00;00;06;23 - 00;00;32;02
Speaker 1
Hi. Welcome to Dig In the podcast brought to you by Dig Insights. Every week we interview founders, marketers and researchers, from innovative brands to learn how they're approaching their role and their category in a clever way. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Dig In. This week I've got all four founders of Dig with me, so we've got Ian, Paul, Dom and Michael.

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Speaker 1
I hesitate to ask all of you at the same time, but how's everyone doing?

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Speaker 2
And now none of us answer at the same time.

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Speaker 2
It's a monday afternoon.

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Speaker 3
How are you doing?

00;00;46;03 - 00;00;53;03
Speaker 1
So I'm getting through. I'm getting through. Dom, where are you right now? Are you at home? Yeah. Everyone's. And Paul, you at the office?

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Speaker 2
I am solo at the office. If you look around there, what you can't really see there is zero people here today with me. I came in and I was like, Oh, hello. Nobody.

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Speaker 3
Sounds like someone's got a case of them Mondays. Partly is fine sitting on top of me.

00;01;13;05 - 00;01;44;29
Speaker 1
Yeah. It's funny. You're like, directly centered around. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me today. The idea here is we're going to have you join the podcast a little bit more frequently so we can get a sense of what you guys think is happening within the market research world. We can talk about some of the cool stuff that we're building internally, but today I wanted to focus a little bit on essentially where we think the next generation of insights professionals are going, what we think that should look like.

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Speaker 1
So we're going to talk a little bit about skills. You approach to insights or methodologies needed. You know, how how aware people need to be of the business context within which they're operating and a little bit more. Obviously, you have this amazing company now. You've had it for more than a decade, but sort of like what keeps you excited about being in this space?

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Speaker 1
Like now that you know you've been in it for? We all know how you got here, but like what keeps you here other than the fact that it's your company? Like, what excites you about the fact that, you know, you're still in market research or what's happening in the space today? Ian, why don't you kick us off?

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Speaker 3
Well, I mean, it's changed a lot. I mean, there's been a huge amount of change, you know, really, particularly in the last sort of five or six years with the rise of, you know, tech and platforms and automation. So, you know, when we started when we started Digg, there was you know, there was some of that, but it was very nascent.

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Speaker 3
And we're talking about like SurveyMonkey in its early incarnations. And I think Qualtrics was kind of just getting off the off the ground really, and it wasn't really so automated. So things have changed significantly since we started Digg and there's been as a result, there's been massive investment into our category. And so I think that's it's, that's been exciting and it's forced us to learn a lot of new things.

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Speaker 4
I think those are the bits that haven't changed, like what's always been true, but the industry is that we exist to help companies understand people and understand what motivates them and understand what you might do differently to motivate them to change their behavior. And I think that's just intellectually really interesting. Like, why do people do what they do?

00;03;31;19 - 00;03;56;19
Speaker 4
How might you change their behavior? How might you convince them of something like I've always really enjoyed, even just the selling side of the industry, like selling projects to clients, because that's another way of sort of understanding. People need talking to them in a relevant way, motivating their behavior. I think just as a person, I just find that really interesting to try to understand someone else and try to be relevant to them and the tools, the ways that we do that have changed, but that underlying need hasn't changed.

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Speaker 2
I kind of come from a different way. I mean, only because, you know, you guys have given such great answers that I don't think I could be better at that. But the people I work with that gets me keeps me excited about it. I think everybody is in market research.

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Speaker 4
I think. Paul.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, present company excluded. They're just such a genuine, nice people that that, you know, they've come working in our company or work in our industry. They, they care about their clients and their needs. And I just, I see it more and more with not just the people who've joined our company, but you just those in the industry are just genuinely great people that yeah, it just keeps me motivated, continue to work in this industry.

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Speaker 3
Again, present company excluded.

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Speaker 5
Yeah.

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Speaker 2
Except for Yeah, I can, I can live with that. Ian Aside from that, you know great people.

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Speaker 1
Dom do you have anything to add to that? Paul That was like a very nice response. That was like a warm and fuzzy response.

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Speaker 3
No, I just, I agree that they've all said I think it's, you know, it's an industry that's changed over the years. We were always what I love about is when a client comes to us for an engagement, it's usually it's one of the most important things for their business they need to figure out. So I figure, like we're always working on the latest challenge.

