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Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth!

In this episode, "Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market," host Kerry Curran welcomes Cynthia White, president of Ceatro Group. They explore the critical junctures where companies often face hurdles, from the initial stages of product development to bringing a product to market. Cynthia shares insights on how her firm intervenes when products underperform or companies struggle to meet market demands.

Join us to discover how strategic thinking and deep market understanding can turn potential failures into resounding successes. If you're ready to unlock the secrets of accelerating your product launch and boosting your company's revenue, let's get started!

Podcast transcript

 

 Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:02.398)

Welcome Cynthia. I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about yourself and your company.

 

Cynthia White (00:08.511)

Sure, thank you so much. I'm Cynthia White. I am president of Ceatro Group. We are a management consulting anthropology firm. And our specialty has been helping companies understand the people that matter most to them, whether it be customers, employees, or supply chain partners, and figuring out what that means to their strategy, service, experience, product, financial strategy, sort of playing the middle between the market or the humans and the business to make sure the whole, both the company and the people get more value out of it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:44.542)

Excellent. And so I know we've had a few conversations about a lot of the research you do and the partners that you work with. Talk a bit about when companies and brands tend to call you in and what are their pain points or questions they usually need help with.

 

Cynthia White (01:04.095)

Sure, so specifically for us. We are usually joining companies, the most ideal scenario is when they are just starting the exploration for a new product or service. That's the exciting stuff because you start early and you stay with them through the whole thing. That's not usually where it happens. Usually they call us in because they've heard that we can help them solve a problem that they haven't found another solution for. And that is usually that there's a product or a service or an experience in the market and it's not producing what they hope or the customers have been complaining or something shifts in the … 

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:14.782)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (01:36.593)

… market and they need to make a big change. So in the scenario of service development, it could be anything from fixing a customer service strategy. Right now we have a client for whom we've been with for three years where during COVID they recognized that their in -person customer service experience in apparel wasn't going to work well due to COVID and already the changing landscape and they needed a better direct and digital service and experience strategy.

We have a few other clients that we're working with now in the tech space who are launching new products or product feature additions and they want to understand more about how it will land or they want to understand needs and gaps. Right now we're putting together a proposal for a company that wants to transform their post login experience and that means understanding what customers may or may not want from post login. Of course, companies always think if they build it, the …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:28.862)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (02:36.305)

… customers will come, but that almost never happens. So we try to do that early work with them to also see what is worth creating based on the money they need to make or the goals that the company has, not just the customer's goals.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:50.974)

And so how often do you find that they have a product in mind or a solution and they can't quite find the right market or they're asking you to identify, come up with something that just might not exist?

 

Cynthia White (03:06.495)

You know, I would say over the last three decades, it's transformed to be less about early research and needs development and more about getting this thing to market and we have an idea of what will happen. 

And that's a reality of what's been happening even more so than COVID and even more so in the tech space, especially software. There's a lot more, you know, our smart people have an idea or we have this addition to our tech that our capacity allows us to do. We're going to make it go find someone that it's for. And that is a challenge. We sometimes, we do go to market, to work, but typically what they're actually asking is before going to market. They've got the product and they know someone should have needs that it fits and they ask us to go find the target that has those needs and we wish they will have pulled us in for needs identification before design or with much more conviction on who they designed it for so then we could do the go to market step. You know there's ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:53.022)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (04:08.991)

I think you and I have been talking as we prepared for this about different languages in this space. Just this morning we were talking about audience targeting versus customer needs versus market needs. And there are many different points in product or service development or campaign development or a product relaunch where you need information about the market. And each level of information is different during each stage. And...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:13.694)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (04:35.647)

Typically, when you already have a product fully baked or a service, we'll just use the product, but we mean services or experiences too. When you have that fully baked, you're ready to say to someone, okay, go make some campaigns or go launch this. And that's a really great place for tactical, go to market. We're going to test this, we're going to test marketing language.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:48.318)

Right, right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:55.774)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (04:56.287)

And then way up in the front, this sort of fuzzy front end of innovation or product development is where we do more platform work or strategy work to understand who is actually for or what needs are in the market that would lead to something that you'd be capable of making. And then there's all this stuff in the middle.

