4 Pillars of Customer Insights

 

Priscilla McKinney:Welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney. I am the CEO and mama bird over here. And I just have these amazing conversations with people in the industry.

They're so unconsciously competent about what they do and it's just a delight to have people on and chat about work and really dig a little deeper into each other's expertise. So I did rustle Dan Womack into the conversation today. Welcome to the show!

Dan Womack:Well, thank you for celebrating.

Priscilla McKinney:It's good to see you again. And last time I saw you, we were riding a Longhorn in Austin.

Dan Womack:Or you were riding the long horn. I exceeded the weight limit for the long horn, so I got a photo of the side.

Priscilla McKinney:Give me a break. That was your excuse, huh? Well, this is what's so fun about this industry. We do get to see each other at some pretty wild cocktail parties.

And it's so fun because we get a little bit outside of our work and get to connect on a more personal level. But today we're going to circle back and we're going to do work again because you and I have an interesting overlap with the custom insights that you provide about communications. And you know, that's where I live is making sure that we're communicating clearly, you know, the right messages to the right person at the right time.

But if you don't know Dan, he is the president of KLC. They are a boutique agency that specializes in building custom insights communities to help clients in all kinds of industries to really get closer and understand their customers. And before joining KLC, he built and led insights teams at Fortune 500 firms for almost two decades.

So he has a lot of corporate research experience including being at GE Capital, Genworth Financial, and most recently at Affleck. So this expertise is coming from hard-won lessons and throughout his career he has volunteered in the industry and this is one of the things I just really love about him. Looking for ways you can serve on boards and looking for ways that you can help make the associations that serve this industry better and better.

And of course, we're connected through Insights Association and full disclosure, we met at a question pros event for X-Day. So always super fun. But Dan, I'm going to dive into it because it's so fun for me to have another expert on who really understands how insights have to really translate into strong messaging.

And the messaging is only going to resonate if the insights actually showed to understand the client. So tell me a little bit about your perspective about how teams are operating today. We're going through a lot of changes in the industry, a lot of changes in where people sit, what their roles are. But what do you think is actually happening? Because you and I talked a little bit maybe about a problem about roles or where the insights professionals sit. Tell me what you think is fundamentally being misunderstood about the role of insights.

Dan Womack:Yeah, great. You're right. It's an unusual time. I think it's a difficult time for a lot of corporate researchers, the brand researchers, and of course companies like mine that are trying to help them.

There are many changes afoot. Lots of things change in the way decisions get made inside of organizations. Everything from better data analytics capabilities, better data storage capabilities. AI is certainly starting to show its impact more and more, and I think that's going to continue.

And I think one of the challenges still remains because there's still a need for primary research for sure, and there's a need to understand customers at a deep level. I think one of the challenges for traditional marketing researchers, and I grew up in that world, is breaking out of what I've always called the study mindset. And the study mindset is you sort of get it in this production mode and you just have a project.

Maybe that's a piece of survey research, maybe it's a piece of qualitative research, but you just focus on getting that project done and delivering that report. And that really should be the beginning versus the end as I see it. And I was fortunate early in my career to have someone asked me what the definition of a research report was and I wasn't sure what he thought that answer was I said, you know, I really don't know.

It's a good question and keep in mind this was still when most things were on paper and his answer was it's a slow walk to a trash can and that's what a research report is. So and I think there's a lot of truth in that right for executives. They're not gonna spend hours reading the report the people that are actually making the decisions just don't have that kind of time.

So just delivering a report should be a piece of it, but rarely are decisions made based on one piece of research. There's history, there's social context, there's what's going on in the economy at the moment. And I think as insights pros, we need to be thinking about all of those things too.

Priscilla McKinney:Okay, that is just priceless. That's a good laugh in the industry and I guarantee you I'm going to use it. I'm going to try to remember I got that one from you. We'll pass that one on.

You know, you and I had an interesting conversation and as we were discussing this bit of a problem, almost like a, you know, heads down, you know, mindset that doesn't, that's not helpful to understand the holistic reason, the raison d'etre for market research, really. That there were four pillars that you think that people should be focused on and you and I started talking about them and I really wanted them to be shared on this podcast. So what do you think teams should actually be focused on and tell us about those core functions, those four pillars that you have. I think my audience will find that very valuable.

