Sean truly is a great guy, and I am so glad I am able to share that with you! – Holly
And here is part 2! We hope you enjoyed getting to know more about Sean and what we do outside of the podcast!
Contact Sean: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanjjordan/
This month is donate life month. If you are interesting in becoming an organ donor, or you would just like to know more, please visit https://donatelife.net/.
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
Transcript:
Holly Wooten (00:08)
Hey guys, welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. Today’s episode is a little bit longer, so I will keep the intro short. This is part two with my interview with Sean. ⁓ Again, like I said yesterday, today’s episode is more about what we do now ⁓ outside of the podcast, so enjoy.
Sean Jordan (00:26)
Okay guys, welcome back. This is part two of our interview with Sean. Like I said yesterday, we’re celebrating surpassing 100 episodes and so we wanted to mix it up a little bit and have you guys hear from Sean and kind of this episode is gonna be more about what we do here at RPG, which is our research firm. Well, I say our, it’s more yours and I’m just.
I’m just work here. I do not think of it that way. We are all a team here. We all work together. yeah. So, ⁓ one of the things that you’ve gotten into while working here at RPG is working with organ procurement organizations around the country, not just here in St. Louis ⁓ or OPOs as it’s abbreviated. ⁓ And it is actually National Donate Life Month. So, yippee.
So tell me a little bit about how you actually started working with the OPOs and how they’ve become such a big part of what we do here at RPG. So when I was in my internship here back in 2008, ⁓ I knew one thing about organ donation. That was that I had signed up to be an organ donor on my driver’s license and that was it. And never a question for me, by the way. I’ve always thought that it was a good thing. But when we were working on a project for Mid-America Transplant,
and it’s actually three projects that we were doing together at once. I had to learn very quickly how this all worked because we were going to their office and having meetings with them. it was very intimidating because I had no real understanding of how a hospital worked. I had no real understanding of what all this terminology and technology was all about. It really required a lot of listening and learning. And it took me a few years, honestly, before I really started getting it. But
What happened was we were doing this work for them and then we also had a couple of other organ procurement groups we worked for, or OPOs as we call them as we said. ⁓ And what wound up happening was that a bunch of them got together and they said, we really want to have a firm do like a national study for us where we can compare ourselves and we can see how we’re doing. We want to have some benchmark data. So we’re going to put…
this out there and see who can do it. And they went to, they originally had done this with a very large research firm, who I won’t name, but they were really unhappy with the results, is the long and short of it. I remember reading the report and going, I’m a researcher and I have no idea what this report is saying. So it was really confusing. So they opened it up, they had three different agencies bid and we won the bid. And so this gave us a foothold into all these other organizations we’d never worked with, that really never would have considered us because we were so small. And
As it happened, ⁓ working with all of them, we really got to know a lot about what they do and became super valuable in terms of our knowledge of, here are some ideas about things people are doing that we can share with you. And I had this big idea at the time that, you know what? They gave us all this work. Why don’t we give back to them? Let’s hold a best practices summit where we get everybody together and we just talk about the things we learned.
And we’ll just invite the people that have hired us and they can share and collaborate with each other. They don’t compete with each other. They all have their own territories. So they’re going to be willing to share ideas. And that turned out to be one of the best ideas I ever had because ⁓ giving back to the community that had helped us ⁓ is a big part of the relationship we have with the opioid world today. we’ve worked with
over 40 of these groups now. ⁓ And there were at one point there were 58. Now they’re down to I think about 54 because they’ve started merging and consolidating. And there’s a lot of reasons why that’s been happening. There’s a lot of drama going on in the industry right now. And ⁓ they’re definitely my favorite pool of clients in terms of just the mission that they’re on. And that is not to put down my other clients. We only work for great clients. But the mission.
that the OPOs have, I think we can all agree saving people’s lives is the top mission, right? Like that’s the one where you really respect and honor what they’re doing. And what they’re doing is they’re finding the people who want to be donors. They’re making sure that those gifts are given to the people that need them. And, you know, up to eight lives can be saved by one donor. That’s amazing. And then beyond that, they also can take the tissue. They can take your eyes and corneas. They can take your bones. They can take your skin, all kinds of other things.
and help people with those things. And I’ve been to the places where they process the tissue and it sounds really crazy. It sounds like science fiction. Like you’re walking in a room and you see somebody just, they’re sawing through bones or, you know, and making them into vertebrae for someone’s, you know, replacement vertebrae, or they’re taking huge slabs of skin and getting them prepped so they can make skin grafts and things like that. It’s surreal. But when you see the lives that have been touched through all this, it’s amazing. So.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of that industry, but I will also say I’m one of their ⁓ sharpest voices in terms of things that need to change because we see it in the data all the time and I’m always accountable to the data. What the data say is what we need to listen to. And we are constantly trying to help. In fact, we do another podcast for just the opioid industry where we provide insight on that. And I even have a newsletter that I do about that because it is so important to me. Yeah. And I know I personally was
very dubious of organ donation before I started working here. I was registered, but I was kind of on the fence about it. after working with the OPOs and doing what we do, it’s powerful. That sounds kind of corny, I guess, but it really is like reading people what people say.
like when we talk to the actual donor families, it changes your mind about a lot of things. Let’s just leave it at that. is 80 to 90 % of the donor families that go through this process appreciate it not just a little, but a lot. I mean, they are extremely positive about it. And sometimes it’s hard to find things to tell them to do better at the OPO because there’s so few people that have criticisms and critiques when they’ve been through the process.
