Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
KELTON/ MATERIAL - Gareth Schweitzer (Co-Founder/ President). Why are most researchers so bad at storytelling? Learning from journalism; founding Kelton; how to build lasting client and agency relationships.
Gareth Schweitzer (ex-President/ Founder @ Kelton, Vice Chair @Material) gives great insight from his background as a White House correspondent around crafting compelling stories, founding a highly respected agency in Kelton, deciding how and when to integrate into a bigger group, and so much more....
Brought to you by Horizon https://www.gethorizon.net/
In this episode we cover:
- Gareth falling off stuff
- From the White House beat to consumer insights
- Shaking up storytelling
- Learning from journalism
- From starting an agency to sale
- Tips to build client relationships and sales
- Effectively integrating agencies
- What comes next? Predictions.....
Ands some great book recommendations...
TOWNIE : ANDRE DUBUS III
THE OTHER WES MOORE, ONE NAME, TWO FATES: WES MOORE
All episodes available at https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/
Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com
Gareth Schweitzer: Journalists always write to space, and in the research world, no one writes to space. They just create and create and create. And so there's so much of a mass of information and very hard to distill what the point was.
Henry Piney: Welcome to Future View. Now that's just a short extract from Gareth Schweitzer, the cofounder of Kelton and until very recently, the Vice Chair of Material. Now, Material have extended the conceptions of an inside or data analytics agency, building from foundations in the consumer insight world, but then integrating multiple companies across research, marketing, PR, design, activation, and other related areas. Gareth himself used to be a network news journalist, so we dive deep into his recommendations for effective communication and storytelling. That's not all, though. We also get into his entrepreneurial journey, tips on how to build client relationships, and how to go about integrating multiple companies in a harmonious way. I think it's a great conversation, and hopefully you do, too.
But just for a moment before we get going, I'd like to introduce our Sponsor for this episode, Horizon.
Horizon is a pioneering, SaaS company in consumer insights. They're taking a new approach to consumer research to help support strategic product and pricing decisions. They do this by moving beyond the written concepts and the often basic stimulus that used to be used in this type of research and introducing a new approach called pretotyping. The really cool thing about pretotyping is that it gives consumers the chance to interact with new products and pricing options and concepts in real environment from a client's perspective. They're then able to make consumer centric decisions based on real behavioral data, in addition to traditional metrics like stated intent. Leading global companies such as Bosch, Siemens, and beauty brands like Essence are already using Horizon to make better product decisions. Check them out@gethorizon.net. And now on to the interview with Gareth.
Henry Piney: Gareth, nice to see you again and thanks for joining today.
Gareth Schweitzer: Of course, Henry. Always a pleasure.
Henry Piney: Fantastic. So we've got lots and lots to talk about, but first of all, I want to do a bit of an ice breaker. What is something that most people don't know about you or that they might find surprising? So it doesn't have to be a huge secret or your deepest, darkest inner thoughts, just something we wouldn't be able to find usually.
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah. Well, I guess my latest thing is that I'm going through the painstaking process of trying to learn how to surf in middle age. It is an extremely humbling experience for a guy who's played sports his whole life. And I'm certainly no kind of professional great athlete, but sports have always come pretty easy, and surfing is just a different thing. It's like it is. You start out in deep water, so, you know, if you're not an ocean comfortable person, it's a different experience than you're probably used to. And it just requires so many things to work in tandem for it to work. So I'm trying to learn that, and it's been a humbling experience, and that is my thing. You don't know about me, du jour.
Henry Piney: I'm slightly in awe of you. I've been way too chicken to try and do that type of thing later in life. It's just all the getting back on, falling off. I accumulate myself most of the time anyway.
Gareth Schweitzer: That allows me the exhaustion of perpetually feeling like you're about to drown.
Henry Piney: I can definitely see that. When we first met, you shared with me your story about how you got into the world of consumer insights, and it's pretty unusual, I think. Could you share that again?