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Speaker 3
And so, you know, whether it was, you know, how companies navigate the pandemic or whatever the case was, we were helping them figure out these new business models and changes. And I think that's, you know, like Michael said, where the intellectual challenge is really exciting. I, I do agree with Paul that the people like the company that we have, like 200 of us are big.

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Speaker 3
I, I sincerely think of them as like my extended family. And I really I mean, I miss going into the office and seeing people, but I think that's great. And then people outside of Dig are our clients, our competitors, our partners, all of a it's a really great group of people in this industry. And going back to your previous question, most of whom just fell into it, you know, like that's the weird thing.

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Speaker 3
Like it's not like people go to school and they honestly market research and this is my path. It's like they end up doing something else and then discovering there's this really cool way to make a living. And that's, that's what I like about it.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I feel like when you're in university or even like in high school, you kind of think to yourself, like, I want to be in this industry, but it typically never works out that way. Like I want to work in fashion like, but your skills end up being used that you wanted to use in the fashion industry somewhere completely different.

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Speaker 3
So it's like Michael and he still manages to work it in.

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Speaker 1
So yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 2
I wanted to be in film, but I had no idea what that meant, how to do it or anything. So here I am.

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Speaker 3
I wanted to be a vet, but I still.

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Speaker 2
Hold in the boom. Mike I feel like the boom.

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Speaker 1
I mean, so we've we talked a little bit about, you know, tech and the huge impact that tech has had on the industry. Michael, you're talking about how it's really interesting just to focus on like what's changing about the consumer. You know, pollen And Dom, you just talked about how great people are in the industry, which is awesome to hear.

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Speaker 1
But I'm wondering when we think about someone who's just starting out in their career and is looking at new jobs and they see a job posting for somewhere like DEG within the Insite space, what sort of like one skill that you think they really need to sort of bring to the table when it comes to working as an analyst within a research company or on the client side don't all answer it once.

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Speaker 1
Paul Okay.

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Speaker 5
Now.

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Speaker 2
I mean, I would my one thing that I've always kind of said is make a really successful person that has come on this field is just problem solving skills, like just being resourceful and being able to solve challenges like not, not like, you know, always needing somebody to tell you exactly what to do. It's a matter of how do you how do you go about solving some of the challenges that you're faced with.

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Speaker 2
And every time, like we did all our especially for us, all of the studies that we do are very customized to the client's needs. We got understand the client, understand the customer. We got to figure out what their strategy could be. We're piecing together a lot of things. And by even just piecing those things together, we're we're solving a lot of those challenges, love those problems.

00;08;08;07 - 00;08;18;16
Speaker 2
So that skill overall, how that translates into like somebody actually applying, demonstrating it becomes a different different ways. But problem solving is like one of those key things I think makes it very, very successful in our area.

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Speaker 1
Okay, Michael, you're allowed to go now.

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Speaker 4
All right. Thank you. I would say obviously there isn't one skill. It really depends on what sort of role you want to play within the company. So people come in in a data analytics role, it might be a slightly different skill set versus people coming through more of a consulting role. To me, one of the most important things though, is it's a little consistent with Paul's that's slightly different is creativity sort of ability to say, for example, see a data set and creatively think, okay, what are the implications of this for the ability here are quite challenging creatively.

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Speaker 4
Think, how might I address this? It's that ability to go beyond just like the literal. Here's something that I have here. The challenge that I have here, some data that I have here is a report template that I have. And to think of how can I take this one step further? I think that's really what someone who's really successful, apart from someone that just sort of can sort of chug along.

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Speaker 2
So you're saying if I applied for a job at times new Roman it, you know, as final going to get here and.

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Speaker 4
It's not about design, creativity and design. Going old school might actually be the most creative thing you could do.

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Speaker 3
I think agree with these guys. They problem solving and creativity. I was going to say curiosity, you know, like just the desire to answer questions like I remember it was some years ago and there was a young person who's working with us and they're no longer with us and they they're pulling data on some concepts. And I remember it's like a fanatic test.

00;09;41;11 - 00;10;04;13
Speaker 3
They're four or five ideas the client had given us and asked them was like, Oh, so which one looks like it's the winner? And like, Oh, I haven't got to that part of my have you got to that? Like, that's like you've been working on this for a few days. Like, how are you serious? Yeah, exactly. And so I think just that idea to want to solve problems and if you can do it creatively, all the better.

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Speaker 3
But just to be curious, I think is, is really at the heart of what we do for a living. That's important. Yeah. I think, you know, if, if all you're doing is the very basics, if all you're doing is saying, you know this so statistically significantly higher than that. So that's not the future of our industry because those things will be automated and even even the commentary for very basic things like that will just be done by AI.

