Author: bigeyeuser

Jenni Romaniuk is the International Associate Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia. In the first of two episodes discussing her new book, Better Brand Health: Measures And Metrics For A ‘How Brands Grow’ World, Jenni shares insights about how brands grow, why small brands should adjust expectations when assessing brand metrics, and the ways that advertising can most effectively create category buyer memories.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Jenni Romaniuk: If you are a small brand, you shouldn’t expect the loyalty of a big brand. You should be able to calibrate your metrics according to your size so that you can get an assessment of, “Am I performing better than I should for a brand of my size?” And that’s something that’s missing in a lot of brand performance metrics analysis, but also in a lot of brand health analysis as well. 

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency, growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. If you’ve ever commissioned a brand tracker or designed, fielded, or analyzed the results of one, today’s episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS is definitely for you. We’re going to discuss an approach to measuring brand health that’s based on empirical data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, the world’s largest center for research into marketing. Since its formation in 2005, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s team of researchers has been committed to supporting marketing practitioners around the world through its publication of academic papers, books, and an industry-supported R&D program. The Institute’s Associate Director is Jenni Romaniuk, who is also a Research Professor. Her research focuses on building and measuring brand memories, and Jenni is a pioneer in developing measures and metrics for distinctive brand assets, category entry points, and mental availability. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these terms, hopefully, this podcast episode will be both informative and inspiring since Jenni’s latest book, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a ‘How Brands Grow’ World, has recently been published by Oxford University Press. To talk about her work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and how it’s reflected in this book, I’m delighted that Jenni is joining us today from Adelaide, Australia. Jenni, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Jenni Romaniuk: Thank you. It’s great to be here. 

Adrian Tennant: Jenni, what prompted you to write a book focusing on brand health?

Jenni Romaniuk: Yeah, this came about from a number of different, factors that came together. So, one of them was the fact that I, in my frivolous youth, actually have managed brand health trackers. So I’ve been responsible for designing the questionnaires, analyzing, reporting back to clients, and trying to make sense of all of this. And when I did that, it made me realize so much I didn’t know. And being lucky enough to also be an academic, I started to plug those knowledge gaps with, fundamental R&D that we were doing at the institute. And I kind of got distracted for a while because, that then spurred on the research we’re doing in mental availability, category entry points, and other areas that I’ve been involved in and in distinctive assets, for that matter. but then, when I’ve been talking to people about how they feel about their brand health tractors, it’s one of those things people spend a lot of money about but don’t really feel very good about doing so. and some people were getting disillusioned and thinking about giving it up, and so I thought it was a time to pull together all of the different bits of knowledge that we had that were scattered around, update it as needed and put it together in one sort of resource that people could draw on who wanted to learn more about this thing called brand health tracking and how to do it well. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, your book’s full title is Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for A How Brands Grow World. Now, for any listeners who haven’t read the books, How Brands Grow, Parts One or Two, let’s start by exploring the three evidence-based laws that inform the approach to measuring brand health that you describe in your book. The first of these is that brand growth occurs primarily through penetration, increasing the number of buyers rather than the frequency of purchases from so-called brand loyalists. Jenni, could you unpack this for us? 

Jenni Romaniuk: Yeah, so I mean, decades of R&D have shown us that while there might be many ways to grow a brand, there is really only one way that brands sustainably grow, and that is they grow by expanding their customer base, which means more of all types of buyers roughly in the proportion that you have. And so when you document how brands grow over time, you see that much more change happens in the number of buyers they have than the weight of purchase or the loyalty of those buyers. I mean, that does actually go up a bit as well, but it’s nowhere near as much as the change in penetration, which is why it’s often referred to as a penetration-led strategy. 

Adrian Tennant: What does this law mean for large versus small brands?

Jenni Romaniuk: Well, it means that not everything is equal. So the law of double jeopardy converts this to say that small brands basically suffer twice. They have many fewer buyers, and those buyers are slightly less loyal. And the reason for this is not because small brands are worse than big brands, it’s actually about the nature of their customer base. Small brands tend to attract heavy category buyers who tend to split their loyalties amongst lots of different brands, whereas bigger brands tend to monopolize light category buyers who don’t buy a lot and so don’t have a lot of loyalty to split. And so when you compare them, it looks like the customer base of a big brand is more loyal than the customer base of a small brand is. And that means that if you are a small brand, your benchmarks for what to expect are different. You shouldn’t expect the loyalty of a big brand. you should be able to calibrate your metrics according to your size so that you can get an assessment of, “Am I performing better than I should for a brand of my size?” And that’s something that’s missing in a lot of brand performance metrics analysis, but also in a lot of brand health analysis as well. This idea that not every brand should score exactly the same on every metric. 

Adrian Tennant: Does this rule hold true for categories outside of CPGs?

Jenni Romaniuk: Yes. Because how you measure buying weight, varies by category I’ve got two chapters in there one’s on category buying and one’s on brand buying. And these are two really important chapters in the book because often these sections of the questionnaires are designed without much thought or consideration. I mean, I’ve had so many people show me their questionnaires, and I’ve looked at the brand usage section, and they’ve gone, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we collect that, but no one pays any attention to it, so we just don’t believe it.” I’m like, “Okay. Why are you collecting this if, really, no one’s putting any credible store in it?” And it’s partly because those questions are really poorly designed, but yet they’re really important. But how you do that varies by category. So, for example, if you’re talking about banking or insurance, you might have number of products as your loyalty measure. If you are talking about, a durable category, you might have repeat purchasing of the same brand as your loyalty measure. You know, how many people who previously had a Ford car buy another Ford car, next time they buy a car. So all of those things, the metrics vary, but the patterns don’t. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, the second of the empirical laws in a How Brands Grow world is that buyer profiles differ much less than one might expect across competitive brands within a given category. Jenni, could you give us an overview of what your data shows? 

Jenni Romaniuk: Yeah, well, it’s not just my data. When it first came out, when Andrew Ehrenberg did his first work on this, it won an award from the Market Research Society for the research that told us the most about how advertising works, which was funny because there’s nothing about advertising in the research! It’s actually about just documenting if you look at the profiles of competing brands, they hardly differ. And yeah, this speaks to a whole range of different areas where we assume that, you know, by virtue of your gender, your age, your income bracket, things like that, there are all these differences in your brand buying. But actually, when we look at competing brands and do a proper apples-with-apples comparison, you just don’t see that much variation. And even importantly, when you do see some variation, It’s usually not a good thing for the brand. So when a brand, for example, skews to be more female than male, the question isn’t, “Why did it get more females?” The question is, “Why aren’t more males buying it? Why is that so different from every other brand in the category that maybe has 50/50 of females than males?” And so when you take that perspective, it leads you to have a look at differences between competing brands from a very different point of view. It’s no longer a mark of success, but more a problem to be solved. 

Adrian Tennant: So, do we currently worry too much about segmentation? 

Jenni Romaniuk: Yes. There’s a whole series of rationales that underpin my, “Yes,” there – many more than we can go through in a single podcast. But it is about understanding that, brands compete for a reason and trying to do things that mitigate that competition, that distance you from other brands in the category just doesn’t seem to work. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, the third empirical law is that a brand’s main competitors are almost always the biggest in the category. Have you ever seen exceptions to the rule?

Jenni Romaniuk: I mean, there are what we call exceptions that are partitions, which are when brands share more with other brands than they should for their size and they’ll separate those out from saying, you know, “How does the duplication of purchase law not hold?” Well, that we don’t see. The only time it breaks down a bit is when you put things that are obviously not in the same market and then you notice that there is an oddity either in a submarket breaking off to be its own market or just one brand that just acts really weirdly with everything else. So that, to a certain extent, makes the duplication of purchase analysis a good way of understanding what belongs in your category and what doesn’t in the behavior of consumers. But yeah, they’re called partitions. I think it’s a useful analogy because if you think of an office, you can have walls that really separate you so that you can’t see what’s going on. Or you can have a partition where it separates you a bit, but you can still stand up and see over into someone else’s cubicle. And that’s what partitions in the data are like. They show when brands share slightly more than they should with each other, but they still even despite that partition, compete normally in the wider market as well. 

Adrian Tennant: two key factors that contribute to brand growth are mental and physical availability. Jenni, can you explain briefly what these are and how they work together?

Jenni Romaniuk: Yeah, well, mental availability is about being easily thought of in buying situations, while physical availability is about being easy to find and buy. So I usually like the analogy of the Olympics. So, you know, we’ve got Paris coming up. If you want to compete in the one hundred meters in Paris, no matter how fast you are, you just can’t turn up on the day and go, “Hey, put me in. I’m here. I’m quick.” No, they don’t let you do that. You have to go through qualifying that shows that you are capable of doing it. You have to be selected for a country. You have to get basically a ticket to Paris to compete at Paris. Well, mental availability is like getting that ticket. It gets you in the race. Now, physical availability is your performance on the day, because, obviously, you get there on the day, but maybe you had a too-rich croissant for breakfast, and so your stomach’s feeling a bit funny or your shoes don’t fit right, or, you know, just competitors are better than you on the day and so you don’t win, you don’t get chosen. So think of physical availability being easy to find and buy as your performance in the environment on that day of purchase. And so those two come together to help us map out what we need to do in terms of how to grow brands. 

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Bigeye is an advertising agency, so I have to ask you, what is the role of advertising in this context? 

Jenni Romaniuk: Advertising is about getting people to think about brands when they really don’t want to. I like to go out to dinner. So I think about restaurant brands. But I’m not thinking about that right now because it’s nine o’clock in the morning here. I’ve just had breakfast,  enjoyed my coffee and talking to you. If I suddenly started, you know, pondering different restaurant options and thinking about where we’re going to go for the next, time I’m catching up with people, you would think it was weird because I’ve got other things to do. But there will come a time when I need to do that. But if I on my way to work here, you know, I’m listening to a podcast and suddenly there’s an advertisement for a restaurant, I would think about restaurants and think about that brand on my way to work when I really wasn’t thinking of doing that. Or I might see it on a billboard, or on a shelter, cause I take a tram into work, so I might see it on a bus shelter or a tram shelter. So that’s where advertising allows us to do is to get the brain ready so that next time I’m in a buying situation, you’ve given my brand a slightly better chance than it should, you know, just up the odds, nudged it a little bit higher, such that then, you know, maybe the wings will swing in its favor next time I am, you know, selecting restaurants to go out to dinner with my family.

Adrian Tennant: So definitely not persuasive, which I think is how advertising is often viewed by folks. This is more nudging.

Jenni Romaniuk: Yeah, really, quite frankly, the way we pay attention to advertising, it’s not … have you ever tried to have an argument with someone who rarely pays attention to you and was busy doing other things? It’s very hard to convince them on your side. No. But persuasion is something that, you know, sales teams do and things like that. But to be honest, as a species, humans are awfully bad at persuading other people, about something. it was one of the realizations I had about my job is it’s not about persuasion, it’s about publicity. If you genuinely don’t believe, the evidence of how brands grow, nothing I say is going to change your mind. I can only reach the people who either don’t know or are unsure and let them know about it. And I think we need to approach all of our knowledge and memory-building in that way. Persuasion, first of all, it requires that people have a strong opinion to be persuaded about. And the evidence of how people feel about brands doesn’t, it suggests most people have mildly positive feelings about the brands they have, which is not really conducive for needing to persuade. and then the capacity, if we did need to persuade of advertising as being the route to do that, will it, it’s like that would be like taking a wrench and trying to, bang a nail in with it. It’s the wrong tool for that task.

Adrian Tennant: In addition to your work on the two How Brands Grow books, you wrote the definitive guide to Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Now, while that book could easily provide topics for a whole series of podcasts, Jenni, could you explain briefly the role that distinctive brand assets play in creating category buyer memories?

Jenni Romaniuk: Thank you. It’s very lovely for you to say. Distinctive brand assets are basically alternative representations of the brand in memory. A brand name is a word. Words get stored in what’s called our semantic memory, which is our memory for words and their meaning. So when I say to you, “This is a chair,” you have an understanding of what a chair is. You know, it’s, you have a visual representation of likely chairs, you know, that a chair is something that you sit on, you know, you know what a chair means, that comes from your semantic memory. However, we have lots of other aspects of our memory, the processes, colors and sounds, and, faces, and things. And so when we represent the brand in different ways, we tap into different parts of memory and that can allow us to get more attention for the brand. in environments where the brand is often competing against, non-word-based and much more, attention-grabbing stimuli. 

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages. 

Michael Solomon: Hi, I’m Michael Solomon. During my 40-year career as a marketing professor, consumer psychologist, speaker, and author, I’ve had the privilege of developing strategies with many Fortune 500 companies to help them connect with their customers. Now, you can have access to these strategies through my online course. It’s called Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics. I’ll show you how to apply years of research on consumer psychology to your brand or business. And as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can receive a hundred dollars discount on your enrollment. Just follow the link in the transcript for this podcast on Bigeye’s website and use the provided coupon code to take advantage of this offer. I hope you’ll join me for Engage! to learn how to turn board customers into brand fanatics!

Go to Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics and save $100 with either of these discount coupon codes:For the full payment option: BigeyeFor the three-payment plan option: 3PPBigeye

Sandy Skees: I’m Sandy Skees, author of the book, Purposeful Brands: How Purpose and Sustainability Drive Brand Value and Positive Change. Based on three decades of experience, the book presents a clear, practical blueprint for defining and communicating your brand’s purpose and, more importantly, creating alignment across your organization to drive meaningful change. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of Purposeful Brands by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and e-book bundle offer. When you order directly from Kogan Page, shipping is always free to the US and the UK, which also helps us authors. So to order your copy of Purposeful Brands, go to KoganPage.com. That’s K O G A N, P A G E dot com. And thank you. 

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jenni Romaniuk, Research Professor and International Associate Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia. We’ve covered a lot of ground already, but I’d like to turn our attention now to some of the ideas in your new book, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. One of the first things that the readers who’ve worked with brand trackers in the past will probably notice is that you don’t call the research instrument a brand awareness survey, but rather a category buyer memory tracker or CBM for short. Why this name?

Jenni Romaniuk: Because it reminds us what we’re actually doing with this. When I first started engaging with brand health trackers, one of the things I noticed is, and this particularly resonated in the attribute list, so that’s the list of different qualities that, brands are assessed about, is that they’re all about brands. So, you know, is this a trustworthy brand, a reliable brand, a friendly brand, you know, all of these things. And I thought, wait a sec, but how is that relevant to the buyer and haven’t we missed the point that people buy brands to do stuff with? so you don’t buy the most trustworthy brand. You might not buy a brand if you have doubts about its trust levels. You know, if you’re not sure it will do the job. But you don’t, go out and go, oh, when’s the last time you thought to yourself, “Gee whiz, I feel like some ice cream. I really want the most trustworthy ice cream out there” yeah. so this is where I went. we need to rethink these things because they’re too brand centric. And of course then that influences the design because you then design it for your brand. Now you ask it questions based on what you are building for your brand. and the consumers, the category buyers kind of lost in all of that. So I wanted to reorientate it and go, we should be starting with a category buyer first, and the group of them that we are trying to get sales from because that’s our core reason for being.

Adrian Tennant: Could you talk a little about how the spreading activation model has informed your methodology?

Jenni Romaniuk: Yeah, so there are some theories of how memory works, and I do think it’s something we need to do more in our marketing curriculum generally. I’m amazed at how many people who’ve done any form of education in marketing haven’t learned the basics of how we build memories and how we use memories, given that much of our marketing activity is about building memories that we hope buyers will use. It just seems like a very big glaring omission, that, you know, often I go in and have to explain to marketers what this is about. And I, the rest of the institute were very big proponents of this. So the associative network theory of memory, which is a model of how memory is structured. So this idea that it’s associative networks where different items are connected together, spreading activation theory is a model of how we access things from memory. And it’s underpinned by this idea that to get into our memory, we first of all need a door or a cue as it’s called in memory literature, to go into. So, you know, you’ve got this mess of associations in your head. you know, if you ask someone can you remember something for me? You’ll often get a really puzzled look because they don’t have a cue to go into their brain. But if you say, can you remember something from your primary school days? Then that is a cue that they can go, “oh yeah, I can remember when we did this and when we did that,” and sort of stuff. And memories become easy because you’ve given them a door. But because everything’s all linked together, there is a danger if there’s not like a stopping mechanism, you can just go on forever and ever and ever. And indeed the first person who came up with, associate network theory, at least is attributed to, was Aristotle, who did it by asking people questions and asking them to just verbalize what was going through their minds as they were trying to find the answer. And so he’s the first one who said, “Oh, it looks like people jump from idea to idea to ideas. So maybe these are all somehow linked together.” So spreading activation says there’s only a limited amount of energy that you’re going to put into any one retrieval search. And so what happens is when you use that cue, imagine everything linked to that cue is like a pipe and spreading activation is water being poured down that pipe. So the more pipes you have, the more that water gets spread across many different items, the harder it is for anything to be retrieved. Things that have shorter pipes that are stronger, are more likely to be retrieved. and all of that influences whether or not something’s likely to be retrieved.  an interesting factoid for those of you who might be aging amongst you is this is one of the ideas of why as we get older, it’s harder to retrieve information. It’s not because we are forgetting, but it’s just because we’ve got denser networks. And so that makes it harder for anything to be retrieved. We are just so wise that it’s harder to retrieve any bit of information, and I personally find that quite reassuring.

Adrian Tennant: Well, another important difference in your approach to measuring brand health is a focus on category entry points or CEPs for short, which is a concept that you pioneered. Now, could you talk about what CEPs are and how brand marketers can use them?

Jenni Romaniuk: So it’s a nice follow-on from the previous question because CEPs are basically, those sorts of cues or doorways that buyers use when they’re about to buy from a category. Going back to my restaurant analogy, as I said, I go out to dinner, I like going out to dinner, so I am a restaurant buyer, but I’m not right now because, well, it’s morning, so I’m not going out to dinner right now, but come six, seven o’clock tonight, I might be like, “oh, let’s go out tonight.” And then start to think of things to have and based on a whole heap of factors, it might be and they can be how I’m feeling, the people I’m with, what the weather’s like. I’ll have different thoughts that sort of go into, define what sorts of restaurants are going to suit at this moment. and the thing about it is my brain does that for me. I don’t even have to ask it to, it will just pop into my mind given the sort of criteria, sensors, the ones that are most likely to suit it because our brains don’t like working too much. So if it can shortcut things for us, it will. 

Adrian Tennant: Okay. How do brands identify their CEPs?

Jenni Romaniuk: Well, there are different ways to, I mean, you can do it internally if you are experienced in a category. And I’ve developed a framework of the Ws to help people overcome their own internal biases. Because the thing about category entry points is they’re not deep, dark secrets and they’re not, if you are familiar with a category, you’ll recognize most of them, but there might be things you don’t often think about. For example, if you think about, you know, what is the most common category entry point for people who buy shampoo? Well, it’s because their hair’s dirty and they just want it to be clean. But have a think about when’s the last time you saw an ad that actually just reminded people that was a common reason why they buy a shampoo. You know, so often as marketers, we kind of forget the everyday and go for the unusual and the special. And that’s counter to what category entry points are about. They’re about the everyday, normal reasons why people come into a category. So that means often you have to go to category buyers and ask them, but ask them in a way that reveals that every day. Another analogy or metaphor I like to use is that category entry points are like highways. You usually choose a highway because it’s the quickest way to get to where you want to go. And when you’re on the highway, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, you just drive, you get there. So when we do category entry point research, we try to get people to remember that highway journey. You know, was there a McDonald’s on the side? Did you see a rest stop, you know, by this, what was happening at this exit? Was there this store here? And just getting people to relive that experience so that we can understand the cues and thoughts they had to get to whatever destination they were. 

Adrian Tennant: Jenni, what are the Ws in your framework?

Jenni Romaniuk: So the Ws, it was actually adapted,  unconsciously, ’cause I didn’t realize this as someone pointed out, from a basic philosophy. But they go through the different areas that can influence your buying. So we have when, which is timing. So that can be time of day, time of week, time of month, time of year. It could also be if something needs to be done quickly or taking time. We have while, which is other activities that you are doing at the same time. So it might be I’m eating dinner and watching tv. There is the with what, which is other products or services you might be consuming at the same time. So I might be eating dinner, watching tv, having a glass of wine. There’s the with whom, with the for whom, and that’s the influence of other people. So I might be, in front of the tv, eating my dinner, having a glass of wine with a good friend. There’s the where, which is the location. So in this case it would be in my house, or it might be at a friend’s house. Then we have the why, which is the benefits and motivations that come through. And finally, we have the how feeling, which is the emotions that you might have before, during, or after interacting with the category. 

Adrian Tennant: That’s all we have time for on today’s episode, but we have plenty more to discuss about brand health and how we can apply the learnings from this approach to develop effective advertising creative. So we’ll be continuing the conversation in next week’s episode. Jenni, if folks would like to learn more about the work you’re doing at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, or contribute data for your studies, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Jenni Romaniuk: LinkedIn or email. my email’s pretty well available. I work for a university –  we don’t tend to hide our contact details, but also LinkedIn. That’s the platform I’m most active on. 

Adrian Tennant: For now, thanks for joining us on, IN CLEAR FOCUS, Jenni. 

Jenni Romaniuk: It was a pleasure.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, and the author of Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a ‘How Brands Grow’ World. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation, along with links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Podcast’ from the menu. Thanks again for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Sandy Skees, author of the new book Purposeful Brands, discusses brand purpose, sustainability, and ESG communications. We examine how marketers can foster positive environmental and social outcomes and why Sandy believes businesses must commit to their purpose in order to create a flourishing planet and equitable society. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can claim a 25 percent discount on Purposeful Brands at KoganPage.com by using the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Sandy Skees: In order to meet the challenges of climate change and to create a society that’s less divisive, we need businesses to lean into their purpose, their responsibility for creating a thriving planet, and an equitable society.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Over the past several years, national and global surveys have shown that consumers have become more conscious of the social, environmental, and ethical implications of their purchasing decisions. Younger consumers – such as Millennials and members of Generation Z – report prioritizing brands that align with their personal values and beliefs. And with the rise of social media, consumers have greater access to information about brands’ policies and practices. Consumers are ready and willing to hold brands accountable for their actions. Our Bigeye Book Club Selection for May is Purposeful Brands: How Purpose and Sustainability Drive Brand Value and Positive Change written by Sandy Skees. The book offers marketers a practical blueprint for defining and communicating a brand’s purpose, as well as fostering alignment across the enterprise, explaining what’s required to support a brand’s mission, values, and sustainability initiatives. Sandy is EVP, Global Purpose and Impact Lead at Porter Novelli, a leading communications consultancy, part of the Omnicom Group. With over three decades of expertise in management consulting and strategic communications, Sandy has worked with clients including Visa, Abercrombie and Fitch, eBay, and Panasonic, among many others. Recognized as PR Week’s Most Purposeful Agency Pro of 2021, Sandy holds a board director position at Sustainable Brands and is an experienced speaker on branding, messaging and sustainability topics. To discuss some of the ideas in their book, Purposeful Brands, Sandy is joining us today from their home in Santa Cruz, California. Sandy, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Sandy Skees: Good to be here with you.

Adrian Tennant: You’ve written a lot of industry magazine editorials and academic papers, including for the Journal of Brand Strategy, but this is your first book. What prompted you to write Purposeful Brands?

Sandy Skees: You know, I think after doing this work now for almost two decades – and by “this work,” I mean exclusively in purpose and sustainability – after more than 15 years in communications, I was ready to sit down and gather my thoughts about how the intersection of purpose and sustainability in ESG with communications is such an important dimension for creating positive change. And so what I was attempting to do is two things. One: put almost three decades’ worth of expertise down on paper, but specifically in order to accelerate change, it’s my view that in order to meet the challenges of climate change and to create a society that’s less divisive, we need businesses to lean into their purpose, their responsibility for creating a thriving planet, and an equitable society. And so if I can tell people how to do that, then maybe more will do it, and then the change will happen faster. So that’s why I wrote the book.

Adrian Tennant: Purposeful Brands is organized into 10 chapters. The first of these is Defining your brand’s purpose. Sandy, could you explain the differences between a brand’s purpose, its mission, and its vision statement and how they complement one another?

