months ago, 90% of people were still regularly working 9 to 5, on-site, with someone working remotely on the odd occasion.

Hybrid
Accenture defines hybrid as working remotely for at least 25% of the time. They found from their data sets that people ideally wanted it to be about 50%. Hybrid workers typically choose to work outside of the office for 25-75% of their working time.

The big debate around hybrid
The current big debate is around the employees’ personal choice when telling their employers how much time they want to spend working on-site versus the employers telling them when to be there. Being fair and inclusive in those situations is a challenge for those in HR because there is no playbook for them to follow.

The populations where hybrid appeals most
Millennials, baby boomers, and women in minorities appear to have embraced the hybrid model the most. Women tend to play multiple roles. So they prefer having a model where they are less likely to be penalized for doing that.

The challenge
The challenge is to create cultures, experiences, and visibility, regardless of how people are interacting.

Exciting new trends
Although some exciting new trends are emerging in technology that will make that possible, our brains are still wired for in-person interaction.

Child-care
Solving for child care is still a problem for working moms going back to work. Although CHOs are trying to get creative in figuring out ways to incentivize working moms, women are still opting out far more than men right now in the narrative around returning to work.

Planning
When planning their workforce models, researchers are currently seeing a divergence of strategies. There is no right or wrong, so Kelly advises people to vote with their feet and with what they want.

The people who feel the best
Data shows that the people who feel the best are those who work in a very balanced environment where they have the choice to be hybrid, and their on-site space is calibrated around cutting-edge technology focused on in-person interaction collaboration. Kelly feels that the companies that best support that will win.

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On this episode, host Sima Vasa talks to George London, Chief Technology Officer of Upwave. George shares insights into the complexities of the advertising ecosystem, the role of data in campaign optimization and the parallels between financial and ad markets.

Key Takeaways:

(02:14) From philosophy to data leadership.
(05:34) Persistence and adaptability shaped George’s path to CTO.
(08:15) Causal inference helps Upwave provide reliable insights for large media investments.
(11:32) Rigorous measurement turns $10M in ad spend into $20M in value.
(13:10) Daily insights from Upwave simplify complex national ad campaigns.
(15:12) Actionable insights drive Upwave’s mission to optimize brand investments.
(16:23) Targeted surveys reveal brand impact across specific ad campaigns.
(17:59) The ad ecosystem spans brands, publishers and a complex chain of intermediaries.
(20:36) Generative AI powers Upwave’s automated ad reporting with Trade Desk.
(22:47) Advertising shares dynamics with financial markets, including bidding and price discovery.

Resources Mentioned:

UpWave

Trade Desk

Thanks for listening to the Data Gurus podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Data Gurus podcast! Today, Sima is happy to have Josh Chasin, the Chief Measurability Officer of Videoamp, as her guest for the show.

Josh’s career journey
Josh is an audience measurement professional in the world of market research. He has specialized in both media research and audience measurement and has always viewed his career as living at the place where research and marketing overlap. His first job was as a number-cruncher at Arbitron while he was still in college. He then moved on to a full-time job in Arbitron’s Statistical Services department. He was also studying marketing and doing an MBA, which enabled him to get a job as Arbitron’s Manager of Market Development.

Learning from the best
Josh spent his first seven years at Arbitron gaining a solid grounding and learning sample design from some of the best people in the business. Then he spent another seven years working for their advertiser agency group in marketing, positioning their services to the buy-side users. For his last three years at Arbitron, Josh was their VP of Marketing for new ventures. That was at the time when the internet was emerging.

After leaving Arbitron
After leaving Arbitron, Josh spent a few years as an entrepreneur and then became President at Simmons for a short time.

A consulting practice
In the early 2000s, Josh owned a consulting practice for about seven years.

Comscore
Comscore was one of Josh’s consulting clients. He later became their Chief Research Officer and spent the next thirteen years doing that.

Videoamp
After leaving Comscore, Josh joined Videoamp. Videoamp lives in the ad tech ecosystem. Founded in 2014, it has become known primarily as a DSP (Demand Side Platform) that helps buy-side agencies plan, buy, execute, optimize, and measure the performance of their buys. Videoamp has recently expanded into the measurement space.

Measurement
Measurement is at the core of everything happening in advertising.

The next generation of cross-platform measurement
One of the things that led Josh to Videoamp was that he liked their vision for doing the next generation of cross-platform measurement and wanted to help.

Cross-platform measurement
The dream of advertisers is to know on an impression-by-impression basis where an impression was delivered and how it contributed to the performance of their campaign.

The goal of advertising
The goal of advertising is to shift from a mass-broadcast game to a granular one-to-one game where advertisers will know precisely where impressions are going and how they are working.

A challenge
One of the difficulties that Videoamp faces in media advertising is that heavy viewers tend to consume a disproportionate share of impressions. Their challenge is to distribute impressions to those who do not have their eyes on their screens as often.

Reaching consumers on different screens
Viewers have different tolerance levels for ad loads in streaming content versus ad loads in traditional linear content. So advertisers need to figure out how to get impressions in front of people in different places. One of the things that cross-platform enables is ways to reach consumers on different screens.

The ad spend for Facebook and Google
Currently, Facebook and Google account for between 65 and 70% of the total digital ad spend in the US. So they know everything there is to know about how the advertising is working on their platforms. However, advertisers want to understand their advertising campaigns across the platform and holistically. So it is not enough to know only about everything is that is happening inside Facebook or Google. Advertisers want to shift advertising amongst Facebook, Google, NBC, ABC, CBS, and other media channels.

Privacy
Although Facebook and Google know that people need to understand their advertising campaigns holistically, they have covenants with their users. So they have to respect the privacy of their users. The data generated on those platforms is not necessarily Facebook and Google’s to share.

Enabling advertising across platforms
Facebook and Google recognize that the whole ecosystem rises with the rising tide, so they have both been active in the WFA initiative to design systems to enable people to look at advertising across the various media platforms.

Consumer privacy
Privacy is of paramount importance to everyone in the ecosystem. So now applications have to ask if they can track you. There is an almost buried setting that defaults to off where advertisers ask if they may track you. That will impact the availability of data related to consumers, so companies in the measurement space will need to figure out how to build systems that can project up to the census level based on a sample. It will also make panels more important.

The younger generation
Research has shown that the younger generation is less concerned about issues of privacy.

Why Videoamp is different
Videoamp has all the right pieces in place at the right time. They have done a great job of meeting the needs of the buy-side. They have solid leadership and many smart people who are dedicated to a vision and are building solutions. They are also highly customer-focused and have clarity of vision around what they are building.

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Josh Chasin on LinkedIn

 

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Welcome to another exciting episode of the Data Gurus podcast! Today’s episode is a little different. Sima will be focusing on people, or founders, who are considering selling their company. In today’s episode, Sima hosts John Sipala, one of her colleagues at Oberon Securities. John is a Managing Director at Oberon Securities and has more than 25 years of experience in investment banking.

The market right now
Private equity firms want to be in the market and are looking for companies, so there is a lot of dry powder in the market right now. Many tech companies are performing very well coming out of Covid.

Selling is not simple
When the market is very active, people start thinking about selling. When talking to the founders of companies, John initially asks them why they want to sell and why they want to sell now. That tells him whether they have thought things through, whether they truly want to sell, and if they need to raise capital. Often, the founders don’t understand that selling will require them to go through several in-between steps.

Common themes for people wanting to sell
Some people want to sell their company when they feel they have brought it as far as possible. Other owners need to bring in more capital, and some are simply tired and feel ready to move onto something else.

Dialogue
Business partners should engage in a dialogue before they decide to sell, which will help them understand what others want to do and ensure they are all in lockstep when they eventually do the transaction.

A personal involvement
When John does a deal, he gets personally invested and it’s not just a transaction for him. He makes sure that he is aligned with the seller’s expectations and there is a high level of success associated with the transaction.

The role and value of an investment banker
Selling a company involves complex transactions that are often very different from any the founders have experienced before. The transactions are multifaceted, and there are many things, even beyond evaluations, that could affect them. The role of the investment banker is to ensure that all the transactions get done in the right way, from beginning to end.

Culture
Before selling, consider the culture of the buyer, what their intentions are for the business, and what your role will be after the sale.

The market
The market is important, but it is not the only driving factor. The timing of the market should not be your primary reason for selling. You have to understand the external part of the market before bringing a deal forward.

Strategy
Having a strategy for what you want to do and how you intend to go about doing it will add a lot of value to your company when it goes to market.

Buyers
Avoid making changes to your business when it goes to market. Buyers want things to be going as they are supposed to go.

Some high-level things founders should think about when selling:
1. The transition period will be at least six months or even a year.

2. Most buyers like the founders to stay on for longer than the transaction period. It could take as long as two years, so make sure that the role you have during the transaction is  the role you want.

3. If you opt for an earn-out, try to keep it short and make sure that you run the business during that time.

Roll-over of equity
Buying a business with a roll-over of equity is the best way to align the interests of the management with the buyer because if the business performs, everyone benefits. The sellers also benefit because they can get another turn to profit as the business grows.

A typical transaction
From start to finish, a typical transaction takes between eight months and a year. It could take longer, however, if you need to re-market.
The Oberon model

The Oberon model adds expertise to the upfront piece of the transaction, which involves talking to the client and obtaining information.

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Oberon Securities

John Sipala on LinkedIn

 

 

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Today, Sima is happy to have Tim Wilson as her guest for the show. Tim is the CEO and Co-Founder of Qutee.

Tim’s journey
After attaining a legal degree in the UK, Tim went to music school in Hollywood. He later returned to the UK, received some funding for a record label, and ended up touring with bands like Def Leppard and Alice Cooper and releasing some records.
In 2009, after gambling with a few commercial projects in the UK, Tim moved to New York. Then, in 2012, he and his business partner acquired some NLP technology and embarked on a slow process of looking for areas where they could use the technology in unique ways.

A comments platform
They built a comments platform over the following two years. It was a simple yet ground-breaking plug-in to filter user’s comments. It could be used to listen, help engagement, and have smarter conversations with more insights.

A survey tool
They also built a survey tool that was used with some major health engagements, like the National Health Service in the UK.

Creating a social UX
They then came up with the idea of creating something bigger. Having already built a cutting-edge comments system that provided them with analytics, they decided to create a social UX. They wanted to provide consumers with smart conversations and a smart conversation experience while also engaging with them in a social environment and collecting qualitative and resilient insights. They hoped it would stimulate more participation in surveys and allow brands to create panels and focus groups overnight. That was the gestation of Qutee.

Investors
When Tim and his partner showed their investors what they wanted to do, the investors agreed to help them build it.

Starting small
They started as a small team, doing fundraisers from time to time, and eventually got Qutee up and running.

Influencers
They started working with three or four gaming tech influencers very early on when they were still in the alpha stage of their development. For the next two-and-a-half years, the influencers pushed their audiences towards Tim and his partner while they drove insights, created reports, and perfected their technology, analytics methodology, and reporting.

Pre-Covid
Just before Covid, they were about to go to market. Not able to do that as a result of Covid, they accepted that things would move slowly and decided to keep working on their API and technology. Now, things have started to accelerate.

Qutee
They call Qutee social asking. It is a place where you can have an open-ended conversation. You can share it with your audiences via social media and CRM and use influencer audiences to drive conversations. People comment and answer via polls, and it gets analyzed in real-time. They also have an analytics dashboard, and with the click of a button, they will give you a comprehensive call-on-call report.

Their focus
Qutee focuses on allowing brands to engage their passionate audiences, social, and CRM at scale within hours.

Insights methodologyQutee’s insights methodology is superior to sentiment analysis because they ask users to type their comments or sentiment and then analyze them using augmented/collaborative AI.

Report
They then create a comprehensive and relevant report showing all the participation numbers and NPS they pull out using the AI representative comments. They also give the polls, the conversational breakdown, topics, and the representative comments across verticals of tagging and NLP.

Consumer-focused
Qutee is consumer-focused. They have created an environment where consumers feel happy to collaborate with the brands and feel their voices are heard. They can also work on an industrial scale.

Games
For games, it is vital to get the player’s perspective. Getting information and insights on the issues they are experiencing and how they think they should get fixed is very important. That is where Qutee comes in because it allows users to see things from the consumer’s perspective.

Passionate consumers
Passionate consumers are those who are wedded to your product and organically spread faith about it. They are the people to who you have to listen.
Comments
So far, Qutee has collected 160 000 comments. Their average comment length is five times that of YouTube.
Qutee users can also see some of the insights, and you can share things with them to drive further qualitative discussions.
The best of all worlds
With Qutee, you have the commenting element, the NLP element, and you also have the polls intersecting.

Qutee feels social
Qutee feels social and friendly, just like a regular experience on social media. That is why it has been successful. The only thing you are required to pay for on Qutee is the reports.

Passionate audiences
Qutee is all about having passionate audiences and people who care. They are all about truth, passion, and quality.

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Tim Wilson on Twitter
Tim Wilson on LinkedIn
Qutee website

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Today, Sima is happy to welcome Anton Umnov, the VP of Consumer Insights and Partnerships at Drop Technologies Inc., as her guest for the show.

Anton’s journey to where he is today
Anton started working in the consumer insights and data space about ten years ago. He spent a long time at Nielsen Data Analytics, where he had many engagements on the client-side with various experiences across multiple categories. Then, about a year ago, he joined Drop.

Data analytics and consumer research
Anton loves data analytics and consumer research. He particularly enjoys the intersection between data and research.

Drop
Drop is a consumer app with about four million users based primarily in the US and Canada. It is a downloadable platform that focuses on driving loyalty rewards and value for the clients, users, or consumers. Apart from getting great deals, shoppers can also get rewarded for doing surveys and playing games.

Why Drop is different  
You can connect the information from your bank account to Drop. That will allow you to unlock better deals and offers from brands and retailers automatically. So you do not have to scan receipts or use loyalty cards.

Drop users
The majority of Drop users are millennials and Gen Z. In most cases, the users are willing to connect their bank accounts to Drop for a seamless experience and better deals.

Security
Security is one of Drop’s primary concerns.

A younger audience
Although the big retailers already have many shoppers, they still work with Drop as clients because they think of Drop as having a younger millennial audience and consider it a user acquisition gain.

Retailers
Smaller retailers use Drop to attract new customers after launching a new brand or product. For the bigger retailers, it is all about the loyalty play. Drop can share a lot of data with the retailers because they have their customers’ banking information. They can see exactly where the customers were shopping in the last six months. That allows them to prove to the retailers that the customer that they attracted is incremental for them.

Share wallet switches
At Drop, they can see the share wallet switches, which allows them to provide all their partners with additional analytics that help them evaluate the success of their campaigns. It also allows their partners to see if they gained any volume over the last few weeks and where their sales originated.

Data by category
At Drop, they sell data by category. They are currently tracking about forty different categories. Those include food delivery, CPG, financial services, and travel. They also go to specific retailers and brands to see who is winning and losing and why.

