How consumer insights will get its power back

Ryan Barry:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, the recent winner of the MR Podcast of the Year. My name is Ryan, I'm joined as always by my host, Patricia and our producer, Kelsey. What's up ladies?

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Hey, dude.

Ryan:

How's it going? It's your birthday today.

Patricia:

It's my birthday. Happy as a clam.

Ryan:

So, yep, Patricia turned 30 today. And we are recording this on May 11th, so next May 11th, mark your calendars, please send Patricia flowers and nice bottles of wine and things for her dogs to play with.

Patricia:

There you go, but even if you get this podcast and you feel like sending him anyway, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with sending…

Ryan:

Yeah, late birthday presents are fine. While we're at it, my birthday is December 12th, and you know who else's birthday is on December 12th? Kelsey Sullivan's. Two members of this show have the same birthday, no big deal. So please also mark calendars there. I would really appreciate just good vibes, I don't need anything else, I got all the things I need. But if you're in Boston, maybe take Kelsey and I out for a libation. As you heard on a previous episode, we do not discriminate on the libations.

Patricia:

Equal opportunity drinkers.

Ryan:

Exactly. May 11th, for those of you on the YouTube crew, thanks for watching, I am rocking an NBA Jam t-shirt today. Shout out to the Boston Celtics, game five of the Eastern Conference Semis. I really hope this sentence ages well. I'm a big basketball fan and my wife is not a big basketball fan because what basketball means is, particularly playoffs, I'm watching a game pretty much every other night. So she probably wants them to lose, I really want them to win, but anyways, the NBA Jam t-shirt is pretty sweet. It brings me back to my childhood. But nobody came here to listen to me talk about the Celtics, although ladies, maybe I have a secret career in NBA podcasting. I don't know. We're here to talk about insights. Yeah, we do all the things. I got all the equipment now.

So this is a special episode. We invited our founder and CEO, Steve Phillips, to join. Steve is somebody who I've had the pleasure of building a company with for the last eight years of my life. They've been eight wonderful years. I've never worked with somebody who I have a more complimentary set of skills with, who I can argue with so productively, and who shares a lot of the same values that I do. And it's the reason I joined Zappi eight years ago, was betting on him and his vision. And obviously when you're building companies, it's not as linear as everybody thinks it is. There's dark days and there's great days and we've been through them all together. And I really wanted to have him on to share his vision for data and insights and where it's going. I think you'll enjoy the conversation, quite a bit of bants between the two of us.

Ladies, I haven't told you this yet, but in my notebook right here is a whole bunch of ideas for interviews for season five. No big deal. I'm pumped up. It's going to be great. We're going to bring the heat back, as always. And our last two episodes have broken records for the amount of people who have listened. So Steve, no pressure, you better get your social media game on and share this interview. I think we should get into convo because it's a real good one. Let's do it.

Patricia:

Go for it.

Ryan:

Hi, Steve, how you doing buddy?

Steve Phillips:

Not bad, Ryan. How are you?

Ryan:

I'm good. I'm glad to finally have you on the podcast. It's taken me a long time and you employ me, and so I appreciate that about you. And I'm really excited to have a conversation about where the industry's going with you, so we're going to have some fun today.

Steve:

Look, it's just really exciting to get the chance to be on an award winning podcast.

Ryan:

Yeah, we won podcast of the year, which was super cool. As I said to Steve, I didn't expect to win it. And I just want to thank everybody who voted for us, but I really want to thank Kelsey and Patricia, because without them the show wouldn't happen, so thank you ladies. 

So I was at IIEX, great conference this week, put on by the GreenBook folks, shout out to all of them, they did a great job. And somebody came up to me and asked me how I came to work for Zappi. Let's start there because we're coming up on eight years of adventure. And I was at the time working for a company called GMI, which was getting ruined by Kantar. And so I was looking for something else to do, but I didn't want to do something that wouldn't scale. My wife had built a dog care company, but it was big enough where she was now running a business versus working with dogs and so she gave me an ultimatum, "Either you run this or I'm selling it." 

And Lenny Murphy sends me a LinkedIn message and for any of you who've ever tried to message me on LinkedIn, I'm not good at messaging on LinkedIn, so I probably haven't responded to you. My email address is Ryan@zappistore.com, please email me. Anyways, I responded to Lenny, because he said, "I have a gig you might be interested in..." You had just won the IIEX innovation exchange award, I had no idea what Zappi did, but there was a bit of buzz about the company at the time.

And so we met and my final interview was in Atlanta. And I remember making the mistake of saying to you, "Oh, come check me out. I'm going to be presenting." So our interview was over lunch and for those of you who ever go to a conference, the conferences are funny because you eat dry salmon and rice in a big open room, so we're having a job interview in the middle of this thing. And one of my customers comes and sits with us, so Steve and I look at each other and we're like, "Nevermind." So we didn't end up doing the interview. And instead Steve texted me and said, "Yeah, I'm going to go out and have a few beers with my friends. Would you like to join us?" So to this day, I think the only reason I got the job is because I could drink a bunch of beers. I mean, I'm not sure if that's actually true or not, but it was a wonderful journey to get to the place, but holy shit, what a ride we've been on.

Steve:

It's been a lot of fun. I don't think we promised you roses and flowers along the way. I think it's always interesting when you have change. I enjoy change. I enjoy the ups and downs and you have to just enjoy the ride. So hopefully you have.