Sandy Skees: This is such a great question, Adrian, because I think a lot of people conflate purpose with mission and vision, and even values to some extent, and then they conflate it with sustainability and ESG. So let me start with your question about what’s the difference between a purpose and a mission. The way that I define purpose in the book and the way that I hope all of us will share in this definition is purpose is a business strategy that a company deploys in response to its sense of responsibility to create some greater good in the world through its business. It drives value for the company as the business that it’s in, and it takes responsibility for some piece of the commons. And by commons, I mean all those things that we depend on but none of us own, like fresh water, clean air, a functioning society, an equitable society. All those things are the commons and a company in what it makes, how it makes it, who it makes it for, or maybe leaves out, all of those are ways in which a company can organize the breadth of its resources towards addressing a piece of the commons that it’s going to take responsibility for. That’s purpose. Mission is the business that you’re in and the way in which you’re going to deliver your business. So if you’re a technology company that makes computers and computing machines, your mission is to build the best computing machine to tackle, you know, problems and challenges. The why you do it, that’s your purpose, right? So your purpose may be providing that computing power to everyone and your purpose leans into access. So that’s the difference between a purpose and a mission. And then your vision. This is your description of how will the world be different? Where are we all headed collectively? That’s what a vision statement is, and those all work together in helping a company define for all of its stakeholders, most importantly, its employees, to create alignment that everyone understands. This is what we’re all showing up every day to do together. I’ll use Porter Novelli where I work as a good example. Our purpose statement is we were created on purpose to help companies do business better. Our purpose that we show up every day for is to actually help companies live out their purpose. That’s our purpose. And so I know when I come in every day, that’s what we’re trying to do and I work alongside my colleagues to do that. So that’s how the interplay between purpose and mission and vision play together. 

Adrian Tennant: You feature case studies and examples throughout Purposeful Brands. Are there some successful brands that most US or UK consumers recognize as being purpose-driven?

Sandy Skees: I’m going to answer this in two parts. The first is, I think, because a lot of people confuse purpose and brand and mission, some well-known companies with highly recognizable brands get credit for being purposeful brands because people understand who they are as a business and companies like Apple and Google and others like that, they get credit because they’re such well-known brands. Having said that, I do think there’s a handful of companies that are in fact living out what I would call the true meaning of purpose, which is some greater good they’re trying to create in the world alongside and through their business. Actually, a great example I think is IKEA. They’re a fascinating company that sort of democratized furniture and household items, right? And very quickly, they saw the environmental problem they were creating in terms of sort of throw away, non, long term items. and what I’ve seen them do is take responsibility for that and start building still price accessible homewares that are more durable, more lasting, and so I think you’re watching that company, in some ways, reinvent itself in order to take the responsibility for the environment, which is where its purpose has landed and operationalize it in its business in terms of the kinds of products it’s making, and the ways in which they’re helping their customers refurbish or return or recycle any products they may buy from them. So it’s a very interesting company that I’ve been watching. I actually think Proctor and Gamble is another great example of a company. So think of it for a minute. Proctor and Gamble is a consumer packaged goods company, CPG. CPG has become a category or an industry now consumer packaged good. These are the companies that make these things that we either consume or ingest on a pretty regular basis, and then throw them away. Throw the bottle away, et cetera. what Proctor and Gamble did is took a look at their portfolio of multiple brands from Tide to Cascade to Ivory to Olay, right? They’ve got beauty brands and house cleaning brands and personal care brands, and they began to look at, “Well, what’s the environmental footprint that these products, both environmental and social, and they’re looking at what’s the environmental – we’ll take that as an example – impact of our products on the planet?” And I’m going to use Tide as a great example because everyone washes clothes. So what Tide discovered when they assessed the environmental footprint of the Tide product is actually the greatest impact on the environment when washing clothes was heating water to make hot water, to wash clothes. And so they went to their scientists and said, “Hey, can you create a formulation of Tide that works just as good in cold water and gets the same level of cleanliness?” and you know, scientists being scientists, they did that. However, now where are we? Now we’re at a behavior change challenge, which is a communications challenge, which is how do we get people to set their washer setting to cold and actually wash clothes in cold? Most people think it has to be pretty hot to get things clean, although that’s not true with this formulation. And so now they’re in the midst of culture change at scale, which involves changing consumers’ behavior and their interaction with the product. And then they’re also in conversations with washing machine manufacturers, right? Because did you know that the normal setting on almost all washers is actually quite hot? And so inadvertently, we’ve got everybody setting it to normal, and even if they wanted to set it to cold, if they set it to normal, it already is hot. So that’s a whole system change in order to help a product move from being environmentally impactful to reducing its impact. The other thing they did is, and almost all the detergents and now shampoos and most of the personal care products are looking at concentrating, right? Because a lot of those products, they are developed as a concentrate. You add water, you put ’em in the bottle to put it on shelves. Well, all that water, when you’re going to just add water when you’re showering or washing clothes, that’s actually the best place to add the water instead of putting it in a jug that then is heavier, that takes more energy to move it around from factory to distribution center to grocery stores. So they’re looking at all of these things, and Partner Gamble isn’t the only one doing it. But what I like is how they very much understand and are working on product innovation simultaneously with, culture change, behavior change by their consumers. 

Adrian Tennant: In the second chapter of Purposeful Brands, you describe ways of articulating a brand’s purpose. Could you talk about the key components of the three-phase process that you’ve developed and used with clients?

Sandy Skees: Happy to. So the three phases for anyone in the, you know, marketing, communications, and brand world, these phases are going to sound familiar. It’s discovery, then it’s what I call blue sky ideation. And then there’s plan development. What we’re talking about is how does a company articulate its purpose: this greater good it’s going to create in the world; this part of the commons, it’s going to take responsibility for. A lot of people think that a purposeful brand has to be one that is coming into being now, it’s got to be an early stage. You really can only have a purposeful brand, if you build it that way. And that’s certainly true. But what we see is mature brands, companies that are hundred, 150 years old, also can articulate a purpose. And the first thing in that discovery phase is, I like to say, go back to the founder’s story. Because usually, in a founder’s story, what the very earliest days of the company were, or a desire to create something that positively impacts the world in some way. Ford and its creation of the automobile was about allowing for transportation to be available to everyone. The way they priced the initial Model Ts, all of it was designed to make access to mobility for everyone. And if you look at how they’re defining their purpose now, it’s still about mobility. It’s still about access. But it’s also taking the planetary impacts of that mobility and transportation into account. It’s why, gosh, it must have been 10 years ago that their business strategy shifted from an internal combustion engine product line to now what you see is more and more and more fully EV brands, including their most iconic brands of the Ford Mustang and the Ford F-150 truck. So that’s a company that saw its initial sort of founders story, founders lore, and have re-envisioned and re enliven it today. So in the discovery phase, you’re going to look the company and its founding story. The other thing you’re going to do is look at the environmental and social dimensionality of a company and how it’s behaving today. Most companies are certainly doing things that are good for the environment and good for society, because regulatorily, they’re required to, whether that’s managing the pollution that companies put into the air or ensuring that workers are safe when they’re working on the factory floor, all companies have some approach to environmental and social good. And hidden in those programs are sort of beyond regulatory or beyond compliance, that different companies are doing, that gives you a hint at where their sense of innovation and imagination is around that. And you might have a company that has really dangerous, manufacturing in and around dangerous chemicals, for example, and they’ve adopted a high value of a safe work environment. So that type of care for employees gives you a hint at where a purpose might land. So in discovery, you’re going to look at that too. What are we already doing? What do we have capacity to do more for? We’re going to look at the competitive landscape. What are others in your category doing? Have they defined a purpose? What sort of territory have they staked out as being their territory or their part of the commons they’re working on? Because you always want to have your articulation of purpose be true to who you are as a brand, what you’re able to do, what you can do, what you have imagination and resources to do, but also that differentiates you in some way from those in your peer group. Um, and then lastly, you’re going to look at what’s happening out in the world. What does the world need? What we need now are companies who, in addition to doing no harm, are going to commit environmentally to actually restoring ecosystems in some way, to putting water back in the aquifer is cleaner than how it was taken out. Those kinds of restorative and replenishing purposes can be revealed if that’s what the world needs in the business that you’re in. So that’s discovery. When you put all that together in a, you know, a pot and you mix it all together, that’s where the blue sky ideation comes, because somewhere in the who you are, where you came from, what you’re uniquely good and prepared to do, and what the world needs from you, is your purpose articulation. When you get that right, a plan, and imagination, and creativity become just unlocked because you are clear about your purpose, and most purpose statements are focused in either an environmental, cause or a social dimension. Not both Because you can’t have purposes that fix everything. You have to run your business and make money doing it, but it’s as a business, in addition to driving value for your customers and your shareholders, what value are you bringing to the bigger world to the commons. All of that together should give you permission to try things you haven’t tried before and say no to some directions that maybe aren’t as tight in alignment with your purpose. So those are the three dimensions, discovery, blue sky ideation, and then plan development.

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages. 

Michael Solomon: Hi, I’m Michael Solomon. During my 40-year career as a marketing professor, consumer psychologist, speaker, and author, I’ve had the privilege of developing strategies with many Fortune 500 companies to help them connect with their customers. Now, you can have access to these strategies through my online course. It’s called Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics. I’ll show you how to apply years of research on consumer psychology to your brand or business. And as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can receive a hundred dollars discount on your enrollment. Just follow the link in the transcript for this podcast on Bigeye’s website and use the provided coupon code to take advantage of this offer. I hope you’ll join me for Engage! to learn how to turn board customers into brand fanatics!

Go to Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics and save $100 with either of these discount coupon codes:For the full payment option: BigeyeFor the three-payment plan option: 3PPBigeye

Sandy Skees: I’m Sandy Skees, author of the book, Purposeful Brands: How Purpose and Sustainability Drive Brand Value and Positive Change. Based on three decades of experience, the book presents a clear, practical blueprint for defining and communicating your brand’s purpose and, more importantly, creating alignment across your organization to drive meaningful change. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of Purposeful Brands by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and e-book bundle offer. When you order directly from Kogan Page, shipping is always free to the US and the UK, which also helps us authors. So to order your copy of Purposeful Brands, go to KoganPage.com. That’s K O G A N, P A G E dot com. And thank you. 

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Sandy Skees, Executive Vice President, Global Purpose and Impact Lead at Porter Novelli, and the author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club Selection, Purposeful Brands: How Purpose and Sustainability Drive Brand Value and Positive Change. Chapter seven of Purposeful Brands is Showing up as an ally, advocate, or activist. Sandy, what are the differences between these three personas?

Sandy Skees: So anytime a company articulates its purpose, there’s an expectation that that company, more and more, is going to show up and speak out on social issues in particular. And we’re seeing this over and over today, especially. That’s the expectation. it started with Covid, certainly after the murder of George Floyd and the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. You see an expectation that companies speak out. In my theory of change, and in the book, what I talk about is a company cannot show up and speak out the same on all issues. It doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint. And so the first thing is to look at the issues that are relevant to your business and then decide –  are we going to show up as an ally, an advocate, or an activist? And ally means we are going to have a more passive, “we’re here, we agree, we know this issue is important to our employees and we recognize that these are important issues.” That’s sort of allyship. “Yes, we see this issue and we stand in solidarity.” An advocate is willing to put a little bit more social capital, if you will, or not capital in the sense of monetary capital, but, more in the sense of, effort in saying, “you know what? we might sign a petition or sign on to a statement or stand alongside others.” That’s what it means to be an advocate. An activist, to take that stand on an issue, means you’re going to lead change about that issue. great example is Patagonia, right? They’re an activist when it comes to the environment. They have pushed for legislation. They have filed lawsuits against the United States government in terms of protecting public lands. They’re an activist when it comes to protecting the wild spaces in the environment. They show up more as an ally on some DEI and social issues, it’s important. It helps a company know how much effort, and based on how relevant the issue is to the brand, to the company, and your purpose.

Adrian Tennant: As we are recording this, of course, we have sort of an unfolding news story. In the past few weeks, Bud Light came under attack and faced threats of a boycott from some consumers after the brand sent beer in a personalized can to transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, who was commemorating her first year of womanhood. Although Anheuser-Busch’s CEO, Brendan Whitworth defended the partnership with Mulvaney, two senior marketing executives have since reportedly taken involuntary leaves of absence. Sandy, are there lessons for brands to learn from this controversy? Can brands show support for marginalized communities without attracting this kind of backlash?

Sandy Skees: Yeah, it is fascinating to watch this unfold. And I will start by saying, the apology or the statement by the CEO was, I think more benign or more flat, if you will. It was just a fairly flat statement. Can brands avoid this kind of controversy? The answer is no. When activist groups – any activist group – decide to take an action – in this case, it was a marketing campaign – and use it as a spark to drive outrage, there’s nothing you can do about that because it isn’t actually about the person necessarily. it’s a means to create a bonfire of outrage over in a community that can have its outrage inflamed. What we know with these kinds of activities, boycotts, and frankly BUYcotts – which is the opposite, it’s like, “I’m going to go buy from that company because I believe in what they’re doing,” – is the long-term effect of these on revenue, on share price, they don’t last. Because if the fundamental of the business, is good, the business will be fine. So I feel like this is a flash. It’s lasted longer than I would’ve expected. But you look at a company like Nike and its support of Colin Kaepernick; they had all the same kinds of outrage online, and the company didn’t suffer long term. You might have a lot of negative noise on the social networks for a while, but it’ll die down. What I think is interesting here is you had a smart marketing executive who understood where the next generation of customers are coming from and who that next generation is, by and large – Gen Z and, Millennials, and then Alpha below Gen Z, the next generation of young people – they aren’t beer drinkers yet, but one day they will be. They are, by and large, completely accepting of the fluidity of gender and gender identity. They are, more multiracial, and multiethnic than any generation before, and they have certain expectations of the companies they buy from. And so one of those leave of absence marketing executives understood and was making an attempt in a closed system. It was products sent to a particular influencer, in this case, Dylan Mulvaney, so that Dylan could talk to her followers. That was when that post got shared beyond her network, that the outrage machine started. So this was not taking a transgender influencer and putting that person over in every demographic group. It was intended to help begin to create some affinity with a young transgender-affirming community. So can brands – how do they show support? I think you continue to show support and expect this kind of backlash. Know that it’s coming from certain groups and build that into your plan to tolerate it, and don’t engage with it. 

Adrian Tennant: Excellent advice, thank you. For brands that have an authentic sustainability story to tell, the eighth chapter of Purposeful Brands provides a communications framework and campaign approach. Sandy, could you talk briefly about the roles that research and platform ideation can play?

Sandy Skees: Well, the first research is to understand the attitudes and beliefs and how much information and knowledge do people have about your purpose or your sustainability issues, across your stakeholders. Your customers have one set of understanding about who you are and what you’re doing. Your investors will have another, your employees, another. So the first is just to do some basic audience profiling. And when I say that, I mean not just what they think about the company and how they rate your product or your services, but what they think about your company’s response to climate or social issues and what they expect of you. So know that because you’re going to create messaging once you’ve established your purpose or your sustainability strategy, now you need to message it in a way that your stakeholders understand what you’re actually doing and what kind of progress you’re making. Then it leads you to the creation of whether it’s a purpose platform or a sustainability platform. Because think about it, whatever your purpose is, if it leans more heavily into an environmental good you want to create in the world, or a social cohesion, let’s call it inclusion or something like that, whichever rise to the top as your purpose, you’re going to be implementing that through a sustainability strategy, And you’re going to have a sustainability, both environmental and social program, managing your environmental inputs and impacts and your social impacts. You’re going to be managing those just as a normal course of business, and you need to be able to tell a cohesive story about how all that fits together. That’s the beauty of a purpose platform it’s a way of expressing the non-financial dimensions of your business and how those things all play together. for some companies, their sustainability strategy, you know, it might be something like, Well, let me go back to Proctor and Gamble cause I think that’s actually a good idea. Their mission is, “we will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value,” but their purpose is “to improve the lives of the world’s consumers now and for generations to come.” And you can hear in that signals that tell you they’re going to have a diversity and inclusion program and they’re going to have a planetary program now in generations to come, tells you that they’re going to care for the earth for multiple generations and likely unspoken, but in there is all species. So that gives you a signal of how they’re going to behave. Once you’ve got that statement, then you can have the pillars underneath it, which allows you to go really deep in. “Here’s what our environmental program looks like. Here’s what our social program looks like. Here’s the governance structure that we have in place. That means you can trust that these goals we set, we actually have resources and capitalization in order to keep meeting them.” And then,” here’s how we’re going to be a good corporate citizen and show up in the world. we understand our role in the world. We have a mature sense of the role we will play in the world.” Those are the sort of pillars that sit underneath that platform. And then below that are all the proof points, and those change year on year, depending on programs that are working well and things that you’re doing, milestones you’re hitting, accomplishments, challenges you’re facing, all that becomes part of the storytelling underneath. 

Adrian Tennant: What do you hope readers will take away from Purposeful Brands?

Sandy Skees: There are two things I want people to understand about communicating purpose and sustainability in all kinds of communications, from advertising and marketing through to corporate communications, all of it. The first is these are very complex dimensions of a business that require a whole range of communications across all of your owned, earned, and paid channels. There’s so much complexity in what a company is doing to reduce its carbon footprint, for example, or reduce its greenhouse gases, improve the way it manages water, all those things. Highly complex. This isn’t just one report you’re going to issue. You need to be communicating it over and over throughout the course of the year. Think about on-pack as a place to communicate those messages. Think about it on-shelf, on your website, on your socials. This is a complex story that needs lots of ways in, et cetera. The second thing I want you to know is that the language you use to tell the story runs the spectrum from highly technical, highly factual, extremely transparent, very detailed, and data-driven, all the way up to inspirational, aspirational, and visionary. A CSO that I’ve worked with who I love dearly, who’s been a leader in this space for years, she said, “It’s up to us to set the highest order vision of the kind of world we want to create with our business. That we have to both set that vision and then explain in scientific terms how we’re going to get there.” And that is a very interesting communications challenge. We need words that are aspirational and pull people along with us as a business and a brand. And we need highly technical information so those who are trying to really understand the progress we’re making can find the facts in the things that we’re saying. 

Adrian Tennant: As you probably have noticed, the industry magazine, Adweek has recently been running a series of articles under the banner, The State of Sustainability. It reflects the uncomfortable reality that the advertising industry significantly contributes to carbon emissions. Now strategists and planners may not be directly involved in mining, manufacturing, or shipping products, but we do play a crucial role in generating and amplifying consumer demand, which justifies product creation. So Sandy, what advice would you give to other creative and communications professionals looking to make a positive impact on sustainability and climate action?

Sandy Skees: I think there are a couple of ways. One is in the way in which we depict people in commercials, in ads, and in visuals. Can we have a recycling bin somewhere in the shot, for example? Can we have two people who are chatting instead of each holding a disposable coffee cup? Maybe one’s rinsing out the peanut butter jar to throw it into the recycling bin. Like all those social cues, that we as creators have access to, we can change behavior very subtly. Or using those subtle behavior cues, you know, in the shot, and think about how do we do that? How can we use this commercial for, you know, hand soap? Maybe we show the person washing their hands and turning the tap off in between soaping up your hands. Like it’s all those little behavior cues that will drive behavior change. So I think that’s number one. The second thing and I actually said this, I was a guest speaker at a very large food and consumer goods packaging company – I was a guest speaker for their Earth Week all-hands employee kickoff – and what we were talking about was product innovation. Brand managers are always looking for what’s the next product we’re going to bring to market? We’ve got a budget, we’re in the innovation pipeline. We’re thinking about, you know, “Let’s go with a vanilla flavor this year. Let’s add vanilla.” And my question to them was, “Hey, instead of a new flavor, how about using that capital and developing a bottle that’s based on bioplastics, not petroleum plastic?” Like, let’s let the innovation not necessarily just be one more SKU on the shelf, but improve the SKUs that we have, or if people are currently enjoying your products in a particular form factor now today, which involves packaging that they peel away and throw away, what might be an innovative way they could enjoy what you make in a completely different form factor that you haven’t thought about yet? That’s a product innovation and a marketing innovation, that can have both social and environmental impact. Another is, are there swaths of the market that you’re leaving out? We were working with a yogurt company that was looking at places where there were food deserts – and a food desert is a place where communities that are economically challenged don’t have access to healthy foods. And so what they were looking for is “How do we get our high-quality yogurt in convenience stores and bodegas and other places where the choices for consumers are less?” So they had a product strategy that had a social dimension to it, and I think those are all ways that we, as marketers, communicators, brand strategists, can use what we do. It’s how do we leverage our communications vehicles and platforms, and then how do we think about the products that we’re using? 

Adrian Tennant: Sandy, thank you for sharing your insights with us today. And if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you and the work you’re doing at Porter Novelli, what is the best way for them to connect?

Sandy Skees: The best way is on my website, which is SandySkees.com – S A N D Y S K E E S dot com. There’s a place where you can pop me an email, and I’ll be happy to get back to you. 

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. And if you’d like to read Sandy’s book, Purposeful Brands, as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you’ll receive a 25 percent discount when you purchase a print or electronic version online at KoganPage.com. Just enter the promo code, BIGEYE25, at the checkout. Sandy, thank you very much indeed for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Sandy Skees: Thank you so much, Adrian. It was a pleasure.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Sandy Skees, the author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Purposeful Brands. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation and links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. Thanks again for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Inside Coverings 2023, the largest tile and stone trade show in North America. Recorded during the event, host Adrian Tennant is joined by three guests to discuss the latest trends, innovations, and technologies in the tile and stone industry, Bigeye’s role in creating marketing materials for Coverings, and how attending the event benefits designers such as Christina Rexford, who shares her excitement about new products, innovations, and some of her favorite exhibitors.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Carley Conrod: They’re expecting just over 26,000 people to attend, and registration this year was actually up by 20 percent. 

Rhett Withey: Going in, you think like, “Okay, yeah, we’ll make some signage, we’ll do some lanyards, and we’re good to go.” But it’s way more than that. It’s way more than that.

Christina Rexford: It takes your creativity to a whole nother level. it opens so many possibilities design wise and it’s very exciting. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. We are recording today’s podcast at Coverings, an annual international trade show and conference dedicated to the ceramic tile and natural stone industry. It’s being held at the Orange County Convention Center here in Orlando, Florida. To discuss what it’s like to attend Coverings and learn about Bigeye’s involvement in designing and developing marketing materials to support the event, I’m joined by three guests. Christina Rexford is the principal of Christina Rexford Designs, based in Orlando, and currently working in interiors. Welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS, Christina. 

Christina Rexford: Thank you. 

Adrian Tennant: Carley Conrod is an account manager at Bigeye and has worked closely with the Coverings event management team. Hi, Carley. 

Carley Conrod: Hello. Hello. 

Adrian Tennant: Rhett Withey is Bigeye’s Art Director who this year celebrates ten years with the agency. Hi, Rhett.

Rhett Withey: Howdy. 

Adrian Tennant: Carley, let’s start with you. Could you tell us what Coverings is? 

Carley Conrod: Absolutely. Coverings is the largest tile and stone trade show in North America. Featuring more than a thousand global exhibitors from 40 countries, the event brings together industry professionals, including manufacturers, distributors, retailers, contractors, architects, designers, and builders, to showcase their latest products, innovations, and technologies. Coverings provides a platform for attendees to network, share ideas, and learn about the latest trends and developments in the tile and stone industry. The show features a wide variety of exhibitors, educational sessions, hands-on workshops, and design challenges, making it an important event for those involved in the tile and stone market. This year, it’s being held from April 18th through the 21st, here in Orlando. 

Adrian Tennant: Carley, what has Bigeye’s involvement looked like for this year’s Coverings? 

Carley Conrod: Bigeye developed the exposition brand identity and built out additional collateral, including web graphics, print ads, social graphics, and even items needed for the show, like attendees’ badges, along with lots of other things.

Adrian Tennant: And as the account manager, what has your role been specifically? 

Carley Conrod: As an account manager, I’m the agency voice to the client and the client voice to the agency. I, along with our account specialist, Sofia, make sure that all of the pieces of the project are running on time in scope and meet client expectations. So I work with the client to find out what is needed for a certain project and then take that to our internal team, work with our project management team to route it to all the necessary people in the agency, and then get it back to the client.

Adrian Tennant: How have you facilitated communication between the creative team and the Coverings event management team to ensure that we kept within the scope and delivered on time? 

