35. Consumer Insights Beyond the Algorithm with Jason Fulton

It's not that I'm so anxious when I talk to you. No, actually, I just want to make sure that, um, I'm able to interview in the way I want. To, uh, so it's been a while, uh, but, uh, maybe you don't know, but you played an important role in my marketing career, Jason, uh, because my first real consumer insights project was led by you.

Uh, and when I say real, uh, meaning that I was before I worked with you on a project, uh, on the project that we had in Turkey, uh, I was involved in qualitative, quantitative research, just like more of the traditional methods of Consumer research, like customer research, uh, but then there was this moment that, uh, we were about to launch a big campaign, like big change in the culture. And then I met you and the project in Turkey.

Uh, so I would like to, first of all, ask you what is different when you do a qualitative or quantitative research and the work that you do, uh, and you provide in your project.

And sometimes when I face the question that you're asking me, it's not only do I face this question from people who work in consumer insights, but I also face this question from people that work in marketing or product creation, which is what makes your work so unique within the industry now, how I would answer that question is that it all starts from what I believe. To be foundational human behavior. That's where it starts.

And we all have the foundational qualities needed to do the work that we do. And what I mean by that is that as human beings, we have all grown up with wanting to ask questions, wanting to find answers to questions, being curious about how other people live, or why people behave in the way that they do.

And I believe that with any people-centric work, be it quantitative or qualitative, it should all start with the foundation, which is we are human beings and this is what one of the things that we are on earth to provide for ourselves. Right? Answer some of those questions. So I, I would say from a big picture thinking, that's something that we all, um, as a team, there's six of us in the agency in Amsterdam. That's all.

The things that we share as a team now, the other thing that we share as a team is this idea of a framework, right? So, yes, we have this curiosity. Yes, we have this sort of burning desire to have those big questions answered, but we also work within a framework. The framework that we work within is, um, I'd like you to imagine a tree.

This is timeless behavior from the cavemen to where we are today and where we will be in 50 to a hundred years time. That timeless behavior is we all want to tell stories, right? That's our timeless behavior. All want to tell stories. Now, the trunk of that tree is the behavioral culture. Now, depending on the cultures that we are from, you and I have different cultures, you and I have different genders. So, the culture changes the way that we like to tell stories.

to each other, be it through spoken word, be it through written word, be it through music, storytelling, rap music, folk music. So the actual behavioral culture is changing, right? So the route is still the same. We still want to tell stories, but the cultural difference changes the way that we tell stories. And at the top is the material culture. what we use to tell stories. So as I said before, in my example, we used to tell stories around the campfire.

Now, stories are being told via TikTok, Instagram, ChatGBT, and AI tools, enabling us to tell stories. And those things change. Those things change more frequently, like the shedding of leaves of a tree. One season we're green, the next season they're gone, and the following season it's a different color again. So, our framework of even thinking. Is always remember we have a timeless influence, we have behavioral culture and we have material culture.

So that's the foundation of the way that I would like our team and also our partners, our clients, our collaborators to think within that framework.

And again, just kind of coming back to human behavior, one of the things that we like to work with, and we like to, uh, encourage in our own behavior, but also the people that we work with, is this idea of applying Empathy and that empathy again, that's part of human behavior, but when you apply empathy to finding out answers to the big questions that already helps to establish putting you in the right frame to get to the right insight.

And that empathy, I believe, are things such as having an open ears to listen

So even fundamentally, we set our cells up with these two elements, which is again, this tree focus more on the trunk, I would say, but also an open. Is mind, heart and will. That's the foundation for everything. Now, when it comes to directly answering, what do we do best? I would say by using those two things. And over the years, we've worked with yourself in Turkey, Istanbul.

I worked for Nike for 10 years, I've had my agency for 15 years, so I've been working within the qualitative consumer insights business for the last 25 years. So I've seen many, many changes, um, and what I've seen, what has been successful in the way that we work, is it's moved from just being quant, To qual to more ethnographies, you

Select the trees that you, you will listen to, uh, because like in a forest, uh, the same trees, uh, like different trees, but like same thousands of the same tree. How many do you select? And yeah. How do you define which one do you select?

