Customer Insights and the Power of Context

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird with you as always. I find all these amazing people to talk to and you are going to love this conversation today. I get to see her at all kinds of conferences, so lucky me, but I finally wrangled her into the podcast. Welcome to the show, Keren Novack.

Keren Novack: Thanks so much for having me on the perch with you.

Priscilla McKinney: It's so fun. And I just got to say, your whole Curion team, what a bunch of smarty pants.

Keren Novack: No kidding. I am honored to work with every single one of them.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, it's such a cool group. And over the years, I've just, of course, seen them at all kinds of conferences. I was just with a lot of them at a women in research event. And so that was fun because that's work. But is it really? Maybe, maybe not. So if you don't know Keren, let me tell you a little bit about her and then we're going to dive into a pretty fun conversation today.

Keren Novack is the president of Curion and is obsessed with product truth. We get to have so many fun conversations about this. What she's always interested in is what really happens when a product hits people in the real world. And she is a self-professed, eyes wide open leader who thrives on taking big, bold, and admittedly sometimes scary ideas and turning them into action.

And she really knows how to connect with people. Hello, this is why we're on the show today, but she is so good at building strong partnerships. That's very evident in the way that she interacts in this industry and continues to build this industry and give back to it. But she brings all kinds of energy and clarity to her team and also to her clients. And that, in my opinion, is what really pushes teams to take that insight, that elusive, real truth, and actually get real impact.

So let me just tell you, you're going to want to also connect with her on LinkedIn. And I'm going to do you a favor right now. It's Keren, K-E-R-E-N, Novack, N-O-V-A-C-K. But I don't want you looking for Keren with a different spelling and realizing you can't find her. Okay, we got that out of the way. Now everybody's going to connect with you, Keren. But you and I got to talk recently about what you mean by being product obsessed. And there is a lot of talk out there right now about how teams need to be more product obsessed, but I'm really curious what you mean by that and what you think that actually looks like in practice and why you even like to talk about it, why it's so important.

Keren Novack: Yeah, I'm so product obsessed in my personal life and at work. But it's about finding the product truth. And the product truth comes from a consumer's lived experience with a product. It doesn't come in concepts. It doesn't come in promotions or placement or price and all of this. It is part of it, right? But it is about that lived experience that you get when you experience a product.

And a great lived experience means repeat purchase. Repeat purchase, you can ask any CMO this one, is your primary growth driver. So why are you not obsessed with product? I would ask anyone else.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, why do you think teams, I wouldn't even say they shy away from it. Maybe it's that they're just so busy doing all kinds of other things and they maybe lose the plot. Is that what's happening? And they forget to come back to that product.

Keren Novack: Yeah, so I started my career in sensory science. It's a division often out of food science, master's, PhD programs. It's fascinating. It's not often seen as the most sexy group. There's a lot of really fun, cool work that's done in marketing and consumer insights and really pressing the creativity and the boundary. That's not to say that we're not creative, but it's oftentimes seen as the necessity.

I've got to undergo product testing. I've got to do some sensory on this. It's not front and center. If you look at just about any product launch, rarely will you find the sensory scientist at the end of the launch being the one spiking the football in the end zone. They're just not. It's generally someone in the marketing teams.

But boy, they're not spiking the ball until product and sensory have done their work behind the scenes. And even if they're spiking it the first time, nobody's coming back to do it again because the lived experience hasn't held up. It just has to.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, tell me a little bit about that. Let's kind of parse that out because what you're talking about is the sensory people out there doing their science work, right? So they're happy if they nerd out on it, that's great. All the smarty pants that you guys have. But there is one thing about testing in a controlled environment or taste testing or package testing, all these kinds of things. And then getting it out in market and you guys really know that world. So tell me a little bit about Curion's take on what it means to actually test this in market and really understand the truth of that experience.

Keren Novack: Yeah, that's such a great point. One of my catchphrases that I have is the only expert on your product is the consumer. A lot of sensory teams will say, I've got an expert panel and I've got people that are trained to taste wine or coffee or whatever it might be. Cool. That's great. And I'm sure they're learning a ton from that. We're learning from our consumers. The consumers are the only true expert of your product.