Dan Womack:Yeah, these are, so I will just tell you in your audience, these aren't fully refined yet. That's something I'm working on that may be a presentation, maybe an article down the road. But I'm trying to think back.

Priscilla McKinney:It's totally okay. This podcast can be a work in progress. I think that's the point of it. So share your expertise.

Dan Womack:Yeah, so you're catching me in the middle of developing a piece of work. And so I'm pretty excited about it. And I think it has some legs, but some of it, I'll just tell you, maybe a little controversial and that's fun, right?

So of these four pillars or four sort of main functions of a corporate insights team, as I see it, the first one is what I'm calling understand what customers know and believe. And I don't think that one's going to be very controversial. I think most researchers and insights pros would agree that that's really what most primary research does.

It tries to understand what customers know, what they believe. I was a qualitative researcher for a long time, a specialist, and my qualitative training at an organization called REVA, which is Research in Values and Attitudes. They're still around. They're excellent, by the way.

One of the things I learned early on is when you're doing qualitative research, you're looking at perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and values. And so that's fundamental to doing any piece of research with consumers. So don't think that one's going to be too controversial. Second is then we need to understand how is it that these consumers came to know and believe what they know and believe. How did they get there?

And I think often that's ignored, but I think it's important. It's a little more than the why. The why is part of that. But if you can understand how someone came to believe what they believe, your opportunity to speak to them and communicate with them effectively significantly increases, right?

Third is then we have to look at what this means for the company. What are the implications of that knowledge for my business, my organization, my nonprofit? And again, that's a little harder, I think, for traditional marketing researchers. You have to, because you have to know more. You have to understand the business. You have to understand what the business is trying to do.

Priscilla McKinney:I find that that's very common end of a conversation I have at a lot of these association functions is to really talk about how do we really bring insights people to understand how to not just speak business, but to truly understand business. Those implications, how these things are gonna be rolled out. And I do think that's one of those undervalued skills for the insights industries to say, but do you know what this means when it hits the C-suite?

Do you know what the CMO is trying to, why they even ask the question? Why they asked you to go do the study? What are they trying to achieve? And I think it's making that connection with the implications that is really deep and I would go even further to say that I think inside people need to understand the P &L of the company they're serving.

Dan Womack:Yeah. You know, I think a couple of things that have helped me in my early career was fortunate. It's not like this was natural. I was tided. But I started out in marketing, entry-level marketing and communication jobs. That's right. It's basic copy. I was writing newsletters, things like that.

And I was in the user of research role for a while. And I think that really helped. And then when I was, I was at GE for several years. And one of the things you mentioned, understanding of P &L, everyone was required, not everyone, it was optional, but it was suggested that you take a finance for non-financial managers course that GE offered three or four times a year.

And so again, early in my career, I was able to get that kind of understanding and see how all this stuff works together, right? Yeah, I think it is hard when you are trained to do primary research really well in the traditional sense, that in and of itself can seem like a full-time job and it can be, right? It's a lot and you want to do it well, but you just can't be as effective as you'd like to be if you if you can't go beyond that.

Priscilla McKinney:I love that. Okay so number three implication I'm totally with you. What's number four?

Dan Womack:Okay, number four is, and I think this is the really hard one, is how.

Priscilla McKinney:Okay, good. Let's just blow this podcast up now. Go for it.

Dan Womack:Yeah, yeah, let's make it. How do you ensure that the business actually does something? How do you ensure that they act on what you brought to them? You're showing them what customers no one believes you can show them how they they came to that place. How do they come to know what they know and believe?

And even tell them what the implications of that, those facts are for the business, that doesn't make them act. And the interesting thing today is I think, and this is a little scary for all of us. I'm way closer to the end of my career than the beginning, so it's less scary for someone my age, for younger people. I'm sure this is kind of frightening.

The first three things on that was AI is getting really, really good at it. AI is already capable. I've been playing with some of the tools. And I don't, just don't think it's going to be long before those first three things are primarily done by AI with some humans walking alongside.

But it's so, so then your question becomes, what is my job? And I think this fourth one is a good place for younger people in the space to think about it. So, okay, we, now have this knowledge set, if you will. And we know how it could impact the business and AI helped us get there.

