Quit Basing Multi-million Dollar Campaigns on Bad Customer Insights

Priscilla McKinney: Hello, and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Mama Bird over here. And I do nothing but scour the world for amazing people, interesting people, people you would want to invite to a cocktail party. And that is my goal. I have found someone for you today. Christopher Brace, welcome to the show.

Chris Brace: Thank you very much, Priscilla. I have to say, I love a good perch. All I'm missing is the cocktail. It'd be perfect.

Priscilla McKinney: We're gonna sit and we're gonna ponder for a little bit. So okay. Well, I'm sorry. I should have sent that in advance. As per my first cocktail. Well, let me tell you a little bit about Christopher just to set the tone, the context here, and you'll understand why he's on the show and what we're gonna talk about. He is the founder and the CEO of Story Legacy.

That is a qualitative research group that uses storytelling to really find that deep, deep brand why. Ugh, we gotta love that. He is absolutely committed to helping insights teams make those strategic contributions to brand partners. And, you know, it's that strategy that we're gonna talk about today and how much people are investing into campaigns possibly based on bad customer insights.

So he's got decades of experience, and so we're gonna glean from that as we go. But let's kick off, Christopher, with setting the stage. You know, you are called in often when a brand is stuck, right? A brand's growth maybe stalls, and the team typically goes back to the research department for answers. So tell me in that moment, it's kind of when things are getting hard. What do you see that is going wrong in that moment or what it signals?

Chris Brace: I think to answer this question and to kind of set the stage for the entire conversation, I want to set the scene for what is the very traditional brand planning process, right? So kind of this is how this cycle goes. The brand team at the end of a fiscal year starts talking about what are the business challenges we need to solve in the next fiscal year. So they focus on those. They go to the research team and they say, hey, research peeps, what research can we do to help inform how we might solve this problem, right?

So the research team builds a plan. They go out and they execute that plan. They come back with insights and the heads are nodding. Yep, this makes sense. I think this works. There is a solution that is built that is then executed in market and it doesn't deliver the volume growth that was expected.

So the next fiscal year, that same business challenge shows up on the desk of the research team, maybe different words, but it's the same challenge. And then the research team.

Priscilla McKinney: Wait, we've, we kind of need a little bit of like drama music right there. Like dun dun dun, here's the same damn problem.

Chris Brace: Yes, exactly. And the research team executes a research plan again. This is what I call the persistent business challenge cycle. And, you know, I just, you know, when I was on the brand side and when I was on the agency side, I saw this all the time. I see this all the time.

It is so frustrating for research teams because it is not that the research team is doing something wrong. It is not that the research itself is doing something wrong. What is happening is we are, and I'm going to throw in some new terminology here, what we are doing is we are using inform work methodologies to deliver inspire work insights.

And in research, especially right now with the AI apocalypse upon us, that's where we need the dramatic bombs blowing up in the background. This is a really important distinction for us as an industry, right? So, inform work is really what we spend most of our time doing because this is what our buyers, the brand team and C-suite, this is what they want.

They want inform work, which is quantifiable, it's representative, it answers questions that somebody thought to ask, and what it is solely meant to do is reduce uncertainty and risk in the decision making process, which is all really, really good. But because inform work can be measured against a predetermined definition of success, it's easy to automate. And this is exactly what AI is automating.

Now you have the other side of it, which is the inspire work, completely different. Inspire work actually completely changes the questions that we're asking. Because what we need to do is we need to completely reframe the business challenge so that decision makers see new possibilities. The great thing about inspire work is it cannot be held to a predetermined measure of success, therefore it can't be automated.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, you talk about one thing in there about asking the wrong question. And let me get really specific about that. You know, I know as a cultural anthropologist, working in this field, is that people are really bad at knowing why they do things. And so when we have work that is asking them how they decided something, you know, there's a stat out there that really only 5% of how people actually decide something is something that they can actually consciously explain.

So what you're talking about is stacking work upon a question where the question itself is wrong. So in that example, clarify for me exactly what most of that market research is actually measuring. That first of the two.

