In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Sean McCullough, Sr. Brand Insights Manager for Coors Family of Brands, Imports, Economy, Non-Alc, & Whiskey at Molson Coors
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You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Spreaker. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.
Thor:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Consumer Insights podcast. Today, I'm excited to have a brilliant insights leader joining me for what I know will be an amazing conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Sean McCullough, Senior Insights Manager at Molson Coors, where he's been leading the brand and marketing insights team for their premium flavor, spirits, non-alcoholic and import beer portfolios. He's worked cross-functionally to launch and drive success with brands like Simply Spiked, Five Trail Whiskey, Zoa, and Topo Chico Hard Seltzer. For nearly 15 years, Sean has sought to deeply connect with and understand consumers to drive more effective innovation, brand, and marketing results across categories. Thank you so much for joining me, Sean.
Sean McCullough:
My pleasure. With an introduction like that, it's pretty easy to be here.
Thor:
I absolutely love the setting in which you're dialing in from. So with that setting in mind, could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your role and how you got to where you are today? How did it all begin?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It'd be my pleasure. So the first one of the first things I kind of tell everybody is that at the end of the day, I'm just a small town southern boy. I grew up in a small town of about 2000 people in East Tennessee. I ended up going to school in the Midwest and now I've been living in the big city of Chicago for over a decade now. So, you know, in addition to being a husband, father of two beautiful girls under six, I'm also, I feel the product of living across a lot of different places and pieces that really make America the melting pot that it is because the experience in Chicago, as you might expect, is nothing like the experience in release Tennessee. And yet the way humans all talk and interact with each other and our needs that ultimately we get from insights are all rooted in the same thing.
So I started my career actually funny enough in industrial transmission manufacturing. I was a company in Indianapolis and while I was there I traveled the US, Canada, China, you know understanding the global oil and gas and mining sectors and helping them build an innovation pipeline and really using insights as the lever for that. From there I moved to Chicago.
I wanted to be closer to my then fiance, now wife, and I worked for Nielsen for six years there. Three of those were with Basis, testing innovations and helping companies like Molson Coors to help uncover insights and launch better innovations. In fact, I loved Molson Coors back then, Miller Coors, so much that I decided to join their on-site Nielsen team and help them with their day-to-day data needs and lead a team of analysts across most of the portfolio. I then took a couple years, got my MBA, thought I wanted to be a consultant, but then ultimately went back to the client side and joined Conagra, helping lead their salty snacks and sweet treats insights. But in the back of my mind, I think Molson Coors was always just calling me because ultimately I ended up back here. I've now been here two and a half years. I lead our brand and marketing insights, as you mentioned, for our AP Flavors, spirits and non-alcoholic beer portfolios. I'm actually going to be leading our insight soon for our Coors family of brands, of course Banquin and Coors Light, as well as Miller High Life, Keystone Light, and our other value price beers, which I'm very excited to be doing that in addition to imports and some of the other brands I was working on previously.
Thor:
That's a fascinating journey you've had there, Sean. And with that journey in mind, and how would you define an insight? And do tell us how that definition has changed over the course of your career.
