Interviewed August 23, 2007 by Seth Roberts
She runs a small Los Angeles company that does market research for big companies. The big companies want to know how consumers view their product. The work involves lots of experiments in which different versions of a product are compared. She spends a lot of her time reviewing research plans -- for example, questionnaire details. She likes working with lots of different people at lots of different companies and staying friends with them over the years. She also likes what she does, the pay, and the flexibility. She doesn't like that sometimes there is too much work to do. What people don't realize about her job is how detail-oriented you must be. If you're interested in this job, she advises you to go to industry websites and meetings.
[00:00]
INTERVIEWER Hi. Can you tell me in a few words what your job is?
MARKET RESEARCH I’m a marketing researcher. I provide marketing research services that are usually surveys for large companies that need to know something about their consumers, the people who are buying their products and services.
INTERVIEWER What do you feel comfortable saying about your pay?
MARKET RESEARCH At this point in my career, I make something a little bit north of $200,000 a year.
INTERVIEWER How long have you been at this job?
MARKET RESEARCH At this exact job, 6 years. In this profession, 27 years.
INTERVIEWER What are the hours, roughly?
MARKET RESEARCH For me, about 8:30 am to 6:00 pm.
INTERVIEWER Five days a week?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes. Some weekends.
INTERVIEWER Where is your company located?
MARKET RESEARCH In a suburb of Los Angeles.
INTERVIEWER How big is it?
MARKET RESEARCH It’s small. This is a small, private company. There are only about 3 or 4 full time, permanent employees at any given time. Everybody else is occasional, part time help or contract help.
INTERVIEWER You’re the owner of the company?
MARKET RESEARCH I am.
INTERVIEWER You started the company 6 years ago?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes.
INTERVIEWER I’d like now to start back at the beginning. Where did your entrance into this job start?
MARKET RESEARCH I have a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. After I did a post-doctoral fellowship, I decided that I wanted to see if I could apply that psychology background someplace other than an academic setting. I looked at a lot of different opportunities and stumbled into the field of marketing research. I really had no idea that it even existed. I was just very lucky. I was hired into a large corporation that at that time had basically a training program. They hired people with either MBAs or Ph.D.s and taught them marketing research.
[02:39]
INTERVIEWER In other words, you got a job with a marketing research company?
MARKET RESEARCH No. It was actually a manufacturer. It was what we call a client-side company. It was a company that manufactures stuff that people buy. A lot of marketing researchers work in that kind of environment. They work in usually one of 3 environments. They can work for a client-side company like The American Widgets Manufacturers Inc. They can work for an advertising agency. Advertising agencies hire a lot of researchers to study how people think about the products in the ads and what not. They could work for what is called a marketing research supplier. That is what I am today, a marketing research supplier. The client-side company and the ad agencies hire my company to actually get in the trenches and execute the research.
INTERVIEWER When you studied experimental psychology, what did you do?
MARKET RESEARCH I was studying some aspects of the brain substrates behind perception. It was heavy duty biopsychology stuff. Neuroscience is what you call it today.
INTERVIEWER What’s the connection with what you’re doing now?
MARKET RESEARCH Rats. People. Not that different.
INTERVIEWER It was data and doing experiments?
MARKET RESEARCH It was the scientific method. That’s what you learn in graduate school psychology. You learn how to conduct experiments. You learn the basic science. You learn statistics. You learn how to design, execute, and analyze a study. A lot of that basic training on what’s a good test, reliability, validity, things like that carries over perfectly to the world of marketing research. We’ll often have an experimental design; a test cell and a control cell. The control cell might be the current product. The test cell is, “What if we change our supplier of X ingredient? Does that change the product enough so that people don’t like it so much anymore? Can we get a detectable difference between the current product and the reformulated product?” That’s a classic example of the test and control design. You use the scientific method. You figure out the sample sizes to get a statistically reliable result.
INTERVIEWER You run experiments like that?
MARKET RESEARCH All the time. That’s a big part of what clients hire us to do.
INTERVIEWER Maybe I better ask you more about marketing research. I can see there are many kinds of it.
