Mastering the language of data for impact with Karen Kraft of Johnsonville

Description

Collecting data is one thing; creating impact with it is an art that needs to be mastered. In the latest episode of The Curiosity Current, hosts Stephanie Vance and Matt Mahan welcome Karen Kraft, Associate Director of Consumer Insights at Johnsonville, to share her secrets behind the art and science of turning data into impact. From mastering the chameleon-like ability to speak different business languages to revolutionizing creative testing and knowledge management, Karen shares battle-tested strategies that have earned her a seat at the executive table. Whether you're a seasoned researcher or just starting your insights journey, this conversation offers practical wisdom on building influence, telling compelling stories, and navigating male-dominated industries. Tune in to discover a whole new way of creating meaning with data.

Karen Kraft joins the podcast as a trailblazer in the world of brand-side market research. As the associate director of consumer insights and analytics at Johnsonville, she has been instrumental in driving innovation through initiatives like the widely celebrated “Keep It Juicy” campaign - one of many that bear the hallmark of engagement. With a wealth of experience from her time at Johnsonville and Hormel Foods, she has navigated the ever evolving landscape of market research with a focus in segmentation, ad testing, and innovative ways of leveraging technology to deliver impactful insights.

In this episode, Karen spills the beans on her strategies for balancing the multifaceted roles of a market researcher, the critical and absolute importance of knowing your consumer, and how to turn insights into real world impact.

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Transcript

Stephanie Vance: Today, we're delighted to welcome Karen Kraft, a trailblazer in the world of brand side market research. As the Associate Director of Consumer Insights and Analytics at Johnsonville, Karen has been instrumental in driving innovation through initiatives like the widely celebrated Keep It Juicy campaign. Karen brings a wealth of experience from her time at Johnsonville and Hormel Foods, navigating the ever-evolving market research landscape with expertise in segmentation, ad testing, and leveraging tech to deliver impactful insights.

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Matt Mahan: This episode, we're looking forward to hearing from Karen about her strategies for balancing the multifaceted roles of a market researcher, critical importance of knowing your consumer, and how to turn insights into real-world impact. Karen's experience offers invaluable takeaways for anyone aiming to master the art and science of Consumer Insights, and we are looking forward to hearing from her. Karen, welcome.

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Karen Kraft: Thank you, Stephanie and Matt. And thank you for the very nice introductions. Hopefully I can live up to those.

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Stephanie: We have no doubts. Okay, to kick us off, and we always kind of like to start at the beginning, but Karen, you have had an impressive career sort of shaping Consumer Insights at two major brands, Johnsonville and Hormel Foods. Before we dive into the specifics, can we take a step back and have you talk to us about what initially drew you to market research and how your relationship or approach to the field maybe has evolved over the years?

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Karen: In all honesty, my exposure to market research was at a very young age. My mom started as a bookkeeper at a small boutique firm in LA when I was six. By age eight, I was pulling golf pencils off of unused movie exit questionnaires that my siblings would bring home. And while I was watching Saturday morning cartoons, I'd pull the pencils off and put them back in the boxes and stack up all the unused questionnaires for them. So I literally grew up in market research. The brand of ketchup we had or the brand of popcorn we had, it was based on who the client was. My mom would get free samples at work or she'd be like, nope, this is who's paying my salary, so this is what we're buying. And then I worked my way through high school and college there and worked there after college. And then I got kind of antsy. It was like, you know, need to do something different. Completely left the industry for a couple of years, went and worked on a cruise ship in Hawaii. That's a whole another story. That's where I met my husband, though. And when we left, we moved to Texas because it was kind of neutral ground. He was from Iowa. I was from LA. We had friends in Texas, so we moved to North Texas. And at that point, I was kind of in a crossroads. Do I stay in hospitality or do I go back to market research? And I decided, no, market research is probably the better choice. And went to work for a decision analyst who's based in Arlington. Worked there for 11 years and then got the itch to go work on the client side. And that's when I went to Hormel. So I've been all over. I remember when everything was done on paper and pen way before the internet existed. I joke that the number of years of experience I have is deceptive because it doesn't match necessarily well with my age. And it's because I started so young.

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Matt: In the formative years. I mean, if you're learning market research as a six-year-old, that's got to stick with you for life, though. Those are important years.