And so you can bring consumers in, we can put them in a booth and we can run them through a number of different products. We do that all the time. But there's a lot you're missing by doing that as well. You've got to get the product in market, to get the product in consumers' homes. You've got to get them interacting with it in context in a way that is familiar and comfortable to the consumer.

There is no one size fits all place to test, way to test. It's all about the objectives of the research. You've got to consider that and control. Oftentimes we're dealing in prototypes that are not cleared for public consumption. We're dealing with products that have to be disposed of one hour after opening, 30 minutes after opening, two days after opening, whatever it might be. We have to maintain control of a number of different things in regards to that, so sometimes you have to bring the consumers in.

To us, it's about remembering what you're researching and then applying the best both methodology and experience for the consumers for them to be able to react. And then remember what you've done. Because if you test a product in the booth, I might give you some really awesome results from that and really insightful information. If we start adding some other contextualized aspects to it, what you're eating it with, where you're eating it, the temperature you're eating it, things can change real quickly. That's my eyes wide open piece. You remember what you learned, where you learned it, and then apply that the next time you go forward.

Priscilla McKinney: So when you talk about this context, let me just put this in normal people terms like me. So you're at the store and you're looking for a particular product. You're like, okay, this one, maybe this one, kind of looking around, all of your phone buzzes. Somebody else wants something, kids pulling at you. This is the actual context in which people purchase, right? And then kind of to your point, let's say it's a taste test. Well, it's different if I come in a controlled room and I'm like, here, taste this wine. Oh yeah, I love it. Versus taste this wine, you're going to have to be stuck in a networking session with someone who's making you miserable. Boy, that wine doesn't taste so great anymore. Right, yeah, it could have a positive or a negative impact, but your point here is the context.

Keren Novack: No, but you might drink it twice as fast.

Priscilla McKinney: You breezed right past one word just a second ago, you said methodology. So tell me about a methodology you have at Curion that you lean on for understanding the context, for really understanding what's going on in the market versus controlled labs.

Keren Novack: Yeah. So one of the methods that we've created most recently, it's a new name for a method called Curion In Market, but it's something we've been doing for some time now. And it's about getting out of the lab and into real life. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year finding product for our clients and finding consumers and bringing that all together in a central place or in their homes or whatever it is.

Finding product is so difficult sometimes. And you know what, it's part of the experience. And so the in-market methodology is about not just connecting that very important consumer in that product, it's about the location of that product itself, having a consumer go out and buy the sandwich at the drive-thru. What's that whole experience like? Ultimately, the product at the end of it is important and the distribution that it got to get to that is important as well. But what was their experience like at the drive-thru? What was their experience like in the store?

Finding it on the shelf. You know your own grocery store. There it is. Found it. You walk into any other grocery store, you're looking for the same product. The layout is a little bit different. It's in a little bit of a different aisle. My mind can just explode and this is what I do for a living. That experience is part of your product. It is a web of moments that can make a product experience be positive or negative.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, I love that. Now let's kind of bring that back around to what we started with, which is this idea of being product obsessed. I know that your end clients talk to me all the time. They all want to be on my podcast and talk to me because they know I'm never going to sell them anything, and I hear interesting things from them. And I oftentimes hear this dichotomy between them being asked to really understand, is this product good enough? But what they really need to be asking is, but is this product competitive in the category?

And that is one thing that you kind of brought up, this idea of context. Standing on its own, it might do really well, but now let's look at where it really sits. Certain verticals have more challenger brands, there are more options in different categories. So tell me what this difference is and how you get your end client, who you do sell to, how you get them to stop asking, is this good enough, and get them to start working with you to say, yes, but how can we be even more competitive?

Keren Novack: Yeah, boy, there's a lot to unpack there. I want to talk about Curion Score for a second because I think that really gets at this gap that we had in the industry. But our clients are going through some tough stuff right now. So much competition out there and not just from their competitors. Social media, the current administration, margins, the economic pressures, boy, there's a lot there too. Which makes all of that even more important.