Carley Conrod: We utilize an online project management platform called Basecamp to keep an open line of communication. Basecamp helps us share proofs and receive feedback from the client while keeping everything organized in threads. Sofia and I also meet with the client weekly to touch base on items currently in production and keep an eye on what was coming up on the horizon. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, I had an opportunity to explore the event this morning, and it’s huge. There are over 1,000 exhibitors from over 40 countries. Now, do you know how many attendees the organizers were expecting? 

Carley Conrod: Yes, actually, they’re expecting just over 26,000 people to attend. And registration this year was actually up by 20 percent over 2019, which was their benchmark year, as they returned to pre-Covid operations this year. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, how did you keep the project on track? 

Carley Conrod: This project definitely had many moving parts, especially in the beginning. There were a lot of times when we were handling initial design revisions and final files for different projects all at the same time. And sometimes, one small change on one piece would affect several others, even ones that had already been finalized. Sofia and I used Asana to make sure we always knew the status of every piece that was in production, and it was great to be able to see everything at a glance as well. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, as the client’s representative within the agency, in what kinds of ways did you ensure that the creative team captured the key messages and goals of the Coverings event?

Carley Conrod: The trickiest part was maintaining the messaging for the different audiences and always making sure that the most current messaging was being used. We had a brand messaging document that was constantly being updated, so the creative team always had the most recent copy to pull from. 

Adrian Tennant: Are there any insights or lessons learned from our collective experience this year that you recommend we apply to next year’s event?

Carley Conrod: We will definitely be shifting to a ticket-based system for project management, like Asana, for the production work next year. There were times when we would be working on 10 or 15 different pieces at any given time, and Asana really lends itself to fast-paced, detailed work like that. 

Adrian Tennant: Over to Christina. Now you work in interior design, and you’ve been attending Coverings today. Yes. But this is not your first time at a Coverings event, correct? 

Christina Rexford: No, it is not. 

Adrian Tennant: So tell us a little bit about your previous experience with Coverings. 

Christina Rexford: Well, I’ve gone a couple times, usually when it’s in Orlando, I have not gone to the other location for the show. And it’s always impressive, but it’s at a whole new level. And I think those years have probably a couple years during Covid that they couldn’t come out. They had a lot of wonderful things in the works, and you’re seeing them all today. I know last year I wasn’t able to go, but I’m excited to be able to see what I saw today. 

Adrian Tennant: Now you are the principal of Christina Rexford Designs. I know you have a strong multidisciplinary background that includes graphic design, illustration, jewelry design, and photography. Today you are working on several interior projects. How does coming to an event like covering support your design practice?

Christina Rexford: It’s huge because it takes your creativity to a whole ‘nother level. Because now you’re seeing the products and the fabrication of products align with your imagination that you couldn’t even imagine. I guess it’s a hard way to explain it, but it opens so many possibilities design-wise, and it’s very exciting. And, when you do multiple mediums and design, I love fabrics. I love this. I love that. And you’re finding the tile is merging to almost look like fabrics. And you know, as a designer, it’s very overstimulating. It’s exciting, and it’s really, it’s a treat. It’s a treat to see what’s happening. your creativity has more and more places to go now, which is wonderful.

Adrian Tennant: I know I mentioned that you have a multidisciplinary background, and I believe that includes fashion design. 

Christina Rexford: Well, I worked in fashion, not as a designer, I designed ads, not a clothing designer, but I styled, I did photo shoots and just did the runway shows, you know, the casting and the directing and yeah, it was great. I really enjoyed it. Hard to do once you get married and have kids, so, you know. But yeah, I loved it, and I think fashion leads everything. And you see it in interiors usually a couple of years after you see it on the runway as far as colors, and I’m finding now with this digital photography and the water jet and all these techniques that are just getting better and better, you’re almost seeing the tile become fabric and art and things that it’s no longer your back splashing, you know? It’s now the piece you’re gonna put on the fireplace and wrap around. You know, it’s just really, yes, it’s wonderful. If you love fashion, this is a show you need to go to. If you are a designer or a stylist or whatever that works in interiors, this is where you have to just come and take it all in. ‘Cause you’re not gonna see it at a lot of the local distributors. Not yet. They come here, and then you start to see it. So really it’s exciting. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, I saw you taking plenty of notes as you are walking around and taking business cards, which is exactly what Coverings is for. What were some of the most innovative products or materials you’ve seen being exhibited at coverings this year?

Christina Rexford: I think just the way they’re digital photography has just changed everything anyway, with tile and stone. And, I mean, let’s start with the tile. Of course, some tile, like way back when doula printing, you had to have a volscreen, you know, and then all of a sudden digital photography came and, but it’s getting to a point where they are shooting images of stone that is so precise and finite that you’re looking at a porcelain tile that looks like a big slab of marble, and it’s not. It’s porcelain tile. And then you see the machinery, technological advances where they’re able to make these thin so you can hang them on a wall without it weighing 300, 400 pounds. So you’re seeing the technology between photography and machinery and the etching. And however they’re doing it, you’re seeing it marry with it’s the beauty of the products in general, and it’s just, it’s an explosion of geology and technology every day. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just fantastic. So that is the innovation for me this year was just over the top. I mean, they’re shooting these pieces of marble and stone or phonics, and then they’re photographing it and backing it to glass that you can backlight. But they’re doing it in little sections so that when you get the macro, the micros were all put together, and it’s like you’re looking at the actual stone, but it’s on a piece of glass, and you didn’t have to spend $5,000 – I mean, it’s just, it’s fantastic. And I mean, it just, it, if you can think it, they’re doing it, and it’s the fact that they’re thinking it is what is exciting to me. So, yeah. And then also the techniques that they’re, the finished techniques have been amazing. And then, what they’re incorporating the innovation of bringing in the black lip mother, you know, mother of pearl and all of these other natural elements. I’ve purchased black lip mother of pearl, and I had to get it in England. It wasn’t a common thing you could just buy anywhere. Now I’m seeing it incorporated with porcelains and mosaics, and it’s like, great. They’re all like, the circle’s getting smaller and smaller, and it’s nice. The resources are getting more plentiful for these products, so it’s great. 

Adrian Tennant: Now I mentioned I saw you taking notes of … 

Christina Rexford: … Yeah.

Adrian Tennant: … Exhibitors. Do you want to share some of your faves so far? 

Christina Rexford: Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you the ones that stood out, like stood out, stood out, stop me on my track is Antolini, which is out of Italy. They are really quite something. Beautiful slabs from Italy of marble and various other stones, but they have this technique, and I begged Mark Hubert, who is the manager, there. And he couldn’t tell me, but I tried for two days. But they have this amazing way of finishing these stones. they have many atypical finishes, but what they’ve been doing, Well, some of these is, they’re isolating, it seems like they’re isolating the striations in the stone, which is the character so when you’re looking at it, you can feel the difference like it’s like a three-dimensional feeling almost. Because you can feel where the striations are separated in the stone and, say, you have a marble, it has a flame character, and they’re taking it through, and they’re doing the stratus finish to it. they’re deeper where the expression isn’t because that’s mostly at the sandier, more gravelly stone. So that automatically has the character pullout, and it’s just remarkable. I mean, it’s remarkable. For me, it was very exciting ’cause when you see how they’re, doing the match print of the granite or the marvelous just. This incredible artwork really it’s, it’s amazing. So they were terrific. They’re one to watch. I will watch them. And also Ellen Lando, they have amazing stuff. They have a designer who went to Pratt Fashion and, they look like fabrics, just the water jet technology has really just given so much possibility to these mosaics ’cause they’re just, they’re precisely cut. They’re the colors they’re able to bring in there. It’s just mastery. But this woman is a designer, Dana, that they have. She just took it to a whole ‘nother level for me. And I think maybe, as a designer, I appreciate her designs. It’s not your typical backsplash. It’s odd, you know, when you’re not in Italy having a mosaic artist do it like she’s just doing it here in America, you know, it’s fantastic. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Colorado Stone was really impressive. People will forget that in America, we have our own beautiful marbles, very impressed with them, beautiful finishes. They have a process where they take the marble, which is usually, it can be not the most durable, and they have a process where they’re impregnating it with some type of stabilizer that fills in the pores and makes it more like dolomite, like a denser stone. Makes it more user-friendly. Anyway, very, again, innovation, the technology with the geology, and it’s just great. 

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages. 

Sandy Skees: Hi, I’m Sandy Skees, author of the book, Purposeful Brands: How Purpose and Sustainability Drive Brand Value and Positive Change. Based on three decades of experience, the book presents a clear, practical blueprint for defining and communicating your brand’s purpose and, more importantly, creating alignment across your organization to drive meaningful change. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25% on a print or electronic version of Purposeful Brands by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and e-book bundle offer. When you order directly from Kogan Page, shipping is always free to the US and the UK, which also helps us authors. So to order your copy of Purposeful Brands, go to KoganPage.com. That’s K O G A N, P A G E dot com. And thank you. 

Michael Solomon: Hi, I’m Michael Solomon. During my 40-year career as a marketing professor, consumer psychologist, speaker, and author, I’ve had the privilege of developing strategies with many Fortune 500 companies to help them connect with their customers. Now, you can have access to these strategies through my online course. It’s called Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics. I’ll show you how to apply years of research on consumer psychology to your brand or business. And as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can receive a hundred dollars discount on your enrollment. Just follow the link in the transcript for this podcast on Bigeye’s website and use the provided coupon code to take advantage of this offer. I hope you’ll join me for Engage! to learn how to turn board customers into brand fanatics!

Go to Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics and save $100 with either of these discount coupon codes:For the full payment option: BigeyeFor the three-payment plan option: 3PPBigeye

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. Today’s episode is being recorded at Coverings, the annual international trade show and conference dedicated to the ceramic tile and natural stone industry. I’m talking with Christina Rexford of Christina Rexford Designs, plus Carley Conrod and Red Withey, my colleagues are Bigeye. Do you feel inspired to explore new ideas for projects you’re working on, Christina? 

Christina Rexford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like you said, it opens a possibility, so a lot of times you feel like you’re stifled, like, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that.” But you can’t ‘cause you can’t match material with what you’ve got in your head, you know? So we’re getting real close. So there are so many things that I’ve seen that, “Oh, if I only had that two years ago when I did a water wall, it would’ve been so much easy to use that product than to take the risk and use that product.” You know? So there is just, it’s great. Yeah, I know I keep saying that, but yes, it’s very inspiring and you’re exactly right you’re at a whole new level of inspiration. How’s that? Yeah. 

Adrian Tennant: Now, as you know, there’s growing consumer interest in sustainable products and sustainable living. So I’m interested, did you notice any eco-friendly materials at coverings?

Christina Rexford: Yeah, lots of them. you see a lot of the simulated wood products, whether they’re for wall coverings or architectural elements, or even just the pavers or flooring. the tile industry has, again, with this photography, They’re able to create a product that looks like wood. It’s not wood or, I, I was really impressed with the pavers, and the plank pavers that you could do on a back patio ’cause you want it to be sustainable. You want doing epay, cutting down these beautiful cypress trees to get wood. That’s okay for the moisture and wetness, but you also don’t want it to look like an interior fake wood. You want it to look like you actually used teak or some moisture-friendly wood. And there were a couple of Turkish companies that just nailed it, completely nailed it, and very sustainable. They’re trying to find a distributor, and I hope they do because I really wanna be able to buy their products. So I’m pretty sure they will by the end of the week. But yes, very sustainable. There’ll be a lot less exotic trees being cut down if we can get these products out into people’s back patios. That was the one thing I thought we were missing a few years ago. I mean, we are there, so that’s great. 

Adrian Tennant: So Christina, in what kinds of ways does attending Coverings influence your approach to selecting materials for projects? 

Christina Rexford: I have a mental clipboard. So as I’m walking around, just like in, when you work in fashion, you. That would be great, and this would be great. And you’re pulling, it’s the same thing. I’ve got a clipboard in my head, and I’m like, “Okay, that would be amazing for if I ever did this project,” or “This would be really nice if this other residence that I worked on, and if we do this, this would be great.” Like you’re always matching the product with an actual project you’re working on, or one that you hope to work on, or “If I had a project like that, this would be what I would get.” So you’re consistently putting things on your little clipboards in your head if you have clipboards in your head. 

Adrian Tennant: Christina, do you plan to incorporate any of the design trends or materials that you’ve discovered at coverings into one of your upcoming design projects? 

Christina Rexford: Yes, absolutely. 100 percent. Some of the water jet mosaics would be beautiful out for an apron of a drop in tub, and a master suite. I’m doing a project, a new bill down in Southwest Florida, and it’s on the water, so there were such a femininity to some of these, these products that in Koosa, Koosa always has beautiful stuff, and so does Wow. These are other exhibitors but Koosa, they’re just amazing. Cossa Stone. they just get better and better and better, and they’ve been around a long time. But there’s like a whole new femininity to the products that I’ve noticed. ’cause again, we’re looking at almost fabrics here, but the colors were feminine. The, the, the tight design, it’s just beautiful. So for a home, a master bath, you know, you can bring them in and it’s more like art and, it’s inspiring. 

Adrian Tennant: Christina, what advice would you give to other designers who are considering attending coverings for the first time? 

Christina Rexford: Well, you have to come more than one day and prepare to be overstimulated. it’s just one wow after another. You really, you get a lot of wow at the distributors and the showrooms. You really do. But when you see it like this,it’s a lot and it’s great. You just have to have more than one day to do it, because one day you want to just scan as much as you can. Next day you go back to your favorites, and then you explore what you didn’t get then. So I Irene, three, four days. You could do the whole, I think maybe four days you could get the whole show done. For a show like this, this year, you have to do it. You’ve gotta do it. You’ve gotta go. 

Adrian Tennant: We’ll come back to you in a moment, Christina. Rhett, you’re Bigeye’s Art Director, and you’ve been leading the visual development for this engagement for the Coverings events team. What research did you undertake before starting work on the project? 

Rhett Withey: Well, this was, more than a year-long process. We sent our team to the 2022 Coverings show in Las Vegas to just get the lay of the land basically, and understand what this undertaking is gonna involve. We also looked at the past trade shows for this event, previous years of Coverings to make sure one, we’re not repeating any ideas, but also to kind of understand how they’re using all their elements, in different ways and where are some of the challenges that we might be seeing, just as an outsider. We looked at other competitor trade shows, again to make sure we’re not copying any ideas on accident, but also to see some of those edges of improvement as well. And then we also just look at tile and stone manufacturers and distributors themselves to kind of catch that trend of what they’re doing and see if we can catch anything, that we are seeing creatively that we can involve into the show campaign.

Adrian Tennant: How did you approach the development of the visual branding system for Coverings? 

Rhett Withey: So, we took the name literally – Coverings – and thought about the process of when you’re laying tile or when you’re involving stone, and it’s literally layering pieces on top of each other. So we took that concept, and the entire creative team put together mood boards of what they interpreted that as. And then we got together and took our favorite pieces and talked it out and expanded on that idea of one layer over the other and covering different pieces, each other to create this 2023 Coverings brand. 

Adrian Tennant: What were your main sources of inspiration? 

Rhett Withey: So we literally started at the natural element of earth, where the rock and granite and stone come from. Water, where they’re mixing the mortar or grout. And then just the actual process of laying tile or stone, because it’s a wide audience that’s coming to this event. It’s not just tile and stone distributors or creatives, it’s also the people that are laying and doing the work itself. So how do we incorporate all of those different audiences into a campaign where they can see themselves in the visual elements? So even like the process of taking their pallet with grout and wiping it on the floor, that’s how we got some of the elements that we see in this campaign. 

Adrian Tennant: What are some of the practical considerations you had to take into account when designing so many different marketing assets such as the posters, banners, social media, all those print materials. I mean, as we can see on the show floor, some of these pieces are huge. 

Rhett Withey: Right? So, thankfully years of experience has led up to this, to this moment. But we try to do as much as possible in the vector format. If you don’t know, vector can be scaled infinitely. You could make a logo the size of the moon as long as it’s vector, you’re not gonna lose any texture or quality, in it. So, as much as we could do in a vector, that way, it could be as large as a billboard that’s on the side of the building to as small as the trade show booth number that goes on the floor without losing any sort of quality. That was our main goal for that, and also the sheer amount of assets in the campaign concept itself. That way, if there are certain elements that can’t quite fit on this shape, we don’t have to use, that we can use a different element from the campaign, and it still will come together cohesively.

Adrian Tennant: What challenges did you face during the design process, and how did you overcome them? 

Rhett Withey: It’s mostly going to be the big challenge of the sheer amount of things that have to be produced for this show. ’cause going in, you think like, “Okay, yeah, we’ll make some signage, we’ll do some lanyards, and we’re good to go.” But it’s more – it’s way more than that. It’s way more than that. It’s all of those things, plus, the intangibles that we don’t even think about, wayfinding or the things as small as like swag items, tote bags and stuff. So it’s kind of important thatwe keep to our process and keep things organized, which we do with every client, but as long as we stay organized, then it was very smooth. And Basecamp helps with that, with client communication, our own internal server, our own internal processes all helped with that. 

Adrian Tennant: I’m just curious, can you identify the smallest item that you produced and, of course, the largest?

Rhett Withey: Okay, so the largest is probably the registration walls. Yeah. Which is right across from us right now. Those were probably the largest. The smallest is probably the little booth numbers on the floor …

Carley Conrod: … or the app icons. 

Rhett Withey: … or the app icons. I didn’t think about that one. That’s even smaller. Yeah. And even the app icons have some bit of the branding elements for this campaign as well. 

Adrian Tennant: Were there any specific design trends or styles that you incorporated into the visual branding for coverings to make it resonate with the target audiences?

Rhett Withey: So red is their primary brand color and the client said that they want to keep going with red, so we had to start with that. But red is a very harsh color so we wanted to make sure that we paired it with some colors that could lighten it up a little bit. So we brought in a beige that paired really well with their shade of red. And we brought in this lavender color, which is also very trendy right now. And then when we pair those color elements with typography, which we take a lot of pride in – that we feel we are very good at spotting nice typography, great fonts – and the fonts systems that we chose for this campaign just really, really makes those colors and all the elements come together.

Adrian Tennant: Are there any insights or lessons learned from your experience this year that you recommend we might want to consider for next year’s event? 

Rhett Withey: There’s always room for improvement. Always, in our own work as well. And it really helps walking around and seeing how they’re using things and seeing signs that we didn’t realize that this convention center even had, but they were able to utilize in a good way. That way, we know for the next year they have these kind of signs, so let’s do something even better. So, as much as we are excited about doing this show, being able to walk the floor and seeing everything come to life makes us even more excited for next year’s show and how we’re gonna do even better for next year.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Now, Christina, since you had no access to Bigeye’s designs beyond what you received as an attendee, I’m curious, do you think that Coverings advertising and marketing assets contributed to your anticipation of the event this year? 

Christina Rexford: Yeah, absolutely. You bet ’cause I get a ton of mail, and the piece they sent stuck out and I grabbed it. I registered the minute I got it. Usually I’ll register through one of my vendors. So I literally took the initiative and registered on my own. It was from that direct mail piece that was beautifully done. And the colors, you’re right, just perfect waves. It was just great. Look, great. It got my attention. I pulled it out, you know. Did the call to action … 

Rhett Withey: It worked.

Christina Rexford: It worked. It did what you wanted to do. 

Carley Conrod: And you parked for free.

Rhett Withey: Yeah. And you parked for free. 

Christina Rexford: Yeah. Which is nice. I would’ve paid, but I enjoyed that. Excellent effort. And I got a lot of prompts too, prior, which I really appreciated too, because your weeks are busy and one day bleeds into another, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s right.” I kept getting some additional support from your marketing efforts, and I did appreciate that very much. Got me more excited.

Adrian Tennant: That’s great to hear. Well, Christina, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about your design services, where can they find you? 

Christina Rexford: They can Google my name, and my Houzz page usually pops up: Christina Rexford Designs. I have a website. It’s ChristinaRexfordDesign.com. It’s in the process of being revised and renovated, and I’m on Instagram too, so yeah, they can just search. You’ll find me somewhere. 

Adrian Tennant: Christina, Carley, and Rhett, thank you all very much for joining us this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS. Thanks to my guests this week: Christina Rexford of Christina Rexford Designs, Carley Conrod, Account Manager at Bigeye, and Rhett Withey, Art Director at Bigeye. I’d also like to thank the event marketing team for hosting us at the Coverings podcast studio, with a special thank you to our on-site audio engineer Brian. You’ll find a transcript with links to the resources we discussed today on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘Podcast’ from the menu. And if you enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and contribute a rating or a review. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye. 

Dr. Rachel Lawes returns to discuss the newly expanded second edition of her book, Using Semiotics in Marketing, which takes readers on a complete journey from identifying business problems to publishing and debriefing. Learn how to develop publishable semiotics research by following the step-by-step guides in the book. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can claim a 25 percent discount on Using Semiotics in Marketing at KoganPage.com by using the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Rachel Lawes: Everybody does semiotics all the time, every day. Consumers do this when they encounter your brand, your advertising, your packaging, your corporate website, or whatever it may be. They’re constantly decoding things and interpreting them in light of their signs and codes. That’s why brands and marketers need semiotics so that we can have a role in that process of communication.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Today’s episode is part of our Bigeye Book Club series in partnership with Kogan Page. April’s book selection is the newly expanded second edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing: How To Achieve Consumer Insights For Brand Growth And Profits. The book’s author is the preeminent authority on commercial semiotics, Dr. Rachel Lawes. As the founder of Rachel Lawes Consulting, she has over two decades of commercial experience providing brand and marketing strategies to clients, including Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft, Diageo, and Nike, among many others. A regular international conference speaker, Rachel is a fellow of the Market Research Society and the author of Using Semiotics in Retail, which was a Bigeye Book Club selection last year. To discuss the new edition of her book Using Semiotics in Marketing, Rachel is again joining us from her home in London, England. Rachel, welcome back to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Rachel Lawes: Thanks very much for having me on the show.

Adrian Tennant: For anyone listening who missed the episode last year, could you give us an overview of what semiotics is? 

Rachel Lawes: Yes, of course. I would love to do that. So the simplest possible definition is it’s the study of signs and symbols. And the simplest possible examples of signs and symbols are the components of, for example, brand marks. So if you look at your own brand mark, you’ve probably had to make a lot of design decisions along the way. Is it red or is it blue? Are we going to use nice, bold, capital letters, or are we going to use a cursive typeface with lots of flowing scripts and curlycues on it? So these are what we would call semiotic signs, and they’re loaded with meaning, right? You can probably already detect that I’m thinking in my mind about the difference between Coke and Pepsi, and they manage to convey hugely different brand values just through these small design decisions. So things like color and what typeface are we using? These are the really entry-level examples of what a semiotic sign is. Now, there are many more types of semiotic signs in society, but essentially, the practice of semiotics is about recognizing semiotic signs in the wild and in your, um, consumers’ lives and in your own brand communications and, manipulating them, using them consciously so that you can convey brand messages that you want to convey and which are going to land with your target audience. 

Adrian Tennant: How is semiotics typically applied to marketing contexts? 

Rachel Lawes: That is a great question, and it’s one that I can answer with reference to three different kinds of clients. The first group is brand owners, often global brands, and they are often people who know my work. I’ve been writing and publishing and doing this work for 20-odd years now, so are people out there who know who I am. And because they know what I do and they’ve seen examples of my work, they’re confident about bringing me strategic problems that need solving. So it could be something like, maybe there’s a household brand that is, you know, well established, everybody knows its name, but it’s going out of date. It’s becoming a bit locked and out of touch with contemporary society. Or maybe they’re looking for opportunities for innovation, as it’s so often the case, they want to think up some new products or new services, or they wanna identify some new markets they could tap into. Or another common situation is that they were very comfortable in their category, but now the category is changing quickly. There are lots of new entrants, challenger brands out there, often direct-to-consumer brands, and so on and so on. So these are the types of, quite strategic marketing kind of problems that brand owners will bring to me to solve, Occasionally they’ll come to me with very straightforward questions about things like the packaging at the level of, should we do this in red or blue? but that’s often where they start, and then they evolve and grow and get into the bigger questions. The second group of clients who I work with frequently is ad agencies. ad agencies are loads of fun to work with. They do everything at high speed and, they frequently will find themselves in competitive pitch situations where they need to come up with original ideas at a short notice. and often it’s as if that were not enough of a challenge, they’re expected to come up with original ideas concerning, some quite everyday things, right? Processed cheese and laundry powder and that type of stuff, right? So because semiotics offers a lot of tools for thinking, I’ve got a good track record of being able to come up with winning ideas at speed. So for me, this is a fun challenge. It’s a bit like shorter order cooking, but you need to make a dish that’s new and different every time. So that’s another group of customers who I work with. And the third group of clients is market research agencies. the usual situation is they’re doing some qualitative research. Maybe they’ve done some depth interviews and they will often share, a selection of transcripts with me because I can see things in those conversations that might otherwise go unnoticed. And this is partly arising out of the tools that semiotics equips you with, but also just cause I have a lot of general knowledge that I can draw on about psychology, history, culture, anthropology. I’m saying these things not as a way of saying look at my hobbies, but, because continuing education in all of these subjects, in my view, is a requirement for being able to do semiotics and keep getting better at it.

