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Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
Published in conjunction with InsightPlatforms.com...Learn how industry leaders use consumer insights and data to market, nurture and expand great businesses. We talk to innovators from across the eco-system - clients, agencies, platforms, financiers and tech providers - exploring the stories, thinking and people behind successful businesses in the space. New interviews every Wednesday UK time. Suggestions, questions or thoughts? Please send them through to futureviewpod@gmail.com
Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
J.D. DEITCH (part 1) - Judging Cheese; Representing the fan base at Man Utd; The Future Of Research and Researchers....
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Delighted to have on J.D. Deitch, the ex COO of Cint, esteemed research sector analyst and adviser. In part 1 of this interviews, we go from cheese caves in Paris to the terraces at Old Trafford, then into the guts of how insights work really gets done. Among other areas, in part 1 we cover
• Judging cheese and the risk of palate fatigue
• Becoming a Manchester United fan and then leader
• Why researchers often miss the C‑suite,
• Operational economics: legacy operating models and DIY’s limits
• AI agents, fieldwork automation, and new pricing
• Whether specialist agencies can elevate to consulting value.
• Two career path options: strategy shapers and method builders
All episodes available at https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/
Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com
Guest Intro
SPEAKER_00More seriously, I I think there's sort of two emerging career paths for insights, people, like that that we will see coming coming as we come through the sort of AI age. One of them is around strategy and really understanding how to get the right information to support decision, not just decision making, but then the execution that comes after it, right? Because you have to join up the strategy and the execution. But I still think there are roles for researchers, for for people, for methodologists, for people who understand how to make those decisions, how to set up the information gathering to get the right people to make sure that the output of that is good.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to FutureView. Now you heard just there from the incredibly erudite and knowledgeable JD Deutsch. JD is American but lives in Paris. We'll get onto the relevance of that. And you may not agree with everything he has to say. I know this is a shameless tease from me, but we get onto some of the more controversial elements of our conversation in part two. However, JD is always thought-provoking and interesting, and especially so I think in part one, where I have to confess we went totally off plan and ended up talking about cheese, JD's role in representing the fan base at Man United, and the many challenges therein, but also why researchers often don't make it to the top of their companies, why DIY really doesn't work or can be very, very challenging in the space, and what the future for researchers is in the age of AI. There's a preview of part two at the end of this interview, but in the meantime, let's get into it. So, JD, first up, uh thanks so much for joining today. Really delighted to have you on. Yeah,
Developing a cheesy palate
SPEAKER_01fantastic. And so I'm going to start off with the usual icebreaker that we use on most of these interviews, which is just something that people might not know about you that's a little bit surprising that you can't see on LinkedIn or whatever.
SPEAKER_00A few people who've been with me at conferences know this about me. Having moved to France a number of years ago, I have developed an unhealthy addiction to cheese. And to the point where I actually blogged about it for a while, have my Instagram account with about a thousand followers. And I am every two years a judge at the Salon du Fromage here in Paris. And I judge the the the sort of favourites, the what they call the coup de cœur, the the favorites of the show. And it's been something I've been doing now for six years or something like that. And I love it. It's one of the, you know, one of the benefits of living in a country where there's great food.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's really interesting. And so are there certain criteria that you look at when you're when you're judging? I mean, is it sort of like wine, you know, where there's a process you go through, whatever it is, the various stages of the color and the aroma and all that type of thing.