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, I really love that question a lot. You know, it's changed. If for no other reason it's changed, then it used to be something I read in a textbook and had very specific definitions to say, well, there has to be a tension and there has to be a solution. It has to be true for all human beings. And, you know, over time, I think what I've realized is what's changed about how I think about an insight isn't the exact definition of it. It's really where the insights come from. So I'm going to probably we go on a bit of a soliloquy here, but I promise it all ties together. For me, Insights really started in high school. We had a marketing club called DECA that we helped run the school store. We made Otis Spunkmeyer cookies and helped everyone get that sugar dose that they needed to get through their afternoon classes. And while helping run the store, I saw some really interesting patterns emerge. I saw all of our fruit sell out in the morning. And then we'd put more fruit out in the afternoon, but no one wanted it. That's when everyone moved on to candy, sugars and cookies and things like that. And that was when insights first struck me. And I said, cool. I can figure out what we need in the store in mornings and afternoons and what's going to sell and what I should put on sale simply by watching people do things. Wow. Insights is really easy. I can just do this my entire life. And then I started my real career at Allison transmission and I'm out in the oil fields. I'm in the mining grounds, I'm talking to people that work on the equipment, on the day -to -day, and I'm immediately able to uncover these really interesting insights and hear how people use the product, what their true needs really were. I said, well, I can't just watch people. I have to actually talk to them and hear what their needs are and hear how they use the product. And from there, I can make really cool innovations that are going to help them do their jobs better and help us on the business side to have a stronger business. So then I was off to Nielsen and I'm testing all these cool innovations and concepts and I'm looking at sales trends and diving through more data than I ever imagined existed. And I'm starting to see some things work, some things don't. I'm seeing that people always talk about how they're gonna go purchase organic and non-GMO products and all these health products, but then they don't actually do that in the real world because household penetration didn't follow those trends. And so then I said, I don't have to even talk to people for insights, I can just be behind a computer screen and I can look at all this world of data and that's going to give me everything I need to be able to help companies launch better products or have better marketing. I mean, it doesn't get easier than that. I don't even have to leave my home. So I go off into this world of consulting and I say, okay, I can sit down with groups of people and lead to these qual groups and I can understand how they all interact with each other. And I can use that to create strategies and innovation pipelines. And now I've finally made it to Molson course, where I've realized that, really thanks to the leadership that we've had here with our insights team,
that all of these lessons through life and all of these different moments of insights really come down to one thing, that insights come from everywhere. They aren't just one thing. They can't just be one thing. They can't just come from data. They can't just come from talking to people. Sometimes you're going to learn something by talking to people to a consumer.
Sometimes you're going to learn something because you pulled a certain data point out of Nielsen or IRI or your own internal sales. So at the end of the day, what is this insight to finally answer your question? At every point, I found that it's a piece of information. It doesn't matter how you gathered it, but it does have to be grounded in human behavior and in human needs that then ultimately guides a smarter business decision. And when you've got all of that combined, to me, that's what truly makes an insight.
Thor:
I love that definition. And when we were preparing for this episode, you mentioned that you strongly disagree with the idea that insights people don't need to be data experts. Can you tell us more about how you've come to this belief?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, absolutely. So if we just go back to that definition that we just laid out, if we at least believe it might be right, that it's information that's grounded in human behavior. Well, data is by far the biggest piece of information that we have around us. And conveniently, that information is all grounded in human behavior. While it might show up as a number on a screen, it's humans that power that household penetration number that you're pulling down or those sales trends that you see happening. And I'm not trying to say that to be successful in insights, you need to be able to run your aggressions and use R, you know, Python and all of these coding things. I mean, I can't do any of that. But you should be able to understand the output that they give you. You need to be able to understand when you're looking at sales numbers or looking at a regression or a conjoined analysis, like what it truly needs and how it comes together. You know, at the end of the day, you know, I was just reading the other day that 90 % of the world's data that we have has been created in the past two years. You know, we're going to create 60 times more data this year than we did in 2010. And if you can't pull that data down and understand it and learn how to use it, you're missing millions, if not billions of possible insights and ultimately millions of smarter business decisions that would come from.
Thor:
That's such a powerful number that you shared there, Sean. And you also shared that the understanding, that understanding the data makes you a better strategic partner in the long run. So what are some of the benefits you've seen here?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, I think it just, you know, for insights folks in particular, and if you're working with brand and marketing, or if you're more shopper insights or sales teams, you know, I think that's especially true for us. But honestly, I think everyone can benefit from it. You know, especially these days, we all get asked for a dozen things every single day. And, you know, it's my opinion that data really can help us answer so many of those needs and those questions so much faster because we don't have as much time as we used to, to go out and talk to consumers in real life and understand their needs. Or a lot of times we may not even have the budget to go do that. And so to me, being that good strategic partner means being able to go beyond that insight, have the entire business in mind, understand how these data points interact with each other, and then be able to help the brand team or your marketing team or whoever your partner is cross -functionally that you're working with. Be able to then understand when we go make this decision, it's likely to impact these other things. And if we go push Miller Lite forward and do this and this with it, it may impact Coors Lite based on these insights. And this is how we can think through that and use data to help prove that You know, when I was at Conagra, it really meant, you know, we use what we called evidence -based demand there. And it meant that I needed on a day -to -day basis to be able to pull down, interpret and utilize data from everything from Pinterest and Google trends and very simple things like that, to pulling down restaurant menus and sales figures, ultimately combining multiple data points into one story to say, this is why this product needs to exist. And this is why this innovation is a good idea. You know, and here at Molson, even I need to be able to interpret how those gains in one brand are going to impact all the other brands in our portfolio. Because that's the beauty of a portfolio of brands is you don't just have to think about one thing. You have to think about all of the brands and how those decisions come together to ultimately drive the business forward. And all of this is found in data. It's not found from just sitting around thinking about it. And data provides us answers. It provides proof to those answers when you need it. And it helps you find new things. It helps you find new products across categories, new ideas, new innovations that might serve your category. The information is truly limitless because we just create so much of it. And, you know, I think the thing that we forget so often that's so important with data is that it truly is grounded in human behavior, that all of the data we see, whether it's a Wikipedia article or Google trends or the sales data that we see in and out every day, that humans power that. And so to pretend like it's just a bunch of numbers on a screen, I think really does a disservice to what creates that data ultimately.