Ryan:

I have enjoyed the ride. It's been incredible. I mean, I wrote down some goals in the beginning and we're about halfway to achieving those. So I do believe our best years are in front of us and it's going to be good. But so you started, I'm not going to make you repeat the Zappi founding story, which if you want to hear Steve's Zappi founding story, he's on a lot of podcasts, it has to do with wine and it has to do with coming up with an idea that eventually I think has really changed this industry. And so I thank you for doing that and that's why I joined you because you were going to change this industry. When you started Zappi the industry was in its infancy of adopting technology, so you either had to... And by the industry, I mean the corporate landscape, because Decipher, Confirmit, Dimensions, all these other platforms were really being used as operating systems for agencies.

They were buying sample, programming surveys, et cetera. But when you started, the brands either were insourcing by programming surveys on Qualtrics or Survey Monkey or Decipher or hiring full service agencies. Holy shit, has that changed. I was just at this conference, there's like a thousand tech companies, a lot of them do the exact same thing, but what's the thing that you've noticed now that you didn't anticipate that night in your garden when you had the, "Aha, if I combined tech and thinking, I could change this game."

Steve:

So if I look back on my career and the time I've been in market research, not so much my career, but the time I've been in the research industry, there've been a couple of things that have been, technologies that have been game changers. So I would say, I sort of missed the telephone revolution, because I'm not quite that old, but the industry went from face-to-face to telephone. And that did a couple of things, it made interviewing a lot quicker and cheaper. So it meant that you could go from doing a project in eight weeks to doing a project in five or six weeks. That probably happened largely in the '80s, in the late '90s and the early 2000s, you had another revolution, which was all about field work again, which was moving online and I missed out on that revolution in the industry. I did not get involved and if I had one regret, it's probably not piling into that because the people who did built great companies, made a lot of money and did some really interesting work. Really interesting.

Ryan:

I think that era for my first house.

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that both of those revolutions, though, made the existing process faster and cheaper, but didn't fundamentally change the way insight was used. And I think when I came up with the idea for pure full scale automation for Zappi, it was to solve effectively a core client problem. The core client problem was that market research was too slow and too expensive. So I went out of the way to try and make it faster and cheaper because I knew that would be popular, so I knew people would want to be faster and cheaper. What I didn't anticipate was if you make it so fast enough, if you make it happen in hours or days, instead of weeks and months, it can change the way enterprises use that information. So it enables agility, it enables the use of things like design led thinking for product creation.

It enables people to be iterative, to learn over time, to basically run advertising creation processes, product creation processes, in the way that you would run software sprints. So it enables people to fundamentally change the way they build out the products and services that they're trying to take to market. And I think I did not expect that, I did not anticipate that. And that is an outcome of the collapse in timing that it takes to do a project and it's taking it not from eight weeks to four weeks, but four weeks to a day, which means that you can think about something in the morning, have an argument with your team and then go, "Let's do some research. Let's come back to it tomorrow. And then we can iterate." And that's a fundamentally different way of running a business and that's the element I did not anticipate.

Ryan:

And so I don't know if you've seen this yet, so I must email it to you, but one of our customers was showing the data of brands in their portfolio who used technology to test the way they used to, meaning we're doing it late stage as a validation exercise, now they can do it fast and cheap. And it's not just us, I attribute you to creating this movement, now there's 800 platforms that do it, which is great, I think it's beautiful. Contrasted against brands that explore territories, learn from them, come up with storyboards and idea framings, then they develop the idea further and then they go to animatics and then they get to finished film.

The proof is in the sales and the brand lifts. The brands that are doing that are selling more products and building brands for the longer term. This stuff works. And so I think that insight that you had is profound, but frustratingly that's still something today that needs to change. So I was having a discussion with one of our customers and what he said to me was, "I've digitally transformed insights, but unless marketing changes the way they work, none of it will matter." And we'll come on to our next frontier in a little bit, but I think that's something that we need to change. So just getting the way you used the work done quicker, doesn't actually change the learning, it saves you a bit of money. It’s good. 

So I'll tell you the one naive thing that I didn't anticipate, and you know what I'm going to say. I was in the data collection business for a long time before coming to Zappi and I thought to myself, "Oh phew, I get to leave it and go build a software company with this lovely man, Steve. He likes cricket, I like baseball. It'll be great." Sample's really important and this industry has ignored it for a really, really long time and I attribute a lot of good work we've done to the sample industry, but naively in 2014, I would've never thought it was one of the biggest problems. And I think you would say the same, you thought people were going to want to change the surveys every single time, but that was always one of the friction points.

Steve:

Yeah, I think, and probably naively, when we think about sample, we shouldn't think about it in some sense as sample, I think the revelation we've come across, we've come to, particularly when you are continuously iterating, is quite how important data quality is. So in a world where you are building an advertising campaign or a product and you do one project, you can have an argument about data quality, but it's a difficult argument to have, because you've got nothing to compare it to, except the last campaign, which was a different campaign. When we are doing iterative test-and-learn, then you are testing an ad or a product or a pack and then changing it a little bit and then seeing how that change has worked. And so the comparison data is so much closer, both in time and in relation to the stimulus you're testing, that data quality becomes so important and so clear and obvious a criteria.

And frankly, we sell data and data quality is essential. So I think, again, it's the iteration factor that I didn't process of the change and then that has a bunch of add on effects across the industry across the way that we have to think about data and data quality and how important it is and then also about the way other people use the data and use the data to make better decisions. So I think that change to agility is a profound change and it's not a change in our industry, it's a change in industry. It's a change in the way things are being built. So if you look across major enterprises, all of the departments are trying to be more agile, it could be operations, it could be manufacturing, it could be marketing, it could be sales or whatever.

