Today we are posting part one of my chat with Lisa Richter!
Are you ready to learn from one of the seasoned pros? Have you ever wondered what phytoplankton are, or how research can be controversial, or how the St. Louis Cardinals can learn a thing or two from the LA Dodgers about engaging fans?
We’re kicking off our interview series with this interview with Lisa Richter, an experienced marketing researcher who’s full of interesting insights to share! In fact, we learned so much, we broke it into two parts! (This is the first of them.)
BONUS: You’ll even learn how research is like Batman and Superman in Sean’s introduction!
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:00.78)
Hi, everybody. This is Sean and St. Louis. It’s a Marketing Gateway. And today we have a special guest as our inaugural guest on this show. This is Lisa Richter from Stakeholder Insights. And I’ve known Lisa for quite a while. We’ve been in the trenches together doing some research and insights work together. And Lisa, welcome. Thank you, Sean. It’s a pleasure to be here. Wonderful. Well, you I start off by asking every guest to tell us something surprising.
So we’re going to start this today as a new trend. So what’s your surprise for us today? Well, I learned from Co-Pilot, an AI platform that you taught me about, something really fascinating about our environment. Most of the Earth’s oxygen comes from the ocean. Tiny marine organisms called phytoplankton, which I’ve seen when I’m snorkeling, produce 50 to 80 % of the oxygen that we breathe. It’s not trees. It’s the ocean. So we need to be
learning more about that as residents of the earth. All right. Well, that’s a great insight to start ourselves off with today because I think part of what we do in insights work is we question things and we try to learn new things about the world. And it’s kind of neat to know, you know, that conventional knowledge that we have about trees being our kind of a source of oxygen. Maybe there’s a little bit more to it with phytoplankton. So thanks for sharing that. You’re welcome.
Let me ask you to tell us a little bit about how you got into the field of insights research. And this is something that we both do. We both serve a lot of different marketing departments and agencies and things like that. how did you, you started out at Fleishman-Hillard. How did you move from working at Fleishman-Hillard to go out on your own? Well, I got into market research, which it was called before. It was called insights research.
because I always wanted to keep learning. I wanted to keep going to school, but my personality is that I couldn’t sit still long enough in one place to pursue a robust academic career. So when I learned when I was in college that there was something called market research, I looked around to find out how I could actually practice that or intern about that. And my idea was to use that career to explore
Sean Jordan (02:21.418)
opinions of the world’s populations on current events. that really, current events are current services and products that we use. that fascinated me. So I became a intern at Fleischmann Hillard, actually a research associate, to a pollster, a political pollster who soon left, but then I continued there in the market research field for many decades, three decades most.
But I left that company, that fine company, because I knew it was time to turn over the leadership to a younger generation. I’d done it long enough. And that’s one thing that I learned in my career. You can’t hang on too long in one place or you get stale. And there are other people that need to move into your function and make it better. At that point, when I left there, knew enough people in marketing who needed some contract market research to start my own business. I had a base of business.
But right before that, I spent two years at the United Way of Greater St. Louis as their head of brand management and marketing, and I helped them rebrand. One of the things I did there was help them put up their first website, and that was very important for that organization. And then I started my own organization.
Well, I know one of the things you and I have talked a lot about is the importance of gathering information that’s gleaned from research to support strategic decision-making. And that’s one of the things that you do now at Stakeholder Insights. So what are some of the ways that you advise your clients to use research to get the most out of it? Really, when we sit down for the first time or meet virtually, I ask them at the beginning to define the decisions they will make based on the information they want.
What will help them? What are the situations for which they need insights from typically their customer base or other stakeholder groups like investors, employees, the community, et cetera? That encourages them to ask decision inputs to know rather than just nice to know information and helps them structure and limit what we include in any market research insights questioning.
Sean Jordan (04:39.713)
it helps them define a specific and limited set of research objectives. I’ll give you an example from a convention group, meeting group client that we worked with recently. Their goals, their research objectives were to gather insights into their meeting organization process and program of this nature. They wanted to find out how their meeting brand was perceived.
They wanted to find out what scientific program within their meeting this year was most valuable to the attendees. They wanted to measure industry engagement, industry being their sponsors that pay for these meetings. And they wanted to use the information to develop future strategy to keep this meeting program going well in the future, gain more attendees, more sponsors. So they said, OK, well,
This is the areas we wanna question people about, and we’re gonna use the information to increase attendance at the meeting next year and in subsequent years. We’re gonna explore interest in additional workshops. Being scientists, the content is always changing of what’s new and what people need to share knowledge about to each other, to fellow scientists and people who are commercializing scientific discoveries, to, in this case, improve the health of our population.
