Maggie Garner on Listening & Culture

Maggie Garner is the co-founder of Waterson Garner. She started her career at P&G in what she called the golden years where the consumer was boss, and qualitative was well-resourced. I met her through the Exposure Therapy community, where she shared her approach to radical listening.

Yeah, so I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She teaches oral history, and it's a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it's big and beautiful, I kind of over explain it the way I'm doing it right now. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer and not answer any way that you want to, and it's impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from?

Well, I love this question, as for many reasons I'm sure you know, but I love hearing about where people come from. But I come from Urbana, Illinois, Central Illinois. It's a university town where the University of Illinois is and is otherwise surrounded by soybeans and corn.

So it's kind of in this very agricultural zone of the state, but is this, you know, vibrant university community that is, I think, was huge in terms of what I grew up valuing, being exposed to, versus if I had just lived a couple towns over, it would have been a really different experience for me.

Yeah, what was it like? I mean, that would be the Midwest, yes? Is that what we're talking about?

Yeah, well, it is totally Midwest still, in terms of my experience. So growing up with all of the Midwest cliches and, you know, having lived in other places now, it definitely has made me realize how fundamentally Midwestern I am. But growing up in this university community, it was a really creative community. I was exposed to a lot of art, and the music scene was vibrant. A lot of the kids I grew up with were in bands. A lot of the kids I grew up with had really brilliant parents who were professors at the university.

And so going over to their house, you would get into big conversations. But also, I grew up with kids that had farmland around town. So it was a really rich experience. I think I grew up kind of being exposed to a lot of big ideas. We got to take classes at the university sometimes. So it kind of got into that kind of passion for learning, and I guess very young without even realizing that I was.

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Well, it's funny you asked that because about, I guess, eight years ago now, we moved my parents out of my childhood home and I was going through boxes of stuff in the basement as one does when you help your parents move. And I found a newspaper from my senior year where every student proclaimed what they thought they would be doing in 10 years. And I actually said I would be in advertising. And so I must have known. I don't even really remember that, but I must have known that that's what I wanted to do. And I kind of remember that was around.

This is a little bit cringy, but that was around the time that the Mel Gibson movie came out of What a Woman Wants. I don't know if you remember that movie.

Yeah, of course.

And I think that planted a pretty big seed in my head of what advertising and brand building could be or what it could be about.

Yeah. And what was the allure of that story? What do you recall?

I think it was the first time that I had connected the dots that a brand could connect into something really deep and meaningful from a human level. Now, going back to that movie, I have no idea if it aged well. I haven't watched it in a really long time, but I do remember it was at least attempting to kind of build empathy and understanding of what it was like to be a woman in the professional realm.

And I think it was Nike was their client was trying to tap into sort of some of the tensions around that. I think that was a pretty cool concept for me at the time that that was something that could happen in advertising.

Yeah, that's beautiful. So catch me up now. Now, where are you and what do you do for work?

Well, I ended up, I guess, with that level of clarity in high school, I ended up going to Indiana University to the Kelly School of Business. So I went directly into the business school there.

But also, you mean directly into the business school?

Well, as a freshman, like I declared myself a marketing major as a freshman. So I was very focused. I was crystal clear. That's what I wanted to do even, I guess, before I even took a marketing class, I had already declared that. And that just set me on this path. So I graduated from Indiana and got a job immediately at Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati in their consumer and market knowledge group, which was what the insights group was called back in the day.

And 24 years later, I'm still doing consumer and market knowledge and insights work. So my career at P&G took me into an opportunity to establish my own practice with my co-founder Katie Waterson. And we now have an insights and brand strategy and innovation firm called Waterson Garner. And we are doing, I guess, what I saw Mel Gibson do back in the day. It's come full circle, where we're helping brands understand people and how they can build more relevant stories and products and services for them.

And did you just celebrate 10 years?

Yes, we just celebrated 10 years at Watterson Garner. Yeah. Thank you.

What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?

Well, I think a lot of this has been good timing and amazing luck. So when I started at P&G, it was really the golden era of consumer insights at the company from then to now. A.G. Laffley was the CEO, and he really operated with the mantra of consumer as boss. And so the insights function was really empowered. There was huge investment in consumer research at the time, a lot of innovation, a lot of kind of mixed method integration. Market mixed modeling was kind of being born, and segmentation was being advanced with new statistical methods. And quality was also really a huge investment. This is when the transfer of ethnography into in-home research was huge, and everyone was doing that. And so I walked into that world of highly resourced, really kind of having a real powerful voice at the table and marketing as an insights person.

