Seb (00:02):

You are listening to the Insightful Connections podcast. Our guest today is David Bruce. David is a managing partner at TLDR Insights. Founded in 2020 TLDR. Insights is a boutique marketing research and strategy firm that builds on years of industry experience to deliver strategic insights that help clients make an impact. Unlike many research agencies, TLDR is staffed entirely by highly experienced researchers, allowing their clients to receive speed, quality, and actionable recommendations. Grounded in both experience and innovation, David and TLDR are synonymous with high quality B2B market research and it's built quite a name for themselves in the industry. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today, David.

David Bruce (00:40):

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Seb (01:05):

David, my first question for you, and I kinda like to get this context with everybody that we talked to, is tell me a little bit about how you got into market research originally and how that accounts for where you are now.

David Bruce (01:15):

Sure, sure. And this is, I mean, I feel like this is such a great question 'cause there's very few people that I feel like, you know, whenever we talk about this, they're like, oh yeah, like I grew up, I always knew I wanted to be in market research. Like it feels like everyone has their own winding path into this industry. I'm, you know, I'm not unique in that case, [I] come from a family of two PhD research scientists. So from a young age was sort of pre-ordained, like, you're gonna go and you're gonna do like science, you're gonna go and get your own PhD. That was sort of the path for a while there. And in college, ended up taking a class in freshman year, I'm in the international relations, shout out Jonathan Mercer coolest professor ever that we're now 15 years on and still, you know, just made such an impact.

David Bruce (01:55):

And it was, you know, I got hooked, hooked on the political science bug and kind of followed that path on down. And it wasn't until almost, uh, like senior year or I read this article in [The] New Yorker about what Frank Lunds was doing in the word lab for the RNC. And for those of you who aren't familiar, basically what they would do is they would run all of these focus groups like tons and tons of focus groups. And it was focus groups that were designed around the idea of the power of language, right? The power of words, the power of framing. You know, it's, were not conservatives, were traditionalists, they're, you know, they're not progressives, they're liberals, these framings, right? Which subconsciously affected the entire messaging and the entire framing of the conversation that everyone is having around politics, around values, around policies, and that idea, right?

David Bruce (02:44):

That we could better understand and influence and predict human behavior simply through measuring reactions to language like that just absolutely, you know, knocked my socks off. And so I was like, like, what is this discipline and what are these people doing and how do I tap into that? And how do I blend the hard sciences that I grew up with, with sort of the more interesting human element that I found so fascinating about political science and turns out market research. And so actually I was in a few market research studies as a kid, you know, like stuff like Go-Gurt and an oatmeal alternative at one point. I'm pretty sure the NDAs up at this point. So, uh, you know, uh, <laugh> you, you're welcome for saying no to that. But, uh, that was my exposure to market research. And so getting into that and then, um, in interning there and, and kind of growing through that in my career, I've always found fascinating, right, in that, you know, we are attempting to not only measure, quantify, establish and better understand human behavior, but also try and influence and predict it, um, in strategic ways for anyone who's ever tried to convince anyone of anything.

David Bruce (03:52):

That's never a simple matter. And so doing it at scale, doing it on complex topics, doing it in, you know, unique, uh, scenarios and context is fascinating to me. And so, um, I like to say I've, I've never done the same project twice over now almost a 15 year career. And I think that's what keeps it interesting and what keeps it fresh.

Seb (04:14):

I think it's so interesting, right? It's, uh, the discipline of being sort of professionally curious. And I think one of the great things is you never really know what you're gonna find in the market. And, uh, yeah, it's just, uh, interesting to hear all of that, you know, it's so common and, and sort of the origin stories that that's what sort of draws people in and gets them hooked on the drug, so to speak. <laugh>, I'm curious, so right or wrong, TLDR is always a name that I've associated with B2B market research, and I'm curious how that focus on B2B insights, uh, sort of emerged for you and, and the rest of the team.

David Bruce (04:48):

Yeah, it's a great question. I guess for me personally, uh, and I guess I can maybe speak to the team a little bit more broadly, B2B was sort of what I knew. Um, so I come from a little bit of an IT background. I got plugged into computers very, very early, built my first computer with my dad at like the age of five. And so like computers were just sort of in the blood so to speak. We, um, he ran a program where we would take old defunct machines from the company that he worked at, rebuild them, and then, um, give them away sort of as like a lottery to the back in the day. I'm aging myself, right? But back in the day when, you know, computers were in every household and so they did like a lottery to give old computers to employees.