It’s a little different when you’re talking to the doctors and nurses, they’re a little more critical. But the people that go through this, it is important. What it provides for them, and I didn’t really understand this probably the first seven or eight years that I was doing this work, ⁓ is what we call a lasting legacy, which is like, my loved one died and her loved one could be a teenager, could be a small child, could be ⁓ a ⁓ mother who just suddenly got in a car accident.
or a husband who someone had just married and all of a sudden passed away. There are all kinds of situations like that. We see them all the time in the data. So it could be someone who really died tragically in a motor vehicle accident, an accident, gunshot, suicide, overdose, all kinds of other things. And yet in that tragedy, their last act on earth is to give what they have to other people so that other people can live. And these people would die.
There’s a hundred thousand people on the waiting list right now and they will all die if they don’t get an organ transplant. That is amazing. And that they’re willing to do that and that their donor family then can have that story to tell. It is so impactful. And when you talk to families of donors, especially a few years out, that’s the thing they remember most is, know what? A terrible thing happened, but somebody got to live because of this. And in fact,
they’re really disappointed when they don’t get to meet the recipients or when they don’t get to talk to them because sometimes the recipients don’t make it or they don’t want to talk to the donor family. They’re really embarrassed about it. So it’s not always possible to set those interactions up, but the donor families just so badly want to talk to the people that have benefited because that’s such an important part of the story that they get to tell. ⁓ again, we are privileged to be able to talk to those folks and hear from them. And it is gutting sometimes. I’ve cried reading some of the data.
I really have, ⁓ especially now that I’m a parent and reading about people losing small children or losing someone to suicide or things like that, it’s really painful. But knowing that something good came out of that awful thing still gives me a lot of hope and a lot of faith. ⁓ that’s why I believe in our organ donation system is because I know the people that are working for this are doing good almost all of the time. There’s lapses here and there as there is in any industry, but
I think those lapses are over reported and they are definitely not illustrative of what we usually see. I will say one of my favorite comments that I’ve ever read was, think, I believe it was a daughter or it was somebody’s child. It was an older gentleman that had passed away and ⁓ he donated tissue and he ended up being helping somebody who had to get ⁓ a mastectomy.
Yeah. she was, or the person who made the comment mentioned that their dad would have gotten a kick out of being somebody’s new boobs. So I thought that was kind of to leave that one on a little bit more of a positive note where, you know, it’s things like that that like the people find the positive in that situation, which is also just really great because like you said, it is.
So seeing those ones also warms my heart a little. Another thing that we have been a part of here at RPT is focus groups. So I know that I’ve even been a part of a few since I started. What is one of your favorite stories about doing focus groups?
I’ll tell you my most embarrassing story. ⁓ So when I was a little bit younger, less experienced, so please note I would not do this today. ⁓ We were doing focus groups all over Southern Illinois and ⁓ David had me do a few of them because he wanted me to get some experience. so I walked into, I want to say it was Carlisle, Illinois or Nashville, Illinois, some place like that, ⁓ a little outside the Metro East, but not so far out that it was like, you know, out in the complete rural area. But
I went in and I started making jokes about how I had had to drive in rush hour traffic to get here today. They probably just had a rush minute in this town and that did not go over well. It really offended people in the room that I was coming in there and talking like that. Even was just trying to break the tension, right? ⁓ Cause I was, I was putting myself in like, well, I’m a, I’m from the city and you guys are not as good as me kind of by without meaning to. And I spent the whole night trying to recover from that. So I learned a tough lesson about when you’re trying to build rapport with people, be sincere.
but be empathetic and understand how people are interpreting you. You’re a stranger coming in and asking them questions and they want to answer your questions. They’re getting paid. They get a check or cash or whatever for showing up to those groups. I did recover. I did ultimately fix the problem, but I felt terrible about it. And there have been other times too where I inadvertently, I’m really good at reading people and I just kind of call out a characteristic of them.
⁓ Like I told a student recently that I noticed that they were very literal and ⁓ I could see when I told them that on their face that they didn’t understand what I meant and they were taking it as an insult. And I said, no, no, no, I don’t mean it in a bad way. I just mean that you really process things in a kind of black and white way, whereas other people, they’re talking a little more metaphorically. It wasn’t an insult, but the way I said it didn’t make it sound like I had their best interests at heart. So I still make these mistakes because I’m human, right? But we have to learn when we’re talking to people that
Ultimately, people want to talk. They want to be heard, and they want you to listen. And so the more that you’re trying to tell them about themselves or tell them what to think, the less they really want to contribute to your focus group. So we live and learn, ⁓ but I’d say most of the time what I do best is listen. And some of the groups you’ve been a part of, I remember the one we had, I’m not going to mention the client, but there was, we were talking to detractors from a net promoter score study, which is
Very brave, right? I I told this client, I still tell them to this day, like, cannot believe you guys did that study. Like, I seriously, I admire your commitment to the people you serve. And one of these detractors, he was really angry. He had had a pretty weird and unusual experience with them and they’re a good customer service company. So it was very aberrant, but he was hot about it and constantly just disrupting the group to complain about his problem.
