Where does authentic connection fit in a data-driven world?

In this week's episode, we chat with Robyn Rouse from Vital Findings, a distinguished qualitative researcher and a 2023 Greenbook Future List Honoree who emphasizes the centrality of genuine human connection in her work. As she delves into the nuances of tailoring research methods to clients' needs, Robyn also highlights the symbiosis of design in effectively conveying findings. Exploring the future, she touches upon the intriguing possibilities of AI in research and its accompanying challenges. Beyond the mechanics of research, Robyn reflects on her personal journey, the gratification derived from connecting with people, and the necessity of emotional resilience in the industry.

You can reach out to Robyn on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Robyn for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; our editor, Big Bad Audio; and this episode's sponsor, Dig Insights.

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Dig Insights. Using decision science, Dig Insights helps researchers at the world’s most well-loved brands drive growth in crowded categories. Their work is supported by proprietary technology, including Upsiide, the only ResTech platform exclusively built to test and optimize innovation. Learn more at diginsights.com.

Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to spend it with myself and my guest, because you don’t want to just listen to me, so it’s a good thing that we do have guests that seem to want to talk. Today, my guest is Robyn Rouse. Robyn is the insights strategist at Vital Findings. Welcome, Robyn.

Thank you so much, Lenny. Excited to be here.

Well, let’s see if you think that when we’re done, but I’ll do my best to try and maintain the expectation that this was a good experience. Now, Robyn, you and I’ve never met, so it’s a real pleasure to have the time to get to know you. For myself and the audience, won’t you tell us a little bit about your background and yourself?

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah. Like you mentioned, I’m an insights strategist. I work with Vital Findings. We are an insights strategy agency, and we specialize in creative mixed methods, design, and storytelling. My specific role within that is being the bridge between the research. I lead a lot of our research efforts, so between that and our client consultation side of things. I’m leading our teams. I’m pretty in the weeds of our work, but I’m also consulting with our clients. Then, I could see how the other little bit about me specifically, I am a moderator, so I do a lot of our in-house moderation. I’ve had a chance to develop that skill out quite a bit over the last few years, so anything from IDIs, ethnographies, shop-alongs, and focus groups.

Okay. Very cool. As you brought this up right before, and you were—recently got married, so congratulations. Relatively recently.

2020, so not that recent, but it took a while to do the name change thing.

Yeah. Well, I mean, getting married in 2020. I actually had two daughters get married in 2020, and it was—yeah. It’s still weird for me that I—so, whatever that’s worth.

Yeah.

All right. Well, congratulations. You were a Future List Honoree, so congratulations on that as well.

Thank you. Yeah. It was such an honor and really exciting to attend IIEX. It was actually my first industry conference, so it was very, very cool, very interesting to hear what’s happening, all the innovation that’s going on in our work.

Yeah. Well, so, speaking of innovation, the—you called yourself a moderator, but you do a lot of more innovative immersive work than your traditional focus group. Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us the cool stuff that you’re doing to expand and innovate around qualitative research.

Definitely. It’s both in terms of the actual approach to research that we’re doing but also in how we’re sharing those insights. On the research side, I mean, we really pride ourselves on being very consultative and collaborative with our clients, so a lot of the more innovative work that we do is an extension of us really getting to in-depth understand our clients’ needs and objectives. A couple of examples of work that we’ve done recently, we actually did a road show speaking to some of the co-creations that we’re doing where we are quite literally bringing our clients and consumers in the same room and developing out—dependent on what the need is—doing a co-creative session, so simulating an environment where, maybe, a product, if you will, is going to have an actual play and getting both the folks that are creating that product and consumers in a room talking about what’s needed, what’s missing from what’s currently on the market. Things like that. My experience, a bit more directly recently, has been doing a lot of that immersive work, so a lot of—we were just talking about COVID. As things have lifted, there’s definitely a need to understand what folks’ experiences look like now. We’re definitely back in in-person and have been able to do a lot of work in-home where we’re able to bring our clients along. One of our clients in particular, they’re in the retail space, and they have some muses. They have some segments. Our ability to bring their segments to life has really been based in our ability to get them to look at—into their lives, so going into their homes, looking at their closets, doing tours, but also taking them out into the real world and visualizing how they shop and how they think about things. Different approaches for different reasons, different needs. One of my favorite things that we’ve done recently that was on the insights sharing side of things was some work that we did with a brand that included a mixer, which was very different, and it’s new territory for us, but it was another similar situation where—

—I’m sorry. A mixer like an event mixer?

