MarTech Interview with Tricia Houston, Vice President of Discovery & Design, KS&R

Tricia Houston, Vice President of Discovery & Design, KS & R shares a few insights on breaking down data and insights more optimally to drive customer conversations in this martech interview:

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Hi Tricia, tell us about yourself and your role at KS&R. We’d love to hear about marketing and brand growth learnings over the years as well.

Sure, thanks for chatting with me! I’m an experiential marketer and classically trained market researcher. Through my work, I aim to demystify research by redefining how it’s conducted and applied. A specific focus of mine is helping brands prepare to serve their users versus persuading users to come to them. Persuasion has its place, but you can rely on it less when you shore up your interactions so well that folks simply want to return.

At KS&R, my role is leading our Discovery & Design practice. We integrate design thinking and experience research into workstreams supporting a range of industries, and we partner with our marketing sciences team (DSI) to create unique methods for quantification as part of the innovation or experience design process.

Day-to-day, my team is conducting interviews, facilitating workshops, on-site doing observations, creating surveys, or drafting activation plans. Our work is very mixed-method.

How can modern marketers today enhance their processes using insights from real-time behaviors? What should they do more of to break down insights from behaviors more cohesively?

Go out and experience / observe themselves! While digital is powerful, let’s not forget to gather insights from live interactions.

So often, we can get disconnected from the products, services, and experiences we sell…especially the digital ones. Do a competitive audit with your team. It can provide a solid foundation for further exploration of the individual insights you have along the way.

Optimize physical product and packaging by hosting an Opening Party

• Purchase your product and competitive ones… invite the team and open them together
• Also good for getting photos made that can be used in research or internal docs

Iterate services and experiences by seeing them with fresh eyes

• Create a simple form for folks to follow and assign them to complete a visit or sign-up for your offering as well as a competitor (don’t be afraid to think outside your competitive set!)
• Have them bring someone along who does not work for your company – friend, previous co-worker, kids, partner, etc.
• Document any gaps or opportunities either of you see along the way

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For businesses and teams looking to launch new service lines in a tough market, what top thoughts and tips come to mind?

Don’t add to the sea of sameness! Seems easy right…? Just be unique. In reality, it’s harder than it looks.

We’re all trying to do the best job in our respective areas when launching new things – be efficient, profitable, likable, etc. However, that can lead to convergence in what’s offered in our industry. Uniqueness stems from purpose, you have to stay true to the essence of your brand promise. Even if something seems like a natural line extension based on category norms, also consider is it a natural line extension based on your unique value proposition.

I call this the Grayscale SUV problem. It’s natural for carmakers to want to offer an SUV, but a Lamborghini SUV? They just moved their brand from the exotic category to the family-hauler category… which is a grayscale sea-of-sameness.

Another example in the market place recently is that Southwest Airlines announced a move to assigned seating due to customer demand. No need to ignore that customers / potential fliers WANT assigned seats, but how can you solve that in a distinctly SWA way…? As described in their announcement, the solution sounds like “customer said they want what they get elsewhere, so we are going to do that.”

How do you see modern marketers and customer teams using new age AI, martech, salestech and associated tools to drive processes: a few best practices you’d like to share when it comes to optimizing a brand’s tech stack across functions and verticals?

In general, I’m a tech stack minimalist. My key criteria when looking at process or enablement tools is whether or not using it “worth my time.” Meaning what’s the value received for time spent using the tool. There’s high value in automating a manual process, for example, but there’s low value in adding new data streams that your team would have to spend significant time to analyze for meaningful insight.

Essentially you can think of designing your tech stack like you would design your personal schedule. Looks for real value, not just shiny bells and whistles.

That said, one hack is to make friends with the CX team in your org. Instead of adding to your tech stack explore theirs – it’s likely to be a treasure trove of raw comments, conversations, and interactions with your customers. I find that recovery interactions (emails, recordings, or call notes) and post experience surveys to be full of “small moments that matter” that you can capitalize on as marketers.

How can modern marketers capitalize on market research more to drive their growth goals?

A gap I see is not incorporating interactive feedback throughout your organization, project, initiative, etc. Research is more than opinions are scale and it’s not all academic or black box.

Leave the predictive analytics or market level surveys to the pros but train your internal teams on how to conduct effective customer or frontline team member interviews and make conducting them a habit. While a single comment during a single interview can’t warrant a large capital investment, it certainly can warrant further exploration.

Also, research isn’t a transaction, it’s a conversation. So don’t forget to communicate back to your audiences. This can be one-to-one, as a recognition for regular participation, or one-to-many as an acknowledgement of “we hear you” and sharing what actions are being taken based on the feedback received

Can you share a few thoughts on the future of marketing and martech before we wrap up?

One thing I hope to see more of in the future is the push toward sustainable marketing. This includes, but also goes beyond environmental sustainability… it’s really about business being a force for good.

There was a top-down catalyst for this starting with the Business Roundtable in 2019, when the CEO led group “adopted a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation declaring that companies should serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate.”

This school of thought is gaining more bottom-up momentum through the rise in popularity of B-Corps, Conscious Capitalism, and other similar initiatives. You can also find academics focusing on this as well. For example, Neil Bendle, a UGA professor in the Terry School of Business has recently created a course on Sustainable Marketing Strategy.

As marketers, we can take day-to-day steps to focus on people-first practices that build community. After all, bringing people together is what we do best!

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