Gareth Schweitzer: Sure. So I had the good fortune of having a partner in my business, and that always, I think, makes the growth process easier. But my partner, Tom Bernthal and I were both we were both journalists in our prior life. So he was a producer for NBC News, won a couple of Emmys covering the 2000 election. I was a White House correspondent. I covered Capitol Hill. I covered the WorldCom collapse in Mississippi and was an embedded correspondent in Iraq. And we know we knew each other from childhood. Tom had been working for a couple of years for a DC based pollster named Frank Luntz and had decided to strike out on his own. And when I had sort of reached out to him to kind of talk journalism and next steps, he said to me, I'm working by myself, doing this market research thing. And it's kind of like journalism because you go out in the world and you get to talk to people and you tell their stories. For big companies, the difference is it pays a little better. I think we could make a real company out of it. What do you think? And at the time, I was living in Washington, DC. And I was pretty happy, but I was probably more as open to a change as I had ever been. I had just met a wonderful lady in California who's now my wife. So the star is aligned. And as I said, I threw my stuff in my little jalopi and drove out to La. And I've been here ever since.
Henry Piney: That is a great story. I'd like to claim my own story is quite as glamorous, but I was working at ABC News at the time, and it really triggered it when you said, we'll pay you more. I went to a company called Frank Magid Associates. Believe me, it wasn't hard to pay me more, not at Magid but when I was at ABC. So that's what prompted the move.
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, you were also part of the mass journalism exodus. I feel like the early 2000s, everyone ran for their lives as digital took over and circulation started to plummet. And it was sort of chaos in the journalism world. And I think a lot of people got the heck out and decided to find something else to do with their time.
Henry Piney: Yeah, exactly. So just picking up on the whole storytelling point, I mean, you just mentioned it just now, as in, there's some similarities between research and storytelling and kind of in journalism or broadcast journalism. Given your experience, has that remained true, do you think? Where did you sort of see the parallels, and what could you take out of your former career as a broadcast journalist and bring into the world of market research?
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, I think when I first got into market research, what I realized is there actually weren't any similarities in the way that stories were told. I found it really interesting with researchers that they always felt a need, and still do. I think because of the way that research is set up in the circle of kind of marketing services, there's a real need to prove yourself. So you lead every story and every deck you send with the number of people you talk to and where you went and the type of analysis that you did. And, like, you know, a journalist would never do that. A journalist would lead with what they thought was the most interesting thing about the story. And at the end, they'd say to you, by the way, I spent six months researching this, and, you know, here's all the sources that I used, and here's the data. And so I thought research was always very backwards, and it had this real need to kind of prove yourself at all times before you could actually tell a story. And I think one of the things that we did differently that was really successful was we flipped out on its head a little bit, and we said, you know what? If you don't trust us to have done the basics, to have figured out how to get the right sample size with a low enough margin of error, we should be talking in the first place. But if you need me to lead a story on telling you with that information, we're not the right people for you. And so we found a lot of clients who said, yeah, we get that. We get that. We've got to trust you to do your job well enough, and we don't let you tell the story in the way that you want. I still think there's a lot of things in corporate America that prevent good storytelling, PowerPoint being one of them. And I think over time, what happened is people got new tools for telling stories. We did podcasts as part of our research for certain clients, so there were more inventive things that sprung up over time. But I think it was hard, and I combine that a little bit with I think over the last 20 years, I think the people have gotten worse at writing as they come out of college. I think as other skills have become sort of prioritized in the hierarchy of the labor market, the number of people out there who truly know how to write has gone down. So for all your college kids out there who are looking to do something truly different, now you can say writing is truly different because we had a struggle always finding it in our employee base.
Henry Piney: Yeah, and now they can't spell it's all, also correct, all that type of thing. It's a really interesting area just digging into it a little bit. And I recognize there are different mediums. But when you were thinking about telling stories for kind of market research, did you tend to recommend a more linear narrative style, as in, I'm going to give you a story and then I'm going to kind of hit you at the end with the conclusion, which I see a lot of researchers do. Well, were you slightly kind of more journalistic of your go, almost that old pyramid structure that you used to talk about in kind of print journalism?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, so we were much more of the latter. I mean, I think we used to have this joke that we would tell people when we were training them, which was, don't leave the important stuff. A third on slide 22, a third on slide 54, and a third on slide 97. Nobody will find it and nobody reads it. Like, you've got to lead with the important stuff and you've got to tell a really tight narrative upfront, and then you can provide the rest of the story as evidence and context, which is what journalists do. Right. If you read a New York Times Sunday story that starts on the front page and has a doublefold story inside the newspaper, what you know from the first three or four paragraphs is exactly what the story is about in the direction that it's trying to take. And everything that comes after that is context, information, detail, data that supports that upfront story. And I've just always found that a much more enriching way to communicate with people.
