Behavioral science is carving a seat at the table for market researchers.

Founder of the Mindstate Group, Will Leach, joins GreenBook's host, Lenny Murphy to discuss how behavioral insights are opening doors for researchers across the field. In a world of abundant data, behavioral design is optimizing research methodologies and exposing new facets of consumer understanding.

You can reach out to Will on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Will for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, James Carlisle.

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Hello, everybody and welcome to another edition of the GreenBook Podcast. I am Lenny Murphy, your host, and I am sure glad that you have chosen to spend some time with us today. And by ‘us,’ I mean ‘our guest.’ Today it is my honor, my privilege to have one of the greatest guys in research, a good friend over the years, Will Leach, the founder of Mindstate Group. Will, welcome.

Hey, Lenny, good to see you again. Good to be on the show. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. It’s going to be a fun conversation, I hope.

Abs—well, we’ll see. We’ll do our best, right?

[laugh]. Between you and I, we could probably talk all sorts of different things. [unintelligible 00:00:50] it’s going to be good for the audience. But hopefully, it will provide some value, you know?]

Hopefully, hopefully. So, for those who attend IIEX events, particularly our IIEX Behavior event, Will is probably somebody you are intimately familiar with because, like a black hole, we sucked him into our event horizon long ago, and [laugh] have Will’s always exposed through our stuff because he’s just so smart. But for those who don’t know you, Will, why don’t you talk a little bit about your background and about Mindstate Group?

Yeah. So, I’ve been in the marketing research field the better part of 25 years now, which sounds very weird to me, but that is the truth. I started off in the US military and then I found my way into different universities in the world of economics. So, I am a classically trained economist, and went into the field of marketing research, client-side, right? Did work in biotech energy.

Very, very cool. And for our listeners, you’ve probably just gotten a taste of why Will is so sought after as a speaker. He’s just so much fun and engaging. You practice what you preach my friend. You are very good at triggering emotions through your own enthusiasm. So.

When it’s passion, it helps. That’s what I tell my students. I teach it to universities now, at SMU, as well as Tex A&M. And they’ll oftentimes ask me to kind of—“What’s the secret”—in some way—“What’s the secret to success in life or in business or whatever?” And I’m always like, “Find your passion and monetize it.” And so, I got lucky where I found my passion and now I’m thankful that I can do this with my life.

All right. Sensei Will. Now, that’s how I’m going to refer to you.

No, you know, I am. And I also would say, it’s also being driven by many clients today want more out of the researchers than just say, “Here is the big consumer insight,” and recommendations. What they want to know is that their research or their insights—you know, investments—are driving top-line revenue growth. And the way to do that is to not show up with a pretty presentation that says, “Here are the top five reasons why your customers act the way they are.” That’s interesting.

I couldn’t agree with you more. And since I asked the question and you said yes, of course [laugh]. But what’s interesting is for so much of the history of the industry, we go through these phases of experimentation and innovation and then it became IP, and then it became currency within an organization. Think about ad testing, right? The Millward Brown ad test, Nielsen ratings… hell NPS, right?

No, I’m glad you said dichotomy because I was before you said that, I was going to say, “I’m not so sure if I believe this.” But let me give you an example. I was sitting in the offices of Amazon a couple years ago. Gosh, I can’t believe it, it was probably five years ago. And we were talking about behavioral science and understanding the why.

Yep. And I think the part of this exciting change is that we went through an era of relative stability, I think, from sociological standpoint, right? Culturally. There were gradual changes, but I think we had a pretty good sense of this is what drives consumer behavior. And we had benchmarks and norms and all those things. And I don’t think it’s a safe bet to say that anymore.

So, true. That’s—I never thought of that. You’re right. There’s all those benchmarks don’t make any sense anymore. Yeah. And I guess your point, too, Lenny would be, and is it ever right to re-benchmark? I don’t know. Like, that’s an interesting question. Should we re-benchmark again? It’d take you 20 years, 10 years to re-benchmark. Maybe benchmarks is the wrong question to have answered [laugh].

Yeah. Well, you know, even as the—you know, it’s kind of the old salt, each generation looks at the, you know, the generation coming up, “And I don’t understand you.” But you know—so that has always been true, there have been generational and cultural shifts. It appears, in my mind, to be accelerating. It was already accelerating through lots of different forces, you know, of technology and economics, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it’s accelerating even more now.

But you know, I’ll tell you this. I’ve never had a CMO or an executive in a company say, “No, I’d rather my insights team not do that.” Like I’ve never seen that. They’re like, “You mean, you could help us understand a consumer better and help us relate better with them, do better marketing do better innovation?” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s called behavioral design.”

Yeah. That’s a… [laugh] yes, I agree. We have now gotten our place, the seat at the table, and what we do with it is fascinating. So, let’s talk about that for a minute, then. Because I often said a few years ago, when this conversation came up of the, you know, the insights organization deserves a seat at the table, like, “Well, why? Have we earned that seat at the table?”