And that sets the tone, I think, for what I know to be possible, for what happens when you have the right insight to work. And so that got me, I think, into this world of really understanding the power of what I call radical listening. You've heard me use that term before. And I was actually working in the pharmaceuticals division at P&G, which they no longer have. But I was working in the women's health space, particularly on a brand that never made it to market, but it was a testosterone patch for low sexual desire in post-menopausal women. And so as a young 20-something, I was in interviews with women and their spouses, their partners, diving deep into what it's like to have lost and then rekindle a sexual connection in the relationship.

And so that really set the bar for the kind of intimacy and vulnerability and power that comes from really personal consumer research, but also what's powerful and possible when you take that and honor that and lead it into a brand strategy and innovation strategy so that you're really delivering against what's really going on in those people's lives. And so it set a pretty high bar for me from the get-go of what research can be like and what it can do and unlock. And I've never really let the bar lower for myself as I've gone through different roles and worked across all different kinds of brands and industries. I still think that's the kind of conversation that you can have about almost anything if you know how.

Yeah. How were you supported? What was it like to be a researcher? What did you learn? I've never worked with P&G, but everybody, you know, it's such a powerhouse, you know what I mean? And so what was the culture? How did you learn to be in that space with those people? What kind of training did they give you or how did they structure that for you?

It was kind of an amazing thing and something that I think has really shifted in the industry. So back then, we were brought in and kind of went through what they called a new hire college experience. And so we were in deep training workshops for weeks for our first year together, learning about all kinds of methods.

But of course, the most important learning ground for me was in the field. So working with really experienced researchers and moderators who knew how to have these kinds of intimate conversations, it was, you know, watching them navigate and really carefully honor that experience was key. But then I think, you know, coming back and learning how to translate anything that we learned into actual grand strategy, that is one of the things that P&G does better than many companies, is that they don't just leave it at an insight. It always is pushed into a competitive advantage, right? So what did we learn about our consumers that no one else knows? And what are we going to do with that?

That was really kind of the rubber meets road training that I got an expectation that I think helped me really develop a philosophy of how important it is to make everything we learn immediately actionable, even if it's a big idea, even if it's a big concept, even if it's really intimate. And so I think that's the balance that I think I learned early on there.

The power in these interviews, I keep hearing people talk about the value of finding something that nobody else knows. Can you tell me more about that? Is that still part of your process? And how do you do that?

Well, that's sometimes hard to pre-orchestrate. One of the things that I think is tricky about research in today's get it done now economy is that building trust and intimacy and depth takes time. And so thinking about research as a way to get answers to questions is a sure way of getting shallow responses and really getting the same answers that all of your competitors already know as well.

So creating a layered contextual and trust building method has helped us go deeper into conversations where maybe we're connecting dots on things that are not obvious at first. So if you know what's happening culturally, what's happening in their personal lives, what's happening in terms of aspirations and what's getting in the way of all that and a lot of the magic happens also on the back end when it comes to sense making. And so we're gathering all this rich contextual layered learning, but then the hard part is now what does it all mean? And we call that sense making. There's a lot of words for it, synthesis, sense making. But that's where kind of the art and science of insight distillation comes in, right?

Where you're acting more like an editor in a lot of ways, kind of connecting the story, finding the story, deciding what's interesting but not really part of the story that can be left on the editing floor. And then creating this kind of rich narrative around the insights that really unlocks kind of a whole new way of looking at the world. And that's what we tried to do even on projects that are, you know, for things like cheese or beer or house exterior siding like these are all things that actually do have a lot of depth to them. If you allow the time to get into it.

Why are we so surprised that there's depth there? Can you tell I'm curious about telling you more? Maybe there's a banal experience you've had.

Well, I think one of the things that although I knew from the get go that I wanted to be a marketer, every chance I got in school to take a class in the social science realm, I did. So I love taking classes on gender studies and psychology and music history and whatever else I could find that I think helped me also just put everything I was learning about brands in context of the world. And so I think you either see brands as a thing that sort of exists in consumers lives, or you see it as part of a broader society and system. And I really see every brand as a part of the broader systems in which we live. There's a thing called systems thinking, which is a way to sort of see the bigger sociological, economic, cultural forces that really kind of create the context for any decision to be made.