Henry Piney: I think historically, it actually came from Prince, didn't it? Because you were editing the copy and you're trying to fit it on the page. So you almost started off with the most important stuff up top.
Gareth Schweitzer: Your whole idea, too, back in the day, was you needed people to get to that inside story so they'd look at the ads. Right. The way to get them to the story was inside the newspaper and get eyeballs on all the ads was not leading with the boring stuff. You had to lead with the interesting stuff. So people were captivated and said, you know what, I'm going to flip to a 14 and spend my Sunday reading that doublefold story. So I think there was a compelling reason why it happened. And then newspapers also wanted uniformity in the way that their stories sounded and were told. And so the only way to get that, and the AP was the perfect example of this, was they taught everybody how to open a story in the same way. And you can say it's boring, but you also very much knew exactly what you were getting into right from the outset.
Henry Piney: Obviously, you've been in this game for a while now, but what sorts of other forms or interesting forms of presentational storytelling have you introduced over your career?
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, I think one of the things that we went back to a number of times was we went back to short less than 200 words written summaries of projects, because we were always really good writers and we were good at finding some good writers. And so it was easy. Instead of saying, look, CEO of Target, you're probably not going to read this 90 slide PowerPoint deck, but if I write you a really pithy, interesting one and a half page summary of this massive research project which really clearly spells out what's interesting, lo and behold, it turns out people still like to read, especially if the writing is concise and compelling. So we actually went back to writing in long form, provided that it was condensed enough that an executive could actually digest it. So I think that was one of the things that was really successful. We had a whole slew of projects that we did over the years which ended up in interesting deliverables. We got called early on by a hotel client who wanted to figure out how to tell parents what the most interesting things to do were in America's top 30 cities. So instead of delivering that as a research report, we actually delivered it as, back in the day, a brochure that you could pick up at the counter that we designed ourselves that had all this stuff. And we went out and we interviewed kids about what their favorite things were to do in each of these cities. And so we had these amazing little brochures that you could pick up at the hotel that were the top 30 things kids say to do in Kansas City. And it was great. So I think it was really a case of tailoring what you delivered to the audience versus staying static and assuming what is always delivered is good for everybody. And so we'd always ask our teams to start every project and say, like, you really thought about who's digesting this information, how they process the time that they have, and use that actually to build deliverables that sometimes were just tweaks from the norm and sometimes were entirely different.
Henry Piney: Would you say the 200 word limits you mentioned? Should that be a guideline for people to think about? Like, can you summarize this in 200 words?
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, I think that whether it's 200 or 300 or 150, I think that people setting word limits on what they create is really, really important. I think the same thing goes for creating slide decks, right? It's like if you don't say to yourself, you field a survey with 120 questions, in it, and you don't tell yourself you're delivering it in 20 slides or less, you end up with 96 slides, most of which nobody ever reads. And so I think that's another thing about journalism, right, is journalists always write to space. And in the research world, no one writes to space. They just create and create and create. And so there's so much of a massive information, very hard to distill what the point was. So I think regardless of what you are doing professionally, writing to space and deciding what an appropriate length is for what you're delivering is really important.
Henry Piney: I should also add here that to some extent, Gareth has gone back to his journalistic of roots with an audio video podcast, which is the real ones with John Bernthal. It's a little bit of a plug for you guys. I check it out. I think it's brilliant. Do you want to just maybe just briefly describe what that's about?
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, yeah, so John is a childhood friend of mine, and he had an idea that through his life as an actor, he's met all these incredibly fascinating people on movie sets and while traveling, most of whom have real world experience dealing with some of the big issues of our time. So, you know, police officers and social activists and actors who are engaged in philanthropic endeavors and doctors and lawyers and firefighters on the front lines of climate change, not as a scientist, but as somebody actually battling the outcomes of what climate change does in California. And he said, you know what? What if we gave the microphone to a lot of these people, a lot of whom are not famous, but are doing unbelievably interesting things, and just let them talk about that real world experience? So no punditry, no political agenda. It's just literally what people are seeing and living. And it's gotten a really good response. John asked me to get involved to help him kind of manage the process, to, I think, utilize some of my now rusty journalism skills, I think, to tighten the project up a little bit. And it's been a lot of fun, and it's really taken off for us. So post post Research World has been an interesting endeavor for sure.
Henry Piney: I'd really check it out. It's really, really kind of compelling and earthy, but also very sort of insightful at the same time.