Launching surveys automatically
At Drop, they see spending transactions almost immediately. So they can do an NPS-type survey, or a more complex one, right away.

A hybrid product
They have a hybrid product on the market that has quite a large amount of transactional data. They also talk to people to find out why they switched to another brand or retailer.

Two pillars
At Drop, they have two pillars that work hand-in-hand. They have an app to maximize the number of points and rewards that their consumers will get. They also have the data side of the business that works in conjunction with the app itself because the more data they monetize on the market from working with different brands, the more value they can provide for their users in terms of rewards.

Market research analytics
Market research analytics is a big part of Drop’s overall business. It is one of their key pillars for 2021 and beyond.
Expanding
Drop is trying to expand outside of traditional CPG and pressure retail. They are also focusing on some of the newer industries, like food delivery and crypto.
Stimulus tracker
Via their Stimulus Tracker study, they tried to help the banks and hedge funds understand how people were spending the stimulus money that was deposited into their accounts.
A surprising finding
They found that right away, many people invested the money they received on home improvements. Many consumers also invested some of their money in stocks and crypto. That was a surprising finding for the team at Drop because their audience is mainly millennials.

A joint approach
They used a joint approach incorporating both transactional data and survey research for the study.

Data and insights 
Drop spent their first year making sure that their data made sense. Then, last year, they started putting some of their insights on the market.

The biggest obstacle
For Anton, the biggest obstacle is trying to find a product-market fit that combines data and surveys.

The challenge
Drop has coverage on forty industries. That makes it challenging for Anton to decide on which industry to target and focus on.

The future vision
Drop is expanding. They are doing some work in the UK currently. They will be focusing primarily on the US and also on Canada for this year and the next.

The goal
Their goal is to maximize different revenue streams, rewards, and points for their members.

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Anton on LinkedIn

 

In this exciting episode, Sima is excited to have Nitzan Shaer, the CEO, and Co-Founder of Wevo, joining her.

Nitzan’s background
Wevo is the fourth company that Nitzan has either started or joined early on. He loves the thrill of joining a team of like-minded people in the early days of a new venture. Skype was among the companies that he joined early on, which were all in the space of trying to help consumers solve a big problem.

Wevo
The context for Wevo got formulated while Nitzan was with Skype. He started thinking about other industries where the cost-per-minute was very expensive, and reducing the costs would make them more efficient.

A nightmare
At Skype, they wanted to understand more about their customers, but it was too expensive. It was also a nightmare to collect user research to know which products to build and which features to improve.

The background for creating Wevo
Wanting to listen to their customers more, and knowing they were in an industry where costs could get reduced dramatically, were factors behind the creation of Wevo.

Reducing the time it takes
At Wevo, they take a process that usually takes about 200 hours to run, like a feasibility study or focus group, and reduce it to a half hour.

What Wevo does 
Wevo is an AI tool to listen to customers, hear their needs and challenges with their user or entire customer experience, and provide validated insights on the core problems, the core hurdles, and the things that are working very well. They answer why people are experiencing a challenge in their user experience. That enables a team to generate a better user experience. They also enable their users to validate their ideas.

The user
With Wevo, the user needs to define its target audience and identify the experience he is trying to optimize. That usually takes less than ten minutes. At the end of the process, the user gets a report with all the needed information.

Updates
The expectations of users are continuously evolving. Wevo believes in a continuous flow of updates around what people are feeling and how they are responding.

Partnership
Wevo has a partnership with multiple participant providers to help its customers find their exact target audience.

Three lenses
It is hard to evaluate the user experience, so through a process that began about four years ago, they have developed three primary lenses through which they look at each user experience:
What happens on the pages of a user experience
Areas that are roadblocks or hurdles to conversion
Areas that are helping the engagement

Diagnostic drivers 
The diagnostic driver, which examines areas to understand them and to benchmark progress. Areas examined include clarity, appeal, credibility, relevance, and overall experience.

Expectations versus reality
The technology asks people about their hopes and concerns when considering purchasing a product or service. Then, once they have experienced it, they ask them to answer whether their expectation got met or not. Human-augmented AI is vital in that process.

The Wevo Sentiment Map
The Wevo Sentiment Map shows the areas of the biggest problems in the experience and the areas that are the biggest helpers.

Quant and qual
Everything they do is quant and qual, so they also explain why there is a problem. (They call that qualt.) Nitzan points out that many systems today lack the partnership between quantitative and qualitative.

Those who gravitate to the Wevo solution
They are currently seeing much adoption with UX researchers, designers, marketers, and product managers. Engineering teams have also started using it.

The disruptive power of Wevo
Wevo is compressing the time it takes for people to get validated feedback. That means that organizations can move quickly because their learning starts to accelerate. Their ability to take risks also accelerates because they can test everything.

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Wevo

Welcome to today’s podcast! In today’s special episode, Sima continues her conversation with Gary Laben, the CEO of Dynata in the second part of the exciting two-part interview.
In this episode, Gary and Sima continue with their discussion about the things that influence the size of opportunity within the industry and discuss whether doing things faster will denigrate the research process. They also talk about standardizing the data-collection process, acquisitions, integration, and culture.

The size of the opportunity for the entire Industry
Up until now, many people have defined the size of the market research industry at around 80 billion dollars worldwide. However, the advancement of technology is bringing more players and different buying audiences into the space. Gary believes that two things drive the number: the changes that are going on within traditional market research from a technological standpoint and the marketing services ecosystem, which Gary sees as being continuous.

The work that gets done in market research
Gary believes that market research is inextricably connected to lead and demand generation, CRM, and advertising. And the work that gets done in market research is ultimately to understand someone so that some behavior, purchase, or customer relationship can get driven. Gary believes the data that drives the decisions at the start should be the underlying or first-party data that drives the execution of those ideas. If you can keep that data consistent along that continuum, you will reduce the opportunities for getting it wrong.

An order of magnitude
Gary thinks there is an order of magnitude of size and opportunity in market research. And the rest of the marketing services spectrum is another order of magnitude on top of that. Gary estimates the total value to be a couple of trillion dollars, which is very exciting!

Agile research
The introduction of agile research into the industry has allowed Gary and his team to address the challenges in they could not reach previously.

Will faster denigrate the research process?
Gary believes that market researchers have to be fast, ask the right questions, and have a sound methodology and diverse representation. They should also ensure the fidelity of a given project.

Value proposition
Dynata’s value proposition will always be to provide the highest quality first-party data to drive their outcomes. They will not drop that in the pursuit of speed or any other metric that adjusts to the changing market dynamics.

Standardizing data 
As an industry, we have not made the progress we need, so Gary thinks that standardizing the way data gets collected for market research is vital.

Acquisition
Dynata makes its acquisitions in one of two ways. If they want to expand their data asset or the capabilities surrounding it, they look for businesses in geographies where they might be under-represented, like the African continent. They look for companies and assets that would help them to build out their insights platform.

Insights platform
Dynata launched their insights platform a couple of years ago with the idea of having one place for their clients to come to do everything from accessing their data to performing the entire set of market research activities related to their data. They have been working toward arranging all the puzzle pieces to ensure the platform is a complete offering for their clients. Dynata hired third-parties to achieve integration with their acquired companies and to create value.

Culture
Gary points out that a shared purpose binds people together and wants to ensure the strategy and direction they have chosen at Dynata is the best it can possibly be.

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Dynata 

 

 

 

 

In today’s episode, Sima is happy to welcome you to the podcast, which is the first part of an exciting two-part interview that she did with Gary Laben, the CEO of Dynata.
Today, in the first part of the series, Gary talks to Sima about his journey that led to where he is today. He also talks about his general leadership style and the impact Covid-19 has had on him as a leader and on his business. They close the episode with Gary giving a deeper understanding of how he views the landscape and where Dynata’s core area of focus lies within the market.

A perspective of Gary’s career and how he got to Dynata
Gary started his career by working his way up in the culinary world over the summers while in college. He was offered a position in a data marketing business, which he did for a summer before graduating. He enjoyed that so much that when he got offered a full-time role in the data marketing business, he put everything else aside to try out the world of data. From there, he moved on to various roles within different data companies.

Moving over to Dynata
Although he had never worked with first-party data accessibility before, it had always fascinated him. So, when an opportunity arose on that side five years ago, he moved over to the company now known as Dynata.

Gary’s experience at Dynata
Gary has had tremendous experiences at Dynata and even though the industry is rather tight right now, and people have been moving in and out of the organization, Gary has enjoyed seeing his relationships continue throughout the industry.

Learning the business
As he learns the business, Gary often jokes that even after five years, there is rarely a meeting that he attends where he knows anything more than anybody else about the subject at hand regarding tools, techniques, and capabilities in market research.

Gary’s favorite part of his job
Gary loves to meet with clients. The best part of his job is to spend time with the folks interested in working with Dynata, even though things are getting done virtually for the most part right now. The second best part for him is to do little talking and still come out way ahead because his clients will have learned a lot about what Dynata can do better and what they need to do in the future.

Getting back out
Now, the people at Dynata are talking about ways to make it possible for them to get back out to their offices around the world. It appears that Asia will be the first place to which Gary will be able to return.

Virtual engagement
At Dynata, they engage with their clients virtually. They also have town halls where they regularly engage at a regional level and an office level. Gary sometimes even gets asked to appear virtually and unannounced, at monthly team meetings.

Gary’s leadership style
At Dynata, the leadership style needs to be empowerment. They cover all geographies and have broad service offerings, so they have leaders of both geographies and functional areas within the business. Gary feels that he has less familiarity and experience in particular sectors than many of those leaders have. Because of that, he loves to give those people autonomy. They have an aggressive and methodical goal-setting and management process, so allowing people to operate very independently within the boundaries of execution, without having oversight, is the key.

Humor
The pandemic has shone a light on things far more important than people’s day jobs. Being able to approach leadership with consideration to priorities, and looking for places to inject some humor, is very important for Gary right now.

Covid
Covid affected the company’s goal-setting process in that they had to think differently. They set themselves up as a business to preserve liquidity and to ensure their employees were safe.

New goals
One vital new principle they set was to figure out how to thrive.

An aggressive expansion strategy
They set out an aggressive expansion strategies in parts of the business. That was so successful that they decided to continue using those strategies.

Acceleration of change
They also realized that the acceleration of change could happen at any given time and are currently happening a whole lot faster than they were before.

Resilience
Dynata decided to embrace the very thing they feared at the beginning of the pandemic and apply their newly-acquired resilience to their day-to-day operations going forward. So they started looking for ways to get to the best solutions as quickly as possible.

The business within which Dynata works
Dynata is in the provision of first-party data to drive insights and answers businesses and companies need to drive and execute their strategy and day-to-day success. They surround that with several products and services that facilitate their access and use to the data to drive those answers even better.

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On today’s show, Sima welcomes Mike Page, the Co-founder and Chief Executive of Phebi, as her guest on the podcast.

The founding story of Phebi
Phebi has been around for a little more than a year and their focus is on the insights industry. Their journey has been around the explosion in voice and voice tech when they saw the whole landscape of how people interact with technology was shifting to voice. That created a wonderful opportunity for insights specialists and researchers. It gave researchers the chance to offer their respondents a better experience while simultaneously creating a richer source of insight for themselves.

Talking versus typing
People talk more naturally than they type, so you tend to get longer, richer answers. The audio can get people used to listening to how people are speaking and not just responding to written word.

Webinars
Phebi started with some webinars with friendly companies, like Askia, which were very well received. Then, a London company wanted to try what Phebi was offering, so they presented at a healthcare research conference, and that was how Phebi really got its start.

They won the innovation award
In January, Phebi went to the IAX Conference and won the innovation award. That was very prestigious for a small company!

Phebi continued to grow
Soon after they won the award in 2020, the world shut down. Since then, things have continued to grow.

Things have taken off
Their message resonated. And the ability to capture non-conscious metrics to use alongside things like text analytics from an audio source that is easy to collect in a self-serve manner, has taken off.

Non-conscious measurement
With non-conscious measurement, you have the potential to pick up more nuanced sentiments and emotions that could not get spotted before. Doing that at scale is much of what Phebi does. Non-conscious measurements can help researchers get to insights quicker and more effectively. It adds the resonance that comes with audio so researchers can capture people’s first sentiments related to a question.

Emotional Resonance Score
The Emotional Resonance Score is one of the things that they provide for comparing things.

Non-conscious measurement is a good predictor
When you use a non-conscious measurement to compare things, it is very good at predicting what people are likely to feel the most passionate about or connected to.

A live setting
They even have some clients who are using Phebi in a live setting, where they are looking at people’s true sentiments and emotions while an interview is in process.

Non-conscious measurement combined with a 3-D transcription
When a non-conscious measurement gets combined with a 3-D transcription, it opens a lot of opportunity for understanding how people feel about something.

Getting better and quicker
At Phebi, they have gotten better and better and quicker and quicker at delivering self-serve tools that will help people extract insights from voice.

Going faster
2020 has allowed them to establish their technology and grow much faster. Now, everything gets done virtually, so their whole adoption process has accelerated.

People don’t always say what they mean
People don’t always say what they mean. So hearing how they say things can be very interesting.

The Phebi portal 
After gaining access to the Phebi portal, you can upload any audio into it. There, everything gets organized. You can then create groups and subgroups to get the emotional scores in all the different sections.

The Phebi plug-in
You will also get the Phebi plug-in to manage the technical aspect of things. It works with all the main survey platforms.

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Mike Page on LinkedIn
Phebi’s website
Email Mike at mike@phebi.ai

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In today’s episode, Sima is excited to welcome Gangesh Ganesan, the Founder and CEO of PeerNova, as her guest on the show. This podcast is typically about data and the data ecosystem. Today, however, Gangesh takes us into the area of the financial market. In this episode, he explains the importance of ensuring that data has good quality and is accurate.

PeerNova
PeerNova is a Silicon Valley-based data company founded by Gangesh Ganesan about five years ago. They have offices in Silicon Valley, San Jose, London, and New York. Although their themes mostly get distributed worldwide, the core is in Silicon Valley. Some of their development happens in Eastern Europe and they also have a theme in Brazil.

A global company
PeerNova is a global company. They are venture-funded and raised a substantial amount of capital to develop their software platform.

Software platform
The PeerNova software platform is called Cuneiform and offers data quality for financial institutions.

Data quality
Data quality means ensuring the correctness, completeness, consistency, and timeliness of data that might get distributed across different applications, databases, data stores, and data warehouses in a global financial institution.

Making the correct decisions
Currently, data quality is vital for making the correct decisions in the financial industry. It has been a big problem in that industry for the last two or three decades.

Financial Institutions
Financial institutions typically solved their data quality problem by employing many people to ensure that data was correct, complete, and consistent. In some cases, it could take tens of thousands of people to solve the problem for large financial institutions.

The Cuneiform platform saves time and money
The Cuneiform platform is about applying technology to automate as many of the workflows as possible. It can do that at a substantially lower cost, and more importantly, it does it near real-time.