All the, I wasn’t in the back room. was moderating the group, but the people in the virtual back room were all hating this guy. They just tired of hearing from him. And, ⁓ you know, I kept trying to shut him down and he kept coming right back up. So these things happen sometimes where when we’re doing these groups, ⁓ no matter how good you are, how skilled you are, you just have to kind of ride the waves sometime and get through it. ⁓ and then, you know, what, what I said to the client afterwards was, you know, what he was saying was uncomfortable, but I wanted you to notice that.
almost everybody else in the group was disagreeing with them and saying, no, this isn’t usually how they behave. This isn’t usually how they are. ⁓ So even those detractors that had the chance to jump on the bandwagon wouldn’t do it. So that was a positive in a very crummy group. ⁓ I’ll tell you another one we learned. We had actual, and I’m not using this as a pejorative.
but we had actual Nigerian scammers in one of our groups. And yeah, so we were doing it was for a gaming study for gaming products. And we had these people that we thought were students because they were all showing up as coming from different places. And so when you have students like their names can be a little bit different because they might be international students. ⁓ So they all had names that seemed like they were they have an English first name and then like an odd I don’t wanna say odd but like a more foreign last name. And it wasn’t
necessarily a Nigerian last name either. ⁓ And so we got them in the group and I realized very quickly that four of the people in our group were all in the same house. And they were all ⁓ dark skinned, ⁓ they had very thick African accents. And the reason we found that they were from Nigeria is when we had to cut the group off because we realized that the group was completely tarnished. We were going to pay them, because you usually pay people out in these situations because it’s our mistake, not the participants.
And we couldn’t pay them because they all were in Nigeria and our payment system wouldn’t allow us to do international payment. Well, that led us to ask a lot more questions. And they had all lied to us. They had all found ways to get through our system to participate in the group. And we didn’t have enough checks and balances to really screen them out. We thought we did, but we didn’t. It was virtual, so it was a little bit harder to figure that out. now what we do, and Holly’s been the person that’s had to do this a lot, is we do technical checks with people before the groups.
and we ask them some questions about their network and where their IP address is and all these kinds of things. We do that so we can tell them we’re testing their internet, but we’re really doing it to see if we think they’re masking with a VPN or if they have some other kind of abnormality that we need to know about. And we have thrown a couple of people out because of that. So it’s helped us and saved us from having to do that again. We had to repeat that group at our own expense, and that was a costly mistake to learn from and also very embarrassing.
By the way, learn how to use Zoom on your computer and your phone. Very true. And then going off of that, with that kind of situation, does that happen often? Would that mean that are focus groups even a good form of research because of that? This is one of those age-old questions because focus groups are a, let’s just call them a flawed methodology.
in terms of their actual research and I could and won’t go into the history. I think I did an episode on that. We talked about how it was actually a woman that created focus groups and then Robert Merton came and took all the credit. The woman was heard a Herzog by the way. ⁓ Credit where it’s due. my point being that they’ve long been a flawed methodology because even the way they originally developed is not followed. And so we look at them as researchers as
kind of the same way we look at Net Promoter Score, where it’s like, okay, it’s not perfect, but we can make it work. And the way we make it work is by insisting that we do groups in pairs. So if we have two groups that have very similar composition of people, and they both say basically the same thing, then we know that the group itself was not contributing to that dialogue. was probably thematic. And I say probably because the discussion guide can still be a factor, or the moderator can still be a factor, but probably, if you’re hearing it from multiple groups, you’re probably hearing closer to the truth. We call that a directional insight.
Would I trust a focus group to tell me anything really important? It depends. define what really important means. I would generally trust in-depth interviews more than I would trust focus groups. ⁓ They are much easier to control. They’re much easier to analyze. They are not fraught with all the problems that focus groups have. But if I’m going to have invite a client to watch, and you’ve been through this with me, where the clients just get bored after about a fifth or sixth interview.
⁓ It’s much more exciting for them to watch a focus group than it is for them to watch a ⁓ series of interviews. And I’ll be honest in saying, sometimes them watching the focus group makes them think differently. ⁓ And that’s really all that needed to happen was they needed to think differently. So there are times where focus groups are appropriate. There’s times when they’re not. And if you want to really know the difference, call me sometime or email me and I’ll be happy to tell you. I mean, let’s kind of touch on it a little bit. Why should people use a focus group?
what would be, in your opinion, a good use of a focus group? Well, not even my opinion really, but mean the evidence from the ⁓ practitioner literature is brainstorming is probably the best case scenario for focus groups. If you need to hear ideas and you need people to kind of express them in a social setting, brainstorming is great. It’s really hard to get people brainstorming in an interview because there’s no social dynamics at play.
