In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Tara Kenneway, Senior Brand Strategist and Insights Manager at T-Mobile.
Insights isn’t a standalone discipline.
The more you work in concert with other areas of the business, the more likely you are to deliver on consumers wants and needs.
In this episode, we’re joined by Tara Kenneway, Senior Brand Strategist and Insights Manager at T-Mobile, as she explores how to build insightful brands through an interdisciplinary approach. She discusses the intersection of insights, brand strategy, and product development, leading to a comprehensive understanding of consumers that goes beyond the obvious.
We also discuss:
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 an amazing insights leader. Joining me for what I know will be an incredible conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Tara Kenneway, Senior Brand Strategist and Insights Manager at T-Mobile. For more than 25 years across interbrand, LPK, Marsh Partners and T-Mobile. Tara has enjoyed the challenge of helping brands create competitive advantage through insight-driven strategy and design. From positioning, equity tool development, and insight mining to product innovation and execution, she believes in leveraging traditional brand building tools while still knowing when to innovate and even break the rules. Tara fosters problem solving in her teams and coaches to strengths. She believes that when we combine our natural curiosities, we can design excellence. Thank you so much for joining me, Tara.
Tara Kenneway:
Thank you for having me. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.
Thor:
we want to get to know you. So could you take a couple of minutes and tell us about yourself, your role and how you got to where you are today? How did it all begin?
Tara Kenneway:
Sure, I love that question because it all began in something that's still really important to me and fundamental to how I approach work and approach leadership. And that is I wanted to be an advertising copywriter. And so I went to school and studied creative writing and I actually went out into the world and did what I studied and became an advertising copywriter.
Communication and that way of connecting with consumers was sort of fundamental to launching me in what now is really, like you mentioned, a career rooted in strategy and brand work and insights.
So I started as a copywriter and sort of a traditional media agency. And then as I grew in my career and the questions got bigger and more interesting, I sort of just naturally started to gravitate to strategy because the creative execution, as fun as that is somebody's usually handing you a brief and you're executing against it. And I was more curious in how's this brief even getting created? And so this is definitely the Cliff Notes version of my career, but over time I just found that's how I oriented. And then I was at a brand consultancy, spent a number of my careers as a consultant to Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, which is sort of, you know, a great place to really learn brand strategy and how to take things to market. Spent a lot of that time on the Pampers brand. And I feel like that's what really taught me the value of insights because they had big budgets, deep pockets, and really could do a whole bunch of robust research. Ultimately, that's where I found myself just orienting more and more. And when I joined T -Mobile about five and a half years ago, it to me felt like that unicorn kind of role because I was going to kind of take all this past experience I had in branding and in strategy and go to market execution and get to lead teams that live across all of those spaces. So that's my journey.
Thor:
Such a fascinating journey though, and with that experience, I want to know how would you define an insight and tell us how that definition changed over the course of your career.
Tara Kenneway:
Yeah, I love that. I think there's sort of an academic definition of insight that probably a lot of your listeners already would snap to and say, you know, it's a consumer truth. And in some ways, it needs to be beyond what's obvious.
But I think in what I've seen most successful around insights is it's something that truly is actionable.
So one example of this would be the difference between somebody, you know, I could say, hey, guess what? Everybody wants this type of device, this type of cellular device. I mean, okay, that's not that actionable. But if we understand it's really more about social pressure and fear of missing out and there's specific cues that tell people, this is the phone for me and this is how I'm going to share it via word of mouth, and this is why I want to share it, because of X, Y, and Z, those are much more powerful insights. So it really needs to go beyond the obvious, I would say. That's a really good insight.
Thor:
I absolutely love that. And one thing that I think is really interesting is that in your current role responsibilities, they cover both brand and insights. Now, I think some might see the creative nature of brand strategy and the more scientific nature of insights work as being at odds with each other. What have you learned and actively working with both disciplines?
Tara Kenneway:
This is a very loaded question, Thor. So, okay, I'm going to start with like painting a picture of the Venn diagram. In your mind, think about insights, think about brand strategy, and I'm going to add a third one because that's product and product development, which my team also handles insights around. And if you overlay those, it's almost one circle. Those things..