Inspiration
Early on, Gangesh was inspired by some ideas that came about in blockchains. A crucial notion in blockchains is that of lineage, with which you can find the origin of any transaction. And you can track it either forward or backward to find the seed or genesis event. That idea inspired Gangesh to build a generic software platform with which every piece of data could get tracked in that way.

Data quality
They soon realized that maintaining the lineage and ‘audit trails’ of the data quality of financial institutions at scale and solving for correctness, completeness, and consistency problems was a vital challenge. It took them four or five years to build their Cuneiform platform. Financial institutions have been undergoing many changes
Financial institutions have been undergoing many changes over the last twenty years. And their pain points have become very acute.

The current focus
The entire focus of Gangesh’s business is currently in capital markets and financial institutions.

The Zero Code
Using what is known as Zero Code, Gangesh has ensured business users, who are often tech-savvy but are not developers, can have the four attributes of data quality-correctness, consistency, completeness, and timeliness for all their data.

Accuracy
In the financial industry, they cannot afford to make any mistakes, so their data quality needs to be accurate one hundred percent of the time.

Enterprise selling
Enterprise selling of software at very high levels can be a problem, so Gangesh offers his clients the chance to do a free pilot to see if their model works for that specific use case. Reference-able clients are a big deal at PeerNova, so they also try to identify easy-to-replicate use cases to have a step-and-repeat concept that is easy to demonstrate.

The problem of data quality
The problem of data quality is something fundamental. The financial industry has always lacked a comprehensive end-to-end solution for that problem. Gangesh believes that data quality is a category-making idea for which PeerNova is well-positioned. He believes they can build a large, successful business within it.

The future
PeerNova has built a platform with many features and integrations. Over the next five years, they will continue building and adding more capabilities and features to the Cuneiform platform. They are bringing more and more clients onto the platform and they are growing their top line and footprint within the industry.

Email me your thoughts!
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On today’s show, Sima is excited to host a panel of three powerful and well-respected women as her guests. Tiffany Hays is the CEO of FUEL Global. She is and also CEO of The Focus Room. Aryn O’Donnell is the Vice President of Corporate Services of Fieldwork. And Kelli Hammock is Senior Client Solutions Manager at L&E Research.
Tiffany, Aryn, and Kelli are all in the qualitative space in which Covid-19 greatly impacted.

The impact of Covid-19 on Fieldwork
Fieldwork has in-person qualitative research spaces that got impacted by Covid-19. At Fieldwork, they have always been solving their clients’ problems, and right now, they are solving new problems. They got forced to think differently, ask questions, and find new ways to connect with their industry colleagues.

The impact of Covid on L&E Research
L&E Research had to make a big pivot to learn how to get proactive around the changes that happened within the industry and the company. They had to come up with solutions to apply to the new problems that their clients were having. The biggest thing for them, professionally, was getting out of the reactive mode and figuring out how to make things work.

The Impact of Covid on Tiffany, as a leader
The biggest thing for Tiffany, as a leader, was making sure that her employees had even more flexibility than she was used to giving them. There were new challenges that she never expected to face as a leader. She had to set boundaries for her teams to ensure that everyone gave each other space and checked up on one another’s mental health within their organization of about 25 employees. They had to become aware of the new challenges with which people were dealing.

The impact of Covid on FUEL Global 
In the business itself, Tiffany’s clients preferred to be in-person. So there was some push-back to them having to use an online qualitative platform. Working on a global scale, the company had to learn to manage clients across the globe. One of their biggest challenges was ensuring that the clients could get what they needed in the online world.

A breaking point
Tiffany believes that this will be the breaking point in our industry, where the clients realize that they can do both in-person and virtual. And we will see a permanent reduction in in-person research.

Clients are thinking critically
Aryn believes that clients are now thinking critically about what the goals of their research are. And they are deciding what they need because all research cannot get done remotely.

Producing revenue
Understanding client’s objectives clearly, and helping them figure out how to get what they need out of the research is vital right now. Tiffany is helping her clients figure out how to get things done because that is not going away. And that, in itself, produces revenue.

Safety within the facility
From a facility perspective, Aryn feels that it is her company’s role to educate the clients. And work with them to find the right solution in terms of safety protocols.

From where the hesitation to get back to in-person research is coming
Kelli does not think that any hesitation to get back to in-person research is coming from the respondents. She feels that it is coming from a corporate legal perspective.

Where we are most likely to see in-person research get back to normal

We are most likely to see in-person research getting back to normal in the markets with many local clients who need not travel too far to get to the facility.

Flexibility and support
Some challenges that research companies have to manage currently around their workforce are offering flexibility and support. And setting boundaries. They also have to address the mental health repercussions of the pandemic.

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Tiffany Hays on LinkedIn
Aryn O’Donnell on LinkedIn
Kelli Hammock on LinkedIn

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On this episode, host Sima Vasa talks with J. Walker Smith, Knowledge Lead at Kantar. They discuss shifting consumer sentiments, the paradox of strong spending amid uncertainty and changes in market insights.

Key Takeaways:

(02:14) Experience in trends and futures at Kantar aids in predicting consumer values.

(04:37) Consumer spending is strong, but sentiment is recessionary amid uncertainty.

(07:57) Consumers seek familiarity and reassurance from brands over novelty.

(10:55) Consumers prefer brands focused on well-being and personalization.

(13:55) Gen Z prioritizes mental health and values digital convenience.

(17:20) Gen Z’s tech-driven shopping requires marketing to algorithms.

(19:33) Curating market data to refine key insights and filter noise.

(21:48) AI will automate research tasks, shifting insights to focus on growth.

(25:36) Future insights roles will prioritize strategic growth over pure research.

Resources Mentioned:

Kantar

Thanks for listening to the Data Gurus podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech

Today, Sima welcomes Andy Davidson from the Engine Group as her guest. Andy is the Head of Analytics and Data Strategy at Engine.

The Engine Group
The Engine Group is a full-service marketing services firm specializing in a range of things from insights and analytics to planning and content and distribution.

Background
Andy has been with the Engine Group for about two years. Before that, he spent twenty-five years in various assignments across research analytics and data science. He worked on the client-side as well as on the agency side. His focus has been on helping advertisers and their agencies in addressing business problems with data analytics. He spent a lot of time helping his clients develop marketing strategies. And then personalizing the customer experience and measuring those efforts in the returns they are getting.

Engine specializes in three areas
Insights and analytics: This function supports both advertisers and agencies in making better decisions using data and analytics.
Planning and content: These are about creative and media strategy and media planning.
Distribution: Engine owns a proprietary ad exchange. They have relationships with a lot of the publisher networks. Through that capability, they can place media programmatically for much of the market. That includes both the agencies and the advertisers directly.

A combination of services
The Engine Group has a combination of services, from a data and analytics perspective and a distribution perspective, that many other firms in their arena don’t normally have. That creates a seamless experience for their customers. Their clients are increasingly becoming multiple threads. They also have plenty of more single-threaded situations.

There are some key challenges in the ad space
When it comes to audience targeting, media campaigns don’t always reach where they are supposed to. That can happen as often as fifty percent of the time. At Engine, they recognize that challenge, and they have invested a lot in helping their clients overcome it.

Data
The targeting challenge, at its core, is a data and analytics problem. Data is behind every decision that an advertiser makes around bidding on an opportunity, whether it is a video ad, a display ad, or a CTV-type impression.

Accurate data
That data is usually pretty accurate when it comes to straight-forward behaviors, like past purchases and demographics.

Where things tend to fall apart
Things tend to fall apart, and problems become apparent in the area where advertisers spend a lot of money. That area includes attitudes, intentions, and sentiments in the softer type of targeting requirements.

A huge opportunity
All the requirements around attitudes are a huge opportunity. At Engine, the focus is on investing in solutions that build a better cross-walk between the people who the advertiser wants to reach and the people to whom the advertising gets sold to reach that goal.

Programmatic media
Programmatic media is all about understanding who you are looking at and what their attitudes and behaviors are.

No validation
There is no validation for many of the data solutions out there, particularly those related to attitudes.

Improving precision
At Engine, they are working in the opportunity area of data solutions to improve precision. They do that by building from the ground up using survey research, starting with the voice of the customer.

The measure of success
Their success can get measured by comparing the legacy model with the new model to see how many more people they have reached in a particular segment. Their best measure of success is whether or not they got to the person they wanted to get to. Their success can also be measured by whether or not the campaign ultimately had the expected effect.

The future of ad measurement
The future of ad measurement looks very exciting for Andy. We will soon reach the point where most things are connected. All consumers will get connected. Therefore all advertising delivery will be digital and connected in some way, shape, or form. The best thing from a data standpoint is to have connected data sets across the entire consumer journey.

Protocols
Andy feels that it is important for us to have the right protocols in place to protect people and their wishes and desires.

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Andy Davidson on LinkedIn

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Sima is excited to welcome Erinn Taylor as her guest for today’s podcast. Erinn is the Executive Vice President of Product and Platform at Canvs AI. He has had a breadth of experience within the field of market research.

Some of Erinn’s background

Erinn grew up in market research. He worked his way up at several different organizations. About a year ago, he met the founder of Canvs and was intrigued with what he was doing related to text analytics, so he joined Canvs.

A great year

Canvs had a great year last year. They have done a lot technology-wise, and they have grown the platform.

Canvs

Canvs is a text analytics platform, and they think it is the best solution in marketing. They call it an evolution of sentiment analysis because they use more nuanced emotions. They take data and analyze it and provide themes and insights directly from the consumer.

The organization is about six or seven years old. They work with companies like Disney and Netflix.

Speaking unnaturally

With the technology they were using, they could expose what consumers and viewers were seeing. And what they were saying about programs. They utilized that information to learn how people speak unnaturally. They found that in a modern era with a lot of digital text, we tend to talk differently than we might otherwise because we use shorthand and emojis.

Learning new things 

Things change over time, so we have to keep learning. Many other applications have tried to do text analytics, but it requires a lot of training and data to get and understand a small sample, and Canvs has already done that work.

An ontology

Canvs has an ontology that they have cultivated through AI and NLP. They also have some social listening tools to see people on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.

The best bring-your-own-get-a-platform 

Erinn thinks that Canvs is the best bring-your-own-data-platform in the industry to identify what people are saying. Also, to identify how they are feeling about what they are talking about.

Any survey platform

The Canvs platform is intelligent and easy to use. It works with any survey platform.

It’s quick and easy

It only takes a few clicks of the mouse, and most data sets get processed in one to two minutes.

Sentiment analysis vs emotions

Traditional sentiment analysis is positive/negative/neutral. At Canvs, they have their Canvs proprietary emotional mapping, with which they can identify forty-two core emotions. And they have a data science team who have spent many years getting to understand groupings around the core emotions.

Things change over time

People and language change over time, so they continue to upgrade.

The way people speak

Through the way people speak, they can identify and expose how they are feeling. And also the context in which they are feeling it. And they can work out what people are talking about.

Use cases

Canvs started in the media space. Currently, they work with companies like Disney to find out how well people are speaking about their airings, and to see how their movies are trending. They also do ad testings to see what people are saying about the ads.

The goal for the future

They would like Canvs to be the core platform for analyzing unstructured data for organizations, brands, research partners, and communities.

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Sima Vasa is excited to welcome Hunter Thurman, the President and Founder of Alpha-Diver, as her guest today. Hunter has been in the insights and strategy world for the last twenty years.

Some background for Alpha-Diver

In 2011, Hunter got to a point where he felt dissatisfied with how he was doing insights and research and translating it into a strategy. (Subsequently, he learned that his approach had been model-free. And the industry had also been operating in a model-free way at the time.)

Around that time, Hunter started exploring, stepping out of the industry, and hanging around with neuroscientists, psychologists, and people from the world of academia. He forged a copasetic relationship with the academics, which became the basis for the company, Alpha-Diver. They use mostly neuroscience. But they also use a lot of psychology, which they translate for business applications to answer the questions that help companies serve their consumers.

A framework

Hunter later realized that when you have a framework, a place to start, a foundation, and a model, it’s much more rewarding. And it can lead to much richer discoveries.

The pain point

With the model-free approach, it was hard to explain how they were doing what they were doing. Although Hunter was in a leadership role, he did not feel that he could teach very well because he did not have a model from which to work.

In a model-based space

In a model-based space, you are going out, and using an established model instead of collecting data broadly and bringing it back to an existing model.

Some surprises when talking to people in academia

Hunter was surprised at how applicable the academic knowledge that he received was. He was also surprised at how relevant those insights could be, how little connectivity there is from the academic world to the rest of the world, and how dissatisfied many academics are. He had always assumed that neuroscience would be far more technical, far more physiological, and much less applied than he discovered it truly is.

Insights challenges

Going out, and looking at insights challenges, whether you are looking at the segmentation, the journey mapping, or the drivers and barriers of your brand or category, is very chaotic, noisy, and difficult to organize. That caused researchers to overlook what is going on between the ears of a consumer. Yet we have quite a simple explanation of human cognition and the lenses we use to react to the world around us.

What a model-based approach means

A model-based approach can be likened to us using all five of our senses.

Neuroscience

What neuroscience has discovered is that there are durable and predictable drivers and barriers, which are pretty simple, and happen mostly subconsciously in people’s brains.

The 9 Whys

Hunter and his partners developed a framework that they call The 9 Whys. It tells us that there are four drivers and five barriers that can simplify the world.

The drivers

The drivers range from very rational and practical, to social and tribal, sensory and exploratory, to impulsive and instinctive. In a given context, one of those four drivers would become the primary lens that a person uses to make decisions. And in a different context, a different driver could apply to the same person.

Context

We have gained from neuroscience the recognition that context has an enormous impact on the driver that we are using. Currently, occasions are the incarnation of how the industry is looking at context.

The five barriers

The five barriers are:

1. Price (Price is the least punitive)
2. Time
3. Effort or Physical barriers
4. Social
5. Emotional

The questionnaire

The questionnaire that Hunter and his team are using is simple in that it can get administered in a regular survey. The data from it provides them with certain tells of an individual’s psychology, and their cognitive processes, in the context they are studying. And the algorithms on the back end let the computer know what those responses mean and help the strategy team understand them.

Consumer’s decisions

From one of his studies, Hunter discovered from the subconscious data provided that the consumer’s decisions were based far more on their personal preferences than they realized. It revealed that the consumers were more self-reflective than socially reflective. The study was wildly successful, and it drove a double-digit increase.

The future

Hunter thinks that the merging of qualitative and quantitative will continue in the future.

 

Hunter’s quotes:

“I had the assumption that neuroscience was going to be far more technical and far more physiological and much less applied than I discovered it is.”

“In a model-based space, you are going out and using an established model instead of just collecting data broadly and bringing that data back to an existing model.”

“When you have a framework, a place to start, a foundation, a model, it’s much more rewarding, and it can lead to much richer discoveries.”