Thor:
And, I mean, doubling, doubling down on what you said or double clicking what you said right before, when you mentioned the fact that some people might react negatively when they hear that, and they start thinking about learning Python and R and all those things. There might be listeners that perhaps don't see themselves as data experts. What advice would you give those looking to rescale or upscale?
Sean McCullough:
Great, and I think that's completely okay. I certainly am not a data expert. I couldn't begin to code something if my life depended on it. But I know people that do know how to do that. And I love having conversations with them and learning from them. And ultimately I'm able to understand the output from those. I'm able to understand the inputs that I should think about so that we can have better results, you know, come out of the work that they're doing. And to me, it's just start anywhere. It's you know, if you're an insights person, you think you always believe it's never too late to learn. And, you know, one of the things that I think is most helpful is just the people around you. Odds are good. You know, somebody, even if not at your own company, somebody in your network that truly is a data person, whether that's an IRI or a Nielsen person or whether that's somebody that codes and uses Python and deep analytics.
Data people love helping each other. We love teaching people things. I get so much joy when somebody comes to me asking how to pull something from Nielsen or from Circana and I can help them understand what those data points mean.
And I found that to be true my entire career is that data people love helping other people become data people and understand data. Once you're there, if you've got sales data, just dive into it. Take a poke around. You're not going to break anything. And, you know, understand, look at what's happening in your category. See what's going up, see what's going down, and then ask why. Say, this competitor, they're getting a lot more sales than they had last year. They're up 40%. Well, what caused that? And ask why. Was it distribution? Have they had pricing activities happening? Did something new just launch in the category? Well, if that just launched, why is that launch already outpacing my sales? So find these data points and then start to ask why. And as you ask why, you're going to find yourself just naturally going down the rabbit hole. But don't be afraid to ask for help. That's the beauty, I think, of when you find insights and data people together is we can't help ourselves. We love helping people.
Thor:
On the topic of naturally going down the rabbit hole, the value of curiosity is something that's been discussed a lot on this podcast. And it's something I understand that you also see as being crucial. You shared a great story about cornbread of all things when we were preparing for this episode. Can you enlighten the audience on the connection between curiosity and cornbread?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, so as I kind of alluded to a bit ago, that to me, incessantly asking why is, in my opinion, one of the biggest superpowers an insights partner can have. You know, we should almost be toddlers in the way that we just endlessly ask why, no matter where we are, no matter what we're looking at. You know, unfortunately for my wife, I think for the spouses of many of us that are in insights, you know, I'm an absolute nightmare to go shopping with.
Especially if we're in a grocery store. If something seems weird, I'm going to go ask why. Whether that's a display that seems a little out of place or doesn't make sense to be where it is or whether I pass somebody an aisle and their cart just looks a little funny. They've got something weird in there that doesn't quite make sense to me. So back when I was at Conagra, I was working on the launch of the new Dolly Parton baking mixes. And at that time we were exploring launching a cornbread mix, which ultimately did launch. And one evening and I was at the store just grabbing a couple things that we needed and I go down the mix baking mix aisles I did often around that time and I saw a guy with he must have had 20 boxes at the small little jiffy cornbread boxes and That's that's a lot of cornbread and I think there must be a sale and I go do I need some cornbread tube I look up there's no pricing sticker. It's the normal full price say well "Are they out of the value pack and he just needs a lot of cornbread?" I look over, nope, the value box is sitting right there. Say, okay, I've got an odd situation. So I had to ask. And I just go, what are you doing with all this cornbread?