SPEAKER_00There is, and I don't want to even suggest that I am anywhere close to being as good a judge as some of the people I know in the industry. My passion for cheese led me to actually do what the French call stages. So they're they're like sort of lengthy internships, if you will. And I spent a couple of weeks in in a in a cave, a kind of a tunnel, uh, an old railroad tunnel that is now being used to age cheese. And I did a whole bunch of training on affinage and how you taste cheese and how you evaluate cheese and and things like that. So there are there are things that you do, and ultimately, I mean, you know, and not a small part of it is what your own personal tastes are, right? I mean, you know, there are definitely good examples of cheese and bad examples of cheese, and if you just sort of think about things, and you know, then there are your own preferences. I mean, I I quite like sheep's milk cheese is just by way of example, right? So they they make a uh a ton of those around the Basque country near the border of France. Spain, Parmesan cheese is a sheep's milk cheese, Roquefort, I mean, there's all sorts of varieties. So it's it's quite fun. And the downside to that though is that when you're doing cheese tasting, like after the first four or five, they all just sort of begin to taste like modeling clay, if I'm perfectly honest. And there are things that you do to try to cleanse your palate, right? I mean, everything from like eating apples to you know drinking coke, eating bread, things like that. But you just get to this place, like you know, I I've pictures of the tables where we did cheese tasting at the last one. I mean, there's 16 cheeses I had to taste. I mean, like, you get to the end, you're like, I don't really ever want to eat cheese again. So yeah, that's funny.
SPEAKER_01I mean, we could probably do a whole podcast actually just about. Let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_00I'd much rather talk about that than Market Rista.
SPEAKER_01Uh people may be more interested. No, I'm sure they wouldn't. They want to hear about panels, they want to hear about product market fit and all that good stuff. But maybe they also want to know about Man United, or maybe not, because I had to ask, I've been doing a bit of my LinkedIn stalking, and so what's the whole thing? Well done. You seem pretty you seem pretty involved in the Man United world.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I will confess, obviously, as an American by birth, but I didn't really know that much about Manchester United. And it wasn't until I started working with a guy called Mike Williams, an expat Brit working in the Washington, D.C. area. We we both worked at a credit union. He was a programmer, and he was a mad united fan. I mean, he had poster, he had a poster of Ryan gigs in his office. This is back when programmers actually had closed spaces and you know didn't sit in a in a big open space. And he used to invite us over to his house, and you know, inevitably at the end of uh at the end of the soires that we would have there, he'd put like old Man United games on the television, DHS tapes of Manchester United. And this is before the uh before even uh the games were televised in the US. And you know, look over time, I I can't say I really understood how good Manchester United had become in the late 90s at that point because it was just so infrequent in my life. But one day in around 2003, we were watching a pay-per-view game on television, and a friend of mine looked at me and said, we should go. Okay, well, how do you do that? No idea, right? So worked it out and ended up going with uh one of the official supporters clubs in in the United States. There are now multiple. At the time, there was only one. And we went, it was a derby, so we were playing Manchester City. This is before they were owned by Southern Wealth, basically. And I went and was hooked. I ended up joining a fans group because I wanted to sort of stay involved, and that fans group was sort of trying to make sure that the ownership of the club ended up staying in the right hands. And this is around the time where the Glazer family, who owned the Tappa Bay Buccaneers, were starting to increase their investment in United. And, you know, bizarrely enough, you know, I ended up just volunteering to do whatever the group wanted when United were in the States in 2004. And when I ended up on the BBC and they did interviews of me on Man United's television channel, I mean, it was uh it was pretty amazing. You know, I did a lot of work behind the scenes over the years and always stayed involved. I mean, these are my friends now. You know, I stay at their houses when I go. And about four years ago, right after the European Super League debacle, uh my friend Duncan, who's chief executive, asked me if I wouldn't mind kind of taking over the chairmanship of the group, being a little bit more involved in trying to help us both improve the organization, how we operate, but also kind of you know try to take things forward for Manchester United fans as well. And so there's, you know, it's it's one of the one of the I think the great parts of the many different aspects of my life. One of the things I enjoy the most. I don't really enjoy the the politics of it all, that's sort of a necessary evil of it. And we don't always see eye to eye with the ownership of Manchester United or the management. I mean, the best part for me is always just being with my friends at the games, right?