David Bruce (05:27):

And so, you know, back in the DOS days and, and so like computers in the blood from that perspective. And so when it came to research, there was a a point in my career after the politics stint where, um, I had a project that no one wanted to do and they're like, oh, it's this really complicated B2B Tech thing. I was like, all right, I mean, I, I get computers, like I could probably do this and I liked it. And so, you know, kind of from there, really just taking on more and more and learning more and more. And what fueled me personally was this notion of, you know, you're sitting in a room with a bunch of very, very smart people and you're used to kind of knowing what's going on and all of a sudden you are swimming in very, very deep water and you don't have your floaty.

David Bruce (06:05):

So that incentive to learn more and to be conversant and to be able to understand and not hopefully not be the idiot in the room was a very powerful motivator for me. And I think, you know, a lot of us have then now taken that on where it's like, hey, there are these challenging concepts where you have to do your homework and you have to go out and figure out what's going on. You have to learn and learn complex topics and how they manifest. And I think what drives a lot of us is sort of taking on that challenge and it's almost kind of like, Hey, I want to understand, I want to learn more. I don't want to talk about something that just everyone understands. I want to, you know, kind of dive a little bit deeper and really kind of flex my brain to a certain perspective and engage in those challenging topics. And so we all have our own unique motivations. I I won't pretend that, you know, TLDR is a monolith, even as a smaller shop, but I think a lot of what, what drives most of us is sort of that intellectual curiosity and desire to take on a challenge.

Seb (07:01):

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think, uh, you know, in, in many ways it, it ties into that sort of importance of domain knowledge that you guys, and you in particular David, have always sort of brought to the craft, right? We'll get into that a little more later in the conversation to preview a little bit of what we're about to be talking about. I think that's really interesting because often, and as a fairly amateur moderator myself, I shouldn't speak out of turn, but I think often there's an assumption that an outsider perspective can be helpful as a moderator. And I think that's maybe true up to a point. But in a B2B context, I think there's maybe that more elevated need for domain knowledge. And, and I think that's part of the challenge that represents

David Bruce (07:39):

Yeah, absolutely. In the early days, you always used to joke about doing B2B qual, and it's like, if your data center was an animal, what kind of animal would that be? So much of qualitative research and moderation is sort of teeing up a question to get someone to like, explain their soul and explain their brain, explain their thought process and their why in such a way where they don't even really know that they're doing it right. And, you know, 'cause we all have these cognitive biases that we bring to every, every conversation even with ourselves. And so moderation was all about like helping people get outta their own way and sort of explain their thought process or explain what's going on in their head. But the challenge that I certainly found when doing my first foray into moderation was really around this concept of how do you do that in the context of you're talking to a senior cloud architect who's like, Hey, I'm responsible for 10 different applications that bring in $5 billion worth of business.

David Bruce (08:38):

Like, don't waste my time and I am a professional and like I make, I make million dollar decisions every day. And you're like, whoa. Like, all right, I probably shouldn't treat you the same way that I would treat someone talking about like, so which hard seltzer flavors do you like? You know, both very important questions that are, you know, you have to give their due. And, but two very different approaches in terms of how you talk to, how you frame the conversation, how you have to understand what they're talking about. 'cause if you're stopping someone every five seconds and be like, whoa, wait, whoa, whoa, what does that acronym mean? Like, can you talk to me more about like how does actually work? And you're doing a lot of interesting learning, but it's not really helping them tell their story or help them explain to you how their thought process works and, and what matters to 'em.

Seb (09:22):

And just riffing on that a little bit, like I think everybody that you'd speak to in a B2B context is also a consumer, right? But it's almost a different kind of thinking that goes into consumption choices and, and how we do our day-to-day jobs, right? I think one's a lot more emotionally driven and the other is a lot more driven by maybe technical concerns and things that you need to have at least a bedrock understanding of.

David Bruce (09:45):

Oh yeah, absolutely. One of the challenges that we often have, especially as we get more and more disintermediated, you know, we're not, we're not sitting over a table chatting face-to-face, right? We're having a zoom conversation. And so as we get more disintermediated, we have this predisposition to think of other people very monolithically of like, oh, they're a pillar of their organization. Like they're doing this job, they're doing this task, they're doing this role, and like they're going to approach it very logically and they're looking for the optimal outcome. And so much of business, right? Is finding the optimal outcome and mix shifting and figuring out like, okay, I, you know, I need more of this, less of that, dial this up, tune this, it's this very logical context. But then you talk about like, my favorite variable, right? The human variable. There are a lot more undercurrents to it than that.