Everyone is trying to work in a much more agile way and whilst we are now fulfilling the requirements from an consumer insight perspective, there was a real danger that for our industry, that if we didn't fulfill it, people wouldn't stop working in an agile way, they would just ignore consumer market research. So what they would do and I've seen companies thinking about this, and there was a famous example, I can't remember who the brand was, but they had a consumer insight war room, so that they could work in a much more agile way. And they had streams of data coming into it and not one of those streams was consumer insight data. It's clickstream data, it was social media data, it was sales data, whatever it was, but it wasn't the data that we were providing because we couldn't stream it and that's the thing that we have to do.

Ryan:

Yeah. Amen to that. And I think to close the topic of data and quality, we've been going in the reverse direction on this topic as an industry for way too long. I mean, if you're expecting to pay 75 cents to interview somebody, for that person to pay attention, for that person to give you thoughtful responses and for the company that you push all the crap downhill for, to care about quality, you’ve got to wake up, this is a holistic supply chain issue. So quality is obviously where we're at now, companies like us are bracing for costs to go up because that's the right thing for the industry.

Steve:

Absolutely.

Ryan:

The thing that excites me about what we could be doing with data, and it builds on your point about streaming, is we know a lot about people. If I know that you like cricket and you live just outside of North London and that you're a vegan and you like music and you like history and you enjoy going to the movies, by the way these are all facts about Steve, I can ask you very targeted questions when I have limited attention span from you. And if I connect those data sets together in an intentional way, it's not a fire hose data mine thing, it's a really intentional piece of research. But I got invited to kick off the Sample Con conference in about a month out in Los Angeles. But the truth is, I'm going to go to that conference, I'm looking forward to it, but we won't be talking about the integration of first party data and what's happening in the world, so more to do there. 

All right. I want to talk about building a business for a minute, so most of our audience are corporate research people, we have a lot of people that are on the supplier side. Your background is not that of a technology executive, neither is mine. We're research guys who have built a tech business, I believe that's an advantage we have. 

We have had to figure out software in an industry that we know and love. You are an entrepreneur, always have been, built qualitative insights businesses, consulting companies, so you're not uncomfortable with the uncertainty of building a company, but what did you have to unlearn to make the shift? And I don't know that a lot of people knew you were going to make the shift to build a, we'll be roughly $70 million company this year. What are some of the things that you had to take with you that you learned in your early years of building qual companies that you still maintain, but what are some of the things you had to unlearn to build a software company?

Steve:

Yeah, it's interesting. So the companies I've built before, I've been in agency life anyway, and so when I was running a qualitative company or a hybrid company, I could do every job in that company. So we got to 15, 20, 40 people by the end, but I could do the job of everyone in there. I knew what everyone did, so I could help them do their job, quite frankly, I could get right in the weeds with everything. And so it's a very different way of looking at it because now we have 70, 80 developers, they are pretty much all smarter than me, doing something that is incredibly complex, that I have no idea about. I did, as you know, send myself on a “learn to code in a day” course, so obviously became an expert after that.

Ryan:

You're also really good at unplugging things when they break and then plugging them back in.

Steve:

You turn it off and then you turn it back on again.

Ryan:

I mean, you're the best in the game in that, my friend.

Steve:

So obviously I've learned some things around IT, since starting Zappi, but the reality is that you have to go in with a humility of just not knowing and being able to ask questions in a way that I didn't in my previous companies because I had answers. So now I'm approaching things much more from a questioning perspective than an answering perspective. And I think that's the core of it. I think with software, there is a period where you are just sort of blindsided by it and you just don't understand anything and you don't think you can input into it, but you don't think you're useful in any way. So you're just sort of learning from the developers. There does become a time where you realize that your insight, if described in the right way, is actually really helpful for them, because the way that we brief developers now is through stories and epics.

So what we're trying to describe is what does a customer want to be able to do with that piece of software? Give them empathy for the customer's problem, the customer's desire, where they want to take it, how they want to analyze the data, what types of insights do they want to get out of it? And when you give a developer that insight, that understanding and that context, then actually they can create great software. And so over time, I think I went through a trough of ignorance where I thought I was useless to a large swath of the company, a large sway of what we were trying to do, to a point where I found a role helping supply the vision and where we want to go in terms of the products and where the market is going and that is really useful for the development function.

So I think it took a while to understand my role and where I could be useful and where frankly I was not useful at all. And so when you get to the bit about where you are not useful, get out the way, just let them get on with the job, because they're good at it, they're smart, they'll do it. And particularly now that we've scaled, I mean, I was running 20, 30, 40 people companies before. Zappi is so much bigger, so we are almost 300 now. So there are large groups of people who are doing things that frankly have not had much or any input into, and you just have to have trust in those people to do the right thing. Now, how do they know how to do the right thing? As with what I was talking about with the developers, it's about stories and epics. It's about painting a vision and a picture of where do we want to go?

And that might be delivered through software, it might be in terms of how we want to service our customers, it might be in terms of how we want to manage the business or the business intelligence, the data that we sit on, it's all of those things. And you realize that weirdly you go back to the roots of market research in the sense that it's storytelling on top of data. I mean, that becomes the job, it's about creating an understanding of the vision of the company and the vision of the product and where you want to go and where you believe the market is going and it's telling that story backed up by obviously data and insight from clients, from what's happening in the marketplace. So some of it is having the humility to just back away and let people get on with their job.