Thor:
Hahaha!
Tara Kenneway:
They are at odds with each other. It's a good, healthy tension, I would say, because we need to kind of be in concert with one another, those disciplines, and we also need to challenge. So in the tech space, in wireless, you might have a team that's off chasing a really cool technical thing that the engineering team has uncovered, like, hey, this is something we could bring to market. But unless they're bringing brand strategy along, and unless we're building a robust learning plan where we're really gauging things with consumers and ideally bringing them in really early and helping to iterate and shape how this is going to come to life, then it's just going to be weaker by nature if you don't have all those disciplines along. And I've seen the same thing happen with maybe an initiative that starts in brand strategy. We did a big adjacency stretch project last year. We're exploring different categories where T -Mobile can go and has a right to win. You could do that in isolation, certainly. And that's kind of how it was originally briefed. Let's look at this just from a brand strategy standpoint. But hey, why wouldn't we bring CS and A along? And these teams that already kind of have tenure out ideas and yes, that's a little messier. It's a little trickier to get all those people together and align the work. But in the end, it makes it better and stronger. And so we came out of that body of work, not just knowing here's some territories that we want to go explore immediately and longer term, but we actually had ideas already coming out of that body of work. And I don't think we would have done that if brand strategy hadn't brought those other groups along. So I think they're complementary.
Thor:
I love that. And if we build on that, what priorities do you think are essential when looking to build insightful brands?
Tara Kenneway:
There's so many things to prioritize. I mean, fundamental, and I realized again, this is probably 101, but we need to talk to consumers early and often. And I do think sometimes in the innovation space, you hear people say things like, well, consumers can't tell us what the future looks like almost like it's going to be wasted time to go out and learn or deep dive. And I just, I believe that's not true. People are savvy. I give consumers a lot of credit to be able to help you ideate into the future. Sort of along the same lines, I think trends are really important in understanding what's culturally relevant to now, sorry, and trying to forecast what's going to be culturally relevant, again, like two, five, 10 years out. Because I feel like that's another element that often gets backburnered, is looking at the cultural relevance of something. You can have a great idea, you can have a segment that's excited about it and has a big appetite and unmet need. But if you're gonna kind of have a lame effort when you go to market, the whole thing could fall apart. So I think more attention to forecasting trends and bringing that into work streams is another big piece that I think is important to prioritize.
Thor:
And when we were preparing for this episode, you mentioned that you used to believe that communities were not a good research tool, but you've since changed your mind. Can you tell us a bit more about that journey and why did you disagree and what made you change your mind?
Tara Kenneway:
I have. Yes, I've changed my mind over the years about a lot of things because I think you just have to sometimes lean into things and go, you know what, I'm wrong or the tools have changed. Certainly certain research instruments have changed and improved. But the interesting thing about communities, here was my prejudice that I had that people get really conditioned in a community. And why would I want to go back to the same people, time and again. It's the same reason I hated building panels. Companies would say, we're going to just run some quick research with our employees. And I would, like my mind would explode. Like, why would you want to talk to your employees? Like, they're so biased. Anyway, that's a different issue. With communities, that was my bias is, you know, you're just going back to the same well over and over. But here's what I've thought more about. We're all conditioned as consumers. And people who are passionate about a category or a product or a brand, they're great to speak with because they can be your ambassadors. They may be like your bullseye target. And I no longer think it's such a bad thing to talk to people that know a lot about the world of wireless or home internet or devices. It's amazing sometimes to me when despite all our screening to get people into like a qualitative group. And we'll wanna make sure, you know, that they don't work necessarily in our category. And they're so savvy. They know so much. There's just a lot at your disposal now. And if you are interested in, you know, doing speed tests on your phone every five minutes, you can. And so I think with communities, having a group you go back to time and again can be a real positive. And even if they're not like your super fans or uber fans of your brand. Certainly all the efficiencies and things that come along with the community and control of sample. Again, like we're all so tired of the bots and scrubbing data and being able to sort of preserve and protect a sample is just a huge relief, something you don't have to think about because you kind of set it up and you get your criteria in place and you can kind of control that. So that's another thing I really love about communities and we're using them more and more at T-Mobile.