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Karen: Yeah, I colored on the back of unused questionnaires. That was the scrap paper at home.

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Stephanie: It's so cool.

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Matt: It's amazing. Karen, one of the things you have said, a concept that you've shared that I think is really interesting is this idea that to be successful, a market researcher really has to be a chameleon, you know, meaning someone that is engrossed in the data. They understand the methodology. They know the science, but they also need to know how to speak the language of sales teams and the language of marketers. How do you approach sort of switching your mindset under these different circumstances? And what's the key? What's your key to doing this well?

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Karen: Like a chameleon, a lot of times chameleons aren't necessarily conscious of when they're changing colors. They just do it. So based on the environment. So really, a lot of it is I have to know, you know, when there's a piece of research or, you know, I have to be an expert on whatever topic it is, whether it's sausage or spam or, you know, some other other client. When I was on the supplier side, you have to know your subject. You have to know the research. And especially when you're dealing with things that involve statistics or advanced analytics. While I don't have to know exactly how to run every type of analysis, I have to know what the analysis is, why it's used, why it was used in this situation so that I can be prepared to speak to it. And more importantly, help someone understand why the answer is solving their problem without getting them lost in the weeds. But then as you're talking to your business partners internally or your clients, you have to be able to speak their language. And it's not always the same. Like when I'm talking to a brand manager, a lot of times I feel like I'm in sage and educator mode. I'm really trying to help them understand their consumer. And some of them may have never been in a consumer's home face to face and be able to really make sure that they understand the problems that they're trying to solve and why people are turning to their product. But then if I'm talking to their boss, a director of marketing or someone higher up on the food chain about the business. They don't need nearly as much detail and to be able to just guide that people talk about your developing several versions of reporting deck, where you have. Here's all the details food reporter, and here's the part that goes to the brain team. And then here's the few pages that go to the executive team, you have to be able to do that when you're talking to people as well. And if you can't, you get lost in the weeds. And that's one thing I've seen. When I fist started in Johnsonville, they were used to researchers being kind of researchers and the brand team, taking the data to then, present, on somewhere else because the researchers didn't do that switching in front of people, they were like, huh and it's definitely gotten me a seat at the table and before me, there was no one ever hire than a manager of consumer insights at Johnsonville. So I think it just shows that I grew my job by showing that I can speak the language of the people in the c-suite.

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Matt: That's a great point and it sounds like that's allowed you to, uh, circumvent, sometimes the game of telephone that can happen when insights folks stay in their bubble and sort of leave the translation up to others. That's where some trouble can creep in. So you've been able to avoid that.

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Karen: Yeah, on more than one occasion earlier in my client-side career, I saw how sometimes a brand manager can put on rose-colored glasses and when they're presenting the research, they're only telling the part of the story that they want to tell to get a decision made in their favor. And it's like, no, sometimes you have to be able to stand up there and say, hey, this isn't the best stuff you did. And it's hard for people to say their baby is ugly. So I sometimes just have to be the one that tells them that. The brutal news that sometimes somebody's got to say it.

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‍Stephanie: But switching topics a bit, you've spoken about the importance of truly understanding who your consumer is and how they use your products. I have a lot of passion around this topic too, and I'm very interested to learn what frameworks and methodologies have you found that are most effective for kind of cultivating that consumer understanding?

