Author: Jason Chebib

Head of Strategy @ 180NY (Former VP @ Diageo)

Is the supplier-client relationship different now than it was a year or two ago?

Posted on by Jason Chebib

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In North America, the market for research, data, and analysis has never been more vibrant and more evolving, and one of the things to remember is that clients don’t want to renew their research relationships every week, every month, or even every year. What clients are looking for is relationships with research providers, which allow them to consistently deliver good consumer understanding to their business without having to renew it and refresh it all the time. That puts pressure on research companies to evolve without being pushed to. The providers that I was most inspired by are always the ones that brought changes to me and treated is as a partnership. In client-agency relationships presenting and visualizing data often gets neglected and left up to the clients to think about how they want to visualize it internally, and some clients like that degree of control; it’s crazy not to share an agenda for how data is presented, especially to people who don’t deal with data every hour of every day. So for me, that was always a very big deal –

How can we get better at showing data? Data that can be easily understood can also be easily leveraged and used – and it was always a big deal.

How important are behavioral and implicit data in your decision-making?

Posted on by Jason Chebib

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The biggest single long-term change that data and research provides should embrace is a move from explicit to implicit data.

Relying on or putting faith in claimed purchase intent is like a habit that the industry won’t shake off. Those metrics are so poor and so poorly validated that even as directional metrics, they are of such little use and so outdated. I understand

it is not easy to move every metric to implicit right now, but I am a big fan of those that are trying to do

and of clients that embrace the effort to move forward with methodologies where consumers don’t know what you are asking them and are not preprogrammed and biased to a certain way, which you see all the time in sorts of explicit research.

Should brands revise their strategy based on insights that are a product of the zeitgeist?

Posted on by Jason Chebib

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Once you get into strategy with some depth, you realize that there are different ways in which consumer insights can be leveraged – some are more strategic and some more tactical or opportunistic. We acknowledge that there are different types of insights, and part of understanding what you’ve got when you have an insight is understanding what it’s really useful for. That depends on a number of factors, contextual factors too. So whether insight is relevant depends on the context into which you are trying to create communications, change consumers’ or brand’s behavior. The issue with strange periods like COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter is that the gauges of relevance become skewed in the short term. For example, during the pandemic, there was a lot of advertising that looked and felt the same. One of the things that happen in those circumstances is that insight that feels like they are very relevant at the moment turns out to be very generic and not particularly relevant.

That’s where smart marketers need to do a combination of things and remind themselves what’s really at the heart of their brand, business, and consumer.

They have to stick to the kind of consistency that their brand has in its industry and marketplace and take a step back and observe. The experience will tell you when a situation is volatile and not conducive to making those decisions. A precious few companies seem to be able to rein that in during COVID- 19 in 2020.