And I think some of it is also having the strength of your beliefs to push forward on things that you think are important, that's where the company's got to go. And I think you framed it in the sense of me being a technology entrepreneur, but I'd actually turn it around now. I mean, if you listen to Andreessen Horowitz, Software Is Eating the World. It's not me as a software entrepreneur that's got to go through this, it's every executive in every profession around the world, software is eating into every… marketing, operations, market research, everything is becoming software. Everything is becoming software focused and it's taking that same view, I think, of understanding the capabilities of software, understanding where you want your team or your department to go and trying to make those things work effectively together.

Ryan:

Yeah. I love it. You're right. Every business is having to do it. I mean, there's gum companies that have subscription services, how many companies, old brick and mortar is now an experience that you then go purchase online, I mean, it's changing. And as I said, a few minutes ago, while software is eating the world, unless we learn how to work with it, we won't get the full benefit. So it's, I think, equally about people and process. So yeah, I mean, I can relate to a lot of the learnings. On a personal note, I've always come up through customer facing work and I was sharing this with Steve a week ago or so, as I've taken on, I've probably had a hundred different roles that have been under three job titles in eight years.

Because when you're building a business, you just do what's in front of you and then you iterate and learn, but I've found as I've started to be more responsible for things I'm not an expert in, so much of what you say is true, and it's actually easier to be a good leader when you don't know the answer. So on a personal note, it's harder for me to be an empathetic coach to our sales team, because in my head I'm like, "Do that." So I have to really... Whereas I just spent a week and a half in South Africa with our engineering and product team, I don't know shit about engineering, so I just ask questions like my six year old would and that helps them simplify it, but also you can fall back and so our job is more about the direction and the what, than anything else.

All right. So the method behind my madness here, I always send a discussion guide, but there's always one thing that comes up that I want to talk about that you're not prepared for. This is that time. I was out the other night in Austin, Texas with the folks who were building Highlight, they just won the IIEX innovation exchange award. Dana, their CEO is wonderful, she's fantastic, and I think they're solving a problem that nobody's really been able to solve about getting products in people's homes to test them. As you know, when anybody asks us when we're going to build an IHUT capability, I get triggered and then remember all my PTSD.

But she said to me, "I'd love to learn all the piles of shit you stepped into so we can step in different ones." So what are some things that you now know that you wish you knew over the course of this time? I'll share a few examples as well, as we go. But to your point, doesn't matter if they're building a business or if they're inside of a business leading it, what are some things that you're like, "I wish I did X earlier. I wish I didn't do Y at that time."

Steve:

So I'd go back to what I said earlier, I wish I'd have got into the online sample industry early. I'm sure I'd probably be sitting on a beach by now. And I do think there is something about that. And if I offered any career advice to people, it is really important to look at what's going on around you, look at what's going on in other companies, look at what seems to be pushing the barriers, the frontiers, and try and get involved in that. It's just the best way to build a career, is the truth, it's the best way to do interesting and dynamic work, so that's one thing. I think having an understanding that being at the bleeding edge or the cutting edge, there’s a reason they're called those things, they bleed.

Ryan:

Yep. It hurts.

Steve:

It hurts. You fuck up multiple times and we've talked about this, learning from failure. So we've done presentations to the company where we've talked through five or six times, I made absolutely fundamentally wrong decisions. But do I wish I hadn't made that decision? In some ways I don't even know whether I'd say that. Do I wish someone had said, "Oh, actually Steve, just go in that direction." That would've been fine, but I wouldn't have learned anything. So we built custom code for some clients early on, it was my decision, we loved these clients, we built some custom code for them. We hadn't done a lot of discovery, we didn't really understand whether they were going to use it, we didn't get commitment, we spent eight, nine months building it with the whole team, they used it twice and then didn't use it again because we didn't fundamentally understand what they wanted to do. It was the wrong business direction. We wasted tens of thousands of dollars and man hours at a time when we couldn't afford it.

Ryan:

Good point.

Steve:

But it made us really, really clear about what we wanted to do afterwards.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Steve:

Did we burn a couple of bridges? Yeah, maybe. Was it a problem for us cashflow wise at the time? Yes. It was difficult, but it made it very clear about the direction we wanted to go in, in a way that if you'd have gone, "Oh, I don't think we should build custom code. I think we don't want to be that sort of shop. I think we should..." You wouldn't have had the commitment that we had after making those mistakes and as we say, internally, in the business all the time, it is absolutely fine to make mistakes. There's only one thing that's not fine and that's not learning from it.

Ryan:

100%.

Steve:

So make as many mistakes as you can, we have a very experimental culture. We will always encourage that experimentation. We have a mantra of kill, scale or amend. So kill, if you experiment, you try something and you find out it doesn't work, kill it. Great. Wonderful. You experiment, you try it, find out it does work, you scale it. Great. Wonderful. The only bad outcome is amend, because you can get on this doom loop of continuous amendment. So actually there are lots of occasions where I wish I hadn't done something, but in the round, do I wish I hadn't had the experience of doing the wrong thing? I think probably not.

Ryan:

Totally resonates with me. It is easy to look back, hindsight's always 20-20, but some of the bruises, they form who you are. And I look forward to the next several years of bruises together, Steve. We'll learn some shit we don't know now. I think one thing for me is chasing cash, chasing venture money, chasing growth above everything else. And that there's always an inherent tension, whether you're a publicly traded company or you're a startup, of you got to pay the bills and as soon as you welcome people to your cap table, for those who aren't familiar with banker speak, by the way, I don't like banker speak either, those are investors that own a percentage of your company that end up forming your board of directors. You have to be careful who you bring in when and that is not a detriment on anybody who's on our table.