MARKET RESEARCH Yes, there are.
[05:35]
INTERVIEWER What kind of marketing research do you do?
MARKET RESEARCH I do a lot of different types. That’s the beauty of it. That’s what I love about it. That’s where it gets to be really fun and challenging. One whole sphere of marketing research has to do with new product development. Any time you go to the supermarket or the drug store and see, “Huh, that’s interesting! We now have broccoli flavored ice cream. Great!” a whole bunch of marketing research has gone into bringing that product to market. That’s why you don’t actually see broccoli ice cream in the store because nobody would ever want it. There are all kinds of testing that’s done all along the way before that product ever gets on the shelf. I saw an ad last night from Head & Shoulders saying that they have something like 19 different dandruff shampoos for every possible condition you might have. You can be sure that many hundreds or thousands of dollars were spent to develop all those different varieties of Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo or whatever else is out there. Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream tests the basic idea of Cherry-Garcia-flavored ice cream with people. Then they develop prototypes of the product, maybe 6 or 7 types of versions of Cherry Garcia ice cream. We test those with consumers to find out which one seems to do the best. Which ones are losers and which ones are really pretty good. We might test the packaging, the name and the price. All those different variables get tested with consumers. Not all the time, but many of them get tested with consumers to determine what product goes on the shelf.
INTERVIEWER You do these tests?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes. I’m using the example of Cherry Garcia. We’ve never worked on that product. Obviously, it’s already in the market and all that. Let’s say broccoli flavored ice cream. The client has decided that they’re going to bring this out. They might say, “We want to bring this into the market but we’re not quite sure how high a price we can charge for it and people will still accept it. What’s the trade off? We’d like to charge more money and have a very high quality image associated with it but what level pricing will people accept?” We can design an appropriate study that will help them determine, if you price it here, this is how it’s going to work; if you price it a little bit lower, or a little bit higher, this is how it’s likely to work. How much resistance do you get as you raise the price of the product? How many people do you lose as you raise it? We can tell them, don’t go above a certain price or you’re likely to alienate too many people. They might say, “We’re considering 2 different package graphic looks. Which one is better?” It’s very easy for us to test. We do that sort of thing all the time.
INTERVIEWER By "test," you mean you gather a bunch of people, ordinary consumers, and they mark a sheet or something?
MARKET RESEARCH We develop a design and a questionnaire. Let’s say you have 2 different package designs for your Cherry Garcia Ice Cream or whatever it is. You’re not sure which one is going to be better. There are a few different designs that we might deploy depending on what the particular issue is. Essentially, we would wind up showing people a package and having them evaluate it on a bunch of dimensions. Some people see Package A, some people see Package B. Then we ask a whole battery of questions about things like purchase interest and overall appeal and uniqueness, how new and different it is, how well it fits with the Ben & Jerry’s brand and if it’s consistent with that or whatever. Then we would test those with what we know to be a statistically reliable sample size. We compare and we advise the client. Package B seems to be your better bet than Package A and here’s why.
[09:50]
INTERVIEWER Where does this testing take place?
MARKET RESEARCH It depends on the nature of the study. We might be interviewing people over the phone. That doesn’t work very well for the package tests though. For package tests we might do it over the internet. We might do it with something called mall intercepts. You might have been at a shopping mall from time to time where someone stops you and asks you a few questions. They ask you if you’d like to participate in marketing research. We don’t do very much through the mail system research anymore. That’s been pretty much replaced with the internet. There are panels of people who agree to participate in surveys over the internet. People think it’s fun and it is. It’s interesting. You never know what you’re going to get surveyed about. What you might do with using an internet panel where we would survey people from all over the United States, carefully balanced by age, gender and other demographic characteristics so that we could report back to the client. This is how the package has performed on a total US basis. If it’s a product that’s viewed very, very heavily in one part of a country or another, then you wouldn’t want to do it nationally. You’d only want to do it in the area that it’s very strong. For instance, if you’re testing chili, you might be doing that in Texas and the surrounding States. It depends on where the product is strong and is sold. That’s part of what we advise our clients on.
INTERVIEWER Do you specialize in any particular kind of product?