An event. Yeah.

Okay, okay. Not a blender mix… [Laughs]

Oh, no, no, no. No. We did a—almost a cocktail party type of event where we invited some of the segments or their muses that they were really interested in learning more about and our clients. We were in downtown LA. We were at a nice area of a hotel that we were able to rent out that had a restaurant, and we created this focus group that we were able to have an actual scheduled slate of questions. At the same time, it was woven in between our stakeholders getting to interact with these people and actually ask them directly in a way that felt very organic and authentic and not purely question-answer form. Yeah. We’re still definitely exploring, and what I’ve really enjoyed about it is that it’s really catered to whatever specific needs our client has. It could look one way for one and something totally different for another.

Yeah. That is a really cool idea and—as soon as we clarified what type of mixer we were talking about. Yeah, yeah. I’m going to use IIEX as an example. Right? The networking component of walking around and engaging and talking to all of those folks is as much a data collection exercise for me as it is a social exercise, so to actually bake that in methodologically, that’s pretty darn interesting. What have you found with tradeoffs in going for more of this immersive experiential type of interactions versus more of the structured traditional components? Are there things that you think, “Oh, we’re going to have to give up this, but we’re going to get this instead?”

That’s a great question. We tend to approach these things from a mixed methodological standpoint, so that is, maybe, one component. In this specific example that I’m thinking about, the mixer came after a round of more traditional qualitative work. I think that’s part of it is it’s not always standalone. It usually is grounded in something that is a bit more traditionally based or an extension of that. If we were to focus in on that, I honestly can’t think of tradeoffs, because it’s its own experience. There’s a lot of great work that comes from it. I think, if anything, it inspires further work, so it’s either a jumping off point or something that helps ground the research that we’ve already done. That’s my thinking. It’s not necessarily a standalone piece in most cases.

Okay. You don’t think of it as a tool in the toolbox, so to speak? Yeah, or like, “Okay. Here’s the business issue. We’re going to do the mixer, because that’s going to give us exactly what we want.” Instead, it’s more of a, “We want to—what’s the best way to get to the heart of the matter?” so to speak.

Exactly, exactly.

Now, twice you used the word “muse” to describe segments or within a population. I find that fascinating. I get it as soon as you say it. Yeah, cool, but it’s not one that we hear very often in the context of research. Tell me a little bit about that. Why is that the word? Are you a classicist? You just love Greek myth and thought, “Okay. We’re going to…”

Yeah, well, that’s funny. I didn’t even hear myself using it, I think it’s so baked in. I think it’s such an easy way to get folks to think about the essence of a consumer that they’re targeting. It’s one thing to have a segment and to—or have your several segments and know, “Okay. There’s this person and this person and this person.” It’s another thing to get to know them really intricately and intimately. I think that’s where muse specifically comes from, because it really—it does stand as someone who—if we’re doing it effectively, anyone at the organization, whether—and I’m still thinking about this retail space in example—but whether you’re on the product side or marketing or in a C-suite, you can see this person and feel like you know them. That’s really the essence of the work that we’re trying to capture. Not just know them but know how to meet their needs and how—what your lane within your brand can be doing to better meet their needs.

It’s neat. I think of the word—right—and the foundation of it is an inspiring figure. Right? There’s an element of customer centricity baked into you utilizing that concept. Do you find that that’s one of the things that separates you within the type of work that you do is—you said it was unconscious that you think in terms of finding that inspiring customer centricity and consumer closeness as that’s what you enable? That’s what you empower?

I think so. I think throughout our work—and regardless of methodology, at our core, we’re trying to boil things down to human experiences, so understanding people at that very human level, I think, is something that we’ve really aimed to bring forward in all the work that we do, and it comes through in different ways. Right? It’s in how we talk to them, so the actual methods that we build around the research. It’s how we talk about them to our clients. It’s also—yeah—how we present them, so design is a huge part of what we do. Bringing to life is another term that I—that we use a lot, and I think that’s really integral to our work.