 

Cynthia White (05:14.527)

The worst case scenario that happens a lot is when someone comes to us or any other consultant and they say, I have a concept. Can you go test this concept? You know, the concept is this glass case. Can you go test it and tell me the response to it? And if we come back with bad responses, they say, well, no, the responses are supposed to be good. So we often say, well, let me see the research that led you to this glass case. And they say, there isn't any. And that's where we're sort of stuck in this loop.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:41.278)

Yep.

 

Cynthia White (05:42.399) 

When it comes to a feature change or an additional product, that can be okay, because you've already done all the work ahead of time. But if no one did the work to know why this was important, except that you had a hunch, what we often tell companies is that if you had a hunch to make something, but you don't know who the needs are, you better be ready to invest a lot in marketing and thought leadership, because you're going to have to create a market. We just had to have this conversation last week. We tested a concept that was fine.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:48.478)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (06:11.103)

The clients would accept it, but they didn't think it had enough. It was too much risk for what it was worth. So it would probably fall flat, but it wouldn't kill anything. And our advice was if you think it's important, then you better invest in thought leadership to create this foundation that it's going to land on. Cause otherwise the market's not excited about it and you're about to put development dollars to it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:28.734)

Right, right.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I often remind brands or companies that why would you create a product or solution if you're not going to invest in marketing it and matching that customer with the need and convincing them they need your product? And your deeper side of it is your ...

 

Cynthia White (06:47.903)

Mm -hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:58.43)

… creating products before you've identified the customer and what that need is going to be. And it just reiterates the need to pull in this kind of strategic thinking earlier on. And, you know, and you're talking about different ways to build market research and build awareness and thought leadership for your product. And that all ties back to having that more comprehensive strategy of.

 

Cynthia White (07:12.383)

Mm-hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:28.03)

Something meeting the customer's needs and then making sure they're aware of it and that demand and that you have the solution for them.

 

Cynthia White (07:37.087)

We see the opposite too. We work on products or feature changes, especially on websites or digital tools. We work on any kind of product, but specifically when it comes to a digital change, we'll often see a company over invest in research on what is a table stakes like digital feature, like sorting or customizing. And of course we'll do the work with you, but we wish you were investing in something bigger because this customizing is going to pass. People are going to want it, but ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:42.334)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (08:05.471)

That's just something you don't have to market, right? We wish that companies would decide early on whether they're about to make a tiny incremental change or they're about to make a significant change. And if they're about to make a significant change or launch a significant innovation, then they have to be running the business case along at the same time as product development. And that's where we ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:07.742)

Right.

 

Cynthia White (08:30.047)

We see lots of companies doing it lots of different ways and strategy is usually involved, but there is a belief I'm not sure how we all get there, but we believe too much of our own stuff like if I make this they're definitely going to use it and there will be a business case.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:45.598)

Yes, because I like it, so everyone else is going to like it.

 

Cynthia White (08:47.775)

Right. And we are advanced in technology and many times it is true. And it is quite hard to get market feedback on something that the market hasn't even imagined. We're seeing that right now with AI. Everyone, AI, no one has any idea what they're talking about when you do research in AI space. They all think it's going to be amazing. Years ago, we did some work in public safety and it was when the show 24 was out.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:52.19)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (09:14.783)

And I hadn't watched the show, but we were interviewing firefighters and police officers about what new technology they would like. And they had been watching that show. It was very popular. And so they were coming up with ideas like, I want that thing where if you have a loose finger or thumb, you could just put it on this thing and it identifies the person. How often do you have a loose finger or thumb? And they were like, no, it never has happened. But their imagination is so far out. It's the same with AI right now. But …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:38.846)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (09:42.111)

… even though it's hard for them to dream about the future, what we hope to do is get customers' reality today, what they have coming, and then use the smart solution maker's future -looking information. So the company is the smart solution maker. We don't expect the market to tell us what to make, but we expect the market to tell us their context and also what they respond to, and then mix that together to come up with the product and the strategy that's right to go forward.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:47.902)

Right, right.

