Sebastian (00:02):

You are listening to the Insightful Connections podcast. Our guest today is Monika Rogers. Monika is VP of Growth Strategy for CMB. CMB is a trusted insights and analytics partner for Fortune 500 brands, delivering sophisticated custom research that drives growth and efficiency. An ITA group company, CMB is ranked as one of the top 25 insights and analytics companies by the Insights Association. Prior to joining CMB, Monika was co-founder and CEO at a restech company called Digsite, ran her own boutique research and consulting firm, held a position as director of the AC Nielsen Center graduate program at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and spent the first six years of her career in consumer Insights at General Mills. Monika, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Monika (00:44):

Thanks for having me.

Sebastian (00:47):

Monika, I like to start off with this sort of contextual question for everybody. I'm wondering how you initially got into market research and how that origin story accounts for where you've ended up in the years since.

Monika (01:22):

So I discovered market research in undergrad, which maybe is fairly unusual for folks, but I took a class on new product development, so it wasn't my market research class that got me excited about market research. It was a class on new product development and in that class they had a specific case study where they showed how you could use multi-dimensional scaling to determine the similarity of cars. And I thought this was the coolest thing that you could derive, uh, associations by just asking people similarity, this is just really cool, I wanna learn more about this. And so I went to my actual undergrad market research professor and I asked her if I could take like an independent study class. So she let me actually play with some data I was using, I think it was, uh, SaaS at the time and got to kind of play with quantitative data, which I hadn't done because my market research professor was actually a cultural anthropologist.

Monika (02:19):

And I did ethnographic research, believe it or not, in undergrad for market research, which was also very unusual at the time. So I got into market research, I was really excited about it as a possible career choice, but I didn't find a job coming out of undergrad and that I found a job doing sales, but I was able to find the AC Nielsen Center for Market Research at UW Madison for graduate school. And so I actually went to graduate school for market research and was off to General Mills. So I I was like one of the rare people who like intentionally pursued market research as career choice.

Sebastian (02:53):

It's so funny. So when I introduced that question framing to the podcast, I kind of had this sort of mindset that like so many people land in market research, that's my background and don't really set out to get there. And then I've had so many guests say, unlike, you know, the people that land in market research, I actually chose this out as a path. So it's interesting to see and maybe I need to adjust that question 'cause I, you know, it's, it's more common than I may be expected. So the things you did after joining General Mills is some of the things that you've done in the industry. I mean, Monika, you've held a, a pretty wide array of different roles in the industry and done a lot of really cool stuff. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.

Monika (03:30):

Yeah, I'm gonna be dating myself with some of this, but when I started at General Mills, some of the things that I gotta do that were first one, the company just got its first license of Sawtooth and we did our first conjoin study. The company did its first ethnographic research for Betty Crocker. We did our first website research. I actually did website research on the Cocoa Puffs website. So there was a lot of innovation in market research at the time, a really huge shift in tools and methods and approaches. And that doesn't even account for the fact that we actually shifted all of our research from doing door to door phone and mall to online. That was right in that same timeframe when all of that started to happen. So when I moved over at the time, I like went to the evil competitor Pillsbury, who got bought back by General Mills.

Monika (04:24):

So it was in that whole timeframe, it was, it was almost like a race, like I was working on validating concept testing for stage gate, new product development and coming up with new methods to make online match, right with our prior data sets. At the same time my colleagues at General Mills were doing that. So I was doing it for Pillsbury was doing it for General Mills. Then when I came back to General Mills, they had to choose like which method to use. So there's a lot of really cool, fun transformational things going on at the time. I really kind of decided that client side, while it was exciting and I think that there was no better start for me for my career, I was really had an entrepreneurial mindset even back then. But I was a little afraid to go out on my own and start my own company.

Monika (05:11):

And so I found a very small ad agency, it was like 50 people and I went there to help them create a new capability called Brand Next, which was really to take their creatives and their creative department and apply them to uh, helping brands come up with new product ideas. And so I did ethnographic research, we did ideation sessions and we used the creatives within ideation and then we helped and we did things like packaging and naming and all sorts of cool things, but it was definitely very different from, you know, a traditional like client side role, uh, really creative and fun. And uh, so that took me into that, which took me into the next step, which was deciding, oh my gosh, I can't work for an A UC, I got little kids, I'm burned out, I need a break, I'm going to work for the university.

Monika (06:02):

Coming back to the program that I got my graduate degree from and helping advise students, helping expand the advisory board. And at that time was really interesting. Another transition in the industry because we were, you know, we was very CPG oriented, right? And then it wasn't all of a sudden we had tech companies on the board. I brought McKinsey onto the board. Uh, so big consulting, all sorts of other industries were getting into market research in a way that was different. And at that time it was like, well, p and g and General Mills know the best way to do research. And that really shifted right over the next 10 years to say, now there's all sorts of other methodologies, approaches and needs that are specific to industry. So kind of went through some of that change at UW Madison and then of course that entrepreneurial bug just keeps knocking at the door, right?