And so if you see brands in that way, you can kind of zoom out in the conversations. You can see how, you know, different dynamics around social class and identity economics, whether it's micro or macro cultural norms and rituals and institutions, how all of these actually are at play in the relationship between a consumer and a brand. And that macro view is where you can start to see interesting connections that maybe the consumer can't really articulate necessarily, but they can kind of help you see maybe where there's an intersection point that's worth digging into or thinking about more.

And so, in that system's thinking method, you can kind of get to some pretty interesting and rich dynamics about any topic, whether that's, you know, like we're talking about beer, dairy, whatever it is.

For example, in that home siding project I talked about, the shift of the role of women in home buying and home investment decisions has fundamentally completely changed how exterior home projects are happening, and the psychology and kind of path to purchase looks really, really different than it used to maybe 20 years ago. And so that's a big conversation about the role of women in the home, in the home buying market, in the renovations market, who they look to for advice, how they're treated in that process.

Like there's just so much going on there that it was an incredibly rich project that ultimately was really just about, you know, how they wanted their homes to look and how it matched up to what they wanted their home experience to be.

That's awesome. So, you talked a little bit about the constraints today. I mean, I love how you call out it takes time, you know what I mean, like qualitative in particular, any kind of research like the sort of the human the relational part of that process isn't something that really can be rushed. Yes, we are constantly forced to kind of rush it. So I wonder if you might talk a little bit about how you negotiate space for that kind of work.

Yeah, this is actually this, this rub that you're talking about right now is the basis for a program that we developed, probably five or six years ago now called Human Fluent. Because we keep getting this question from our clients. So we'll do a project with them. They'll see the power of this transformational experience of radical listening by diving deep into this layered system around their brand and their consumer and they'll say, how do we do that? Like, what, how do we teach our people to do that? We don't do this. What does it take?

And so we developed a program called human fluent that ultimately is a rebranding of the qualitative process. So we really want to kind of step out of what you might think you think qualitative is. There's a lot of, you know, old associations with qualitative research with focus groups. Eating M&Ms behind the mirror, things like that, and kind of flip charts and a two page summary and that's qualitative research.

And so we're, we want to rebrand qualitative research as something that's way more about getting to understand humans and opening up the aperture of what it can be to learn about people. And so we developed this program and we walked through exactly what you're talking about. One, what is the sort of mindset that it takes to even be ready to develop human fluency.

And a lot of that is working through your own biases about your brand, your consumer, your market, managing those, being aware of those, using those as a way to open up new and deeper and bigger questions. And then it comes down to the investment it takes to do this work well. And so there's some simple things of just, you know, how to design good research.

But ultimately the hardest part that we hear from people is not so much that the research takes time, but it's that the sense making takes time. And so I think in this kind of automated world where answers are available so quickly, it seems, creating the space to actually analyze, find patterns, connect dots. That's actually where it seems like the biggest issue is on time. Not so much the research. You can kind of get people to commit a week to learning about people, maybe having multiple interactions with them. It's really on the back end of, okay, so now we have a lot of really rich but unstructured data that we have to organize, analyze, and make sense of.

That is a skill and a discipline and a time commitment that I just don't think people have a lot of experience with anymore, period, let alone in marketing. And so that's really the biggest challenge that we find trying to kind of develop and scale and roll out these programs to our clients.

Yeah, that's so interesting. That is sort of surprising. So what do you, what do you do with that? Or are you just, how do you manage that?

Well, sense making, there's definitely some, some...

Well I guess too that you're, are you treating them? Sorry to interrupt you, because there was a piece of, part of this feels like you're really coaching them. Is that correct?

Yeah, so we have, we have training and capability programs that we deliver for clients that are going through the human fluent program. But the sense making part is one that is, you can teach to a point, and a lot of it is the muscles that you have to build through repetition, through practice, through kind of the, just the lived experience of working through sense making. And so in some organizations, they can kind of build the space and the skill set and the team and the leadership to support that kind of work.

And in others, I, you know, I do feel like that is where sometimes the promise of the sort of depth of the research falls down. And so it's a real challenge. I think it's a real challenge in this kind of, especially in the world of AI where synthesis seems like you should be able to put all that data into a query and then get a report and get the insight out of it. But that's just not really how it works. That's not really how big insight, distillation and sense making works. It's a hands on discipline, and it's a muscle you have to build.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I have to keep thinking about that somehow. There's two things I want to return to you. One is the joy. You told this amazing story but I wanted to, you answered the question about where the joy is for you and what you love about it.