Whereas the qualitative tends to get you the emotional data. How are people feeling about a certain Issue or a challenge or the way that they are living their lives. And what's really important about that qualitative part and then going deep into their lives is that you don't need a huge amount of people to talk to, to get to, uh, some of the pain points of what's happening in their lives or their community or whatever it may be.

What's important is the quality of the people that you're talking to. Let me give you an example. A lot of the projects that we have worked on, especially over the last 15 years, have been driven sometimes by consumer segmentation. Now what is consumer segmentation? It's an interesting question. Consumer segmentation. So let's go back to that quantity of numbers that I was talking about, 2000, 20, 000, 60, 000. So consumer segmentation. Tends to start in this area.

A big survey has been done and a broad picture or even a broad outline of what a person's life is like, what they are interested in, what they do, how frequently they do something is broken down into segments. So let's take 60, 000. You can break that into segment. A are high network individuals. Their demographics are between this age group in this age group. They do this. They spend money on this. Um, and they do this.

This frequently, then you have another segment, how much they earn is not as high as the previous segment, but they earn this amount. Their age group is this and you can break that 60, 000 people into six or seven different segments. And those segments are very useful when it comes to having a broad picture of what is happening within the marketplace or a sector based on big numbers. Right.

And that can help to steer a marketing team sometimes, or a sales team in terms of, hey, we need to focus on, we want high network individuals, or we want first jobbers, for example, another segment. Over the years, our clients have said to us, we did a huge segmentation piece and we understand a little bit about who our consumers are. are, but there is no emotional data. There is no feeling of why they choose our brand, how, and why they choose to spend the money the way that they do.

There is no emotional connection for a brand to be able to. Connect with them. Brands, as we know, are moving much more towards being, um, a character, a personality, and with those brand characters and personalities, each brand has an emotion.

The project that we worked on, which was Turkish athletes, I think it was, I think it was football players, I think it was runners. Basketball players, even going into their world, observing their world from the outside, not interfering, just observing their world, seeing how they behave as individuals, as a group, as a community, but actually being part of their world for a certain amount of time means that you're immersing yourself.

In that world, and you're immersing yourself in their behavior, but as a researcher, you're able to step out, observe, and then step in and say, we noticed this happened. Can you explain to me why this happened? Please tell us your story about what we just saw. Can you explain to us why you behave in this way? And the way that we work enables us to observe, to ask the questions, to go deeper, and very often shed light on behavior that the people that we talk to didn't even realize themselves.

And this is insight.

And they say that I'm really having fun when I'm with my certain friends. But there is a reason to that emotion, why he or she is having fun. Then she is with those certain friends, which she, she, or he may not know. I mean, that's, that's the beauty of insights. And I think the part that I love most about projects.

It may appear that when people do qualitative work that it's completely random. Right? So, the six people that Jason was talking about, or these twelve people that Jason was talking about, it's completely random people that you talk to. That is not the case. When it comes to quantitative work, it's very clear that there is a process. There's a questionnaire, 30 questions, 50 questions, 60 questions, people answer A, B, C, or with a scale, and then the numbers come out at the end.

Okay, there's a very robust, tried and tested process when it comes to qualitative work, qualitative insight work. There is also a process that takes place. And this process is very key to understand that this is not random. It's a process that can be followed. The process that we use, we've decided to call DIG. That's D, that's I, and G. The D part stands for discover, the I part stands for ideate, and the G part stands for go.

I'm going to break DIG down for you into those three elements, and then you see how much of a process It's part of that. Let's start with D. The D part tends to come in when the client says, Hey, we've got some quantitative work. We've got some consumer segmentation, but now we really feel like we need to understand the emotional part of our consumer and where some of their pain points are. Can you help us? Yes. We're going to dig with you.

The D part comes into, okay, can you explain to us what is your main research question? What are you looking to find out through this whole research project? Is it to do with product? Is it to do with, um, community engagement? Do you want to learn more about their pain points? So we tend to spend a lot of time with our clients. Digging deep into what are you actually looking to find out? What are your objectives of this project?