MARKET RESEARCH Not really. No. That’s also part of the fun of being in marketing research if you’re on the supplier side. On any given day I might be working on products you find within the supermarket, in the drug store. I might be working on entertainment, financial services, healthcare, all kinds of different products because the principles behind good experimental design and behind good, solid marketing research apply regardless of what the particular product or service might be.
INTERVIEWER When you got that first job with the company that made consumer products, they hired you because you had a PhD in experimental psychology, correct?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes, that’s right.
INTERVIEWER Those people are in relatively short supply? You didn’t have to have a bunch of other stuff? You didn’t have to do an internship, have a friend who worked at the company or anything like that?
MARKET RESEARCH That’s correct.
INTERVIEWER Because it was such a rare skill?
[12:29]
MARKET RESEARCH There are a lot of them around actually. There are a lot of people with PhDs in psychology, political science, sociology or any of those areas where you’re trained in the scientific method who are interested in considering careers outside of academia or government.
INTERVIEWER You seem to be saying it’s relatively easy for those people to get a job like the one you got; an entry level job in marketing research.
MARKET RESEARCH What makes it difficult is a couple of things; some of the barriers to getting those types of jobs. There are several things. When I started in this back in the early 80s, there were still large manufacturing companies, General Foods is a good example of one that doesn’t even exist anymore, that had massive marketing research departments. Leo Barnett, an ad agency in Chicago had a famous marketing research department that was huge and did fantastic work. Bell Labs in New Jersey, same thing. There were quite a few companies all across the country that were known for having these huge, fabulous marketing research departments and they did a lot of training. People from there dispersed all over the country to different kinds of companies. That’s gone away now. Companies don’t do that so much. On the other hand, we now have an educational system in place that trains marketing researchers. Now there are quite a few schools around the US where you can get an MBA, some sort of masters degree or beyond in marketing research. Now those people have been in huge demand from the moment they enter graduate school. That’s where the employers are going today. That is my understanding. That’s where they look today for their very highly skilled entry level people.
INTERVIEWER It’s no longer so easy to take your experimental psychology PhD and get a marketing research job?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes. If you want to do that, you’re going to have to do some work selling yourself. You’re going to have to do a good job positioning the relevancy of your work to an industrial kind of setting, a business world setting. The employers are going to be afraid that anybody coming out of a strictly academic background without training in business or marketing research is going to be very inflexible, didactic, other worldly, not practical, not a good team player, head in the clouds, that sort of thing. One has to position yourself to make it clear that you won’t be that way. If you are that way, then business won’t be a good place for you. Most people can say, “Actually, I’ve had to do quite a bit of selling.” For example, “I had to be very flexible and prepare a proposal to get my NIMH post-doctoral funding.” You can present to a potential employer that you actually do have and even used a lot of skills that you’re going to need in the business world.
INTERVIEWER Do you hire PhDs?
MARKET RESEARCH No. We’re too small to be able to use and afford that caliber of skills. The way that we work with PhDs is we have a fair number of them with whom we work, but they have their own independent businesses. We sub-contract with them. For example, there are statisticians with whom we work but only we don’t have enough work to keep someone like that busy on a full time permanent basis. We’ll just jump in and say, “Hey, can you help us out doing this factor analysis?” or “Do this segmentation analysis for us.”
INTERVIEWER I’d like to move on to the daily life of your job. Can you say what an average day was like?
[16:57]
MARKET RESEARCH Yes. I referenced a little bit of that earlier. The thing I like about my area of marketing research as a supplier is that I work for many, many different kinds of clients. On any given day, I might be working on a number of different projects for various different kinds of industries. That’s what I love about it. Other people, that drives them crazy. On a typical day, I might be writing a proposal. The client might say, “We might want to refresh and revise our packaging for Ben & Gerry’s Cherry Garcia Ice Cream. We’ve developed some new designs. Can you do a proposal for me on how you would test that?” I might be working on developing a proposal for them. Someone else? “I’m sitting here looking at a stack of computer tabulations on my desk.” Another project, we’ve already completed, the data’s all collected, and the surveys have been processed. Now I have to analyze and study. I’ve already decided what I think the relevant breaks are. Maybe I’ll look at males or females, younger vs. older, or whatever within my testing control cells. We’ve got these voluminous computer tabulations on my computer, maybe even hard copies and I will start to analyze. Another study, I’m actually polishing off a final report, putting the finishing touches on that and writing a cover memo to the client that says, “We’ve tested these 2 different packages with 300 different people. Here are the results. Here is what we think you should do. Go with Package B or whatever.”