We have wonderful investors, but as soon as you invest and sell a thesis of growth, that is the expectation. And I see a lot of businesses and we did fall into this trap of let's raise money before we have clear product market fit. And I'll tell you, it's one of the things I admire most about Qualtrics, is that they just built slow for years and years and years and then they threw gas on it. But part of why I go on this tangent is short termism, so I don't know how many people listening know this, but we had about two years, maybe even three, Steve, where we weren't clear if we were going to achieve our ambition. Reason being we pivoted from being an app store to an enterprise platform, it took three years.

It didn't take a quarter. It didn't take six months. It took three years and there's a famous Bill Gates quote of: people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in three. And it's just one of these tensions that you have to balance, you got to pay bills, you got to hit numbers, but really hard, innovative problems take trial and error and learning and patience. And so we talk about this a lot, this tension between pace and patience that you constantly have to throttle. That's quite interesting.

Steve:

Yeah. I think it is interesting, particularly when you are trying to be a fast growth tech company, so we're trying to be in that bucket. And we've had periods where that's very true and periods where it hasn't been anywhere near as true. And so growth means multiple things, so there is just simply an element of growth, which is about revenue. So you are making more money and you are pursuing that money in some sense, I don't think I've ever been obsessed by growth from the measure of just money, although it is an obvious measure that's important. There is a measure of which is about customers liking your product. If we are building something great, we should have growth, it should be there.

And of course, it's one of the metrics you're going to look at, because we think our software is the best in the world. And if we were low growth, I'd be sitting here going, "Why are these clients not liking it, if we built the best software in the world?"

Ryan:

True.

Steve:

So the more I get involved with investment bankers and VCs, they look at the world in a really interesting way, they tend to be very smart, but they tend to look it in a very simplistic way and they expect growth. But I don't even think in their mind, it's simply about the revenue growth, the revenue growth is an outcome of great product market fit.

Ryan:

Yep.

Steve:

And the only reason you would have not high growth, if you have a great product, is that you've got a poorly functioning sales and marketing motion. So it makes the business structure and whether it's going to be successful or not very simple to understand. So it's either in product or it's in sales and marketing, it's in one of those two places. And if everything's going great, then you know they're both working and if everything's not going great, you've got a problem with one of those and you've got to go and fix it. So it's an interesting space and it's interesting listening to them and how they diagnose businesses and business problems.

Ryan:

But it totally resonates. If you have product market fit, you have strong retention. For those of you who aren't familiar with some of the SaaS metrics, get familiar with them because software is eating the world, net retention is the percentage of your growth, so if you had 100 rubies last year and you only had 90 from the same customers, that's not good. It means you have a leaky bucket, but if you have 120, which we happen to be very fortunate in that case, it means that you could turn off sales and marketing and just grow your company. That is a sign of product market fit. So then you go, "Okay, once I have that, well now I want to advertise and market and sell."

And I think a lot of businesses try to get growth. It's the classic linear startup journey, raise money, sell a bunch of stuff, panic and realize half your customers quit and then go, "Oh crap, we got to fix that." And then a lot of companies die there. It's why so many businesses don't get beyond 10 million or what have you. It's quite interesting. All right. The next, let's say five to seven years, because of our point of underestimating time, what's going to happen in this industry from your perspective? What are the key things that need to happen and weave into your answer your vision for our role in that and what happens next.

Steve:

Yeah. And maybe just indulge me, I'll go again a little bit back into history. So when I first joined the industry, I remember going to a market research training session. It was done by the MRS in the UK and this is the early '90s and we had a presentation from someone from Procter & Gamble, I think it was, and it was a senior marketing person. And the senior marketing person said, "The job of insight, it is to be the marketer's accountant." Now I thought about it at the time, I didn't really want to be an accountant, so I wasn't overly pleased with the idea.

But the interesting thing, reflecting on it, is that what one of the things he was saying, is you supply us with the data, you supply us with the data to work out whether our brands are doing well, whether we should advertise more or less, where we should put our retail activity, whether we should launch a new product or service. So the data that a CMO relied on was mostly consumer insight data coming from market research companies. Now you ask a CMO that now, where's your data coming from? I'm not even sure that they would answer consumer insight at all. So they would say clickstream data, they would say social media data, they would say sales data, they would say other forms of streaming data coming from their CRM system or their ERP system, whatever it was, they have a continuous updated understanding of where their brand is and how it's doing and how healthy it is. And they can predict sales next week from sales data previously. 

So we have lost our job as being the central data supplier to the marketing organization. I think in the next five years, we have the chance to get back that role. I think we lost it because in a digital world, there is such a profusion of instant data, and instant data is so satisfying when you're trying to move fast, that you would take instant, but not necessarily very insightful data, over more insightful data that took a while. And that's why we've lost out as being so powerful and having such a strong role within the marketing organization. 

I think we have the chance to turn that around. So what I would like to see our industry do, and absolutely Zappi should be at the forefront of that in my view, but what the industry needs to do, is be the streaming source of consumer insight that informs every decision that a marketing organization makes, whether it's what ad to produce, what to do with a new brand proposition, what packaging to create, what price point, what target audience, what retailers to distribute in.

All of the decisions that they're making now that are made on the basis of data, but not necessarily consumer insight data. We need to get back into that room and the only way we can do that is to fully embrace technology. And what I think is really exciting now is that increasingly we are seeing clients starting to drive that agenda, both on the marketing side and on the consumer insight side, I think you've got a new breed of consumer insight manager who recognizes that technology and platform is essential, but for them to play the role in their organization, that they want to play, they want to be at the table, they want to be there when the decisions are being made.