Part of that is also, can you share any previous work that you've done on the consumer that you want to connect better with? And quite often, this is where they share the segmentation. Uh, and then when we see the segmentation, and they say, Yes, but we really want to know, More feeling and emotion about segment A or segment B or segment F. We really want to get deeper into that. Can you help us? We start by saying, okay, explain to us who segment A, B or E is.

Give us the sketch of who they are. And we start to look at that sketch and we start to say, okay, let's sort of amplify that person. Okay. Be it A, C, or E. Let's amplify that person. You've said that they are aged between here and here, and that they do this particular activity three or four times a week. But let's start to apply some more questions to that. All right, which is why do we think that they're doing it this many times a week? Why do they are they buying those brands?

Why are they part of this type of community? And we start to basically flesh out the consumer segment in terms of more criteria. We want to know. Not only what they're doing, but why they're doing it. And so we start to actually ask already more questions of the segmentation and those questions start to create what we call a qualitative consumer survey. And that qualitative consumer survey is about recruiting people.

Or also, sometimes the segmentation is so broad that they have to, Nietzsche's down, uh, because usually when we talk about segmentation, there's also a problem that people tend to do segmentation based on demographics only. Uh, or like it's so wide or so narrow, then is it possible still to work with you then in that case, or they have to make the segmentation, uh, before upfront? No,

You know, the, the teams that we tend to have come to us tend to be brand teams or tend to be product teams and they, and they want to have something more tangible, something more concrete to work with mostly. A problem that the team want to solve. And if it's too broad, then there is nothing to, to create from equally. We've had something which is very narrow, which is, it's a very sort of definitive consumer segment, but it's so narrow that the team feels.

Like they're in shackles that they can't really be flexible within that consumer segment. So you do have these two camps that sometimes things fall into. Um, sometimes people come to us and say, we don't know who our consumer is. We have a vague idea of who our consumer is, or we have an idea of the consumer that we want to connect with. Can you help us to construct a consumer that would fit with our brand or our brand aspiration?

So there tends to be these three camps that we commonly come across, but coming back to the question of, you know, the number of people that we speak to. Once we get the segmentation, sometimes, sometimes not. We try and look at, okay, you as a brand. What's the type of person that you want to connect with? Why do you want to connect with this type of person? What is it that connecting with this type of person will give you? What solutions do you think that the consumer needs solving?

So quite often it's a consultation with the brand and the ideas that the brand have about who their consumer could or should be. In combination with looking at the segmentation that they have, and then reconstructing it all together to say, okay, this is your hypothesis, your assumption of who the consumer is, this is the data that you have, but this is the place that you want to be. Now, let's construct the type of person that you should be speaking to in order to get insight.

And once we have this sort of description, then we really flesh it out. And then we build a survey, we call it a recruitment survey that helps us to get some initial answers to this sort of new profile that we're starting to create, gets us some initial answers.

And then even the quality of the answers that we start to get from those surveys starts to give us an indication of who do we want to talk to, how talkative are the people who are answering these surveys, how willing are they to participate in a type of research that we want to set up for them.

So. Quite often in our dig phase, where we, we're starting to understand the segmentation, we're starting to understand the client, we're starting to understand, you know, what the client is looking for in terms of the objectives. We then start in that discover phase, start to say the best ways to really get to some areas of deep insight will be to do. These things, it could be a focus group. It could be, um, a duo, which is, you know, two people talking to each other.

It could be a triad, three people talking to each other. It could be a day in the life of one of these consumers. It could be a weekend in the life. It could be a week in the life of the consumer. It could be digital diaries, for example, where you follow that consumer, you ask them to complete exercises over a weekend or a week or even a month. So you have all of these sort of different methodologies that allow you as a researcher to go really deep into their lives.

So you need to understand what you're looking to discover. You need to leverage methodologies that allow you to discover those things. And then you need to create the questions and the exercises that enable you to get answers to those questions. And then you need to go in the field, meet with those people, depending on the methodology you're using. As I said, we tend to really live their lives with them, and that is our discover phase. It's very thorough, it's very methodical.