Well, the conversations that I've been able to have over 24 years with, I mean, gosh, I don't know, thousands of people I don't even, I can't even imagine how many people I've interviewed at this point, but those. Those are some of the most enriching conversations I have. These are people that I would never meet outside of my bubble.

These are people that teach me things about how they see the world and how they experience the world that I will never personally be able to experience in my life because we, we come from different places we are different people we are in different systems of society and industry and economics. And so, it feels like continuous learning to me. It feels like I'm constantly being exposed to new ideas. And it's really humbling.

It's really humbling work, because you realize there is still so much to learn. I've been doing this for 24 years. I've done research on so many categories so many brands and still every project I get there's something interesting and new and different that I get to hear about in these interviews and so it to me it's just food, it's like food for my brain, and I love it and I don't get sick of it.

You had mentioned that you knew you wanted to go into marketing, but what was your first experience with the research and qualitative and how did it was it a surprise to you I guess. And how do you - you’re celebrating it now but what do you really attribute to. How has it changed you I think is the question.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the sort of role that I had in that women's health division was. I mean we did not waste any time on small talk in those interviews when you're talking to people, women who have had chronic life altering health changes. It's the tone and the potential of the conversation is just powerful from the get go, you know, so I remember when I first started at P&G I kind of, I was jealous of my friends that were working on the big brands like Tide and Crest and Pantene and these really cool sexy brands that I thought that.

Well, that was, that was why you went to P&G and then I was like what am I working on an osteoporosis medication. But I remember kind of hitting me several months into that whole experience of like the conversations I was having were so real, you know, getting an osteoporosis diagnosis is a complete confrontation with the inevitable inevitabilities of aging for women.

It's like a complete undeniable of the aging experience and that was a really rich, powerful conversation, maybe a little bit more rich than the challenges of stain removal on a shirt right and ketchup and mustard and whatnot. And so I think that sort of experience like just completely set the tone for what research can be for me. And so that's, you know, I've really carried that forward into all of the work that I do and I look for projects and maybe seek out projects that just set up that level of richness. Even though we do projects that maybe aren't as rich as well but we can find it, we can find the human experience in any topic.

Yeah. And tell me about radical listening.

Well, one of the projects that I know you've heard me talk about before is a project that we did exploring rural and urban identity. And this was back in 2016 when the first Trump election had really shaken up a lot of preconceived notions about American demographics and identities and voting groups and the really sharp difference between urban and rural voting patterns became very clear. And so the project that we were doing was in service of a beverage company who wanted to make sure that their marketing practices were relevant across groups, but it was fundamentally a much bigger project than that.

And going into communities of different types in rural settings across the country, in urban settings across the country was an exercise in radical listening. So we went in, not with a really tight discussion guide, but rather we recruited what we called local storytellers. So these were people in their communities that really were the heartbeat of that city or that town could introduce us to other people that could really explain what it's like to live their past, present, and future, help us get into kind of the soul of the community and what it's all about. And that wasn't really like a classic interview experience. That was more of a conversation, and it required us to really put all of our biases aside and use radical listening. And so it's an exercise in really managing bias, designing research to overcome a lot of the biases that we might not even be aware that we're bringing into it.

And listening truly to listen, not to get an answer to a question, but to allow kind of for the exchange and space to happen where when I hear about why kind of a political view comes up,

Instead of reacting to that, I'm trying to really listen to where that's coming from, what's behind it, what's the human experience that's really shaped that need or that belief system. And it was a life changing project. And I wish that more people got a chance to radically listen to people from other communities and other walks of life today.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about, because we've talked about this before, but the methods you talk, you talk about sort of managing biases, a little bit about how you do that in order to be receptive and sort of able to listen in moments when Yeah, it might be, it might conflict with your own sort of reaction.

Yeah, yeah. So some of it's just the practice of being a really good researcher right and that takes years and years and years, and then some of it are active exercises of self awareness. And so we actually have a session we do before we go out into the field and sometimes even as we're kicking projects off.

Before we even necessarily set the focal question for the project because oftentimes we're getting a project that's framed in such a way that there's bias built into the frame from the get go, and it's limiting how we see the possibilities for that brand how we see the possibilities for And so we have a method that we call power framing that is designed to one, make sure everyone knows that biases is natural, that we all have it. That just because you have it doesn't mean you're a bad person doesn't mean you have any kind of lack of intelligence but rather, it's a survival instinct right this is a system one system to tool developed over time so that we can, you know, think fast.