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Speaker 3
So unless you have the ability to tell a story out of the data, you're you're really not going to have a place in the very near future in our industry.

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Speaker 1
That's a really good point, actually. And that kind of leads me on to another question around, you know, how much influence technology is having on market research and the way that we conduct market research sort of do this work. It's every used for democratizing insights across companies. I mean, when someone maybe not just starting out, but do you feel like being comfortable or being open or maybe it's curiosity to use sort of new methodologies and leverage technology, do you think that that's sort of a prerequisite for entering market research these days?

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Speaker 5
No, not.

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Speaker 3
Everyone's nodding and you're just asking.

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Speaker 5
Right now. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
For you, there's everyone was nodding and Michael was just.

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Speaker 2
Like to remain relevant. No, no, no, no, no.

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Speaker 4
No, no.

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Speaker 2
This technology thing.

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Speaker 3
I mean, realistically, it's every it's it's every role. Everywhere is somewhat going to be impacted by that. I mean, that's a good point. You know, the average company has I don't know how many SAS applications they're using at any given time. You go into any company and you're going to need to be able to quickly learn how to use, you know, notion for instances, you know, gets hot or Miro gets hot for a while or whatever it is.

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Speaker 3
And if you are not able to keep up with those things, you're not going to do well anywhere, let alone in market research where you're expected to be able to analyze data quickly with whatever the newest tools are. So definitely you need to be comfortable with applications and technology doesn't mean you necessarily have to be a developer, but you definitely need to be comfortable.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, Everyone agree?

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Speaker 2
I mean, I don't think anyone disagrees. I think, you know, I was speaking to somebody today about even just hiring for a sales roles. And so if you don't if someone doesn't come in and have, you know, proficiency in a lot of different tech stacks that enable sales, it's been the same with marketing, too. You don't understand the technology that's used by marketers today.

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Speaker 2
You're at a disadvantage. So everybody that even if it's just something as basic as understanding Tableau, like looking at what what types of software that exist that help you understand patterns and data and make sense of information, those are just kind of critical just to actually bring a sense of being able to interpret information in a different way.

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Speaker 2
I think just even that skill set is important.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, I like the the nod to data visualization because we're actually working on a campaign fatigue right now around data storytelling and data visualization. And I've had a lot of conversations with people around, I guess to Dom's point, like curiosity, to use those new tools. So as a researcher, like telling a story by being able to visualize it in sort of a new way or an effective way.

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Speaker 1
But we've also I've had conversations with people of like do researchers also need to have design the ability to like, design things in a visually appealing way, Like it's not also something that people have to add to their their skillset, I guess. Would you say that researchers now, in order to tell like a concise story, have to be quasi designers as well?

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Speaker 2
Yeah, that's.

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Speaker 4
Sort of what you mean by designer. Like if you mean like pure graphic design. No, I think they need to be able to distill things and make them look reasonably good. And then maybe on really high profile stuff, you bring in a professional designer. But I think I think any researcher should be able to take some data and make it look at least decent.

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Speaker 4
So, Paul, I think I interrupted you.

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Speaker 2
You know, it's funny, you look right now biggest one of the biggest assets you could have is just like being able to use PowerPoint proficiently. And be.

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Speaker 3
Sure.

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Speaker 2
But a lot of that is also changing. Like had I known in school that my biggest skillset coming out of it would be like to be stellar designer in PowerPoint, I think it would have been like exceptional any job that exists. But since I'm mediocre at this one, but like today, there's so much like dashboard and automated tools and stuff like that even gets away from the needs that you even know that.

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Speaker 2
So it's not like you need to be a designer. You just need to know really what looks good and really kind of what's easy to interpret. I think there's a lot of tools that assist assist in that, but it's finding the right ones that actually make it easier to understand. There's a lot of dashboards that make it completely harder to understand that information that you get.

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Speaker 2
But the ones that actually are good at interpreting information and presenting a really compelling way, those are the ones that I think people will start to lean more on in the future to actually use in that in some of their reporting.

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Speaker 5
Nice.

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Speaker 4
I had one additional thought on technology, and this is not my thought, but I saw someone share this online and I thought it was sort of interesting. Is there is this old idea of how technology or AI specifically would sort of disrupt things? It would start at the bottom of the food chain. So it would start with the most basic tasks and sort of automating those and then work its way up over way up or work its way up.