Who are we looking to find out, how are we going to do it, and then let's do it. And that can take four weeks. To find those people. And sometimes it's six people, sometimes it's 12 people, sometimes it's 18. It's not about the number of people that you speak to, it's about the quality of the people that you find and asking them the right questions and experiencing the lives, their lives, uh, through their eyes, but with your eyes as a researcher to ask the right questions.

on the discover phase anyway.

This word, observing, is really key, because in that discover phase, that's all that you're doing. The ideate phase, is observing. Is where you start to look for the patterns of observations that you've done from being in the infield. So for example, you've designed the project with us where you've done focus groups, or duos, or immersions into their lives. And you, you're observing all of these things with the six people, or the 12, or the 18.

And you've seen, okay, with these people, I've done these observations. But now. I need time to be able to analyze what have I observed. And the observations and explaining the observations, making sense of the observations, is where you start to move from observation into insight. And the way that we do it is we have our team that go in field, each person doing the observing are seeing their consumer from a different perspective.

If you work in sales, the way that you observe the person, you're seeing them from a, maybe a, how much they spend perspective, like really sales. If you are somebody comes from a product perspective, the way that you observe the consumer is the way that they. You know, put their product on or use that product. So you're seeing things from a different perspective.

The IDA phase is when you bring everyone who have observed that consumer together and you start to share information, you start to tell stories. What did you observe from the time that we spent with the consumer? Oh, you observed this.

you know, observation A, which is quite similar to your observation A. And what you start to do by sharing your observations, you start to see that there are specific patterns that emerge, which are important to, Either that individual who has been the observer and eventually the team, because you start to say, Hey, this observation keeps coming up from person a person B person C, this is obviously an important thing that we've observed as a team. Hey, let's put that up there, right?

An important observation. And ideation is about methodically going through the observations, telling stories about why you think that this observation is important over this observation, and with these patterns, you start to create specific themes. Yeah. Now, how you get to an insight is when you start to look at the themes that are emerging.

And if theme A, B and C keep coming back as themes, you start to look at how can theme A and B come together as a description of, we can see what is happening, but now we need to try to describe why this is happening. And this is the key component of what makes an insight. And an insight is a description of what is happening, a collection of themes with the description of why it is happening, because the why that it is happening.

Is what starts to get the team to create something new to solve, it could be a problem that the consumer is facing, which is why they're behaving in this way. And that opens up the creative space for the brands to provide a solution to that problem.

It's where you start to take those insights and you start to say, okay, if we understand now the behavior and why that behavior is, how as a brand, how as a company, how as an organization do we address those needs? Um, and that's essentially how the dig phase comes together. The discover, knowing what you want to find out, going into the field, doing it, the idea coming together. You know, getting to the themes, the go phases. Okay. How do we provide the solution?

And then putting together of the decks or the films or the recommendations. And that's how we use this dig process to get everything done. It's quite complex, but it's something that we've been working with and on for years.

And we did focus groups with them, we saw them play football, quite often we played football with them, we saw them with their team, we spoke to coaches, we spoke to their parents, we spoke to other football experts, all around this topic of, what are these kids doing, Within their preseason and why are they doing it? And one thing which kept coming back as a theme was a formal preseason is six weeks.

But the kids that we were speaking to were actually starting two weeks earlier and doing a pre preseason. And when we were asking, why are you doing that? And they were saying that they actually wanted to get ready for their pre season, the first day of pre season, because they believed that this is when the coaches were already starting to make the judgments of who was going to make the team. It wasn't made at the end of six weeks. It was made on the first day of pre season.

So these kids were doing pre season. Two weeks before, so that their first day, they were already shining in front of their coaches. One of the first big insights was around pre, pre season was about impressing the coach on day one. The other thing that we learned was that a lot of goals, winning goals, deciding goals were scored in the last 10 minutes of football matches. Then we started to put some patterns together. So they start early, two weeks, they then do six weeks.

So actually they're doing eight weeks of pre season, but it's actually for the most significant part of the match was 10 minutes. So our insight was that they actually spend eight weeks working for 10 minutes, for the last 10 minutes of games, the hardest eight weeks for the final 10 minutes. And this insight helped the brand to change how they launched their preseason. So they were no longer doing it over six weeks.