Monika (06:55):

And so I decided to start my own consulting firm. I decided to call it a brand consultancy and not call it a market research firm because what I loved, and you know, this is like a process of self-discovery and market research, right? What I love was design and reporting and I really loved the kind of like multi-stage research. So say have a company come to you and say, I wanna create a pipeline of new product ideas. Okay, to do that, we need to do this ethnographic, then this ideation, then this concept testing, then this product testing, right? And take it all the way through. So I, that was kind of fun for me. I started my consulting firm in 2008 in January of 2008. So we all know what happened later that year and I really had to kind of reinvent the practice because almost all my clients were laid off or the company's budgets were cut and I had to kind of start over and build a more scrappy company.

Monika (07:56):

And so that led me to doing different kinds of research, <laugh> and you know, finding my way through. And that ultimately led me to realize that we had an opportunity to do research differently on social media. And I was excited about that and that, and also, I mean, honestly I kind of felt like consulting was me selling my brain and I really wanted to create a company. And so the, the lure of tech kind of pulled me in to say I wanna shift from running a consulting firm to actually building my own technology. And so I basically went out and started a tech company.

Sebastian (08:34):

It's so interesting that that's kind of the timeline and, and how things lined up because you know, one of the things that a lot of the advisors here in in our startup accelerator are preaching to us is to like not really be discouraged by the macro picture of the economy. And that often recessionary periods are periods in which a lot of innovation emerges because people have to try different ways of doing things, right? And they often cite Uber, Airbnb companies like this emerged out of 2008 and it sounds like big site's a very similar story. I'm a little curious about the problems that you guys set out to solve with technology and maybe, and I might be going out on a bit of a limb here, but the way in which sort of you were present for that initial transformation of research from paper and pen and door to door to very technology driven and how you sort of went from observing that to actually being an active participant in that process.

Monika (09:29):

It was interesting. One of the things that of course happens when you get into consulting work is you do a lot of qualitative research, right? So I was doing a lot of qual work and what I found was that even those big companies that started with me in 2008 then kind of went away and then came back. They didn't have the budgets or the teams that they used to have. So they were trying to do these cool research programs with a lot less, and I was really enamored by the concept of social media and not big data, but qualitative, like what kind of contextual learning can you get? And so I was about it. I just ran an experiment. We ran a private Facebook group and we just had a conversation, I think it was on pets and we set up like a private group.

Monika (10:15):

We had this conversation on pets and I haven't even started moderating yet. People are posting pictures of their pets and having conversations with each other. And I'm like, wait a minute, this is different than any bullet board I've ever run. Right? And then I looked at like bulletin board <laugh> as like 11% penetration. Like people weren't even using a lot of these online tools and it just felt like the next frontier, right? It felt like this is where we needed to go, but we weren't there yet and why weren't we there yet? And why weren't people adopting online qualitative? And I felt like a lot of it had to do with that experience and there were big communities, but they took weeks to set up. And most of my clients were trying to do things quickly. And that's one of the reasons they came to me is 'cause I was nimble.

Monika (11:00):

I could do things quickly. And so that's what kind of led me down the path of saying, okay, well I want tech to do this. And honestly I thought, oh, I could just create a little Facebook app. That's what I thought, right? And then you jump down the rabbit hole of, well let me look into that and let me talk to some people and let me find out some more and let me meet with my friend Neil at the small business development center and oh well he, I should meet with Janet. Eddie and I should meet with, you know, and you just start meeting people, right? And you more and more people. And then by the end of the day I'm talking to somebody who's like, well you need six people and a million dollars to do this. Like, and a co-founder and, and all this stuff. And you just kind of go down the rabbit hole, right? And I think it was really exciting for me, it was also quite an adventure to try to figure out if I could do this. And I knew all the statistics around failures and, and all that. And I just felt like, hey, if I don't do this, somebody else will. And if I don't succeed, maybe I'll have regrets, but if I don't ever do it, I'll have more regrets. And that's what got me to just jump in and and give it a whirl.

Sebastian (12:07):

Fascinating. What was it that gave you the push to kind of go from the idea to actually embracing that risk of starting a company? Like was there a conversation or was there a moment where it sort of twigged that like, yeah, I'm all in on this.

Monika (12:22):

I being a research geek, I read a book. At the time the book was called The Lean Startup. I'm sure we all have heard of it by now, but at that time it was actually a pretty new book, <laugh>. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna run a test. Like is this really a thing or is this not a thing? There's only one way to find out will somebody buy, it's basically what the book said, right? Can you get someone to buy it or some surrogate of it or invest something to prove that it's not just an idea in your head. And at the time, one of my clients was subzero and they were doing these, whenever they put out a new appliance, they would put the appliance in people's homes. Okay? So sometimes they were employees, sometimes they were just people they found, but they gave them a free, very expensive refrigerator, stove, whatever, right?