David Bruce (10:36):

And we have this preposition to treat people as an element of a larger machine, as a like logical cog or almost like a logic gate. And you know, I think you and I both know that's not true at all. People bring all their own biases to every single decision as a human, as a consumer, as a parent, as a friend, as a peer, as a someone trying to build their career as someone worried about their own reputation in their field. And I think that's what makes it interesting, right? And there's so many opportunities that I've had to, you know, we were talking about like, well wait a minute, why don't you just do this? And they're like, well, if I do that, I'm outsourcing my own job and I'll be out of a, you know, I'll be out a house and home in the next five years. Like, that doesn't seem very good to me. And it's like, oh, I didn't think about it like that. So it's always fun to weave the organizational and logical goals that folks have in with the personal benefits and the career benefits and the, you know, just even ego and, and personal ambition that plays such an important role in the decisions that folks make.

Seb (11:38):

David, I know you've been doing a series of articles on B2B interviewing and how to do it adeptly, I think you're at part two of three waiting with bated breath for part three of three to draw. But I'm curious, you know, one of the things that you know is kind of attack that you guys have focused on is the idea of building trust with B2B audiences. And I'm curious where that focus comes from, where sort of the importance of trust as sort of a pillar of B2B moderating comes from for you guys, and what does the term really mean in the context of moderation?

David Bruce (12:08):

What was the Robin Williams quote from Goodwill Hunting? It's like, trust is everything. Trust is life. You can't really expect someone to bear their soul or even a piece of it if they don't trust you. That conversation I was having with that one person, like, why won't you adopt this? And they're like, 'cause that's my livelihood, man. Like, I don't have, that's my, like, I'm literally outsourcing 90% of my job now to this, this technology, and that's pretty uncomfortable for me. And I don't know if that's something that you just admit to everyone on the street, right? Like that's certainly not something they wanted to admit to their boss. Getting someone to share that type of information with you is about building trust. And I think in the context of B2B and certainly B2B Tech, I think, so what we found was that there's a surface level conversation and then there's the deeper level conversation, right?

David Bruce (12:56):

So I was, I would be talking to ITDMs and like, these are this the early days of cloud, right? And you're talking to ITDMs and they're like, it's like, so what's really important to you? And they're like, oh, security and, and costs. It's like, okay. Like yes, those are important things, but also like that's just part of the conversation. And if you didn't really know more in depth, and it's like, oh, talk to me about security. Like, do you think the security at your data center is better than like AWS or Microsoft or Google? And they're like, well, no, no, it'd be better. It's like, oh, but they're more likely to get hacked, right? And they're like, well, well no, actually no. And it's like, so you start to peel back some of the layers of the onion and you get back to it and it's like, well actually it's not really about security, it's about the feeling of control and being able to point to something and be like, that's where my deal lives right now.

David Bruce (13:49):

I know where it is. And like if the board comes to me and says, you know, what are we doing with our data? How is it protected? How is it secure? You can point to it. And I was like, it's there and we've got these security cameras and the security guards and video feeds, and we know it's security. We've got our eyes on it. And so having that domain knowledge and being able to push on some sort of surface level, you know, I don't wanna call 'em platitudes, but that accessible information that is skin deep and really being able to push past that I think I found was critical. The better understanding and helping people tell their stories, right? Because to the average person, I'm sure, like everyone in research gets asked like, what do you do? And it's like, um, I ask questions and then tell people the answers.

David Bruce (14:30):

That's the very simplistic version of it, right? But it's far more complicated than that in the grand scheme of things. But unless you feel like someone is able to appreciate your truth you’re far less likely to share it, right? So my family, you know, my extended family at Christmas parties is like, so what are you doing these days? And I'm like, oh, you know, just still asking questions and giving people answers versus, you know, we're having this conversation, right? And it's far more in depth, right? There's far more that's going on that you're willing to share with someone who you either consider a peer or someone who you consider, you know, might appreciate what you're talking about and be able to understand it and in a way that you can have a more interesting dialogue as opposed to just, Hey, man, security cost. You know, those two things get dialed in, we're good to go.

Seb (15:14):

Yeah. It's so funny. It's like, uh, and I might be outing myself a little bit here, but like, when I have a difficult day at work, my wife is often like, well, you know, what happened? And it's like, I really have to go to, to square one of explaining when a client starts drifting off their screener <laugh> and asking for stuff, we, you know, explicitly at the kickoff call, didn't talk about stuff like that. There's a whole level of, again, going back to that domain knowledge that if you don't have it, just getting to the point where an explanation would be possible is actually so much work that it's just sort of a cognitive shortcut to say, you know, oh, a tough day, difficult request, something like that. It's a short, digestible answer that kind of allows you to skip the heavy lift of bringing somebody fully up to speed with everything that goes into that answer. And I can see that it would be equally relevant in a research context as it would be in life.