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Karen: I would say two things that work really well hand in hand. The first being jobs to be done. Understanding where are all the places that your product is being used and how is it being used? Why is it being used? What is it solving? Because if your product isn't solving someone's problem, whether it's a huge stated problem or just a small, I just need to feed someone dinner tonight, you still need to know why are people turning to your product. And then understanding how people are segmented across your category and what segments aren't using your category. I very rarely have in my career done a segmentation that is just of users of the category. I try to go one level up so that we know, okay, if we look at, for example, the Johnsonville segmentation is among all meat-eaters. We know that any given day, about 94% of the population needs meat. So pretty much everyone needs meat except the people that are vegan and vegetarian. We are into the plant-based world. So we can set those folks aside. They're never going to be our users as long as we are offering what we're offering. And then beyond that, we have our segmentation. But we understand that not all of those people are sausage people. They're not all pork people. Yes, we make chicken sausage and we need to know what segments are eating our chicken sausage eaters versus turkey versus pork. But once we understand, then we can understand, okay, these are our key segments that are using us. These are the segments that are really attractive that we want to try to reach. And, with a really good segmentation and more importantly, socializing that segmentation. We don't just do a segmentation and put it on the shelf like it's moldy and dusty. We have been able to socialize the segmentation so that the brand team is using it. The MarCom team is using it. R&D product developers understand it. Our agencies understand it so that they understand this is who we're trying to keep happy. And this is who we're trying to attract so that when they're looking through the eyes of if it's a vendor partner, that's looking through the eyes of trends and saying, hey, we're coming up with some new flavors we want to show you. They can be informed and show us things that we know are relevant to what our goals are. And when you just are thinking of people that are like users versus non-users, there's so many shades of gray. And very rarely is there a category where just using the category users versus non-users is a fair assessment because not everyone's using the category the same. Again, because of jobs. Some people are turning to different jobs at different time. Some are relying on using you only for one job. And this is how they pigeonhole you. And you're never going to get them to do anything else. And that's fine. You just have to make sure that you don't change your product so that it's not working for that job anymore. And you can keep happy.

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Matt: Yeah, such a great example. Like a nuanced approach to segmentation is so key. I'm always the guy that asks the interview question like, tell me about a time when. But I think examples, they work really well at kind of bringing things to life. Do you have any really interesting insights that came out of this? You know, nuanced segmentation approach that you can share, obviously, without giving away Johnsonville's secret sauce?

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Karen: Well, the segmentation that we started with was actually the data and everything had been collected right before I joined Johnsonville. So I kind of had to end up bringing it across the line and helping determine what are the final segments and socialize those. So our original segmentation that was done in that we've completed in 2018 had six segments. And a lot of how those segments fell out was how people felt about cooking and railing. Well, 2018 was a point in time. And then there was this little thing called COVID that changed a lot of how people cooked and grilled. We had people forced at home that had never cooked before that were teaching themselves how to cook on YouTube. You had people firing up their grills like no tomorrow, because when you have to cook every single meal, and especially if one partner in the house is the primary cook and the other one's the primary griller, you're going to get the primary cook saying, okay, we're grilling. I'm taking the night off. You're preparing the meal for us. And it really changed those behaviors. And what we saw is that the size of our segments, we had a couple of segments that had been really important to us that were starting to shrink. And these people still exist. What happened? So we actually refreshed our segmentation, and we found that a segment that before had very little cooking confidence didn't exist. They had graduated to they actually liked to cook when they had time. Because they had learned how to do cool stuff during COVID. And then we had other segments that their priorities shifted in with inflation. And so we ended up going from six segments to five with three of the segments being fairly similar to previous segments with just a little few tweaks and then two segments being fairly new. And I think knowing when to when you need to refresh a segmentation, obviously, that's a very extreme example. But normally, you know, I say, oh, you don't need to worry. You know, you could just kind of keep measuring along the way and make sure your segments are about the same size. But you have to recognize when there's something crazy that has happened in your category or your industry or in that case, society, that is going to impact how people are acting, that it's actually changed their behavior. And getting to live through one of those moments in history that actually changed how people cook, those don't happen very often. I have a presentation that I did once internally that showed like the three or four things that really changed how Americans cook. And one of those things being World War II and women going into factories and then being forced back into the kitchen and all the things that were done to make that to entice them. You know, look at all these new convenient tools that you can use to make it seem like it was fun to cook again. Or the bra burning of the hippie era where along with burning bras, people bring their aprons because I'm not a domestic slave. I'm not going to cook. And that led to a whole bunch of millennials that grew up, in households where they didn't learn to cook because their mom didn't cook. And if they did, it was all convenience food. So it's really interesting when you can tie history to these things. And that's another thing I try to do to make sure as I'm telling stories, because it then helps people understand how we got to where we are today.

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Matt: That makes so much sense. And I mean, to your earlier point, it's not just a change in shopping behavior, which is where so much research tends to focus when you're talking about some of these large changes. They're fundamental. And thinking back to what you said, about your overall segmentation approach, maybe being a little bit broader than the company would have been comfortable with before you joined on. You might not have even been able to see the significance of those changes had the segmentation not been set so broadly. You know, I mean, it's a big shift that you were able to sense.