It didn't take us a lot of time or effort because they helped us, right? But still it's, and one of my favorite songwriters has a song where he talks about if a telephone rings in an empty room, does it make a sound? And I think that's, know, if an insight falls to an empty room, right? Nothing happens with it. So I think.

Priscilla McKinney:Okay, now I'm going to have to give a shout out to Matt Valley who has a podcast in this industry called Rock and Roll Research and he usually talks about different songs because I'm going to have to tell him that you might need to come on and talk about that song.

Dan Womack:Yeah, absolutely. It's a senior star writing guy's name is James McMurtry. So his father Larry McMurtry the novelist. So if anyone.

Priscilla McKinney:I love that. Give me a little bit of meat on that bone for us. Like help us understand when you saw a challenge inside a brand, any kind of story you can share where you had the implications but the company needed to move to that action. Like what you have I'm sure you have a lot of stories to pull from but what's something that comes to mind that would be helpful for people to understand?

Dan Womack:Yeah, I've got a, I have a fun one that is old enough that it won't get me in trouble because I'm not going to be sharing any trade secrets or make any brands I've worked with upset, I don't think. And I think it's still relevant enough that even younger people will get it. But I have to set the stage a little bit. So we're going back to the mid nineties, so 30 years ago.

And I worked for a small research firm and we had, this was the, you know, it's a Clinton's president, and I guess in the, the end of his first term maybe, the economy's booming, personal computers are just starting to become, they've been around for a while, but.

Priscilla McKinney:Well, and also I was wearing overalls very consistently during this era. Just throwing that in, but continue. Okay. Hey. You never know what's going to happen on this podcast.

Dan Womack:Well, that may fit into the story really well when you hear who the brand is. So, and where they're from. Yeah, well, I think, yeah, I think that your overall spin in well with the story. You'll figure that out in a minute.

But yeah, it's a kind of a booming time, but the PC world is just blowing up because the prices have come down. And they're becoming just almost necessary, especially for young people, for students especially. And there are two big players in the space, a company called Dell is still around, still going well, I think.

And then the other company was a company called Gateway. And Gateway, this is where the overhauls maybe come in, was, I think like most tech companies founded in a garage in Iowa. And then by the time I was working with them, they'd moved to South Dakota and they shipped their computers all over the world in these black and white cow boxes.

Priscilla McKinney:Oh my gosh, I totally remember this. I remember getting my first one. So yes, I remember the black and white, the cow, the cow box.

Dan Womack:Yeah, and they were those boxes were immediately recognized. It was beautiful, wonderful branding. I always thought anyway, because it's you would see that box and everyone would immediately know who it was. So that's hard to do, especially in the newer category.

So we were hired to test some ad copy for them. That's important because that was they were at the point where they had this campaign. They were pretty much ready to go to market with, but we were gonna help them refine it. And so we had, if I recall correctly, probably three concepts, and they were gonna try to pick the best one, refine it a little bit, and get it into market.

And the idea was to sell computers to parents and grandparents of kids in high school or getting ready to enter college. So it good idea. It was a great need. The was that the way computers were sold then, for the most part, were in pieces.

So they were thinking they were just going to sell the box, what people might refer to as the CPU or central processing unit back in those times. And so just the box and you would get your monitor and your keyboard and all that other stuff separately. It did not take long when we started testing those concepts for parents and grandparents to kind of start showing us and keep in mind I'm traveling marketing executives are out there the product development executives are out with us on the road doing focus groups around the country and the parents and grandparents are telling us this just doesn't make sense to them and what we finally figured out I'll get to the shorter version of this what we finally figured out the reason it wasn't resonating is what it was actually my introduction to jobs to be done or had any idea what jobs to be done theory was, they didn't see how that box was going to help their student.

That was the challenge. And what they wanted their job to be done was to give their child something that got them to a report that they had to deliver to a teacher faster. That's the way they were thinking about things in those days, right? That's what this was basically going to be. Word processing device for students.

And they started telling us, once we understood this, well, what would that look like? And they told us, and it's basically, well, they're gonna need a keyboard and they're gonna need a monitor and they're gonna need a printer, right? It's not just that box. So to their credit, and this is really hard to do when you think about the money that had been spent and the development that had gone on in this campaign.