David Bruce (16:05):

And we're all guilty of taking cognitive shortcuts. I mean, that's what our brains are designed to do, right? We are trying to find the path to least resistance, trying to optimize, trying to get from A to B, and like in, in qualitative interviewing, it's all about the journey. It's all about the why. And so finding either, you know, strategies like exercises or finding ways to push back respectfully within reason, it's always challenging when you're talking to someone who quite literally knows a lot more about a topic than you do, and you're like, they give you an answer and you're like, yeah, but like really that you're calling BS on someone who theoretically is teaching you something. And it, it's a delicate conversation to have. But I think what I've found personally is that people appreciate that in a weird kind of twisted way where they're like, oh, you actually know enough to call me on my BS.

David Bruce (16:55):

And so from my own time doing tech stuff, people would ask like, oh, like what are we doing about this? I'm like, oh, it's this, that, and the other thing, right? And they're like, but haven't you thought about this? I'm like, oh, you actually know what you're talking about. Yeah, let's actually talk about it. Because so often you would run into situations where people read something and had some words and knew enough to be dangerous and you know, you go past like step one and then it's like, oh, you actually don't understand this concept, nevermind. But in the situations where they can, it's actually this opportunity to bond and to foster that relationship and foster that trust. You know, when you're talking about like, oh, how did you guys deal with the log four J exploitation's? Like, oh man, that was the worst. And like I had to like, you know, I was up for like 36 hours straight making sure everything was patched and we had to roll out these other things like that type of camaraderie that can only be built through shared experiences, I think critical to sort of unlocking some of those doors of trust.

David Bruce (17:51):

And that really only comes from having that shared experience.

Seb (17:54):

I wanna change tax lightly. So where do you see the potential role of AI in all of this?

David Bruce (18:00):

Oh, man. ai. So I'm assuming we're talking about generative ai. You know, it's funny, we used to, I was having these conversations, these like, um, consumer focus groups and you know, it's like, raise your hand. Who here has used ai? And this was like four or five years ago, or maybe like three or four years ago who here used ai? And it was like, I don't know, I used ai. And you're like, all right, who here is the, you know, got a item recommended to them on Amazon and they bought it, and they're like, oh, I've done that. It's like, great, you've used ai, you know, AI has been around, but as we think about generative AI and sort of the, the moment that's we've been having over the last 18, 24 months or so, you know, I think it has a lot of roles to play the tactic that I think a lot of us are guilty of.

David Bruce (18:39):

When a brand new technology comes onto the scene is like, oh, this is gonna take over everything that's gonna do like x, Y and ZA, B, C 1, 2, 3, this is gonna like, take over the world and do my job for me, and this is gonna be incredible. And, um, as much as I would love for that to be true, I, I feel like it's not there yet. You know, maybe, you know, we're having this conversation in five years and it's not us having a conversation. Our two, you know, chat bots chatting with each other, learning from our conversations. 'cause as, as my wife will tell you, I'm running outta stories after 10 plus years of marriage, you know, there's, there's only so many jokes I have left, new material’s hard to come by when I think about gen AI and what it can do today.

David Bruce (19:17):

It is incredibly adept at summarization, right? Looking across things and having a sort of a naive perspective or even an informed perspective that you give it. But it's really interesting at sort of getting around some of your own biases, right? Of helping unpack things and find macro trends tactically. Stuff like the AI transcriptions, getting a little bit better, deploying your brain at scale, right? To be able to follow things up in sort of the mixed qualitative, quantitative type of scenarios. Asking the little why's and sort of drilling a little bit deeper. I think it's really effective there, but as much as I would love to be able to like say, Hey, ai, like listen to my last 50 interviews and learn how I ask questions and just go out and interview people for me, and I'll just, you know, kick my feet up and have a cup of coffee.

David Bruce (20:05):

It's not really there yet. I would love for it to be there eventually, although talking about bringing your own personal biases in, right? You know, are you gonna outsource yourself out of a job? But I think when I look at what it can do today, I think it is great at translation and not translation between languages, but in terms of translating between two different contexts, if you have not tried to have, uh, chat GPT or Gemini rewrite an article in the style of your favorite rapper, um, highly recommend doing that barrel of Monkeys barrel of laughs. That's great, that great summarization. But I think where I have tried to push it and where I've seen it fall short a little bit is in some of those more human aspects and, and those intellectual curiosity moments. Frankly, computers don't have intellectual curiosity, right? They are executing a playbook, running a task per instructions. And granted, the instructions to an LLM are incredibly complicated, right? You know, billions of different vectors and contexts and all that fun stuff. But at the end of the day, I just don't feel like that intellectual curiosity that you bring as a researcher and as a human being is yet conveyed within the context and the prompts and the conversation and the, the lines of thought that are programmed into generative ai.