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Stephanie: Exactly. I wanted to lean into some questions around creative testing because I know you have a lot of experience there. I think a lot of us who have worked on the brand side and both Matt and I have too, you know, we don't currently, but we've been there too. But we've wrestled with that kind of daunting challenge of getting creative agencies on board with the idea of creative testing, whether that's concept stage or like dial testing of produced ads before they launch. Can you talk to us about how you've approached those conversations and that experience to align that creative agency on the importance of testing without compromising the creative vision?

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Karen: I think having learned early on in my career on the supplier side, there were times where we were testing ads either directly for agencies or for brands and their agencies were in the loop. I quickly learned how much agencies don't like testing. It's not a secret. Especially creatives are like, this is art, this is, you have to understand the whole story. And it's like, yeah, but at the end of the day, we're trying to sell something in 30 seconds. And where I finally evolved to was I try to make sure that both my agency partners and my internal partners understand that creative testing is one diagnostic tool. It is not a yes or no, we're going to air this, we're not going to air this. It's one tool to look at, just like when you show it to an executive and the executive doesn't like something, it's up to you to decide, are we going to change it or not? A lot of times you are, because the executive has the power of the burst. But at the same time, it's like you need to understand where there are potential ways to improve it. And more importantly, not telling people necessarily how to improve it, just pointing out there's something wrong here. This isn't being communicated. And then letting it go back to the creatives to figure out how to fix it. Because there's nothing worse than trying to tell an agency, oh, you need to do this more. That's when their flags come up. When the minute you become the creative and are starting to recommend them to change something, that's when they'll shut down. But when you can just say, point out there's a problem here and let them then creatively fix it, then they have more buy-in. And I think my favorite story with creative testing at Johnsonville was when I first started, we had some ads that I felt really needed to be tested. And our head of MarCom, who is now the head of strategy, and he's now my coach, that's what we call our bosses at Johnsonville. But at the time, he was just the head of our marketing communications department, which is someone that I served, but I didn't work for at all. And I was trying to say, we need to test these ads. And he came from the agency world. He was an account exec at an agency before he joined Johnsonville. So he and one of the other people on his team were both from the agency side. So they both were like not feeling comfortable about testing. And I literally went, sat in his cube, stared him straight in the eye, ride with me. And he was like, oh, So I tested the ads and I showed him how to use the testing as a tool. And he was like, wow, I've never seen someone do this. And that really opened his eyes to if you use it as a tool, it can help you produce something really great. He and I still to this day go back and forth on whether you should test ads before they're filmed or not. He's a finished film guy. That's fine. And luckily, our current campaign, we have lots and lots of hours of finished film that we cobble together for our ads. So if something isn't working, we could always find something new. But I think helping people understand that ad testing isn't a yes or no thing. It's not a red light, green light or even red light, yellow light, green light. Any ad can be improved. It may not look much like it originally, but also when you test something really bad, which hopefully it doesn't even make it to testing because most people's guts are pretty right. But when you can show that when you take something and test it and then change it and improve. And that's one thing that happened with our Keep It Juicy campaign is the original main anthem ad. We originally tested that. It wasn't an animatic. It was all finished film, but it was just all found film put together in with a voiceover. And then by making tweaks and tweaks, we turned it from a very average ad to a really high performing ad that is done amazing for us.

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Matt: So cool. Okay, so changing gears again, just a little bit. It's been lots of change in the industry, in the world over the last few years. What are you doing at Johnsonville to keep things current? How are you making sure that the Consumer Insights team there is supporting your business partners in the best way? Are you using agile methodologies? Are you getting into AI?