SPEAKER_01I mean so your role, JD, I mean, what's the current role? You're basically you're you're helping represent the supporters' interests and voice of the Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The the So I'm the chair of the Man United Supporters Trust, and and the trust's objective is to make sure that fans' interests are represented at every level of the club, that the club keeps those things really at the heart of its decision making. And that's an increasingly difficult thing to do in a world that's quite dominated by money right now. And you see that in the way that prices go are going up for ordinary fans. And you know, clubs are looking to try to monetize just about everything that they have. And, you know, the reality is that I don't think fans object to their clubs making money. I mean, we certainly don't. It's just that we want that money to be plowed back into the success of the club, which means into footballing, you know, yeah, absolutely. Keeping ticket prices low and making it easy for these businesses to not lose the things that made them appealing in the first place, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, very much so. I mean, I I guess we've probably both seen, you know, we're recording this, whatever it is, like mid-December, the Ferrore overnight around the prices of the, you know, the fine, the World Cup finals that are going to be in the US, whatever they are, like I think is it £3,000 or dollars or whatever it might be per ticket as the cheapest price. Not for me to comment on FIFA, but it kind of seems crazy.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's you know, the s look, and it is there's there's a ton of money to be made, right? I think everybody, you know, is sort of sees that, right? And the reality of these businesses is that you gotta make hay while the sun shines because there's no guarantees in football. And and you so you have the international associations trying to really capitalize on this. And you know, increasingly sport is is sort of you you you get these people kind of looking at it as bucket list items, right? I mean, for me, it's a regular thing. I go to Manchester, I maybe I'll see half of the home games in in a season. I you know, I have a season ticket, I follow them away when I can as well. But there are people who would be prepared to spend an ungodly amount of money to be able to say, well, I went to Old Trafford or I went to uh the World Cup. I think Barcelona was probably the first to really capitalize on this. You get people spending thousands to go to the new camp and see a great team play. And Barcelona have been a great team for decades. And yet, you know, the the folks, the sort of socios who sit in the ends who create the atmosphere, they're not paying the same amount of money to do that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. Yeah. But you say you've got to get that balance right, don't you? And and and I guess, JD, transitioning like a little bit, and as I said, we might go a little bit off schedule. Um, how do you gauge the sentiment among supporters, kind of from a market research technique, I guess? Uh you know, that perspective. It's exactly that.
SPEAKER_00I mean, look, I I will I will tell you, we uh we use the same things that you would use in a business to try to figure these things out, right? I mean, if for years you could gauge the sentiment of Man United fans by just simply walking around the ground, right? I mean, you know, when I when I was first handing out leaflets in Manchester in 2005, right before the Glazer family sort of took over the club in one of the biggest leverage buyouts in the history of Spore, we would walk around the ground. And it's because, you know, there was just there was a less international sort of awareness of Manchester United before the massive broadcasting contracts and things like that. And you could get a sentiment by looking at match day supporters. It's obviously a little bit more complicated than that these days, and certainly clubs are trying to monetize their international fan base, but we do the same things that we would do in the business environment, right? We ask people what they think and what they do. And we ask, you know, increasingly, since you know, I'm a member of the club's fan advisory board, we ask the club for its own data. What is happening here, right? Because, you know, they're everybody has sort of feelings about what what's going on, and and you know, football is a sport that's fundamentally based on passion, right? And you do not get people with sort of you know weakly held opinions when it comes to Manchester United. And it is very fair to say it's a broad church. You get people who are like, you know, I don't want to get involved in the politics of it, or people who are very upset about Glazer takeover and have since decamped to FC United, which was a a breakaway team that's now playing in the lower leagues of of uh of the football pyramid in in England. I mean, but we ask them, right? I mean, we every year we actually do a huge survey.
SPEAKER_01Social media analysis, like the whole show.