⁓ Another thing is when you actually need to simulate social dynamics. like, let’s say you’re testing something where it’s like, I want to understand how people would talk about this to other people. Well, Focus Group is great for that. They’re really good for taste tests or for product reveals where you just want to kind of get some quick feedback on what people think. Because again, that social dynamic is there. People don’t always know how to express what they’re thinking and feeling. And when they hear other people, then they can grab onto it and say, yeah, I agree with what Holly is saying. And I want to add.
it’s much easier for them in that setting. So anytime that social dynamic needs to get played, that’s when focus groups are valuable. But there are other methods of focus groups you can try to. There’s ⁓ what are called mini groups, there’s dyads and triads where you just have two or three people that can also do those things and be a little bit more controllable. So again, the research design really needs to factor in what’s the best way to get this information and is it cost that’s causing the focus group to be the most attractive thing? Is it scheduling? Is it just because we really want to do a focus group?
Those are all legitimate reasons to do it. And then one of the things that you’ve done a lot is advertising research. I’ve actually worked on a couple of those projects with you. What is one of your favorite stories from doing those kinds of ⁓ projects? I tell this story to my students all the time. I’m going to caveat with apologies to the agency and to the client. I’m not going to say their names.
⁓ Because I don’t think anybody meant for this to happen, but it opened my eyes so much to how when you’re putting creative stimuli together, and creative stimuli would be like we’re showing people like a concept ad or concept video, ⁓ how much you can miss the boat in terms of your internal interpretation versus what people actually see. So let me set the scene for you. ⁓ The healthcare organization is trying to communicate the idea that what they provide is
personal. So they listen to you, they hear about your life, they understand what your interests are because they care about you as a person, not as a number, right? And so trying to find a creative way to say that. And one of the concepts that they have a show, the idea is that there’s this guy that really loves to go kayaking and hunting out in the reedy marshes. And they understand that that’s his lifestyle and that’s because they’re personal, right? But the picture is
from a low angle, looking up at the back of this guy’s head. He’s wearing a big brimmed hat. He’s got a canoe paddle in his hand. He’s kind of holding in a way that’s kind of firm. above him, it’s kind of a black and white kind of picture too. And above him, the words, this is personal up here. And almost every single person that we talked to in the interview series that we did was laughing at it and saying it looked like a horror movie poster. And what in the world were they thinking?
because even the lettering of this is personal looked like this is personal. Magazine cutout lettering. Yeah, and it was a print ad, so it was completely inappropriate for what they were trying to convey. And I was actually glad that we had that one because a couple of the other ones were little more nuanced. That one was the clear loser. nobody at the creative agency, nobody at the client saw it that way. They all saw it the way they wanted to see it.
as soon as we put it in front of people, they immediately saw something different. And that is so valuable. I talked to my students about how when we see pictures, we project onto them. We see ourselves in the image and we try to interpret the image through what we know. And if you’re interpreting through a picture that this healthcare provider is akin to a horror movie, you’re not gonna go there. You’re not gonna take them seriously. You’re not gonna pay attention to their advertising.
or anything else they have to tell you because you’re going to project that onto them that, you know, they really don’t understand how to talk to people. ⁓ So we have to be careful about how we communicate. Now, as it happens, like you got to work on one where we had an ad that we didn’t think was going to do very well and it went really well. It was probably the most successful ad testing I’ve ever done. Almost everybody loved it. And the funny thing was the client didn’t really think that much of it. Like the agency had put it together and
The agency did a good job on it. It was really well produced, but the client decided, it’s too generic. The people aren’t going to really connect to this at all. And my gosh, people would pick out these little scenes that were on screen for a second and connect to it in a meaningful way. And they were actually saying, I don’t even know much about this health care system, and now I want to check them out. I didn’t know they could do this. And it was all stock photography. It wasn’t even really things from the hospital. They wound up filming those things and putting them in the actual ad.
I think the one that got me was there’s somebody ringing a bell. what the client told me was, you know, I think that’s actually an employee ringing a bell. But people were grabbing onto it as, that person is now cancer free. They’re ringing a bell to show they’re cancer free. And how did they get that? I don’t even know. Like, I didn’t get that. But that’s what they got. And so when you do ad testing correctly and what you’re looking for is you’re not looking for the crystal ball. You’re not looking for is this going to succeed. You’re looking for
Is this resonant? Do people respond to this in a positive way or are they responding to it like that? is personal ad where they are really repulsed by it. That’s what you’re trying to understand. And then what is it gonna convey in terms of transferable qualities? Those are the things that we really talk about with research. Well, how, I mean, we’ve talked about it before. Well, I say we, you have talked about it before in like episodes and we’ve also had some of our guests bring it up as well. ⁓
AI. How can advertising research be done well today with AI being as widespread as it’s getting? All right, let me jump on my AI soapbox for a moment and say, first of all, AI is a very large term that we are generally applying to a very narrow set of AI applications, are generative AI or large language models.