And then third, to grow sponsorship support for the meeting so they can have the funds to continue it. And then again, to inform strategic planning to strengthen long-term success of this meeting. This meeting, like everything else, is not in the category by itself. are many competitor scientific meetings. And so they want to make sure that this one has a unique role and an appealing and useful role.
That helps them decide, they weigh what they’re going to get from what they’re going to spend to get the answers to those question areas. They’ll tell them, this will be worth $10,000 or $25,000 or $5,000. If we know this and we can grow our meeting X, the research is a good investment.
Sean Jordan (06:57.39)
It’ll help them figure out what they’re going to gain from the not small investment of time and money. Research takes time and it costs money. And it also takes their brains and skin in the game to make it as good as they need to make those decisions. So we’ve seen impact from our insights, know, return on investment from certain various studies, not this one, but some others.
in these ways. A construction company reorganized and restaffed its business development function in one of its major markets where it wasn’t really doing as well as it wanted to, to get, to invest in bigger bandwidth of staff resources to expand its business development efforts so they could grow their profile and their business in the market. Number two, a chemical manufacturing company decided not to site a somewhat hazardous plant and distribution center
in a regional location where they needed a distribution center and they needed to produce product because we learned from the research that the site that they liked was adjacent to an elementary school and dense suburban housing. The community was not at all in favor of the proposed industry when we tested it in focus groups anonymously. But the company still needed a site and a distribution center in that location.
in that region because they had none and they had the business to support it. Instead, they decided to modify the activities they were going to do there to be on more a safer end of the spectrum of all their operations. And they also invested their private money in expansion of local public roads to ensure the safety of transporting their product from that location to the whole up and down the region.
that they needed to serve. So it modified their behavior by getting input from the community and realizing that they would have a big fight and damage to their brand on their hands, possibly long-term, if they tried to input their original model. And also, the study was done after they had already failed to be accepted in three other communities. So this time, they thought, OK, we need to listen to the community first and figure out which
Sean Jordan (09:23.15)
approach will be acceptable. Another study was for an alcoholic beverage manufacturer back, I don’t know, 20, 30 years ago when the government, when our government and various consumer groups wanted to put warning labels on alcoholic beverages for the first time. These were not always there because consumers
were concerned, there was a lot of information in the media about fetal alcohol syndrome and consumer groups and government agencies wanted a message about fetal alcohol syndrome to pregnant women to avoid drinking while they were pregnant. And this company could not believe, they thought it was the focus group moderator’s shortcomings that couldn’t get the right answer from the consumers.
Our quote, our title report finding was a quote from one of the focus group panelists who said, if a warning label saves one baby from being born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the labels are important to add. Even after we heard that the company put its own public affairs people in focus groups in a different market to try to get a different answer, but they got the same answer.
So the company decided not to spend additional resources fighting public sentiment at that time and go along with the regulation to put warning labels on their products. Then another branding exercise was for a local family-owned business which had grown very large in 123 years or something of time in existence.
and they wanted to rebrand and they also wanted to figure out what their key brand messages would be for the year 2000 or whenever we did this, I can’t remember. So we tested five or six attributes associated with the company’s reputation or with what they wanted to be known for. And they were very proud of all was saying as their first message that
Sean Jordan (11:46.83)
This company had been owned and operated by the same family for 123 years. That’s so important. We found out that it ranked fifth and last and very important among very few people, very few customers. They were most interested, far more interested. And of course they weren’t mentioning enough specifics on this point, which is how does your current technology benefit us as customers? And they had
segments of customer groups. So they needed to adjust the message by customer group. They were more interested in, the customers are more interested in what’s in it for me rather than who are you? I want to see what you produce that I can use. Right. What have you done for me lately? Right? Exactly. That’s all they wanted to know. So we got them to drop that. We got the family that owned the business.
And then after they became more successful after the rebranding, then it was sold to a publicly held company. So the family was not in the picture anymore. But we helped the non-family members that were managing the company explain to the family that we didn’t need that message as much as we needed to get more specific on the benefits of our new technology. Then my last example is
We pre-tested version 2.0 of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare website, two or three years after the legislation was passed to make sure that potential subscribers to the Affordable Care Insurance Coverage variety, permutations, could understand what offerings would be.
best for them and what they would have to pay. And we have found over and over again that every time you test some, pre-test a communication, there will always be changes needed to the communication based on input from those who are intended to receive it. We can never be sure that we are communicating what we want, that it’s important and that it’s clear and that it tells you exactly what to do unless we run.