SPEAKER_00Surveys, yeah. I mean, surveys uh there's a a lot of sort of one-to-one work that we do on match days. But we're regularly, I mean when we do this at scale, I mean, every year we run what we call United Voice, which is a massive survey. And like last year we had a Van Westendorp analysis of pricing because the club was changing the pricing structure. And so we know sort of we we know a lot about what fans are are willing to pay. We know, you know, we ask them very simple open-end questions and learn a lot about the things that are on their minds so that we can then go back to the club and say, look, here are the things. This is not us, you know, sort of making these things up. These are things that fans are saying to us, and we can tell you the frequency with which they they say that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. And I could see it being particularly important in a subject like football, as you say, where you're gonna have, or a subject area like football, or any of these sports, where you've got some very, very opinionated, very passionate voices, and then one needs to kind of quantify it or understand the extent to which are those just a few very very strong opinions that are held by a vocal few, to what extent are they representative of the broader fan base? I guess with a team like Man United as well, the perceptions are also going to vary significantly based on those who are attending games regularly, you know, might be might be more locally based as opposed to the international following. It's quite complex, I imagine.
SPEAKER_00It's absolutely complex. I mean, the what you just said is actually one of the major sort of friction points in the fan base these days. The the rise of international broadcasting availability of this and social media as well has created this real sort of schism between match-going fans, right? And when I say match-going fans, I'm not necessarily saying people who are just in Manchester or even in the environs, right? I mean, you get tons of people coming in regularly from Ireland, from Norway. I mean, that there's you you know, the in in the Scandinavian countries, I mean, there's a lot of people who come to see Manchester United regularly. And there is also a large group of people, you know, that you've got fan cams, you've got people who sort of live overseas, who believe that they are, you know, that who see the club in a different way, right? For
Representing the fan base at Man Utd
SPEAKER_00them, like their sacrifice, if you will, is they're waking up at four o'clock in the morning to to watch football. And they they experience it in a really different way. And it creates this, you know, they don't really give a crap about the prices that people pay in the ground, don't see, don't see the impact that can ultimately have down the road if you sort of price out the the noisy fans who create the atmosphere, who make, you know, who are legitimately sort of the 12th man on the on the pitch, right? And and that's just one of the one of the friction points. And you know, when you when you look at trying to represent football supporters, and it doesn't necessarily have to be Manchester United, Manchester United has probably the greatest variety in terms of support in in English football, but it's the the same sets of issues, right? You know, even on match days, you've got sort of general admission season ticket holders, you've got concession tickets going to older people or the next generation of football supporters. One of the biggest issues we have at Manchester United is making sure there's another generation that follows. And if the club wants to make them pay the same amount that an ordinary GA ticket holder would pay, that's just simply not going to be affordable for a kid who's you know maybe 21 years old, just you know, starting a professional life. So there's the you know, there's all sorts of different constituencies in a team's support and and you know, understanding what they are, being able to contextualize them and and trying to fight for those things. It's not like there's a a ton of inconsistency in in terms of what people want. I mean, people want the club to do well, but you also in front of you have a management team and a rather opinionated owner, new owner in Sir Chim Ratcliffe, and a club that is going through a bit of financial turmoil right now. Let's not forget United have hundreds of millions of pounds in debt and need to refinance that in somewhere around a year, year and a half. Oh, and by the way, trying to build a stadium that'll probably cost two billion quid, you know, there are there's there's only sort of so much appetite and attention that we can get from the club on these issues as well. And and it can be deeply, deeply frustrating, right? You know, when you think about the passion people have, and people get really ticked up, and we do too, right? And yet at the same time, it you can't walk away because then you're just sort of you're almost ensuring that they're gonna screw you over. And you can't really sort of scream and shout at them in a boardroom, right? Just because you know, that just doesn't end. Up being effective. And so there's a lot of ways that you have to work together to try to coordinate maximum pressure. As my career has shifted, and I've basically been able to kind of pivot towards the operating side of the business, right? And you know, research being a research director is career limiting in the sense that it's not often you get to the top table. Right. And so I had a shift in my career that initially was kind of operational management and then general management. And I just find the the running, the execution, the marketing of these businesses really fascinating, right? It's a fascinating industry to be a part of. And it's one that when it allows itself to be so, is sort of on the forefront of a lot of innovation as well.