“We bought in that world of mostly neuroscience, but there is a lot of psychology that we use as well, translating that for business applications, to answer the questions that help companies serve their consumers.”

“What I was experiencing in the model-free was that it was hard to explain how we were doing it.”

 

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Sima Vasa is excited to welcome Kristin Luck once again as her guest! Kristin is the founder and managing partner of Scalehouse Consulting, and Kristi and I are both advisors at Oberon Securities, on the investment banking side.

Where the industry is, as related to the impact of Covid

The abrupt impact of the pandemic on the overall economy brought the industry to a near standstill last spring. It is unlikely to return to its 2019 turnover levels until 2022.

ESOMAR

Although ESOMAR initially predicted a downturn in research revenues of up to 30%, we still ended up with a stronger third and fourth quarter than predicted, particularly with tech and digital businesses.

The digital side of the industry

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the digital side of the industry regarding its accuracy, approach, and basis in terms of true research methodology.

A revolution

The pandemic is accelerating a revolution in the research space. So there were many naysayers about many of the digital technologies, particularly on the qualitative side of the business, going into 2020. When the pandemic hit, it started to fuel the tech revolution and acted as an accelerator to the dynamic shifts that we were already seeing with the digital technology segments and the established market research segments.

Masking the effects of the pandemic

The performance of the tech and digitally-enabled segments masked the effect that the pandemic had on the established part of the industry. The established part experienced a downturn of 15% last year, in contrast to the 9% growth expected across the digital and tech-enabled segment.

Face-to-face qualitative

Kristin does not think that face-to-face qualitative is dead. She feels that there is value in face-to-face contact with respondents. And in many cases, qualitative research can be conducted in a digital format and still produce quality results.

Migration to more digital techniques 

We will see a substantial and permanent migration to more digital techniques. And there will be a combination of methodologies that will integrate both types of tech and digital.

Blockchain

Most of the companies that started in the blockchain space have pivoted. Although blockchain as a technology still has value, many businesses that were focused on being blockchain-only companies realize that they need to have products that deliver value other than the blockchain platform. Although blockchain is a means to the end and can enhance a portfolio of products and solutions, it is not the end to the product.

An ESOMAR member

Kristin has been an ESOMAR member for almost eleven years, and she has been on the board called ESOMAR Council for the last six years. For the past two years, she was Vice-President.

ESOMAR

ESOMAR is a little different from some of the local and regional associations in that they are truly a global association. They look at everything from privacy to data ethics and sound research methods around the globe. And they give those a global perspective.

A global perspective

Kristin has been involved with ESOMAR for a long time because having that global perspective has been invaluable to her career and the businesses she has developed. Getting some insight into how research gets conducted in other regions gives Americans a broader look at opportunities for researching new and different ways.

How ESOMAR differs from other industry associations

The overall global look is what sets ESOMAR apart from other industry associations. ESOMAR focused on keeping track of the lobbying for privacy and data ethics all around the world.

The structure of ESOMAR

The ESOMAR Council consists of elected individuals.

Underrepresented

North and South America, Africa, and Asia are underrepresented in ESOMAR. So ESOMAR members need to remember to vote for the candidates in their region.

Running for President

Kristin is running for President of ESOMAR. She was inspired to do so for several reasons. She has been on the ESOMAR Council for many years. She has over a decade of experience in building and scaling businesses and non-profits. And she also has a keen understanding of how to navigate rough waters during turbulent times.

Three key pillars

Kristin feels passionate about three key pillars for her candidacy. They are:

1. Expanding on Council and their platform of building bridges to become a truly global association that serves its members on all continents.
2. Bringing younger researchers into the industry and ESOMAR so that it can remain relevant to the new generations that are driving the evolution of the industry.
3. Opening ESOMAR’s arms to data scientists and second and third-party data providers so that the importance of data quality and ethics does not get lost as the research industry evolves.

 

Quotes:

Kristin:

“The abrupt impact of the pandemic on the overall economy brought the industry to a near standstill.”

“Although ESOMAR originally predicted up to a 30% downturn in research revenues, we ended up with a stronger third and fourth quarter than predicted.”

“The industry is likely not returning to our 2019 turnover levels again until 2022.”

“The pandemic is accelerating a revolution in the research space.”

“When the pandemic hit, it started to fuel the tech revolution.”

 

Sima:

“The technology is bringing in new players, new capital, and new excitement to the industry.”

“Blockchain is a means to the end, but it is not      the      end      product.”

 

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In Person Qualitative Research Companies

Sima Vasa is excited to have Bob Qureshi join her today. Bob is the co-owner and managing partner of i-view viewing facilities in London.

Bob talks about the history of his business

In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the qualitative research in the UK took place at the home of the recruiter. Over the years, specific facilities for research were being built in the US. Then, in the 80s, that also started to happen in the UK.

A game-changer

In 2010, Bob looked at the UK facilities and saw that they were all laid out like recruiter’s living rooms. They lacked things like white marker boards, places to put stimulus, and the ability to screen. So Bob decided to start with a game-changer and build everything they needed on one floor, in an easy to get to location in central London, with wide doors and access for people with special needs. They paid specific attention to detail, which means they made sure that they took account of everything.

Bob’s background

Bob’s background was in the corporate client-side, and he has always had an interest in qualitative research.

Best Viewing Facility

For the last three years in a row, i-view was awarded Best Viewing Facility in the UK. That is not an easy thing to do, and Bob feels very humbled by it.

The impact of the pandemic

The impact of the pandemic has been quite devastating for Bob.

Collaboration

Bob realized that the key thing was to replace the word “competition” with the word “collaboration”. So he decided to talk to the other viewing facilities, to collectively agree on which message they would send, who they would send it to, and how they could drive it forward.

Rates relief

In stopping unnecessary costs in the UK, they managed to save the municipality rates relief of over a million pounds across all the viewing facilities. They managed to recover very quickly as a result.

A similar standard

Through the collaboration, all the viewing facilities in the UK are sending out the same message and adopting a similar standard to deal with the prevention and spread of the virus.

In-person

What Bob and those with whom he is collaborating have to look at, in terms of when in-person will resume, are some of the key statistics and figures that are coming out. Essentially, they are looking for infection rates and death rates to fall and the vaccine levels to increase so that the most vulnerable in their society do not fall prey to the pandemic.

When lockdown will finish

Bob believes that in the UK, they will not get any indication of when they can open up again until the end of February. He assumes that lockdown will finish in March- possibly mid-March to late March or early April at the latest.

Attitudes are changing

People’s attitudes are changing because they feel restricted. So they are no longer as cautious as they were at the beginning of the pandemic.

Bob’s passion for qualitative research

Bob loves qualitative research because he wants to understand the emotional reasons for what drives people’s decision-making and causes them to behave in particular ways.

Technology

Bob feels very fortunate to run online focus groups or online interviews and test everything beforehand to eliminate any potential problems.

Bob’s other business

Early on, he decided to have several business areas that would complement each other. It means that if one sector is not doing too well, another will have the opportunity to make up for the shortfall. That is why he also owns another business, a telephone center B2B data collection agency, called Provision Research. And it has been doing very well because people are at home and easy to contact currently.

Colour of Research

Bob is the cofounder of Colour of Research, which started officially in June of 2020. It is a mentorship program where people of different ethnic groups can see others who look like them, who are either doing well at work or are on the way to doing well. Bob feels that it is one of the best things that has come out of the pandemic for him.

 

Bob’s quotes:

“We are all project managers at heart.”

“Attention to detail is trying to make sure that you’ve taken account of everything.”

“For the last three years in a row, i-view was awarded Best Viewing Facility in the UK.”

“We realized that the key thing to do was to take out the word competition and replace it with collaboration.”

“I believe that in the UK, we are probably not going to see any clear indication of when you may open up, certainly until the end of February.”

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Sima Vasa is excited to welcome Tim Clover as her guest for today’s podcast. Tim is the CEO and Founder of Glow, based in Australia. Tim is originally from the UK and has been living in Australia for the last ten years.

About Glow

Glow is an online research platform, and people often compare it with SurveyMonkey on steroids. For Tim, it is about a lot more than just creating surveys. It is about the whole workflow for research.

Some background

As a kid, Tim was into engineering and finding out how things work. He started his first business after getting his engineering degree. He tried to use Excel macros to standardize processes and do things like process mapping. And he wanted to work out how to create channels into different markets. Although he earned enough to pay the rent and eat, he needed to gain more life and company experience, so he ended up working for a UK company, doing business simulation work.

Not fitting the mold

A friend called Tim and suggested that he apply for a role at the company he was working for because they needed someone with his skill set. Tim applied for and got the job. But he felt that did not quite fit that mold, which was generally very academic and did not involve much thinking outside the box.

Assumptions

Tim became interested in the sensitivities around many of the assumptions in the models that were being used in the company he was working for. He wanted to understand where the data was coming from that was feeding those assumptions. That pushed his career within that company into a role of story-telling, and into dealing with much more senior people in the organizations, to challenge them and help them form assumptions. From doing that, he became well-known within the organization.

Australia

In Australia, they were trying to do a similar thing. They wanted to build a team to analyze data and analytics from an operational perspective. So Tim decided to move there and help the company build a team in Melbourne.

Retailers

Tim did a lot of work with retailers. A big retailer called Coles was going through a major transformation at the time, and Tim’s team helped them pull together all their data together.

The birth of Glow

It took a long time to get their customer data together, and Tim started tinkering around to find ways to speed things up. Through his endeavors to find a better way to capture the information, Glow was born.

Glow

Glow, as a concept, was born because of a gap in the ability to reach consumers. It was a way that companies could tap into their customers more quickly and directly. Initially, Tim did not think of it as a survey platform. He just wanted to close the gap in hard-to-reach places and create experiences for the customers to engage.

Good times and bad

When starting a business, you have to weigh up the personal risk and realize that the path will be hard. If you’re not absolutely focused and completely determined, you’re going to find the ride pretty tough. Tim has had some fantastic times and some tough times over the last seven years.

At first

At first, Glow was all about getting data from hard to reach places and leveraging their tech to fund growth. In the background, they were investing more heavily in the ability to write the surveys themselves.

Clients could log in

After starting to write the surveys themselves, about three years ago, they released the first version of Glow where their clients could log in, look at their account, see the surveys running, and change some of the questions.

Getting data

Before, Tim was more of an insights person than a researcher. So when he got into research, it was about getting data.

Online panel

Three years ago, Schweppes asked Tim to do an online panel. He looked into it to find out how it might work, and it eventually took about two hours to get it working beautifully. The panel that Tim created takes people from building a survey to creating links to get responses, to then analyze the data online.

The big change

Integrating with the panels made the bits of the experience that used to be hard very easy, and it made a big change for Glow from a business model perspective. They have seen enormous growth in their revenues and business.

The role of insights

Tim believes that the role of insights is to take on the big programs and do them well. And to use your resources to find ways to capture the other questions that the business is asking and serve them with the information they need

The future of Glow

Glow shares their data, and they encourage others to do the same.

Tim sees the future of Glow being about building a narrative around data shared quickly is a good thing because it enables people to get involved and important topics discussed.

Data quality

The data quality for Glow is about the quality of the panels.

When Glow manages projects for their clients, they are responsible for looking at the data quality. They actively invest in tools that help identify quality data.

One of the risks

One of Glow’s risks is that people could use the data inappropriately. They are mindful to avoid creating more of a problem than what they are trying to solve.

The future

The future of Glow will follow their vision. Their vision is to provide more access to better tools that more quickly surface data and reduce some of the half-life challenges that data has. Their future also involves a seat at the table around trying to achieve more of a human-centric future.

 

Tim’s quotes:

“Glow is an online research platform, so people compare us often with SurveyMonkey on steroids.”

“It’s not just about creating surveys. It’s about the whole workflow for research.”

“Retail is one of the industries everyone has an opinion about because we all participate in it.”

“Glow, as a concept, was born of a gap in the ability to reach consumers.”

“When you start a business, you have to weigh up personal risk.”

“When starting a business, if you’re not absolutely focused and completely determined, you’re going to find the ride pretty tough.”

“I believe that the role of insights is to take on the big programs, to do them well.”

 

 

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I am happy to welcome Ken Roshkoff, the CEO of AMC Global, as my guest for today.

Ken’s father started AMC Global

Ken’s father started their company in 1979. He was a true researcher who loved working with data, doing analytics, and working with project staff.

The competitive component

Ken always loved the competitive component, so he spent much of his childhood focused on sports. He loved tournaments and competing, so he knew that he would eventually embark on a career with competitive elements.

Getting involved with AMC

When Ken initially got involved with AMC, his father started training him to crunch the numbers and become an expert in running projects. However, Ken quickly realized that was not going to be his thing. He felt that for him to be excited about what he was doing, he had to bring his clients into a space that would be more interesting to him.

Giving the business another shot

After less than a year, Ken left the business to go to grad school to get an MBA. Coming out of that, he decided to give the business another shot. He wanted to do things a little differently, however.

A unique methodology

Given his interest in CPG, he identified an opportunity in product launch tracking. In around 1991, he developed a unique positioning and created and patented a unique methodology that would help major CPG companies capture robust insights from the purchasers of the products in the market. That program became known as PFU (Purchaser Follow Up).

Marketing the PFU program

Ken then began actively marketing the PFU program to CPG companies. He created a niche. Then he leveraged it to form relationships with some of the largest CPG companies in the world.

Working at all stages of the product life cycle

AMC does work at all stages of the product life cycle.

Where the program fits

Ken’s program fits between pre-launch and post-launch work.

The launch phase

The issue for many of Ken’s clients is that they were not getting reliable repeat information until six months, or longer, into the launch. Ken’s launch phase starts from day one of the launches and runs throughout the first three to six months.

A robust way to capture insights

He developed the PFU program as a robust way to capture insights, both qualitative and quantitative, from the very first purchasers of new products. Then they track those consumers to understand how well the products fit into their lifestyle if they are re-purchasing, and if not, why not.

What the PFU program involves

The PFU program works by placing an invitation in or on a package, in a slightly disguised way because it is not meant to be a purchase driver. Ken wants people to find the invitation when they get the product home and use it. When they open the product, they typically find an offer for a prepaid cash card.

A built-in usage period

They build in a usage period. So after the extended usage period, they send the purchasers a cash card with instructions for how to activate it by doing a phase-two survey. It is a bit like an in-market home-use test, and it is flexible. And it can get used globally.

The beauty of the system

As long as the product sells, they can provide their clients with top-line information at any point during the project.

Trends related to launching new products

Lately, Ken has been seeing a lot of companies shortening the pre-launch process. And that makes the launch-phase tracking that Ken does even more important.

Historical product launch data base

Ken uses his historical database to benchmark new products against other similar test products that they have tracked for other clients.

Post-launch activities

They also do a lot of the more traditional brand health tracking for their clients. Once the products are out there for a longer time, in addition to using more traditional panel-based systems, they also leverage the database they developed from using the PFU program during the launch phase so that they can go back to those consumers and do further testing at different stages of the product life cycle.