 

Cynthia White (10:10.367)

… and know if it's going to be a big difference or a small difference, and then calibrate all your business expenses against that and your resources against it. And that also means to be ready to kill the idea if either the product track or service track or the go-to-market track don't support it. So you sort of see it coming in at to-go-no-go points where either could kill it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:30.174)

Mm-hmm. All right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:37.15)

Yeah, no, I remember we were talking about that and the importance of just even having that communication between the two teams and that often it does kind of end up siloed and to your point of not being able to make progress because there's so much information and feelings and opinions, so …

 

Cynthia White (10:55.391)

Yeah, I mean, some companies have gotten quite far ahead with research by creating research and strategy teams, UX teams, UX and design teams. But what we see is that those teams aren't always thinking about the business side. So we've gotten far ahead on making sure we're thinking about users, especially in tech. We've gotten farther ahead thinking about design elements to make sure it actually lands correctly and looks good.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:58.974)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (11:24.607)

But often companies will put the business resources, and that could be any, it could be finance, it could be marketing, they put them on the end of product development, and we really like to see them running along the side. Yes, the idea has to come first. And you see in some industries like pharma, they work on a molecule for eight years before a product even starts to come out, and so it may not be appropriate to always have a business case.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:30.814)

Mm-hmm. Right, right.

 

Cynthia White (11:52.223)

… eight years out, but that's one of the only industries, maybe semiconductors in which that happens. Others, you want to start running thoughts and testing ideas along the way. Also, so you know what resourcing you're going to need to have, because you may have to staff up to get it done.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:01.598)

Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah, and making that one year, three year, five year plan as part of the process as well. And you'd shared a good story of just building efficiency in a process where you had a client who would set themselves up to be able to do eight ideas instead of one at a time. I want to share that a bit.

 

Cynthia White (12:16.031)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that was a number of years ago and it was a consumer electronics company and they historically had gotten one amazing product out a year in this space we were working in. And the way that they worked is that they had very smart scientists, electronics scientists that would come up with an idea. They'd sit in the concept of an ivory tower and then when the idea got birthed, the rest of the teams would pick it up.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:50.685)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (12:57.855)

… and run with it. And sometimes the idea would then die with the team that couldn't sell it right before it ever got produced. And they had already done a product development process in place. They had just finished that. And then they realized actually it was the front end of idea management that was the problem. That they didn't have a culture of which the idea came out to the world, the internal world early enough. So they had us build an idea management system.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:20.638)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (13:25.727)

That ran a gating structure with tech or R&D and business running at the same time. Now, if the business track was feeling more negative about it than the R&D track, it didn't necessarily kill the idea at that gate. But it put enough doubt in that at the next gate, if business was still feeling concerns about it, they'd have to have a very serious conversation about it.

And they told us a few years after that the outcome was that the first year they had that running, they got nine ideas out. So I don't think they were expecting that, but it got more, the scientists realized they had to get more ideas into the front of the funnel for the amount that was going to kill it. And they were able to get a number of different variants out of the same product at the same time. And that's what the market was demanding at the time. And they had competitors that were putting out variants that this company didn't believe in.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:00.894)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (14:18.623)

They didn't believe in color changes and things like that. And then all of a sudden, here they were making color changes because they could see the business case.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:19.262)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and the market demand. So it's all tied together. No, it's definitely interesting. Can you share a bit about your process in kind of how you're getting into these consumer market data points?

 

Cynthia White (14:41.503)

Yeah, so we do a lot of B2B work. We do consumer work, but one of the areas that there's a real challenge in learning is in B2B, because how do you know what those companies are doing? But in either case, from a research point of view, we use qualitative interviews, we use some ethnographic out in the field work, we use a lot of digital tools, and then we have a few quantitative partners where we'll do survey work and other kind of work, some panels and things like that.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:05.31)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (15:11.711)

And that helps us continue to measure whatever it is they're measuring all along. When it comes to that fuzzy front end, what are the needs? That is mostly qualitative work. What we really want to hear there is we want to, we want to be on the shoulder of the person while they're doing it, because we don't want them to tell us what they need. We want to observe something, bring it back to the team, have the team read the quotes, watch the videos, whatever it is we're bringing back.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:20.062)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (15:40.863)

Stand in the shoes of those people and then ascertain their needs or needs that they're willing to solve. We also use a lot of work that might be secondary or produced by somebody else to understand. There's no need to rework if you don't have it. There's some industries in which there's great data, like in supermarkets, the data just, you can just buy IIR data, it's there, you can use it that way.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:45.182)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (16:07.295)