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Karen: First of all, I am very active in the Insights Association. I also attend several conferences a year. For example, I met the AYTM team at Quirk's New York last year. And I go to things like Quirk's and the Insights Association Corporate Researcher Conference because they have a lot of really good presentations where there's client-side researchers sharing, this is the partner we used and this is what we did and this is how I used it. And being able to see how other corporate researchers are using new tools and how it's working for them, I can, then, be sitting in the audience and say, I think I have a solution for that. Or I can just say, that was really cool. And then six to eight months down the line, when I have a similar problem, I know, oh, wait, I know the new tool for that. I'm also not the kind of person that you'll never hear me say, this is how we do it. Yes, I've used lots of tried and true methods for years, but I'm always open to experimenting. And some of my closest business partners on the vendor side know that if they want to beta test something, nothing excites me more than hear the word beta test. Oh, you have something new to try. Okay. And I'll find some low risk situation where I can try out something new. And, you know, if the research doesn't work perfectly, it's not the end of the world. But by being willing to experiment, it helps me and being willing to partner with people on how something new they're trying. And then that keeps me on the forefront. And it's actually really over time helped me. Keep my budget fairly flat over the years, but getting so much more research done and getting questions answered in really cool ways. And there are times where I still need the occasional big, huge, you know, six figure research project and going to a very tried and true method. But there's so many questions that can be answered in so many other ways. And it's because I've been open to experimenting and listening to people when they say, hey, we have this new thing we want you to check out. Sure. Nothing makes me more excited. And I think part of that is because I have a situation where I have a lot of autonomy in my role in terms of deciding what the methodology is to be used to be answering questions. And I know not everyone has that. If you have someone higher on the food chain that's dictating to you that this is how we do things or we don't experiment, we're not willing to try things or I don't have to justify to the purchasing department every decision I make. I just put in a request for a P.O. and it gets cut. I appreciate that autonomy that I'm the one that sends off it. I'm the research budget at the end of the year. I'm the one that makes those decisions. So I can play a lot in the sandbox and it is really, really fun.

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Stephanie: I love that. This next question, I think you've answered in the context of creative testing, but I would be very curious to hear you talk about it a little bit more broadly. So, you know, I'm going to start with a really obvious statement that I think we can all agree, the three of us here at least, that insights are only as valuable as the impact that they create for your business, whether that's your brand or your products. Is there a particular strategy or do you want to talk about a strategy? Because I'm sure, as you said, you know, there's multiple ways to do these things. Is there a strategy that you like for ensuring that the insights that your team is uncovering translate into tangible outcomes for your business?

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Karen: A couple of ways. When someone is needing research or insights, I never want to talk methodology with them. I want to find out what is the business problem you're trying to solve. And that is how I write my RFPs. This is the business question that is being solved. And I might have a suggested methodology when I'm sending it out to a vendor saying, here's what I think we should do, but feel free to, if you have another way of answering this, feel free to let me know. So I think it first starts at when you're designing the research to make sure you're answering what is the business question and what are they going to do about it. If the brand manager or the innovation manager can't say, this is how we're going to use this, they may not need research at all. They might just be fishing for fun information. And it's like, you probably don't need it. So that would be, I think, the first thing. The second thing is utilizing everything that you know. Oftentimes, there's so much information that a company knows about their category and their brand. And I think it was in my first meeting with the then VP of marketing, now the president of the U.S. retail business at Johnsonville, and he said, we know more about sausage than any other company in the world, which is probably a pretty true statement. The problem is we had all this data that wasn't being used. And part of it was because I came in at a time where there wasn't someone in Consumer Insights to pass along to me. They'd had a break. They were filling the role and it had gone months without a body in it. So I came in and I was just given access to, here's where our insights files were. And you could tell they were organized just kind of by whatever. Some had code names, but it was whichever insights person was on the desk at the time. It was their kind of little personal thing. And there was no rhyme or reason. And one thing I picked up from my previous, boss, Ellen Cole, who I adore her and I will forever be in her debt for introducing me to a way to categorize studies, give things numbers. I have a spreadsheet. And it's to the point where if I got hit by the proverbial bus, anyone can go in and find something. And it's all organized, whether in the file systems and things. And it's now all in Teams and SharePoint. And now we have Lucy on top of it so that we can use a knowledge management tool to mine things. So making sure that we have all of our information. And now, and as I mentioned, we have our knowledge management tool, Lucy, which not only sits on top of all of my files, which are super organized, it sits on top of everything that our customer insights team uses, as well as our product insights team within R&D. And anyone in marketing, sales, product insights, category insights, Consumer Insights, innovation has access to all of that information just by asking a question on our website. And so when we introduced it, I warned people, I was like, you can't ask me for reports anymore. You just asked me, hey, can you send me this report? I'm going to ask you, have you asked Lucy? And that's what goes on today. And so I get a lot of emails now that start with, well, I tried asking Lucy, but that works. It's like, okay, it means you're asking something really hard. Or sometimes people are looking for something really old. And I make sure that Lucy can only see things up to four years old. So people aren't pulling stuff from ages ago and running with it. Because if you're looking at something from 2020 or before, you got to use some common sense and a little bit of, oh, is this still true or not? And I want to know when people are looking at those things. But knowing that we have access to everything and democratizing insights so that anyone can use them. There are things I'll every once in a while go spy in the back end of Lucy to see what answers are being, what questions are being asked. And I love seeing their salespeople that normally never would have bothered me because they were like, oh, Karen doesn't have time for my little question. But they're getting their answers and they're using the data that we've paid for over the years. And it's so valuable to be able to know that people are actually utilizing all the information we have. And it was all inspired by that one quote. We have more information than anybody. We know more than anybody. The question is, you're not using your brain. It's like your closet. If it's in your closet, but you don't know it's there, you don't have it. And now we have a way to access everything. I think that's something that's really important, whether you have a formal knowledge management system or just organize your files so that you can find things. Because if without organization, you're just going to remember the last couple of things. And then once somebody's off a desk, no one's going to remember that study was done.