And, you know, but this is probably a good time for me to mention that I don't just go around to costing people in grocery stores and slamming them with questions and, you know, off the gun. And I don't recommend anyone else do that. You know, I introduce myself, I tell them what I do for a living. I ask them if they have a couple of minutes and I'm happy to walk around the store with them so I don't have to interrupt their trip. Highly recommend that as the way to go about it rather than just stopping their shopping cart in the middle of an aisle. So he talked about how he and his family, they eat cornbread a lot of times with their meals. Sometimes it's just he and his wife, other times neighbors may come over, maybe their kids, and they never really quite know how much they're going to need on any given day or any given week. So the problem with the value bag though was they felt like if it had been opened and not used immediately that it would go bad. So they always just got the smaller ones and combined them to make bigger batches as they needed.
Now we didn't ultimately create a product from this, but I heard his story and I started reading tonight said there is a world where a value-sized box of this with separate stay fresh compartments would actually be useful for consumers like him who are big cornbread lovers these all the time That want to buy in bulk but are worried about sacrificing freshness One other shorter story. I'll share that just happened really literally last month I was walking into our local grocery store and I saw a somewhat older gentleman coming out with a shopping cart full of nothing but Pilsner or KEL. He had cases of Pilsner or KEL. And this is not a super popular brand in America, despite being the original Pilsner. It's an especially old brand from the Czech Republic. So of course I stopped him. In this case, at least I was happy to introduce myself, tell him that I worked on the brand here in the States. Take a short pause. He nearly tackles me. He was so excited to meet somebody that worked on this brand. And the long and short of it was that he and his family just recently moved here to Illinois from Russia or from Ukraine after Russia's invasion. And this was one of the ways that he and his family kept memories of home alive was by drinking Pilsner or KEL. And, you know, there's no insights that comes from that. But, you know, at the end of the day, I encourage this curiosity as often as possible in the real world. You're not always going to get cool innovation ideas. You're not always going to unlock a promotional idea. In fact, you rarely are. Most of the time someone's gonna say please get away from me I don't want what you're selling or they're just gonna say I don't know why I just grabbed it. But sometimes something cool is gonna happen. You might help somebody find something in the store that they didn't know existed. You might discover an unmet need like needing separate compartments in your cornbread. Or maybe you'll just find somebody that loves your brand, that loves your products, and you have an opportunity to say thank you, which frankly goes a lot farther than I think a lot of us realize.
Thor:
That was such a beautiful story. Now in preparation for this episode, you also share that you think insights leaders need to stop defaulting to, we need to research. Can you tell us more about what you mean here?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, you know I think for me with defaulting to research.
The reality of the world is we just don't have unlimited money. We don't have unlimited time to go do all of this research. And I think as time has progressed, and as my career has progressed, I've just seen that the budgets and the time that we have to find an answer just gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
And this is especially true for smaller brands and smaller companies. And so I think we have this tendency that we desperately want the consumer stamp of approval on whatever it is that we're working on. If we don't have that, we can't move on to the process. But as I've started to reflect more and become a little older, I think I've started to find that, you know, let's say you're launching a new chocolate candy company and you're going to make chocolate bars. Do you really need to talk to consumers to understand what flavors you need to make? No, you need a milk chocolate. You need a dark chocolate. Maybe you need a white chocolate. If you're going to go make a cheddar, a gluten-free, Cheeto, which I'm sure already exists, but let's pretend it doesn't and we're in this world and you work for Ooty's or Glutino and you want to make a gluten-free Cheeto. Do you really need to test the taste of it or can you use just some internal employees and say, hey, does this taste like a Cheeto? And do those internal comparisons because you know that's what consumers want. The marketplace decided a long time ago that that's what a cheeto should taste like.
Thor:
I think that's such a good example and I think we can relate to it. But what do you think, like when people hear this, I think it will feel very obvious to many of the listeners. But what do you think they should become much better at doing instead?