Yeah. Well, so, let’s segue into that. Your—as the name would suggest—Vital Findings and this idea of bringing the human to life within the findings, is there anything different that you do in terms of communicating the findings? Do you do workshops? I’m guessing you don’t just do a PowerPoint deck.

Yes.

Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that—about that communication process to get to the actionable insights that your clients are looking for.

Definitely. I think it really boils down to what our clients’ need is and understanding our clients’ needs. I’d say that’s our first step is we do a lot of work to immerse ourselves in the category, in helping our—sometimes helping our client really identify what their need is, then we’d say something. Through conversation we find it’s something deeper, that’s step one. Then, in terms of—I think a lot—a lot of clients in this day and age or what we see across organizations is the struggle to evangelize the work with stakeholders to really bring it beyond the page—right—so that they’re not just looking at numbers on a page or a quote on a page. We do that through, one, because sometimes our deliverables are those decks. Right? It is just a PowerPoint presentation. In that, design is a huge part of it for us. We know that our clients may be sharing with stakeholders that are not as research savvy—right—or who don’t have as much of that experience. To the extent that design can pair and work with the research to help better visualize and communicate the story that we’re trying to tell this big piece of it, we do do workshops. It’s dependent on what the client needs. They’re very custom in nature in each case, but sometimes it’s—if it is a segmentation—we’ve been using that example—they may need help prioritizing their segments. We’ll do a workshop that, one, helps to lay the groundwork of getting everyone on the same page with who it is that we’re talking about and who they’re talking to and what their audience looks like. Then it’s different activities that we’ll do to help get them to that point of being able to prioritize and then think through next steps. We had one instance where we were working with the—an entertainment brand, and they had, again, several different stakeholders that were involved in the work and wanted to have a true immersive experience, so we set up several different rooms. Each room was the foundation—it was built off of the insight that—the core insight that we were trying to communicate. It wasn’t your typical, “Okay. Let’s get through this session, and we’ll redo this slide.” We had a mix of videos from consumers and some more of the traditional data-driven pieces that are—that were important. Others were conversational, more like interview style. It does a good job of really helping to break up and get you out-of-the-box thinking in terms of how you’re talking about these insights and taking them in.

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Now, what’s your origin story, Robyn? Right? How did you get into this? Obviously, you’re very passionate about it. It seems like a bit of an avocation. Did you always know, “Yeah. I’m going to do qualitative research,” or how’d we get there?

It’s interesting, because I didn’t know that this was going to be my path. My origins of research came from college. I was a research assistant for one of my psychology professors. Didn’t take a single business class when I was in school, but Vital Findings truly was my first entry point into this industry, and I’ve been working in it ever since. I think that I do owe a lot to the company for giving me so many opportunities to explore what I like. It came naturally. It came organically. I’m trained in both quantitative and qualitative, and I like both. I definitely see use case for both, but I happen to be in conversations where I was able to see the big picture very early on in my career, so whether that’s sitting in on discussions that are happening with clients or brainstorm sessions, and got to really cultivate my voice and what I liked through that. A lot of it was the observation and given the opportunity to be observant and collaborate where I can too. It happened naturally, I think, and I find that qual was, I think, what I gravitated to a little bit more so.

That’s really probably, yes, a majority of people in the industry. It’s a similar type of story. Did you set out to be a researcher? No. Myself included. Like, “Wait.” Once you’re here, you just kind of, “Oh, wow. This is cool.” Then follow up question on that. Where do you find the most satisfaction personally? You think, “This is why I love doing what I do.” What does that look like for you?

That’s a great one. I truly enjoy connecting with people, that human element that I spoke to before, I think, is really what speaks to me. I feel like, especially in the qualitative work, being yourself is welcome. Right? Because it leads to this place of connection and vulnerability and fosters a sense of trust, and, so, getting to that point with regular people—or it could be with participants but also within the organization, with clients that I meet—having that freedom to be authentic is been very rewarding.

Yeah. I agree. Over the years, we’ve had to think, “We need to let Lenny be Lenny,” because I don’t know how to be any other way. Right? I agree with you. I think that that is a—since we used origin story as a metaphor, I think that’s a superpower—right—to be able to engage with people through being authentic. Also, I’ve certainly experienced times and circumstances where it did not work out very well, that the being authentic, trying to connect no matter what, it just was not going to happen. Have you experienced that, where it wasn’t going to happen no matter what?