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Stephanie: For sure. And it sounds like you guys are really ahead on the data lake problem, which is it's so pervasive that I would say even on the supplier side, there have been times where I've had to say, hey team, I think I've done a similar study for you maybe about a year ago. Why don't I grab that? And it feels so odd to be doing it from the supplier side because you just assume like, oh yeah, that exists. They know everything that they have, but like a lot of companies really don't. That organization is enhanced, and when you have like buy-in from the top, like you said, and then you have a knowledge management system of some sort or some good organization so that people know where to find stuff.

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Karen: Yeah. When I was on the supplier side, it would amaze me the number of times a client would call and say, have we done a project on this? Yeah, it was eight months ago.

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Stephanie: Yeah, exactly.

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Karen: A couple of years ago, I did that for something. You know, it's one thing when people have moved desks and, oh, this is a new brand manager on a new desk or a new research manager. But there are times where it's like, yes, I can find that for you. And yes, I still have it and I'll send it to you.

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Matt: And to your point, there's such a power up once an organization finally cracks that data lake issue, because just like you were speaking to, it changes the whole mindset towards knowledge and insights because it's just so much more accessible at that point. That's great to hear. It's kind of inspiring. I know, like, especially from the brand side, I know Stephanie and I have both felt that problem. That problem has been around since like the dawn of time, it feels like. And, maybe it's that the technology is finally catching up to the needs and the capabilities that are actually required. I don't know what it is, but I think I'm hearing more and more stories about people channeling some more energy into the idea of knowledge management, you know, in this era of AI and solving some problems. It's a hopeful message.

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Karen: I think one thing that's fascinating, and I've been in a couple different conferences where this has been a topic, is how Consumer Insights and market research departments are where AI is really getting its foothold in corporate America. Because so much of what we have isn't just, you know, it's not like finance or accounting where so much of their data is spreadsheets and structured numbers and things. We have all kinds of stuff and we have things that are in spreadsheets and data files, but we also have things that are in PowerPoint or recordings. And it's such a mishmash of things. It's like the perfect storm of information to seek AI on. And I think that as worried as people are about AI is going to take over our jobs, it's kind of exciting in our industry because it's actually saving us time for all the where's this file and where's that or whatever. And helping us then go, okay, here's the what. Now we get to talk about the so what and the now what. And it also, I think, is helping people show that consumer insights is an investment. Because when you can refer back to three studies of we learned this, this, this and this and now this, then it's like, oh, every time I do something, I know it's not just a point in time. I'm not just paying for one little thing. We're going to be able to get use out of this for a while. And I think that is helping show that we're just creating such richer stories and like our customer insight team loves tools that are AI based because they can it can help them create really rich sales stories from lots of different information that especially they don't know what I'm working on or they don't know what some of our other tools, what information is out there, because most of the time they're up to their eyeballs and sales data. But they need to be able to add that rich story to make their sales decks that much more compelling.

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Stephanie: For sure, bring it to life.