A good time to get new products out there

Since Covid, sales have gone crazy for a lot of Ken’s clients in the CPG space. As a result, he has seen that a lot of his clients pushing ahead with new launches. It has been a good time to get some new products out there into the retail space.

The team

In Ken’s type of business, you need to assemble the right kind of team to grow. Ken’s team is his number one asset, so he is cautious about who he brings onto the team. Those people need to be innovative, a fit for the culture, and a fit for their clients.

The future

Going forward Ken wants to offer the highest quality to their clients and collect solid researchers along the way. He wants to train his juniors up to be the next generation of best researchers in the industry and have structured growth over time.

 

Ken’s quotes:

“We developed the PFU program as a robust way to capture insights, both qualitative and quantitative, from the very first purchasers of new products.”

“As a result of all the video conferencing, I feel like we’ve got stronger relationships with our staff and our clients.”

“I grew up around market research.”

“I always loved the competitive component.”

“I developed a unique positioning and I created and patented a unique methodology that would help major CPG companies capture robust insights from the purchasers of the products in the market.”

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This is the first episode in our MRX Podcast Network series. I am excited to kick this year off with an episode focused on perspectives and thoughts related to our industry for 2021.

A year like no other

2020 has been a year like no other. As an industry, we collaborated, we called on each other for help, and we were there for each other, both personally and professionally. That was an important statement, and it showed me that, as an industry, we are resilient, we can adapt, we can pivot, and find a path forward.

No playbook

We have no playbook to follow. And we can’t look at history to know what will happen with consumer behavior, consumer attitudes, consumer perceptions, and the decisions and choices that companies will make, both on the supplier side and the in-client side.

The good news

The good news for our industry is that people need information and insights to inform the decisions they have to make. I think that 2021 is going to be a vital time for our industry to get more engaged and to focus on being able to provide solutions.

Stakeholder capitalism

2020 was a year when we saw stakeholder capitalism take place. Employees and consumers wanted companies to stand for something beyond profit and loss, and they wanted companies to be linked to the values they represent. They wanted to vote with their dollars as to the companies they believed in, and the products and services they believed in that were in line with their value system.

A big question

The big question is, as brands, organizations, and companies grow, will that concept allow for sustainable growth? And does that translate to performance and something real that shareholders and investors can believe in? Those are topics that need to be researched and understood.

Playing a vital part

The silver lining is that our industry can play a vital part in helping companies to answer some of those questions.

2021 is going to be similar to 2020

In 2020, every week felt like a month because many decisions were getting made. So we had to be faster because things were moving. In my mind, 2021 is going to be similar. It will continue to be fast because brands and clients will have to accelerate the speed at which they operate.

Technology

Technology is essential in our industry. It will cut across the entire landscape.

Faster and more efficient

Organizations will have to be faster and more efficient in how they go to market, launch new products, develop campaigns, sell, manage their supply chain, manage their employees, and hire. Every function and business process will need to be quicker, and companies will need to keep up because if they don’t do it, a competitor will.

Deliver solutions

As part of the data, marketing, research, insights ecosystem, we need to deliver solutions to meet those needs. And to do that, we will have to adapt and do things a little differently in 2021.

Impacting each part of the data ecosystem

Over the years, we have seen tech-enabled companies impacting every part of the data ecosystem. When there is technology, there is scale. And when there’s scale, there is investment. So, I believe that in 2021 and beyond, we will continue to see capital getting put into our industry. And that is a good thing because it keeps innovation alive and allows us to grow our share of the pie in terms of dollars spent.

The driver

The driver is speed and to facilitate decision-making as efficiently as possible.

Strategic research

We need to continue doing strategic research and using metrics to understand how we are doing.

Parts of the value chain where technology plays a vital role

You can enhance what you are doing with technology. You can create a new business model where we are seeing tech and scale, subscription revenue, and a different sales model.

API (Application Protocol Interface)

API has made a big impact in the sample world and it will continue to be prominent and grow. And we will get additional data sets through API connections, making us faster and more efficient in delivering richer data.

Consumer insights

Consumer insights within brand organizations will do well to democratize the use of information through visualization and platforms that create automated charts and get the insights faster to a broader audience and make the value more about the decisions that get made around the insights because people need to get empowered with insights.

Empower people

To operate faster, we need to empower people with insights. People need to understand quickly what the results of a study are.

Change is hard

Change is hard, but it takes just one company to change, and others will follow.

Data

The data is not the power. It is the fuel that drives decisions.

An opportunity

Consumer insights and market research professionals have a huge opportunity now because many tech-enabled platforms did not get developed by traditional researchers. They got developed by innovators and people who want to build new business models. And they need the partnership, the experience, and the understanding of what the playbook is for data. And they need to know what the parameters that are going to guide the decision-making are. So, as a result of the technology, there will be a great need for data governance, improved data quality practices, and ultimately, data stewards.

We have an opportunity to blend our industry, up our game, and share our experience. And as a result, we can make our industry even stronger.

We need to be open, embrace change, and ultimately, be leaders of this journey.

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I am excited to share some news with you today. Some of my fellow podcasters and I came up with the concept of an MRX Podcast Network.

The main mission of the podcast network is to be able to podcast on a topic on our respective podcast channels, and provide multiple points of view, perspectives, and formats on how we address the specific topic, and give all our listeners in the industry a broader perspective as it relates to that topic.

We are starting this year with what we think that 2021 holds for our industry. These are not predictions or forecasts. They are about what each one of us wanted to share, related to 2021, and our thoughts about the market research industry, data, and analytics space.

We hope you enjoy what we have to share. We will be publishing the first series over the next few days.

For this podcast, we have put together a teaser to showcase some of what will be coming up in each of our podcast episodes, related to the outlook for 2021. Stay tuned for more!

2020

We will remember 2020 for many things, including a rise in the number of podcasts. Currently, 37% of Americans listen to podcasts monthly, and in 2020, more than a hundred million Americans listened to at least one podcast each month. It was the first time that that has ever happened.

Today’s show

We will be hearing from six podcasters today, and each podcaster will give their outlook for market research in 2021.

David Paul – The Audible Insights Podcast from the Insights Association

This podcast focuses on quick-take conversations during industry events and longer interviews with industry leaders. They strive to keep everyone up to date with the market research industry, the latest methods and techniques, and the trends for the future.

Kathryn Korostoff – Conversations for Research Rockstars Podcast

Conversations for Research Rockstars is a video podcast that Kathryn has been running for a couple of years. It is about advancing the work and careers of market research and insights professionals. Kathryn has thousands of subscribers, and she has had some amazing conversations in the series.

Merill Dubrow – On the M/A/R/C®

Merrill has just completed his first year with 56 episodes. There is one episode for every year that M/A/R/C® research has been in business. Each episode is unscripted, uncensored, unrehearsed. There are plenty of takeaways from the amazing guests that he has had, including a mix of professional athletes, insight leaders, and CEOs.

Sima Vasa – Data Gurus

The mission of the Data Gurus podcast is to help everyone in the data ecosystem navigate the sea of change. Sima speaks to leaders, practitioners, CEOs, and change agents in the industry.

Stephen Griffiths – Digging for Insights Podcast

The Digging for Insights Podcast is a marketing and career podcast with advice from insights leaders from companies like Nestle, Ipsos, and General Mills. As a client-side researcher, Stephen focuses this podcast on helping client-side and supplier-side folks get the insights they need to grow their careers and the businesses on which they work.

Jamin Brazil – Happy Market Research Podcast

The Happy Market Research Podcast has had over 300 episodes and covers four industry trends per year. For each trend, they interview subject matter experts from major brands, including Adobe, Microsoft, and Proctor and Gamble.

David’s outlook for market research for 2021

David’s focus is on seeing the rebound of in-person research happening as soon as possible. He is anxious to support the ability to safely and quickly get people back in-person, doing in-person qualitative, and ramping that part of the industry back up.

Kathryn’s outlook for market research for 2021

Kathryn thinks that survey research for 2021 will be about the areas that are likely to be hot. For quality researchers, she thinks that we will see some of the people who had to pivot to online research go back to in-person research, to some extent. Many people have said that they will never go back to the level of in-person research they had before because their online has worked so well.

Merrill’s outlook for market research for 2021

For Merill, 2021 is all about opportunity and insight. Clients are changing, and insights will be more important than ever. He thinks that there will be opportunities in the insight community to build products and services around geo-targeting and geo-fencing. We could also be heading towards a cashless society.

Sima’s outlook for market research for 2021

Sima thinks that the demand for insights could not be greater. She sees the democratization of insights coming into play and providing quick-turn research. And the visualization of data allows the democratization of insights through large brand organizations, enabling people to make decisions more quickly and efficiently. She also thinks there will be more conversations around data quality and privacy, and how to protect consumers and technology will play a big part.

Stephen’s outlook for market research for 2021

Stephen sees a change coming in the way we are working, especially on client-side companies. He sees that the idea of agile and experimentation is starting to take hold. The desire to be more agile and get real-world learning will continue to be a trend for the future.

Jamin’s outlook for market research for 2021

Jamin thinks we need to take the time to get to know all the people we work with because they are our best resources for all the rest of our careers. He believes that we will continue to invest in the asset of a relationship because it is the one thing that is unmoveable in our ever-fluid world.

Links and resources:

David Paul – The Audible Insights Podcast

Kathryn Korostoff – Conversations for Research Rockstars Podcast

Merill Dubrow – On the M/A/R/C®

Sima Vasa – Data Gurus

Stephen Griffiths – Digging for Insights Podcast

Jamin Brazil – Happy Market Research Podcast

We are excited to welcome Steve Schlesinger, the CEO of the Schlesinger Group, as our guest for today’s show.

Join us today to learn about Steve’s journey. You will hear the story behind the Schlesinger Group and find out how it got founded by Steve’s mother back in 1966.

Steve’s mother’s story

The Schlesinger Group was founded by Steve’s mother in 1966.

A few years before, she started looking for a part-time job, and a friend of hers who was working for a company in New York City, got her a job as a phone interviewer, working from a bedroom in the house in which Steve grew up.

She was very good at what she was doing, and after a year or two, she was promoted to Regional Supervisor.

In around 1966, some of the companies she was working for encouraged her to open a company and set herself up so that she could manage several groups of people, and they could feed her business.

Her business got incorporated in 1966, and she built up a roster of clients for whom she did the field data collection.

A group of women

Steve’s mom was part of a phenomenal group of women who all started in the data collection space more or less at the same time in the late 1950s. They built up businesses over the years, and some of those businesses ultimately got bought out by other companies. Those women did a wonderful job of building up the data collection aspect of the market research world.

Working for his mother

When Steve was seventeen, he started officially working for his mother by doing intercept interviews at New York Airport for United. He did that for her many times while he was in high school.

Growing up

While Steve was growing up, there were often leftover products from product tests in their house. Occasionally, he would get asked to deliver something to an interviewer or a responder. That was fun for him.

Starting to understand 

Steve’s mother used to do focus groups at their kitchen table when he was a teenager, and while he was growing up, there was generally a lot going on in the house. That was when he started to understand what his mother was doing, and talking about, in terms of ad campaigns.

After college

Steve took a year off after his first year at Medical School. During that year, his mom insisted that he worked for her while figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. He ended up falling in love with the work he was doing for her and decided to keep on doing it.

Building the business

In light of that, and knowing that she would soon retire, his mother decided to build up the business to make it more substantial. She also decided to open up an office to get Steve out of the basement of their house. He worked for his mother for about six or seven years before taking over and running the business himself.

A strong foundation

Steve’s mother had a good reputation, and she was very ethical and honest. That gave their business a strong foundation and allowed it to grow. Steve has always appreciated what his mom gave to the business, and he still lives by those same principles today.

Some of the early lessons Steve learned

You need to learn as you grow because as the business grows, you need to manage and lead it differently. You need to make new decisions about what you want your business to be and do what it takes to get there. Ultimately, you need to learn from your mistakes, and you need to change as an individual within the organization during all its different stages of growth.

Steve’s style of leadership

Steve is a good delegator, and he does not enjoy micromanaging. He is a good listener, he is good at putting faith and trust into the people around him, and he believes in staying humble and appreciative, regardless of the success you might have achieved.

He is not a control freak. That works when you’re scaling up and trying to evolve a business.

The Schlesinger Corporation has been around for 57 years. Adapting, changing, evolving, and staying relevant is what Steve is most proud of having achieved.

Feedback loops

Having feedback loops will give you the insights and information that you could otherwise easily overlook, and they will ultimately help you make better decisions.

Partnering with Gauge Capital

In more recent years, the growth of the Schlesinger Corporation has been more modest than it has been in the past. For more opportunities and to improve their service, financial success, and the way the company functions, they decided to bring in Gauge Capital as a capital partner. That helped them to transform the business in a short time.

The potential for more growth

Steve believes that the company could potentially grow to be three or four times its size in the next four to five years.

Integration

Steve thinks of integration as a critical component of the acquisition game. For him, it is always about the people. So if you get that right, everything else will fall in line.

Steve’s quotes:

“My mom started in the market research business in 1963.”

“My mother was part of a phenomenal group of women who all started in the data collection space more or less at the same time.”

“Part of our growing up was all those products around our house, plus the fact that the business was in our house.”

“I took over the business, give or take, maybe twenty-five years ago.”

“My mom allowed our business to have this really strong foundation.”

“You don’t need to know everything, and you don’t need to be good at everything.”

Links:

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Sponsors:

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In-Person Research

On this episode, host Sima Vasa speaks with Darrell Bricker, Chief Executive Officer, Public Affairs at Ipsos. They discuss the evolving landscape of public opinion research, the role of emotional connection in politics, and the shifting global demographics shaping our future.

Key Takeaways:

(02:30) Mentorship and opportunity shape a meaningful career in polling.

(05:01) Public affairs research centers on understanding citizens, not consumers.

(06:58) Global polling now offers real-time insights into worldwide issues.

(08:43) Mobile phones enable global polling access, even in remote areas.

(10:28) Decline in deference empowers citizens to challenge authority.

(12:56) Political volatility rises as traditional party loyalty declines.

(15:04) Constant skepticism in research strengthens accuracy and reliability.

(16:29) Emotional connection now outweighs rationality in political appeal.

(19:21) A public affairs career thrives on social science and global curiosity.

(22:13) Global population is set to peak mid-century, then decline rapidly.

(25:42) Urbanization and women’s evolving roles contribute to lower birth rates.

Resources Mentioned:

Ipsos

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

Thanks for listening to the Data Gurus podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech #publicopinion

We are excited to welcome Dave Shanker as our guest for this episode. Dave is the CEO and Founder of David Shanker Consulting.

Dave’s journey

Dave’s career spans more than thirty years, and he has mostly been involved with market research, running different market research agencies. He has also been involved in startups and has had a family business along the way.

Dave’s leadership style

People have often told Dave that he is authentic and that he wears his heart on his sleeve, so what you see is what you get. And he communicates a lot, he cares, and he gets invested in employees, clients, and the business.