SPEAKER_01And and so just double-clicking on that point you made, so why is it limiting, do you think, in terms of if you're a research director? I think it's a very fair point that a lot of the practitioners maybe don't reach the top table, depending on the relative like size of the business. Do you think is it something to do with their mindset? Is it something to do with the relative kind of prioritization of business prioritization in terms of impact within the business? It's an interesting trend. I just hadn't really thought about it. But I think it's true that like in you look at particularly the bigger companies, a lot of the practitioners are are not necessarily in the C-suite.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, it at best you'll have like a chief research officer, right? And and I'm not trying to diminish the importance of these roles, right? Because research companies can't really succeed, you can't really sell what they do unless they do it reasonably well. But what you start to learn, I mean, there's just sort of two aspects to it. One of them is that the running of these businesses is very different. When I say running, the operating of these businesses, the business models, the operating models is very different from the content of what these firms produce, right? It's a completely separate discipline. And then the other aspect of that, if we're perfectly honest, is that elements of the methodology and quality are never a goal in and of themselves. They are a variable, they're an exogenous variable that has an impact on, you know, sort of what you sell, but they are things that clients trade off in the quite famous iron triangle of our industry of price and speed and quality. And so you you get this sort of situation where, yes, absolutely, the the nature of the product, the content, the the all of the value that a client wants to buy is is quite often held in the heads of the these researchers who really understand what it is that they're doing, and yet the operating of the business economically is completely separate. Because the reality is that market research businesses and probably in general information services businesses, from an economic point of view, are project management companies. Right. And when you look at the PLs of these companies, there's a huge part of the revenue that gets eaten up by operating costs, right? The the cost of producing the sausage. Maybe that is panel costs, but it's also the project managers and all the manual labor that's there. And so I think that's part of the the this distinction and why the kind of the management of these companies and the research element ends up being separate at the highest levels.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'd I'd agree. And as I said, we may well go off schedule, but I mean, don't you think it's the case that a lot of that type of thinking is really from a legacy world where we're old enough to remember a lot of face-to-face research, phone research, so on and so on. Obviously, it moved online. But then the pricing models in many cases, when things moved online, everybody just transferred over the old face-to-face type of model. Costless pricing, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And now surely we're moving to a point where by with AI and all the rest of it and the you know the technology that that actually a lot of the project management components should be so much easier. And that what I'd hope is that the industry won't necessarily drop its price points, but might adjust the model to actually really put value on quality of data, the analysis, the things that matter. But it it's interesting, I totally agree. And that I think in many cases, you talk with clients and they'll be saying, you know, they could do a lot of this themselves, a lot of the process themselves. And there are various reasons why they may not do. Some of which is about, I think, the credibility of having an external supplier with a brand name and sort of sort of supplying data. But a lot of it, I think, is historically, is they just don't want to deal with the logistics and the project management. And I think that is may well be changing and possibly will push the industry into a different place whereby agencies have to really rethink what they're offering if the project management side gets a lot easier. And would you agree with that? Sorry, it was a very long statement, probably about several ideas in that.