Chris Brace: Yeah, well, so it's called the 95-5 rule, right? So about 95% of every single decision a consumer makes occurs below their conscious awareness, so in the non-conscious part of their brain. That means only about 5% occurs in their conscious awareness. So when you ask them, hey, consumer, tell me why you buy my brand, buy my competitor's brand, why you don't buy my brand, whatever the question is, they're gonna give you an answer, but that answer's gonna come from that post-rationalized 5%. It's not gonna get to the 95%.

Getting to the 95% requires different questions, different research structure, and wait for it, different methodologies, right? This goes back to, inform work methodologies are awesome, but they are not always going to get you the inspire work insights you need to reframe a business challenge to get to all that untapped brand growth. Because every brand that I've ever spoken to says to me, yes, we have untapped brand growth, we just can't get to it. This is why.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay. Okay. So let's expand on that a little bit. But that explains why people really are basing multimillion dollar brand campaigns on bad customer data. Right. On the wrong thing. Right.

Okay. So let's talk about that untapped opportunity that you kind of just opened up a whole new window here for us to talk about. You talk with brands who are slipping into stagnation. They're saying we have this untapped opportunity out here. But when you get involved, you're like, hmm, that's interesting. You look like everything else on the shelf. Why is that? So how is it that a brand can be doing kind of everything right in market research? And yet this is the place where we've found ourselves.

Chris Brace: Yeah, so a brand sliding into stagnation doesn't happen overnight. But what does happen, how it does happen, is kind of one unfixed business challenge after another. And as that cycle continues to repeat, your brand, your product begins to look like everything on the shelf because you're not differentiating what your brand can stand for and what your product actually means in any way that's really differentiating in the minds and the hearts of consumers and shoppers.

It's a complicated process. What industry data shows, and by the way, this should scare every single company who sells anything inside four walls in a grocery store, 2025 data shows that about 45 to 48% of the categories in a grocery store already meet two of the four signs of stagnation.

And those signs are shoppers only buy on price, there is very little to no differentiation recognized by the consumer, there's really no loyalty, and private label brands are stealing share, are seen at parity with national brands. By 2035, that's gonna be over 50% of categories. And any brand that shows two of the four signs, you're going to lose 20 to 30% of your market value.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, that is very scary, but it also makes sense just in terms of just as an average person looking out in the store and seeing the level of disruption. There are challenger brands, there's new kinds of categories, there's things maybe even in a different aisle than I expected them to be anymore, things stacking up very differently.

So you're saying that we already are awash in a sea of brands that have not been able to differentiate themselves in any real way. This is great news for you because this means you're gonna be gainfully employed for a very long time, Chris. I love it. I love it. Next time when we have the cocktail and do this, see it's gonna be better. We're just gonna be counting money.

Chris Brace: From your lips to my bank account, Priscilla.

Priscilla McKinney: But let's talk specifically. You're talking about what's bad, what's wrong out there. There's a lot of them that are doing it wrong. But what is that difference between a brand that has been able to stay relevant in a way that's really deeply resonating with people? And why is that brand then as quickly as anybody can copying them? Like what is going on over in that winning scenario?

Chris Brace: Yeah, so this comes down to the difference between two words. And by the way, if you haven't figured this out, I'm a word nerd. I think we have words for a reason, so let's be choiceful. So brands often pursue the word relevance. We encourage brands to pursue resonance.

They're very different. Relevance is primarily a cognitive question, right? That sits in the 5%. Resonance is absolutely a non-conscious, emotional, 95% experience.

And let me just draw the difference here very, very quickly. So if you were to go into a guitar store and there are 30 acoustic guitars on the wall, they're all perfectly tuned, you take an electric guitar, perfectly tuned, plug it into an amp, and you pluck the E string, what happens to those 30 acoustic guitars?

Priscilla McKinney: Hm, they all vibrate on some level.

Chris Brace: The E string vibrates and you never have to touch them. That's the physics principle of resonance. It's exactly the same thing in marketing. So, you know, this is what we do with clients.