But in B2B, it's not quite so easy. So we think there's a few types of insights that should be coming always, that you should always be feeding it. That almost never happens. Usually a project team will start and they want everything in a week and a half. And this is a long process. So what we wish companies had, whether it's B2B or B2C or government, is a constant amount of information about statistics. How many people own these kinds of cars? What's the age of drivers? We work with a bra company right now.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:20.862)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (16:36.127)

And even the changing size of breasts and the average bra, that should just be information that the product development team always has. You shouldn't have to go out and get that just because you've decided to now satisfy a different size of person. So you should think of the information that's coming as, what's the constant data that should be running all the time that everyone should be able to know what's happening in this area. And then there's this early stage of stuff that's more platform or strategy work.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:40.926)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (17:05.407)

We think of it as like 12 to 18 months out or semiconductors should be a couple of years out, but you're sensing, you're exploring, you're trying to figure out what people are doing so that you can get ahead of the curve. And then there's all the product data. So we see companies that are very successful at this constantly mining their own product for data and their own sales for data and feeding it back to their product teams and making their product teams accountable for reading it and consuming it, right?

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:05.502)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (17:35.359)

We had a client, as an example, we were doing an MRI improvement project. We were trying to improve the MRI experience without touching the machine. And I don't know if I was telling you this story, but we sat down with the executives afterwards to present the opportunities. And I said, well, I assume you've all been in the MRI machine because you can just sit in it without having any medical costs or anything, any need, any radiation.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:40.734)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (18:01.151)

Not one of them had been through the MRI machine. So here they had invested in a project to make the experience better, but we all know if you've had one, the experience is terrible inside that machine and the anxiety that builds up as you try to get there, right? So we also try to get our executives and all their teams to experience the things their customers are experiencing. And that's another thread of insights. Now, no one signs up for all of these things, but our goal ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:09.63)

Yes.

 

Cynthia White (18:27.807)

Over multi -years with clients is to get them to think more like this, sort of the undercover boss scenario. They don't have to wait. It's not one person's job to understand people. I mean, often we do see it living in marketing or we see it living in some independent organization. But I've seen more and more in the last few years, product teams who you'll say, well, what's the customer like? And they'll be like, they'll turn to their person from design and say, what's the customer like? I think it needs to be everyone's job.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:32.638)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (18:57.279)

So there are other sources. I mean, I think the first thing we'd want people to do if they were doing this on their own is to look at competition and to go out and just read as if you were a customer. That costs nothing and that is what everyone should be doing. If there are competitive demos out there, you should be getting them. If you could go shopping in a store, you should be doing that. That just should be table stakes for any job that you can try to stand in your customer's shoes as much as possible.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:57.438)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Yeah, no, thank you, Cynthia. And I love the research aspect of it. And I really do see the connection between kind of obviously you're involved more earlier in the process or ideally earlier than the process than the marketing team as they're developing the go to market strategy. But so many similar points to knowing your customer, knowing what their problem or pain point is that you're solving.

To make it better and it is that customer or audience research as we call it at RN to make sure that you are creating something that's needed and doing it in an efficient way. And I have one last story that I loved that you shared and it's from a few years ago but the cell phone antenna.

 

Cynthia White (19:55.679)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (20:05.407)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (20:11.655)

The antenna jewelry? Yeah. So we did a project. I was with another firm at the time, but we did a long project for a European cell phone manufacturer and they were having a requirements leakage problem in that the requirement would come in one end and by the time the product came out the other end, it wouldn't show up. And so we had two different product teams. One was an R and D team and one was a product. And the difference being that the R and D team was thinking about what was inside …

the brains of the phone and the product team was thinking about what was on the outside of the brains of the phone. And so we had a specific requirement that stood out as exemplary of their problem. And that was that one of their telecom partners had specified antenna jewelry. So I happened to have, it's not, yeah. Okay, so I happen to have a flip phone right here, but you may recall that these used to have an antenna that you could pull up on them. 

