The Reality Advantage™ Series - Max Keane
"Very few things good come from a culture of fear"
Welcome to the third post in The Reality Advantage™ Series.
In this series we chat with marketing leaders, clients, and friends about the importance of human-led research, and the difference it can make to brands and businesses.
We believe that in an industry increasingly dominated by big data and AI, understanding real people is more important than ever.
Whilst more and more brands are buying synthetic realities to help them deliver work quicker than ever before, we believe the brands who want to go deeper with real people and understand what’s really going on in their lives benefit from a Reality Advantage™ that their competitors don’t.
Each post in this series explores how speaking to humans uncovers deeper truths, and how this kind of research works alongside other approaches to create strategies that can create disproportionate results.
In this post we’re going to be talking to Max Keane, CSO at VCCP Blue. Max is a friend and a client - and we’ve worked together on a few different projects over the past few years.
Chatting to Max
I always enjoy catching up with Max - the conversation turns from agency life to strategy, from brands to darts(!), and there are always areas he shares that gets my grey matter buzzing.
When we chatted, Max shared a few things I thought were really interesting.
Discussing how far synthetic data can go
Inevitably, and quickly, our chat turned to synthetic data. And as we’ve mentioned previously, we’re not anti-synthetic. We think there’s a real use to it… but it’s limited. It can miss the little nuggets, the looks, the feeling of people’s lives.
Max highlighted a project we’d worked on a while back to exemplify this point.
“ I was looking at that piece of work you did for us on Müller. We were talking about families that are on the breadline and what they can do to add value and provide value. And you've got a lovely little insight in there: there's pride in poverty - not in terms of poverty porn, but the sense that the conviction, the pride that the respondents were telling you in terms of how they're navigating the breadline. Not cowering in vulnerability. There's a sense of graft and grit to it, which you would just wouldn't get from a synthetic piece of data, which just says these people are struggling to make ends meet.”
Sharing how a bad meeting got him back to basics
Max shared a story about when he’d had a bad meeting with a fast food brand. Afterwards, he got back to basics: he went and observed.
A simple thing, that anyone can do, that is underutilised, but is incredibly powerful. Just watching people in the relevant environment, spotting behaviours, trends, themes…
“We had a big presentation to a global CMO of a big fast food brand and we got our arses handed to us, and I just got in the car and sat in a drive-thru for the rest of the afternoon, watching people place orders. And actually it was the interaction that people have and how they navigate the menu and how they refer to different things that all of a sudden offers so much more insights, sort of fuel for, for lateral thinking, that you just don't get a focus group, right. Because of the artificial environment.”
How observation is as important as what people say
We discussed how the beauty of what we do is beneficial because we not only chat in-depth with people over a period of time, but we observe their behaviours too. Their behaviours can sometimes augment what they’re saying, but sometimes they can contradict what they’re saying… and that’s sometimes where the magic is…
“There is a fundamental paradox to research isn't there… because it's inherently system one thinking that you're trying to get to, but in order for the respondent to get it out it's got to go through the system two… filter to reach us. And I think where the stuff that we did together on Müller was really brilliant in getting to that system one the non-verbal cues, the essence of what it's really like to be in that audience, that life stage and what the real need states were. The application of that was incredibly powerful in developing the strategy. ”
Fundamental skills for Planners
As an ex Planning Leader myself, I asked Max what some of the fundamentals are that he wants his team to embody. One of them is the simple but powerful skill of talking to people. Getting out there and chatting to real people.
With all the pressure Planners are under at the moment, it’s great to hear this is still happening because it’s still so important.
“ What we talk to the team about is ‘do as much firsthand as you can’. We're quite good at that at VCCP in terms of when we don't have budget, we will go out onto the street and do Vox Pops, street interviews… Because I think even though it's quick and dirty, there's just, there's no replacement for it.”
Where research is powerful
We chatted about the fear that seems to be growing in the industry. The fear to experiment, try, push, challenge. Max shared a thought about how the industry is currently using research that reflects this fear.
“The old Ogilvy quote:… ‘people use research like a drunk uses the lamppost for support not illumination’ and I know it's a bit of a trope now but it feels so true… a lot of the time… we're doing this to pass to the next stage rather than to learn how to… understand what is going on with people, or how to improve or how to enhance. And I think it's quite a corrosive place for us to be - very few things good come from a culture of fear. ”
We all need to up our game
I’ve been in debriefs with Max, and they’ve been great. He and his teams are collaborative but also challenging and they want great research to power their strategic leaps. Just how we like it.
But we need to make sure we deliver beyond what AI can deliver. We always try and do this - sometimes we get it right, sometimes not. But we need to make sure we’re constantly delivering something of value, otherwise smart planners like Max will legitimately look elsewhere!
“It's been a little while since I’ve sat in exploratory strategic insight research and sat and thought ‘fuck me wow that's killer’... it has been a while since I've seen a research deck and thought oh that's that's come out of left field.”
And that’s the opportunity that Meet the 85% and our peers, partners and collaborators all need to grasp. We need to make sure we’re constantly reminding our clients why they should work with us.
The magic of reality, the texture of humanity, the feeling of real people. Combine that with our strategic brains, and that’s what we’re all selling. And it’s a beautiful and powerful thing when it comes together.
I’d like to thank Max for his time - it’s always a pleasure to chat to him.