This is the difference between brands that cannot be duplicated and brands that are duplicated. The brands that can't be duplicated is because they have their brand resonance, right? And when you go out and you ask your consumers, what is emotionally meaningful to you that makes sense to our brand, and you reflect that back to them, it's gonna resonate with them at the non-conscious level and they're never even gonna consciously know why, which is exactly what you want.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay. I'm gonna play devil's advocate just a little bit. And that is you said when you ask somebody what resonates with them or what emotionally is important to them, we already stated that 95% of what resonates with me, I can't even explain it to you well. So how do researchers then, instead of just asking, how do they go about getting that really great fodder in order to understand how to move away from relevance and move into resonance?

Chris Brace: Yeah. Yeah, so there are only certain ways you can actually get to the 95%. One of the ways is storytelling. So what sociology and psychology, I mean, just think talk therapy, right? What they've known for decades is that people reveal what is emotionally meaningful to them at an unconscious level through the stories that they tell about their lives.

So that is what we do at Story Legacy. That's the word story, right? We have a very structured way of engaging consumers in what we call facilitated storytelling, right? We basically just get them to tell us their lived experiences.

What's really important though is we have a proprietary AI model, because everybody has to talk about their AI model now. What we can do is we take those stories and all that non-conscious qualitative and we code it into five very specific variables. So what this does is it takes qualitative data, it codes it into structured data, so you know exactly how to use it.

And by the way, this has always been the struggle of qualitative. Quantitative has clear structure. Qualitative has never had clear structure. We bring clear structure, easier to activate. That's how you know what's resonant to your target.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. I love it. I do think coming back and underscoring that shift that's so important from relevance to resonance, it's really key. Okay, so I'm gonna come back up to the very top where you kind of started with me about your day-to-day, like you're called in, and it's a researcher who just feels like they keep solving the same problem year after year.

Chris Brace: Yeah.

Priscilla McKinney: And I mean, on the survey, maybe it's worded differently, but where do they get started? We've kind of given them a light at the end of the tunnel by some of the things we've seen said, in order to show them, well, this is why it's not you, it's a bigger problem. But what is the first thing that someone should be questioning, or what's a better conversation they could start having in their company in order to move toward this potential of actually having resonance?

Chris Brace: Well, I mean, the first thing that teams need to recognize or ask themselves is, do we fully understand our consumers' decision making process? Because if you think you do, you're gonna be stuck in that persistent business challenge cycle for sure. So recognizing that there is this whole other part to how they make their choices is step one.

Step two is what in there do we need to know, and how are we going to find it, and how is that actually going to solve our problem? So, you know, one of the biggest struggles I think brand teams and research teams often have is correctly articulating the business challenge itself. When I was in consulting and I tell my friends who go into consulting now, the number one job of a consultant is to make sure your client is asking the right question, because 95% of the time they might be talking about a symptom, not really talking about the cause.

And once you identify the cause, that's gonna actually help you understand what exactly is it about the consumer that we need to understand. Then you need to ask yourself from the research side, do we have the methodology to get that information?

Priscilla McKinney: Mm. Okay. And then what's next?

Chris Brace: So then basically what's next is, when clients come to us, the process is we help them frame the problem, make sure that it's strategically framed, because that also helps activation on the back end. This is exactly what we need to solve. Here are the communication hurdles we have to overcome.

Now let's go through your existing research, and what we do is we look for what are the emotional territories that are most relevant to your brand. We pick those and then we write a storytelling question. So let me just give you a quick example. So a board game company came to us and said, we are getting trounced upon by video games. So we need to figure out how do we get medium and light board game households to play more board games.

So they had been trying to solve this issue, by the way, for about two to three different business cycles. And what they were doing is, is that they'd go out and they'd do research, they'd execute a plan, it didn't work, they'd come back, they would take the old research plan and add something new to it. So focus groups, now we're gonna do IDIs. And then the third time we're gonna do focus groups, IDIs and shop-alongs.