I don’t know that it’s to that degree but definitely where you feel, “Okay. There’s a wall. I’m not getting much further past this point.” It can be with respondents. It could also be with clients who are very, “This is what I need. This is all I want.” Again, we really try to develop consultative relationships even if it is just a client that we’re working with once. Right? In some cases, they’re very—they can be very straightforward about what they want and not want to necessarily want to go deeper in that relationship. With participants, that can be really challenging when you’re in the middle of an IDI, and they’re giving you nothing. That’s definitely happened before. I think you just—you just have to roll with it, do your best. That’s really all I can say is you take it as far as you can and respect what that person’s boundary is, and that’s all you can do.

Yeah, yeah. Good advice. I think as you—as we’re growing through that process—talking about you but, for me, I think I’m a naturally friendly kind of guy, and I enjoy interacting with people. I remember vividly times where, if that connection wasn’t happening, I took it personally. What’s wrong with me? Right? Why don’t you want to be my friend? [Laughs] That doesn’t happen anymore, but I certainly early in my career remember that. Getting to that point of realizing, “This has nothing to do with my feelings, per se.” That’s that wall that I have to have as well, so, that I’m not going to get personally invested in this business relationship. I want it to be enjoyable and honest and authentic, but it is a business component. Right? We’re not going to be best friends. Have you had a similar type of experience of finding your own boundaries to feel good going through that process?

Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. That would be one of my biggest pieces of advice to anyone who’s coming up in this industry is as much as being authentic, showing up as yourself can be beneficial, it doesn’t always land with some folks. Not taking that personally, I think, was—I don’t know that it was a direct lesson that I had to learn where I really took something personally, but I picked up on it, definitely, as I grew into this. It’s helped me very much to be able to put things down at the end of the day and let it go.

Yeah. All right. I’m an old geezer. You are, obviously, far younger than I am. For the audience that can’t see you, you are. You’ll see the picture, and you’ll look at our pictures side by side and go, “Yeah. Well, Lenny looks old. Robyn is not.”

I don’t know [audio break] old geezer though.

Ask my kids. They would say geezer. Anyway, that’s a whole other thing. My point is I would suspect that there is still a lot of runway from a career standpoint for you. What does that look like for you? You’ve accomplished a lot in a relatively—compared to an old geezer like me—short period of time. What’s next?

Thanks. Yeah. I think, as I’m sure you’ve experienced as well, those—this first portion of your time in this industry is really laying down the foundation and sharpening, maybe, more of the tactical skills, and then it grows into being able to do more of the storytelling behind analysis. I’m starting to really get into strategy and understand what that looks like, how to think big picture, how to connect the dots between what’s happening within an organization but also more broadly within the industry. Definitely getting more strategic, being more immersive with clients. I think that’s the next step for me. I don’t know that I have a very specific track. I think qual is something that I love and I feel really strong in, but I like and enjoy quant as well, so getting a deeper foundation of knowledge and things like advanced analytics is definitely an area of interest for me. I’m appreciative that it feels like there’s room for exploration. That runway metaphor that you said, it’s not necessarily a straight line. It does fan off, which is great.

Yes. What I do today has very little to do with where I saw myself even 10, 15 years ago. That place had very little to do with where I saw myself 10 or 15 years before that. Yes. It goes all over the place. I want to be conscientious of your time as well as the listeners’, but since we’re talking about the future, what do you think—playing amateur futurist now—right—and the changes in technology and culture and et cetera, et cetera, is there something that you’re hoping that you get to try out in a few years? Maybe it’s too soon now. Maybe it’s metaverse or whatever, but you think, “There’s going to come a time that we’re going to do that, and that’s going to be really, really cool to try this new approach or this methodology?”

Well, the first thing that comes to mind—I think it’s on everyone—top of everyone’s mind is AI and where that’s heading. I think it’s in its infancy, and people are getting on board with understanding it. I think there’s a lot of fear around it—right—of what does it mean for validity and quality of respondents, things like that, but I’m really excited to explore how it can help us within our industry. Again, this is very, very early on for us, but we are exploring different tools that can help with qualitative analysis and even incorporating in very low stakes and way in—on the quantitative side too. I think the possibilities with it are really exciting. I think it’s going to be really important for us to stay on top of what’s out there. Yeah. It’s hard to say right now, but that’s definitely an area that I’m interested in and we’re keeping an eye on.