Seb (21:20):

And just to build on that, one of the things that I suspect is not going anywhere for a long time is the ability to apply contextual knowledge about what is actually strategically important to the client. And on the fly in the middle of an interview or a focus group, deviate from the discussion guide and, and pursue a line of inquiry that's maybe not really, you know, what on paper we set out to find here, but that we know, you know, is highly relevant to the strategic interests that the client has, right? It could be both in a consumer context or a B2B context. I see it all the time, most of the time, or many times, some of the most important insights to come out of a project happen when the moderator puts the guide aside for a second and pursues an interesting line of inquiry that opened itself up.

David Bruce (22:04):

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I hate to keep making movie quotes, but you know, the, what was it? The Pirates of the Caribbean, you know, there, the pirate codes more or less of rules and more of just guidelines. The discussion guide is a guide, it's not a script. And, you know, if you stay resolute to like, I'm going to ask these questions in this order, I've seen it done and I've unfortunately probably done it myself a few times where someone was like right there and they wanted to share this really interesting insight, be it a personal story or like, actually, you know, that's how it normally works, but it didn't work that way this time because of, and you're already moving on to the next question and all of a sudden you just, I mean, you lost something, you left it on the table that could have been particularly insightful and changed the way that you really approached the whole problem and, and could have been impactful to how your client does business.

David Bruce (22:54):

But you were so resolutely focused on, I have to ask these 10 questions and get answers to these 10 questions. You sort of miss the forest for the trees and yeah, like knowing and being able to read body language and to read vocal tone and understand kinda the direction of the conversation and play that translation role, right? Because at the end of the day, for me, when I think about, you know, what is your role as a moderator in qualitative research, it is to translate between what the client wants and what their business needs in terms of strategic insights and telling the story of the people who they serve, their customers, their audience, their potential customers. And you're constantly trying to tell both sides of the story and be that translational piece. And oftentimes that means following threads that you didn't think of. I mean, that's the most exciting thing to me about qualitative research in general is you never know what you're gonna learn.

David Bruce (23:49):

So much of quantitative is confirmatory, right? Of yes, I know that there's a relationship between these two things, but how much of a relationship, what else drives that relationship? You know, we're doing, you know, semantic driver modeling and it's like, what are the true drivers of this behavior? I know, I know more or less what this whole picture looks like, but I wanna understand like where, you know, different things dial in and exactly how much I know people wanna pay for this, and then it's interesting and exciting, but what is the exact right price to pay, to charge for what features and how do we package this, right? It's always more of the quantification and the how much, but qualitative is all about the unknown and, um, peeling back the onion and understanding things beyond what you think you already know. And, you know, I would love for AI to do that at some point, and I'm sure it will, right? The AI that we have today is not the AI that we're gonna have in five years, in 10 years, but then knowing when to lean in, when to pull out how to elicit information that people may or may not want to share, that domain is still particularly human, at least for today.

Seb (24:55):

David, last question for me, actually, second to last question for me. What keeps you motivated?

David Bruce (25:00):

Two kids going to college? <laugh>? No, I, I think, you know, what keeps me motivated is trying to do better. I think that we have this tendency to, we have this victory and we do this thing, and it was very hard and we feel really good about ourselves. But you know, the reality in, in this business, at least in my experience, is you're only as good as your last triumph. There are lots of people in this world who are very capable and competent, and if you don't continue to push the boundaries of what you know and what you can do and how it manifests and how you can help people like, you know, eventually things will pass you by. And so I think that's what motivates me is trying to beat your personal best and, you know, do better than you did yesterday and continue to push forward and find unique and interesting ways to do your job. That's probably my purest motivator.

Seb (25:50):

Okay, for real, this time. Last question. Where can folks find you?

David Bruce (25:53):

Usually I'm, uh, in this lovely little office here, but, uh, no. Um, so tldr-insights.com Is kinda where we live. And then, uh, I am semi-active on LinkedIn. Uh, I'll say, um, probably not, you know, if I were a content creator, my sponsors would be yelling at me for not posting enough. My social media presence is, uh, not the best, uh, on LinkedIn as well here and there. Or if you're in the Seattle area, I, I am usually here. It's, it's not a bad place to be.

Seb (26:20):

David, thanks so much for talking to us today.

David Bruce (26:22):

You're very welcome Sebastian. Thank you so much for having me on. It was, uh, such a pleasure and I, I always appreciate your thoughts and your, your partnership and, uh, your perspective.

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