Welcome to the 2019 IIEX North America Conference Series. Recorded live in Austin, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Patricia Houston, Founder and Chief Operating Officer at MMR Live.
Contact Patricia Online:
MMR Live
[00:00]
Patricia Houston. We were live at IIeX. MMR Live is the name of the company. She is the founder and Chief Operating Officer. Enjoy the episode.
[00:12]
My guest today on the Happy Market Research Podcast is Patricia Houston; MMR.Live is where you find them online. Tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing.
[00:24]
Sure. So, MMR Live is only about ten months old now. We’re a startup within an established market research company that’s 20 years old, MMR Research, the ones in Atlanta, not the UK. But our focus is on experience. So we’re on a mission to improve every experience, be that retail, digital, physical events. That’s my world, and that’s where we love to live.
[00:42]
Perfect. Like an older company... And now, is it a rebrand or a division?
[00:49]
Division, a new team. And partly why I did it... It’s not just my passion ‘cause my background is in experiential marketing. That’s how I started as bringing my two careers together. But it’s also about future-proofing. So, if we think about all the consolidation we’ve seen in the panel space, you know panel is changing; it’s always going to continue to change. So how long until panel is no more? And getting somebody to answer one direct feedback question is too much?
[01:16]
Perfect.
[01:17]
That’s what we’re trying to solve for.
[01:18]
That’s a really interesting point right now. I don’t know if you heard the Greyhound presentation.
[01:25]
No…
[01:25]
So, they were talking about when they were going through the activation stage of their research, they wound up moving from a 20-minute longitudinal study to a 2-minute survey. And – this is what’s interesting – they saw no degradation of insights that they were able to get out of between the two. So, there was like no negative tradeoff, except that it was a much better experience and the data that they pulled out of the 2-minute survey was so accessible to the larger organization they improved their net promoter score by 20 points.
[02:02]
Oh, that’s incredible.
[02:03]
It just speaks to the importance of thinking about a respondent’s point of view and the better that we do, I think, servicing them, then the better their information is that they’re going to provide us to do stuff.
[02:14]
And that’s right, and it’s all part of your brand, right? So every interaction you have with the consumer, even if it’s a research survey, that’s part of your marketing. It’s part of your brand-building.
[02:24]
It’s so funny that you bring this up. So, actually my first brand plant was a company called Intuit, is a company called Intuit, which, of course, you’ve heard of (QuickBooks, Quicken), largest S&B company, I believe. So, they started their research-based organization. If you know anything about the up-and-comings of that company, market research is a core tenet; consumer insights is a core tenet. One of the things that I found that was real interesting as I was working with them as they were installing online surveys in the early 2000s as the main way of doing consumer insights: we were touching about each customer 1 to 2 times a year, and some customers as many as 16 times in a year. Now, we were touching those customers almost as much as marketing was touching the customer.
[03:16]
That’s right, and if you add those marketing touch points on top of your touch points...
[03:21]
Huge win.
[03:21]
Yeah, I mean what is that? Picking the right context... We’re actually doing some work now pro bono w...