Adrian Tennant: The first edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing was published in 2020. You’ve added a lot of content for this expanded second edition, including three entirely new chapters. Rachel, what prompted you to update it? 

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we’re three books in at this point. So there’s a story here that links these three books together, right? So the first edition Using Semiotics in Marketing, back in 2020, was a book that I’d waited years to write. I just waited until I wanted to do it, and the time was right in my own mind. You know, I could have written it many years ago. It needed writing for a long time. What it does is provide a self-contained course in semiotics for marketers and market researchers. And, you know, we can discuss what kinds of things it teaches you to do, but let’s just say for now that it goes a long way beyond analysis of data, So the first edition then was a kind of handbook or a guidebook, a self-contained course in semiotics with anybody who wanted to learn how to do it. The second book then concerned retail, partly because there’s a lot of interest in that topic. Unilever, uh, very kindly contributed a lot of content to that book and generally endorsed it and helped promote it because I improved sales for them, in the area of shopper marketing. So, while I was writing this book about retail, I took the opportunity to do a deep dive into the future, cause it’s one of the more exciting things you can do with semiotics right? Is to, form an opinion on where we’re heading, you know, in the near and more distant future, So, I wrote like almost the second half of the book on retail is actually about the future, about the future of retail, also about the future of humanity, about the future of cities and urban living and all that type of stuff. And when I was researching and writing this, material, I essentially uncovered a lot of problems that people were enduring. Now, a lot of pain out there, you know, a lot of anxiety, loneliness, depression, depersonalization, which are really interesting topics, and various other problems that people are encountering right now. Now marketers usually like pain points because where there’s pain, there’s an opportunity for us to do something about it. But I wanted to not stop at pointing out problems. I’m a great big believer in using semiotics to find solutions, One of my personal rules of thumb is that if consumers are having a problem, they’re probably already on the case finding ways to solve that problem, And so, I sent myself this challenge of finding out what kinds of solutions and coping strategies people have identified for themselves? How are people finding ways to be happy? How do they find ways to preserve their mental health, to have good-quality relationships? To feel safe in the world, to feel that society’s moving in a good direction, to feel that we’re making some progress? This is quite a challenge if you look at the state of the world, right? You know, the planet’s on fire, there’s a widening gap between rich and poor. Covid hasn’t gone away, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a lot going on, There are plenty of reasons to feel despondent. So I wanted to do a deep dive into how people are, attempting to resolve the situation for themselves. Because as marketers, that’s what we can learn from. we are not going to be able to, most of the time, come up with something that’s miraculously better than the solutions that people have already developed. It’s just a case of, identifying what those solutions are and then building them into something. Making them into something, using the assumed wealth and power of your brands to really build something positive. So in retail, I identify several problems and, in the new edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing, I set out to find how people are building their own solutions for those problems and what marketers can learn from that.

Adrian Tennant: The book starts with a tongue-in-cheek quiz designed to reveal the reader’s cognitive style. Rachel, can you explain why it’s important to understand one’s true generation? 

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, I think it’s really important not to take this too literally, you know, I mean, I have a sense of humor and to some extent, this quiz is just me joking around. It’s a fun little multiple choice quiz. I think one of, from memory, one of the questions I asked was imagine that you’re in a situation where a coworker that has somewhat of an emotional breakdown at lunchtime in the break room. Okay. And reveals a lot of their personal problems to you. How do you respond to that? You know, and the options are things like, “Well, I’m sympathetic, but I really think they should talk to HR,” through to “All this emoting is making me uncomfortable, but I managed to make them laugh with a few on-point jokes.” So there’s that through to “I feel really happy that they felt safe with me and were able to share their feelings and we were able to talk about it in a respectful and compassionate way.” So these are just to put a simple gloss on it attitudes which are characteristic of different generations. Now, again, we don’t need to be too literal about this or too set on it, you know, it’s really, just a way for me to use a fun engaging little exercise to actually get people to then accept what I have for them, which is some quite heavy duty theory about metamodernism and Western culture and why we like this. But having said that, you know, as much as it’s, an easy entry point for thinking about Western culture, there is also some value in it. You know, we can clearly see that there are, generational differences have emerged, over the last several decades, and that can sometimes make it hard for people to understand each other. So, for me, one of the reasons why I went looking for metamodernism theory was because I wanted to understand what was driving all of this change? We can see that people behave differently now than they used to. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know where the Be Kind movement had come from. I wanted to know something about the sudden ascendance of identity on all of these topics because they’re connected together. And so, I went to find some solutions and so this little fun quiz, I hope is an engaging, lighthearted way of getting people to join me in exploring this question of why has the world changed in this particular direction?

Adrian Tennant: Using Semiotics in Marketing is designed to be a practical manual. What are some aspects of conducting consumer research and developing creative ideas using semiotics that you cover?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, I’d be really happy to talk about this. So, as I mentioned, this book, Using Semiotics in Marketing, is a self-contained course in semiotics for marketers and market researchers. So you might say, well, there’s already books out there on that. And that’s true. There are some really good ones as well. But the books that are out there tend to focus almost entirely on the business of analyzing data. And these are very exciting and engaging activity, right? It’s the part of semiotics almost everybody starts with. So you’ll take some item of packaging or a bit of advertising; even better if you’ve got contrasting ones that you can compare. You start sort of picking them apart and looking for semiotic signs and figuring out what they all mean. Now, this is super fun, and it’s a great way to get going. But for people who are academics, they’re often very advanced in thinking about semiotics, but they, by almost out of necessity, they don’t have loads of business experience or marketing experience, you know? And so that is why, these enormously instructive and helpful books, which we couldn’t do without, are often focused solely on the kind of data analysis element of things, But as anybody who’s ever done consumer research knows, there’s a heck of a lot more to a market research project than data analysis. And so this is the first book, and I think as far as I know, the only one printed on semiotics, which takes the readerIt takes ’em on a complete journey from, starting with, I have a business problem, we might need some consumer research. Maybe we need semiotics. I don’t know. I’ll take you from there through how to write a brief, how to write a proposal. How to plan a project, including things like, do you want to include some field work? Do you wanna meet some consumers? What kind of sampling are you going to do through different ways to do the analysis? how to, then write a report concerning your findings, how to quality check that report and make sure that you’re saying something that’s both true and helpful, and also how to publish and debrief, right? So it’s a really, is a complete end-to-end journey Which, is also accompanied by exercises throughout. So the kind of proposition of the book is that if you do all the exercises in each chapter in the order in which they’re presented by the end of the book, you’ve got a publishable piece of work, a com. It might be your first effort with semiotics and maybe you’ve got a long. Journey ahead of you, but you’ll have a competent enough, good enough piece of work that you can share with other people to, make their lives easier and to, show off your own skills. So that is why, using So In Marketing is a different book. And added to that, as you mentioned, I included chapters on,how to use semiotics to become more creative and how to innovate as well, because those are very exciting topics for business clients.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages. 

Adrian Tennant: Each month in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail and brand. Our featured book for April is Using Semiotics in Marketing: How To Achieve Consumer Insights For Brand Growth And Profits by Rachel Lawes. In this second edition, Rachel has added new revelations about brands, consumers, and their emerging needs, plus three new chapters. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of the book with the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and ebook bundle offer. When you order direct from Kogan Page, shipping is always free to the US and UK, and it helps the authors too. So, to order your copy of Using Semiotics in Marketing, go to KoganPage.com. That’s K O G A N, P A G E .com.

Michael Solomon: Hi, I’m Michael Solomon. During my 40-year career as a marketing professor, consumer psychologist, speaker, and author, I’ve had the privilege of developing strategies with many Fortune 500 companies to help them connect with their customers. Now, you can have access to these strategies through my online course. It’s called Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics. I’ll show you how to apply years of research on consumer psychology to your brand or business. And as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can receive a hundred dollars discount on your enrollment. Just follow the link in the transcript for this podcast on Bigeye’s website and use the provided coupon code to take advantage of this offer. I hope you’ll join me for Engage! to learn how to turn board customers into brand fanatics!

Go to Engage! How To Turn Your Bored Customers Into Brand Fanatics and save $100 with either of these discount coupon codes:For the full payment option: BigeyeFor the three-payment plan option: 3PPBigeye

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Dr. Rachel Lawes, semiotician, futurist, marketer, and the author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club Selection, Using Semiotics in Marketing, Second Edition. Rachel, How do signs, texts, and codes work?

Rachel Lawes: You know, there’s a little bit of jargon in semiotics. In the material and the books that I write I try to keep it to a minimum and I try to, where I have to use these words, I try to define them as crisply as possible because it makes everybody’s lives easier. So let’s take a nice, easy approach to this. Okay. let’s imagine that, one morning the postman arrives at your. And, something in an envelope lands on your doormat. And, this envelope and its contents are what we would call a text. It’s a little self-contained object. It didn’t exist in your world a few minutes ago, but then it arrives through your letterbox and now it does, know it’s a thing in your world. And that right there is a text, you know, doesn’t depend for its meaning on, the color of your carpet or what type of lock you’ve got on your front door or that type of stuff, right? It’s just a little self-contained text all by itself. And, it’s entirely composed of semiotic signs. So let’s imagine that you open this envelope, which is white and, rectangular, not too large. when you open it up, there’s a place of folded cardboard inside and you take out this folded cardboards. And on the side facing you, there’s a brightly colored picture, right? And you can recognize some elements of this picture. There’s some, balloons in different colors, and maybe there’s also some glitter and, there’s, some party poppers and a few stars maybe, and that type of stuff. And it says, there’s a word at the top that says invitation all looking good, right? And before you’ve even opened this thing and looked inside and you know there’s going to be some script inside some text, before you even have opened it, you can already detect all these individual Semiotic signs, right? The balloons, the particular choices of colors. this word up at the top that says invitation, the particular typeface. also what sort of card stock has been used here? The one I’m visualizing and maybe the one you are thinking of too, if it’s got balloons in glitter on it, it’s fairly, probably moderately cheap shiny card stock. It’s not super heavy white ivory paper that’s been embossed. You know what I mean? So all these things are individual semiotic signs, right? And they all mean things by themselves. Like you could get any consumer to free associate around the idea of a balloon, and they’ll come up with all sorts of rich stuff about childhood and happiness and being carefree and that type of thing, So all of these are individual signs in themselves. Useful, but more than that, as you interpret the meaning and significance of this card and what it wants you to do, we start to deploy the idea of a semiotic code, You will quickly perceive, assuming that you know you are old enough and you’ve had enough, experience in this particular culture, that a birthday party or something like a birthday party is happening. You’ve got an idea of what a birthday party is, how you’ll be expected to dress, what sorts of things will happen, likely what kind of day or day of the week it’s likely to be. And so what you are doing there is identifying a code, which is to say that you are recognizing that these , balloons not just meaningful in themselves, but they are, often found in the same place at the same time in the company of other semiotic signs, Just like people, semiotic signs tend to have friends, right? They have mates and champions who they hang out with, So where you find balloons, you often find glitter and, silvery cursive scripts in reference to parties and stuff like that, SoThis is an example of how everybody does semiotics all the time, every day, you recognize the individual semiotic signs are adding up to something, a code, which is greater than the sum of its parts, So in a sense, every time you receive a piece of mail through your front door and open it and make sense of it, you are doing semiotics, right? Consumers do this all the time, and they do this when they encounter your brand. When they encounter your advertising, your packaging, your, corporate website or whatever it may be, they’re constantly decoding things and interpreting them in light of their signs and codes. And it’s because consumers do this all the time and without thinking about it, and because they do it in this really unstoppable way, that’s why brands and marketers need semiotics so that we can have,more of a role in that process of communication.

Adrian Tennant: Could you explain the differences between bottom-up analysis and top-down analysis In semiotics?

Rachel Lawes: It’s a question that I get asked a lot, and I’m always happy to talk about it because it’s really important. So, a couple of times already in this conversation, I’ve characterized a situation where you might be a newcomer to semiotics, either as a practitioner or as a buyer of research. And, I’ve said a couple of times now that when you are a beginner, you’re going to start in predictable ways. The common scenario is that you might start with decoding packaging. It’s the easiest possible thing that you can do. And, honestly, a lot of practitioners will stop there. They will collect a few texts, identify some signs and symbols, sort them into codes. And that will stop there. Now this is an activity, which in my view is one-half of semiotics, which is called bottom-up semiotics. And you can perhaps see why it’s called bottom-up, right? We start with very tiny little units of communication, like semiotic signs. We figure out what they mean and we gradually work up to something larger, often identifying codes. so there’s something I wanna say at this juncture, which I think is important. I’m speaking to you if you practice semiotics. Okay. I know this activity is easy and fun and useful, I know, but, if we, stop there, then our client is justified in asking how this is different from, let’s say, a focus group exercise. Because you know, let’s say that you want to research tea. You know, you could type 20 packages of tea, put them in front of a focus group and they adeptly sort the T into groups, which we could regard as codes, and they’ll point out the symbiotic signs and make the difference. So the, is it a really relevant, salient question, right? How is this different from anything a focus group can do? It’s because there’s a missing piece that is not as available commercially, but is absolutely vital, which is top-down semiotics. So the thing to know about semiotics is it’s very interdisciplinary, and it has at least two parents. One of these is linguistics, which is where this detailed focus on individual signs and symbols comes from. You can see how words are semiotic signs, right? But the other parent of, semiotics is anthropology, and that means this, often quite broad brush thinking about culture, about what makes, the UK different from the United States, for example, or what makes Anglo-American cultures different from Europe and, and so on and so on. And so, the reason why we want this kind of thinking in our semiotic practice, Is because it gives some points and purpose to that bottom-up activity, So, instead of like using the birthday invitation example that I was talking about earlier, we don’t just stop at the point of observing that there’s a semiotic code, which has to do with parties and celebrations, even though that’s easily converted into something like an ad campaign. using a top-down approach, we are,then invited to consider, what in fact is the status, of, let’s say birthdays and celebrations, in this particular culture for this particular market. how does it differ in other parts of the world? How does it differ historically?. How might it differ in the future? And, what kind of, I wanna say philosophical experiments can we do with this idea? imagine we were doing some work for Hallmark, let’s say. And we wanted to,uh, give them some new ideas about things like birthday cards and greetings cards, One of the first things you’re going to want to do is take your target market, let’s say the United States, and make a complete list of everything which is conventionally believed and accepted about birthdays, And then you start turning those ideas on their heads. Look for reasonable oppositions or reasonable reversals to those ideas. all your time. You’re trying to break out of the frame of common sense, So you can break out of it by going to a different point in history, by going to a different part of the world, by going to the future. And you can break out of it by philosophically crash-testing the foundational beliefs about why birthdays matter and what a celebration is, and all of these are ways of,giving you a fresh point of view on familiar subjects, and now you’ve got some real power in your hands. Now you can really start to develop creative ad campaigns. You can genuinely start to innovate. You can start to, identify,opportunities within a category that other people haven’t spotted, and so on and so on. So, bottom-up is great and it’s where everybody starts, but if you want to prove that you are better than and different from a focus group and if you really wanna start shaking things up and being innovative and creative and special, and getting paid a decent daily rate for your work, top-down is the necessary complement to your bottom-up work.

Adrian Tennant: I’m curious, how does semiotics make you more creative? 

Rachel Lawes: You have to constantly look for ways to surprise yourself. That’s really what keeps the creative duties flowing. You know, back when semiotics was first taking off, people used to sometimes, talk about it as desk research, which was always a description that I felt really uncomfortable with because yes, you’re going to have to sit at your desk at some point, you know, there’s going to be a lot of reading and there’s going to be a lot of writing of PowerPoint decks and so there is going to be sitting down. But to describe it as desk research is really to miss the point. I think the thing is with Symbiotics, it’s a lifelong commitment. You know, you can’t just do a bit of packaging analysis for a couple of hours at the office and then forget about it the rest of the time cause you’re never going to make any progress. You know, so much like being an artist, it’s a kind of lifelong thing. Artists are constantly looking for ways to feed their own creativity and feed their own imaginations. And you need this with Symbiotics as well. a key question in Semitics that I use all the time when I approach anything is, um, ask myself, where have I seen this before? it could be a visual image, like in somebody’s ad. It could be a mission statement, could be a strapline. Could be just do an interesting turn of phrase or an interesting expression on someone’s face, right? And one of my first questions is going to be where have I seen this before? So you need to give yourself as many reference points as possible in order to answer that question, So, obviously that’s why you wanna read a lot, but you also wanna have as many different experiences as possible. You want to go out and meet people and you need to travel as much as possible and see the world as much as you can. I try to go out of my way to see a lot of art, because it refreshes what, I guess you could say, neural networks. It helps me to, combine pieces together in this new way. I try to have new experiences a lot of the time and I also do exercises, which might be surprising to people, but I do formal exercises which encourage me to look at the world from another point of view. and there are so many of these things you can do. You know, like if you’ve got a very particular point of view on how your categories should operate, try and just write a page of stuff where you argue the opposite point of view because it will really help you, you know. or another thing is to express yourself creatively through lots of different media. symbiotics doesn’t mean endlessly writing all the time on a keyboard. You know,your mind will be more flexible and you’ll be more able to have new ideas for brands if you allow yourself to explore ideas through lots of different things. I make collages and, you know, I’m like visual art and a thing that’s worth exhibiting, but it helps me think. in case this sounds a bit abstract, I’m just going to quickly share with you, an example of one of the things I do, which was a bit too spicy and controversial to be included in the book my publisher told me. So, one thing that’s really fun to do that I really recommend if you’re trying to explore a category, is to, take your client brand Mark and, apply it to some ads, not just competitor ads, but ads in completely unrelated categories or even at different points in history, because you’ll learn something, So one of my students did this. I mentioned that I’d do some academic work from time to time. So at the time I was teaching a course on creativity for business students at Regent’s University, one of my students did some excellent work where, her brand of choice was Heineken. she worked with physical media, you know, she was printing and cutting out and sticking things, sticking bit of paper together. And she, cut out the, Heineken logo and essentially made stickers out that, and applied these, brand marks to, lots of other ads with interesting results. so one was like a early 1980s ad for Pampers talking about how to get babies to be quiet. Another one was an ad from the 1960s for, I think it was Lux soap featuring a woman lying in a bubble bath, surrounded by pink bubbles, you know, with a big pink bow in her hair. I think she might have had a telephone in one hand, and it was a message about kind of self-care and self-indulgence, you know, so doing this a really interesting exercise because when you apply your client’s logo to another ad, you’ll find that it’ll either make sense or it won’t, right. When you try to read it, which is what consumers do all the time, when you try to read this new text that you’ve created, you’ll either make sense or else it won’t. And if it immediately makes sense, often with humorous results, then you’ve learned something from that about your category about, in this case, alcohol consumption actually is a form of self-care about relaxation and pampering and about its pacifying and soothing abilities. 

Adrian Tennant: Rachel, could you share a couple of case studies from your consulting work where using semiotics significantly impacted your client’s marketing strategies? 

Rachel Lawes: Last year, I was a finalist in the Business Impact Awards, known as the Bobby Awards, along with a client of mine – a market research agency called Narrative Health. And they operate in the pharmaceutical space. And so together we were nominated for this award for business impact. So, the client was a company called MSD and they make drugs that treat cancer. And it’s important to realize, I guess, that, you could have the best cancer drug in the world, but if people are not willing to take it or if they’re disengaged from their own healthcare generally, then they’re not going to be able to benefit from it. So, the business impact of this piece of research that we did together concerned, identifying and bringing on board new segments of consumers who, for whatever reason, are disengaged from treatment itself and from their various treatment options. And I wanna say that in fact, this situation is not limited to cancer. It’s a very common problem across pharmacies causing healthcare, right? So people will try things and start out full of hope. You know, they get diagnosed. They’re initially dismayed, but also sometimes relieved and also sometimes full of hope because their doctor’s telling them that there are treatment options, And then they try a few things and they get burned out. And then their resistance, trying anything new because they’ll take this attitude that, well, we’ve tried this before and nothing works. I’m doomed, and so on and so on. So this is a known problem across lots of different healthcare, situations. So I mentioned earlier that sometimes people will share transcripts for me to look at. As you can probably tell based on the things I’ve been saying today, semiotics is, very concerned with the stories we tell ourselves and, because we use these stories on a daily basis to build the world that we live in. like I was describing about the birthday card earlier, and probably if listeners are from a similar culture to me you could picture a lot just from those few words. Maybe you could picture the kind of hallway, maybe you can picture the front door, the letterbox, what kind of floor covering is there, exactly what does this envelope look like? What are its dimensions? You know, there’s a lot of shared cultural knowledge there that enables the speaker and the listener to cooperate in a, story in which there’s a, a birthday invitation with all that that implies, right? So these stories that we tell ourselves in which things like birthdays and birthday parties happen this is how,cooperatively and collectively we build certain versions of reality for ourselves, right? Now exactly the same thing happens when you get a diagnosis of, let’s say, cancer or some other incurable condition. What will happen is that people will start to, they’ve got it’s shocking thing to happen, and you’ve gotta try and make sense about that. So people will search around and they’ll start to craft a story about themselves, about the state of the world, about society, about their relationships, about, medical, institutions, about sometimes about doctors specifically. and they quite quickly will build a version of reality for themselves in which certain things happen and certain things are impossible. And so because, I’m a semiotician and I’ve got a good eye for language, I’m quite, able to spot when this is happening. And more to the point, it’s not just about being able to identify when people are telling themselves a negative story that might be keeping them away from treatment, but you can actually identify quite a number of different stories which people are deploying, and you can specify what that’s doing for them, how they’re benefiting living in this version of reality. And you can also start to have an informed point of view on things like patient information materials and how we can align those to unmet consumer needs. it’s a fairly specific example, but essentially semiotics will enable you to spot when semiotic signs become stories and stories become very specific versions of reality and a real-world that may or may not exist. So you can do a lot with that. And essentially, sales for MSD went up. So there’s the business impact of that. A more prosaic example: I was involved in the creation of a very successful campaign for McVitie’s with Grey London, in which they, with my help, managed to make biscuits into a very powerful symbiotic sign, signifying the kindness of strangers, which is a compelling emotional concept. It’s very timely and relevant. And, it was something that hadn’t been overdone already. So quite a nice example of the ways in which quick semiotic insights can convert into a new and different ad campaign.

Adrian Tennant: Fantastic conversation, as always, Rachel. I know you’ve got some upcoming speaking events, so where can IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners find you?

Rachel Lawes: So my next conference is going to be EphMRA, that’s the European Pharmaceutical Research Association, where I’m going to be giving a presentation of some original, semiotic research concerning menopause. And then, in May, I’m going to be at IIEX, the innovation conference in Texas. And the reason for that is because I was invited out there by McDonald’s. They also have a podcast, and they want me to be a guest. So I’m going to go all the way out to Texas so that we can do some live streaming from the show. 

Adrian Tennant: And if you’d like to obtain a copy of Rachel’s latest book, Using Semiotics in Marketing, Second Edition, as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you’ll receive a 25% discount when you purchase online at koganpage.com. Just enter the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout. Rachel, thank you very much indeed for being our guest again on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Rachel Lawes: Thanks very much for inviting me, Adrian. That was great.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Dr. Rachel Lawes, prominent commercial semiotician, and the author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Using Semiotics in Marketing. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation along with links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at Bigeye agency.com. Just select podcast from the menu. Thanks again for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

We delve into Bigeye’s national pet ownership study alongside Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson, examining the legal recognition of animals as sentient beings. We also investigate the impact of social media, with Bigeye’s Savannah Santiago explaining how she selects pet influencers. And we learn about medical breakthroughs that could extend the lifespans of dogs and humans. The multifaceted aspects of pet ownership and advertising: download the full report at bigeyeagency.com/pets-23

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: It’s not strange to me to see Gen Z using social media accounts for their pets to talk for and about their pets’ lived experiences. 