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Matt: I wanted to go back to something just really quick to get your advice on, because, earlier we were talking about the importance of kind of staying involved in the communication of data of your research results sort of throughout, you know, really being the champion crafting that story. What's your best storytelling tip? Sometimes I think you kind of alluded to it. Sometimes researchers are not the best storytellers. How do we get better at that?

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Karen: I remember hearing about someone recommending people take acting classes or improv classes. I think a lot of times we're recruiting people that are coming from MSMRs or they're coming with a bachelor's in business or marketing. And I think if we can open our aperture and realize that we need to recruit creative people as well. And if you don't have that background, force yourself into something that is more creative. Try taking an improv class. Try writing something and try telling your story. Because if you think about what makes good storytelling, it's, you know, you got to get people the hook and then you got to build up the suspense and then you have to pay it off. And I often have, when I'm helping new younger researchers learn how to write a report, I try to have them imagine you're writing a children's book where you're going to have a very simple line saying, telling your partner the story and then a picture to illustrate it. And I can't tell you how many sessions I've done where we've taken, they start putting together a PowerPoint and have them print out the slides on paper, one per page, one per side. And we sit there and spread them all out on a table in a conference room and organize them and put them up on the walls of what's the order of the story? Where is the story and what's compelling? And most importantly, what is good to know, but we don't care about that can go in the appendix. And you might start with 30 slides and you get down to the 10 that are the most compelling that are answering the question. And again, telling the story to answer the business question. And if you haven't taken, you know, there's so many great storytelling seminars out there if you are needing helping with storytelling. But I've also known people that have done things like gone to improv classes or do something creative to learn how to better tell stories. And I think that is really, really important. And when I'm interviewing people, I try to get them to tell their story. And listen to how are they telling their story in the interview. And if they can't tell their own story, I can teach you a lot of things about research, except the really technical things and the really applying for an advanced analytics role where you have to be a PhD. Statistician. Research isn't really that hard. I can teach you a lot of the things and I can teach you how to, you know, but it's really about, are you curious and can you tell a good story? And if I can see those grades of that in you, I'm going to hire you. And I don't care what your background is. Like last year, I was able to have a long-term temp slash intern and her degree was in anthropology. That was my degree in college. And she was blown away when I hired her because no one else was paying any attention. I'm like, I know what an anthropology degree is. It's studying people. It's telling the story. And she really loved it. And I wished I could have kept her, but it was just a, it was a temporary help that I needed. And when the period was over, it was done, but it's all about finding. And if you don't have that already recognizing it and reaching out and finding ways to improve that creativity, because storytelling and creativity are the key parts of the art of the art and science of Consumer Insights and market research.

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Matt: Couldn't agree more.

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Stephanie: Yeah, I totally agree too. It's funny because, you know, you're inspiring me to create more exercises for team members, even though we're a supplier side company, you know, we do get more and more clients who are like, we want to see this from a storytelling perspective. And the one thing I have found is that a good entry point can often be a segmentation because you have so many data points and you have a segment, right? And it's like, sure, that's great. We need some persona development here, right? And so giving people the task of take all of this, tell me a story about this person, right? Like turn this into a person, this data set, turn it into a person for me. And I think that hook can sometimes be a little bit easier to get into because they are telling a story about one person and they have all of this profiling data and it starts to help them understand like, oh, there's a lot we can do here to take data. To a totally different place where it just like inspires people.

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Karen: Yeah. And I have socialized my segmentations. And part of the workshop is each table is assigned to do a deep dive on a segment. And at the end, they have to have someone dressed up in a costume telling the story. And I bring in like a couple of giant tubs of stuff that people know way too much about what's in my closet, my costumes, my cookbooks, because I'll raid my house and my husband's going, oh, doing another segmentation workshop. Things start disappearing from the kitchen. Everything goes into the tubs. And then so that people can have, you know, a tool in their hand or this is the cookbook that I use or, you know, this is the apron I'm wearing. And it really helps. In addition to being a fun, humorous exercise, it really helps bring to life. And the one thing, though, about segmentation, going back to that, the one thing I recommend, you never do is never name a segment after a person in a specific name. Because imagine in 2019, your favorite segment that was like your core best consumers were Karen's.

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Stephanie: Yeah, you can rename your segment, but is that a personal story? I'm so fascinated.