Gareth Schweitzer: Appreciate it. Your checks in the mail.
Henry Piney: Thank you. So moving back to your journey in the research world, so what year did you found Kelton and how did you proceed to build it out?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, so, Kelsey, we started in 2003 and as two guys who I think had a knack for storytelling, a good understanding of people, and absolutely no idea how to run a business. So we had four or five sort of topsy turvy years leading up until that sort of 2008 crash. And anybody who was around for that remembers going into their office and picking up the phone to see if there was still a dial tone because no one was calling for about five months. And I think that was really the kick in the rear end. We needed to sort of buckle down and start running the business like a business and also to start realizing that we had separate skill sets. We needed to bifurcate our responsibilities and that that was critical to scale. And so, like a lot of things in life and in work, sometimes the things that are really bad for you end up being the thing that is the best for you. And we oftentimes look back at that 20 08 20 09 period as the thing that really pushed us to being a real business. And I'm not sure we would have gotten there without that sort of jolt, if that makes sense.
Henry Piney: Yeah, it does. What did you learn? What did that jolt teach you? What did it forced you to do?
Gareth Schweitzer: Well. You know. The basics of PNL management and forecasting and understanding staff retention and who your highest caliber people were and how to think about the work that you did as a revenue to staff cost ratio so that you kept the business and the teams proportional to the work that was being done. How you started to think about a business that didn't do one thing. It did seven things. And so you actually needed seven kinds of people. And was that actually smart for the business and did we need to streamline more to get to some scale? So I think all of those were questions that kind of popped up for us. And for the first time we were smart enough to go out and actually talk to some people who knew more than we did and get some advice, which I think is something still very few entrepreneurs do in their early days. They sort of go it alone. And I think it's a very American thing to believe that the success feels better if you figure it out yourself. And the problem is that success just takes longer and it doesn't always feel better because you don't always get there. And so I always tell people, like, get the advice early on, figure out what you're not good at and go find people who can help.
Henry Piney: So is there anybody in particular you spoke to and what advice did they give you?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, we had a friend named David Macarozi who came in and sort of looked at our financial structure and said, you guys need to get your **** together. But he was a person who really knew the financial world. He knew the right people to come in and help us with the bookkeeping and just make the place operate better. And so he served for a little while as a kind of one person de facto board for us, which was really helpful just to have somebody to lean on in the area that we really were insufficient in.
Henry Piney: You have described a very sort of customized, creative approach to storytelling, but as you mentioned, projectability is one of the key issues that research companies run into, particularly more customized research kind of businesses. So how did you address that? Were you able to shape the business in some way so it became more projectable?
Gareth Schweitzer: How do you mean projectable, as in.
Henry Piney: Projecting revenue, likelihood of future projects with clients, that type of thing?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, I think what we ended up with was we had a pretty good kind of historical record of what clients spent with us. And I think one of the things that agencies are often reluctant to do is simply go to their clients and ask the question, what do you guys see doing with us next year? Like we did X last year. We're trying to build our business. We've been a great partner to you. We'd appreciate any information that you can give us so that we can help build our business in a way that's equipped to serve you. It's amazing how rarely that question actually gets asked. And when we did ask it, some clients would give us wishy washy answers and some would tell us nothing. But a pretty good chunk of them would come back and say, hey, great question, let me get back to you. And they come back and say, well, we've already got you slotted in between January and September for these four big engagements and we go put that in our forecasting ledger. And then we knew what those clients, even if it wasn't recurring revenue, so to speak, you get in with a client for six years and they've been spending with you that way and they've been honest with you, it becomes trustable data or as trustable as you can get in that world.
Henry Piney: Yeah, and I think it's great advice and I'd agree. From my experience, I think particularly if you put it nicely, which I'm sure you guys did say, we're not trying to hold your feet to the fire on this, we're just trying to plan out our business, make sure we're effectively resourced and so on and so on. Most clients are pretty nice people as long as you do a good job.
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, and look, most of them, again, good job, caveat, always important, but most of them want you to be successful. And so the idea that they are going to try to do something that is counterintuitive to your success is actually counter to their success. So any logical client who you're doing, again, great work for wants to help.