And I really don’t like to conflate the two because I’ve been following AI for decades. I’m really interested in it. And there are good AI platforms out there that are doing what we would now call machine learning, ⁓ which is very different from generative AI. And then there are bad AI platforms out there that are just tapping chat GPT or Claude or any of those other programs and just running things through a generative AI chat bot and then having it generate stuff, which may or may not be trustworthy. So we have to understand.
the differences because they are significant. ⁓ what I worry the most about when I talk to other people that are using generative AI is that they’re trying to use it to replicate human processes that humans really need to be involved in. And whether that’s art and design, whether that’s copywriting, whether that is ⁓ to some degree proofreading, although I think AI tools actually are good for proofreading, at least for a first pass.
But if you need really, really technical proofreading, you need to have a human look over things. ⁓ If you’re talking about laying out a strategy, if you’re talking about research, you can’t trust AI for research. I don’t care what people say. ⁓ Show me something you’ve researched in AI, and I’ll show you where it made something up, because I’ve never come across anything that’s been remotely 100 % correct. It’s worse than Wikipedia, and Wikipedia can be very untrustworthy, too. Guess what it uses as a source?
⁓ Here’s my other problem with AI is that in research, we’re often trying to understand what do people think today so that we can use it for tomorrow to be on the cutting edge. AI is built on training data that are from yesterday. And sometimes they’re from significantly from yesterday. I you don’t know what you’re getting because it’s a black box and you don’t really know what it’s looking at and it’s training data before it spits out output. So there’s a lot of people that are selling synthetic respondents right now.
Synthetic respondents, there is an actual good kind of synthetic respondent that’s built on completely different technology. ⁓ And they’re used primarily just for ⁓ trying to understand really particular things and data. ⁓ That’s not what most people are selling. What they’re selling is chat bot derived make-believe respondents. There’s been a number of papers that have come out that said they’re not trustworthy, they don’t match reality. When we compare them against what people actually say, they don’t wash it all.
They’re sycophantic. They’re overly positive. You can’t trust them. Okay, so those are bad solution And then this other thing is called digital twins Which that term has been used for a lot of different contexts But in research is used for when we take somebody’s profile from a survey and then we create a digital version of them So it’s based on reality. It’s not based on us, you know make-believe Yeah, but it’s still based on make-believe and and again, it’s looking backwards. It’s not looking forwards It’s not looking at the present and taking it into the into the future
it’s taking data that might be significantly out of date and applying them to a person’s profile. It’s kind like having AI write Facebook posts for you. It’s going to come across as very inauthentic and unreal. It might sound a little bit like you, but it’s going to sound a lot not like you too. So we have to be really careful about trusting this stuff too much. ⁓ I always, and I do mean always, disclose when I use AI. ⁓ We use AI a little bit here on Riverside.
which is our podcast platform, to help us with ⁓ clipping things or maybe forgetting summaries or things like that. Okay, you know, that’s fine. That’s a good use. But we also, ⁓ everything we do, we write. We produce, you know, we film. I’m never an AI construct. It’s always me. You can tell because I stumble over my words or sometimes I mispronounce things or ⁓ Holly’s gotten to hear me ⁓ mispronounce things in some pretty crazy ways. Sometimes I’d have to redo it, but.
This this this is real and reality is really what we’re striving for so I encourage people in the marketing world You know with with this technology always think about it in terms of can a human? Provide more value than this and the answer is almost always yes Even when I’m looking for like stock images or I’m Sometimes I’ll go on Canva and I make our thumbnails through Canva or I will sometimes make
graphics, like a few episodes ago, I think it was the other day when you were talking. Well, as we’re filming this the other day, when you were talking about the ice cream, I went and made a little fake computer with a website for Sean’s driveway ice cream. Like, I do all of that myself. I don’t, if I see something that looks like maybe AI, like in the stock.
photos or in the graphics on Canva, I try to steer away from it just because it’s like, I follow a lot of artists on Twitter and stuff. I get to see that side of how it affects those people. And I try to avoid that. So. Absolutely. If you can hire a human to draw something for you, you are almost always going to get a better output. It’s going to look more real and more plausible than an AI output. ⁓
You mentioned that. Sean’s driveway ice cream. An ice cream truck was literally driving by my house when I was riding that. And I just thought, okay, well, might as well talk about ice cream. I was inspired by actual reality. I don’t know why the ice cream truck drives by my house all the time, maybe because my son runs out there and buys ice creams from them. But they know there’s a sucker living somewhere there. the reality is like, I’m not ready to take.
what I’m doing and hand it off to a machine that’s not going to do it as well and which quite honestly is never going to learn and never going to get better the way that you or I would. ⁓ You know, another thing about technology that I is really important is technology is here to help us, it’s not here to replace us. So in the survey industry, for example, when I started here, we were still doing paper surveys, believe it or not. Like we had, we used to have a whole room that was just file cabinets for all of our paper surveys. And that’s long gone. We haven’t had that in decade, but.
⁓ When’s last time I did a paper survey? mean, you know, even for other people, like not one that I’m administering, but for other people, I very rarely do paper surveys anymore. And I honestly feel sorry for anyone that has to input them, deal with them because they’re a pain in the butt. Online surveys are so much more convenient, so much better. Why would you want to go back? But at the same time, did we have to replace some people for that technology? Yeah, but those people moved into other jobs and did other things that involved servicing those online surveys.