Yeah. Definitely. We’re already seeing if it—the 2020 caused the shift to digital qual from face-to-face as the primary method, and we saw widespread adoption. Now AI enables scalability, and no brainer from that standpoint—right—as a tool to understand unstructured data primarily and to add a lot of what we used to think of as secondary research. Super easy now. Right? I think we’re going to see some really exciting stuff with synthetic examples, virtual respondents, persona playing. I agree. Super interesting times. We say it’s in its infancy, but, man, that infant is already running laps.

It’s true. True.

Hard to keep up with. Do you have any children?

I don’t, no.

You don’t. All right. I was going to use the terrible two analogy of a toddler that you can’t keep up with. It’s kind of like that. [Laughs] All right. Here’s the great moderator question, even though I’m not a moderator. What didn’t I ask that you wanted me to or that I should’ve?

Okay. I wish that you had asked what Vital Findings is doing next and where we’re headed. If I were to answer that question [laughs]—

—Please, go ahead. Please.

—I would tell you that we are doing—we—well, we’ll be CRC, so we will be talking about evolving and evangelizing segments. Then, for myself personally, something that’s very much top of mind that I’m extremely excited about—I know we just talked about digital qual becoming huge, but we’re still—we’re still doing in-person. It’s still very important, and it’s still so incredibly helpful in terms of getting our clients access to people in their day-to-day lives. We are actually working with a client where we’re going to be doing some global qual, so I’ll be going to the UK, France, Germany, China, South Korea, and Japan before the end of the year where we’re going to do very much a cultural immersion across a slate of segments that we’ve identified for this client. Yeah. In-person qual is still very much alive and well and useful.

Absolutely. Well, and thank you for talking about Vital Findings. That was kind of a silly thing for me not to ask, wasn’t it? Yeah. I think, as we’ve seen this change shift, that people have asked as my pundit analyst role, “What’s—where does in-person qual go?” My default has always been, “When it needs to be experiential.” However you define that: touch, taste, smell. Obviously, any of the sensory stuff is obvious. The work that you guys are doing, which is far more ethnographic and experiential in terms of interpersonal interactions that are not just sitting across from a table from each other, I hope we see a hell of a lot more of that. I’m hearing from qualitative facility networks that that is—that’s what they’re seeing is more informal. Not so much using the focus group rooms, but using the space in new ways to engage. Even some stuff with utilizing AI to do rapid prototyping and using things like Midjourney to, “Okay. Right here. Let’s design what this concept may look like.” Things like that. I think all those things are really, really interesting.

Yes, no. Agreed 100 percent. There’s still so much innovation on the table. Our clients’ needs are changing, and their ability, though, to connect with their consumers stays the same. It’s just we’re now challenged to do it in more creative ways.

Absolutely. Where can people reach you, Robyn?

Can reach me through Vital Findings. You can reach me through LinkedIn. Robyn Rouse. I’m around.

Okay. Well, this has been a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. It’s so cool that you’re pushing the boundaries with doing all these things. Safe travels. World traveler for a project. That’s great.

Thank you so much, Lenny. No, I really, really appreciate the opportunity. It’s been great.

Well, good. You weren’t disappointed from the beginning when you thought—

—No. [Chuckles]

Okay. Good.

We’ve checked the box. Yeah.

All right. All right. Satisfaction survey. All right. Good to know. No. Well, Robyn, thank you so much. Best of luck, and I’m sure that we will see you again at some point certainly, maybe at IIEX since you experienced that and seemed to enjoy it.

Sounds great. Look forward to it.

All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you as well to our audience, because, without you, Robyn and I would just be having a conversation. It’s a little more meaningful, I think, when you guys get to pick up something from this. Thank you to our producer, Natalie, our editor, Big Bad Audio, and to our sponsor, Dig Insights. I’m Lenny Murphy. That’s it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. We’ll be talking to you again real soon. Thanks. Bye-bye.