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Karen: One example of like, you can change your segment name. I can't change my name. I'm stuck with it. But there's so many things. You can always bring a story to life and you refer to that segment as Jane, who is a blah, blah, blah. But make sure that the blah, blah, blah is something that is unique and just descriptive and fun sounding and not tied to a specific person. Plus, if you name your segments more like, you know, the qualities of the segment. So, for example, one of our old segments used to be practical providers. Just the name of the segment tells you a lot about what those people might be, what would be important to those folks.

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Stephanie: For sure. Okay, switching gears yet once again, Karen, and we appreciate the time you're giving us today. I just want to say that because I think we're probably a little bit over what we normally do, but it is just been such a fascinating conversation. I am personally really interested to hear you talk about how you have navigated, not market research per se, but I'm assuming the world that you live in when it comes to Johnsonville, Hormel Foods, this sort of male-dominated industry. And it seems like you've been incredibly successful at it. And I would love to hear what kinds of lessons you've learned about leading effectively and how do you encourage others, particularly women, to thrive in those kinds of environments?

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Karen: Yeah, I definitely live in and have worked the last, you know, almost 20 years of my career in very male-dominated meat industry. And a lot of it, luckily, I grew up in a household with three brothers, one sister, and in a family where everybody was treated equally. There were no boy jobs and girl jobs. Chores were rotated. Sometimes you were out doing the outside chores. Sometimes you were doing the inside chores. Me being much younger than my siblings, by the end, I just was cleaning bathrooms. But I grew up where, you know, if dinner needed to get started, it was whoever was home. If it was my oldest brother, he was cooking dinner. And so not having to growing up with defined gender roles, I think, is what has helped me in my career. Because when I'm at a table, I don't necessarily feel like the only woman. And there are often times where I'm in a meeting and I'm looking around and like, I'm the only chicken here, that doesn't bother me. But at the same time, I also realize that not all women, and especially living in the Midwest, where there's a lot of people that grew up with very defined gender roles, haven't had that example to be able to see. So I was very active in the women's ERG that Hormel had. And then when I came to Johnsonville, not long after joining Johnsonville, there was interest in starting a women's member resource group. And I am one of the founders of it. It's called WJVL, Women at Johnsonville. And while it got a rocky start because of COVID, it's now very active. And while we are happy and we do have members of both genders, it is also an opportunity and a safe space for people to be able to talk and compare notes and get some feedback on whether it's their personal development plan on how can I do this or some advice on how can I deal with this. And now there's actually, I'm just starting to get involved through our, women's group at Johnsonville. There's an organization called Women, W-M-I-N, the Women's Meat Industry Network, that is actually an industry-wide, absolutely free organization for women to join, whether they're in the plants or work in the corporate areas of the meat industry or even industries that touch the meat industry. So there's people that work for packaging companies and things. But there's definitely, it's an industry where people have recognized that this has been male-dominated for a long time. And by working together and helping mentor each other, we can lift everybody up and make it so that it's not such a dude-heavy industry.

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Matt: Karen, this conversation has been just so incredibly enlightening. To wrap things up, we always ask this. What's one piece of advice you'd share with future leaders in market research who are kind of looking to thrive in this field, especially given all of the change that we're seeing right now?

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Karen: Don't be afraid to speak up and don't be an order taker. You're an expert, you're a consultant, and that's how you need to treat yourself. Even when you're a junior level, you know information that other people don't and you need to use that information as power.

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Stephanie: And then finally, looking to the future, what excites you most about where Consumer Insights and analytics are headed? And how do you see the role of tech shaping the industry in the next decade?

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Karen: I think, as I mentioned with AI earlier, I think tech really is something that is going to allow us to free up our time to not spend as much time in the weeds of collecting insights, but more about talking about what to do with this and what it means. So that is what is exciting me about the industry is that it is helping us be more consultative and get us a seat at the table because we're not spending our time building decks and building in the weeds with the data. We're more spending time about what does this mean so that we can then tell that story and make the presentation and be at the table and really influence the decisions that are being made on a day-to-day basis within companies.

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Matt: Amazing. Karen, thanks again so much for your time. Again, just a wealth of knowledge. I took notes. I have notes all over. Such great advice. We really enjoyed our conversation today. And thank you again for just giving us the time.

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Karen: Thank you for having me.

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