Sean Jordan (14:06.666)
it by those we intend to receive it. So Americans who wanted to learn about the potential cause, their potential costs and benefits from the Affordable Care Act received clearer and briefer online information after we pre-tested version 2.0 with 30 consumers that we recruited from across the country in different age groups, different income groups, different ethnic group backgrounds. One of the things that we learned that I remember was a lot of
you know, majority did not know what that little I in the circle meant. At that time, this was 10 years after the wide birth of the internet usage among the general public. And they had some important information in that little I thing if people clicked on it. So that was one change we suggested that I think was adopted. I don’t know that that website exists anymore, but we got that money.
the money to do that study through the Missouri Foundation for Health, they were able to give a grant to a group that was working on behalf of the Affordable Care Act legislation to pre-test it. And I think it was valuable research. Wow. Well, I think some of the things that you’re talking about there just make such a strong case for why research is necessary. Because a lot of times when we go into the research process, we kind of assume that we know what people are going to say.
I’ve done a lot of testing for marketing messaging and for concepts for advertising and for positioning and things like that. And almost always I’ve been surprised by what I hear. I’m sure you have been too. And I think, you even when you’re talking about, you know, like a family owned business that thinks that the longevity of their business is what matters to people. And what really matters is the service that they have to offer today. They have to break out of that internal narrative and they have to think about what
people outside of the organization really think and feel. Once they can get those two things aligned, then their marketing can come back into focus in the right way. So valuable what you’re talking about. Again, I think this is one of the reasons why you and I are both big believers in the need for insights research or marketing research to be able to shape good marketing messaging and good marketing strategy. So I’m to change the subject a little bit because somebody else I’m sure that you have.
Sean Jordan (16:28.522)
Experience I experience it all the time. A lot of times research professionals like you and me will get a phone call or an email where somebody just writes and says I want to survey or I want to focus group or something like that. So walk me through your process for how to help to guide that request into an actual study and what sort of things you have to think about because that’s not enough to go on. You always have to ask a lot more follow up questions to make that work. huh. OK, so what?
What do I do with the new client? Ask them what they want to know, what they’re going to do with the information, who they need the information from. Do they have a list of those people or a database? mean, it’s almost impossible unless you use pre-recruited online panels. And even then,
you know, there can be bias and the people you need to talk to are not in those databases. So who you talk to is very important. And then giving them an incentive, you know, some small monetary incentive or some drawing, you know, for a bigger incentive is very important to get participation. But as my career has unfolded, more and more I want to tell
the potential client immediately what we’re talking about in terms of money required to do insights research. So that we can educate them for free in this first conference conversation, but most people don’t do it often. So they don’t know unless it’s a large corporation with an insights team inside that has conducted Margaret research. They don’t know that, you know,
They don’t know we’re talking 5,000, 25,000, 100,000. And a lot of them have needs that are very expensive when you’re talking about a small elite audience of, you know, like potential physicians or scientists or government officials or community leaders who get a million requests for surveys. So, you know, we talk about the costs, we talk about the benefits, we try to isolate what the questions are and what they’re going to do with the information, you know, what kind of questions you what.
Sean Jordan (18:50.688)
might yield some information. And even before that, we ask them, existing information do you have about this? Because there are so many associations that conduct research for their members. I worked for one company, did a huge expensive study forum. And when I was writing the report, I noticed that they have a trade association that were mentioned as one of the sources of information that one of their customers use. And I looked it up and they had a beautiful
membership survey of the most important issues facing the industry in the next five years on their website. And I told them about their own industry study that would be useful in answering some of their questions. So the first thing you want to do is look at what’s out there, ask them if they know what’s out there and also get their, they have conducted insights research before with their customers, have them,
get that for you to look at or ask them what was in there. I don’t think that enough marketing people have been have been trained in the nitty gritty of market research insights research such that we constantly need to educate people on what we do in simple and quick language so they don’t fall asleep. But any kind of popular
analogy that you know you you wouldn’t order chocolate ice cream if you’ve known from experience you break out in hives you know what what is the what’s the behavior what’s the result from. know prior experiences with this service or this product that you know about that that’s out there ask questions like that or you know what happens when.
the seasons change, you know, and you’re selling outerwear or you’re selling bathing suits. I mean, you you have to look at the external factors that affect the client’s business or if it’s a nonprofit and they’re, you know, going to have a cap, going to run a capital campaign, who are the competitors for the dollars? What do people know about the organization? Does the organization have cloudy branding that nobody understands, you know, in the name or in the website?
Sean Jordan (21:15.48)
There’s a lot to cover in that first meeting. And then the next step is to isolate what you hear is the most important factors and give them probably two or three levels of proposal based on effort and money required. So, you know, one of the things that you just mentioned, which is so true about insights research is that much of the time,
the focus is not enough on hearing what customers have to say or hearing what those external users of a brand really think. And in fact, one of the biggest surprises I’ve had in my career is how little value there is in talking to people that aren’t brand users or who aren’t customers, because a lot of times they don’t know anything about your brand. They can’t tell you how to be better because they’ve never actually experienced you. And I think that that…
really surprised me a lot when I realized the value of hearing from people that know something about you is so much more than those that don’t. But there are other surprises that we’ve uncovered in research. What are some of the biggest surprises you’ve uncovered in your own research? Well, this is a controversial topic, but we did some work for Planned Parenthood about 15 or 20 years ago and found that among women of reproductive age,
in the St. Louis area, has large amounts of women on both sides of the aisle in terms of pro-life and pro-choice that planned parenthood has a much bigger fan base than one reads about in the media. among women who were brought up in religious affiliations that are clearly pro-life, they were in medical situations that required planned parenthood services.