INTERVIEWER Let’s take maybe yesterday. What happened yesterday? What did you do? Can you take us through the day?
MARKET RESEARCH Yeah. Let’s do that. I had a lot of communication back and forth with a client about potential new projects and spent a fair amount of time delineating what those projects might actually look like.
INTERVIEWER What’s a fair amount of time, an hour, two hours?
MARKET RESEARCH I probably spent an hour and a half to two hours on that.
INTERVIEWER Is that on the phone or by e-mail?
MARKET RESEARCH A combination. A little bit of phone time, a little bit of emailing back and forth. Then, time that I just spend thinking and writing notes and sketching out, “Here’s what I think we ought to do. Here’s how it ought to look for a research design.”
INTERVIEWER What about answering email? What other tasks did you get done yesterday?
MARKET RESEARCH Reviewing a questionnaire. We’ve gone through one path starting to shape up a questionnaire. I look at it and I work on it and I say, “No. This isn’t in the right order. We’ve got to put this over here. We’ve got to expand this section.” Maybe I say, “This is nice but this question here is going to take a half an hour to administer. It’s much too long. We’re going to have to cut. Here’s what I’m going to recommend that we delete. I’ll asterisk those or highlight them and say things like, “It’s a half an hour survey. You can’t hold people that long. We’ve got to reduce this by 13.” We’ll shoot it back to the client. The client will look at it and get back to me and we negotiate back and forth to come up with a viable questionnaire. I did some of that. This stack of tabulations that I’m looking at, we developed what’s called a banner plan where we tell the data processing person, “I surveyed 300 people. Here’s how I want to cut the data. I want to look at the data based on all 300 but I also want to look at it based on the men vs. the women, young vs. the old or the heavy users of this product category vs. the lighter users of this product category.” I spend some time “specking” out, meaning setting up for my data processing person just how I’m going to want to analyze this data in order to meet the objectives of this study. You’ve got to look at the data in all these different little sub-groups. Here are my instructions to you, data processing person as to how to align that data for me.
[21:37]
INTERVIEWER You wrote out the instructions? Does the data processing person work for you or is this a subcontractor?
MARKET RESEARCH In my case they’re a subcontractor. Other companies will have them as an employee. It just depends on your size and your structure.
INTERVIEWER Your contact with the data processing person was over the phone or by email?
MARKET RESEARCH Email. Lots and lots of emails.
INTERVIEWER What parts of your job yesterday did not involve sitting in your desk or at your computer?
MARKET RESEARCH Yesterday?
INTERVIEWER Yeah. You were on the phone right? You’re on the phone a lot?
MARKET RESEARCH Not much at all. No. We use the phone very little these days. I don’t think I was on the phone more than half an hour. That would be a lot. Most of it is email now.
INTERVIEWER Okay. What happened yesterday involving your job that wasn’t email or sitting at the computer?
MARKET RESEARCH Not much. I had some conversations that I referenced earlier. I had some conversations with a couple of clients about potential projects. It’s rare for it to happen on the phone anymore. Most of that conversation happens via email back and forth.
INTERVIEWER What about the other people in your company? Did you have interactions with them?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes I did. I have a person who’s like a project manager and I spoke with her about the scheduling of things. “When are we getting this data in? Okay. Now if this study happens, when is that going to be starting?” and telling her, “Here are my travel plans for September. I’m going to be out of the office these days. We want to work our other report dates and what not around that”. We do some of that, administer the scheduling. That was a fair amount of the conversation that went on yesterday. I have another associate in the office. She’s analyzing a study that we’re just getting the data in now, and talked to her a bit about, “Okay. How’s that report going to shape up? What’s our time line going to be? Let’s be sure we look at X, Y and Z variables; part of planning the analysis.”