And the way for them to do that is to be able to supply brilliant insight when it is needed to whom it's needed and the only solution to that is technology. So I have a very, I think, positive vision for the industry, which is that we play a much, much stronger role in the decision making of our mainstream clients and our large enterprise clients. And that we start driving the agenda again in a way that in some sense we did, when I first joined the industry. I think we had more of a back seat driver role then, but we were supplying all the data. Now I'd like us to have a front seat role, where we're creating the agenda off the back of streaming data.

Ryan:

Yeah. And it almost doesn't matter who owns the data, so I think the reason why I believe you, that this is possible, is the appropriately skilled insights people of the future will be grounded in business acumen, we'll have a litany of empathy for community and culture and will be able to look at trends data, sales data, experience management data, pre-launch data that currently sits in PowerPoint decks, and weave that into strategy. And then the people who are more grounded in technology and systems will have careers doing data engineering work to pull it together.

I think those are two different roles, but that's the thing the people who write in SQL all day might not have the skillset for and they're wonderful, but it's the empathy to take all this information and say, "Okay, I see all that, but we're going right for these reasons." Because it's not just what the math says, it's the qual data, the quant data, the social media mentions, the testing and learning data. But also, we talk about this a lot, the ops/sales/measurement people are over served with data, but they're not afforded the benefit of the two-way relationship between what they create and how it performs and how those things connect back. And I think it's a huge opportunity for us as a business to take an analog industry and connect it.

Steve:

I would also say, I think that there's something about the mind of the researcher, the curiosity that's at the heart of being a market researcher.

Ryan:

Yep.

Steve:

And the fact that we've always dealt in multiple data streams. So we've always dealt in open ended questions, close ended questions, we've always had qualitative and quantitative, and we've always tried to align those data sets. So it's sort of in our DNA and we've always tried to tell stories on top of that data. And that's why I think as an industry, as a profession, we have a chance to really thrive in this new world, because what is it? It's multiple data sources and people need to connect them and tell a story about what they are and give direction of where the business should go and what decision should be made and there's no other real section of business, maybe BI, but BI is not a natural storytelling function.

Ryan:

Right. Right.

Steve:

It's more of a database function and actually could well be heavily integrated with consumer insight in enterprises, I think, in the future. So we've got a real chance to shine. I think it's really about... We haven't tended to be as pushy as a group of people that maybe we need to be, but I think we can play a really much more essential role than we've ever played before in the industry.

Ryan:

I couldn't agree more. All right. So we do something at Zappi a lot, where we identify a problem or an opportunity space, we get around a table, we talk about it, we prioritize it, we make sure we're all agreeing to something before we go do it. One of the techniques that we use is something called a pre-mortem. So we thought we had this opportunity a year from now, we screwed it up, why? So let's do it. 

It's five years in the future, there are very few insights departments left in the Fortune 100. Software's eating the world with programmatic data without empathy, which I think would be really sad for culture. Why? What are the things that get in our way of achieving that industry vision, which I'm 100% behind? What are some of the things that fuck it up, if we get it wrong?

Steve:

So I'd probably highlight two. I think the first is that we didn't grasp the opportunity to lead the data strategy. So clients are amalgamating data streams at the moment, they're trying to integrate multiple data streams into a DMP or a CDP or whatever they're trying to integrate it into. At the moment that is a data engineering activity, so someone in SQL, it needs to be a data valuing job. It needs to be someone saying, not just, "I'm going to align that data." But, "I'm going to make that data valuable." There is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be the insight department, because look at the name, the clue is in the name, it's about taking that data and making it insightful. We should be all over that and telling stories and mining data and creating insight on those multiple data streams.

And there is, again, as I said, just now, there is nowhere else, I think, that is perfectly equipped to do it in the way that we can. So the first thing I think we would fuck up is not trying to take that role and I think we absolutely have to take that role. And that's really important to do within enterprises really soon, really soon. 

The second thing I think is missing the wood for the trees, so you have to take that data and then tell stories. So we need the empathetic, qualitative storytelling mindset on top of the we're helping understand this data stream. And it's that combination of skills that, as I said, we've always had, but we've been held back by being a bit too demure sometimes, about our role in this and letting others take the lead. So those are probably the things I think will hold us back. As I said, I'm optimistic, because I think there's enough people who've started to see this, as where the industry is going and are trying to impose themselves on it. And I absolutely think that's what the industry has got to do.

Ryan:

Yeah. I completely agree. So I'll add two quick ones. We try to make the people who connect all the systems, be the same people who have to curate the thinking. And there is I think a specialization afoot here. And then the second one is we don't, because it's funny marketing as an industry and insights as an industry have one problem in common, we suck at marketing ourselves. We don't effectively compel change. I had the chance to meet a woman from a telehealth company. They're going through onboarding with us.

So I had a coffee with her recently and she's in the board meeting because the company's seen the value of synthesizing learning. And so when she says, "I need to spend a lot of money to buy Zappi." "Yeah, done, go do it." And so I think the insights leaders on the phone or the ones who are going to be leading tomorrow, work on your assertiveness, your business acumen, your executive presence, because you're going to have to sell this change, because McKinsey and Bain, Deloitte are telling your board, "Do this." But they don't actually know how to do it, the board doesn't know how to do it, you're the one, as Steve says, who's best placed to do it, but don't miss that opportunity. 