Savannah Santiago: We definitely see more and more people incorporating pets into their wedding, which I think is such a beautiful thing. the incorporation of pets and weddings just further drives home the point that more and more people identify pets as members of the family. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS – fresh perspectives on the business of advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us today for the first episode of our eleventh season. This week we’re going to talk about the results from Bigeye’s second national study of pet ownership, which reflects responses from over a thousand pet owners nationwide. We’re joined again by Dr. Andrea Loren Simpson, a research assistant professor and lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Laren Simpson is also the author of the book, Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined The Household. Andrea, welcome back to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Thank you, Adrian.

Adrian Tennant: Regular listeners of IN CLEAR FOCUS know that we’ve been charting the rise of Influencer marketing for quite some time. Reflecting the widespread use of social media, you identified several pet Influencers in your book, Just Like Family. You also cited a 2016 study that then found 30 percent of owners followed pet Influencers. Well, the Bigeye study reveals that today, one-half of all owners do. Owners of multiple pets are a bit more likely at 54 percent, but the most likely to do so belong to the youngest cohort, Generation Z, among whom almost three in five But owners are not just following. Approaching one-quarter of owners also manage social media accounts on behalf of their pets. Dog owners are slightly more likely to do so than cat owners, but again, it’s Gen Z that leads: 36 percent manage social media accounts on behalf of their pets, in contrast to 11 percent of Gen X owners. And this also seems to be related to the owner’s environment. Urban pet owners are three times more likely to be hoping their pet becomes an Influencer than those in rural communities, and at 32 percent, male pet owners are 11 points more likely to be managing a pet’s account than female owners. Andrea, are you surprised how these numbers have increased and what does it tell us about the nature of social media and pet celebrity?

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Well, what I would say is that this trend, especially for Gen Z, to be involved with social media just in general, I mean, your listeners know this as Gen Z has grown up on social media. So the Influencer piece is not surprising to me. It’s kind of Gen Z’s form of advertising. You think about television-based advertising, this is Gen Z’s form of advertising. And to see that there has been this dramatic increase in pet Influencers is not surprising either, because, as we’ve been talking about, there has just been this historical shift towards thinking of dogs and cats, in particular, in terms of personhood. Certainly, Clinton Sanders, who is a human-animal behaviorist, talked about how we talk for our pets. We talk about what their desires are, their needs, their wants. What their histories are, right? We talk for them. And as a result, it’s not strange to me to see Gen Z using social media in general and social media accounts for their animals, their pets to talk for and about their pets’ lived experiences. But I think that trend is also a response to others within the same generation who are also viewing dogs and cats as valuable members of the family, but not just valuable members of the family, valuable consumers – that really, what I think advertisers have to focus on is advertising to our pets now, not advertising to us as the owner. And so you see this in social Influencer accounts where you’ve got celebrity pets, and the pets are wearing particular clothes or eating particular food, or going to particular movies or whatever it happens to be, because what we are now perceiving, especially Gen Z’s perceiving dogs and cats as our actual consumers and these pet Influencers can help them to make money, right? So you talked about men versus women being more likely to have social media accounts and pet Influencer accounts, for their animals. This makes sense to me. There’s a greater kind of masculine focus on providing for and bringing money into a family. So utilizing dogs and cats in this way seems very gendered to me. It would make sense that more men were doing it. But really thinking about the pets as consumers, and then thinking about what their preferences and desires are, all of this is no surprise to me. I will say this too, I mean, Influencers are really all about marketing, right? In my mind, social Influencers are about marketing products. They get paid to market products sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in unobvious ways. I think that this is probably more evidence for Gen Z, that through their modes of advertising, they are reproducing pets in a way that supports that pets are family and that the multi-species family is a new family structure, and that that family in and of itself is increasingly kind of spending on services for sure.

Adrian Tennant: In Bigeye’s study, one-half of all owners say they purchase costumes for their pets. Owners who follow pet Influencers are more than twice as likely to report having photos of their pets taken by professional photographers at 50% than owners who do not follow pet Influencers at 21 percent. Andrea, do you find this point interesting? 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: I think that pet owners who are more likely to be followers of social media accounts, especially social media accounts that mention professional pet photography, I think that going and buying that service and feeling justified in doing it because they’ve seen the reproduction of the multi-species families through social media advertising, helps them reinforce their perception of their dogs and cats as family members, as children. And it also rewards them, right? It gives them a good feeling because, “Here is my family, here’s the professional photography of my family,” and they are deserving of recognition as such. “My family has four legs. Yours has two, your children have two, mine have four. We’re all the same.” So Gen Z being the ones that are the most wrapped up in this, it’s very unsurprising to me, but interesting.

[Music]

Adrian Tennant: Since the earliest print ads, animals have often been used in advertising. CPG brands’ distinctive assets include Tony the Tiger for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, the Aflac duck, Chester Cheetah for Cheetos, and of course, the GEICO gecko. Domestic animals like dogs and cats are employed by advertisers to elicit emotional connections with consumers. Retail giant Target’s mascot is called Bullseye: a white dog with the Target logo painted around one. The insurance company MetLife used Snoopy, the beagle from the Peanuts comic strip, as their brand mascot for more than 30 years. And Bush’s Baked Beans commercials featured a talking golden retriever named Duke, always attempting to reveal the secret family recipe. Today’s social media has further expanded the role of animals in advertising with the rise of pet Influencers, allowing brands to capture consumers’ attention and build awareness in new ways. To discuss what this means in practice, I’m joined now by Savannah Santiago, Bigeye’s social media manager. Savannah leads our agency’s social media content creation team and manages partnerships with Influencers. Savannah, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Savannah Santiago: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Adrian Tennant: So, can you tell us about the members of your multispecies family?

Savannah Santiago: Yes, so we have Willow. She is a four-year-old Australian Shepherd who just happens to have a dash of great pyrees in her. So this makes her around 75 to 80 pounds. We also have Benny, he’s a rescue cat who’s also about four years old, and the two are basically besties.

Adrian Tennant: I know you love being outdoors and recently spent some time as a digital nomad. You decided to take your dog and cat along with you as you traveled cross-country. How did that work out? 

Savannah Santiago: You know, there were some really incredible and fun parts about having them both with us. And there were also some not-so-glorious moments about having them along the whole time. They’re both super great travelers, thank goodness. We have a pet hammock in the back of our truck, that’s where they both hang and sleep in addition to having the soft-sided cat carrier open on the floor, and that’s where he just kind of goes to sleep whenever he wants. As for the truck bed camper, they would just nap together all day. And I have so many pictures to prove it because it was too cute not to take pictures! And then my husband made a pull-out drawer for his cat box, so we were able to put it away and then pull it back out at night. That way, we weren’t just stepping in cat litter all the time. And then we also have a super cute stick-on cat scratcher that he would play with at night, and then the food and water would just kind of get left out. So that was a little bit of our routine when we were on the road. But the biggest hurdle was definitely the cat at nighttime. You know, that’s kind of when they wanna go on the prowl, they wanna go play, they wanna get the zoomies. So he definitely wanted to go outside. And towards the end of our three-week trip, he definitely wanted his space to go explore. He actually ended up running away for 36 to 48 hours. He snuck out the back door. Long story short, we ended up getting him an Apple tag so that we could just let him go out at night, and he would come back in the morning, and we’d always know exactly where he was.

Adrian Tennant: That’s a relief – that he came back!

Savannah Santiago: Yes. Oh, for sure.

Adrian Tennant: One of our clients that you are working with is a retail chain that specializes in providing pet supplies, pet food, and pet-related products from its over 200 brick-and-mortar locations, as well as an online store. This is a relatively new account, so I’m curious, how does the social content planning and creation process compare to other brands that you’ve worked with?

Savannah Santiago: So far, it’s been an absolute blast. It’s fun getting to be creative and market for furry or feathery animals, whichever one you have. I was just making some graphics yesterday and was literally cracking myself up because of the expressions of some of the animals in some of the photos. Now, while it’s super fun, it still had a learning curve because you could have one idea for content, but the animal could be totally uncooperative, and you’ll have to pivot your concepts entirely. So as we’re planning it, it takes a lot in order to balance, you know, the priorities of so many different types of pets in addition to in-store and online promotions. But all in all, it’s becoming one of my favorite accounts to create content for.

Adrian Tennant: What types of social content are you finding resonate well with pet owners? 

Savannah Santiago: So overall, video content is definitely king. In a recent study done by Sprout Social, about two out of three users prefer short-form video over other types of content. We’re really leaning into trends, especially with this brand. We can let our hair down and show their personality when making these videos and the copy and the graphics. Pets are fun, so we wanna make it fun. There are two pillars of content that I find resonate really well. First off being entertainment. You know, pet owners love seeing content of pets, regardless if it’s theirs or not. As a pet lover and viewer myself, I’ll send dozens of them to my husband over the week so that we can sit down and watch them together – just laugh over cats and dogs and doing crazy, silly things. The second one is educational. Whether your dog is an anxious traveler and you’re looking for tips to make it a calmer process or flea and tick prevention in these springtime months, or what to buy for a new puppy before you bring it home, or what type of food to buy your pet during different phases of life. The important part of this pillar is to show the brand as a leader in the industry without coming off as boring or without a personality to consumers. It’s just a super fine balance, to find there.

Adrian Tennant: Well, as you know, in Bigeye’s national study, we found that over one-half of all owners follow pet Influencers. In the report, we list the top six dogs and the top six cats their owners told us they follow. Savannah, are there any on those lists that you’d previously come across?

Savannah Santiago: You know what? I actually only heard of a couple, and I don’t follow any of those. I do, however, follow a handful of other accounts that are in that pet Influencer space. The ones that I follow, I just kind of resonate with them on a personal level. You know, they take their cats and dogs on hiking trips or camping trips, or they travel out of their camper or their van, or they have certain breeds of dogs that I really like. So I actually don’t follow any of those. But they are really funny ‘cause I was going through all of their content after I looked into seeing which ones were the top ones, and they’re very funny. 

Adrian Tennant: We also learned that approaching one-quarter of all owners manage social media accounts on behalf of their pets. Savannah, I’m curious, are you one of them? Do you manage accounts for either of your pets? 

Savannah Santiago: I don’t, I use my personal account as a place to dump all of our adventures, and Willow is already in there most of the time. If you were to follow my personal, there would definitely be a lot of pet content on there. 

Adrian Tennant: Do you have any friends that do?

Savannah Santiago: Oh, totally. I absolutely do. I can think of at least one off the top of my head and probably two or three more.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m discussing the results from Bigeye’s national study of pet ownership with Savannah Santiago, Bigeye’s social media manager. Are you seeing any trends or strategies employed by pet Influencers that are unique to pets or that are just not as prevalent in other categories? 

Savannah Santiago: Yeah, absolutely. There are always trends that are going to be unique to a category, just like pets. And then there’s going to be ones that are more universal that, you know, maybe Just a fashion industry can take on and the pet industry can, do its own spin on it or the music industry and vice versa. there’s just definitely some more evergreen universal ones that can go both ways. But yes, there’ll always be ones that are unique to pets.

Adrian Tennant: What role do you think humor plays in the success of pet Influencers on social media? 

Savannah Santiago: I think it plays a pretty big role. You know, humor, relatability, and even just being cute are kind of all key players in the pet Influencer game. People wanna laugh and love seeing pets do silly things, so, humor is just kind of the best of both worlds.

Adrian Tennant: If anyone listening is considering working with an Influencer, whether for a pet brand or a non-pet brand, can you explain how you typically assess an Influencers suitability for a brand partnership?

Savannah Santiago: Yes. So typically, after chatting with the brand, we’ll align on priorities and, for example, are we going to pursue a pet account versus a pet owner account? What type of pet does the Influencer have? Where the Influencer lives, where most of their audience lives, how frequently do they post about the pet? Also, have they done any other competing partnerships in the last six or so months? So those are just the high level things that we usually look into when looking at an Influencer.

Adrian Tennant: Can you explain the difference between nano, micro, and macro-Influencers?

Savannah Santiago: Yes, so there’s nano, which is about 1,000 to 10,000 followers. There’s micro, which is 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and then actually there’s another level in there called mid-tier, which is 50,000 to 500,000 followers. And then macro is 500,000 to a million followers. And then you have mega, which is your one million plus followers. Those are usually celebrities or the biggest accounts that are out there. 

Adrian Tennant: Savannah, what kind of engagement metrics should brands consider when evaluating an Influencer’s audience?

Savannah Santiago: First, I look at the content quality and the overall tone of their content. If the content doesn’t align with the brand or meet the standards of the brand, then the rest of the metrics really don’t matter. Second, I look at the relevance. Their content might be high quality, but does it have any relevance to the brand at all? Are they breed-specific, pet-specific? Do they talk about pet health, training, fashion, lifestyle, et cetera? It’s important to make sure that they can speak to at least one thing about the brand. That way, there’s a connection between the brand and the Influencer. Third is consistency. How often are they posting about the pets? Daily, weekly, monthly? If it’s less than monthly, probably not a good fit. Then, have they collaborated with a competitor? If so, how recently? Depending on the brand and the Influencer, if we’d still pursue after a previous collaboration with a competitor. Sometimes if it was a one-off partnership or something, but six months after that would generally be long enough in the past for us to consider the Influencer as an option. And then, after they pass all of that, I’ll look at their engagement rate, how many people are engaging with their content. The higher engagement rate usually indicates a more dedicated, interactive audience. So then lastly, I look at audience demographics. If the majority of their audience is from a location where there isn’t a brick-and-mortar, or a product isn’t available for purchase, it really just doesn’t benefit us or the brand to invest in that Influencer.

Adrian Tennant: In the Bigeye report, we also list products that owners told us are their dogs’ and cats’ favorites. What are your pet’s favorite toys? 

Savannah Santiago: So Willow has a toy moose, which was on that list, and that was one I was most shocked at that, that was a very common one because I thought she was special. But she absolutely loves her toy moose. She does love a good tennis ball, but unfortunately, she just wants to strip the fuzz off of it. So those don’t usually last very long. And then she loves Kong toys, with peanut butter inside. Those are a big hit. and then she also just loves any sort of hard bone chew toy type of thing. And then Benny just recently got a cat tree upgrade. Our friend gave us their cat tree because their cat didn’t use it anymore. So my husband combined our old one, and our new one, just like adult-sized Legos, and built an eight or nine-foot tall cat tree. So not to worry, it’s not going to fall over. It’s screwed into the wall! But Benny is absolutely obsessed with it – it’s amazing.

Adrian Tennant: One of the things that Andrea commented on was that having photos of pets taken professionally appeals most to younger consumers, who are among the most likely to engage with social media and follow pet Influencers. Savannah, you are married to a professional photographer, so do you see social media influencing the style of photographs your husband’s clients request for weddings or other events? 

Savannah Santiago: Yes, absolutely. We definitely see more and more people incorporating pets into their weddings, which I think is such a beautiful thing. We even did it ourselves with both our cat and dog. In Colorado, your pet can actually be your witness, so both of their paw prints are on our marriage license. But I think the incorporation of pets and weddings just further drives home the point that more and more people identify pets as members of the family. So yes, I completely agree that social media and professional photography do have at least a little bit of an influence on, clients’ requests for their wedding photographs.

Adrian Tennant: Savannah, thank you for taking the time to chat with us.

Savannah Santiago: Thank you so much for having me. 

 [Music]

Adrian Tennant: Two-thirds of pet owners in the US believe that animals deserve the same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation. This belief is held most strongly by Gen X, among whom over three-quarters agree. But there are some differences based on gender. While more than seven in 10 owners identifying as female agree, just over one-half of males do. And owners in the Midwest are the most likely to agree that animals deserve some protection from harm and exploitation, but it’s still appropriate to use them for the benefit of humans at 36 percent. That’s 13 points higher than owners in the Northeast. Andrea, where are we headed? Do you believe that pets will eventually be conferred legal rights akin to personhood, or do you think some have suggested that pets need a hybrid legal status as living property?

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Well, I think this is a very interesting and complex question. I think that when you look at global trends in like laws, right? You look around the world, you find some very interesting trends. So, for example, in Spain, they have just very recently passed laws that say that animals are sentient, they experience, they’re agential, and that pets are now considered family members by law. So when you have a divorce within Spain, the law now says that there have to be custody decisions put in place and that owners have to guarantee pets’ welfare. So, not just within a divorce, but just within the family in general, owners have to guarantee that their pet’s welfare will be an utmost priority. When you look at animal sentience in general – so sentience, I think is one of those main hallmarks of personhood. We think about, having agency, having self-conscious or self-awareness. We think about emotional experiences, having memories of experience. These are all components of personhood. And so there are a number of nations around the world that have begun to recognize animals legally recognize animals as sentient: France and New Zealand, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and Spain obviously are the most recent countries to make these legal decisions. Actually, Tanzania was one of the earliest to put this in place, saying that all animals had to be protected and cared for within the family by humans. So there’s definitely a movement globally towards assigning personhood towards animals. It gets interesting in the United States. The US is increasingly shifting in its legal institutions about the ways in which we should view companion animals within the family. US law, in particular, has now created a mechanism by which we can write wills for ourselves, and in those wills, we can assign ownership for our pets, but also, more interestingly, we can create trusts for our pets, so that there’s funding in place for their caretaking, and for their new guardians to ensure that their welfare is held to utmost standards. Divorce is also kind of an interesting thing here, you see in the United States that most states still kind of answer the question about divorce with companion animals as one of property. So dogs and cats are really, they’re just property, they’re like furniture. But there are a number of states that have shifted, most recently, it was New York, I think, either 2022 or 2021. New York now has in place laws that say that the judges through judiciary discretion have the right and should decide custody. California has this in place. Alaska has similar laws in place, as does Illinois. There’s an increasing trend to recognize dogs and cats like that, but still as property. So even those divorce laws feel more like living property than personhood, right? You know the answer, I think probably, to your question about where I think we’re going with this, that’s something that’s difficult to predict because there are consumer forces, there are organizational forces at work, lobbying forces at work that are very much so pushing back against that. And the biggest one that I can think of pushing back against the idea of legally assigning personhood to animals is the American Veterinary Medical Association. it seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But in doing this, assigning personhood to dogs and cats, and other companion animals, the AVMA is worried that what would happen for veterinarians is that we would have to see an increase in malpractice insurance. There would be a whole new complexity that enters the veterinarian clinic in terms of privacy, similar to HIPAA laws, perhaps, right? Where we have to take into account, the privacy of not only our human clients but the dogs and cats in and of themselves as persons. Welfare becomes much stickier, right? So the welfare of the animal and the veterinarian clinic. In terms of euthanasia, can we euthanize animals anymore? What about sterilization? What does this mean for sterilization? If we assign personhood to dogs and cats? So, you know, there are kind of interesting components to both sides, right? About why we should or why we should not. I don’t think in the US, especially because of the influence of corporate structures and lobbies. I don’t think we’re going to see the legal assignment of personhood to companion animals or any other kind of non-human animal anytime soon. I’m not saying I don’t think we should. I’m just saying I don’t think we’re going to. I think living property is probably a much greater likelihood in terms of legal designation because it kind of satisfies both sides where you’ve got, families and individuals who either are engaged in divorce or who are engaged with corporations for things like cloning or for things like the dog aging project, right? And kind of genetic help for our dogs. Where they want to have some sort of rights built into the contracts that they create with those entities. But at the same time, within US law anyway, allowing those entities to maintain a distance from the idea of personhood so that they’re not as legally responsible for the outcome of dogs and cats and other companion animals as they would be if we gave them that legal designation. So I do think that living property is most likely where at least US law is going to go for the foreseeable future.

Adrian Tennant: Andrea, you were mentioned in an article in last November’s issue of Wired Magazine, which chronicles the research being undertaken to produce a pill that can help dogs and, eventually, humans live longer. What’s your association with this story, and what do you think about the idea of using dogs for this type of research? 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: My association with the article was Tom Simonite contacted me just to interview me about the history of how this relationship has developed. He was very interested in the Dog Aging Project and trying to understand how, in terms of consumers that this particular product and the use of rapamycin might be picked up going into the future, and the methodological ways in which they were researching the use of rapamycin, for increasing lifespan in canines. And I think the hope is for humans as well. Rapamycin right now is a drug, I think that’s used in organ transplants to fight fungal infections, if I recall correctly, but it’s shown some anti-aging properties. So he just wanted to contact me and talk to me a little bit about why it is anybody would be interested in having such a pharmaceutical intervention applied to their dogs. What has happened historically to bring us to that point. And so I think that as far as what I think about that type of research, from my own work, I think the economic driver behind this research is consumption, and so I’m not in any way saying that the researchers that are really heralding it are not interested in expanding canine and human lifespan, just that in terms of creating a pharmaceutical intervention, I think that there’s a definitive monetary incentive to create a drug that will expand, in particular, our dog’s lives because of the ways that we’re thinking of them now. If we’re thinking increasingly of our dogs as our child or as a brother or a sister, and this is our perception now, if our brother or sister or our child becomes gravely ill with something that maybe we could have prevented earlier in their lives with pharmaceutical intervention, we are likely to experience incredible amounts of grief over this and missed opportunities. and the grief over the time that we could have had with our furry child, or our children’s furry brothers and sisters, right? And so bringing a product onto the market like this is reflective of family, of multi-species families, the increasing percentage of families in the US that identify themselves as multi-species families. I think you mentioned earlier that in your own quantitative research, about 97 percent of your respondents said, “Yeah, my dogs and cats are family to me.” So if we’re perceiving them in that way, we are going to increasingly purchase products, whether they are simply for entertainment, or for healthcare, or for life extension, that will enable us to continue to engage with our dogs and cats in that manner. So I think, if I remove the potential profit motive behind it, and I just look at what the motivation is in terms of healthcare and extension of lives, I think it’s a pretty cool idea. I worry about the profit end of it, though, as a sociologist because I worry that this will be something that’s available to families that can afford it. And so it becomes a privilege, right? Where we can expand our beloved canine’s life, while those that come from lower socioeconomic statuses are as they are right now, simply left to let their dogs die early because they can’t afford an early treatment or they can’t afford diagnosis of conditions that would predict later chronic illness. I mean, it’s the same issue that we’ve talked about in the past in terms of lower socioeconomic families, sometimes not even being able to keep their animals because of the cost that’s associated with doing so, and that brings tremendous emotional burden into their lives and brings increases in diagnoses of depression and anxiety and even PTSD into their children’s lives. So that’s an extended answer with lots of different points in it. 

Adrian Tennant: So Andrea, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you, your academic work, and your book, Just Like Family, where can they find you?

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: They can find me on academia.edu with my name, Andrea Laurent-Simpson, or they can email me at ALaurentSimpson@smu.edu.

Adrian Tennant: Thank you for being our guest again on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Thank you for inviting me, I’ve had fun.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to both of my guests this week, Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson of the Department of Sociology at Southern Methodist University, and Savannah Santiago, Bigeye’s social media manager. Now, if you’d like to obtain a free copy of the report we’ve been discussing, please go to our website at bigeyeagency.com/pets-23. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson of SMU discusses Bigeye’s 2023 US Pet Owners Study, revealing that 97 percent consider their pets family members. Hear how owners derive personal happiness and emotional support from having pets, and why the data reflects consumers’ desire for healthier lifestyles, holistic well-being, and the growing number of child-free or involuntarily childless individuals who treat their pets as family. Download the full report at bigeyagency.com/pets-23

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Today, we have dogs and cats specifically being thought of as actual family members, and in many cases, being given human identities, like brother, sister, and child. Some of us are choosing the properties that we buy to live in based on what works for our dogs and cats. This is not a pet anymore – it’s very clearly a family.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello. I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us today. This week, we’re publishing Bigeye’s second national study of pet ownership. The report reflects responses from over a thousand pet owners nationwide, revealing what kinds of pets are most popular, how owners acquire them, and the food and non-food pet products that are purchased most regularly. We also wanted to know if owners think that what they say is understood by their pets, and how well owners believe they understand what their pets might be trying to communicate to them. The report is available now on our website at bigeyeagency.com/pets-23, and you’ll also find a link in the description, and in the transcript for this episode. To discuss some of the findings from Bigeye’s 2023 national pet owner study, and to provide some context around why dogs and cats have evolved from domestic animals to cherished members of the family, we’re joined today by a guest making her second appearance on in Clare focus. Dr. Andrea Lauren Simpson is a research assistant professor and lecturer in the department of sociology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Laurent-Simpson is also the author of the book, Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined The Household, which examines how pets have become so integral to families in America. Andrea, welcome back to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Thank you, Adrian.