They remember back to their early youth days, early adult days, how friends had been helped so much by the medical services and how they had really great, experiences and were willing to advocate for them. Another surprise that we learned
Sean Jordan (23:32.522)
over and over again is that we know we all know this because we all have our friends and family visit us in St. Louis from other places for the first time and they haven’t been to St. Louis before but for work we’ve done for explore St. Louis our our tourism bureau in St. Louis we learned people who travel here for the first time are amazed and extremely impressed by our tourism sites and the activities throughout our community and the fact that so many of them are free thinking about the museums and Forest Park.
We just continue and I always try to rein back my plans whenever I have another family visitor and not try to wear myself out packing in all these free locations. But people are continuously impressed by what we have here as tourism sites. So we interview people in the convention center who are here for meetings, but also manage to get out and see some of the neighborhoods and see the cultural sites.
museums, the parks, we have so many beautiful parks, and they tell us, I never knew. We don’t see this information in the national media, we just hear about crime. So that’s a great surprise that we found over and over again. Another surprise is that the younger generation wants to communicate via text messaging rather than phone. I’ve just learned this in doing business for a long time, that the way to reach people these days is,
Get their cell phone number and send them a text. Don’t call them. They won’t, if they don’t recognize your phone number, they don’t want to answer the phone because they fear a scam. They don’t want to be bothered because so many organizations try to market cold through getting people’s phone numbers or email addresses. So how we approach people is something we learn in our research. We have to know to stay in business, how to do outreach.
And I gotta add, it’s not a surprise to me because I’m part of that generation that much prefers if somebody’s gonna call me, I want them to text me first. So I think a lot of organizations are still not ready to communicate with people that way, even though it’s probably been that way for at least 10 years now. Absolutely, yeah. I’m finally accepting it. I text people about when we can have a call or if we can have a call or do we just wanna text, which we know.
Sean Jordan (25:56.194)
Sean and I know is more inefficient because you have to keep going back and forth. Do you mean this, this, this? Anyway, that’s my perspective as somebody who started out when we just used the phone, the landlines. But one of my very famous favorite discoveries, favorite surprises was when I was at Fleischmann Hillard, we did some work for the Los Angeles Dodgers. And I can’t remember the exact.
research objectives, but we were trying to get more fans to come out and watch the Dodgers, believe it or not. I think they have a healthy fan base now. They certainly spend a lot of money to have a wonderful product on the field. But back in the late 1990s, there was no Spanish language radio station in Los Angeles, our second largest broadcasting the Dodger games. They had had one really famous Hispanic
player Fernando Valenzuela back in the, I don’t know, 60s, 70s, when he was pitching and very successful, there were quite a few Hispanic Latinx fans that did follow the team. But when I looked at their own surveys, I was astounded that they didn’t have any, you know, they had very few Hispanic fans that came to the stadium. And then I looked.
I, so I thought, okay, well how many, how many Latin Latino, background people are in Los Angeles? And it was 40 % in the city of Los Angeles. So I asked, the people in marketing that we were doing the studies for why, why isn’t there, are there no Spanish language broadcasting radio program, you know, radio stations for the Dodgers? They said, no, there weren’t.
So that was one of our recommendations. And our recommendations are always suggestions. Consider figuring out how to get Spanish language broadcasting to your large Latino population to increase interest in the team and tickets at the stadium. Sometimes we find very basic facts out that people don’t.
Sean Jordan (28:17.73)
consider because they don’t get out of their own daily context of the organization and how things have already always been done and don’t think enough about the wider world as we said before. and it makes you wonder here in St. Louis where the Cardinals who are still very popular but they’re seeing declining numbers of people going to games if maybe they need to consider outreach strategies like that as well because I’m certain there’s people that they’re not reaching and they’re not turning into fans that they could be.
if they had a different kind of outreach strategy than they’ve had. I know I’ve heard that organization and I’ve heard the president speak about what they do there. And I know that they try a lot of different things, including, yeah, they have these special nights where they’ll have things like Hello Kitty or things like that to try to get younger people to come in. But it only is as effective as it gets them to come in more than once. If it just gets them to come in once and they don’t enjoy the experience, they’re not gonna come back. So outreach is so important.
I think that’s a stunning insight.
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