It's not just, hey, that product did great in this study and we're going to say that it's going to do well because it scored a certain number. So in product testing, we use a scale called overall liking. Most of our clients, most of the industry use a nine point overall liking scale. It was scientifically backed in, I think, the 90s, and everyone uses it. And the wonderful thing is everyone uses it, and so you can create some concept of normative data.

The problem with any scale like that is it's linear and consumers hate the ends of the scale. What does that mean? It means your coffee scores a six. It means your ice cream scores a six five. It means your granola bar scores a six four. Everything gets compressed in the middle there and the best products score a seven and everything else is just kind of there in the middle. And the reality is there's a ton of compression.

But when we do a product test, we actually ask anywhere between 15 and 30 questions of the consumers. I always try to keep it on the lower side because people hate answering questions, even if you're paying them to sit there and do it. We ask all these other questions where the consumer says, okay, yeah, that was a seven. I really quite like that product. Then we ask all these other questions about the flavor and the texture and was it too much or too little and all of these different attributes. But none of that feeds into a whole score.

And so when we went to our clients and we said, we've got 50 years of data, what would you like us to do with this? They all said, give us a score that tells me if my product is good enough. But overall liking alone is not good enough to tell you what you need here. And so we created the Curion Score that takes into account all of the types of questions that we're asking and then gives you a score. And then that is related back to our database of anonymous aggregate data that we have from our clients that have all opted into this for us to be able to give them a category norm.

So that if you've just tested one, I don't know, ready to drink margarita product, we can now tell you that amongst all of the ready to drink products, yeah, that wasn't just a good product, that was a great product. And the scoring system has allowed us to connect that to repeat sales, which going back to the beginning is your primary driver of growth because the product experience was great for the consumers.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, and going back to the beginning too, that's what you mean when you say, yeah, I want to help clients turn insight into actual impact, and impact is revenue. We're all here with businesses that have a going interest in staying in business. And that's how we do it. I got to tell you this funny story. So I had a business coach, best business coach I ever had. And he used to do these evaluations with us and he taught me to do this with my team. He would ask me to rank something, okay, and on a scale of one to ten I'd be like seven, and he'd say, yeah, but you can't say seven.

I'd be like okay so is it a six or an eight? That tells you a lot about a person. And I love this behavioral science to it. And of course he would do this in a very unscientific way, but it helped me really understand something very interesting about humans. And obviously you guys have then put that into deeper context and then applied more science to it. But I love that approach because it is interesting to find certain people just respond a certain way because they are responding to certain expectations of culture or whoever asked them or these kinds of things. And really it requires more refinement.

And so I love this idea about the Curion Score because yeah, it's not just about getting the respondent to give you the truth. It's also helping you move beyond that, even if you got that right, and really understand the larger context of the truth in the category. Okay, I'm going to throw something else at you though, because I was very fortunate enough to listen to a presentation from your team. And you are all running a real world qualitative research about GLP-1, and I was just thoroughly interested in it.

I ended up even in a small conversation with just some guy who was sitting next to me during your presentation and we just ended up staying talking. Why is this and what is this going to, how is this going to affect the industry? But the interesting part about GLP-1 users, and I got to tell you, there was a quote in the presentation from Richard Heath from a company you just acquired called Blue Yonder. He said that the GLP-1 user is now losing one out of five eating occasion moments in the day. Okay, that's significant. And as the number of GLP-1 users grow, 20%. Let's put this into context.

Keren Novack: That compounds real fast.

Priscilla McKinney: So that's a very fascinating intersection of behavioral science and product strategy. So where do you see the in-market research going next? Like what's that next frontier for understanding how even trends impact this kind of context, and as you said, the consumer being the ultimate truth of the quality and the buying again of the product.

Keren Novack: Yeah, let me comment real quickly on those other occasions. So we had five occasions. Now we're down to four occasions. Those four occasions are no longer the same four occasions though that they had before. So not only have you lost an occasion, you've also shifted the behavior of those current occasions. That's not on the top of consumers' minds that they've lost an occasion. They're just out there living their lives. Some of them are not recognizing that they're even making different choices in those other occasions that they're still eating within.