Henry Piney: Moving forward, jumping forward, what is it, about 15 years or so, 2018. And you sold the business to Lieberman, since rebranded as Material. So what was the thinking there and how did you go about the process?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, I think every entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs get to this point where you start to have you have an inflection moment about whether you no longer have the skills or ability to scale a business beyond what you've already done. And I think that when we sold in 2018, there was a sort of movement and I think it's even more pressing now, which is that you either needed to go the world of sort of mom and pop research shops was becoming increasingly difficult. Right, because yeah, no, it's the right question. So your data access and sources were more limited. Right. So because you weren't at full scale, you didn't have a 30 person analytics team and you didn't have relationships with every big data partner and you hadn't figured out how to sort of symbiotically include all of this digital information into the sort of face to face or survey research that was being done. So you weren't quite competing on the data end of things. And then on the other end of things, you had people like McKinsey and Bain who were doing consultative market research at a much higher ticket price, questionably whether they were doing it better or not, but they were dabbling in the same spaces that those smaller research shops had always been in. So it felt like the world was getting pulled apart. You either had to become much more consultative and be able to operate in that sort of Bain McKinsey sphere, or you had to become much more heavy on the data centric side of the business. And we were still sitting in a little bit of the middle doing a lot of things really, really well. But I think that sort of polarization of the market was scary for us. And so we talked to a lot of partners, some of whom felt really, really big in a way like it would be a whale swallowing a minnow and that didn't feel good. And then when we talked to Lieberman and we talked to Dave Sacrament, they had some of the things that we didn't have. I think they were more disciplined around their selling process, around how they generated new business. But they had that data engine on the back end, that analytics engine, which we didn't have. And I think we're concerned about building from scratch. So it just felt like a good fit for us.
Henry Piney: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've heard it described the sector describes a little bit like other bar bells whereby you need to be one end big data analytics, that type of world, or you need to be consultative at a much, much higher ticket price. You don't want to be the kind of that's where the wait is. You don't want to be just like the bar in between. So how did you go about the process? Did you just sort of reach out to people or did you hire an investment bank?
Gareth Schweitzer: We had an investment bank. We used a firm called Intrepid here in La. And at the scale we were at that point, it was important because we were fortunate enough to have enough interested parties that managing that process on our own and responding to every request and obviously negotiating on our own behalf with our future employers would have been a lot to bite off on our own. So at the end I think bringing them on was more than worth the expense of doing it.
Henry Piney: But is there any other advice you'd give to businesses to reach that stage?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, I mean look, I think you've really got to come in with an understanding of what your competitive advantages in a world like market research or marketing services because it is so crowded and the number of businesses out there that are trying to sell themselves is going up by the day. And I think we used to live in a world where there were more private equity firms who are happy to just buy an EBITDA positive business, hope they could manage some synergies out of it and or just based on better business guidance get it to higher profitability and resell it in five years. And I think the number of private equity firms willing to operate like that now is going down. What they are looking for is businesses that they can collapse into one larger entity but do it in a way where they're not causing massive amounts of pain in the process. And I think a lot of the world has looked at what has happened with the WPPs and Omnicom's of the world and said like that. Just mass acquisition of agencies in the hopes that they all come together for some kind of better good is really a lost cause and unless you start out with a better understanding of what you are trying to build out of that and how the jigsaw pieces all fit together really really well you're probably going to have a lot of problems down the road.
Henry Piney: So it seems like yours of advice on it might be that it's either going to be a merger of equal partners or there's got to be a bigger entity that has a really really clear perception as to why AGENCYX fits in. I'd imagine collectively you should pull together whatever it is, the first 30 day, 180 day plan. It's just think about all that type of things rather than exactly rather than maybe just trying to get the deal done which has happened a lot. We probably both see that.
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, I think we've both seen that and look, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle and I think people are trying to put thought into what fits together. But ultimately like high EBITDA businesses, high margin businesses are sexy and so what often happens is you look at the EBITDA and you convince yourself of a story of why the business fits versus leaving the EBITDA aside and saying do these two pieces really match and do they make something better than when they stood by themselves?