Yeah. So, to me, you know, when I think about, kind of, the future of insights, I kind of think back to when I started insights and to where I see insights going. And when I first started insights, there was very much my job was to understand and predict. That’s what our job was to do. Understand why people are doing what they’re doing and predict what they’re going to do in the future. Great. So, I think most researchers are doing that pretty well.

I think that’s absolutely right. It’s interesting. I actually had a conversation this morning with a pharmaceutical company and we were talking about [visual tensity 00:25:08] and the role for that within their portfolio of, you know, tools. And, you know, they were like, “Well, does this replace concept testing?” Like, “No. No, it doesn’t.” It absolutely optimizes a key component of your creative. And it’s super cheap and super fast, and hell yeah, why wouldn’t you do this, right?

[laugh]. You sound very smart right now, Lenny.

Thank you, Will. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And it was. I was kind of fired up because it just kind of clicked for me, at least in that conversation of, you know, we really are looking at playing DJ, right?

I was just thinking when you said that, right, so imagine if we were able to tell our creative partners—these people are amazing and they bring art and science together in ways that I can’t even conceptualize; the best creatives in the world can do things that are just inhuman to me—but what if we came to them as researchers, we gave them table stakes. We’re, like, “Okay, here are the table stakes. Here’s where the visual saliency should be on your ad, so make sure your brand is in this area. You know using my model, make sure that you’re talking to somebody’s aspirational goals very high up in your advertisement because if you don’t talk to somebody’s as—or if you don’t speak to your customers aspirational goals early on, you’re more likely to get them to bounce because you’re not focusing their attention. Oh, and by the way, let’s make sure that we use this motivation. Let’s tell them that they can be successful or they can be safe, right? And when I do that, I can maintain their attention on the ad. So, somewhere in the copy, ad agency, make sure that you’re really confirming that they’re going to be safe or they’re going to be successful.”

Yeah, agreed. And I would just add—I agree with everything that you said—so like your example of safety, that is different for different populations. So again, why it’s important, and we still need to understand segments, right? We still need to understand, you know, I think we’re far away from technologically—well, maybe not that far—to that perfect world of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time at scale, individually. I think we’re not quite there yet, you know?

Oh, yeah. No, it’s something that we don’t focus on, I think enough is, I would claim it as, like, cultural, cultural anthropology. Understanding that, I can understand—like, I love your example, right? Security, but how security comes to life for somebody in a rural farm community is very different than you said, in the inner city of inner [unintelligible 00:31:07] of a large city, right? So, totally get it.

Right. Yes. Try living among the Amish. Boy, you talk about a culture shock, right? It is a [laugh]—but those are whole other topics. So, all right, we’re kind of boiling the ocean here, but it’s exciting and fun. And I want to be conscious of your time and the time of our listeners as well. So, we’re recording this on the tail end of—well, it’s the last day of November, right? So, we’re at the end of 2022. What does the year ahead look like for you? Anything that you want to share? And then I have a follow-up question on that.

So, here’s where my passion is right now. It comes to text analytics. Guys, I believe that text analytics is the most underappreciated but highest, most important technology that we’re going to have in the marketing research space. Why? Because I think you saw this stat, too, there was this major study, and it said something around 75% of all company data is unstructured, meaning it’s conversations, whether it’s call center conversations, social media conversations, et cetera.

Totally agree. There’s actually, it’s a company called Yabble you should check out, we’ve used with—we have two text analytics partners we work with in GRIT. One is Canvs, and they do an amazing job. The other is Yabble. They do different things.

Yeah. So, I love that. I think, you guys, it’s not just being used, maybe Yabble uses as a way of, you know, bringing insights from all this stuff, but like you said if you re-ask the query, “Tell my customer why they should buy my product?” B-, b-, b-, b-, b-, bam. That’s crazy.

Okay. I think that it’s… yeah, that’s—it’s a smart thing, so [laugh].

All right. Well, then it’s good. I was going to ask you [laugh].

[laugh]. No, my son, go forth from here with my blessing. You are—

It’s a great question. The first thing that popped in my head was I know that Covid brought in a lot of investment in platforms for doing yourself. And some of these platforms are pretty damn good, you know? And they meet a need for corporations. And they still do meet a need for corporations.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, the promise of those platforms was to free us to be able to be more creative, to be more strategic, to engage those things, to take away some of the drudgery, the, you know, of research.

Have you seen that, Lenny?

So, the data—and we asked about this in GRIT, right—there are indications that that is happening.

I would just say if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I’ve never heard about behavioral sciences. Like, what should I go do? How should I go learn?” I would tell you this one is, read. Start reading. That’s what I started doing. So, if you go to mindsetgroup.com/resources, I have a list of books and podcasts and things to listen to. So, if you’re into this stuff and you want more information, read.

Very cool. And I assume that’s also where people can just find you a—

That’s probably good, too. Yeah mindsetgroup.com. On LinkedIn, will-leach on LinkedIn. You can find me there, too. Lots of articles and papers and things like that I’ve written over the years, and lots of videos, too.

I was a little jealous. You’ve raised the bar. So, we got a little friendly rivalry going on here now.

[laugh]. Good. Well, thank you, Lenny. I appreciate the experience and your time as well. Happy holidays to you out there as well.