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Speaker 4
And what actually happened is that it's sort of been in the reverse of that, whereas a lot of these chatbot models, they're actually really good at quite sophisticated things and not quite as good at a lot of these rudimentary things. But the broader point there is that we can't anticipate how tech is going to disrupt things. The best thing that we could do, I think, is remain open to text and try to think about how we can incorporate it and even collaborate with it.

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Speaker 4
And that's how we remain relevant because, again, this whole sort of model of like how we think is going to play out is often the exact opposite of how it actually plays out.

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Speaker 5
Yeah.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, that's a really good point.

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Speaker 2
I mean, I listen to Michael, he does have a tick tock account, so I do.

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Speaker 1
How many how many followers are we up to now?

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Speaker 4
Like five.

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Speaker 3
Five.

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Speaker 1
Five more than me.

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Speaker 3
You're looking mostly dancing. It's mostly dance videos so far. Events and makeup tutorials. Those two things he does mostly.

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Speaker 1
Okay. I want to I want to take us in the direction of thinking about like, as someone is already in the market research fields, they're already working insights, whether that's at an agency or on the client side. And I want to talk about like what good looks like in that situation. So I was going to ask you like, what's one skill set as a senior insights professional you would need to have in your toolkit?

00;17;07;27 - 00;17;21;29
Speaker 1
But I think I'm going to slightly re-engineer the question and say, Is there anyone that you can think of that you've worked with in the past? Or one of our clients that's really good at their job and like, what makes them really, really good at their job?

00;17;22;19 - 00;17;23;09
Speaker 2
Ian Ash.

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Speaker 5
There's.

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Speaker 1
So much love in this room right now. It's amazing.

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Speaker 5
He's so good at his job.

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Speaker 4
You would say What is good looking like right? I was going to say. Dom Good looking, right?

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Speaker 3
That's fair.

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Speaker 4
That's a good looks like I.

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Speaker 1
Was a perfect ajoke.

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Speaker 5
Love that.

00;17;42;19 - 00;18;12;09
Speaker 3
It's such a part of answer. But I mean, the reality is it's just like there's a lot of there's a lot of jobs for people need to learn relatively quickly. But I think market research really demands that you have the ability to learn really quickly because not only do you need to be up to date on the technology and data analysis techniques and all the rest of that, but you also need to be able to quickly understand your client's requirements and understand their business.

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Speaker 3
And that often takes a lot of additional research as well for you to really understand how their business works, how they make money. And so ultimately, I think the people who who really do the best in this in this industry are the ones who just have the ability to learn the fastest. They're not necessarily deep, deep experts on a specific thing, but they have the ability to learn things really quickly.

00;18;41;00 - 00;19;02;05
Speaker 4
If I could add one thing to that, too, I think what sometimes we don't necessarily make overt is that the industry, like many industries, is very strongly relationship based. When you're getting advice from someone, you take advice from someone you trust. And a lot of the really good people in this industry, both clients and suppliers, they are really good at building trust and trusting relationships as advisors.

00;19;02;05 - 00;19;10;24
Speaker 4
And I think that is there's no signs that I don't know exactly how it happens, but people's ability to do that really sets the best apart from from the very good.

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Speaker 2
It starts with dancing on TikTok.

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Speaker 4
Well, yes, of course it's there.

00;19;16;24 - 00;19;20;09
Speaker 2
I think those are both really an so I got nothing that was a really good.

00;19;21;20 - 00;19;26;14
Speaker 1
Oh, someone else is in the office now, Paul. Yes.

00;19;26;14 - 00;19;27;22
Speaker 2
It's not just me.

00;19;29;16 - 00;19;31;16
Speaker 1
Dom. Did you have anything you wanted to. Are there?

00;19;32;00 - 00;19;32;24
Speaker 5
No. No.

00;19;33;00 - 00;19;49;12
Speaker 1
Okay. All right. Well, guys, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. You'll be back in a month. You don't know it yet, but you will be to record another episode and we will be back with another episode of Dig In next week. Talk to you guys soon.

00;19;50;05 - 00;19;51;01
Speaker 2
In the office.

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Speaker 3
Thanks, man.

00;19;53;21 - 00;19;55;16
Speaker 1
If I.

00;19;57;29 - 00;20;04;27
Speaker 1
Thanks for tuning in this week. Find us on LinkedIn at Digg Insights. And don't forget to hit Subscribe for a weekly dose of fresh content.