Sean McCullough:
So I think a lot of it is, you know, we talked about data earlier, it's using that data to really understand, you know, what you have and what you already know. You know, you can go find a leader in the space that you're wanting to enter or in a flavor that you're wanting to enter. So use them and use that as your standard for what your product should taste like. Consumers have decided what the best chocolate in the world is. Consumers have decided what the best soda in the world is. That's why we have leaders in those spaces. And so go use that unless you believe that there's a major flaw with that product or unless you believe that you've truly have the opportunity to create something that can supersede somebody that's been a market leader for decades then you can probably use your own employees and just see if what you've got matches it without having to go spend hundreds of thousands of dollars testing that product with consumers. Or even, you know, when we launch, you know, flavors and flavored alcoholic beverages.
Do we, do you need to know which flavors to put in that variety pack? Do you need to test that with consumers? It's helpful, no doubt. It helps drive certainty. But when you're short on time, when you're short on budget, you can look across the category. You can see where gaps might be, where you can offer some distinction. You can also see where you just, you have to have a strawberry, for example. That's a flavor, no matter where you are in fruit flavored things, there has to be a strawberry. You can also leverage the employees you have. I love what we do at Molson Coors and I'm really proud of how we do it. We have employee resource groups like many companies do. But those groups participate with us as part of our marketing and part of our brand process. For example, we did a brand activation project, I believe it was last year, called the Coors Light Beer Bale. We didn't, and it was just a straw bale that looked like it was also operated as a cooler.
We didn't have to talk to 200 consumers to understand if this was cool or how best to do it. We were able to pull together our own internal employees. We have what we call the rural council and talk to them and see like, does this make sense? Is this fun? Do we need to use hay or do we need to use straw? And we got these learnings that helped really make it an amazing brand act for us. And then ultimately the third thing I say is just leverage the expertise that you and those around you have. You know, something like pack design, for example, it can be highly subjective and you can test it five ways from Friday and sometimes get five different answers. But I can also say if you've got 10 people in the room and they have a combined 150 years of packaging experience, they can likely tell you what is and isn't working and why on that package and how to optimize that package based on what your goal is, the market place is.
Thor:
That is such good advice. And earlier this year, if we switch topic for a second, you gave not one, but two presentations at Quirk Chicago, covering some of the research that you and your team have been involved in on major consumer cultural shifts, as well as the psychology of rural Americans. Can you share a bit more background on these projects?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, so the first presentation I did really was more of a panel interview. So at least some of the pressure was off of presenting on that. It was with Jesse Higgins over at Toluna and the very wonderful Ebony Washington over at Beam Suntory. And we talked about all of these major shifts we're seeing in drinking habits across age groups. While this is driven primarily by LDA or what we call legal drinking age, Gen Z, the growth of non -alcoholic products, products like Peroni Zero Point Zero and Blue Moon Non-Alc here for us at Molson Coors. We find that more consumers, regardless of age, are choosing these non-alcoholic substitutes than they ever have before. More of these products exist than ever have before. We're also finding that fewer members of LDA Gen Z are choosing to drink alcohol at all. And those that are drinking are drinking a lot less of it.
And so for companies like Molson, like Beam Suntory, this is a huge shift and something that you can't just kind of bat away and say well it'll all eventually change. It's not. It is a trend that is very much here to stay and luckily for us it's one that we embraced a long time ago and we've you know fortunately been very ahead of the curve on this and this was part of why we evolved ourselves from a beer company to a full beverage company. It's why we also offer spirits, it's why we have created more non-alcohol products over the past few years, it's why we also operate in things like energy drinks. So that no matter what consumers are seeking in the occasion, we have a product for that. And personally, I feel I'm very lucky that I get to work across this entire spectrum, that I get to work in spirits and help our whiskey brands along their journey. I get to work with our non -alcohol brands and help them along their journey. While I'm also getting to see all of the changes that happen every year, things like hard seltzers and things like flavored alcoholic beverages. And it just, it doesn't get much better than that to be able to drive insights and drive innovation in those areas.