INTERVIEWER How long have these people worked for you?
MARKET RESEARCH Three years and one year -- the two people in question. Other people who are working for us, subcontractors, some of them I’ve known for over ten years.
INTERVIEWER How much of your job involves traveling?
MARKET RESEARCH Very little. I know researchers who spend 30% of their time on the road. I’ve structured my life. One of the things I like about research is you have a lot of flexibility in the environments in which you practice marketing research. I’ve structured my set up such that I travel very, very little. That’s the way I like it right now.
[24:46]
INTERVIEWER How much do you travel?
MARKET RESEARCH I don’t think it’s even 10% of the time; probably 5% of the time.
INTERVIEWER I see.
MARKET RESEARCH Virtually nothing. If I wanted to I could be traveling easily 25% of the time but I really don’t want to.
INTERVIEWER You mean you would go visit your clients?
MARKET RESEARCH Visit clients, visit field sites, pursue clients who are not in my geographic area. I’m based in the Los Angeles area. I have clients nationwide but most of them are in Southern California. If I wanted to travel, and some researchers love it, then I’d be developing business as much as I could in other parts of the country. I don’t want it. I try and pay a lot of attention to clients in Southern California.
INTERVIEWER What are typical problems that come up?
MARKET RESEARCH Lots of them. We might be doing marketing research inside a store. You might have this happen to you where you’re trying to get your shopping done and somebody says, “Excuse me. Could I speak with you for a few minutes about…? I’m so and so, doing marketing research.” That’s called in-store intercepts. We do a lot of that. It could be in a supermarket, a gas station, a department store or restaurant, all kinds of places like that. We jump through a lot of hoops to have our interviewers on site at a certain day, at a certain time, with all their questionnaires ready to go and intercept people. Occasionally, that will happen on the day when a blizzard hits so nobody’s going anywhere. That happens.
INTERVIEWER A blizzard in Southern California?
MARKET RESEARCH No. We do this work nationally.
INTERVIEWER I see.
MARKET RESEARCH We’ve gone through all kinds of stuff to have researchers in certain stores. We’ve had to take weeks and weeks to get permission and everything to have them in this store in the Chicago suburbs, on this day in February and we can’t. We’ve had that happen in other places where there was a deluge. We had research going in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Thank God everybody was okay who we were working with, but we didn’t get any research done, that’s for sure. We had to quickly say, “New Orleans: Obviously, we're not going to get any research in that market. We’re going to have to substitute and go somewhere else.” Those things happen a lot. Every now and then we do product tests and a shipment goes missing that we’ve FedExed to some part of the country or the product arrived damaged. Having done this for so many years, we know all the problems that can come up and that’s how we provide good service for our clients. We anticipate. We try and build in a lot of redundancies. For example, if we say I need 150 respondents we might collect data from 170 because some of them may be no good respondents for one reason or another. A shipment might go missing and we want to make sure that at the end of the day we can deliver to the client data from 150 good respondents.
[28:05]
INTERVIEWER What’s an example of an extreme problem that you’ve had to face? Have there been any?
MARKET RESEARCH There was a situation once where the air conditioning here in Southern California, in the office where I was working at that time, broke over the weekend. We had test products that had been very carefully, painstakingly, at great expense, handmade in our office over that weekend. They had been shipped to us and arrived Thursday or Friday and we’re packaging it up to ship it all over the country early the following week. The air conditioning went out in the office and the product was pretty close to destroyed because of the heat.
INTERVIEWER The product was food?
MARKET RESEARCH Yeah.
INTERVIEWER It spoiled or went bad?
MARKET RESEARCH Yeah. The heat did really bad things to it. That was pretty bad.
INTERVIEWER I’d like to ask you about the emotional side of your job. What do you like about your job?