Winning

Dave wants to win, and he wants his team to win just as much.

What makes people scared

Early in his career, Dave learned that not knowing is what makes people scared. And if people don’t know, they will make assumptions, and they will probably be wrong.

Building trust and credibility

You need to be very forthright, upfront, and candid with your employees, over time, to build trust and credibility.

Moving an organization to the next level

Dave believes that putting together a combination of caring, being passionate about a business, and getting invested in the employees, the clients, and the business, starts a good foundation for building a culture change and moving an organization to the next level.

Communication

Dave has always sent out weekly emails to his entire company, telling everyone what he has been doing. However, he knew that he needed to change from typing emails to doing video. So one day, he made a video and spoke for five minutes, and he was blown away by the response he got.

Lightspeed

Dave joined Lightspeed at an interesting time. He had a challenge from day one there in working out how to bring the three different business units together. The fun part of it for him was looking across the three sales teams and thinking about ways to get them working together so that one plus one plus one would equal ten. They were successful because the sales teams all saw the benefits of working together.

The start

Dave started with the employees. He spent many hours talking to the employees one-on-one.

One truth

The one truth that Dave found was that you can’t get to where you are going unless you know where you are. And for him, the way to do that was to talk to his employees.

Customers

After talking to the employees, he started talking to his customers because frequent communication is necessary to get your customers to buy-in.

Points of resistance

Some of the points of resistance that he ran into were around sharing customers, doubts about whether or not his commission would get paid, and whether someone else would manage to deliver as efficiently as he could.

Driving growth

Through the change, they did not drive growth equally across the three different business units. Because of the things Dave put in place, however, they managed to drive growth in two of the three business units. And they realized some substantial wins in how they went about the day-to-day of the business.

After Lightspeed

After Lightspeed, Dave went to a B2B media company called Ensemble IQ and had to do some heavy lifting there. He approached it in the same way as he approached Lightspeed, by thinking about what they could do at the back end to create efficiencies and become seamless, to have one operations team delivering across everything. Although the people at Ensemble IQ were very resistant to change, he still managed to do it fairly quickly.

Centralization

For the most part, Dave likes centralization across shared services, no matter which stage the company is at.

The companies that Dave prefers working with

Dave enjoys working with companies with challenges in figuring out how to sell into the market they would like to get into. And with companies that are struggling to get to the next level.

Account planning

Dave leans towards keeping things simple with account planning. For him, account planning is about having a conversation with the salesperson about what you want to accomplish at that account during the next twelve to twenty-four months. After agreeing about what you want to accomplish you need to think about what you need to do, to get there.

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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 she does, subscribe on iTunes, and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

Contact Dave:

Website

Email – david@davidshankerconsulting.com

I’m happy to welcome Rebecca Brooks to the show. She’s the founder and CEO of Alter Agents, a full-service, strategic market research consultancy reimagining research in an era of shifting decision making. Rebecca has enjoyed an amazing trajectory to her successful career, and her work has never been more relevant and necessary than it is in today’s world. 

About Rebecca

Rebecca fell into market research without intending to make it her career, but she quickly fell in love with this kind of work. Ironically, her college background was in primate behavior, which she touts as entirely applicable to her work today.

How Alter Agents has matured 

Rebecca felt strongly that she shouldn’t have to choose between a career she loved and the family she wanted. She decided that she could run a great market research company and do it differently by focusing on her employees’ priorities. Ten years later, Alter Agents has had their best year ever, even in the time of COVID; they have hired seven new people in 2020. What makes Rebecca the proudest of her company is that she lives up to her commitment by creating a culture that employees want to join. 

Highlights of a study in friendship

During the time of COVID, we are all trying to understand how relationships are changing and what the challenges are in a new environment. Rebecca’s company joined in a study with Snapchat that encompassed 16 countries and 30,000 interviews. Alter Agents helped develop tools to help Snapchat grow in the friendship space and capitalize on a basic human need. 

What you can learn from the refrigerator

The friendship study research showed an interesting practice in the immigrant community. Many people are using a visual platform like Snapchat to check up on loved ones by asking for a picture of what is in their refrigerator to make sure they have what they need. Much more than a text or phone call, Snapchat’s platform has become a positive way for technology to help friends and families to stay connected.

Fear and anxiety in the time of COVID

Alter Agents began a survey in the US in November 2019 to ask what made people feel fearful in their daily lives. The conclusion was that fear and anxiety in the general public was way worse than most people realized–and this was before the pandemic began. The same research a few months later showed a startling decline in comfort and safety for Americans, especially for the African-American population. 

How COVID has highlighted the differences

COVID clearly exacerbated the problems in our economic systems, and the disadvantages were magnified. This occurred more dramatically in the African-American community because of their history of being under cared for in our healthcare system. The differences were also dramatically revealed in the Native American population. The Alter Agents study found that COVID highlighted the brokenness of our system for non-Caucasian people. 

Rebecca’s advice to brands

People want the brands they purchase to align with them politically and ethically like never before. They turn to corporations for stability and structure when their government isn’t working well, and they vote with their dollars. Corporations need to recognize this tendency and realize that it goes far beyond a marketing campaign. Rebecca’s advice is to evaluate the position you take in marketing and who you are, and what you stand for all the way up the supply chain. 

Women in the workplace

Even before COVID, the research showed that the disparity between moms and dads as they parent is even greater than the difference between men and women in the workplace. COVID has disproportionately affected women as many have left the workplace in making the unimaginable choice between their careers and caring for their children. COVID took away the support structure that women relied upon while expecting the same workload and results. The challenge for corporations is how to best support their employees. 

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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 she does, subscribe on iTunes, and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

www.alteragents.com  

 

Sima’s goal for this two-part podcast series is to help senior leaders understand the mindset and psychology of sales. She would like to help sales leaders understand how they need to think about sales as a profession, how sales integrate into an organization, and the psychology behind what makes a salesperson tick.

So many companies struggle with one of the biggest components of scaling their businesses, which is sales. That means getting a balance of the right personality and the right leader and making sure that there is lockstep with the product.

Adam Jolley joins Sima today in presenting the second part of this two-part series.

This week we have Julie Kurd, the VP of Sales and Revenue at CMB, Kenny Thompson, Director of Client Solutions at Schlesinger Group, and Ricky Odello, the VP of Sales at Lucid, as panelists.

CMB is not a SaaS company

CMB is a strategic consultancy and not a SaaS company. Their process begins with the client and not with a product.

The sales process for consulting

Typically, the sales process for consulting is based on selling relationships. It is about establishing long-term relationships and focusing on different kinds of problem-solving and various kinds of longer-term play.

A unique perspective

Ricky comes from a traditional ad hoc type sales environment, which has given him a unique history and perspective. He was with FSI for about ten years, and then he moved to Lucid which is more of a software subscription focused organization.

Ad hoc sales environment

Ricky has found that in a more ad hoc type of sales environment, you are typically dealing with fewer stakeholders, so it is like selling to a person rather than to an enterprise. And the cycle can be a lot faster.

Software subscription sales

Selling the software subscription involves a much longer sales cycle and possibly more stakeholders. Although it takes time, it can be most rewarding once you achieve the contract.

Offering qualitative and quantitative solutions

At the Schlesinger group, they can offer qualitative and quantitative solutions to their clients at scale. They grow their relationships long-term at the facility level through engagements and bidding. Schlesinger has done a great job of having a comprehensive solution set for the industry and their clients so that they can provide them with solutions for all their needs.

A human touch

Kenny brings a human touch to everything, making it warm, fun, and real.

Your personality and style

Everyone is different in the way they work with their customers. Whether you work for a product company or a consultative sale company, either way, you can bring your personality and your style. One starts with the product, and the other one without a product, to begin.

It is important to be genuine 

It is important to be genuine and authentic about who you are because your colleagues and customers can feel when you are real, and when you are not.

The human connection 

Salespeople sometimes get a bad rap, or a stigma, about not being real and authentic and just going in for the sale. Realizing that you are helping people to solve their complex business problems can motivate you to do more research and also help you in the execution of the sale. You need to find a human connection.

Failure

Julie points out that failure is a part of sales. We win and lose every day.

Characteristics

For success in sales and sales management, Ricky feels you need to be a leader within your organization, and you need to have good ethics.

Trust and authenticity

Kenny has always inspired trust in people. He is genuinely interested in others. As a result, he is authentic with them. And he always felt he could believe in himself to succeed if he put in the effort. For sales, you need to have tenacity and authenticity. You also need to build trust and be hyper-responsive in your communication.

Coping with the highs and lows of sales

You need to remain calm and keep focused if you want to weather the storms and avoid getting too whipped up about your gains and losses. Don’t allow yourself to get too emotional or attached to the highs of the wins. And don’t let yourself get too down about your losses. Stay committed and believe in the process.

Culture

The culture at CMB is very fluid, and everything they do gets arranged around the client. The whole team works together in a way that advances the entire effort.

At Lucid, they are a group of people who all care about each other, their community, and their customers. Respect for their community is paramount to them.

Kenny felt like he landed at home when he started at Schlesinger. Adding mental health days, giving everyone a half-day to vote, and giving vacation days in Q4, showed him that the company knows and understands that their people work very hard, and they sometimes have personal issues and struggle professionally.

Walking in the shoes of sales

Any entrepreneur would do well to walk in the shoes of sales because sales are where the business starts. Sales are vital to any business.

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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 she does, subscribe on iTunes, and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

Julie Kurd

Ricky Odello

Kenny Thompson

One of the biggest components for scaling any business is sales, and yet so many companies tend to struggle with it. It involves finding a balance between the right personality, the right leader, and ensuring that there’s lockstep with the product.

Adam Jolley is joining Sima in presenting this two-part podcast series on sales.

Much of the sales piece tends to be forgotten in all industries, and there are no white papers or conferences just on sales. Adam feels that people don’t even want to talk about sales, so, he decided that it would be very helpful to talk about sales in terms of what it takes, and also in terms of some of the intangibles that people have when it comes to sales.

Sima’s goal for this podcast series is to help senior leaders understand the psychology of sales. She would like to help sales leaders understand how they need to think about sales as a profession, how sales integrate into an organization, and the psychology behind what makes a salesperson tick.

Today, we have Calista Corley, the Chief Revenue Officer of Fuel Cycle, and Tacie Avedikian, the Senior Director of Customer Development at Innovate MR, joining us as our first panel of sales professionals. They talk to us about their journeys, people’s misperceptions around sales, and what it takes to be a successful sales professional.

Why Tacie is in sales

Tacie did not start her career in sales. As her career progressed, she realized how much she enjoyed connecting with people and gaining a deeper understanding of their problems, their likes, and their lives. And people used to go and talk to her because they trusted her. Eventually, her boss suggested that she should go into sales because he thought she would enjoy it and she was well suited to it. So she gave it a run, and she’s still doing it and loving it now, seven years later.

Why Calista is in sales

Calista started her career in operations, and she progressed to leading operations teams. She was always front-facing and dealing with escalations. Although she excelled in that area, she realized that she was able to connect with people and solve problems, and that is what sales is all about for her.

People tend to get the wrong image of sales

Calista thinks that when people think about sales jobs, they often get the wrong image. The truth is that many of the best sales leaders and salespeople want to learn constantly.

A thirst for knowledge

A thirst for knowledge and improvement should drive people towards having in-depth conversations about solving problems.

Tacie’s initial reservation around sales

Tacie never wanted to lose herself in pitching something cheesy or something that she did not believe in.

Sales is about sharing

Sales is about sharing something with people that can change things positively for them.

A stigma

Tacie feels that the sales title has an unfortunate tendency to create a stigma.

Sales is a hard job

Calista finds sales harder than ever right now. She believes that you cannot be a great sales talent or leader without being intelligent, thoughtful, educated, researched, and able to identify patterns and pivot quickly. And you need to be competitive as well.

Calista loves mentoring people

It means a lot to Calista when young women approach her to find out about her journey to becoming a CRO. That motivates her to keep on doing what she is doing in her profession.

The qualities of a successful salesperson

A successful salesperson primarily needs to be able to connect and engage with people. They also need to be real, authentic, and curious, have a desire to keep learning and growing, and have the ability to self-motivate and pivot if necessary.

Men and women differ in terms of sales

Diversity is necessary for a sales team. Men and women have certain differences in the way that they sell, and together, they work better.

Calista finds that women naturally have empathy and a sense of connection when it comes to selling. And that works very well.

Tacie feels that the different perspectives brought by men and women work well together in a sales environment.

Handling the ups and downs

Sales is a rollercoaster, so people need to be open to talking about their emotional ups and downs. Calista thinks the best salespeople are those who can remind themselves that an up will come after a down, and focus on that. They also always learn something from the down.

Good leadership

Tacie thinks that a supportive boss, or manager, who is empathetic and allows their salespeople to have autonomy, is essential for a successful sales team.

Work hard, play hard 

Working hard and playing hard is very real in sales because it is such a rollercoaster.

Sales culture

You are unlikely to succeed in sales if you are not working in a team, so companies need to focus on creating a kickass sales culture! Transparency and clarity are vital for creating that kind of culture.

Good leadership

Good leadership requires the ability to view each individual in the long term, in their right role within the organization.

Links:

Email me your thoughts!

Sima@infinity-2.com

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infinity-2.com

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

Books mentioned:

Traction by Gino Wickman

We are excited to welcome Tim Hoskins today. Tim is the President of Quester, an insights and strategies company. He is joining us today to talk about his journey and driving business results.

Tim’s journey

While in college, Tom needed a job, so he answered an ad for a lead-generation specialist at an information security startup. He worked there for two years while he was in college, and then post-college, he got hired by the same company and started as a sales rep.

In the startup world, you get to do everything, and Tim did not like not knowing all the answers, so he read the entire manual. He also started taking all the developers out to lunch to pick their brains, and that led to him becoming the Sales Engineer. His final role there was as a Product Manager.

A consultant doing some work for Quester reached out to Tim, so he left the startup world to join Quester. He did not realize at the time that the company was, in fact, a forty-year-old startup. There, he worked in client services, became the head of sales and marketing, and about five or six years ago, he got promoted to President.

The history of Quester

Dr. Charles Cleveland, the founder of Quester, was a professor at Drake University. He started the company as a communications company with a foundation in linguistics, and they spent years doing qualitative research. They always applied linguistic analysis techniques to help drive communication.

The founder’s dream was for executives on the client-side to look at a qualitative insight with the same confidence as a quantitative insight, someday.

Dr. Cleveland passed away suddenly in 2005. The company was then purchased by three partners who kept on pushing forward with the technology and the same vision. In 2006, they launched the first, simple version. In 2007, they started to develop artificial intelligence, and the team has been working on that ever since.

The current technology at Quester

Today, Questor’s technology fully automates a one-on-one interview of up to forty minutes with a consumer. Those interviews are chat-based, or consumers can leverage the voice-based software on their phones.