So getting in market with the consumers is not just about the data that was collected there. That data was collected through a technology called Clickscape. It was very quantitative, very factual, it was in the moment behavioral reactions. The next frontier I believe is shifting from recall, which is pretty much how we ask consumers to fill out surveys, to that real-time behavior, that in context moment, and being able to observe it, measure it, get to it in that moment.

There are so many more opportunities for us to apply methods or capabilities, technologies like that, so that we're not just asking consumers what they think, asking them to recall, but we are watching them decide in that moment, as unobtrusively as we can possibly do so. And I'm talking about en masse. We need to be able to collect a lot more data very, very quickly about those in the moment decisions that people are making and kind of break down that barrier that we have had in the past.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. And regardless of whether it's GLP-1 or not, we have to think about where this is going for the future.

Keren Novack: Okay, yeah. There is so much going on in our collective industries, whether it be food and beverage or health and beauty, et cetera. Trends are real and it is so difficult to figure out what is going to be the next big trend and are you going to be fast enough to capitalize on that? To which I would say about the trends, yes, let them have their moment. What you want to be focused on is what's the next movement? Like GLP-1, there's something else coming. I'm not sure what it is yet, but there's another big one coming.

And so listening to your consumer in market will probably key you into when that next movement, when that next trend is going to become a movement. Everything starts as a trend. It has to. What comes next is a movement and being able to watch your consumers in market, that will be your key to figuring out what the next movement is. And that's the one you should jump on from a product research, product understanding perspective. Wait, I just went back to product, didn't I? I am obsessed.

Priscilla McKinney: Hello, you're right on theme. This is why I have you on the show. You know, that to me is so perfect. It does come back to that. And I love this idea about, yeah, it starts as a trend. And a lot of people are like, it's a trend. Yeah, but you got to be watching. You got to really know what the sign is when it turns into a movement.

Keren Novack: Yeah, you absolutely do. And it can be so difficult. I got an email the other day and they shared a couple of TikTok videos. Some of them were done by some really just subpar influencers. And I thought, you are a global marketing lead, very senior position. Why are you focused on that? That's great, but that's only one trend. I would be much more concerned about the bigger movements that are out there. And you're not capturing that by one single TikTok trend that's going on right now.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I love that. I think one big word I'm going to take away from this is context. You know how important context is. Hey, I'm super excited. When I was listening to that presentation, you guys have a webinar coming up where you're actually going to reveal a lot of this data. I signed up for it and it'll actually happen while we're editing this episode and so I'll reach out to your team and get a copy of it and put it in my show notes. So if you're listening right now and thinking, well, I want to know more about this GLP-1 and how this might be affecting my buyer, my consumer, and I do want to hear from them, then I'll put that link in the show notes and definitely by then it'll be out and I will have been in the audience gasping a few times, I'm sure.

It's so new. It's so fresh and it's millions of people. So it definitely has a large impact on the economy. But as you said, in context. And I loved all the other things you listed of the other things that are impacting. It's not just GLP-1 that's coming in. We've got a current administration, we've got margins, we've got challenger brands, we've got a waning economy, we've got tariffs, like everybody's dealing with so many other things. Private label. And now we have a generation that doesn't even really consider it to be private label. They consider it to be a brand. You know, when we were growing up, you didn't know, the generic just said generic. But now, Walmart's Equate, Target's Good and Gather, Archer Farms, people actually know these as brands, not as private label.

Keren Novack: Yeah, they're trending. That's what I'm saying. They're literally wearing the name of the private label on a sweatshirt.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, it's just bonkers. So all the more important why context is really king for understanding what is going on and what it takes to be product obsessed. Keren, this has been such a delight. Thank you so much for giving us your expertise, my audience surely appreciates that. And anytime I get a chance to talk with one of the smart people at Curion, I'm going to do it.

Keren Novack: Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your support and having me on the perch with you.

Priscilla McKinney: So from all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.