MARKET RESEARCH I love the fact that I get to work with a lot of different people in a lot of different companies. I’ve stayed friends with lots of people that I’ve worked with over the years. It’s a very small community. I still work with people that I first met back in the early 80s when I first got into the field. It’s that small an industry. Sometimes we’ll laugh and say, “My Gosh! There are only 2000 researchers in the entire country!” Obviously there aren’t. It feels that way because everybody knows everybody else. If you have an issue or problem and you’re stumped, you say to someone, “I just don’t know how to tackle this or I need someone who can help on whatever.” All you have to is send out some emails to your buddies in the field and someone will come up with a good recommendation for you. “Oh, you don’t know so and so? You should email him. He knows. He does that.” It’s great. I love that aspect of it. Many of my clients are personal friends at this point. We’ve worked together for many years. That’s part of it. You really care about trying to do a great job for your client because you don’t want to let them down as a person. Their career is on the line. If a client hires me to do their project then it’s somehow screwed up, late, or doesn’t meet their needs, it’s really bad for their career. We don’t want that to happen. It’s a really lovely community and people really care about each other a lot. I really like that tremendously. I love the diversity where I am because I work in so many industries. If I was working on the client side, people who love that -- and I worked on that client side for many years -- love the fact that they really get to know one product. It’s a one-product category and they really make a difference in the business. They’re really part of the team marketing that product, whatever that is. They can see very clearly the role of the marketing research that they’ve commissioned has had in driving sales of that business. That’s fun when you see your product finally make it to the shelf, do well, and thrive. It’s a delight! You see your ad you worked on really hard on TV and you say, “Oh yeah, that’s it. It’s a great ad. We love it.” It’s fun; very satisfying.
[31:57]
INTERVIEWER What else do you like about your job?
MARKET RESEARCH The nature of the work. The people. That’s pretty good. The pay is good. I like the flexibility. I’ve worked for large companies and small companies and I’ve had my own company now for several years. It’s a career where you can use your skills and apply them in a lot of different environments. You can make the career fit your life. If I suddenly find that for family reasons or whatever, I had to relocate to the other side of the country, it would be a difficult. It would be a struggle but I could do it. I could pick up and move. I’ve been able to practice my profession in a lot of different environments and in a way that suits my life. That’s a huge advantage to it.
INTERVIEWER You're saying that other circumstances put you in a bunch of different environment and in each of those you were able to practice your profession?
MARKET RESEARCH Yeah. I was able to figure out, “How do I make this work for me?” For example, you’re in academia. From my friends in academia, I know that you can find yourself in a situation in which your spouse is in a situation where it’d be crazy for them not to move 15,000 miles away. You’re stuck. You can’t make that 15,000 mile move because you’re fighting for tenure or whatever. You don’t have that. That isn’t a problem when you’re in marketing research. It may be, “Gosh, if you make that move you’re not going to be vice president or whatever.” It’s going to set you back a bit but you can do it. It’s just a lot more flexible than some careers are. Let’s say you’re a physician in private practice. Once you’ve been doing that for a while it’s extremely difficult. It’d be virtually impossible for you to pick up and move some place else. You’re locked in. I see a lot of jobs that are like that. Once you’ve been doing it for 10 or 15 years, you lose flexibility.
INTERVIEWER By "flexibility," you mean flexibility of location?
MARKET RESEARCH Location or even the nature of what you do. For example, I decided that one point with my family life that I just really did not want to travel anymore. What I did is to say, “Nope, I really don’t have to travel so much anymore.” At one point in my life I traveled a lot. When that became something that wasn’t good for me anymore, I was able to shift direction and do things a little bit differently so I didn’t have to travel.
INTERVIEWER What do you not like about your job?
MARKET RESEARCH Sometimes it can be stressful. We’ll wind up with a bunch of deadlines all packed up on top of each other. Even if we planned it nicely things get delayed, get shifted around and suddenly you’re stuck trying to produce too much work in too little a window of time. You just have to figure out how to do that. Maybe got some really late nights, you’ve got some weekends and things like that. That can be difficult.
INTERVIEWER When was the last time that happened?