What their technology does

Their technology analyses people’s responses and identifies a key or interesting idea that they are communicating. It then delivers a contextual-based follow-up question to find even more information.

2011

In 2011, the industry was not ready for artificial intelligence.

Proving themselves

There are always clients out there who know that you can’t solve the same problem with the same solution every single time. Those people give companies like Quester a chance to prove themselves. And that gives the rest of the market the confidence that those companies can do what they say they can do.

The culture

The average tenure of a Quester employee is seven years. Their culture is one of a family, and they do their best to have the mentality of a startup every single day.

Insurgent mission

The book, The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth, helped Tim and his team to focus on finding their insurgent mission and the reason for their existence.

Driving business results

They came to realize that their mission was not about the technology or the linguistic and qualitative analysis. It was about driving business results for their clients. You can’t have a business result unless you have strong and differentiated insights. And you can’t get strong and differentiated insights unless you have a different methodology to collect and analyze data.

The company that delivers business results

Tim and his team decided that they wanted to stand for the company that delivers business results. Behind every business result is a great strategy, and behind every great strategy is a consumer-centric insight.

Changing in one year

In 2018 and 2019, they changed their marketing. They doubled down on strategic insights, and they empowered their team by hyper-focusing them on micro-battles.

The results in 2020

In 2020, Tim and his team have more success than they have had in all the other years that Tim has been with the company in terms of client feedback and business results.

Sales

The sales team at Quester has the title of “Client Services”, and they are essentially strategists. They are trained and highly talented in understanding everything about the business, the questions, challenges, objectives, and identifying and working with the research teams to propose the right solutions. They stay with the project from front to back.

New accounts

They got ingrained into the conference circuit for bringing in new accounts. About two years ago, they decided to change the format of their presentations. Now, they try to spend thirty to forty percent of any presentation at a conference talking about the facts and figures of their business results. Those business results combined with conferences and the traditional outreach has been how they have acquired new business.

Involvement in industry associations

Tim believes that involvement in industry associations is vital for your personal and professional development. And everyone should get involved to the extent that they want to be committed to growing personally and professionally.

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Book mentioned:

The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth by Chris Zook and James Allen

We have the pleasure of welcoming Mark Simon, the Managing Partner for Hawkmoon Advisors, as our guest for today’s podcast.

Mark is joining us to talk about his journey and share his experiences with the kind of work he has been doing to help small businesses scale, grow, and reach their goals. He also talks about what ten-million-dollar companies need to be thinking about if they want to scale.

About Mark

Mark disappeared off the research industry radar for a while after leaving Toluna at the end of 2019 and moving back to the UK. He joined an IT SaaS business in the UK called Datto, and after that gig came to a close, he set up a consulting business that helped small SaaS businesses get going.

Mark’s journey

After finishing university, Mark spent a few years in Paris, teaching English at a high school. After that, he spent most of the rest of his twenties playing the guitar in a rock and roll band, touring around, and having lots of fun. Then he went to work for a marketing agency that won a contract to take AOL to the UK. At the time, Mark was about to get married, and being a bit bored with the work he was doing, he started looking around for something new. He ended up spending an enjoyable year as an individual contributor for a company called Greenfield Online in Europe, where he learned a lot. He then got a call from someone at Toluna, saying that they were about to list the company on the London Stock Exchange, and they wanted him to lead them in doing that.

Toluna

Mark took a risk and joined Toluna. He now feels that was one of the smartest things that he has ever done. He set up a digital practice there, and they went to market properly. He had great fun getting them up to eight figures.

An issue

Toluna had an issue in their North American business, and they asked Mark to go there to turn it around, which he did. He managed to turn things around fairly quickly, and he ended up staying there for another six years before returning to the UK.

What ten-million-dollar companies need to think about in terms of scaling

Mark explains that at any point in your company’s trajectory, you have to think and act like you’re bigger than you are, and that applies from the CEO down to the people who you hire.

Hiring is critical

In Mark’s experience with fast-moving companies, he was spending 70-80 percent of his time hiring or coaching people. He points out that if you don’t do that as a leader, and you’re trying to scale, you are probably focusing on the wrong things.

The people you hire

Look for people who can act one level up but could also be capable of thinking two levels up.

Recurring business

Think about some way to get recurring business and repeatable, predictable cash flow. That will build value in your company.

Incentives

For a ten-million-dollar business, all your incentives need to be in line. It is vital to over-emphasize rewards for long-term contracts.

Customers

Your customers’ satisfaction needs to be ahead of your acquisitions.

The Rule of Forty

At ten million, you need to make sure that your company can exceed the Rule of Forty. That is very important for any recurring revenue business.

Expanding internationally

You should not expand your company internationally too quickly because that could be dangerous if you don’t have a cultural understanding of what works well in different places.

A framework for hiring salespeople

Interviewing salespeople can be difficult to do, so it helps to build a framework for hiring salespeople. Three things that are important to include in that process, regardless of the environment you’re in, are:

1. Coachability
2. A competitive streak
3. Empathy, rapport-building, listening, and cultural alignment

Also, any toxic high-achievers need to get removed from the team.

Hiring a Head of Sales

Hiring the right Head of Sales can be a scary decision for a CEO to have to make, especially if that CEO does not come from a sales background. The CEO should choose someone who has been a successful individual contributor rather than the best sales performer. And someone good at hiring and coaching, someone whose values align with those of the company, and someone who can move people along if they do not perform. They should also hire someone analytical and numerate.

Evaluating a company from the employee side

On the employee-side, when someone is evaluating a company, they should make sure that whatever the company stands for is in line with their values and culture. They should also look at the investment structure of the company, who the investors are, and how consistently successful they have been.

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Today, we have the second part of the podcast series Data Gurus for IEX. We have been focusing on the concept of the last mile. In our industry, the last mile relates to empowering and getting the insights and value that clients want to get from research.

Today, we invited Paul Gaudette, the co-founder of Dig Insights, to give us his perspective on how he looks at his clients from that perspective, to be able to empower and enable his client base to garner the value they need.

Bio

Paul Gaudette is co-founder of Dig Insights, Toronto-based consumer insights, and technology company. Started 10 years ago, Dig continues to be one of the fastest-growing insights companies and has been rated as one of the most innovative research companies globally for the past four years. Paul has worked in the industry for over 15 years and has led/executed projects for clients across a range of industries (including CPG, QSR, Technology, Financial, Retail, Alcohol, and Cannabis). He is a strategic thinker with an analytical background; a combination that allows him to understand complex business issues and address them creatively. A passion for strategy and innovation lead Paul into consumer insights after finishing his degree in Strategic Management at EDHEC Business School in France. Paul currently spends most of his time focused on strategic growth opportunities, which includes private equity investment opportunities, acquisition opportunities for geographic and portfolio expansion, and additional revenue-generating opportunities within Dig’s current operations.

Paul’s background

Paul’s background was mostly educational before he got into market research. He did a business degree, followed by a master’s degree in strategic management. He then joined a company focused more on the innovation side of consumer insights. It was from there that he started Dig Insights, ten years ago.

Starting Dig Insights

He started Dig Insights because he saw a need in the market to focus more on consumer behaviors rather than attitude. It was almost a game-changer at the time.

Expertise

Their expertise since their inception was around their sophisticated knowledge of data and their analytics capabilities.

Dig Insights 

Dig Insights is based in Toronto, and they have offices in Chicago, on the west coast of Canada, and in London. They are slowly migrating to the rest of the world.

Client base

Dig Insights typically serve Fortune 500-type clients. That is evolving, as there are currently two aspects to the business. One is the consulting side, where the majority of their work happens, and the other is more of a tech side.

Tech platform

Dig Insights has developed a tech platform that is much more focused on early-stage innovation testing. Their clients range from McDonald’s, Pepsi, and global retail to small and medium enterprises that are looking to gain access to more cost-effective and faster insights through their tech platform.

The consumer side

On the consumer side, they are speaking to consumers and leveraging the technology that they use on a day-to-day basis to get that insight.

The client-side

On the client-side, they are speaking to clients as if they are running a business.

A need in the marketplace

Paul saw a need in the marketplace to develop a tool that would allow them to get those insights quicker, using technology that consumers were already familiar with, and delivering those insights to the clients faster.

Playing in both places

They made a strategic choice to play in both places, and they made an active effort to focus on the higher end customer work that was competing more with the big firms and also Accenture and Deloitte that were living in that space. That is where they built up their client base.

Grow and scale

To grow and scale, they needed to invest in some technology.

Early-stage innovation testing

The technology that they are investing in, and developing, is in the early stage innovation testing area where they have a lack of cost-effective, quick methods to get the insights faster.

Custom

The majority of the work they do is custom and designed to address whatever complex business needs their clients may have.

An online dashboard

For large multi-country projects with vast amounts of data, they have always provided an option for an online dashboard to access the data. And they have always believed in empowering their clients to get access to the data in the most efficient way.

Evaluating different tools

For a long time, they were providing dashboards and allowing access to the information through several different methods, some of which they built themselves and others that they partnered with.

A complex blend of requirements

They looked for a blend of being able to manipulate the data to create the variables and increase the charting while having appealing visualization of the data at the same time.

Experts in data and data visualization

The people that they put onto their large project, especially when it came to building out the tool with Harmoni, were experts in data and data visualization. Together with the team at Harmoni, they created an easy step-by-step process for accessing, interpreting, and using the data.

 

Paul’s quotes:

“Fortune 500-type clients are who we typically serve.”

“There are two aspects to our business right now. One is the consulting side, and the other is more of a tech side.”

“We have a tech platform that we developed, called Upside, which is much more focused on early-stage innovation testing.”

“We are speaking to consumers and leveraging the technology that they use on a day-to-day basis to get that insight.”

“We saw a need in the marketplace to develop a tool that allowed us to get those insights quicker using technology that consumers were already familiar with, and delivering those insights to the clients faster.”

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Nicole Schmidt and Chuck Mitchell are joining Sima today as panelists for a webinar on the impact of Covid 19 on middle-market firms.

People have been impacted by Covid 19 all over the world. The purpose of this webinar is to provide context, perspective, and some key takeaways for executives to consider as they plan for the future beyond 2020.

About Sima 

Sima Vasa is a Senior Advisor at Oberon Securities. She has over ten years of entrepreneurial experience, operator experience, running a business unit of 45 million dollars for one of the largest market research firms, and also as an executive at IBM. Currently, she has an advisory services firm called Infinity Squared Ventures.

About Nicole

Nicole Schmidt is the managing partner and co-founder of Oberon Securities. She is a member of Oberon’s management team, and she brings more than 22 years of entrepreneurial experience and leadership to the firm. She spearheads Oberon’s consumer and retail group and is actively involved in the firm’s TMT practice. Before co-founding Oberon in 2001, Nicole was a partner at a software incubator. She also spent eight years as a senior equity analyst on both the buy-side and sell-side, covering a range of technologies.

About Chuck

Chuck Mitchell is the executive director at The Conference Board. Since he joined The Conference Board in 1997, as the head of publishing, he has authored dozens of reports on business and economic issues. They include the most recent, Beyond Technology, Building a New Organizational Culture to Succeed in an Era of Digital Transformation and Inclusion Plus Innovation, Leveraging Diversity of Thought to Generate Business Growth. Chuck also co-authors The Conference Board’s annual CEO Challenge Report. He recently completed a two-and-a-half-year assignment, Asian Pacific, based in Hong Kong.

Transforming organizations into digitally-driven enterprises

C-level executives see an opportunity to transform their organizations into digitally-driven enterprises that will make them leaner and more agile.

Being digitally driven

The mandate of being digitally driven requires the acquisition of new skills and investment. Chuck points out that the trend was already underway pre Covid, and Covid has accelerated the movement towards it. It requires a thoughtful and strategic plan to avoid sacrificing the long term for the short-term.

Collaboration through technology

Nicole points out that today, people are no longer centralized, so they have to collaborate through technology. A lot of companies currently think that the physical space might not be quite as important as they historically thought.

A cultural challenge

The challenge in the Covid era is about cultural transformation within organizations. And operating remotely compounds the difficulty of transforming that culture internally.

The function level in digitally transformed organizations

Artificial intelligence and robotic processes will start to replace routine tasks, so the function will be impacted by changing the jobs people do and how they interact with technology. Things are likely to become smaller and leaner to cut costs.

Business travel

Business travel is unlikely to come back as robust as it was pre-Covid.

Cost-cutting strategies

Travel and marketing budgets are getting cut. And another cost-cutting strategy, according to the CEOs who responded to Chuck’s survey, is a movement towards a more contingent and flexible workforce, or fewer full-timers.

Manufacturing abroad

More C-suite executives appear to be re-evaluating whether their manufacturing should be abroad, particularly of products that are critical for consumers, like pharmaceuticals and auto supplies.

Empowering workers

Chuck sees that empowering workers is going to be one of the changes in the workplace going forward.

Changes in leadership style

Leaders have to adjust and find ways of leading in the new and unproven territory. They also need to be empathetic, help their employees to become more resilient, and check-in with their remote staff, rather than checking on them.

Major consumer trends that will stick 

By making things very easy for consumers and catering to everybody’s desires, online stores like Amazon have created a perfect backdrop for accelerating their market penetration. Companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime have also accelerated.

Mom and pop retail stores

Nicole sees a re-emergence of smaller, mom and pop-type retail stores in the longer term.

Consumer expectation is raising the online bar 

The online bar is becoming much higher now because consumers can compare the digital experience they are getting from small firms with the very best digital experience they have had online.

Corporations adopting a new philosophy

More corporations seem to want to be authentic and purpose-driven and represent a higher purpose than they did before.

New types of industries

That could give rise to new types of industries, like ones that are cleaning up the environment and replacing the fossil fuel industry. And we are also likely to see more green companies coming into existence and more greening of existing companies.

Millennials

Millennials have indicated that they want to connect with brands and companies. And that moves companies in the direction of embracing a more ethical code on the business side.

Social safety nets and public health issues

Societies will invest more in social safety nets and pay more attention to public health issues.

Social issues

A lot of Chuck’s research points to the rising expectations of customers, consumers, and employees for organizations to take a stand on social issues and become agents for social change.  

How recovery will look 

With the possible exception of China and Japan, the virus is likely to dictate the speed of the recovery. Depending on the way that the virus is managed, we are looking to 2021 and beyond for any kind of return to meaningful growth.

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We are excited to have Danielle Blugrind, a Senior Consumer Insights Manager at Roku, joining us today. In today’s episode, Danielle talks to us about her journey in the field of market research. She discusses the difference between the client and the supplier sides of the industry, company culture, creative solutions, pivoting, how traditional survey research compares with big data, and how things have changed in the research space since Covid.

Danielle’s background

Danielle has a background in Consumer Behavior, which is very similar to psychology but is more focused on real-life behavior than on laboratory testing. She also loves math and statistics, and many years ago, several people suggested that she should look into a career in the field of market research.

Danielle looked into it, and she made a conscious decision to embark on a career in consumer research as soon as she completed her MBA.