The second presentation that you mentioned was with our friends and partners over at Olson's Altman to present some work that we've been doing over the years with them to continue to more deeply understand our rural consumers and better connect with them. And when Olson had first come to us with this presentation and wanted to say, hey, I would like to talk about rural consumers, he said that's a fantastic idea. Because when I even think of all the insights conferences I've been to over the years, I had never heard anyone talk about rural consumers, you know, despite the fact that they make up 20 % of the consumers in our nation. And for a lot of brands, machine and beer brands, a lot more of our volume. So I said, let's do it. Well, it turned out that it wasn't just a great opportunity to talk about rural consumers. It was really great opportunity to talk about humans because nearly every presentation I'm sure as you saw it quirks was about AI. And while that's fascinating for us. We then looked at Olson's projects over time, because we no longer were able to say, hey, at least we're going to talk about rural consumers. And we said, wow, Olson has done thousands and thousands of these deep consumer learnings over the years, cross categories. Only four of them were about rural consumers. And we, I mean, proudly, we were accounted for three of those.
And so it made it very clear, this is a group that just isn't talked about and needed more attention. So we talked about different ways that you can talk to rural consumers because you can't just necessarily treat rural consumers the same way and expect the same answers. Being in person, being able to sit down and understand and get to know people is a lot more important. Understanding the value of community to the rural consumer. These are the kinds of things that I think really helped us progress so much as a company over the past 10 years and ensure that we're looking at all of our consumers.
Thor:
And did you find any learnings that you think could be relevant for brands and other verticals? If so, what recommendations would you give based on your findings?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think if we start with LDA Gen Z, you know, the first thing that we all had to learn quickly was to just drop all of our assumptions about this group. We had to leave our old research hat behind because we can't research that group the same way that we would any other. And really just buckle up because this group, they are breaking every mold that exists. What they expect from their brands, what they expect from their products is changing so fast and so much faster than what it did for millennials and for Gen X before them. And they are incredibly knowledgeable consumers, much again, much more so than any generation before them. They're going to look up things about your product and they aren't going to hesitate to call you out if things don't line up, whether that's on the product or whether that's in your marketing. Secondly, with this group, they've really grown up with an incredibly unique set of circumstances. You know, they've not known a world without social media.
You know, if you think of with millennials, at least we kind of had a world before computers and a world post computers. They've they have no idea what that could even look like. And then amid that, their most formative years were completely sideswiped by this multi-year pandemic that mostly kept them inside. And so one thing that we found is that this group is all about the in-person social occasion. You know, in our case that, you know, you think of for Gen X and millennials and even boomers, that end of the workday drink or that nightcap, you know, is just something that you would just do. Maybe not every night, but you know you would have have one with LDA Gen Z, that just doesn't really exist at all, or at least at a much, much lower rate than it did with older generations. And so what we found is that if you want to talk to and target this group, really with alcohol or with anything, you have to figure out how your product fits into these social occasions and what it means socially for your brand and for whatever it is that you're selling. Otherwise, there's likely opportunities that you're missing and leaving on the table. Rural lens, the biggest thing I think anyone can take away is that you can't take any group of consumers for granted, period. And when you're on, especially a big brand, it's vital to understand all of your consumers.
We talk all the time that we're targeting Latino, this brand is targeting Latino consumers, this brand might be targeting Gen Z, LDA Gen Z, this brand might be targeting female consumers. You still have to understand all the consumers that consume your product that may love your brand for one reason or another. Not just the young consumers that you're filling the funnel with, not just that specific demographic that your newest campaign is targeting, all of them. And so, you know, my recommendation for any insights professional in this is have a very real sit down with your brand and ask yourself how much you know about all of your consumers. Go understand, see where your volume is coming from and say, hey, we might be targeting this group with our marketing, our advertising, but we still can't forget about this other group that actually makes up 40 % of our sales and we have to make sure that we understand them and their needs and find how that matches with the needs of this newer demographic that we're targeting. And then once you understand those gaps, go do some research.
Thor:
I love this. It's a lot of fascinating things and there are so many questions I want to ask you. But I think you've shared some really insightful learnings with us today. But if you had to summarize, what's the one big takeaway you want listeners to get from this episode?
Sean McCullough:
Yeah, I think for me when I think about having curiosity and I think about being a good partner and a good insights professional, I think about being a toddler. And that is really how you go do it is go be a toddler. Seriously, go hang out with some toddlers for even 10 minutes. And I think you'll understand. You know, I'm very lucky that I have two wonderful girls. They're five and two. And they show me every single day what it means to be a toddler. And I see how that comes through in my day to day work. So, you know, the first thing is just ask why constantly. I know we talked about this earlier, you know, when a client or a counterpart asks you a question, ask them why they're asking the question, because there's always an ask behind the ask. And frankly, you're probably going to be able to serve up something more helpful by asking that question. And when you think you see something in data or in a report, ask why that's true or ask why that makes sense or why not. Even once you get an answer, continue to ask why.