Henry Piney: Yeah, I hear you. Before moving on, I also just wanted to touch on the point you've made about Lieberman and the sales process. That's always a tricky area in the kind of the customer research world. You've got some very smart people. They're good storytellers, they're quite creative. You ask them to sell something and they'll go, no, I can't do that. That's not my role. So how's a good sales structure created within a research organization?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, I would just say that a lot of it is just about discipline, right? And like any sort of intellectual muscle, client development is an intellectual muscle that you have to get used to flexing. And if you are not conditioned to flex it, and you are not held accountable for flexing it, you simply go back to doing the things you're more comfortable with. And so I think that what they did a really good job at was not only institutionalizing that mindset, but training it and reaffirming it and also demonstrating the end value of having done it. Right. Like, your paycheck goes up, the business is more successful. By the way, putting it from the client's perspective, if you believe that your client actually likes you and wants to work with you, why would you not call them to tell them other things that you could do for them? Like, you're not selling, you are doing them a service. If you believe you do good work by reaching out and just saying, hey, I could do these six other things for you, can we find time to talk about them? And so I think there's also, especially in the research world, it's a very sort of self deprecating industry in some ways, and people are worried about ever going out into the world and saying, hey, we're great at X. And I think a lot of what they did really well was just taking the cap off of that and saying, it's okay to tell people if you're really good at something because you're actually doing them a service by doing that.
Henry Piney: Yeah. The phrase that was used by one of our PE investors that I was going through the process with MarketCast, is that we had to start to learn to use our outside voices. So, you moved on to a new role at Kelton, and then Material after it was kind of integrated, and part of your role was to pull together the different agencies. Look at acquisitions. There are lots of smart people work at these agencies. I'd imagine it must be a bit of a pain in the *** in terms of people management, isn't it?
Gareth Schweitzer: How does that work? Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I like that part of the job. I think it was uniquely challenging because we had just acquired a number of companies just as the Pandemic hit, and so we were sort of remote with people we barely have ever met going through what were difficult financial times in early 2020 from almost every agency out there. And so I had seven different agencies that I manage and about 400 plus people. A lot of them I literally never sat in a room with before. And so it was a unique challenge to try to get through. Fortunately, I had worked with a lot of great people and a lot of people who sort of came to work every day trying to make the best of days that were really challenging for themselves, for their families. People were going through personal loss and a lot of troubling times. And it's like a lot of things you go through that are hard, you look back on them and they're formative in some way. And some of the friendships that came out of that I think, will last as well.
Henry Piney: Were there any kind of principles you'd apply to sort of how to start to integrate those businesses outside the lessons of the pandemic?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, well, I think there's a tendency to bludgeon people with sort of, you know, the I word of integration. Right. It's like, we're going to try to get you into this business, and we're going to tell you that there's 22 things that matter, and we've got to get your software moving at the right time, and we've got to get on the same sales platform. And by the way, we've got to change marketing teams, and your marketing team needs to become integrated with this marketing team. And, oh, by the way, there's four new meetings on your calendar, and you have to make some choices on behalf of people or it's just overwhelming and they don't have time to do the work. And so you've got to sort of sit there with the list of stuff that needs to happen. You got to say, like, these five things. I'm going to take these five things. I'm going to leave till September, but we're going to do the five things. We're all going to sit around and hold hands and agree that the five things we're all agreeing to do, we're **** well going to do.
Henry Piney: Yeah, I think that's great advice. How did you deal with the issue that I'm sure came up, as in, you've got the acquired company and they're going, but my system for marketing or sales or whatever it is, is better than the new parent company.
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, as a guy who sold his own business, you know, everybody who gets acquired thinks they know everything and thinks that everything that they do is better, which is odd, right? Because if that was true, you probably wouldn't have sold your business in the first place. But either way, no one sees the irony in it. Everybody thinks they know everything. I think that, again, you've got to pull the leaders of those businesses into the decision making process in a way that helps them not only understand, but feels like they were part of the decision and therefore they can communicate it back to their teams effectively. If everything feels like it has just dropped on them from above, they're not bought into the decision. And instead of going back to their teams and saying, hey guys, like, we love our marketing software, but guess what? The other four businesses, which comprise 80% of the team are on this other platform. So us going, asking them to come to our platform doesn't really make a lot of sense. We kind of got to go their way is very different than going to them and saying you got to move platforms. And then they go back to their team and they say, well, I know we all think our platform is better, but we got to do this anyway. And the impact that that has is dramatically different.
Henry Piney: Just moving on a little bit as particularly once you were at Material and we've touched on some of these kind of questions before around different types of data sets that have proliferated and that become kind of part of the research and insights kind of process. Where do you see the strengths and weaknesses of different data types that are used today?