Adrian Tennant: The last time we spoke on this podcast, we discussed your book, Just Like Family. For anyone who didn’t hear that episode, could you explain the book’s thesis and what the multi-species family is? 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Of course, I think the main thrust of that book was to try and make an argument based on family demography, about how changes in mortality rates and fertility rates post-industrial revolution have changed just the American family structure in general, from one that say, early to mid 19, 20th century and earlier was more of a nuclear family. Got a biological mother and father, heterosexual couple, living under the same roof with very traditional gender roles. But with changes in mortality and fertility rates, drops in both of those rates, we started to see some fracture of that traditional family structure. Probably around the 1970s, we started to see increases in divorce rates, decreases in marital rates, and increases in cohabitation. And so the emergence of single-parent families, divorced families, stepfamilies, like lots of non-traditional family structures, that became emergent, and eventually eroded away that more traditional family structure, which continues to be somewhat dominant today, but is definitely, a much smaller percentage of family structures in the US today. In the midst of all of those changes, the argument in my book is that the multi-species family began arising in the 1970s. When I think of multi-species families, I’m thinking of the families that we see today where we have dogs and cats specifically being thought of as actual family members, and in many cases, being given human identities, familial identities, like brother, sister, child, within the family. And as a result of that, actually being afforded the privileges that come with being a family member. Also the disparity that comes with being a family member. Whether that’s domestic violence or impoverished states, economic states, right? But being included as part of the family. The historical kind of movement in that direction I think was prompted by, industrialization and prompted by movement, within kind of technological innovation in the United States, towards forms of relationships with pets that were no longer as utilitarian in nature, that were no longer as rural in nature. Certainly, our relationships to pets became much more urban in the late 18 hundreds and into the 19 hundreds with the disappearance of the draft horse by the early 20th century actually, so as most of our population was living in urban areas, I guess our relationships became much different with pets or domesticated animals in particular pets, dogs, cats, and birds. So we kind of started to perceive them as pets, defined more like animals that have names, that live indoors, and that don’t really have any other purpose than entertaining us. Some researchers point to that and say, well, that’s the multi-species family. And you talk about this being, kind of a new, relatively new emergence, in terms of relationships within the family structure. But I don’t think we’re thinking of our dogs and cats anymore as simply entertainment, right? And we’re not just simply giving them names and letting them live indoors. We’re actually, as some of your research has shown, sleeping with our animals in bed, where some of us are making food from scratch for our animals, and some of us are choosing the properties that we buy to live in based on what works for our dogs and cats. This is not a pet anymore. It’s very clearly a family. And so this is what the book is about. How that historical demographic drift and changes in family structure have really helped to lead towards the emergence of a multi-species family where our dogs and cats are like people with familial identities, and that they’re no longer disposable. They are indispensable in our families now.

Adrian Tennant: In Bigeye’s Pet Owners Study, 97 percent consider that patch to be family members. More than four in five owners say they love and spoil their pets as if they were children, and approaching three in five owners describe their pets as being like a child to them. Andrea, did these statistics mirror what you’ve seen in your qualitative research?

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: I think definitively, especially for child-free families and for involuntarily childless families, dogs and cats have taken on a very significant role. Where these families are very aware that their dogs and cats are not actual children, but that they have bonded with them as if they’re children. And their behavior suggests that they think of them as children where they are engaged in reading stories to their pets, where they travel everywhere with their pets, where they are willing to lay out thousands of dollars for things like veterinary care to ensure that their pets have the absolute best lives possible. I think definitely the qualitative work that I have for those family structures indicates empirical support for your quantitative findings. I would also say that for families who have human children, who have young human children, there is also the tendency to identify their dogs and cats as babies, as kids, as four-legged family, but they’re much more, I think, careful to draw a line of distinction between their human children and that of their furry children. So while they may refer to their animals as children, and say that they willingly think of them that way, their behavior suggests a little bit differently, which makes sense because US society is very pro-natalist, it’s very supportive of having human children. And so once you’ve had human children, if you begin equating them or holding them on an equal level with furry children, stigmatization becomes a very real thing very quickly. So I think that that also probably lends some support to the quantitative data that you’ve found here. Just kind of, I think, refining it a little bit with thinking about how different family structures are gonna impact the ways in which people think of their dogs and cats and how I think their behavior exhibits the ways in which they’ve identified their dogs and cats that way.

Adrian Tennant: In our study, four in five owners report gaining personal happiness and emotional support from having a pet. Approaching three in five owners report that they experienced less anxiety or depression from having a pet. And half of all owners report that having a pet helps relieve stress. Andrea, what did these stats reveal about the perceived or real benefits of pet ownership? 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Well, Adrian, I think this is, an interesting, ongoing methodological dispute between those in psychology, sociology, and human-animal interaction research. There is a good deal of research to support the idea that companion animals support human health, mental health, and physical health in a number of ways. The CDC argues that bringing dogs and cats, in particular, into our households helps to bring on decreases in blood pressure, decreases in loneliness and anxiety, and even symptoms of PTSD. That triglyceride levels are likely to drop, as well as cholesterol, bad cholesterol levels are likely to drop, and that dogs, in particular, bring on increased opportunities for exercise and outdoor activities that we may not otherwise be engaged in given the ways in which we live our lives: sitting in chairs working and staring at screens all day long. But also for older adults, the CDC has highlighted particular benefits for older adults who are likely to experience isolation and depression, and owning a dog especially, but a cat as well, leads to greater opportunities for our elderly to socialize. Some people argue a little bit against this, like they counter that, well, maybe we see qualitative reports – although your research has offered quantitative reports – qualitative reports, where participants highlight all of these benefits that they perceive as happening with their animals and their relationship. There is quantitative psychological research that says the impact is actually negligible. But I think that ultimately – and this is an argument that I’ve made multiple times as a qualitative researcher – I think that it’s better to foundationally actually listen to what people’s perceptions are and the ways in which they see their lives being bettered by this relationship than to necessarily depend on statistical measures and operationalization of variables through researchers who have well, based in the literature, decided how or what they think is the most important way with which to measure this so-called pet effect. I think those perceptions are much more important and was actually very pleased to see this quantitative support, for the pet effect in your work. 

Adrian Tennant: Thank you. Well, we found that pet owners are pretty brand loyal. Over two-thirds say they’ve always purchased the same pet food brand, but if they do switch to trying new pet food brands, the top three reasons are related to price (46 percent), availability (44 percent), and the quality of ingredients (42 percent). Three-quarters of owners report that they strive to feed their pets only ingredients that they would be comfortable eating themselves. And three in five Gen Z owners say they would prepare meals from scratch to ensure the quality of what their pets consume. Andrea, do you find anything interesting in these findings? 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: I find this report to be very interesting. I especially find the Gen Z reports to be very interesting. There’s an increasing tendency – and there has been, especially for the past decade – for human trends in eating to be reflected in the ways in which we’re feeding our animals. And so I think that generally, US society is moving towards healthier eating habits, at least encouraging healthier eating habits, healthier lifestyles, and even, although affordability is an issue here, even towards more organic lifestyles, right? Eating cleaner. And so, looking at Gen Z, the results were 60 percent of those owners are reporting that they’d actually prepare their pet’s meals from scratch, represents a couple of different things to me. First of all, it represents this continued trend where we are just seeing more and more focus on how we take care of our bodies and what we put into our bodies, the kinds of ingredients that we put into our bodies. But I think also it reflects, potentially, a continued trend for Gen Z coming out of Gen X and, Millennials and now Gen Z, where I think that probably as they get older, as they start building their own families or choosing to be child-free within their family structures, that they’re going to turn to their pets in particular as child-free persons. Gen Z certainly has the potential to have greater child-free choices, I think, percentage-wise, as they grow older, to turn to their pets. And really treat them behaviorally as if they’re human. So we prepare our meals from scratch, and parents of human children, sometimes, depending on whether they have the time or not, are preparing meals from scratch for their human children. Such a high percentage of Gen Z reporting that they would be willing to prepare meals from scratch is not surprising to me at all because I think there’s an increasing trend for child-free – and involuntarily childless owners especially – to think of their pets as children, but also the Gen Z finding was really interesting to me because I think also it might, I wanna be cautious in that analysis because I think it might also reflect, at least currently, a trend that includes opportunity, time opportunity of Gen Z. They’re in their late teens, into their early twenties right now, and so they’re still, you know, when you look at their income, a good chunk of their income is still coming from their parents, right? As their parents hand them discretionary income. They still have some time on their hands, especially since the younger ones might still be in High School, and the older ones may be in college, right? So a lot of them may not actually be living that adult life yet that has so much demand on, time resource, as well as a financial resources. They may actually have more time on their hands with which to engage in this kind of behavior. So I think that analysis is such a young generation, we have to be a little bit cautionary about it. But certainly, I know marketers and research in marketing that is examining discretionary income, are watching Gen Z really closely because of the percentage of discretionary income that they have right now, but also because of how careful they’re being children coming out of the Great Recession. I think that they’re more prone to saving and being a little more frugal instead of going out and buying prepared foods, they are probably more likely to be preparing from scratch, which is a cheaper alternative.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking to Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson about the results of Bigeye’s 2023 US Pet Owners Study. We found that approaching four in five dog owners celebrate their pets’ birthdays or adoption anniversaries. In multi-pet households, approaching one-half of dog owners have birthday or adoption parties for their pets. Well over two-thirds of all owners purchase birthday or adoption anniversary gifts. Christmas is the most popular occasion for owners to purchase gifts for their pets, with 57 percent of owners doing so. More than one-half of dog owners with annual household incomes of $200,000 or more also report purchasing gifts for their pets for Valentine’s day and Halloween. Andrea, can you unpack this consumer behavior for us?

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: I think for sure, and that last point on household incomes of over $200,000 purchasing Halloween and Valentine’s Day gifts, discretionary income, right? There’s just plenty of discretionary income there with which to do so. But I think that probably the most interesting finding, and I’ve always been very fascinated about the celebration of birthdays for our dogs and cats. I think that this really has a root in the historical processes of birthdays in the United States, in particular, in the history of birthday celebrations. If you look throughout history, usually birthday celebrations were reserved for the elite, for nobility, for rulers. Birthday celebrations for the average family or Joe we’re not engaged. But with the Industrial Revolution – I always tell my students, “Look to the Industrial Revolution for why we’ve changed so much!” – with the Industrial Revolution, that brought decreases in family size with increasing importance placed on human children. Certainly, the 19th century is probably when we first see in the US this kind of emergence of birthday celebrations at all. And it rested on children, and it comes alongside some demographic changes where as those families are getting smaller, because of drops in fertility rates and mortality rates, and children are increasingly being seen as more valued emotionally. Whereas in the past, they were more valued economically, right? They could go work in the fields – “We’ll have lots of kids and they can help support the family.” But with industrialization into the 20th century, you start to see kind of this shift over to that smaller size format and greater emotional and financial investment in human children, and part of this is the birthday celebration, and this emphasis on the importance of these children coming into our lives. It’s also, I think, the emergence of birthday celebrations are rooted in or increasing awareness of how time impacts our lives. again, not something that really was paid attention to pre-industrial revolution. Keeping track of time was not something that was really done. Clocks, if there were clocks, they were not usually very accurate, but industrialization brought on urban jobs, right? And brought on the need to be at your job on time and to leave on time. As education became more widespread for children, same thing, getting them to school and back home on time. All of these things shifted our understanding of how time changes and the birthday celebration is just part of this, thinking about how our lives are changing, and thinking about the importance of those in our lives with birthdays. So, what does all of this have to do with how people are spending money on buying gifts for their dogs and cats today? This is, to me, a very predictable trend. Thinking of dogs and cats as family members, as valued family members and needing to spoil them as such, needing to demonstrate to them in the same ways that mid 19th century into the early 20th century, children were increasingly celebrated. These four-legged children are now being increasingly celebrated and being doted upon with adoption or birthday gifts and anniversaries and other holiday celebrations as well. It’s simply a demonstration of the emotional value we place on you and your presence and the time spent in our family. It’s a little bit morbid, but you can also see the same thing in terms of the evolution of the ways in which pets pass away, and how we memorialize them when they pass away. In the early 20th century, you can see the emergence of some very early pet cemeteries. but when you go back and look at those stones, the names that are on them, for the pets, are not human-like. They’re not usually dated, like you don’t usually have a date in terms of how long the pet lived. And you don’t usually have any kind of In Memoriam statements. Right? Whereas today, when you go and you look in places where we bury pets now, pet cemeteries, you’ve got all of that information just like you would in a human cemetery. It is really just literally this kind of historical shift over towards assigning personhood over to our animals. The birthday piece, right, is thinking about how you’ve come into our lives and celebrating these yearly markers, and then the passing away and recording of some sort of historical markers about your life on your headstone as how we kind of sum up our pets as well.

Adrian Tennant: Last year, we saw devastating wildfires in the west and the deadly impact of hurricane Ian across the Southeast. Emergency orders from the authorities to evacuate can present pet owners with terrible dilemmas, especially when their closest shelters don’t accept pets. In our study, almost two-thirds of owners report, they would be extremely or somewhat likely to risk their own lives, to save their pets from a dangerous situation. Owners in households without any children are more likely than others to say this as our owners, belonging to generation X. Andrea, this data suggests that we need more pet-friendly locations for people to shelter during natural disasters. Have you seen anything in your research that reflects this willingness to save pets during dangerous life-or-death situations? 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Definitively, in my research, while we didn’t speak as much about disasters, I certainly saw evidence that people were either willing to sacrifice their own safety for the safety of their pets, whether that was physical safety or emotional safety. I think that that broke down by family structure, especially the physical safety piece. It broke down by family structure, again, with people who had human children reporting that if you put me in a situation where I have to choose between my dog or cat and my human children, I’m going to choose my human children every single time. But speaking with child-free families or involuntarily childless families, it was a very different story, right? There was definitively an increased willingness to put themselves out there, for what they might have perceived as emotional bullying of their pets, either by partners or by friends, but even physical safety. I remember a particular participant, talking about his dog being endangered. He had a Dachshund and he had let his dog down, I guess off of his porch onto the sidewalk to go for a walk. His dog was on a leash and another dog that was not on a leash came barrel, a much bigger dog came barreling down the sidewalk, and could have easily killed his dog and was growling and very aggressive. Well, the participant had some chronic knee problems that made it very difficult for him to move around. And really going up and down steps was an activity that he’d been advised against in totality. and what he reported to me was that he went as fast as he could down the steps. He stumbled a little bit as he went down them, got to his dog, picked his dog up to keep his dog safe from being attacked. Not only did he put his own physical health, kind of at risk going down those stairs, but he also put his physical health at risk because the other dog could have easily attacked him instead. But in his mind, as he reported to me, he didn’t care. He just wanted to make sure that his dog was safe, secure, and that he would be able to ward off any kind of attack. So there’s that. In terms of actual, natural disasters or human disasters like war, and I think that the most common example that human-to-animal interactions think of, maybe I should say the most influential example would be Katrina. The response during Katrina to evacuation was for first responders to go in and get the people out. that was their imperative: you go in and get people out before they die. And what they ran into was people saying, “Okay, I’ll go with you. I’m gonna bring my pets too.” And the first responders had no policy or procedure to take animals with them. They didn’t have shelters to take their animals to. and so essentially, what they were left with was saying to evacuees, “you either come with us without your animal, or we have to leave you behind.” Guess what happened? People stayed behind. They stayed behind, and there’s increasing amounts of research and just empirical evidence and news stories of people saying, “Okay, I’m gonna evacuate, but I’m going back in and I’m going to get my animals. I don’t care if you say it’s safe or not. I will go back and get my animals.” Post-Katrina, the federal government answered this issue with pet evacuation and transportation standards. And essentially, what that did do for natural disasters was govern first responders’ policies about how they would evacuate humans and their pets. Essentially, what they were given was imperative that if you go in to evacuate a person and they have an animal they want to bring with them, you must also bring the animal. and so I mean, different emergency response organizations respond to that in different ways. But ultimately, what it means is now people get evacuated with their pets because there’s obviously a public health concern if people are willing to stay behind with their animals, then that means that we are increasing the risk of public health with, damage from natural disaster, physical injury, disease and the spread of disease, but also post-disaster in terms of post-traumatic stress, disorder and depression and anxiety being much higher amongst pet owners who were forced to leave their animals behind. So, and I will just add this other piece cuz I find this fascinating and it’s not about the United States, it’s actually about Ukraine, right? And the invasion of Russia into Ukraine. there were lots of pictures, as just the mass exodus from Ukraine, with Russia invading the country, of people carrying their animals with them and walking, you know, hundreds of miles to try and get over the border. And some research that’s been done since then found that, 39 percent of people actually reported staying behind in Ukraine, in part because of their pets. They didn’t feel like they’d be able to take their pets with them, so they stayed. and of those that left, less than about 10 percent actually left their pets behind. So one thing that I’ve argued in my book is that this is not actually just an American thing. I think what this is, alongside, looking at total fertility rates and mortality rates and levels of development, is it really is unique to post-industrialized nations that have, higher GDPs, and that have the opportunity to build in these kinds of relationships with their pets. They’re no longer just focused on their own physical safety and survival. they’re no longer focused on building big families with human children. and this opens up opportunities for, bonding with dogs and cats in the way that we see here in the US. one more thing. some more kind of interesting research from the ASPCA indicates that about 90 percent of pet owners say that they bring their pets with them in an evacuation. So the vast majority of pet owners in the USA say “I’m taking my pet with me during evacuation.” Interestingly, 84 percent of them have no like emergency pet sheltering planned, so they would take their pets with them, but they don’t know where they would take them to. And as you mentioned earlier in your introduction to this question, that’s a problem. Like we need some more government funding or something in terms of setting up more pet shelters as we Come upon and approach more and more natural disasters. 68 percent of the people, according to A S P C A that were interviewed, said that they actually feel like the government needs to put some funding in place to support that. So, you know, I mean that’s kind of another, piece of refinement about thinking on natural disaster preparedness is that most pet owners really want that in place, but either they don’t know how to do it or they haven’t gotten a chance, the opportunity, to do it. The vast majority of them don’t have that planning in place, but also a large majority want the government to be the ones that take that responsibility on.

Adrian Tennant: So Andrea, if IN CLEAR FOCUS, listeners would like to learn more about you, your academic work, and your book, Just Like Family, where can they find you?

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Well, they can find me on academia.edu and with my name, Andrea two-thirds, or they can email me at ALaurentSimpson@smu.edu.

Adrian Tennant: Andrea, thank you for being our guest again on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Andrea Laurent-Simpson: Thank you for inviting me. I’ve had fun!

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson of the department of Sociology at Southern Methodist University, and the author of the book, Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined The Household. Andrea’s work was a source of inspiration for the Bigeye Pet Owners Study, and she very kindly reviewed the questions with us before we fielded the survey. If you’d like to obtain a free copy of the report, please go to our website at bigeyeagency.com/pets-23. And if you have any questions about the results or the insights contained in the report, please let me know. You can email me directly at adrian@bigeyeagency.com. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS this week, and I hope you enjoyed learning more about pet ownership in the US. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Expert Dave Kaye talks about his love for qualitative research. Dave discusses his mobile-based ethnographic research platform, Field Notes, which allows researchers to capture consumers’ lives through their smartphones using video, photos, text, and screen recording features. We also explore some case studies and talk about how Dave’s business, Peek Content, guarantees high-quality videos for clients seeking to gain a deep understanding of people’s lives and behaviors.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Dave Kaye: When it comes to ethnography, It’s all about seeing and hearing what people do and what they say. What we do with smartphone ethnography, we are learning about people, we’re seeing how they behave and what they do, but we are using the smartphone to access them in their world.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency, growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. By understanding consumers’ behavior and motivations, product and service brands can develop relevant and effective marketing strategies that resonate with their target audiences. In commercial market research, a method that can help us achieve deep consumer insights is ethnography. Like anthropologists, ethnographers are interested in understanding the cultural, social, and psychological factors influencing people’s decisions and actions. While anthropologists may study different cultures and societies, ethnographic market research typically focuses on specific audiences or customer segments. It’s an approach that can yield unexpected insights into consumers’ needs, preferences, and pain points, which surveys and focus groups can miss. Our guest today is Dave Kaye, an ethnographic research expert who’s traveled the world observing and hearing firsthand accounts from hundreds of participants. A pioneer in mobile phone-based research, Dave founded Kiosk, the world’s first mobile qualitative agency, and as you’ll hear, Dave is passionate about incorporating new technologies into research, But in ways that keep things simple and accessible for participants. To discuss his research career and some of the tools and techniques of ethnographic research used to yield consumer insights, Dave is joining us today from Isleworth, West London, England. Dave, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Dave Kaye: Adrian, thank you for having It’s a real pleasure to have the opportunity to chat today.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Dave, as I mentioned in the intro, you’ve worked in the market research industry for quite a while. how did you enter the profession?

Dave Kaye: Yes, it’s been around 20 years now. As they say, time flies. I discovered the world of market research because I loved languages and I loved travel. I did French and Italian at university, ended up living in Japan after that. So I was fluent in a few languages. I ended up responding to, believe it or not, an actual newspaper advertisement for a company called Flamingo that was looking for people who could speak more than one language fluently, who lived abroad and were interested in culture. And I so I ticked all the boxes. So I applied for that, and before I knew it, I found myself working in international market research. And a key criteria thing for the hire was that I had that international experience, a real curiosity for people, for culture. And, yeah I sort of found myself doing that job without knowing the actual profession existed. So I do know what it’s about now. It’s been 20 years, so I’ve got a good understanding of the industry and everything within it. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, over the course of your career, you’ve focused on qualitative rather than quantitative research. So what is it about qualitative that’s kept you engaged for over two decades?

Dave Kaye: Yeah,  great question. I think, one, I love people, talking to them, and obviously, that’s at the heart of qualitative research. But also, I think the other thing about it is that if you work in the qualitative industry, you are going to learn a lot of little things, and you’re going to get a glimpse into not just people’s lives, but you’re going to get a glimpse into different industries, different products. You’ll learn a lot. You’ll be working one week on, potentially, a new product or a new bit of technology that gets you excited. In the next week, you might be finding out about a rare disease or a condition that people live with and how it impacts their ability to do something. So one of the things that have kept me interested is the fact that you are endlessly sort of learning stuff, not just about the trade and the industry, but also about people and, and new things, which fundamentally means that you are quite good at pub quizzes, I guess. And generally, are able to sort of have a conversation with people about pretty much anything. And I’ve always liked that. I like the fact that you’ve got a huge, wide spread of the world to cover when it comes to qualitative, and that’s always kept me really interested.

Adrian Tennant: Today, you lead the mobile-based ethnographic research platform, Field Notes. For anyone starting out in research or strategy, could you give us an overview of its practical applications? 

Dave Kaye: Yeah, sure. So I guess when it comes to ethnography, it’s all about seeing and hearing what people do and what they say. And the reality of it is, if you were to talk to a university professor about ethnography and how to do it, you’d get quite a different answer than talking to me. Because in its purest form, you’re spending time with people observing them, ideally in the same sort of environment as them. So watching them, hearing them, listening to them, never asking questions, and essentially, just understanding the world. Now that’s great. And pure ethnography obviously exists, and some brands do commit to it. Costs a huge amount of money to do those kinds of projects. I don’t imagine it’s the easiest sell-in, because you’re asking people to give up a lot of their time, and you’re asking for trained professionals to spend a lot of their time being with them. What we do with smartphone ethnography is, I still think very true to the discipline in that we are learning about people, we’re seeing how they behave, and what they do, but we are using the smartphone to access them in their world. You know, the constraints of the industry in research mean you have to get projects done in much shorter periods of time. Quite often, we’re in field for a week, maybe two weeks. You are connecting with people during that period. They’re telling you their stories, you are hearing them. You are seeing them and lots of different ways to set up a project, which means that people can be very natural on camera. And you’re also able to access everything that is on their phone because they’ve given you permission to do so. So you’re asking them to share photos, images, videos that they’ve created already, which are very natural and very personal to them. And you’re essentially accessing their world through the most personal device that exists, which is their smartphone. So everything’s on there, and it allows you to get to know them in a really powerful way. So,  with smartphone ethnography, you’re getting to the very heart of who these people are and the way that they’re sort of represented, and they can share with you a ton of stuff that you wouldn’t get otherwise. So you are essentially accessing their world through the most personal device that’s there. And as I say, sometimes you’re watching them, sometimes you’re listening to them, and sometimes you’re asking them to share with you images or videos that already exist. So you’ve got a really good sense of who they are.