And survive and thrive. And so it takes work to kind of actively overcome that biological instinct. And so we work through different ways of sort of naming and recognizing bias when it comes up, but also changing it into a mindset of curiosity.

And so the number one anecdote bias is curiosity. And so we embody kind of different characters that are really naturally curious and practice playing different characters that have a have a natural ability to kind of ask questions that are not loaded but are truly kind of coming from a place of curiosity and and practicing that before we go in the field before we go into research helps a lot.

That's beautiful. The conditions around that report around around that work, I guess, what are the ideal what are the conditions for that kind of radical listening, you know, I mean, and how is it like maybe this is a, this is a way of pointing at how you came in, you're very clear that you came in, in a beautiful moment in time, really well supported in an organization that just loved qualitative and was really organized around what do you say the consumer is boss.

Yes.

So what are the conditions for kind of radical listening and how would you describe the state of, of, of listening today.

Yeah, I mean the, the kind of blessing and curse of the pandemic is that we had to completely reimagine the way research happens. Some things that came from that are awesome, kind of the reach and the speed at which we can conduct research and the ability to record and have instant transcripts and all the things and people watching from all over the place at any time. All of that I think has so much power and has elevated a lot of aspects of research.

However, it's really hard to be an active listener to virtual research. I think it's asking a lot of our clients to sit in on hours and hours of conversations holding their attention and focus. There's, you know, it's during work time so they're multitasking the whole time that I think has hurt the quality of research. When you have the ability to get out of the office and physically insert yourself into an environment that's already sparking your curiosity, where you're in front of someone having a conversation with them versus behind the screen watching them have a conversation.

All of the kind of power of in person research definitely helps with radical listening. It's so hard to, I think have the stamina to hang with that many hours of research when it's virtual and so we do a ton of virtual research. In fact, that's still mostly what we've been doing post pandemic.

But, wow, we get teams into the field and we're able to kind of do a much more in context ethnographic style of research. It's just transformative for the team, they feel like they know the stories, they feel like they know the people they can come back and speak with authority to their business partners about what they learned because they were there. It's really, really different.

And so we're still wrestling with how to support our clients, so that they can have that kind of transformative learning experience when it's virtual. And when we can get them into the field. When we can get them to touch and feel and, and, and kind of get into the context of the business challenge resolving it's just so different.

So different.

What's your North Star in terms of what do you think about what your job is like for your client, you know what I mean like what are you actually trying to do for them. I mean, I'm sure it varies according to the project and stuff like that but I'm just wondering how you come to define what you're doing for them for yourself.

Ultimately, everything we do results in what we call kind of writing a brand's next chapter and so the work that we're doing is kind of deep and wide brand strategy work we're not working on next month's promotional tagline. We're working on what, where is this brand going to go in the next one to three years, sometimes longer right if it's if it's kind of a long term

innovation project or really upstream innovation. And so we take everything we're learning and translate that into a foundational insight that fundamentally re orients the way the brand sees its role in the world and gives the brand a really clear North Star so our North Star is that the brand sees its North Star, and it's in context of today's culture it's in context of today's commercial realities and competitive dynamics which have never been more, you know, open in terms of the competitive landscape. And so we really see our role is in kind of helping our clients write that next chapter for their brand. Who are they, where are they playing, how are they going to win, who are they competing with, what's the desired experience that they fulfill.

And then ultimately the kind of concepts and products and services that that deliver against that.

How would you say your idea of what a brand is or the job a brand does for people has evolved over time. Yeah, because when you walked in a PNG, or.

I think it's, I think that is shifting. So, I think there's kind of two camps in marketing right now. I think going back to this idea, is the brand part of a bigger human system. We say yes like we say that the brand is part of the human experience and the brand has had the potential and the power to advance the human experience to allow people to access experiences that they couldn't without the brand. And so you have to have a really clear view on what experience is, that is that you want to advance and create for people and why it matters and why it's important. I think there's another camp that says actually the brand can just kind of optimize or kind of manipulate the human experience, not necessarily in a negative way, but it's a little bit more mechanical right it's a little bit more about performance.