Gareth Schweitzer: We are still living in a universe where people are struggling to make sense of volume and really struggling to figure out how basic things like sales data become integrated into an understanding of the customer as a whole person. And so, like, we used to do a lot of work for retail businesses and one of the things that I always think is still so, so interesting is the amount of research that gets done for businesses that know a vast amount about the transactions that their customers make but never layer into things like segmentations. You know, this is somebody who has their heaviest spin during back to school season, is a big Christmas, shopper is shopping these three parts of the store more than every other. It's like of all the things you could know about somebody that are the most important, that's much more important than the segmentation stuff that used to say, sally is a carefree mom of three. It really takes her personal wellbeing seriously. It's like really well, I actually know what products she buys. It could validate how seriously she takes wellbeing or not. So that to me is always, especially in the retail world, both digital and brick and mortar, still this weird gap that I think needs to be more consistently bridged.
Henry Piney: Why not? Those two data sets provide context for each other. They make it much more real and you should be able to bridge them.
Gareth Schweitzer: Some people are. It's just, I think, still not the norm.
Henry Piney: And on a related note, where does this all go next? What do you think of the big trends that will really kind of impact the industry? What might it look like in five to ten years’ time?
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, the truth is, like all of us. I can stick my finger in the air and take some somewhat educated guesses, but I think you look at what is not going away, right? And what is not going away is digital and an understanding of the digital customer. So one of the things I think material is doing that is really smart is they have started to build out a back end sort of digital capability that allows you to take insights about people and actually build things on behalf of those people. So ecommerce sites, websites, customer portals, healthcare access points. But how do you actually learn about people and then very seamlessly translate that information into the construction of sort of digital entities around those customer bases? I think that's smart because that's obviously where the future is going, right? I think that there are certain things that I think still amaze me. Like how much of research is a manual hand crank still of hand typing the same surveys and then somebody manually inputs those surveys into the computer so that you can manually extract the data on the back end. And it does feel like at some point in the next five years that's all going away.
Henry Piney: Yeah, but it may well be a very good thing in that it basically just enables humans to extract more value out of the data, like analyze what's important, tell the stories around it. And I really like the first around potentially taking Insight and moving back to activation? If that's the right way to kind of think about it? Why should Insight just sit in some silo? Why not just bridge that gap? But we've got the insight, let's do something about it.
Gareth Schweitzer: Well, and I think that's what we used to talk a lot about that, which was this sort of concept of Insight loss, right, which was the work of understanding people happened over here, and the work of building things for people happened over here. And depending on the client's sort of facility in moving the insights across that sort of food chain, oftentimes the thing that got built had no resemblance to the thing that people actually had said that they needed.
Henry Piney: Yeah, exactly. And to your point about surveys being more automated, I know that some people make the argument that surveys are dead like and so on and so on, but I actually see more of them than I've ever seen. They're just in a different form. So they're little kind of more like CX type surveys. Three questions that are kind of automated that are much more like dynamic. So I think if anything, the desire to ask your consumers questions and understand what's happening is probably going to proliferate.
Gareth Schweitzer: I think that's right. And I think that's been one of the most important sort of trends, I think in research, is people getting back to asking the questions that actually matter. And I think it's the same thing as where we started when we talked about writing to space. Right. I think survey research kind of lost its way. Human beings don't think in 20 option multiple choice sets. They think binary about things yes or no, up or down, like, don't like. And I think we got really far away from that, and it proliferated in this world of 30 minutes surveys that had 120 questions and asked people to choose from 22 answer lists. And I think a lot of that actually ended up in data that was complete bullshit and was virtually unrepresentative of what anybody actually felt. And I think where it's going now is exactly what you're saying. You're going back to saying to somebody like, you just had a transaction on my website today. Was it good or bad? Oh, it was good. Please fill in a one sentence answer that tells me why, like, wow, I've got a very specific answer to a very specific question that helps me actually make a very specific change to something. I think that's really a good change in the end.
Henry Piney: It's okay with you. I just wanted to do a kind of like, a quick fire round.
Gareth Schweitzer: Yeah, let's go for it.
Henry Piney: So what have you changed your mind about recently?
Gareth Schweitzer: The value of sleep. I spent a lot of my life getting by on four to 6 hours of sleep a night, and I've realized there's no way to do that and not feel like **** all the time. And so I have really sort of transitioned myself to really trying to get seven or 8 hours of sleep a night. So I'd say the value of sleep, in my opinion, has changed dramatically.
Henry Piney: I like it. You're looking very well on it too.
Gareth Schweitzer: Or maybe that's just I appreciate it.