Thor:
But you mentioned, I mean, you mentioned a lot of interesting points here. I mean, on the one hand, you mentioned that the communities can, as an example, allow you to speak to your ambassadors, you know, as you said, a group of very savvy people. But would you say that there are any use cases where you don't think communities are a good fit?
Tara Kenneway:
I've only had one truly not great experience with a community and it's more in the way that we set it up. So I guess you could maybe call that a use case. And it was because it was a very intentional longitudinal study.
And I feel like it was used because we were out of other options for a variety of reasons. And so we were trying to understand if we were moving the needle from a brand equity standpoint in very specific markets.
And so we screened and created a community and it was 12 months long, which is really hard for a community because, you know, you just naturally get a lot of attrition. It's hard to keep engagement high, but it just wasn't realistic, I think, to do something with those kinds of numbers that you have in a community when we really probably in hindsight should have gone out to those targeted zip codes and done some deep qual. So that probably just wasn't the use case. But one thing I do want to add is I think talking as much as we talked about super fans, talking to your detractors is something I'm a big fan of too. Not always necessarily in a community, but when they pop up in a community, we've done IDIs with them. We no longer screen them out of any qualitative work. That was something I changed when I joined T-Mobile because I really believe you can learn a lot from the people who would not consider you. Are they great to have in a focus group? No, because they could bring the whole group down. But I love talking to people that like hate our brand and understanding why. Where's that coming from? What are your influencers, et cetera? So I think that's important too, also to look at the other side of the coin.
Thor:
I think that's really good advice. And I understand that you aim to keep your team at 85 % capacity for usual tasks, reserving the rest of their time for experimentation and proof of concepting, which is really cool. What motivated you to take this approach?
Tara Kenneway:
I think because it was just, you know, it's the squeeze we probably all have. Everybody has less time, more projects. And so we wanted to do proof of concepts, especially in, you know, as AI was coming down the pike and still is, and we're all still leaning into that and learning. If we can't bring, you know, new vendors, new capabilities in and actually test it, we're going to fall behind. So that's sort of the selfish side. And I would say also for team development. The folks on my team love trying new things. It's just a really important thing that we do. We bring new vendors and also with our current vendors, new use cases in. We're protective right now of how we are leveraging AI, so we have to jump through some hoops with procurement and legal, which is fair. So, you know, there's a lot of rigor around doing proof of concepts. And so, yeah, we aim for about 15 to 20 % of our time constantly learning. And then if we love something and it sticks, we bring it in. And I think it's helped us innovate, move faster, do more with less, all those fun things.
Thor:
And what has one of your team's most successful experiments been and why? Anything you could share?
Tara Kenneway:
I think we've done a couple of things that are pretty interesting lately. One is, you know, we're playing with digital twins, you know, in terms of quantitative data, you know, and we're still in learning mode there. So not everything we do and play with and learn is like ready to go out and socialize. And a lot of times our internal stakeholders don't even know that we're experimenting because we run everything typically in parallel. But I would say one of the more interesting things that we've recently done is just quick video aggregators and just using AI to give us themes. It's nothing sexy. And it's, you know, tools a lot of us probably actually have on our desktop too, but there are some vendors doing some pretty fabulous things quickly. And for me, anytime you can get a video reel or a sizzle reel in front of your internal stakeholders, the findings are so much stickier. People love that. And so I get most excited about those things where we've been able to kind of really bring the consumers to life.
Thor:
And what advice would you give to insights leaders who would love to create that time for their teams, but struggle with keeping the workload at 85%. How can more, yeah, I mean, give us some advice here. How can more insights team work this right?