SPEAKER_00So I I've I've written fairly extensively on this, and unsurprisingly, I have a strong point of view. Uh, I mean, look, that's absolutely right. Historically, where this industry has come from, I mean, the, you know, even you think about the surveys that we do, the surveys that we put online are effectively the same execution as when we used to print them out on paper and mail them to people, right? Or stand there with the clipboard in a in a in a shopping mall. I think I uh I think you're right. I am less optimistic, though,
Why Researchers Rarely Reach The C-Suite
SPEAKER_00about the industry's ability to sort of get through this transformation. And I'll explain why. I mean, we start from the principle that economically these are these are project management businesses, and we know that in our industry, you know, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of revenue is consumed, basically, if we're just thinking about survey research, by panel and and operations teams. I mean, the reality is that where where is where are you going to fund innovation from? You can't fund it from the PL. There's not enough margin to do that, right? And these are service businesses, right? So trying to raise capital to do that is therefore equally challenging. I mean, the the juice of the of the innovation has to be worth the squeeze. And it is a it would be a real squeeze to try to transform these businesses. And you know, we're talking about, you know, in many cases, if you and you know, it's this is not just, I'm not just talking about indie researchers or sort of small businesses. We're talking about, you know, definitely all the large players in this industry right now, and a lot of the medium ones as well. You know, they have they have these entrenched operational costs that's based on an operating model. And transforming that requires some fairly painful decisions, difficult decisions, too, right? You need, you know, this is this is gonna impact your workforce. It's going to impact there'll be a lot of bumps in the road, right? Because these are not things you're gonna be able to do in sort of a month or two. You know, it's a year or two of real dedicated effort. And yet, I think you're gonna have to do it, right? I mean, I just don't understand how you're going to be able to actually charge for value to work effectively in this new world if there are other companies that are gonna be able to take the same brains, right? You know, because I can take a researcher and, you know, the same researcher that was used for scale and large, you know, a lot of these companies, you just add researchers so that you can have growth. I can take a researcher and take that knowledge and put it into AI to do a lot of different things. I mean, one of the things I've been working on over the past couple of months is I've built a fieldwork management agent that will manage field work just as effectively as a team of project managers, right? That's like if you're not doing that, if you're not, you know, as a research agency, if you're not taking your intellectual property and all the things that you have from survey design and not using that so that you're not sitting there with Word documents that you're sharing back and forth with the client. I mean, I just I
Legacy Models, DIY, And AI Pressure
SPEAKER_00just don't understand how you're going to be able to succeed. And and I think what's different, because you know, there's a lot of people, including myself, who've written about the demise of the industry, the decline in the industry. And and, you know, one of the observations I've I've regularly made is how automation is starting to change the face of the industry. Well, it's very clear that DIY did not do that. And the reason was that you mentioned this. DIY, all DIY did was shift the burden of the logistics and the project management onto the client. The client never wanted that in the first place, right? The client doesn't even want insight. That's why they use perfectly honest. Exactly, in many cases. You know, the client doesn't is not there to try to learn. The client is there to try to figure out the shortest path in execution that gives them a decision that is decent, right? They don't want to be able to necessarily run the greatest pricing model or anything like that. Just need to get information to get going, right? And I think we're in a place now. I I'm more than think, I'm convinced we're in a place now where AI will be able to do that. But this is not just add AI and stir. It is add I add AI, change your operating model. Yep. Rethink your pricing and go back to market with a new offer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's something we've talked about a lot on this podcast around, but particularly the specialist agencies who have strong domain knowledge and expertise and potentially backed up by norms and benchmarks and that type of thing, who are fundamentally offering a consulting proposition, but don't charge as consultants. And I've heard lots of these agencies express a lot of frustration about that. But actually, maybe from a more positive perspective, this is an opportunity for a body to go 100%.
SPEAKER_00100%. I mean, I I think market research companies essentially have two assets, right? One one of two assets. One of those assets is access to people or data that are useful ultimately for the clients. And the other asset is some sort of know-how that allows them to kind of transform that information into something that clients can use. When we look at specialist agencies, you know, agencies that are really focused on a particular industry or particular problem, right? I mean, these are the these are the companies where they have the ability to elevate out of an insights function and actually have strategic conversations with senior leaders at the company. That's value, right? And they can't charge for it because so much of their, so much of, you know, if they really charge for the value that they add, the the fact that they have all of these costs, these operating costs, would make them charge something that they can't really justify at this point in time, right? And it's a lot of times because they're also not seen as being strategic. You know, if you go to some of the management consultancies, they charge a fortune for what they do, but that's because people have a different perception of the value that they're getting as well.
Operating Models And Automation Reality
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and I would point to some extent to the research industry's historic mindset and the training of researchers. Or I've sat in rooms and people have had the opportunity to present to senior management and they'll be asked a question, and they're not trained to have the confidence to incorporate broader thinking on top of the immediate data that's been delivered from a project.