They actually extended their preseason, like when they launch products, when they launch services, they extended it by an earlier two weeks. They were providing services for these kids, new product, new services for the coaches as well for the pre pre season. Um, and so we helped to sort of re establish the whole process that the brand had in order to connect with these young football kids.

It can be like wide variety of insights from wide variety of customers that you are working with in the future, in the near future. Do you see some emerging trends happening in the space in marketing, uh, or in the consumer insights part also?

But one thing that we have been noticing is that there are companies, organizations, which are using AI to start to observe the answers to surveys. For example, to then create insights. So, I mean, we've been talking through this conversation about quantitative and we've been talking about qualitative. And in my personal experience is the quantitative doesn't necessarily get you to the insights. It is either too broad, too narrow, but it doesn't quite get you to the emotions.

But what we've been finding is that increasingly the sophistication of AI Is starting to look at the results or the questions being answered within those surveys and they're now starting to try to create insight based on surveys. Now that is absolutely competition for us. Why I see it as. It's competition because it's another service out there. It's another methodology of sorts, which is out there at the same time. I don't see it as competition.

And the reason being is that I believe coming back right away to the start of our conversation, which is about human behavior, right? Yeah. Open ears, mind, heart, will. As a human being, when you're engaging or interacting with a consumer face to face, in their space, with their community, with their friends, there is something about that human interaction that you're observing and that you're part of, which cannot be replicated by something Automated or something which is digital.

There's just something which is special about those moments that you have with someone. And I believe anyway, at this moment in time, no matter how sophisticated an AI can be, or a program or an algorithm can be, I don't think it truly gets you, it can give you an idea of where the insights can be. But the interaction with people gives you the direction that you should be looking to follow. And then the insights that come out of that interaction fused with where the brand wants to go.

Because an insight is yes, absolutely. It's about understanding the consumer needs of behavior and why, but a true, A brilliant insight is one which is applied to where the brand also wants to go. So again, going back to the example, the global brand wanted to improve the relationship with a teenage football player during a particular period of time.

It's can, especially for the broader segmentations can be like a good thing, but going deeper is something else. Um, I have a very recent thing that happened yesterday. My niece, she's 12, one of my nieces, and she's in between, you know, when you are 11, 12, you are becoming like a teenager, not a kid anymore. And she's still playing some games that she used to play when she was a kid. But when you look at her online behavior, she's probably spending three hours playing the same girly game.

That she actually doesn't want to play. And I, yesterday she was asking my sister, who's also a psychiatrist. I don't know how she didn't do that until now, but mom, I have been asking you to put me screen limits and you haven't been putting that, and I don't want to play the same. Stupid girly game anymore. Within that time, I would maybe even prefer to play volleyball with my niece, with my aunt, who's here for four days. That is something, well, if you look at AI, probably this 12 year old.

still playing this three hours game, a girly game, and she's quite online and she's quite active, although in the inner side, she wants screen limits from her mom, especially for that game, because she doesn't want to, you know, use that. So, I mean, I'm, I'm sure that everyone has this type of, um, examples in their life, but I think this is something that you can only Do with like a in size project that you have been, uh, that you are living in your work.

Yes, even within that perspectives, there's a diversity of consumers in terms of, um, gender or fluid identity or ethnicity or race or so you have a diversity of the consumer, but the consumer is one perspective that you can look at, but on top of that are the other things. around their world. It could be the people who are influencing that consumer. So even from your example, the person who is influencing your niece is her mother.

So bringing them into the conversation and asking them, how do you see it as a parent or as a partner of the target consumer? Tell me how you see things. Um, and another perspective is internally, from a client perspective. How do you see things within the company? And I think that the beauty of the ideation part, and the inside part, is when you start to put all of those perspectives together. Together, yeah. And again, it could be dependent on how AI is structured.

Um, But what we tend to find when you create a quantitative piece, it's usually just the consumer. But when you do a qualitative piece, it's the consumer, plus it's this, plus it's this, plus it's this, plus it's this. And it's that beauty of the diversity of all of those different perspectives,

Um, it was a book written in 2019, it's about three generations of Chinese women, grandmother, mother, and by a woman, I have the book here and I want to get it right, it's Yung Chang.