Monika (13:09):

And they would run these tasks and they were, they took 90 days. They weren't really getting the feedback they wanted from them. And I'm like, okay, we can run these faster. They could start getting feedback every week, starting the first week rather than waiting the 90 days, right? So I'm like, I'll see, I'll see if I can sell it to them. So I put up the ideas like on a PowerPoint, but it wasn't even a like a product. And they said yes. And so I'm like, okay. So I found a platform, it doesn't exist anymore. It was called Intelligent. I licensed, I got one license for it. I stripped all the social marketing functionality of it. It didn't have any backend analytics that I needed for market research, but I could collect the data and I just did it and I tried it and they loved it. And that was the moment, right? That was the moment when I was all in with somebody bought it, paid for it. I did some version of it and it looked like it had fantastic results. And so I'm like, okay, I should now build something that I actually can sell <laugh> that's proprietary. You know,

Sebastian (14:13):

That is such a perfect execution of lean methodology. Like just the idea of selling something before you've even built anything. I wish that we were that disciplined about being as lean and as agile as you were. So yeah, amazing. That's inspirational. It's an interesting journey kind of res tech founder to now VP growth strategy at CMB. What was it that brought you to this role and what's the kind of work that you're doing now?

Monika (14:40):

When I sold dig site to question, well, it was a good question. Like what's next? What do I wanna do? And it took me a while to figure that out, I'll be completely honest. But one of the things that I figured out after a little trial and tribulation there was that what I love was not operation and execution, it was growth. What I really love was finding the product market fit, right? And figuring out the growth strategy. Like those are the things that really kind of light me up every day. And I happened to know Jim Garrity, a CEO of CMB and uh, reached out to him and said, you know, do you got anything? And he's like, no. Um, but then it came along like six months later he is like, wait, I do have this thing and here's what it is. And it was a really cool opportunity.

Monika (15:24):

You know, it's a company that is established, it's been doing really well. It's actually owned by a parent company, but it's employee owned. They have money to invest. They're, you know, they have a dedicated product development innovation team. They've been doing some really cool things with ai. And so here's a company that's got all their ingredients, but it has not yet really gone to market with what their solutions are. And so I came in really to help lead kind of sales and marketing and go to market strategy and figure out how to take it forward. You know, it's one of those meta things, right? Where I get do market research among market researchers about a market research solution. So it was kinda the perfect, perfect storm for me in terms of something that would be interesting and challenging and still tie into my tech roots, you know,

Sebastian (16:14):

So, uh, I always associate CMB with what I understand of the market research agency model generally. But I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about the newer solutions that you're involved with helping bring to market and ultimately align with the needs of the market.

Monika (16:30):

Essentially, CMB has a product development innovation team they've had for several years and they had looked at acquiring res tech. They looked at and have built some AI solutions. And then more recently, since all of the 1500 rest tech solutions that we have at our industry are now embedding ai, going through the process of vetting and validating many of those technologies and figuring out which ones apply and so forth. So that was something that they were really committed to. They're really focused on growth and they really believe that AI is part of our future. But I think what was really unique about CMB is they are steeped in a ton of knowledge and expertise that is very traditional market research, right? I mean, we know how to do things right, get the right sample, do the right methods, do the right analytics, right? And that's us, right?

Monika (17:22):

We're not like a lot of tech companies that maybe are kind of fall into market research, but are tech at heart. There are both on that side. I know, 'cause I started a tech company as a researcher, but I think what's really unique about CMB was this idea of instead of trying to focus on efficiency or cost savings or kind of the, the race to the bottom stuff that we've all felt pressure as an industry, right? We've all felt the pressure. I think they were looking at it more from a client impact perspective. How can I help my clients get to that launch, right? How do I help them make that decision? Because that's ultimately, I mean, when you have a company like CMB and you're so focused and so close to your clients in terms of your relationship, that's what you're thinking about. And so the way that they've applied ai, the way that they've brought it in and are using it, is much more strategic as opposed to just an efficiency play.

Monika (18:19):

And so that's really what led me to kind of over the last six months in kind of talking to our customers and prospects and, and kind of the team internally to talk about this AI plus AI solutions as the philosophy, the framework, and really the products that we're trying to bring to market. It's not a cookie cutter thing, it's a set of capabilities that now we can build upon to create proprietary approaches and methods. But it's based on the intersection of all the expertise that we have in both industry expertise and client expertise and research methodology expertise along with a whole lot of validation of a bunch of different tech methods and the recognition that right now, and it gonna change, right? At some future point, maybe there'll be one or two solutions out there that we can use. But in the interim there's 1500 and, and that's too much for our clients to sort through.