Adrian Tennant: Dave, what’s the story behind the founding of Field Notes?

Dave Kaye: Field Notes has been around now for over a decade, I think around 11 years now it’s existed as a platform and a service. And it was first built, when I was actually at that business I mentioned earlier, Flamingo, where I was Head of Digital. And in that role, I was very excited by smartphones and what they could do for the world of research and how to get closer the people. So I went out, put together a business plan to essentially build a technology platform, which is what Field Notes was. And Field Notes was originally built by teams of researchers across different countries because the business itself is very international. So we have researchers from Asia, from South America, North America, Europe, all coming together and sort of brainstorming what a great tool would look like for them to get to know people in the ways we’ve mentioned. And we then went out and, you know, built it with, our technology partners, and ran it internally as a tool. About five years ago, we had the opportunity, due to big restructuring within the business, to actually take Field Notes out and make it an independent business. Field Notes became not just a tool for a limited amount of researchers, but actually then became a platform that was accessible for everyone and the research industry and the creative industries, et cetera. So, it’s something that we’ve been able to develop a lot, it’s gone from being a tool for a smaller group to a bigger group. We’ve brought new features in. We’ve basically worked with lots of different partners, and it’s come from strength to strength by doing that. And we’re still very much international, very much, you know, focused on bringing stories to life where everything might be around the globe. But yeah, it’s one of the longest established out there, and it’s remarkable how much things develop and change over time, but it gives you an opportunity to really get close, which has always been the key target right from day one.

Adrian Tennant: What kinds of features or functions does the platform provide?

Dave Kaye: So at its heart is video. We encourage people to, when they come onto a project, to be themselves, of course, but they download the app onto their phones. And once they do that, they’re given the opportunity to introduce themselves, tell us about who they are. But they’re responding to a number of different assignments over the period of typically one or two weeks. Each of those assignments is task-based. For example, if it’s a project to do with food, they’ll be giving us a kitchen tool. They’ll be opening up their cupboards. They’ll be opening the fridge up for us. We’ll get to see who they are. We’ll get to see where they eat. We might ask ’em to film a breakfast, a lunch, or a dinner for us. and you get to know them through capturing those kinds of moments. Not all of our projects are video-based, but I would say it’s the core component of what we do, and we pride ourselves on providing really high-quality video content. You know, we ask ’em to upload, photos, images, text as well, always in response to what we are looking at. And the app also allows you to have a screen recording functionality where you can see online journeys, whatever they’re doing, whether that’s an online purchase journey. Or you wanna understand how they’re using their socials. That kind of thing as well is easy now to capture. So they just have to click a button to share and screen record for us as well. The thing to say is it’s always one-to-one connection. So we get deeper with individuals rather than connecting with a group. The closer the relationship you build, the better the content is that you generate from people. We’re not just asking people to record a video and send it off into space that never gives you good results. We’re giving them tons of feedback, tons of encouragement, and that’s how we get to know people really well. And that’s why I think it’s a really good tool in that respect, but always one-to-one engagement. 

Adrian Tennant: The participants are responding to prompts through a smartphone app. What about the research teams? Are we also working through an app, or are we going to a web-based portal? What does that look like?

Dave Kaye: That side of it’s all web-based. So you basically see all the content coming through from wherever it might be and it lands in your project portal within each task. It’s then fully searchable, and you can tag the content and use the platform to do your analysis. Everything comes in with a transcription. So if it’s video content, it gets transcribed, and you are then able to review the content, and select what you need to tell your story really. But it’s very easy to cover everything to see it. It’s all sort of put together in a very logical way and it’s also very easy to feedback to the participants to get them excited about the project. And then your teams can come in,  typically it’s the research team that’s kind of doing the hands-on stuff. But then the end clients have also got another view, which is a bit simplified, where you can just see the core sort of hero content where you can come in and have a look as well. So there are loads of different ways of presenting the content back, but ultimately it all lives there. So, it’s a really convenient and simple way of collecting lots and lots of people’s content and personal stories, et cetera.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Field Notes certainly sounds very versatile in terms of the kinds of projects that you and your clients can undertake. Rachel Lawes is coming on the podcast in a few weeks time to discuss the second edition of her book, Semiotics In Marketing. Does Field Notes support other qual methods like semiotics?

Dave Kaye: Yeah, I’ve not met Rachel, but I’ve heard really good things about her approach, and I’ll be looking forward to reading Semiotics In Marketing as well. We work a lot with semioticians and we work a lot with semiotic specialists, complimenting their work. So quite often we work with semiotic agencies, and one we work with often is it’s an agency called Sign Salad. Dr. Alex Gordon, based here in the UK, working on projects with Alex and his team, we’re essentially helping to see the actual cultural change they’re talking about quite often, or we’re using it to further bring to life sometimes quite sort of big ideas and big concepts. And for the actual end client, not only the agency providing the semiotic thinking, but some actual examples which then sort of anchor it. So in that context, we worked a lot with semiotics to help tell the larger, bigger story and to sort of help bring to life again and identify some of the things that have come out of the semiotic stage. There’s typically a semiotic stage followed by, Field Notes or a mobile ethnography stage. And that’s the way we tend to work with quantitative as well. Whilst you can do small, simple surveys within Field Notes itself, it’s not a quant tool in any sort of significant way. But what it is very, very good at is, using a focused sort of self-ethno to bring to life the segmentation story that a quant agency has written. So they basically discovered who the consumer is for their client. They’ve got pen portraits or pen profiles, but actually, some very focused video capture. Using a tool like this to get closer to that profile is really helpful. So quite often, quant agencies use Field Notes to bring those actual participants to life in the way that they know them. And it just makes a massive difference when you are sort of distributing the segmentation within the business and passing it on to other people. You’ve got some powerful video bring it further to life.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages. 

Renee Hartmann: Hi, I’m Renee Hartman, co-author of the book, Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future. It’s a practical guide to retail marketing tech, including livestream shopping, quick commerce, and retail media networks. In it, we show you how to create compelling content, drive conversions in digital and physical channels, and monetize data, all while maintaining customer trust. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25% on a print or electronic version of Next Generation Retail by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and ebook bundle offer. When you order directly from Kogan. Page, shipping is always free to the US and to the UK, which also helps us authors. So to order your copy of Next Generation Retail, go to KoganPage.com. That’s K-O-G-A-N, P-A-G-E dot com. Thank you.

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Dave Kaye, an expert in mobile ethnography and the co-founder of the qualitative research platform Field Notes. Those of us involved in consumer research, especially for CPGs, aim to get as close as possible to customers to understand their sequential moments of truth, those interactions with brands that inform or change their opinions. First comes a stimulus, say an advertisement for a product. The first moment of truth is when a customer comes into contact with a product. This term originated with Procter and Gamble in 2005, which described it as the first three to five seconds when a shopper notices a product in a retail environment. The second moment of truth is when the customer has purchased and started using the product and decides for themselves whether their experience supports the brand’s pre-purchase promises. And the third moment of truth is when the customer becomes a true fan and gives back to the brand with consumer-generated content such as product reviews, ratings, or posts on social media. Dave, in what kinds of ways can researchers use Field Notes, to identify and use knowledge about these moments of truth to develop optimal paths to purchase?

Dave Kaye: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think the thing is about self-ethnography, it’s all about moments. You’re actually asking people to capture moments for you all the time. That’s effectively what you’re doing when you’re challenging people or inviting them to take part in tasks. So in each of those parts of the journey, there’s a role for, I feel, self-ethnography, where you can first, find out what those moments are, perhaps by having. your customers giving you a tour, a safari of whatever they’re looking at, they’re taking you out with them to the store. They’re taking you to their favorite locations. They’re showing you what’s interesting to them. So you might actually capture some of those first moments of truth, by doing this kind of work and really get some insights into what’s out there. Likewise, when people have made the purchase. So many of our projects involve that moment – the purchase moment, the point of sale moment. So whilst sometimes you can actually get it in a store, where people are actually capturing the actual, moment itself, you can also, if you don’t manage to do that, you can get the moment straight after. So retrospectives of the journey that they’ve just been on, tell us why you just bought. They can be in the parking lot outside, or they can be in their cars telling you about it, but they’re very close to the moment. So again, the self-ethnography gets you incredibly close to these moments that you are talking about, which are the really key marketing ones. Likewise, we work a lot in healthcare. The holy grail really is the prescription moment in healthcare, and again, with ethnography, whilst you can’t necessarily be there whilst the patient’s in the room, you can be there straight after when the prescription’s been given, when they can report back to you, the healthcare professionals, on what they’ve done, why they’ve done it. That’s as close as you can get to that moment as well. So I think it’s very well aligned. Everything that self-ethnography does with different moments and finally, the third moment of truth, when it comes to advocacy and sort of getting stuff out there, is very similar to what I was just talking about recently. Some of our clients are actually asking us to help them generate sometimes those sort of moments of truth where they’re asking for the consumers to show them the moments they’ve had with their brand, either for a research piece or potentially getting their permissions to then use that content either on social or on the website, et cetera, and that’s really powerful. So kind of thinking, well, actually, you know, what can you do with smartphone ethnography and with these different moments when the reality of it, I would say you can touch all three of those moments you’ve talked through, because at the very heart of it, everything that you capture with Field Notes or with this approach is to do about the moment. And it can be a really valuable tool, I think, across the board, throughout the whole process, and a very visual one, which is what makes it so powerful.

Adrian Tennant: Dave, we’ve talked quite a bit about how Field Notes takes advantage of the mainstream adoption of smartphones, but you also head up another business called Peek Content. Could you tell us a bit about what Peek Content is?

Dave Kaye: Yes. what Peek does is, is quite niche, and we basically specialize in generating really high-quality videos from real people anywhere in the world. Now we do use Field Notes to do that, so it’s our platform for doing it. But if you’re working with Peek Content, then we are, actually, the agency service. So we would recruit people for you, we’d find the right people, and then most importantly, we would give them remote direction and support on how to film. and really the key thing that. are doing is, guaranteeing that you’ll get really good high-quality videos for your, project, whatever your project might be Now, what it then gives you as an end result is really authentic, but high-quality self-shot video, which, is niche, as I say, but that’s what we offer. and the whole reason that the business has come into life is because years of working in market research, I’m just done. I’m finished with seeing badly-shot video. Everyone’s got the highest possible quality cameras, you know, four cameras on their phone, shoot you from every different angle. You can actually put it into the cinema, but yet still people are recording themselves up the nose. Or holding the camera the wrong way around, or have a pet in the background tap dancing on a kitchen floor, which is one of the worst noises to get rid of in any kind of editing. And the video itself is just disappointing when actually it shouldn’t be. The video is incredibly powerful. It’s what you are using to excite your clients, to excite other consumers to do whatever you need to do with it. And there’s no reason why it isn’t really high-quality video, and that’s what we guarantee. Our manifesto is to rid the world of poor-quality smartphone video content. And, you know, that’s what we try and do. That might mean stopping or asking them not to film in portrait mode and film and landscape. It’s thinking about lighting behind them. It’s thinking about audio levels. It’s thinking about what they’re wearing to a certain extent, but actually, it’s still authentic and real when they talk to us because they’re talking about things that are their own stories. We’re just giving them the tools to better film themselves and to better capture the moment for us.

Adrian Tennant: Dave, how do clients typically engage with Peek Content? 

Dave Kaye: So quite often, it’s through word of mouth. We’ve got a client who’s come across us because they’ve started asking around because actually, there is a need for high-quality video because if you’ve spent, you know, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on your segmentation study, and it’s being let down cause you’ve just got very poor video clips bringing it to life, why not spend a little bit more? It’s a fraction of what you would be spending otherwise to really do it justice. So the clients that will commission us, and they, these do tend to be end clients rather than agencies that we, we work with both, but it tends to be clients who value, high-quality video, when they show it in the boardroom. And they also like the fact that they got a lot of control over the process. So when we did a recruitment, we are recruiting to a very strict brief. We’re looking at, quite often, a recruit that is designed to illustrate research findings or a research story rather than discover new insights. It’s about right from the start bringing those insights to life and capturing them. So people have been recruited in a particular way, they might be agreeing already to certain statements They’ve been selected to participate in the research. But again, they’re real people, and clients want to, bring that story to life within their organization. So when they commission us, they ask us how do we do it. How do we go about that? And we’ve got lots of processes that kind of help guarantee the quality of the video and the story. But the fact that we come from a world of research and there’s been, you know, 20 years of qualitative expertise behind it, we know how to tease out what the main story is, to work closely with the partners to bring it all to life and essentially make sure that the end piece is what’s needed. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, we always like practical examples. So Dave, could you give us a real-life example of Peek Content’s role in a client initiative?

Dave Kaye: Yes. So as a leading bank here in the UK, so a high street bank or one of the big boys, so to speak, that commissioned us to bring to life their segmentation. So they have 12 different segments who are all very different, and key to them and important to them. And each of those segments is important, within the broader, bigger business. So again, this is one of the clients that spend a lot of money on a segmentation study, with the quant numbers, and then came to us to bring those numbers to life. And we have developed for them, two edits actually. One is a five-minute edit, which tells the story, of those participants, and of those segments. Where they live. They show us around their homes. They tell us about their anxieties around finance or tell us about what their hopes and aspirations are for the future. A whole story around each of them, and a five-minute edit, and then a one-minute edit. And all of that content then lives on the internal exchange for the business. So they’ve got, in the UK probably about 12,000 people accessing that, looking at the videos and hearing the stories of their actual, real-life stories of their segments and the profiles they’ve been bringing to life. So for them, it’s been very much about giving access to their marketing teams, their sales teams, everybody within the organization so they can actually hear real stories of who they are. So that’s one nice example. Otherwise, we’ve again done quite a lot of content production for clients where it’s been used across social media. So working with one healthcare client where we’ve been talking about dentures, and people have been telling us that if you are actually in the process of losing your teeth, you won’t be very happy about it. And the reality of it is it’s a very stressful time. However, if you actually go as far as to go then and have your dentures put in, then your life changes massively. You can smile with confidence. You can whistle. You can eat steak. You can kiss your partner. You can speak with confidence in a client meeting. Lots of really positive things happen. So we were engaged in creating real testimonial stories for our client to then go online on YouTube, where they could then see the other stories of people that have had their dentures put in, which is just incredible. And actually, in healthcare, we’ve done quite a few things like that where during coronavirus as well, we were doing a lot of work with a number of different brands encouraging people to still go in for their checkups and for, in some cases during the pandemic, finding real people, real patients, hearing their stories. And when those stories were useful to then distribute to other patients – that kind of reassurance from those similar to them is really powerful. So again, lots of content that’s gone on to live outside of the research world to kind of encourage people to do certain things.

Adrian Tennant: Dave, your wife is American, and I know you cross the pond regularly. What are some of the main differences you see between US-based brands’ approaches or attitudes toward research compared to your UK and European clients? 

Dave Kaye: Yes. I, I love my wife. I love America as well, to be honest with you, when it comes to the attitudes that the US clients tend to have. So mean, it’s great. I’m based in London. I have great clients here, but what I always love about the US is there’s a sense of adventure from the clients around new methodologies and new approaches. So I think what you tend to see is more of a desire to explore and to try things out. So, quite often in the UK, you might have a more cautious approach. And I think, to be honest with you, the pandemic changed a lot of things. I think mobile ethnography or smartphone ethnography is much less unusual than it used to be. But pre-pandemic, I think there was still a bit of caution. It still felt quite new. I think in the US when clients hear about it and they like the sound of it, they’re much more likely to push the button and give it a go. So maybe not, you know, a huge project, first time round, but they want to dip their toes in the water. They want to experience it. So generally, I would say there’s a desire and a passion for exploring new approaches in the US, which I really appreciate. And then I would also say that in the US, you’re more likely to come across client insight teams that are doing their own research. I think that’s quite exciting and quite different to the way it is in the UK, where it’s usually an agency involved.

Adrian Tennant: New artificial intelligence-based tools are popping up in consumer research, most commonly in the context of question generation and coding of quantitative survey open-ends and qualitative transcripts. Dave, do you foresee AI playing a greater role in the design, collection, and delivery of qualitative insights?

Dave Kaye: Yeah, again, it’s a question which is on everyone’s lips at the moment, I suppose, but it’s definitely making an impact in online, smartphone, qualitative. I can answer this question by basically saying what impact it’s already had for us as a platform. So, you know, we are still very early days of all of this and OpenAI’s ChatGPT has already impacted the way we do things. So, at the end of this month, we’re actually changing our transcription service completely, and moving it to an AI-driven transcription service, which is called Whisper. And we’re very excited going into that and working with them. And basically, the quality of the output that we’ve seen, and we’ve already got it on our staging server, is phenomenal. It makes a massive difference. You’re looking at it, and you are sadly, questioning whether transcription agencies are going to not have a hard time of it in the near future. Human transcription has always been a massive role in research, but as this technology’s improved, you’ve got away with not using human transcription on a few. What we’re seeing now is that level of, transcription is becoming phenomenal. That’s also true of, translation. So you know, whenever I talk and give tips on how to run an international, smartphone qualitative project, I always say, “Don’t get burned by translation because you’re not sure how much you’re going to have, how much it’s going to cost. It spirals outta control. That’s where the hole is when it comes to, managing it.” And the improvement in transcription is allowing for, I think, really cost-effective translation to come on the horizon. And I don’t think that’s going to be as good it’s a harder thing to essentially deliver, but it is still giving you, a massive opportunity. I mean, it’ll mean massive, massive differences in transcription and translation. We’re already seeing it in our business. And then finally, the other thing that’s already happening within our business is once you’ve got all of that AI-driven transcription, in place, you can then start to begin to ask the tools to provide you with summaries of the actual content. So you are looking at, say 10, 15 minutes of video from a participant, which as a researcher, would take you 10, 15 minutes to go through and then take notes, understand it. Take time on it. And now the click of a button, you can have a summary there of 200 words or whatever, bringing to life, you know, in written text, exactly what happens in that video. And the quality of that – people say, you know, “How good is it? How effective is it?” I think the best way of thinking about it is, it’s like having an extra junior team member, working with you for somebody who needs support, somebody who needs to have a little bit of supervision in terms of what the output looks like, but fundamentally, is doing a really good job getting through it. And that, if you think of the man-hours when it comes to like going through all the content, it’s going to save a huge amount of time. So, it’s going to go way beyond that, I think. But just in the last three months, those are the developments we’ve seen on our own platform, and I think it’s a really exciting time. I think people are going to work differently. New jobs will be created when it comes to analyzing the content, and understanding what best to do with the AI. So I think it will evolve and it will change. We’ve already seen that. I think just technology has changed the role of research, but it’s made it much more accessible to a lot of people. 

Adrian Tennant: Dave, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to know more about you, Field Notes, or Peek Content, where can they find you?

Dave Kaye: So you can come find us at FieldNotesCommunities.com, or likewise also if you’re interested in Peek, PeekContent.com. And I’m on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on there, so if people wanna drop me a line, look for Dave Kaye, K-A-Y-E, and one of those two businesses you’ll be able to find me there as well.

Adrian Tennant: And we’ll be sure to include links in the transcript for this episode. Dave, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Dave Kaye: Thank you so much for your time, Adrian. I really enjoyed chatting.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks to this week’s guest, Dave Kaye of Field Notes and Peek Content. You’ll find a transcript of this episode with links to the resources we discussed today on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeye agency.com. Just select podcast from the menu. And if you enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining us for IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tenant. Until next week, goodbye.

This week’s podcast guest Renee Hartmann is the co-author of the Bigeye Book Club selection for March, Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future. In this episode, Renee discusses how retailers and brand marketers can embrace new technologies to respond to consumers’ changing demands. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can claim a 25 percent discount on Next Generation Retail at KoganPage.com by using the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Renee Hartmann: I think there’s quite a lot that can be learned from looking at the east and some of the innovation and excitement happening there in the retail sector. It is starting to filter into the west now, of course there’s cultural nuances with each one of them, but I think the core is keeping retail as entertainment.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising. Produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello. I’m your host Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. As part of the Bigeye Book Club, in partnership with publisher Kogan Page, today’s episode focuses on our featured selection for March, Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future by Deborah Weinswig and Renee Hartmann. Written with both digital-first and physical retailing in mind, the book presents ways in which retailers and brand marketers can respond to consumers’ changing demands and expectations by embracing new and emerging technologies. I’m delighted that our guest today is Next Generation Retail’s co-author, Renee Hartmann, who’s also the founder of CLA, a research and strategy consulting firm that advises consumer brands on their international expansion. Her firm’s clients include household names, including Giorgio, Amani, Fendi, and Yves Saint-Laurent. Renee has worked as a brand owner, retail operator, consumer researcher, and branding and market entry strategist for over 20 years. To discuss some of the key concepts in Next Generation Retail, Renee is joining us today from her office in Lisbon, Portugal. Renee, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Renee Hartmann: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here today. 

Adrian Tennant: So Renee, can you tell us a bit about your work with CLA and the types of clients you work with?

Renee Hartmann: Sure. so I’ve been working with CLA, I started the company about 10 years ago, and have been working with a number of brands, to help them expand internationally. So we do a lot of east to west, west to east, helping brands go into the Asian market, helping Asian brands come into the US and European market. And we tend to work with a lot of consumer brands, so working with people like L’Oreal or Coach, or Fendi, those types of brands, helping them engage with consumers in a different market. And increasingly, we’re working with a lot of Asian brands, particularly in the beauty sector and consumer sector, helping them go into the US and Europe. So it’s a lot of cross-cultural communication, and very much focus on the retail sector, whether it’s e-commerce or physical retail. 

Adrian Tennant: How did you meet your co-author, Deborah Weinswig? And what prompted you to write Next Generation Retail Together?

Renee Hartmann: Sure. Uh, so Deborah and I met, we both had lived in Asia for quite a long time. I was living in China and Deborah was living in Hong Kong. so we met over some dim sum in Hong Kong and,kind of had a shared love for retail and consumer brands. so started talking several years ago, back when we were in Asia. And I would say over the pandemic, we started talking a lot more just kind of a, I think shared experiences during the pandemic and kind of, uh, really got to connect more. so that was sort ofwhat prompted us to spend more time together. And, I think, when we were approached to write Next Generation Retail we really had a similar approach to the way we thought about retail and thought about kind of,future casting, if you will. So that sort of enabled us to come together, from a kind of an author, perspective.

Adrian Tennant: Deborah’s based in New York City, which is where her firm, Coresight Research is based. And you are in Lisbon. So what did the writing process look like for you both?

Renee Hartmann: Sure. So we did a a lot of Zoom calls. I would say. you know, a lot of, uh, phone calls and, We were writing actually, last year. So we started in the spring and wrote during the summer. So it, it also coincided with a lot of travel. So at some points I was writing, I did interviews from a sailboat writing on my laptop,in the boat. I was at a friend’s, 50th birthday party in Hawaii and they had pictures of me of furiously writing in the background. So, uh it was a lot of kind of shared interviews. Um,and that’s the great thing about, I think during the pandemic is so many video calls and phone calls, just became normal.