But what they hadn't understood is, what we really need to understand is, what's the emotional reason medium and light households play board games less often than heavy households? And the only way they were gonna get to that is through storytelling. And that's what we did, right? We went out, we did the storytelling, here's what we found. It was a simple definition of quality time.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, is there anything from that study that you can share? Because I'm kind of dying to know, because I would consider my household to be a very, very, very heavy board game usage.

Chris Brace: Yeah, here's the LDL. I'll literally tell you the solution. I can even read you the insight. I wrote it down and have it with me. So here's what we found.

Priscilla McKinney: Can I guess? People who play games like their kids more? Okay, that was my joke. Okay.

Chris Brace: There is some truth to that. It actually is some truth to that, and you'll see it in the finding, which was medium and light household parents define quality time as any time the family's together. That means we could be playing a board game or sitting in the living room with the lights out, not saying a word to each other while we watch a movie.

Heavy household parents had a much more specific definition of quality time. Anytime the family is interacting with each other, that's the difference. There has to be interaction. The focus has to be on the family. We have to be learning about each other.

So sitting in a room watching a movie with the lights out, that's togetherness, it's not quality time. So what we recommended was you need a communication platform that addresses this specific variable, right? Because attitudes, part one of the five variables, we said you need to shift this attitude of medium and light households so it's more closely aligned with heavy households.

And the closer they get to heavy households, the more they're gonna play board games, which means the more they're gonna buy. That's exactly what happened. 13% increase in sales in the first 12 week promotional period.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. See, that's how now you're putting real money to a campaign based on a deep insight of what would actually motivate someone to change their behavior, which is very, very hard to do. Very, very hard.

Okay. I want to give you an opportunity just to give us maybe go one way or the other. Either give us another example, which I think is really helpful to kind of showcase your work, or give me a question that you wish people were asking in this industry. Which one kind of tickles your fancy a bit more?

Chris Brace: Well, I think going through another example, I think case studies and examples are always more helpful for people, right? So we recently did a research project on what arguably everyone would recognize as probably one of the most commoditized categories in a grocery store, which is toilet paper. So this brand, the product got very high ratings, but it had the lowest household penetration in the category.

The brand team had been trying to do is, there are seven product attributes that describe toilet paper. They believed that they could find some combination of three that over time they're gonna be able to own. That is never gonna happen, right? You're never gonna be able to, I don't care what category you're in, you're never gonna be able to take the category product attributes and somehow combine them into something that's ownable.

So we went out and we did the research, and here's what we learned. When prompted, toilet paper was probably the single most important personal care product in their house. But unprompted, they didn't even think of toilet paper as a personal care product, right?

We actually had them step into their primary bathroom and record, give us all the personal care products. Two of the 36 said toilet paper. But then when we prompted them, they all were like, my goodness, of course that's the most important one, we use it, everybody, multiple times a day, right? So that was a significant reframe for the entire category.

But then when you link that as a personal care product to the emotional territory of caring for my family, all of a sudden you can take all those different product attributes that they were trying to own, and you link those attributes to the emotional resonance. So over time you have this, this is significant, like memorize this thing, this is your brand, this is the emotional resonance. This is what you want. You don't want this.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, and just for my audio listeners, he's actually putting his hands together. Take, go on, take this on a walk.

Chris Brace: Yes, right. I'm holding my hands together, clasping my hands together. Thank you.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. I love it. Okay. Well, if you want to hear a little bit more about Story Legacy and why story is really the way to uncover that differentiating power that your brand needs, you can go visit Christopher and his team at storylegacy.us. But you can find Christopher Brace on LinkedIn. I'm sure he'd actually respond to you. As you can tell, he and I like to talk about this stuff, so it'll be pretty easy to have a conversation with him about it.

But Christopher, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and also just that expertise. You know, it is very powerful to be called in when teams are stuck, and that means that we have something that we can offer to move things forward. But if you're ready to quit spending lots and lots of money on campaigns that don't yield any more money, then you gotta stop, you gotta stop and ask what's going on here and how did we not get to that resonance point? Christopher, thanks for joining us.

Chris Brace: Yeah. Priscilla, thank you so much. I enjoyed the perch.

Priscilla McKinney: From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing. Have a great day and happy marketing.