Monika (19:21):

So we really need to provide a point of view on which combination of tech might be useful for a particular application. And that is from a data collection standpoint, that is from validating quality sample. That's from doing analysis, right? That's from report visualization. I mean, there's just so many different ways that you can embed AI into your work that in some ways that art becomes our intellectual property that we can kind of work with our clients to deliver so that they don't have to focus on that. They can focus on impact and decisions and maybe how they're using AI in their daily life, but they don't have to worry about it in terms of how to build it into sophisticated market research.

Sebastian (20:07):

So it sounds like the, the idea behind AI plus HI is that it's a philosophy that ties together both sort of new product development, the implementation of those products on specific deliverables for clients and also, you know, curation of the existing off the shelf tools that might have a role to play in enhancing, again, sort of that very outcome focused approach to, it's kind of a step removed from just saying doing research. 'cause it's not so much about the process of research, it's about facilitating the client, getting to that stage in making that decision or releasing that product or whatever that requires that you guys are able to enable. And it, it sounds like AI plus HI is sort of the philosophy that ties all of that together.

Monika (20:51):

Yeah, that's a great way to, to put it. I mean, I think that where CMB has continued to evolve is the recognition that we are in the storytelling business, right? And we not only have to help our clients get good research that is accurate, that can help inform decisions, but we need to help them influence in the organization and create change in the marketplace, right? And AI is playing a role in that too, in organizations. And so we have to really think about that start to finish, beginning to end. How do we build a great relationship with our clients, but how do we help our clients be more impactful in their organizations? Because research is under an existential threat. Research is the first and most primary obvious application for ai, right? I mean, we're gonna just ask a question, we're gonna prompt a question and we're gonna get an answer that feels like research, but is it, research is a whole nother philosophical question, but I don't think CMB is looking at it like, nope, you know, that's not us. Instead we're looking at it as yes and <laugh>, right? Like yes, we need that. And yes, we need traditional methods and we're gonna have to figure out how they work together and what the best thing is for the situation. And by the way, some things AI does extremely well.

Sebastian (22:12):

The understanding that AI plus HI is that sort of philosophy or framework that ties everything together. What is sort of, if you could unpack for me the contents of that philosophy?

Monika (22:22):

Sure. What we look at AI plus ai, what we're looking at is what role does technology play in the work that we do? So foundationally, we're looking from start to finish at all the different places where AI can play a role in our work. And rather than looking at that, say, just from a theoretical point of view, we believe that we have to look at it from an executional point of view, right? From an operational op, optimizing point of view. So we are constantly looking for new tools, we're testing those tools, we're piloting tools with clients early stage, and then we're choosing what works the best and taking those forward. And with the help of the people on our team, really trying to create some standards or best practices around, okay, when and how do I apply that ai, right? Because if say you're gonna use it for betting your sample, you are gonna use it along with other things that we traditionally use, right?

Monika (23:24):

You're not just gonna use it and then say, oh, we're not gonna have to do any of these things anymore <laugh>. And by the way, that goalpost is gonna change in three months or six months. So we can't just say, oh, done check. This has to be an ongoing continuous process. And that's, I think what CMB is doing with ai plus AI is saying, this isn't a specific product, this isn't a specific solution. It can be, and it will be, and I guarantee you we will have very specific, and we do have some very specific methods, but that's going to evolve over time. So we're not going to just say, Hey, done. You know, we're gonna keep evolving the process. So in some ways it's a lot of what I did in tech startup land, but instead of having to build the tech myself, I get to work with a team that's vetting a lot of different tech and then figuring out how to operationalize it in their work. And then at the same time, trying to figure out how it intersects with our client needs and when is the right time to apply it and when is not the right time to apply it.

Sebastian (24:25):

Awesome. Monika, next question from me. And second last question of the interview. What keeps you motivated?

Monika (24:32):

I think deep down, I am a very curious person. I love solving problems, but probably even more than solving problems. I like the process of innovation. I like the process of discovering new things. And to me, innovation isn't a self, it's not a alone thing, right? <laugh>, it's a thing that you do collaboratively with others. And so that's what keeps me motivated, is the people that I work with and their smarts and their ideas that propel my ideas, that propel other ideas. And that is, to me, the magic that really keeps me engaged and motivated.

Sebastian (25:12):

I love it. If folks want to know more about CMB’s AI plus HI solutions, where can they go? Uh,

Monika (25:18):

Hop over to our website, right at the very top is, uh, download the AI plus HI guide. I, that's what I would recommend. It has a pretty clear definition of what the problem is and what the solution looks like in our mind and maybe how think about and vet various AI technologies, whether you are working with CMB or whether you wanna do this on your own. Give some of the frameworks and philosophy around, uh, uh, how to approach it.

Sebastian (25:41):

Monika, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Monika (25:43):

Yeah, I really appreciate it.