Steve, thank you so much. Thank you for a wonderful eight years of fun. I can't wait for the next eight years. I will not make it eight years before you're back on the Inside Insights podcast, it's been a long time coming, but it's been a lot of fun. Thanks for listening, everybody.

Steve:

Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan:

So I had a lot of fun doing that conversation with Steve. Actually, I did an internal podcast with Steve that nobody even heard, except for Kelsey and a few other members of the marketing team, over the summer. And it was because we were restating the vision of the company. When we started the company, it was all about automating the world of market research, and we both realized it wasn't ambitious enough. And so we really want to help and empower creators to make magic happen. In order to get that out of his head, I had to get him comfy, so we did a podcast that nobody ever listened to. But I was like, let's do a legit one. I had a lot of fun doing it, but as always, I want to know what you took away from our crazy, Patricia. So you got some takeaways for us, what'd you think?

Patricia:

I did. The two of you just chat, even when we're just at work, when I was working there, and you guys would just talk. It was just something you'd listen to because there's always so much to learn. Now, I got to listen to your interview and I have six buckets of learning, because at the end of the day, what we want to do is we want to give our audience, our listeners, things that they can take home so that they can build the business. And the title that you guys have for all of it was just a conversation about the industry, where it's been, where it's going. So I've got six buckets, and my bonus, don't forget my bonus. It's short and sweet and powerful. So are you ready for the buckets?

Ryan:

I'm ready. Let's go, birthday girl.

Patricia:

Bucket number one, let's start with the past. A long, long time ago, when the industry was in its infancy, what happened then? The corporate landscape was all about adapting technology, using tech platforms or other operating systems from agencies. Buying samples, programming services. So brands were either insourcing programming surveys on Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, or Decipher, things like that. Or they were hiring full service agencies. Those were the two options. Market research, at best, was ignored and at worst, was used as CYA. Just saying, right? So at that time, the 80s and 90s, face to face moved to telephone. So we went from eight weeks to survey to five to six weeks. Oh, life changing. Then, in the early 2000s, he's reminding us that it went online. So it was faster and cheaper, but it really didn't change the way sites were used. 2015 and coming forward, we're getting closer to the present. Pure, full scale automation, so now we've got research in one week or less. 

Which brings me to bucket number two, all of these things, brung surprises. You asked him, what surprised you? What didn't you foresee 10 years ago? And he's like, oh my god. All of these changes that I just talked about, from the past to now, he did not foresee that, although they were solving a core client problem, market research was slow and too expensive. The surprise was that faster and cheaper completely changed the way enterprises used the information. Agility enabled design thinking, which enabled faster creation, iteration and learning over time. The collapse in timing made things possible, totally new, and created something he called research sprints, like software sprints, which is something that totally surprised him.

Something else that surprised him, sample. I think you had a lot to say on this one. Sample went from being one of the biggest problems to being the essence of data quality. Now that things are becoming more agile, we're testing and learning in quick succession ... Test, optimize, test, iterate. The comparison data is much closer in, so the data quality is more important than ever. So the iteration factor, oh, absolutely, he hadn't thought of that. The iteration factor had add-on effects, it made us change the way we thought about data, it changed the requirements we were replacing on data quality, it changed the way data was being used to make better decisions. And in general, this iteration and this newness changed the way things were being built. Those were the big surprises for him. That was bucket number two. I was like, oh yeah, he's right. I hadn't thought of it that way. 

Ready for number three? Talking shop. He's like, "Okay guys, all of you guys building business, this is where it's got. Let's talk about how to build the business." I love how the Brit said learning, unlearning, and adapting. And the Bostonian said, kill, scale, amend. You both meant the same thing, there are things that we have to learn, unlearn, and adapt. So let's talk about those. Go into the business with strength in your beliefs and the humility of sometimes you just don't know. When you're building businesses, there's things that you know, but I mean, when we went from market research to tech, which is what the shift was for him, there's so many things you just don't know. So, I love this phrase, adopt questioning versus answering perspective. Gold.

Questioning versus answering, because he used to answer all the questions, Now he just learns from experts. Just being the operative word in that sentence. And finds new ways to contribute. That's how he is doing it, asking the questions. And his role now is to paint the picture or the vision of the business and the industry with where he wants it to go, shares all this with data and insight from the marketplace, so that the people who are experts, the software developers, they can understand and be empathetic for the customer. So they can create better. I love how we talked about using stories in epics so that the developers would understand. It's a different language. You, I believe, said, "Kill when the experiment doesn't work." Simple, to the point. Scale if the experiment works. Check. But, huge but, huge. Be careful with amend, don't fall into the doom loop of amend and amend and amend. Continuous amendment can kill you because you'll never get out of it. So you got to amend, but you got to be careful with amending. All right? 

Ryan:

Well, part of the reason is, a lot of times people use the word experiment to try stuff. But if you're a scientist, you have a clearly defined set of success criteria.

Patricia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

And a timeline, and so it's like, did it work or did it not? Amend usually means either that didn't happen ... Best case it means you learned that it didn't work but you have some ideas of the next experiment.

Patricia:

Yep, exactly. And if you're in business, you can't be amending the whole time because you'll go broke. And all the people who depend on you, not only because they're working with you or because they want the product, they're not going to get what they need. So that's a big one, that's a huge but. Then you guys started riffing about software, I loved that part. I put a link into the notes, and hopefully we can put it into the notes of the podcast, you talked about Andreessen, I don't know if I'm saying that name right, Horowitz. So I put a link to him because it's all about software eating the world. You guys talked about software and how essential it is, when you're building businesses, to understand what you want for your company and for your customers, and the capabilities of technology.