It’s not like they were replaced, they just had to shuffle what they were doing. That’s what technology is supposed to do. It’s supposed to give you a new focus and allow you to do things differently and more efficiently, but still have a job. Well, we kind of talked about it a little bit when we were talking about focus groups, but we do a lot of in-depth interviewing here at RPG. I know that project we were talking about where we showed the advertisements to people that
that was in-depth interviewing and things can go haywire a lot. I know from experience, had one person, it was when Kyle and I just moved into our house and our friends came to visit and we wanted to go to Six Flags. So I cleared off my Friday schedule and my Thursday interview was like, hey, I have to work during this time. And I was like, oh.
Okay, we can do it Friday morning. And she kept blowing me off. And then I got one of my coworkers to do it. And I was like, hey, do you mind taking care of this? And she kept blowing her off as well. And I was like, well, I guess you’re not getting the payout for this interview. It was like $100, wasn’t it? I think so. good amount of money. Yeah. For an hour of your time. Yeah. Literally, that was all it was. But how do you deal with situations where
the interviews aren’t working out like that or just aren’t going like the way you want to.
It’s a big question. This is gonna surprise you, but there are some times where I’m actually glad when people flake because sometimes it’s like, oh, I don’t have to do this hour long interview. But eventually I do have to get them done. I mean, it’s what we’re paid to do, right? So if somebody’s flaky persistently, I give them three chances and they’re done. I I don’t mess around with them because my experience has taught me that people will, if they flake on you once, it might be
If they flake on you twice, it might be a fluke. If they flake on you three times, it’s a pattern and you shouldn’t do it anymore, ⁓ especially if you’re paying them. unless it’s somebody that’s really, really important for me to reach or really hard to reach, like an executive or a physician or something, then I’m willing to put up with it a little bit more because they’re busy and a survey doesn’t seem like the most important use of their time to them. And what I usually do around that third time is say, listen, I know we keep trying to schedule this and it’s not working out. When’s a good time when you’re not?
as busy, like I can call you on the weekend or can call you at night or something. They’re usually at that point embarrassed enough that they’re willing to work with me on that. I’ll call them early in the morning. I’ll call them late at night. I’ll call them on the weekend, whatever I’ve got to do. ⁓ One of our interviewers, Sharon, carries interview guides in her purse. So she’s out and about and at the grocery store, something and somebody calls and wants to do an interview. She’s ready to do it then and there. She says she’s pulled off the side of the road and done interviews in her car. ⁓ She’s a full-time interviewer. mean, that’s her full-time job with us. So.
She’s got a little bit more time to do that than I do. if people want to be interviewed, they generally will accommodate you. And if they don’t really care and they just are wasting your time, it’s better to cut them off because they’re going to be a bad interview subject anyway. But I think part of the key, too, is you have to ask yourself, in the scheme of things, how important is this interview that I need to chase this person down? If it’s just a general consumer interview, they are so easy to replace.
and I won’t waste a lot of time with them. In fact, I’ll tell them, hey, we have a limited quota, and if I don’t get to you, I don’t get to you. And it’s too bad, so sad, you know? But if it’s somebody that I have a qualified list of like 20 or 30 people and I’ve got to try to get as many of them as possible, I can’t be that cavalier. I have to then work with them. So it really does vary depending on the kind of study that we’re doing. Joe. One thing that’s ⁓ a little different about you versus a lot of other research professionals is that
you actually have a master’s degree. And you also teach students that are going to become marketing research professionals, similar to what you do here. What kind of tips and tricks are you giving them in the classroom to give them the best chance of success? Yeah. Well, and I don’t want to repeat too much of what I already said because I did talk about this in our last episode, but in terms of the tips and tricks that I offer,
In my last class, I always give them a slide of like, here’s how you actually can be successful in this field. And I give them tips like, learn how to program, read books, ⁓ network with people, ⁓ take time to learn things that you don’t know how to do, and try to learn from other fields. And I give them some other fields that they can look into, social sciences like sociology, psychology, ⁓ anthropology.
maybe areas of interest like semiotics or ⁓ maybe ⁓ behavioral psychology or neuro marketing or things like that where they’re adjacent to what we do, but not necessarily what we do. Or maybe you could go and look at data science or user experience testing or things like that, which are not the same thing as marketing research, but have a lot of overlap. My point being that if you stop learning and you just get really rigid in your skill set, you’re not very valuable.
I am constantly trying to expand myself with things that I read, with things that I watch, with things that I pay attention to. I try to stay off social media because I find that it’s not a good use of my time, but I’ll get on social media if I have a purpose like promoting a podcast, for example, and try to do that well. ⁓ So I think you have to kind of be intentional about how you go about your career and how you try to grow.
It is important to find a mentor if you can. It is important to find people that support you and that teach you new things. It’s less important to go to conferences. And I know I differ with a lot of other professionals about this, but conferences are expensive and they take you out of the office and they require a lot of your time and they’re fun. You can meet some people, you can get some great connections. And if you’re really good at it, you can find a lot of work there. But most of us are not really good at it. And for a lot of us, it’s just something that you do and
if it’s taking away from your family, taking away from your work, there’s probably better ways to spend your time. And there’s a lot of virtual conferences you can do too. So I don’t recommend those as much as I recommend finding local groups where you can meet people and get to know them and learn skills from them. I think that’s a lot more fruitful a lot of times. Well, we started this podcast and like we said at the top of the episode, we are at over a hundred episodes at this point.
A lot of those are you talking about different marketing topics and whatnot. ⁓ They’re very varied. You’ve talked about video games, you’ve talked about the history of focus groups, ⁓ and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ I know you kind of touched on it a little bit when we were talking about AI before, but do you write them all by yourself? I do. do. Every word.
that I put into these things is either written by me or cited from an actual source. And ⁓ that does take a lot of my time. And I’m a fast writer. I write a lot. I write thousands of words every day. ⁓ We have another podcast we do, Opio Insights. ⁓ I write a newsletter that goes along with that. I have a hobby podcast too. I do one about video games. That one takes an hour for me to record every week and it’s about 10,000 words usually. a ⁓ lot of time and energy goes into this, but…
Here’s the thing, ⁓ when you take the time to learn this stuff for yourself and to be able to articulate it in a way that you can actually share and give examples and metaphors and things like that, you remember it better. So when you need to recall it, when you’re talking to other people, you can bring it up and then can even refer them back, hey, I did an episode on that, you can go check it out. ⁓ So the script writing does benefit me and we’re gonna take some of the scripts actually from the last series that we just did and we’re gonna put them into an ebook format and start giving it away.
because why not? You we’ve already created this content. We can use it in other ways. So I would encourage anybody that wants to get into this. ⁓ We really, it’s been a trial by fire for us ⁓ as it is often, but we got into this with the intention of we’re not gonna try to seek immediate growth in the audience. We’re gonna really build it sustainably and let it grow on its own. And we’re gonna invite on great people and just have fun with it. Every guest, we just sent out these.
bags or like cooler bags that say the marketing gateway on them with a Tumblr and some notepads and pens and stuff because we appreciate them. Like they gave up their time to be on the show. They refer to us to other people. So we care a lot about what we’re doing here. But you know, 25 weeks from now we’re going to be on episode 200 if we keep up this pace that we’re going. And I know that sounds crazy, but part of our goal was we want to get the episode count up so that we’re talking about a lot of topics so that we can get a lot of interest.
We hope that we’ll continue to be interesting to those of you that are listening. Well, you kind of touched on it a little bit there, but how do you decide what topics that you are going to talk about and make an episode about each week? Sometimes it’s just what’s in my daily newsfeed. ⁓ know, K-pop Demon Hunters was very popular when I talked about it. The Staples Barbie or baddie, not Barbie, Staples baddie was a big deal a weeks ago. She’s kind of falling off the face of the earth now, but
⁓ The cracker barrel thing when that came up, that was a big deal. Some of those are really topical and they’re just fun to talk about. We’re already talking about them, so why not make an episode about it? ⁓ But I feel like we have to be really careful. ⁓ I’m not a full-time marketer. I’m marketing research professional, which means I support marketing. So I have to talk through my lens and I can’t sit and comment on everything that marketers always talk about. I read Ad Age all the time, for example, and they…
talk about things that nobody else really talks about because they are such an insular focus on creative work. At Age is a long time publication, it’s been around forever, but I feel like sometimes they forget that there’s a whole world out there that’s not paying attention to this stuff. And I read the St. Louis Business Journal regularly and a lot of times I read it and I think, wow, it’s really great to know what’s going on in the business community, but most of that stuff isn’t common knowledge to anybody and nobody really cares about it other than the people that are.
in the very limited business space that it serves. So you have to kind of tune things to the audience as well. And one thing that I have realized is that not a lot of people have a common vocabulary when it comes to marketing. And so if I can help provide that by giving examples and talking about topical things and helping them to understand these concepts a little bit better, that’s way more important to me than just commenting on that issue of the day. And I hope that we’re doing that. I’m going to continue to try to do that. That’s what I do in the classroom too.
Students have told me that’s one of their favorite things about my classes. So I hope we’re doing that here on the Marketing Gateway as well. But I’m also looking forward to having more guests because these episodes take me a long time to write. Again, if you want to come on, we’re more than happy to host you. Absolutely. ⁓ So when I pitched this idea to you to interview you, you… ⁓
mentioned that you didn’t really want this to sound like a commercial for RPG. I feel like we’ve done a fairly solid job of that. But we do offer marketing research services. And I thought it might be a good idea to ask who would you think really needs those kinds of services? OK, so if you’re watching on YouTube, don’t push the jump ahead button. This isn’t a commercial. No, mean, research. There’s a lot of researchers out there. We provide it.
will help you if you need it, but there’s other people that do it too. So that’s why I’m saying this is not a commercial. Where you need research is when you don’t know something. And it’s important to have the intellectual honesty to admit that you don’t know and you need to know something, but need to know, not nice to know. And that’s really a key when I’m engaging with a client and they have a problem that they just want to get an answer, but they’re not really that invested in what they’re going to do with the answer. I often try to steer them away from doing formal marketing research because it’s not going to benefit them.
and they’re going to spend a lot of time and money on something that they really didn’t need. But if you need it to make a strategic decision, if it’s what we call a million dollar decision about an ad buy or a logo change or positioning statement or whatever, yeah, you’ve got to do it. Because you might make a mistake like some of the ones that I talked about where you might put something out there in the world that really upsets and offends people. And guess what?
I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to Cracker Barrel. I’m pretty sure that when they launched that stupid logo that they had to run egg on, that it came out of not doing research and listening to people. They probably did research with the people that they wanted to like their brand, but they didn’t talk to the average everyday consumers, and they got predictable results. So you have to actually bother to care what people think. And that’s when research really comes in handy. But when you talk to a professional, we’re not going to come to you and offer to do a Survey Monkey or a Google Form.
you know, we’re gonna think more strategically about how this fits into what you’re doing. And if you can give us a seat at the table to actually be part of your decision making so we can inform it, you’re going to get such better use out of the research than if you just hire us to write a report, send it to you, present it, and then we’re done.
And then what would be, I guess, an example of when you would say, okay, you need to bring in an outside professional to help out with this? Sure. So a very common one is satisfaction studies. ⁓ If you are gonna talk to people about what you can be doing better, then…
You basically want to make sure that you have a third party that’s neutral that is actually getting that information for you. And it’s hard to do that if you’re doing it on your own because they’re going to lie to you. They’re going to tell you what you want to hear. If it’s a neutral third party, they’re going to tell that third party things they would never tell you. So that’s a very common use. Another use would be when you need to keep your identity secret. Believe it or not, there are a lot of studies where that’s a good idea. If you’re doing a branding study, for example,
and you’re showing things to people that are intended to ⁓ hear their point of view about your brand or understand, you know, kind of what is going on in the marketplace. Sometimes not showing your brand and not telling them who you are means you get a cleaner read and you can’t do that on your own. It is much easier to hire an agency to do that. Another one would be if you don’t know how to reach the people you want to talk to, that’s where you’re going to need us because we have access to those people through research panels.
or through list purchasing or other things, and we’re much, much more efficient at it because we do it all the time, then you might be on your own unless you’ve been in the research industry. those are some great uses for us. ⁓ Where I would say we are the least useful is if you can do it yourself. If you can do it yourself, do it yourself. And then come to us and tell us what you still need to know after that because that’s where we can really help you the most.
Well, like I started at the beginning of part one, I asked you all the questions we normally ask our guests. So I’m going to end it the same way. We normally ask our guests at the end of every interview if there’s anything they would like to plug. So now’s your chance. It is National Donate Life Month. We talked about this earlier in our interview and showed up in part one of this.
But I want to circle back to it because this is the month where the people that are organ donation professionals, and we talked about them in this episode too, ⁓ where they are out in the hospitals doing the ⁓ work of promoting donation. And they are doing flag raisings, and they’re doing memorial services, they’re bringing donor families in to talk to people. They’re making everyone aware. And they’re also running drives for registries to get more people registered to be registered donors.
So it’s really, really important that you consider, if you’re interested in being a donor, registering, because then that helps to make things clearer in the moment when, if you’re in a motor vehicle accident or something where it’s really tragic and there’s a lot of ⁓ activities buzzing around that people know your intentions, but if you are not willing to do that, and there are people that have good reasons why, and I won’t get into all of those, but I understand, first of all. And secondly,
please make sure you tell your loved ones what you want. If you don’t wanna be a donor, just tell them that so that they know, and it’s really easy because you won’t be. If everybody knows, I have a family member that doesn’t wanna be a donor, we all know, it’s fine. But I also have family members who do wanna be donors, who haven’t registered, and I’m glad they told me, because that way if the question ever comes up, we know what their thoughts are. And they told more than just me, they told other people too. So.
National Donate Life Month is really about bringing awareness to the need. Again, 100,000 people on this donor list plus 100,000. There’s more than that. these are people, many of them need kidneys. I think like 70 or 80 % of them need a kidney. And every day they’re on dialysis, sitting there going through this awful process of dialysis because that’s what they have to do to live. And if they can just get a kidney from a deceased donor, someone who’s not gonna need it anymore, they can live a different life.
Think about that. These are moms and grandmas and dads and ⁓ little league coaches and people at work in stores and all kinds of other people that you intersect with in your daily life. You might not even know that they’re going through this. So if you can be a donor, please be willing to step up and be one and either register or let other people know about it. That’s my plug. Perfect. Well, thanks Sean for being on the Marketing Gateway. I appreciate you talking to me.
It’s a rare experience, Truly. Well, this has been the Marketing Gateway. Should we do it at the same time? Sure. See you next time. All right, there we go.
Holly Wooten (50:47)
guys. So that was part two. I really hope you enjoyed getting to hear from Sean. He really is a great person, ⁓ even beyond just the work, the scope of work and everything, just in personal life as well. He is a really great person to know and I’m glad that I got to share that with our audience, ⁓ even more so than you may already have with just the regular episodes. So
Thanks for watching the Marketing Gateway and we’ll see you in our next episodes.
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