Henry Piney: Maybe that's just the surfing and the sun. Exactly. Okay. Now, I've been asking clients this, and I got to flip it around. From an agency perspective, what makes a good client?
Gareth Schweitzer: I think as a client, you either have to decide you are stepping out of the way and letting work happen or that you're essentially going to function as part of the team and be engaged in it. The middle ground is a total disaster where you pop in and out at inappropriate junctures, trying to offer feedback that probably should have been given two weeks earlier in the process or trying to give it two weeks later than it should have been. And so I think you have to make a little bit of a binary choice as a client in terms of how you want to engage. And then I think the second thing is our clients have so many ways to prove their utility internally other than trying to manicure outcomes from projects. Right. And I think the best clients are the ones who are really good at helping insights work, stand up inside an organization to really promote it and champion it and make people believe in it much more than they are the ones who give you 732 comment boxes on a deck telling you which pronouns to change. And so I think everybody works better with different sort of people. But we had some amazing clients who were just the champions of the work that we did and really trusted us on the storytelling part. And it wasn't that they wouldn't give them feedback. It's just that they did it in a very timely, very specific way that really helped make the world better.
Henry Piney: Great advice. And I can think of some clients, but you were very good at that. Basically, just go, come on, what are we saying here, guys? Give me the headlines. What should I take out of this? So if it's not too much of a cheeky question, what personal traits of yours would you like your children to inherit and also avoid?
Gareth Schweitzer: What would I like them to inherit? I think I'd like them to inherit empathy and understanding of care for other human beings, work ethic, the ability to really put the time in to be good at things. I would like them to not inherit as high a degree of obsessiveness. Of a need to make everything perfect in the way that you want it to be at all times. And an ability to put distance between yourself and difficult things and give yourself the head space and the mental clarity to think. Fortunately. Like you said. They're character traits. So they're probably already inherited or not. And they don't have a choice. But it's a good question either way.
Henry Piney: Well, thank you. I won't ask whether your wife would agree with your analysis, by the way, of your good traits and your bad traits.
Gareth Schweitzer: She'd agree and then some. She just adds some to the bad traits.
Henry Piney: Exactly. Okay, so final couple of questions. What's your favorite book or recent book and why? What should I be reading?
Gareth Schweitzer: For instance, I've read a couple of good things recently. I've read a book called Townie, which is just like a really insightful look at a guy who grows up in a very insular community outside of Boston with a lot of alcoholism and mistreatment in his family and kind of what that does to somebody who's trying to get their life together. I think that was a fascinating book. And the other thing I'm just reading right now is a book called The Other Wes Moore, which is written by a guy, Wes Moore, who is running for governor of Maryland. He's a former soldier and community leader and he wrote a book basically about him and another guy named Wes Moore who grew up a lot like him but ended up in prison and just about how their pathways diverged and the small little things that happened that sent them both from an early childhood that looked somewhat similar to different end results. And I found it fascinating so far.
Henry Piney: Final question, what do you think I hope you'll be doing personally in five years time.
Gareth Schweitzer: It's funny, we never made five years your business plans at work, because I could never think more than a year out, and the five year plan has always got torn up. So I can tell you, a year from now, I will probably be doing a higher volume. Hopefully I'll be a better surfer. I will be doing, I think, a lot more of the advisory and board work that I'm doing for smaller businesses. And I could see at some .1 of those benefiting from me stepping in on a more consistent basis to help operate a business through a rough patch or to get it to a new phase of growth. So right now, I'm enjoying the consulting advisory board work, enjoying working on this podcast, and I think those are good avenues to potentially finding one of those things that I dedicate more time to.
Henry Piney: Well, thank you so much, Gareth It's been great. Really appreciate the time, and hopefully we can do it again some other time soon.
Gareth Schweitzer: I look forward to it, man. Thank you as well.
Henry Piney: Okay, cheers. Thanks.
It's always such a pleasure talking to Gareth, and I learned so much from chatting to him again. That said, fortunately, I live miles from the ocean, so I don't think I'll be taking up surfing any time soon.
Also, please check out the real ones with John Bernthal,l It's a really, really great podcast. If you like this podcast and want to hear more, please continue to follow rate. Write reviews on Apple Spotify. Also send me suggestions at futureviewpod@gmail.com. Thanks again to Horizon as a sponsor for this episode, they're introducing behavioral data and products and pricing research, and you can check them out@gethorizon.net. That's gethorizon.net. See you next week.