Because if you don't know those two things separately first, you'll never know how to merge them. That was so insightful. I really loved listening to that and I think everybody who's building business understands that. You also talked about something that was ... One of you, I think it might have been, you said brick and mortar is not going away, but it's an experience that you had before purchasing online. So it's important for anybody who's building a business to understand the relationship of those two, the symbiotic relationship of those two, so that you can understand that it's equally about people and process, in order to get the benefit of both. If you don't understand both, you can't get the benefit of both. So I thought that was impressive. I like talking shop like that because we're all building a business in one way or the other.

Ready for bucket four? Let's go to tomorrow. What's happening tomorrow. I like how it's almost like he's looking into a crystal ball. The two of you were going back and forth. He's like, tomorrow, insights is going to have a permanent seat at the decision making table creating the agenda. He didn't say that at first, he said it at the end, so I pulled it up because at the end of the day, that's what he wants to happen tomorrow. That's what he's making happen tomorrow. Let's decipher that one again, permanent seat at the decision maker's table, creating the agenda. Not following, not taking orders, all of that. Those three, very important, because we're going to be the streaming source of consumer and shopper insight that informs every decision the marketing organization makes. Communication, products, packaging, services, yada, yada, yada. And we're going to do this via insights, creating an insights supply chain.

I had never heard that, an insight supply chain. I like that because that's what's going to connect the research and data sites intentionally so that we can, the industry, deliver holistic insights. Which means joining clickstream, ad hoc, social, sales, all that together so that we can have holistic data. And all that's going to take us to real time brand understanding. Not just the picture, but just a permanent video, a permanent picture, a permanent film of the brand health. Data that predicts sales reliably is what's going to happen. I'm going to expect it. Supplying enterprise and insight with insightful data, not just permanent data, insightful data. Data I can use, because the only way that's going to happen is a full integration of the multichannel data with technology as an enabler. We're bringing the goddamn data to life. End of sentence. That's what's going to happen in the future.

Bucket number five, this was my favorite to summarize. You're not supposed to have favorites. I'm sorry, but this one… I did. Bucket number five is my favorite this time. It's all about things he wishes he knew earlier. So I read this and reread this and I listened and re-listed, and this is my summary of the things that he wishes he'd learned earlier. Because this is like, we've talked about this in the past as advice to a younger self, but he did this all in the spirit of building a business. So the significance of pushing barriers, the sharpness of the cutting edge, the importance of the online sample industry, the value of learning from experts, the worth of making mistakes, the consequence of iterating, and then getting back into the ring. The wisdom of building slow and then accelerating. The dangers of short-termism, the multiple facets of growth, and the essential symbiosis of product with sales and marketing. That was amazing.

Ryan:

Those are like memes, I like this. I like what you're doing over there. You go girl.

Patricia:

Hey, I take this very seriously. All this learning, I love it. So last bucket before the bonus. Ready? You asked him, "What's getting in our way, homie?" Because you know, we get on our way. Well, there's four big ones. We didn't grab the opportunity to lead the data, we being Insights, the data strategy and integration of multiple data streams early. We should have grabbed that ring a long time ago. Let's do that so that we don't get into our own way, number one. Number two, we're missing the wood for the trees. I like that because you took that very common saying, and you were talking about, let's take that data, but then let's tell stories.

We have to tell empathetic stories, stories that build empathy, build understanding, but it's all about qualitative and quantitative data merging together to tell this story. It's a combination of skills that, if anybody has, we have. And we're getting in our own way because we've let other people take the helm. We've let other people connect the dots. We've let other people lead the way. I'm sorry, we can take the lead. We're getting in our own way by not stepping up. And the last thing that's getting in our way of our vision, we don't effectively compel change. We must effectively compel change because we suck at marketing ourselves. That's getting in our way. Now watch this play on words, drop the mic, but I’m not gonna drop the mic. 

Ryan:

She's not ready to drop the mic yet. So I know you had six plus one, but in honor of the Boston Celtics, this young man right here, number seven. Can you call it number seven, just for today?

Patricia:

Yes, yes, absolutely. Luck for my boy. Bonus content seven. Seven is the bonus content, how's that?

Ryan:

Shout out to Jaylen Brown, 40 points-

Patricia:

Shout out. So, we talk about things that get in our way. Now, being a good leader in your new business. You asked him how to do that. Now, remember I just said that we have things that get in our way. Well, being a good leader, you got to do what's needed. Find out what's needed. Not what you want, what you need, what's needed right away. Hire the right people. You don't have to know it all. Learn, iterate, learn, iterate. That's what we're telling enterprises to do, that's what we're telling the marketing teams to do, do it yourself. That's how you're going to be a good leader. Ask questions to simplify the process and then get out of the fucking way and let people do their jobs. That's what being a good leader is. Now I can drop the mic.

Ryan:

I'm going to do a mic drop emoji. I just found one, hold on, ready?

Thank you everybody for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as we did producing it. Our next episode is with Michelle Gansle. If you know me, you might be wondering, how the hell did it take four seasons to get Michelle on your podcast? Because Michelle's a very, very close friend of mine. I was waiting for the right time. And this is the right time. Michelle and I are going to share a conversation we had in Austin, Texas, about where we go for inspiration and how we lead and some of the things that we've learned along the way from making mistakes. It's vulnerable, it's real, it's a lot of fun. And we'll see you next time. 

We've got three episodes left. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you tell all your friends and give us a good old rating because the ratings help with the algorithms and so more people can find us. Kelsey, thank you. Patricia, thank you. We'll see you all in the next one.