Starting with fun brands with fun products

Danielle started working for Mattel, and she went straight into the fun or the client-side of the business. After about eight years, she left Mattel and went on to join Taco Bell, where she remained for the next eight years.

Doing her own thing

After leaving Taco Bell, Danielle became a consultant for a while, and then she went on to do some research on the supplier side of the industry.

Back on the client-side

After joining Roku, Danielle found herself back in her happy place on the client-side.

A love of research

Danielle feels that a love of research should be central to both the supplier and the client sides of the industry.

The client-side

Danielle explains that on the client-side, you get to go deeply into your industry, your brand, and the consumer. She loves that everything she does on the client-side builds on itself. And every time she does another project, she is adding to her knowledge base, and it is like adding another piece to the same puzzle. Everything comes together into one big picture, so she knows what happened before, and she knows the action that is resulting from her research.

The client-side versus the supplier side

On the client-side, you become an expert in an industry or a brand. On the supplier side, however, you become more of an expert in the methodology or the approach.

The consumer

The longer Danielle works at a brand, the more that consumer starts to come to life in her head.

The research piece

Danielle says she would always love the research piece, no matter which company she is working for or the industry she is in. She loves the feeling she gets when she hears from consumers who have an opinion about a brand that is meaningful to them.

Culture is important to Danielle

Culture is a big part of why Danielle chooses to work where she does. From the consumer point of view, if a company seems like a great place to work, but it gets run in an old-school or an unfriendly way, then it is not the right brand for her.

Proactive

At Raku, Danielle is proactive in driving people to try new things.

Creative solutions

If a client needs something done urgently, Danielle is happy to do several different things to address their immediate needs and get them up and running as soon as possible. She then takes some time to develop a full report and a presentation, which she usually delivers a week or two later.

Talking things through is critical

After her presentation, Danielle talks everything through with all the relevant parties. That is critical because it ensures that her research has the most impact possible.

Accessing internal data

Danielle loves having access to the various pieces of data that have been collected internally over the years because it helps her to survey exactly the people she wants to and it also gives her some behavioral information to go with her survey data.

Traditional survey research versus big data

Danielle is not doing any less traditional online survey research because she has more behavioral data accessible to her. That is because, with big data, she cannot probe, follow up, or ask any more questions related to what she sees.

New product launches

Recently, Roku launched their new Ultra Player and Stream Bar, which is a soundbar and player in one. They always ask people about their experience, how happy they are with the product, and if they have encountered any issues with the product. All the data gets looked at daily, and any problems get addressed and solved as soon as possible.

Focus groups

At Roku, they love focus groups. To substitute for those during the pandemic, they pivoted to using online bulletin boards and one-on-one webcam interviews and focus groups.

Human behavior

Danielle has noticed that people are rising to the occasion and becoming adaptable. And they are making these changes with a good attitude.

Shifts in research since Covid

The number of projects has increased, but the content has shifted since Covid. More strategic projects about the state of the world and the way that people are shopping now have come up. And as a whole, there is more research getting done now than there was in February.

Danielle loves research

Danielle loves research as part of a bigger picture. She sees research as a combination of art and science, and she loves it that every project has a different balance of art and science aspects.

Links:

Danielle on LinkedIn

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We are honored to be part of the special video podcast series for IEX, which is part of the Data Gurus platform. We are focusing on something a little different today, related to trends in the market research or analytics space.

We have Anthony Franklin, the CEO of Infotools, joining us from New Zealand to talk about data visualization, data processing, and his experience.

Ant’s story

Ant has a degree in social science. He married a New Zealander in London, thirty-two years ago, and they decided to settle in Auckland. Unfortunately, his wife passed away a few years ago.

An introduction to market research

Ant had previously worked in sales and marketing in the UK, so he was able to use that experience in his role at a company called AGB McNair, the largest research company at the time in New Zealand. He did a lot of syndicated work, ad hoc work, and media there. Working for AGB McNair in the syndicated area was interesting, and it was Ant’s introduction to the world of market research.

A revolutionary platform

Infotools was founded to transform the manual process of data collection into something completely different. It can capture data and interrogate it easily. The platform was revolutionary because nothing like it had ever existed before, and the market was open and ready for it.

The early days

Infotools used to do a lot of work with some of the big multinationals in the early days. BAT was an early supporter of Infotools, and they ended up working with BAT worldwide because BAT wanted to empower their researchers. In those days, Infotools did a lot of work to utilize the power of the computer to sift and find information through the data.

Changing the perception

Infotools was trying to harness the power of the computer to change the perception about cross tabs and give the individual the ability to use the computer and the desktop platform to find the necessary information in the data automatically.

Infotools’s programs

Infotools’ programs have always been designed specifically by market researchers for market researchers. So, although the developers are cutting the code, they still need a market researcher to explain the end that the result is trying to achieve.

Moving into the cloud

Six years ago, Infotools made a conscious decision to move into the cloud and to build a platform that allows their knowledge to be accessible in that way. They decided to do that because market research data is very complex, and it does not easily fit into the normal IT world.

The power of machine learning

Using the power of machine learning is a very efficient way to do data updates.

Clients

When Ant works with a corporate client or an enterprise brand, huge numbers of people have access to the data he has collected.

Value

All the value and the treasure is in the collected data, and Infotools’s software allows organizations to keep their data alive and fresh and get a return on their investment in the research.

The right fit

The clients who get what the data is revealing are the right fit for Infotools.

Changes for the future in the market research space

Business intelligence tools have moved into the market research space, and they are primarily driven by IT budgets, which are substantial when compared with the relatively modest budgets allocated for market research. So there is a promise of delivery. Aggregated data, however, does not hit the mark for market research.

Data lakes

The tools required for getting information in and out of data lakes have not quite worked as yet, for market research.

Tools

As a company, Infotools used Waterfall tools for many years. To a great extent, Waterfall is reflective of market research projects in that all the work and the planning gets done upfront, and the data is available at the end of it. With interactive tools like the Harmoni Platform, however, they can get into the data much earlier on, and they can be more agile in helping organizations to get started more efficiently than ever before.

Old software and tools

Much of the market research industry is still working with software that is twenty or thirty years old, and the rooms full of tables persist today. The digital revolution has arrived, however, and things are slowly changing.

Company culture

The people, company culture, and values are the key to Infotools.

Links:

Infotools website

———————————–

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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 she does, subscribe on iTunes, and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

On this episode, host Sima Vasa welcomes Michael Winnick, Founder and CEO of dscout. They discuss his journey in the worlds of product, design and technology. Michael shares insights on how patience and persistence shaped his entrepreneurial journey and how dscout helps companies conduct innovative, real-time research.

Key Takeaways:

(02:45) Michael’s journey from startups to founding dscout.

(07:16) Democratizing research with new technology.

(10:32) How UX and design align with research.

(14:24) Adapting products to market shifts.

(17:51) Managing the balance between ambition and patience.

(21:15) The challenge of bringing products to market.

(23:44) The importance of building a great team.

(26:02) Success comes from customer impact.

Resources Mentioned:

The Nielsen Norman Group

IDEO

Stanford d.school

Thanks for listening to the Data Gurus podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.

#Analytics #MA #Data #Strategy #Innovation #Acquisitions #MRX #Restech

We’re excited to welcome Michael McCrary, the CEO, and Founder of PureSpectrum, as our guest for the podcast.

Michael helps to solve business, economic, and even social issues with the valuable data and insights that he provides for companies and organizations. He is joining us today to talk about his choice to take the risk of becoming an entrepreneur, rather than remaining a wantrepreneur.

Michael’s bio

PureSpectrum is a modern-day sample automation platform based in Los Angeles, California.

In 2003, Michael joined Greenfield Online, where he became the company’s SVP of North America Sales. He played an instrumental role in Greenfield’s public offering and eventual sale to Microsoft. From 2008 to 2014, Michael helped pioneer Cint as Managing Director, and Lucid as President.

In 2015 Michael went full time as an entrepreneur and founded PureSpectrum, which is one of the fastest-growing consumer insight tech firms.

Michael’s background

Michael started with market research and data collection about seventeen or eighteen years ago, and since then, he has had a wonderful journey within the market research industry.

The last jump he took just before that was working for the Meredith Corporation in their Direct Response to Advertising group, where he had the pleasure of representing the Mid-West Living magazine. It was not an easy sell to the agencies, however, and Michael had to use a lot of data to support the magazine’s claims about its readers.

Taking the leap

In the early days of Greenfield Online, Keith Price was looking for salespeople, and he contacted Michael, who decided to take the leap. Ever since then, Michael has very much enjoyed working in the industry.

A stimulating industry

The umbrella of the insight industry, in general, is filled with great and intelligent people, and Michael finds it intellectually stimulating to know that the work he is participating in helps solve business, economic, or even social issues.

An entrepreneur, versus a wantrepreneur

Michael spent much of his life as a wantrepreneur, which is somebody who talks about wanting to be an entrepreneur. Later on, he had to decide whether he wanted to remain a wantrepreneur or become an entrepreneur, who is someone who attempts to do it.

Making a tough decision

Deciding to become an entrepreneur is risky. It was a big choice for Michael to make because he is married with three children and a mortgage, so he spent about six months thinking about it before deciding to become an entrepreneur.

A supportive ecosystem

Having a supportive ecosystem is vital for entrepreneurs. Michael’s wife encouraged him to go for it, and he also had the support of his investors, yet he still felt he needed some support from someone who was exclusively in his corner.

A mentor

Michael very much appreciated getting the support of his late mentor, who did not expect getting anything in return for his mentorship.

The dark years

Michael’s first years as an entrepreneur were so tough that he refers to that time as ‘the dark years’.

Online sample and data collection

Michael has spent his time in the industry on the online sample and data collection side of things.

PureSpectrum

PureSpectrum is a programmatic platform that provides a lot of value to several agencies. It is very nuanced and complicated because it involves many different and exacting technology connections to suppliers. The focus of the platform is on being simple and easy for anyone to use, and on improving the efficiency automation of the data collection process.

An automated sampling platform

PureSpectrum has an automated sampling platform that brings all the different pieces together to change the trajectory of the speed and time in which everything gets done. It saves business owners a lot of time and money.

The future of survey data collection

The survey research process provides data that doesn’t already exist, so Michael feels confident that survey data collection will find a space in the future, as the industry evolves.

The biggest takeaway

The biggest takeaway for Michael in his career so far is to be humble and genuine.

The best thing about PureSpectrum 

For Michael, the most valuable thing about PureSpectrum is the people who work there and their passion.

 

Links:

PureSpectrum website

———————————–

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Ravi Parmeswar is a VP at Johnson & Johnson. He’s in charge of global strategic insights and analytics. He has significant experience in CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods).

“The Chinese proverb ‘May you live in interesting times.’ we certainly are.” – Ravi Parmeswar

The Changing Face of Analytics

Ravi’s responsibilities take global strategic insights and analytics to drive insights from any source. It’s a global responsibility across all of the consumer business at J&J.

In the last 3 years, things have changed drastically thinking about big data. It’s becoming more real for CPG. When you get access to first body data the game changes significantly.

Ravi Parmeswar Personalized Analytics

Ravi thinks the way marketing is moving right now is the model of more data and more personalized data. It’s better to look at the landscape of data we have right now and how to better connect and how best to use that for targeted marketing.

The traditional way for brand positioning marketing was using attitudinal segments. It was about what people feel and need but that is going away.

Behavioral segments are a lot more actionable. For instance, you’ll have data of what a person bought, if he bought mine or a competitor’s product, what else he buys, what are his media habits and what his digital habits are. With this information, you can target your market more accurately.

To hear what Ravi has to say about working in teams using the left and right side of the brain, download and listen to Ravi Parmeswar Winning the CPG Analytics Race!

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I’m passionate about data and I love to share, learn, and help others that share my passion. If you love data as much as I do, subscribe on iTunes and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!

We are delighted today to welcome Christa Chaffinch, the Qualitative Research Manager at Comcast Business, as our guest.

Christa is joining us today to talk about quantitative research

Christa’s bio

Christa has a background in psychology, sociology, and new product development. She has a master’s degree in creative writing, as well as an MBA.

About ten years ago, she started her career in market research, where she uncovers insights in customer experiences and journeys, product messaging and positioning, and market intelligence, using mainly qualitative methods.

Christa is currently managing qualitative research and competitive intelligence across all areas of Comcast Business.

Christa loves her job

Christa loves her job! And she has a unique way of describing market research in terms of what it means, as well as in terms of the skills that are required to deliver insightful and actionable research.

What Christa does at Comcast

Christa is part of a relatively small, but mighty team at Comcast Business. Her role revolves mainly around qualitative research, and it involves focus groups, in-depth interviewing, and any kind of sentiment analysis. She also takes care of certain aspects of competitive intelligence gathering, to figure out where Comcast Business sits in the marketplace at large.

Doing valuable qualitative work

Christa feels very fortunate to work at a place where qualitative research is highly valued.

A lot of what Comcast Business sells is what people tend to think of as commodities, like voice-lines and the internet. And a lot of what they do there, especially when they’re looking for new product development sites, and different ways of segmenting their customers and messaging to them, is thought of in their qualitative research.

Where quantitative research is used

Hearing people’s opinions about how they run their businesses, what their values are, how they decide which vendors to use, and even about their hiring processes, helps Christa to learn about the different ways that people run businesses. And that’s why the team at Comcast Business makes use of so much qualitative research.

WhyComcast Business does qualitative research 

Christa’s research is focused mainly on businesses, and she explains that by doing qualitative research, her team can gain some deep insights. She hopes that the depth of those insights makes what they have to offer to their customers a little different.

Focusing on virtual focus groups

Currently, Christa’s team has switched over to doing only virtual focus groups. They have even managed to complete two or three projects, from start to finish, doing all their qualitative research virtually.

The virtual focus groups have worked out so well that Christa doesn’t think that her team will ever go back to doing their research in the way they did it before.

Doing different types of quantitative research

With small businesses, Christa’s team likes to get a lot of different people in the room, so that they can all bounce their ideas off of each other.

With universities, health systems, and large companies, their interviews are more in-depth, to give her team more insight into how those large enterprises make their decisions.

The way they do their research depends on what they want to learn, and to whom they are talking.

The total number of projects 

In 2019, Christa’s team managed a total of about hundred-and-fifty projects, from beginning to end.

At any given time, Christa usually has about two qualitative projects going on at once. And, over a year, she averages out at around twenty-five projects.

Things are changing

The way that Christa’s internal clients are consuming the results of qualitative research has been changing over the last year or so. And, over time, people seem to be coming to understand the value of qualitative research more.

Working with every department in the company

Christa’s team does a lot of varied and interesting projects, and they are proud to have done qualitative research work for every single department within Comcast Business.

Being as user-friendly as possible

Her team has also done a lot of work to ensure that their coverage of the way that people search for things is as user friendly as possible.

 

Links:

Comcast Business

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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!