Adrian Tennant: In Next Generation Retail, you explore many aspects of the future of retailing, which you summarize in the three by three by three rule. Renee, can you explain the rule and how it helps readers navigate the major themes in your book?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah, I mean I think when we started looking at the book,we really first started with the consumer and coming off the pandemic, how has the consumer changed? you know, one of the chapters, Deborah and I went through our own personal experiences during the pandemic and how that changed us as a consumer. And I think that’s one of the things, we hope readers will take away is thinking about how have you changed Your consumer preferences and habits, and I think all of us did. So I think, we started at the consumer as the core, and you know, how both the pandemic and then just changing, preferences and needs and technology is shaping consumer preferences. And as a result of that we really came up with kind of this framework of, uh, three by three by three. And so the way we think about it is, retailers have three new things to sell, they have three new ways to sell them and they deliver them in three new ways for the consumer. So we could talk a little bit about each one, but you know, when we talk about three new things to sell, those are actually new products that retailers are able to sell. It’s not just about products. They have new things they can sell, new ways to deliver them to the consumer from a channel perspective. And then the consumer expectations are really changing in three new ways. So I can talk a little bit about each one of ’em, but that’s the way that we thought about it.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s talk about the first of your three rules, new things to Sell. Now, last year it felt like new retail media networks were popping up every week. You have a chapter devoted to this in your book, but for anyone unfamiliar with RMNs, could you explain what they are and how you foresee them affecting brands’ marketing strategies?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah, so retail media networks, what it really does is it turns the retailer into the media network itself, right? So if you think about you know, say like a grocery store or even things like using Instacart, which a lot of us use over the pandemic. it turns the retailer into kind of, the media platform itself. Soyou know, when you think about it, the retailer is the one who has the consumers. The consumers come in, whether it’s physical retailer, whether it’s online retailer, and they’re providing data to the the retailer understands, what they’re purchasing, what types of, products they considered, and then they also have the ability to promote different products to them in a personalized way. So one way I think about it, probably the way that I had the most experience with it was using Instacart. when I go on Instacart all the time, I see, Instacart knows what I’ve purchased before from that retailer. those products are promoted to me first. There’s new products that are suggested to me that are according to my liking. They’re not just random things that are chosen to me. And I find myself, using the products that they recommend all the time because they are things that I like. So I think it. You know, kind of puts the power away from,traditional advertisers, like even things like Facebook and Instagram, and puts the data and the consumer interaction in the hands of the retailer. So it’ll enables the retailer to come up with some new, revenue platforms so they’re able to actually sell media. you know, they can replace the advertising for brands and it allows brands to have access to data that they didn’t have from, say, Instagram or a Facebook. Um, this is really a retailer who knows what people buy, and they have a lot of data about the consumer and themselves.

Adrian Tennant: Well if they haven’t already, what are some of the factors that retailers need to consider if they’re thinking about establishing a media network?

 we talk to retailers about this all the time, and I think the first thing that retailers really consider is, how do I do this in a way that’s not invasive to my customers? I don’t wanna,disenfranchise my consumers. I don’t wanna make them feel like I’m selling to them. So I think the most important thing for retailers is to really figure out how can I do this in a way that’s nuanced? And doesn’t make my customer feel like I’m selling their data or that I’m taking advantage of them. So I think that, the way that we’ve seen it really work well is by just what I was just saying in terms of personalizing the information. So it’s something that feels helpful to youversus feeling like I’m being sold at and given something that I don’t want. the other thing that I think retailers consider a lot of is how to anonymize the data. So it’s not that they’re providing customer data away to brands, but they’re providing insights. so I think those are probably the two key areas. the other thing from a retailer standpoint, where we usually tell people to start, thinking about it, is a multi-brand retailer versus a single brand retailer, they’re gonna have two very different strategies for retail media network. So multi-brands are probably the first place to start. if you are a multi-brand retailer and you’re not doing retail media that’s probably the, the top priority. I would say in terms of, where you start to develop that strategy and how you bring that to life 

Adrian Tennant: And what about brands? In what kinds of ways can they, or their agencies, evaluate whether investing in RMMs makes sense? 

Renee Hartmann: Yeah, I think one of the things that we’re hearing from brands a lot is, the cost of digital media, and the cost of digital advertising is going up a lot. You know, I think it used to be, very easy for brands to just go on, like I said, like all the social media networks use influencers, and they were able to, generate pretty high returns right away. I think that those days are, are pretty much gone now. It’s becoming a lot harder, it’s more expensive, and those social media networks don’t have as much data. So I think from a brand standpoint, if there is a a retailer that does have a retail media network how can you use them to, number one, to promote your product, number two, to learn more about your customer. and number three, to personalize your offerings in a way that will really resonate with that target consumer. So I would definitely encourage brands to, and their agencies to really seek out retail media networks, it provides this, sort of a streamlined way that feel can feel very natural if it’s done in a good way. So I think it provides, a deeper level of engagement than say, some of your more traditional advertising methods would have.

Adrian Tennant: The second of your three rules is New Ways To Sell. US Grocery Chain, the Fresh Market is one of the firms that’s launched a retail media network. The chain has also seen great success with live streaming cooking shows from its stores, and is reportedly set to offer shoppable advertisements during its broadcasts. Renee, you have a chapter in Next Generation Retail focusing on the rise of livestream shopping. So can you give us an overview of the current landscape and how US retailers and brands should be thinking about live streaming’s potential? 

Renee Hartmann: Sure. I mean, I think live streaming is an area that both Deborah and I are really passionate about. it’s something that we think is, really the future of retailing. Um, when you think about blending the online and offline experience, so you. We I mentioned we both had a lot of experience in Asia. China is the behemoth when it comes to live streaming. It is,the amount of money that is generated and that the size of the market in China is just staggering. it is the way that consumers, really understand products. They get to know them, they trust the livestream hosts. It’s become kind of a form of entertainment. and it really has become one of the most dominant shopping, ways that people interact online. . when you look at the US it’s still it’s still very early days when you compare it to a market like China. it’s growing quite a bit. I think you’re seeing, all kinds of, platforms getting involved, whether it’s TikTok or Instagram or,more traditional methods like Q V C. Um, we are seeing a lot of different, providers popping up technology providers as well as platforms that are getting involved in the live streaming sector. So I think it’s still very early. and the consumers that we’ve seen, You who do like to livestream? I think there’s this perception in the US in particular that livestream customers are more like traditional home shopping customers and they’re older, but that’s not really the case. You know, we, we’ve done core site in particular’s, done a lot of research on the consumers, who do you know, livestream shopping in the us and it’s some real mix. It’s everything from. Young kids to, men to women, to people who are looking for, things like fishing online or they want to learn more about different types of products. You’ve got beauty consumers. You really have a broad range of consumers. So I think for brands that are. seeking to, to get into live streaming shopping in the us. number one, it’s a great time to test and learn. It’s not something that’s so advanced that you’re late to the game. It’s a great time to get started. it’s pretty easy to get up and running. It doesn’t cost a lot of money. I think the other misperception we see from a lot of brands, they think I’ve gotta have this huge production capability and I’ve gotta be spending all this money to be making commercial, like video content. we found that’s not the case. with Core Site we did a livestream festival called 10 10, last October 10th. And we had one brand that was on there and the, one of the best selling brands we had was this very high end, cutting board company. And the thing that was really exciting is they took people back into their workshop and showed them how it was made. They showed them what kind of wood is being used, how they put it together really the behind the scenes. And that’s what consumers are looking for, is they’re looking for this really in-depth content and they want it to be authentic. they’re not looking for overly produced commercial glossy content. They really want this, In-depth content where they can learn. So I think that’s another area that we’ve seen. you know, it is pretty easy to get up and running. it doesn’t cost a lot of money. And the other thing is, it’s a great way to educate the consumer. so you mentioned, fresh market. we’ve seen a lot of interests,in the food sector in particular because you can do things like have chefs on, you can talk about, you can do wine tasting, you can do, cook alongs. There’s a lot of really fun content and engaging content. And you think about, the rise. even shows on Netflix, like Chef and all the cooking shows, if you can make it so simple that you’re watching somebody make a recipe and you can buy everything from your recipe right there in one basket, in one click, that makes things a lot easier. And it’s a way to really engage people and create these types of experiences where it is really that experiential shopping. So I think that’s something that. that we really see is a, is a new and innovative, like you said, one of the three ways to sell things. it’s a whole new way to sell and it is something that’s pretty easy to do. and just we think it’s kind of a no-brainer for brands to get started.

Adrian Tennant: I mentioned that the fresh market plans to incorporate shoppable ads into its live stream. So do you foresee shoppable ads and social media influences content converging in the future?

Renee Hartmann: I think so. I mean, I think that’s one of the things, there’s a company that we, that we know called nio, which is, an online,they’re enabling influencers to become retailers themselves, right? So I think the next step is influencers are not just about putting content out there, but. You know, consumers really trust them and they wanna get a curated selection of products that they have, and really be able to kind of buy the products that the influencer talking about. So we see it getting into that next level of how do you get to conversion, and it’s the same thing as live streaming. When you see the content. you wanna be able to buy right away. So I think this kind of content, and the overlap in between the two, whether it’s an ad, whether it’s a live stream, whether it’s an influencer post, as long as it’s engaging and interesting and relevant to the consumer. I think these are natural ways that the consumer is interested in it. I think the key point is the same as retail media network, which is how do you make it something that’s authentic, that doesn’t feel intrusive to the consumer and something they wanna buy. And if you can do it in that, Then absolutely. I think that’s where that convergence between content and commerce will become even stronger.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages. 

Renee Hartmann: Hi, I’m Renee Hartman, co-author of the book, Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future. It’s a practical guide to retail marketing tech, including livestream shopping, quick commerce, and retail media networks. In it, we show you how to create compelling content, drive conversions in digital and physical channels, and monetize data, all while maintaining customer trust. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25% on a print or electronic version of Next Generation Retail by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and ebook bundle offer. When you order directly from Kogan. Page, shipping is always free to the US and to the UK, which also helps us authors. So to order your copy of Next Generation Retail, go to KoganPage.com. That’s K-O-G-A-N, P-A-G-E dot com. Thank you.

Michael Solomon: Hi, I’m Michael Solomon. During my 40-year career as a marketing professor, consumer psychologist, speaker, and author, I’ve had the privilege of developing strategies with many Fortune 500 companies to help them connect with their customers. Now, you can have access to these strategies through my online course. It’s called Engage: how to turn your board customers into brand fanatics. I’ll show you how to apply years of research on consumer psychology to your brand or business. And as an unclear focused listener, you can receive a hundred dollars discount on your enrollment. Just follow the link in the transcript for this podcast on Bigeye’s website and use the provided coupon code to take advantage of this offer. I hope you’ll join me for Engage to learn how to turn board customers into brand fanatics!

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Renee Hartmann, the co-author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future. As the future of retail evolves, retailers will have new things to sell and new ways of selling them. Renee, the third of your three rules addresses new ways to deliver them. What factors do you believe will be the most significant in terms of serving customers?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah, we see three main ways. and this, again, I think when you talk about the consumers and how things have changed,number one thing we want people to, consumers are wanting products that are sustainable and they want the selling methods to be sustainable too. So sustainability is becoming much more important to the consumer. and we think the days of retailers and brands not thinking about sustainability at all or almost over, and consumers are really looking for that. So sustainable is number one. the next one is really personalized. So people are, the consumers are really wanting a personalized experience. This is where I think the convergence of offline and online and all this retail data that we talk about. how do you drive something to a consumer that feels very personal to them, that’s unique and relevant to them. and the third thing is experiential. I think that’s one area that. You know, when we think about, COVID is a great example. it became so easy to buy everything online. so convenience wise, you may as well buy online, but you’re still missing that experiential component of it. And that’s why everybody’s going back to retail, right? they want the entertainment value. They want the experiential value. And for retailers, they have to be able to provide that. It’s not just, I’m going to a retail store to buy something. It’s not a function. experience anymore. It really has to become, it has to become something that is fun, that’s relevant and it’s entertaining and is experiential. So those are the three things, sustainable, personalized, and experiential.

Adrian Tennant: Sustainability is the focus of a chapter in Next Generation Retail, and you acknowledge that It can be daunting to navigate the sheer volume of issues that fall under the umbrella of sustainability. You also cite a statistic from challenge.org which finds corporations that plan with climate change in mind secure an 18% higher return on investment than those that do not. Renee, what are some ways retailers can achieve more sustainable business practices?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah. We talk about different ways that that companies can look at sustainability and I think one of the people that we interviewed through the book, his name was Andrew Sullivan, and he really made some good points. He focuses on sustainability and his point is you have to look across every aspect of all of the business. It’s not just one person’s job, it’s not a sustainability officer’s job. It has to be something that goes back to the CEO and has to be infused throughout the organization. and so we we encourage everybody to look at all different aspects of it. So in the retail store, it could be everything from, looking at the types of lights that you have in your retail environment. How can you make lower energy use? How can you reduce waste in your packaging? we talked to another, interviewee who talked about,automated, checkout and how that freed up time from the checkout person to go out and do shopping. And then when you deliver it to the customer, you’re using route that are using less, energy. You’re using electric cars, things like that. So even everything down to you know, delivery can become a more sustainable option. and then looking at,the product, we always talk about looking at the product backwards, right? um, look through the circular part of your supply chain. would people wanna reuse the product? We’re seeing, retailers all the time, or actually starting their own areas for resale of product themselves. So people who have used the product and wanna sell it back, they’re actually creating marketplaces for that themselves. and of course, obviously going through the entire supply chain, right? In terms of how can you reduce waste, how can you reduce energy, how can you use better materials? we’re even seeing, we have a chapter in the book on blockchain, and we’re even seeing, people use blockchain and sustainability efforts as well. So I think it’s really examining every single piece of the business and it, and really just thinking through how can everything be more sustainable. and then we always talk about reporting it, right? You know, one of the areas that we’ve, we talked about is some brands I think are a little bit shy to talk about their sustainability efforts because they’re worried about greenwashing, they’re worried about consumer backlash. But really, the more that you’re reporting to your employees, to your customers, to your suppliers, it keeps you accountable. And so really having these methods to track your sustainability efforts, and of course nobody can get there overnight. but to have an ongoing vision and something that’s created from the top of the organization is really important. So,sustainability, one of the things that makes it so hard, I think, is that it really can be affected through every part of the organization. And it really does take, a sort of an organization-wide, real mandate to make it become a reality.

Adrian Tennant: In the book Influencing Shopper Decisions, also published by Kogan Page and our featured selection last April, the authors included a quotation from anthropologist Michael Donovan illustrating how successful retailers provide cues, symbols, and spaces designed to engage our cultural imagination. Donovan also defines shopping as – quote – “A central creative activity of American life, a kind of popular performance art,” – end quote. So I’m curious, Renee, as someone who works with brands on their international expansion strategies, what are some of the most important differences between markets in the West and the East in terms of the role that shopping plays in people’s lives?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah, I mean I think this is one of those areas where shopping in the East I think was really ahead of shopping in the West. I think if you’d been going to malls in Asia, even for the last. Five to 10 years. they were always more advanced than in the West, in my opinion. They were always more integrated, they were more omnichannel. even take one silly example like QR codes. QR codes have been popular in China for years and years. and that really enabled that kind of omnichannel experience. They only just became popular in the west, as a result of Covid. so I think in the East,shopping has always been entertainment. It’s always been something you do with friends. This, the malls are open late, you go eat at the malls. You go you have full kind of, you spend hours in the mall and that really becomes your entertainment. And I think that, brands, even when you look to, doing, traveling art installations in malls, doing experiential pop-up stores, really having that kind of digital experience. one thing you do see that’s a little different in the east versus the west I think is you know, lot more things like facial recognition and automated,shopping experiences, which may be some of the privacy laws in Europe and the US don’t allow some of these types of integrations, but you really see that,made to measure personalization. All of these types of really fun experiential retail, advancements that happen in the East I think are just now starting to filter into the West, and we’re starting to see, some of these types of advancements in the west as well. And I think that things like the metaverse, things like, virtual reality, online offline integration, it’s really is becoming you look at a mall like a Mall of America or American Dream in the us, having the mall as entertainment itself. that is the future I think, of malls and that is the future of retail. And I think a lot of that came from Asia and a lot of that came from the east. So I think there’s quite a lot that can be learned from looking at the east and some of the innovation and excitement that was happening there in the retail sector. It is starting to filter into the west now, and I think that’s where of course there’s cultural nuances with each one of ’em, but I think the core is keeping retail as entertainment. And I like the quote you mentioned about retail as performance art. in China there are art malls. You know, when you go into a mall it is like a fun experience. You’ve got, crazy statues and you’ve got interactive art displays. that it is art to a certain extent and I think that way of having it something that you can experience and feel, is really important to the retail environment.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. 

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Renee Hartmann, the co-author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future. What are some of the most important factors for US-based retailers or brands considering international expansion?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah. I think the most important thing, and it’s, it sounds obvious, but you know, To, to understand what the consumer knows about your brand, to understand what they value. I mean, I think one of the things, that’s interesting and not every brand, always realizes, they may think, Hey, I’m really popular in the US for X, y, and z reasons. I assume I’ll be popular in another market for that same reason. And that’s often not the case. You know, it might be one product that you hear, a product it might be, the country that you’re from, that’s an issue. Um there was a lot of brands, for instance, when they went into China, people knew them from maybe from Gossip Girl or from certain types of movies or TV shows. So I think the first thing is to really understand, a, does the consumer know you at all? And b y and then c I would say would be, what are the trends that are happening in that market? And then how do you, how do you adapt to those? Cause I think one of the mistakes we see, make is that they get, a little bit,I don’t know if arrogant is the word, but they think that whatever worked in their home market’s gonna work in another market. And that’s often not the case. Um, sometimes people are lucky that way, but often it’s not. so I think really being able to understand, how you can localize your branding efforts, how you can localize your marketing efforts in a way that is authentic and doesn’t lose who you are, you don’t wanna change too much,really finding those nuances of what’s gonna connect with the consumer. I think whenever you go to a new market, the hardest part is creating consumer demand. Everything else is easy, right? Everything else, yes, there’s new social channels and e-commerce channels and sales methods and government restrictions and everything. But if you don’t have the consumer demand, the rest of it is, irrelevant and everything else can be done. So the core is really understanding, does the consumer want your brand and your product? and if they don’t already, how can you make them do that? So I think the, that’s really the most important area.

Adrian Tennant: And Renee, do you have any favorite consumer research methods for identifying those nuances of local markets?

Renee Hartmann: I think the best ones I’ve seen are ones that, really connect with the consumers on the platforms that they use. So I’ll take China again as an example. social media platforms in China are completely different than they are in the US. So you have, areas like Little Red Book, which is a type of, social platform that doesn’t even exist in the West. it’s almost like Yelp for brands, right? And so it’s about really understanding, what people are saying about you and talking about you. So I think, connecting with people, whether it’s doing surveys on a platform like WeChat, whether it’s, going to areas that people are interested. And I think also taking some of the cultural nuances, in context. So for instance, in some markets, focus groups don’t work as well. It’s better to do one-on-one interviews because of some of the social dynamics. So I think it’s really also localizing the market research techniques, and connecting with people in ways that are really relevant to them in their everyday life.

Adrian Tennant: A year ago, the Metaverse, Web3, and NFTs were all in the news quite a lot. But in 2023, we seem to be hearing less about these topics. Renee, should retailers and brands still be thinking about them?

Renee Hartmann: Should brands be doing NFTs? This is something that I keep hearing from people or NFTs dead. is it relevant anymore? and I think the answer is,we definitely think that brands should continue to be using, NFTs and engaging with the Metaverse. I think, sometimes these types of things like Metaverse, NFTs, they go through fads, and people become up and down with them. But I think at the heart of it, it’s really about engaging consumers in new ways. I was just talking to somebody today about their kids using Roblox and how they can buy virtual items. And I think that it really is the future in terms of how young consumers can really engage with brands and find new ways to understand them, whether it’s from metaverse experiences, whether it’s buying digital items. I talked to another company the other day that’s doing NFTs that are connected with phone numbers, so the consumer sometimes doesn’t even know it is an NFT. So I think there are a lot of different ways that brands and retailers can get involved in the Metaverse and NFTs in particular. And despite some of the news and the ups and downs with Bitcoin and all of the other currencies and markets, it is definitely an area that we see – when you look at Web3 in general – is definitely something that we see staying and we encourage brands to continue to get involved.

Adrian Tennant: We can’t discuss using new technologies without considering artificial intelligence. AI is certainly having a moment in popular culture, but in what kinds of ways is it already disrupting long-established practices in retail?

Renee Hartmann: There’s so many different parts of artificial intelligence and I think what’s getting a lot of press right now obviously is things like ChatGPT and like these types of virtual intelligence and artificial intelligence and how that’s getting involved. But I think, there’s so many different things we’ve seen. We talk about the CORE framework in the book, which is everything from Communication to Optimizing pricing, to Rationalizing inventory, and then creating Experiential retail. And I think that’s something that we’re seeing quite a lot, whether it’s things like chatbots and every time you go online, the quick customer service and the way that consumers are engaging with brands and virtual assistance personalization that’s coming through. I was actually just at EUROSHOP and I saw there is a company that was using AI to optimize pricing and grocery stores based on the expiration date. So I think you’re even seeing things like how to use dynamic pricing, how do you take data to make better decisions and optimize things like supply chain and inventory? So there’s so many different ways. I think there’s the kind of fun and creative ones that get the spotlight, but actually, when you get back into supply chain and some of the real data-intensive ways, it’s how do you take immense amounts of data and then how do you process it intelligently in ways that maybe humans couldn’t do before? I think that’s where a lot of the power comes from, really, disrupting the retail environment.

Adrian Tennant: You’ve included several examples of how well-known retailers apply AI and machine learning to their operations. Thinking about the examples you included in the book, were there one or two that really surprised you or stood out?

Renee Hartmann: There are so many great ones. One of the ones that resonated with me, I’ve just been renovating a house and just moved, and I think a lot of people during the pandemic did as well. One of the ones we talked about was Wayfair having a visual search where you could submit photos of items that you like and then find similar items on Wayfair. So when you think about retail, so much of it is the seeing and the exploring. And sometimes it is hard as a shopper, I think, to know exactly what you’re looking for. It’s not necessarily something you’re searching for. And that’s something where the browsing online sometimes can be a little bit different than say, like, when you’re walking around a retail store and having that sense of discovery. So I thought that was a really fun way to take AI and look at it from a visual standpoint, almost using different senses that you would use from online shopping. So I thought that was one just personally resonates to me. Cause it’s something I’ve been doing a lot of is walking around furniture stores and vintage stores and trying to find fun things. I think obviously one that everybody has used a lot is those chatbots and the ability to even when I’m just online shopping and things like that, whether we talked about Lowe’s and Kroger’s, and Nike. But being able to create that really quick response and being able to answer people’s questions and really, streamlining the customer service experience for consumers in ways that I think are really, making everyday shopping a lot better for people.

Adrian Tennant: Renee, what do you hope readers will take away from Next Generation Retail?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah, I think that, the hope I feel is it doesn’t need to be so complicated. I think people think about innovation and technology, and they sometimes don’t know where to start. so I think one of the things that we really tried to do in the book is to be really practical about, how can you do these, any of these, every chapter, every topic we talked about, whether it’s NFTs or blockchain, Online payments or supply chain or retail media. we tried to break it down into some very easy and tactical things that people can do to just get started. I think so much of this, it really is just starting out, like I said, I was just at a trade show in Germany, and the amount of new technology is overwhelming. I think it took up 20 different huge warehouse rooms. There’s so much out there. But it really just is about getting started, trying new things, seeing what works making incremental improvements, and then iterating. So I think that’s the key lesson and the key area that I hope people will take away is just dip your toe in and start trying things. It doesn’t have to be revolutionary. They don’t have to cost a lot. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It’s just a matter of trying things and seeing how they work for your organization. And I think the other thing is, Every organization, every brand is different, and what works for one is not gonna work for the other one. So I think really being able to have that test-and-learn mentality is really important when you think about innovation.

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you and your work at CLA or your book Next Generation Retail, where can they find you?

Renee Hartmann: They can find me at www.reneehartman.com and I can certainly provide a link for the podcast as well.

Adrian Tennant: And if you’d like a copy of Renee’s book, Next Generation Retail, you can save 25 percent on either a print or electronic version when you purchase directly from the publisher online at KoganPage.com. Just add the promo code, BIGEYE25 at the checkout. Renee, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Renee Hartmann: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really fun.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks to my guest this week. Renee Hartmann, the co-author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Next Generation Retail. As always, you’ll find a transcript with links to the resources we discussed today on the unclear focus page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider following us wherever you listen to podcasts and contributing a rating or a review. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.