[35:30]
MARKET RESEARCH For me, it was probably a couple of months ago. There have been periods when we’ve had months and months where it just seemed like unending stress of too much stuff to do and too little time. It is not predictable, static, the same thing, where you know every Monday through Friday you’re going to be doing this from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and you will have a guaranteed lunch from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm. No. It’s not like that at all.
INTERVIEWER Because each job is a separate contract in there and they come in irregularly?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes they do. They can stack up. There can be down times. Frankly, if we were super busy right now, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation today. I would’ve said, “We got to push this off.”
INTERVIEWER What else do you not like about this job?
MARKET RESEARCH Not much else that I can think of. I love it. It’s pretty good.
INTERVIEWER What’s the worse thing about it?
MARKET RESEARCH Probably that unpredictability of it in terms of stress; when the business comes in you’ve got to get it done somehow.
INTERVIEWER You seem to be saying it’s hard to turn away business?
MARKET RESEARCH Oh yeah! You never want to turn away business.
INTERVIEWER Why is that?
MARKET RESEARCH There are always competitors there who are very happy to take it on. You never want to say “No, we’re too busy for this now.” Forget it. Our clients rely on us to be there for them. We will do everything in our power to do whatever research comes our way. We would never turn down a project because we’re too busy. We would turn it down because we’d say, “I’m sorry, this is out of our area of expertise. We can’t do this.”
INTERVIEWER I see. You could really be way too busy because you feel obligated to take every job your client has offered you.
MARKET RESEARCH Absolutely! That’s why we’ve developed systems within our company to be very plastic so that we can adapt to a very uneven flow of work. That’s worked well for us.
INTERVIEWER Have any aspects of your job been disappointing?
MARKET RESEARCH There are disappointments. Sure. There been occasions where I had to let people go and that’s always hard. That’s disappointing.
INTERVIEWER Why did you have to let them go?
[38:24]
MARKET RESEARCH Most recently, and that’s was quite some time ago, it was because of performance. I made a bad hire.
INTERVIEWER How long ago was that?
MARKET RESEARCH Two years ago.
INTERVIEWER How is a person a bad hire?
MARKET RESEARCH Wasn’t able to do the job for which they were hired. Didn’t have the skills sets that I thought the person had coming in.
INTERVIEWER Can you say more? What did you think they were able to do and what were they unable to do?
MARKET RESEARCH Write a questionnaire, write a report and just weren’t able to produce that at the skill level that we needed and that the pay level justified. That can happen in any environment.
INTERVIEWER Is there something that would make your job more fulfilling?
MARKET RESEARCH I can’t think of anything off-hand.
INTERVIEWER You made a good case. What is it that people outside your profession don’t know about it? You told me many things already.
MARKET RESEARCH They don’t know?
INTERVIEWER Yeah.
MARKET RESEARCH They don’t know that you have to be incredibly, phenomenally detail oriented! People who are outside the field think that, “Ooh, marketing research. That sounds cool. You get to talk to consumers about stuff and do cool surveys. They get to evaluate products and things. That sounds really neat!” They don’t know. We have to be so incredibly cheerful with our numbers. We spend so many hours checking data six ways to Sunday to make sure that we don’t deliver a report to a client where for instance, “Oops! There’s a typo. Somebody put 12 and it should have been 21.” People who are not incredibly detail-oriented run screaming from the profession. Well, that’s not necessarily true. If you’re not detail-oriented and numbers-oriented, there’s still many different ways you can be an excellent marketing researcher. There are people who run focus groups, for instance. They never have to look at many numbers. With the kind of work that we do, which is survey work, it's very, very detail-oriented, very, very logistically-complex at times.
INTERVIEWER What are other personality traits that are good for your job?
MARKET RESEARCH Very diligent, curious, and being able to move from a big picture to a very fine level of detail easily; having the flexibility to be able to operate at both a high level of analysis to sort of say, “Whatever you think the company ought to do with this thing?”, and down to a very nitty-gritty level of, “Wait a minute, do these numbers really add up? Do these really make sense? Is this data correct? Do I need to do something? Have this been tabulated properly? Is there a mathematical error here somewhere?
[41:52]
INTERVIEWER What are some personality traits that don’t fit well, traits that if you have you shouldn’t do this kind of chore? What kind of person shouldn’t go into this field?