SPEAKER_00I think it's even simpler than that. I I think I think most researchers do not understand how businesses are run. They do not understand how decisions are made, they don't understand go-to-market motions, they don't understand even operating efficiency a lot of times, product decisions, things like that. I mean, I'm not saying all of them are that way, but I think the majority of them aren't. And this you know kind of gets us back to why why do researchers not sit at the top table and this comes because they don't understand how their own business makes money necessarily, right? Yeah. I I think it's I I think it's a real challenge for our industry, and it's it's part of what limits our effectiveness, right? Because people always think, well, if I tell a better story, you know, there's all sorts of things that we try to do to try to make sure that, you know, insights people have impact in a business. Ultimately, the insights person, the insight that we're delivering, stops at a place where the client needs to then pick it up and figure out how they're going to take this information and put it into their execution in a way that works for them and their company, right? And that is a bridge too far for most researchers to cross. Like it's insufficient to be able to say, oh, well, you just need to target, you know, I don't know, people who wear red shoes on a Tuesday. You know, like how then, what then am I gonna go do? Yeah. How am I gonna identify those people? Well, what then is my marketing execution, my, my, my go-to-market motion around that, right? I mean, and and then how do I follow that up afterwards? And and I think what I think what the AI age has the potential to give us now, particularly with the technology connections that we can make, is that I think we can get closer to execution and adding real value to firms, but we're never going to do that if we can't get out of our own way in in terms of manual operations.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I I totally agree with you from that perspective. I was also thinking about the question I asked earlier about why you don't have more practitioners or research methodologists at the top
Value, Specialism, And Consulting Mindset
SPEAKER_01table, building off something you were just saying, JD, is that maybe everybody obsesses over that stuff too much. It's like, is it a five-point scale? Maybe this is a silly example, five-point scale, seven-point scale, ten-point scale. And to some extent, businesses are going, we don't really actually care. Do we give a damn about how many points? What we care about is, as you say, getting solid data, good advice, ideally, really, really contextual advice, because you understand what we're trying to achieve. And if you're telling me a seven-point scale as opposed to a five-point scale makes a huge difference to that, then great, let's spend time on it. If it doesn't, let's move on and spend time on the stuff that matters.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we're, you know, we're we're we're being sort of tongue-in-cheek about it, obviously. But, you know, look, I I think more seriously, I think there's sort of two emerging career paths for insights, people, like that that we will see coming, coming as we come through the sort of AI age. One of them is around strategy and really understanding how to get the right information to support decision, not just decision making, but then the execution that comes after it, right? Because you have to join up the strategy and the execution. But I still think there are roles for researchers, for people, for methodologists, for people who understand how to make those decisions, how to set up the information gathering to get the right people to make sure that the output of that is good. I just don't think, you know, for for years, again, the, you know, the they have these people have had project management responsibilities. And I think what we will see is you'll see real specialists who are trying to build this knowledge into products or in in in ways that you know don't require them to, you know, download a spreadsheet and you know, and and check open ends by hand and stuff like that, right? I mean, you know, it's it's not going to be the operational elements that they will be focused on, it'll be feeding into products and systems that bake this knowledge in, right? Because it the knowledge, it it's very clear that we still need research expertise. I mean, the the thorniest problems that people face in research these days is that there's so much data and people don't understand, for example, the the provenance of their data and whether that is actually going to help them make the right decisions. And we're talking about sampling, right? You know, do you have a representative sample of whatever audience you're trying to access? The fact that you have data doesn't necessarily mean it's the right data. There's still there's still room for that, and there's still a need for that.
Business Literacy Over Methods Obsession
SPEAKER_00I just think the execution of it is obviously going to look really different.
SPEAKER_01Well, I hope you enjoyed that part one. Lots more to come in part two, including the importance of being close to clients' businesses in terms of execution, why the research sector may place too much emphasis on statistical validity, the challenges of buying sample by panels, recommendations for buying sample, and much, much more. Thanks for listening to part one. Thank you to JD. Thanks to Insight Platforms for their support, and see you next time.