Tara Kenneway:
I say, yeah, I know it's a really hard one. I say lean into your vendors. I mean, if you've got good vendor partners and there's, we have some fabulous vendor partners, lean into them. Almost all of them have, you know, additional sort of account roles that they can play. We do that quite a bit. And I would say if you don't feel that way about your vendor, then they're probably not the best partner because they should be able to lean in. They should know your business enough that they can, you know, kind of pick up some of that capacity when you need them to. I think the other thing is a flow to the work model. And I know this doesn't work for every team and organization, but it works for my team. We have people who are, you know, sort of experts and then some people who can kind of flow across different types of quant and qual methodologies. And that helps sort of spread out the flow a little bit. It is a tricky thing. And there are times where, excuse me, any given week, I feel almost guilty because I'll say, gosh, someone on my team, they have so, you know, their workload all of a sudden exploded because, you know, projects get complex and nobody has a crystal ball. And then other, you know, and it's, but I'm very sensitive to trying to spread the workout. The other thing I'll say is that T -Mobile, we're an organization where everybody's an individual contributor. So even as a manager, I have work, I can take work off the plate of my teams too.
Thor:
Now switching gears a little bit, but like on a similar note though, you also mentioned in preparation for this episode that you think there needs to be more pressure testing, especially on the AI front. Could you share more on that and what do you mean here? And what are the things that people get wrong?
Tara Kenneway:
Well, I think with AI, and this really showed itself to me when I was at the Quirks conference recently in Chicago, it's like everything's AI. I actually saw an ad on TV yesterday for an AI golf club, and I was like, come on, you guys. I mean, maybe leveraging some intelligence on the back end, but not everything's AI. And so we have a little bit of our own internal filter when we're talking to new vendors, looking, doing capabilities presentations, which we do with the regular cadence.
AI it has to be more than just aggregating data and in spitting out findings. We're really interested in what's next. All those tools that create current efficiencies are great.
You know, we love co-pilot. We love these tools that are just making our day -to -day lives faster and making us smarter and able to find things quickly, which I love too, because I'll tell you on any given day, somebody will come to me and say, do you have a switchers study or when's the last time we looked at back to school insights? Well, hold on. I'm going to find it really fast now. So all those things are great, but it's the AI. What we get excited about is what can it help us do, leaning into the future around innovation, around designing experiences better in our categories, sort of identifying even hotspots faster or pain points and those kinds of things, helping us map journeys in a smarter way. Those are the things where we're like, let's really try some things out, understanding, you know, what consumer, like the connection between a consumer's path online to the in-store experiences for us. And some things that we've struggled historically with because of how we're organized. We have a lot of silo teams and sometimes it's hard to get those connection points. So those are the things that we're like, okay, that would be breakthrough. Less about efficiencies and more about really understanding consumers faster, more deeply.
Thor:
And what are some tactics you've commonly used to pressure test these ideas?
Tara Kenneway:
Parallel pathing is probably the most common one. And so, again, with our partners and in our internal teams, we have a big initiative right now where we are, as just one example, we are going out and doing a very robust study around specific micro targets. So we're standing up a very traditional survey tool. And then we're parallel pathing to understand applications with digital twins. And then we'll be able to map that to a data set. Like in the future, maybe that digital twin completely replaces the traditional survey tool, but we're just not comfortable with that just yet. So those are the kinds of things we're doing. Yeah.
Thor:
Yeah, and I think I just want to build on what you said before with, which is, which by, I, by the way, you know, a hundred percent agree with is that there are so many, I mean, to your point about the ad, about the golf club, right? I mean, current now people there's AI and everything. Right. So, so when, how do you reason when you are being presented all these different options, all these different, you know, AI applications that you can know, now go out and try out.
Tara Kenneway:
Yes.
Thor:
How do you make the selection on where to actually spend your time? I mean, how, how do you reason around that? I mean, you mentioned, you mentioned Quirk Chicago and having been to these conferences myself, I mean, I haven't assisted that one too. I do see a lot of that, right? There's AI in everything. So how do you reason around that?
Tara Kenneway:
Yeah, that's a good question. There is AI in everything. We look for a couple things. And these are more the things we would look across any vendor for, to be honest. It can't be like a one trick pony kind of story. So I think just because of the size and scale of T -Mobile and all the teams we support, we are less inclined to talk to boutique agencies.
Although we do work with a couple of smaller shops, but we want you to have more to that you bring to the table than just a sexy AI tool.
Do you have deep chops? Are you fantastic and flawless with sample? Do you have global reach, strong expertise? Can't just be kind of the AI piece because we're interested again always in sort of trying more than one tool so we can check ourselves, so to speak. So that's one criteria. The second is a team that we connect with, just culturally. It's important to us that we just jive, I guess. I don't know of an easier way to say it, but you know, when something feels good and you're getting just rapport with a team, that goes a really long way because some of these projects are intense. You know, we're gonna be like best friends for six months. So it means a lot.
Thor:
Mm. Yep. Yeah. But, but I like the, I like the fact that you're saying when picking your AI venture and make sure you connect with the humans. So I like that.
Tara Kenneway:
That's right, ironic, but very true. Yes. Yeah.
Thor:
Okay, well, Tara, I think you've shared some really insightful learnings with us today. And if you had to summarize, what's the one big takeaway you want listeners to get from this episode?
Tara Kenneway:
I would say one big thing that I've been thinking more and more about recently, especially because we've gone through a couple of restructurings recently at T -Mobile. So it's highly relevant for me at the moment. I don't necessarily think of insights as a standalone discipline. It was sort of back to one of your very first questions, Thor. Brand strategy, insights, product development slash innovation. We are all, we all have one seat at the table and one job to do. And that's figuring out what consumers want and giving it to them and creating a roadmap or like our brands stay relevant today, tomorrow, in the future, and hopefully even increase in relevance. Like we all have that same job. And so I don't ever think of insights as, as just one thing or like we're just the research team. We are in partnership with these other teams all in service of customers and prospects. And I think that's important to me when I talk to my teams every day. I have worked in places in my career where people talk about swim lanes. And it's like, this person shouldn't be inputting to a creative brief, or this person should. And I'm like, you guys, seriously. More is better. It might be messier, but more is better. Don't be resistant to talking to other disciplines and getting more seats at the table. It will save you time, excuse me, in the long run.
Thor:
I 100 % agree with what you just said there, Tara. Now we've come to the end of this episode and there's one question I just have to ask you, which is who in the world of the insights, who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?
Tara Kenneway:
Okay. I love that question.
I've never met Natalie Nixon, but I want to meet her because her book, The Creativity Leap, is probably one of my favorite workbooks I've ever read. I've actually reread it, which is also rare for me to have the time and energy to want to reread a book.
But I love her whole philosophy on sort of that same idea I was just sharing of like disciplines and sparking creativity from insights and how to really keep imagination and imaginative thinking alive in the workplace. We are super data-driven at T-Mobile. And I remind people, yes, data, but data is from the consumers and like the voice of the consumer. And like, let's not lose the ability to brainstorm and think, you know, without always standing up a big, massive quant study. Cause you can't always do it. You're going to have to use your creative brain power.
Thor:
My God, I would so much want to eavesdrop on that lunch conversation. Wow. This has been such an incredible conversation, Tara. Your perspective on insights is truly something. And I think we can all learn from it.
Tara Kenneway:
Thank you, Thor. It was really my pleasure chatting with you. I enjoyed it.
Thor:
But 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. When we talked about the definition of insight, you reminded us that the academic definition of an insight is that of a consumer truth beyond what is obvious. But you also highlighted that more importantly, an insight is truly something actionable. As an example, the difference between knowing that everybody wants a particular product and knowing that there is a social truth that explains that desire and understanding how you can impact it. You reminded us not to exclude our detractors. Detractors is not a group you should necessarily screen out. You don't need to bring them into your focus groups, but find ways to talk to them. You can learn so much from them. And lastly, you told us that you should not think of insights as a standalone discipline. We all have one job. That is to figure out what consumers want and do all we can to give it to them. We are all in service of the customers and the prospects. Never forget that. Now I know that I've learned a lot from talking to you today. And I'm sure our audience has as well. Thank you so much for joining me.
Tara Kenneway:
Thank you, Thor. My pleasure.