The second is have an opinion. If you've spent a little bit of time with toddlers, particularly ones in that kind of three to five range, you know they have opinions and a lot of them and they're strong opinions. Well, you should have the those two. You know, I found as my career has progressed that insights leaders, especially experienced insight leaders, we are a wealth of cross category knowledge, especially too when we've been at different companies and worked across categories. Weirdly, with an insights professional, I feel like you simultaneously know much more than you think you do and not nearly as much as you think you do. And so you can use those opinions to kind of play devil's advocate whenever you can in a meeting, because that's what's going to help you find the lie.
If somebody has an assumption, ask them why they have that assumption and give an opinion that may be different to that assumption. And finally, keep learning. That's the beauty of toddlers too is they learn so much so fast because once you learn, you can then inform those opinions and change those opinions that you're especially as an insights professional, your opinion should never be locked in stone because we are always taking in new information. And I I'm amazed all the time by my toddlers how much they're learning every day, the questions they ask me and even why they ask me. This was just a few weeks ago, my oldest, we were in the car, we had turned the blinker on to indicate that we were turning. And she asked what that clicking sound was in the car. And we explained, well, it's the blinker. It tells the cars around us that we're making a turn so that we can all be safe. And she goes, well, how do they hear it? And it's such a perfect question.
Thor:
Such a good question.
Sean McCullough:
Because of course, why would she know that there's electronics that go to the car that make a light flash that then tells everyone around us that we're turning? And so their ability to keep learning, to ask these questions that sometimes seem really obvious, but from her perspective is the perfect question to ask. So by asking why, by seeing what these sellers do is show me one, I don't know anything and I need to continue learning. I need to continue to see things from other perspectives so that ultimately we can have the best opinions and the best insights that then lead, you know, hopefully those better business decisions at the end of the day.
Thor:
Such an amazing example. Sean, it hurts me but we've come to the end of this episode and I have one last question that I want to ask you, which is who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?
Sean McCullough:
Man, that is a good question. You know, I have always wondered what the insights world over at Disney has to look like. And so I think it would be whoever runs insights for Disney parks specifically because when you think about something that combines an endless supply of data with people who genuinely care and love something so much and are creating these core family memories that are going to last forever and you have the opportunity to do that to make or break it in so many different ways. The amount of learning that you can come from that, that you can take away from that, and that you can help put forward to make people's enjoyment that much better, it's just, it's gotta be maybe the second coolest insights job in the world behind working in beer.
Thor:
I would agree with you. That must be very exciting. So I might just eavesdrop on that conversation if I see that lunch is going on somewhere. Wow. This has been such an incredible conversation, Sean. Your perspective on insights is truly unique and I really believe we can all learn from it. Now, before we end today's episode, I'd love to return to some of the moments of our conversation that have really stuck with me. And when I asked you to define an insight, you told me that it used to be something you would read in a textbook, but over time, what has changed is more in terms of where the insights come from. And you reminded us that insights come from everywhere. They aren't just one thing. And sometimes it can be a story from a consumer and sometimes it's a data point. At its simplest level, it's a piece of information grounded in human behavior and needs that helps guide smarter business decisions. When we talked about research in general, you reminded us that we don't really have unlimited money and we don't have unlimited time to conduct research, but we have a tendency that we somehow want and seek the consumer stamp of approval. But instead you advise us to leverage the data we have, leverage the employees we have around us and leverage the expertise you and those around you have. And finally, you encouraged us to be a toddler, to ask why, to ask why again, and to never stop learning. I know that I've learned a lot from talking to you today, and I'm sure our audience has as well. So thank you so much for joining me.
Sean McCullough:
It is absolutely my pleasure. I think the beauty of Insights, at least to me, is we have one of the coolest jobs on earth. We get paid to sit around, to talk to other human beings, and simply to learn. And when you think about the idea of just getting to learn every single day and get paid to do it, it's hard to get better than that.
Thor:
Amen.