This is kind of a little bit more in that performance marketing world where we can just sort of a B test our way to the right message to the right time to the right place to create a transactional decision that benefits us. And I just, I will never be in that camp. I just fundamentally don't see brands in that way. I see them as part of the human experience. I think the brands in your life that you love. Have allowed you to access something that you couldn't without that brand, and that's that isn't transactional, that's a relationship.

Yeah. And we've talked before about sort of the qualitative and how vital it is you already talked about so about that of course, but also how sort of misunderstood it is and maybe undefended or unchampioned. Yeah, I'm just curious, how would you describe the sort of the state of equality and think it struggles so much.

I know I wish there was like a council of the kind of qualitative lords right where we could all get together and and work on a rebrand for qualitative research because I think in a, in an era where analytics has has increased and sort of the cache and the power and the value that it holds you look at just even the semiotics around analytics right now, artificial intelligence. Intelligence is powerful intelligence is an elevated, you know, product. Right.

It's not just saying here's your, here's your smarter, better faster computation. That's not what they're offering, it's artificial intelligence. What's the equivalent in qualitative right? where are we capturing the value equation of qualitative a way that matches intelligence. Is it really a shift to society? This is social science. Maybe that's a way to think about qualitative that really honors the value and the role it plays.

But I do think there's just a lot of it because of sort of, you know, things like even base sizes, I'll still get pushback in meetings on sample sizes of qualitative and that just fundamentally shows to me that we're talking about it the wrong way. If we're not open to hearing what sort of that radical listening exercise unveiled and how we see it in this kind of broader system of the human experience and we're really hyper focused on sample size then we're just fundamentally not positioning qualitative In the way that it should be positioned. And so I'm, I'm, I'm all about a rebrand of qualitative research. I don't know who's in charge of that, but I would love to help whoever's in charge of the rebrand. Well, I love that you did it for yourself and that included it assumes responsibility for some training to write because just because I've got so many things going around in my brain right now, but Well, how would you answer that question of what's the elevated state of qualitative. I feel like I have a hypothesis, but I don't know.

I would love to hear your hypothesis. I think this is a question that I've been thinking about for a really, really long time. And I don't know that I have a single Rebrand of it that that quite makes sense. I think it's something that we need. Honestly, I think it's an industry challenge that I'd love to see people come together on and kind of take a stab at I do think there's like I said some there's potential and thinking about this as the role of social science and marketing and brand building. I think there's power in the idea of sense making, and kind of the connecting of dots that really is not only kind of an analytical process but is also a creative process And it requires imagination. It requires openness. It requires a kind of being able to see things and in new ways that is not, you know, something that a Computer or ChatGPT can ever be able to do because of the way that pattern recognition is done through that method. So I think there's routes like that.

But I'm curious what you think and what your hypothesis is.

What is my hypothesis? I think what I think is funny. I'm recognizing that there's been maybe a little narcissism and some of my line of questioning where I've been trying to sort of have you, you know, that thing where you ask people questions because you want them to say what you're thinking.

Yes, we would help you with that Peter in our training.

I love it. Yeah, so for me, I feel like for a long time I felt like it was my job as sort of a heroic figure to go out into the world and get things and then deliver them to the client and then the client would just they would The value and the implications would be self evident and my job would be done. So I brought the treasure. But then I realized, you know, just maybe just for growing old and having more experiences that what I really want to do or when I do my job best. It's when somehow they've I've awakened something in my client that's new to them and they've almost I'm unnecessary really like ideally they would have their own experience of something and it would it would change them in a way that's not and I always end up thinking about intuition. Like it's not rational. It doesn't really make any sense, but they just have a moment when they're there, that part of us that's intuitive and imaginative and creative lets something in and then it shifts in a way. So I always think about quantitative as an analytical understanding that we currently frame qualitative as a lesser form of right. That's why we dare ask about sample size for qualitative. But if qualitative were to articulate its own value, it would have to create the framework for valuing intuition and imagination and that and all of that stuff is functioning now. It's just not formalized. Yeah, everybody's decisions depend on their intuition and their anecdotes, but they don't know that it's a real thing that they could develop. It's like an invisible muscle.

Yeah, I love what you're saying because of what we hear from our clients and it's both incredibly rewarding but also a little heartbreaking for me when we hear that. That project we did together was like the best project I've done in five years. And what I think has happened unfortunately in the world of marketing is a lot of people do get into marketing because they're curious because they like understanding why people do things and they do see brands as the sort of powerful kind of vessel for change or innovation or experience.