That team was so customer-centric and so data-driven that they immediately pulled the plug on that expensive campaign that they've been working on, kicked the ad agency out for a little while until they came back with a better plan. And what they eventually did and became wildly successful, at least for a short while, was develop packages that they marketed to parents and grandparents. So these were packages that included a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and a printer.

So they were delivering what the parents were looking for. And that is, it's still an incredible story to be actually kind of a nerd about this, get cold chills thinking about it just because it was so impressive to see a team admit that they'd screwed up. Just, they spent a lot of money related to that screw up, but they had the support and confidence of their executive leadership be able to go back and start over and do it right versus just kicking that campaign out and washing their hands of it.

Priscilla McKinney:Right. That's such a really good example of all four pillars. It's not complicated, but getting it right is not easy either. You know, maybe simple, but not easy.

And I think that's where you, when we started the podcast, you talked about this syndrome where, you know, insights people have their head down and not really looking at the whole picture. And that is a hundred percent, you know, what the problem is and what it ends up creating. There is a major consequence down the line. So that kind of brings me to a painful topic that gets talked about at insights conferences a whole year long.

And you and I joked a little bit about it, like are we sick and tired of being sick and tired of talking to people about how they want quote-unquote a seat at the table? And what does this mean? And it seems to me and hold on. It seems to me, and it seemed to you also when we discussed it, that it might not be the best conversation we're having in the industry.

So what's your take on that persistent seat at the table discussion? Because I think it does bring us full circle here about your pillars and how we really take our insights, translate them in a marketing message, and make sure that they actually get all the way to making a difference in the life of the consumer. That can't happen if we aren't talking to the right people at the company who can take the action. But where do you think this conversation sits and where should it sit in the industry.

Dan Womack:Yeah, you're going to get me in trouble on the record here.

Priscilla McKinney:I'm trying Dan. Controversy sells man go for it.

Dan Womack:It'll help the ratings maybe. This has been a, I've just always hated and it's not new. I started going to conferences, I don't know, 30 years ago and the industry was talking about it then. How do we get a seat at the table?

How do we get a seat at the table? And I was, think I was, don't do a lot of conferences anymore, but was at three this year. And at every one, there was at least one session on what we can do to get a seat at the table. And I just think it's the wrong question.

It's always been the wrong question. And I even, gosh, was probably more than 15 years ago, I had this conversation with a good friend in the industry, Jeffrey Henning. A lot of people probably know Jeffrey. And we talked about this, I think over a beer at a dinner or something.

And I was telling him that I think it's essentially, not that the world needs another sports metaphor, but my analogy was not everyone gets interviewed after the big game. But that doesn't mean they didn't make a contribution to the win. And because we're so worried about how do we get to be interviewed after the game, that's what that question seems like to me, is how do we get star status or something like that?

It's an ego question, I think, versus how do we get the organization that question that pillar number four, right? How do we get the organization to act on what we do? So yeah, I think that's a much better question is how do we go from insight to action and convince the organizations to value what we do enough that they indeed act on it is way more important than whatever this table is and where we're sitting at.

Priscilla McKinney:I love it and if you disagree with Dan, then I encourage you to go directly to his LinkedIn right now and let him know that. But Dan, I agree with that and I think it's always about us asking better questions and challenging each other. Why are you saying that? What do you mean by that and how would that help?

How is that really contributing to the overall remit that we have, whether on my side as a marketer or on your side as an insights provider. I think it's about asking what is it that they're asking of us? What part do we play? And being okay with understanding that we don't have to be at the table if we delivered what the people at the table needed.

And I like that take that you have that maybe there's a little bit of ego in there. And of course, as with anything, there are some important times where people do need a seat at the table. And I think as all of these refrains that came from a good place, good conversation, but maybe we could stop beating that dead horse now, right?

Dan Womack:I'm hoping to go to a conference in 2026 where it's not on the topic list.

Priscilla McKinney:Okay, let's pick a new topic. You and me, we'll walk around and we'll make sure that it's just fresh and new. You want to find Dan Womack out on LinkedIn and Stan, D-A-N, W-O-M-A-C-K. Go find him out on LinkedIn.

Dan, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. I've really enjoyed all the conversations we had, but I do look forward to seeing you at conferences in this next year and having better and better conversations.

Dan Womack:Yeah, thank you for having me Priscilla really enjoyed it.

Priscilla McKinney:From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing!