Beyond the Numbers: How to Unlock Marketing Insights That Drive Action

[00:00:00] Marketing Insights aren't just about numbers. They're about uncovering the hidden gold in your data that can transform your business. But are you truly digging deep enough? In this episode, I sit down with Brett Townsend, a marketing insights expert who's worked with brands like Pepsi, Walmart, and Lowe's to explore how understanding consumer narratives and data-driven insights can give your brand a competitive edge. If you're only looking at analytics for reporting, you're missing out on real opportunities for growth.

[00:00:30] We're going to unpack how to turn data into strategy. So make sure you stay tuned to this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:01:00] Hey friends, welcome to another episode of Neal Schaffer. You need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your Digital Marketing Coach. Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your Digital Marketing Coach and this is Neal Schaffer.

[00:01:28] Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast. Today, we're diving into a topic that separates thriving businesses from struggling ones. Marketing insights. Understanding data is one thing, but knowing how to extract real actionable insights from it is where the magic happens. Now my guest today is Brett Townsend, Senior VP of Strategy at Quester and author of Insights on the Brink.

[00:01:57] As you know, I love bringing authors on this podcast because they have codified their work and it is something that at the end of this podcast, you can at least buy the book and continue the learning. So Brett has worked with global brands like Pepsi, Doritos, Walmart and Lowe's, helping them use data and consumer narratives to drive innovation and business growth.

[00:02:19] In this episode, we're going to explore how brands, both big and small, can stop using data just for reporting and start using it to shape strategy, develop better products and even create more effective marketing campaigns. So if you've ever wondered how to bridge the gap between analytics and real consumer insights, this episode is for you. Without further ado, here's my interview with Brett Townsend.

[00:02:45] You're listening to Your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neal Schaffer. Hey everybody, this is Neal Schaffer and welcome to another live stream edition of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. For some of you that know, I teach a class on personal branding and how to become an influencer at UCLA Extension. And I just wrapped up a semester.

[00:03:08] And what's amazing is that these students who came in not knowing much about the art of branding or what it takes to become an influencer, left understanding that not only do they need to become content creators, but they also need to understand the data behind their actions. In other words, as you start going as a business, as a personal brand, as you publish more content on any given social network, any given medium, any given format, you begin to collect data.

[00:03:38] And I believe those smart influencers, those smart brands are the ones that really dig into that data to find a lot of different insights. So today, that is going to be the topic of what we're going to be talking about. Now, our guest today has worked with a lot of very, very large brands, but I think this, you know, becoming a data analyst and really understanding not just the analytical side of, you know, what your business is doing vis-a-vis your digital marketing,

[00:04:06] but really trying to gather insights from that can, I believe, I'm not going to say make or break your business, but can uncover a lot of hidden gold for your business. So we're going to go deep into that today. My guest today is Brett Townsend. Brett is the senior VP of strategy over at Quester. I'm sure we'll find out more about what Quester does. He's also the author of this book, Insights on the Brink, Revitalizing the Market Research and Analytics Industry.

[00:04:32] In other words, data analysis, market research, market insights is not a boring old industry. It is a refreshing, I'm not going to say sexy, but I find exciting. I really do love digging into the data and seeing what I can find. So Brett has worked in domestic and global branding and innovation for major brands like Pepsi, Doritos, Ruffles, all of my faves, Walmart, Frigidaire, and Lowe's.

[00:04:56] His work has led to successful innovations, brand extensions, product improvements, and marketing campaigns worth tens of billions of dollars globally. So it's really an honor to not only invite Brett to the stage here, but also to be able to dig into all of his experience to see what value we can find from it. So Brett, without further ado, welcome to the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Thank you. The honor is mine for sure. Thanks. Not at all, my friend. So, you know, marketing insights, analytics data, how did this all get started?

[00:05:25] How did you, you know, begin to work with these, you know, huge global Fortune 50 brands? Yeah, it didn't start out that way. That's not what I intended to do. My undergraduate degree was actually in broadcasting and I did sports broadcasting for a number of years, but then made the decision. I didn't think this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so through a friend started working with the Nielsen TV ratings, Nielsen Media Research.

[00:05:51] And then from there, it kind of blossomed into the career that I have now in consumer strategy and analytics. And that's kind of the fun thing that we always say is that almost everybody who's in this industry has a story about how they fell backwards into it. So it's really kind of fun, the diversity that we have in the industry. You know, interesting that the sports broadcasting, I love sports. I grew up just loving, I could tell you the statistics of any baseball player because I had all their baseball cards, right? So I think there might be this connection between like the data analysis and stats of sports.

[00:06:21] Oh, for sure. And what you're doing in consumer insights, right? Yeah. I mean, when I was in it, there was, you know, Moneyball wasn't around, you know, the analytics were very rudimentary at that point. So it's certainly evolved way beyond where anybody thought it would back in the day, for sure. So let's start to define some terms. Well, define one term specifically, which is marketing insights. And I know that's obviously the topic, what we're going to talk about today.

[00:06:47] When you think of insights, can you give some examples that really define and illustrate not just the meaning of the term, but also the impact that it can have for businesses that get it right? Yeah, quite simply, I think an insight is anything that leads to the development of a product or a campaign that eventually sells stuff. Whether, you know, a big brand or a small brand. And you mentioned the big brands I'm a part of, I have been a part of.

[00:07:14] I've also worked with a lot of small to medium sized brands, too. And it's all kind of the same. And so insights are not observations. You know, there's a lot of people that want to say, well, an insight is, is that we're all more connected than we've ever been, but yet we're disconnected interpersonally. You know, that's not really an insight. That's just more of an observation. And so I think people get those confused.

[00:07:35] But really what I like to say is an insight is something that you can take and use to develop a product or a campaign, an innovation or a strategy that eventually makes money for a company. And to me, an insight is very deep.

[00:07:51] You know, so it can be something that it really unlocks something emotional within someone or explains a narrative behind behavior or really understands people's motivation to do things. It's not just a data point. It's not just this many people bought this product on a Wednesday. You know, that's not really an insight. That's just a data point.

[00:08:16] But it's a great starting point within we would say, OK, now what's the insight behind why so many people are buying that particular product on a Wednesday? You see what I mean? And so we use data to kind of help us know where to start and figure out what questions do we need to ask. The real insight comes, though, from truly digging deep with your end customer and understanding what their needs and motivations and desires are. So a few takeaways there.

[00:08:43] So it sounds like the marketing analytics or data analysis is just part of the picture. It's really the starting point. It's when you have this objective that says, what can I find here that I can apply to a campaign or product? And that process of starting with that data, but digging deeper, as you say, going off the numbers into the real world, having conversations where you can uncover something deeper that I can have bigger impact in the business. Is that a correct way of looking at it? Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say that data analytics is only for the upfront.

[00:09:13] That's usually where I have found it most effective. But analytics can be used throughout the entire process of developing a product or a campaign or something. But yes, usually it's a fantastic starting point because it's data. It's facts. It's telling you what's going on now or what has happened in the past. And so it can really provide a great blueprint to say, OK, here's all the things that we're observing through the data.

[00:09:42] Now, what questions do we have because of what we're seeing in the data? And let's go ask those and get in deep with our consumer and be able to understand that. But then there's also predictive analytics and things that we can then use in the middle and on the back end of any type of project that we're doing to understand what comes next rather than just what's happened historically. So, yeah, it's kind of an overarching thing.

[00:10:07] But I think the key, Neil, is that it works hand in hand with consumer strategy and insights. There seems to be these camps where you have your analytics camp and you have your insights or qualitative camp. And it's almost like they're butting heads. But the best teams and organizations that I've been a part of and have worked with are the ones that use both in Symfony. And it's never just one or the other. You can do all the great qualitative research you want.

[00:10:37] But if you don't have good data analytics to kind of back it up or give you great starting points on where to go, a lot of times you're just guessing. And so it's imperative that these camps stop kind of butting heads and come together and realize that the magic happens when they're working together. So I'm just curious for, let's say, the smaller business and we tend to have smaller business listeners. Sure.

[00:10:59] It sounds like when, and I'm just thinking of a lot of marketers I know, that when they do the analytics, it's more for reporting. It's not really with this creative mindset that says, what can I find here that can help my next campaign or that can help from a product marketing perspective, improve product or create new product, what have you.

[00:11:20] What would you say to the small business marketer that is sort of stuck in that more routine way of looking at analytics, of getting out of that to really find insight that can make them do their job better and help their company more? Yeah, that is such a great question. Because the small and medium brands that we've worked with, a lot of time they're budget constrained. They don't have the resources of a PepsiCo or a P&G or Coke or whatever. And so they feel like, okay, well, we're just going to start with the basics and we just need data. We need some tracking data.

[00:11:49] So they end up doing things like brand awareness or NPS or getting these kind of static data points, which gives them a snapshot of what's going on. But it really does not help them because you can have an NPS score of 20. Great. Why? You know, why aren't you higher? Why aren't you lower? You know, what part of your entire process are people happy with or unhappy with?

[00:12:13] An NPS score is a static number, just like a lot of other data points are, that really don't tell you the story of what's going on. So in essence, you're getting a bit of a snapshot, but yet you don't know what to go do about it. And that's what we counsel and consult with our small to medium sized clients. And you'd be surprised, even large brands get stuck in this static data mentality and they just want all this data, but they're not willing to go and explore the reasons behind these things. And so we talk about narratives.

[00:12:43] We talk about, you know, what is that consumer narrative that is happening that is causing that NPS score? Where along your consumer, your customer journey are the pitfalls? You know, because you could be like, let's take NPS, for example. You could take, you could be an 80 on one part of your consumer journey, but a negative 20 on another part. And so you have to know where to begin, where to look, what to improve. Because, you know, and this kind of goes to with surveys.

[00:13:12] You know, if you just throw a survey out there of what do you like and what's wrong or what could we do better? You're going to end up with an infinite number of answers. And it's almost like you don't know where to start. And so what we counsel is, is that, you know, doing those, those static data things are okay. You really only need them once a year because they don't change that often. Some people think, oh, we got to do it quarterly or we got to do it, you know, more often or monthly even, heaven forbid. It's like attitudes don't change that quickly.

[00:13:41] Behaviors don't change that quickly. Do it once a year and then put the rest of your budget towards understanding the why behind the what. Because one of the things that I always like to say is the what, which is the data, the what informs, the why transforms. And there's never been a great transformative, you know, disruptive product or marketing campaign or company that's been solely built on data points. You know, it's really understanding your customer. What is their conflict?

[00:14:10] What are you trying to help them overcome? And you don't always get that from data. And so that's where we kind of, again, bring these two worlds together and say, you can go ahead and have that data so you know where you're at and you know where to start. But then also use it as a springboard to do deeper understanding of your customer. Gotcha. So that's good to hear that the attitudes don't change that often. And it could be this annual thing.

[00:14:35] But it's also a mindset that you are constantly doing when you're looking at data, I'm assuming, throughout the year of always trying to understand the stories and narratives. And I just wonder, you know, looking at my children in high school and the way they learn mathematics. And perhaps we're not teaching it the way to say, hey, not just do the equation, find the answer. But why? What does this indicate? Especially when you look at trends over time. So I think you painted a clear picture of how marketing and insights can work together. I want to dig a little bit deeper. You started talking about stories there.

[00:15:05] And you hinted at, like, consumer narratives. So how can marketing leverage consumer narratives for richer, more impactful storytelling? So the storytelling, I think, applies two ways, both to that data to find the insights, as well as maybe on the marketing side, right, on the content side. For sure. But let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Yeah, let me backtrack if I can for two seconds. We had talked about data and how things don't change that often and attitudes don't change that often.

[00:15:32] That is almost 100% true unless there is something terribly disruptive, good or bad, that happens that causes an immediate shift in sentiment. And so, like, the one that I use is the Bud Light fiasco from a year or so ago. That was so disruptive and so anti what that brand was about that it caused a major disruption that immediately changed attitudes and behaviors towards that brand. But that's very rare.

[00:16:01] So I just wanted to at least acknowledge that part. Understood. Or maybe a pandemic or external factors as well. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:37] Attitudes. Even emotions in any one given period of time. What it doesn't do is explain what are the narratives that are driving those attitudes, behaviors, and processes that people have. And so that's something that we do at Questor quite well is that we're able to dig in and look at what are the narratives driving behavior and beliefs that we see through research and data.

[00:17:05] And so there's three different types of narratives. There's narratives that we tell ourselves every day, the narratives we tell others, and the narratives that others tell us. And it's not a recent phenomenon where just because we have social media and all these influencers trying to tell us narratives, it goes back decades, even hundreds of years. It just took longer to spread. And it was a little less defined. And a lot of it was more based on hearsay and stuff.

[00:17:33] But the point is, is that narratives have always existed. And the trap that I think marketers fall into is that when they actually understand what a narrative is and dive into it, then marketers, a lot of times, and insights professionals want to prove or disprove a customer narrative. And that is wrong because it doesn't matter if a customer narrative is right or wrong. That's their narrative.

[00:17:59] And that's what's shaping their belief and their behavior. So it's about understanding it, not trying to confront it or to fight against it. And so that gives you the building blocks to conflict. And we can talk about storytelling and all the elements of a story. And a lot of times when marketers hear storytelling, they think, oh, my gosh, a fluffy deck with nothing but pictures. And it doesn't really say anything.

[00:18:28] And it's like, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking the elements of a story which has a protagonist and it has a conflict, if nothing else. And the conflict is really the most interesting part of any story, any book we read, TV show, movie we watch, whatever. The conflict is that engine that drives the story. And if we don't understand the conflict that our customers are facing, then we don't have a story.

[00:18:54] And we don't have a purpose as a brand because we don't know what we're solving for. But once we understand that conflict that the protagonist is dealing with, then we can create a solution or a weapon, which is our brand or our product, that can help the protagonist or the hero, the heroine, whoever, overcome the conflict. And that's really what we mean by storytelling, not fluffy, fluff, fluff and long decks.

[00:19:21] And, you know, once upon a time, there was a consumer, Judy, who would do this. No, you don't have to do that. And Judy's the hero. Yeah, Judy's the hero. You don't have to do any of that. You just have to understand the consumer is the hero every time. There's always a conflict that they are dealing with in their life. And your brand is the tool that helps them overcome that conflict. That's really powerful. I think a lot of businesses sort of dumb that down into sort of like pain points and solution. Burning platforms. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of different names for it.

[00:19:51] You're right. Right. I'm just curious, though. So like understanding that consumer narrative, you said, you know, influencers are saying this or that. And you're right. A lot of marketers will just look at the sentiment analysis. Is it positive or negative? But not really digging into the exact things that people are. So is like social listening, obviously, like, you know, focus groups. I'm sure consumer brands still use user focus groups. What are sort of the tools to better understand the consumer narrative? Yeah. Yeah. So there's different types of social work that can be done.

[00:20:20] So you mentioned social listening, which generally is listening to keywords, to topics, to themes that are out there. I'm speaking generally, of course. You have social analytics, which then puts data behind all these different terms that you see. OK, so this was mentioned 63 percent of the time in these certain environments or whatever else. So it gives you an analysis of what's going on there.

[00:20:46] What we do at Quester is what we call social narratives, where we actually dive into long form conversations that are happening in cyberspace. And we can go back a year, two years, whatever we do, and we can develop. We can figure out what are the actual narratives that are driving the behavior. What are those stories? And that's where the magic is, because then we can go to these brands and say, here's the narrative that's driving the behavior you're seeing in your research.

[00:21:16] And here's what we feel you need to address because of that. And it's a combination of some amazing AI that we've developed and then human linguists that can really kind of pull all of these things together and understand what that story is. And the beauty of it is, is that it's not opinion. It's not subjective. You know, there's this funny thing about insights that they're just really expensive opinionators. And it's really not that.

[00:21:40] These are what consumers are saying about this brand, this product, this process, this problem, this political issue, whatever it is you want. And then understanding what that narrative is and then building a strategy that understands that narrative, that emotionally connects with your customer because you now understand what their story is.

[00:22:03] And then you can communicate with them on a much different level than just simply pushing stuff out to them or giving them generic things. You really understand that specific customer in an intimate way that normally you wouldn't be able to. And that makes your insight, your marketing, your products, everything significantly more effective.

[00:22:26] So I assume, though, that there are companies that just they understand the narrative, but understanding it and then doing something about it are obviously two different things. There's like the onion with every layer you unpeel. There's new things that you should be doing with that information. So with that information, then I'm assuming that the companies that get it right, this leads them more into becoming more customer centric with how they approach the market, how they approach conversations with consumers.

[00:22:52] I also want to touch upon something that I know you wanted to touch upon related to this, which is consumer empathy. So let's talk a little bit about that, about becoming more of a customer centric and empathetic marketing department. Yeah. And this all is wrapped up in narratives, in these things that we're talking about, because if we don't feel for our customer, if we can't put ourselves in their shoes, which is really what empathy is.

[00:23:17] And it doesn't mean you have to have a shared experience or have a common frame of reference. It's just your ability to put yourselves in the life of someone else and to understand them in a deeper way than just saying, oh, yeah, you're dealing with that. It's understanding and having that empathy to a point where you then are motivated to do something about it, to help solve it.

[00:23:40] And it's very hard to have empathy for an organization or an entity or a faceless group of people. Empathy really comes when you understand individuals and their stories. So like one of the most impactful experiences in my career was when I was at PepsiCo and spent a two year stint working on a field sales team for the dollar channel that we were working with.

[00:24:05] And so I got to be in homes of regular shoppers of the dollar channel. So dollar general, family dollar, things like that. And to hear their stories about, you know, this month we had to choose whether or not we were going to eat or pay the electric bill. We have to park our car halfway through the month because we can't afford gasoline for the rest of the month and we have to bum rides or walk everywhere.

[00:24:33] It brought a whole different level of empathy and understanding to the work that we did that we were then able to look for solutions, not products. You know, if you're a product centric culture, it's all about the product. If you're a consumer centric culture, it's all about creating solutions for the consumer. And that's what we ended up doing. It wasn't about, OK, what deal can we throw at them? What new product can we do?

[00:25:02] It's how do we help these people in a way that as a multifaceted food company at PepsiCo, we were able to do that and we could create partnerships and we could do things. But it was all driven through this empathy for this consumer, which was different than any other consumer that we dealt with at PepsiCo. And so that's what we're talking about is that it's empathy motivates you to find a solution to help.

[00:25:28] And that's really the best brands are there helping their customers, helping their consumers, connecting with them in an emotional way that is more than just pushing products. It's really getting into understanding and building a back and forth relationship where you actually are creating love from a consumer or a customer because of this two-way relationship that you have with them. That's really extremely powerful.

[00:25:58] Thank you for sharing that story. You know, we began talking about the data, then the insights and having objective, but also having creativity and looking for the consumer narrative. And I'm just curious, in order to really become customer-centric and have that empathy, you really need to be out there in the field as you were meeting customers. So do you recommend the marketers that are watching or listening to get on, you know, ask their salespeople to get on more phone calls with customers if it's B2B or if it's B2C, go out more in the field? Is that a recommendation that you often give your clients? Oh, my gosh.

[00:26:28] I could not recommend that more. I mean, one of the great quotes that we put in the book was from Jim Stengel, who's the former CMO of Procter & Gamble. And he said, if you want to see how a lion hunts, don't go to the zoo, go to the jungle. Amen. And doing work behind your desk is the zoo. And the thing is, there's so many great tools out there to do consumer understanding where you can do it by the computer. And those tools are great if they're not misused.

[00:26:55] And so they've put data within reach of a lot of people who couldn't get it before or didn't have the budgets to do it. So I fully endorse a lot of those tools that are out there. The problem is people then become overly reliant on them, where it highlights the commodity portion of what we do and not the real money-making part of what we do. And so use those tools to get the data. But my gosh, get out there. Talk to the consumers.

[00:27:24] I mean, even when I was at PepsiCo, I would just go to the grocery store and get a shopping cart and act like I was shopping. But I would just be watching and listening to people shopping. You know, what are the conversations they're having? A lot of times they're just talking to themselves. Or are they just standing there with a blank stare looking up at the shelf like they don't know what to do? And so those are the types of things.

[00:27:47] But absolutely, you've got to get out of your office, away from the computer, and spend time with them to understand these types of things. Because otherwise, you really don't understand what you're solving for. So, Brett, I want to come full circle here. And I have to ask all of my guests because the impact that artificial intelligence has had on our industry has been massive. And I was recently, I'm part of the Digital Marketing Institute, my apologies.

[00:28:14] They're a global marketing certification company, part of their global advisory council. We had a former marketing exec from Coca-Cola speak to us. Currently works for a consulting company. But how all the major consumer brands like the PepsiCo's are all investing in building their own LLMs, their own database of these narratives. And I'm assuming that you see that as well. You mentioned that in your own company, you've also built your own AI as well to better analyze everything you talk about. What you do today, obviously, there are things that don't change.

[00:28:43] Five years ago, 10 years ago, the basics haven't changed. But would you say, when you look at the core work, has AI significantly shifted, significantly disrupted what you do today? Has it helped? Has it accelerated? Is it just another tool that might help you understand things from a different perspective? I mean, how would you sort of classify it today for those that are still on the fence about AI or understanding how this might impact the world that you see? Yeah, my answer is D, all of the above.

[00:29:13] You know, AI does all of those things. But I think a lot of people are scared about AI, you know, because we hear all these things about AI can replace humans and people are going to lose their jobs over it. In our industry, there's two main things that I've learned with AI just by using it over the last several years. One, it is already a commodity. You know, I've likened it very similar to the Internet back in the mid-90s.

[00:29:38] You know, people in the consumer insights industry were freaking out because, oh, no, we're doing our mall intercepts. We're doing our telephone interviews. We're doing our pen and paper interviews. What's the Internet going to do? Well, all it did was shift all those methodologies to online and ended up streamlining things and making them cheaper and quicker. But it didn't fundamentally change anything. AI, oh, my gosh, AI, it's going to disrupt. It's going to mess everything up.

[00:30:04] No, because all people are doing now is simply moving some of these same data collection things to AI. Everybody's got an AI tool. I was at a conference a couple of months ago. Everybody's talking about, look at our new AI thing. So it's already a commodity. But what it does is it can free us up from the mundane parts of our job to help us focus on things like empathy, narratives, stories, you know, these real deep insights. Because there is no empathy in AI.

[00:30:33] There is no emotion in AI. And AI cannot create anything. It only takes from existing knowledge and then spits out what there is. And so it boggles my mind when companies are using AI for innovation. Because that's then what happens is you end up seeing three different companies develop basically the same product because AI is that's what AI is telling them. You know what I mean? And we look at what analytics has done to sports.

[00:31:01] You know, it's made baseball and basketball kind of boring to watch in some cases because they're like basketball, dunk or three pointer. That's all we're doing. You know, a lot of the beauty that people love about basketball is not really there as much anymore. With baseball, we see the shift. We see all these other things that have really raw. You know, the stolen base wasn't that big a deal until baseball started making some changes. And then you start to see the beauty of the game open up. But yeah, analytics makes things predictive and it makes things boring sometimes too.

[00:31:30] And so I think that's where we have to be careful of how we use AI because just like any tool or any technology or anything, it can be overused and used for the wrong things. So use AI for the mundane analytics, for the report building, for some of those things that just are mundane.

[00:31:50] And then it frees me up, which I love, to do what I feel is the important work of consumer strategy, which is empathy, narrative stories, emotional connection, understanding brand love. You know, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I love this industry and so happy I ended up here is because I get to study humans and humans are endlessly fascinating and we're always changing and evolving. And AI can't stop that.

[00:32:19] And it's not going to, you know, change anything that's going on. And so in my mind, I can say thank you, AI, because you're doing a lot of the crap that I didn't want to do in the first place. And you're letting me focus on what I love doing the most, which is really digging into these brands and humans. Yeah, a really dumbed down analogy of that is you can have AI try to create a blog post out of the blue. Of course, that content will just be repeating what has been said on the Internet.

[00:32:45] But if you give it your own information, your own insight, your data, it can then repurpose that into creating something unique for you. And I think that's the you can't expect the AI to understand the narratives. But if you give it the data and you give it the information, it might be able to help you in analyzing and bringing up ideas. Right. And that's one of the beauties of kind of what we do at Quester. You know why I ultimately decided to leave corporate to come here because I was a client of Quester. The week Quester was using AI eight, nine years ago before it really became a thing.

[00:33:15] And we blend the best of AI with the best of consumer strategy and branding and innovation. And, you know, it's really working with with our clients to understand, OK, yeah, you can use AI for this and we do that. But here's a better path to do this and to help you understand that. And so it's really taking these brands and these companies on a journey, whether they're small, medium or large brands, the problems and the and the mindset and a lot of times are very similar.

[00:33:45] And it's just kind of helping people through the process or make sense of what's out there. And a lot of times they'll just come to us for consulting and we'll say, this is how you should use AI. This is how you should use this. This is how you should use analytics. This is how you should use the narratives. And then it's like, OK, so we don't have to give anything up. We just have to maybe repurpose where we're using these tools and how we're using them. So everything is being used in its most effective way. Yeah.

[00:34:13] I mean, a lot of what you talk about, it's not just mindset. It's a lot more heck of a lot more than that. But starting with that mindset can really shift the narrative, to borrow the word, of how you see everything. So, Brett, this has been fantastic. Obviously, anybody listening, Brett Townsend is the author of this book, Insights on the Brink. Definitely check that out at Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. Senior VP of Strategy at Quester. Brett, where can we send people if they want to connect with you, if they want to connect with Quester?

[00:34:40] And if you could just briefly introduce exactly what Quester does and what sort of clients do you work with? Sure. So basically, Quester is a branding and innovation strategy consulting firm. And the insights work that we do is always feeding strategy, bigger picture work. So we really help brands build their unique brand stories. We help them develop really meaningful and standout disruptive innovation.

[00:35:07] We've got processes that we work with to really dive in and help people understand this. And so it really is this consulting type of relationship and back and forth. And as I mentioned before, helping you make sense of all of the things that you have and helping you know where to go and what is the most effective way to do things. And so it's like I said, I was a client of Quester's for 10, 11 years before I left corporate. And now it's really great to be a part of it because it's what we do is it's not project work.

[00:35:37] It's really helping you understand strategy and how we can help your companies be more profitable, which is really why marketing and consumer insights exists in the first place. And you can find us at Quester.com, Q-U-E-S-T-E-R, Quester.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. Heck, you can even email me directly. It's simply as you see my name here. It's just Brett.Townsend at Quester.com. Would love to chat with any of you about whatever you've got going on. And like I said, we work with large brands. We work with medium-sized brands.

[00:36:07] We work with small brands. And it's not a one-size-fits-all, which is beautiful. We really sit down and understand you, have that empathy for what you're dealing with, and then create something that really fits what you're looking for. Well, fantastic, Brad. I mean, it's great to know a lot of the people that listen to this podcast, their businesses, they try to DIY a lot of what they do. But there are some areas where it really makes sense to tap into brilliant minds, brilliant companies that have done brilliant work.

[00:36:36] And I think that Quester, based on what you've been talking about, is an example of that. And the interesting thing is that a lot of times people hear that word consulting, and they think it means really expensive. And it's not. I mean, I think people are, when we work with small to medium-sized companies, they're actually amazed as to some of the things we can do for them that are significantly less than what they thought they'd have to pay. So yeah, don't let that term consulting throw you off. It's really about helping you solve your problems. Yeah. And for those that want to try to DIY it, obviously buy the book.

[00:37:06] And if you need more, connect with Brett. Tap into his experience and go from there. So Brett, this has been great. A lot of food for thought for everybody that's listening and watching this. So thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise and experience with us. Oh, my pleasure, Neil. Thank you so much for having me. And happy holidays. Happy holidays. All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview. As you know, I like to bring on an eclectic group of guests that help deliver ROI with each episode because there is a lot to cover in the world of digital marketing.

[00:37:36] And for me, my takeaway from this episode as a small business owner myself is that marketing insights are not just for corporations with huge research teams. They're really for any business that wants to build a loyal customer base and make smarter marketing decisions. So by going beyond the raw data, and I think it takes a little bit of training to be able to find how to connect that data in insight.

[00:38:02] But going beyond that data and uncovering the why behind consumer behavior, that will give you the keys to the kingdom of creating strategies that truly resonate with your audience. Well, that's it for another episode of your digital marketing coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schafer, signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilschafer.com.

[00:38:32] Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.