And then we get into the trackers and the spreadsheets and the timelines and so many marketers that I work with today are not really doing marketing, as you and I understand it, they're they're managing processes, they're answering urgent questions that require a number to be satisfied. And when they have a chance to sort of reconnect with their consumers in a way that feels really real. It's not only like super rewarding and inspiring work for them, but it sort of reminds them of why they even got into marketing in the first place.

And I think there's power in that. I think there's power in reframing qualitative research as really the life force of marketing as the juice as the blood that can pump through the veins that can inspire creativity that can remind us and motivate us and fuel the work that we're doing that can help us sort of see the world, not only in a powerful way for our brands, but in a powerful way for ourselves. There's really no there's no way if you attend quality research that you're not going to come out of it, understanding the world better at a personal level, like that's just that's just what happens. And so I think if we can reframe qualitative against really what is behind why we all got into marketing in the first place, there's real power in that.

Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. I love it. The juice is totally the truth. I had just encountered something on LinkedIn. I guess it's the future of strategy report that said that face to face qualitative is the least utilized tool of all the, you know, these are these are advertising strategy planners across the world. Yeah, less than 21% I think was the number I'll double check but was sort of shocking to me how far away we are decision makers are from the customers.

Yeah, it reminds it's kind of like everything else that we know is good for us right like we, we know that it's good for us as marketers we kind of know that. But we don't always do it right we don't always eat the vegetables we don't always exercise but every time you do you're like wow I feel great.

Yeah, what about the counterpoint like sometimes I get into this conversation that culture is online culture. Now we're just right so that that when we came in it was like culture was real world culture and so I sort of prioritize real world face to face stuff. Yeah, a legitimate argument to be made that so much of our life is lived online that you, you're presumably you're, you are being ethnographic from your desk.

Yes, I think digital ethnography is real. It's a thing. I start almost every project in my early kind of info gathering stage on Reddit, the quality of dialogue on Reddit. Now of course you can find terrible dialogue on Reddit but the quality of dialogue for topics that I'm looking for is incredible is an amazing starting point. We always look at what the sort of cultural codes reference points conversation is for any category or brand or topic we're looking at. That cultural layer that's really just front and center in our social digital lives is invaluable. However, it's not necessarily the same thing, it's what's happening in real life and I think we all experience that in our personal lives. What you post is not always what's happening. What you post is not always what you're feeling. And so you have to balance that with reality. You have to balance that with context and real decisions, real pressure points, real tensions that may not really be post worthy, but are very real for the decisions that the consumers are making about your category and your brand.

We have a little bit of a few minutes left, and I wanted to maybe return to the rural urban moment right that moment with 2016 created this little window where everybody was like wait we're really out of touch let's go and let's do radical listening. 20 24 and we're kind of back almost in the same position in a way where we're shocked at how little we knew about what was coming. I don't know what your thoughts are on where we are now and how things we might do things differently or yeah.

Yeah, I mean I think you know there's of course this flurry of post election analysis of what went wrong or what didn't we know and clearly there are some really interesting shifts in how identity is predictive or not on voting. And so I think we have to kind of fundamentally back out and go back to these macro systems that are how I like to think about

things and think about what's influencing behavior in the world. So what are the sort of broader systems that are shifting identities and identity groups and what are these groups really needing from the government right now.

And I think there's probably just a pretty big gap in what we think we know and what's real right now on that topic. And so I hope, and I would love to help with any effort there is to to really just kind of blank paper what we think we know about these key voter groups and go into an exercise of radical listening go into an immersive experience with these groups. I did another project about the shifting dynamics of youth power, where the team I was working with was a very progressive urban team who definitely thought that they understood how you thought power would manifest but truly from it was from a worldview of a progressive future.

And we actually immersed ourselves with conservative college students who were leading turning point rallies. I don't know if you've ever heard of the turning point group. It was kind of an interesting foreshadowing in a lot of ways of a young, higher educated cohort who was pushing for conservative values and was very pro-Trump at the time.

And that was an eye-opening experience for them. I don't think we should assume that young people today are kind of going to follow a lot of the kind of progressive trajectories that we've seen in the past and I think we have to understand why. So I would start with an exercise in radical listening and I think it would be wildly illuminating and potentially change a lot of strategies and tactics.

Thank you so much. This has been just a lot of fun and I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and thank you so much.

Thank you, Peter, and thank you for being one of the lords of qualitative that will help rebrand our craft. So thank you for having me.

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