MARKET RESEARCH I’d say the field is broad enough so that any personality type could find a home within it in one way or another. For example, the person who is not numerically oriented at all, who’s more of a lateral thinker, not a linear thinker, not a numbers person, not detail oriented might make a fantastic focus group moderator and a terrible person for evaluating sales data or something like that.
INTERVIEWER What kind of traits do you think that will work well with your particular job?
MARKET RESEARCH Someone who is not detail-oriented, a lateral thinker rather than a linear thinker would have a tough time. Someone who can’t switch gears easily. The kind of person who wants have just one project and let me dive into it to the exclusion of all else and really just focus on that. No. You've got to shift gears all the time. I might be on the phone with a client in one topic and then 15 minutes later be answering emails on a totally different topic. You have to be very, very flexible. Someone who’s rigid, no. Someone who can’t see the other person’s point of view, isn’t a team player will be a disaster. We often have to say, “How do you like the look of your report?” for example. “We will alter our formatting or design whatever to make it work within your organization. We want it to communicate. We want it to work well for you. So what does that mean for you?” People who can’t do that, who have too much pride of ownership, no, not going to work.
INTERVIEWER Was there anything you wish you’ve known about this job before you took it?
MARKET RESEARCH This particular job that I’m in now, I wish I had known how easy it would have been to go into business for myself. I would have done it sooner. In terms of a career, I wish I had known about it sooner. I would have taken different courses in graduate school. I might have taken a little bit different path educationally. I really enjoy it. I would have loved to have gotten into it sooner.
INTERVIEWER When you say you wish you had known how easy it was to run your own business, can you elaborate on that?
MARKET RESEARCH I don’t have an MBA, I don’t have any business courses at all under my belt. Here I am in business and in business for myself -- but there you have it. I just thought, “Jeez, I know nothing about accounting systems. I don’t know what accrual versus a debit. I know nothing about setting up employees, and benefit plans, and the infrastructure of a company. Should it be a corporation, an LLP, a sole proprietorship? I don’t even know what those are? I didn’t know any of that stuff. I just thought, “How could I ever wind my way through all that?” And it really wasn’t very hard at all.
INTERVIEWER What prompted you to start your company? What happened?
[45:15]
MARKET RESEARCH Personal decisions. At the time, I was working for another company. I was commuting, spending 2 and a half, 3 hours a day in the car. I was like, “This isn’t working.” I had to work too hard and spend too much time commuting. I didn’t have enough time for my family. So I said, “This is just silly.” I set up shop for myself close to home.
INTERVIEWER How long were you doing that long commute for?
MARKET RESEARCH I did that one for 2 years. I did one at an earlier point for 6 years, which was just as bad. It took a terrible toll on my family life.
INTERVIEWER It just got unbearable, the commute?
MARKET RESEARCH The commute combined with long hours. We do work hard. It’s not a field where people work 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. It just isn’t. I don’t know if there is anything that is that way anymore.
INTERVIEWER Is there anything you’ve come to slowly realize about your job?
MARKET RESEARCH I slowly came to realize, “Hey, wait a minute. I could be doing this for myself in my own shop.”
INTERVIEWER Yes. That’s part of what led you to start your own business, that slow realization?
MARKET RESEARCH Yeah. I said, “Wait a minute. Why don’t I just not do it this way anymore and just set up my own shop?”
INTERVIEWER Do you have advice for people going into your kind of work?
MARKET RESEARCH Yes. There are a lot of websites where you can learn a lot about it. The American Marketing Association is full of marketing researchers and they have a good website called marketingpower.com. I would advise someone to go to some AMA meetings. There are chapters in every city in the country that you can look up and say, “Where’s the chapter? How do I find out about it?” Get on their mailing list and email list of events. Then go to the events, just talk to people and learn about it. A lot of the college and universities have AMA student chapters in them. If you’re at that point, you can get involved with that. Just talk to people. People love to talk about what they do.
INTERVIEWER Any other advice?
MARKET RESEARCH That’s about it.
INTERVIEWER Thank you very much.