So it gets out the other end of the product development process. They take it to their telecom partner and they say, look, we've got your product. And the telecom partner says, but where's the antenna? And R&D said, well, we didn't need an antenna anymore. And the telecom partner pointed to this entire wall of antenna jewelry that they had recognized that teenagers like, and it was a big part of their selling strategy. Right. And so in that scenario, R&D killed a requirement.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:28.062)

Mm-hmm, the charms, yeah.

 

Cynthia White (21:35.487)

That the customer had put in without checking with the customer or the account team. And of course, that was the problem we fixed. They shouldn't be able to kill requirements without negotiating requirements, right? But that also showed this distinction between what comes into a product closer to when it goes to market versus what goes into an R &D. And then how do you negotiate all those pieces to make sure it can still launch in the right way? And I think for one point.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:44.51)

Right. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:54.462)

I don't know. I don't know.

 

Cynthia White (22:05.471)

… to mention is that we haven't talked specifically about marketing, but we see marketing owning lots of different things at companies. And they obviously almost always owned the end. How do you get this out, whether it's a campaign or a launch or a refresh, those kinds of things. And they usually, but not always, own packaging as well. But sometimes they own all the product marketers are sitting with us at the beginning of the process.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:14.558)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:19.454)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:27.774)

All right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:34.558)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (22:34.751)

… as well. And so I think that's for a company to try to figure out what is strategy, when is strategy marketing? You know, have they pigeonholed marketing as just more calm at the end or could it be, and we don't have a stake in this. We, as a consultancy, sometimes it's the CMO, sometimes it's someone else, as long as the parts get in effectively where they need to get in and people aren't isolated from it. We have a client right now who,

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:41.47)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:45.054)

Right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:49.406)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (23:02.655)

Will not bring sales into the research process. And we really want them there because it's account-based marketing. They do know things. Yeah, right, exactly. So I think those are, it's unique to every company who you bring in, but the important part is that you actively want to bring the market into what you're doing. And that it's, there's, I use this terrible example. It's sort of like if you got married and,

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:06.558)

Yeah, the first, yeah. The first hand, the technologies, right, right.

 

Cynthia White (23:29.471)

You didn't learn your partner wanted an open marriage until after you were married. You know, it'd be much better if you come, it would be much better to know ahead of time. Yeah, you may opt in, you may opt out, but at least you would know ahead of time. And so we always tell our customers, not always using that example, but we always tell them, you know, make sure you listen. You don't have to choose it. Is the customer always right? Like, no, not in your strategy. They're not. But if you don't hear them, then they and they are correct. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:32.702)

Yeah. Things to think about in advance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:49.374)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:56.35)

Right. If you want them to buy, you need their input. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (23:58.975)

You need to decide. And if you decide to go against what the market is telling you it needs, then be ready with your dollars to convince the market that they do need it. All right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:05.374)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, and I think that that's exactly right. And you know, that does tie it all back together. And that would be my recommendation for any company. It's, you know, make sure you're doing the research early. Like you said, don't bring us in after you have the product and you're trying to fit that square peg into the round hole. But I think you're bringing marketing to your point. It's like whether they're observers or just informed or actually part of.

the bringing the market data or the the audience data into that conversation. So yeah.

 

Cynthia White (24:41.115)

Yeah. I mean, I think we see the other end too, so we shouldn't leave that off. We see many companies who are not looping the market, market response data from marketing back into campaign data. So we work on that end too. And, and if you don't close that loop, then you just keep doing the same bad campaign. You know, the campaign is simply a product of a different sort. So if you don't, and that's what's so great about digital marketing is that data is out there for you to see what's happening.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:51.358)

Right, right, right. That's two to two. Yeah.



Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:00.702)

Mm -hmm. Yeah. You can optimize it. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (25:10.943)

And then, yeah, you could, you can loop that back and you can loop it back to digital products quite easily more than you can physical products. So that's quite good too.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:20.862)

Yeah, yeah, it's all and again, it's all important to look at the data to incorporate the data and you know, break down the silos between the teams as well. So yeah, but thank you.

 

Cynthia White (25:33.119)

Yeah. And that leans on tech. Tech companies need to make it a lot easier for this data to flow. Like we shouldn't just blame marketers. This data is not connecting where it should connect very easily. Right. Like we probably did 2000 interviews last year and it's really hard to mine that data. There are ways, but it's not super easy. So it's not only to blame companies for being a little less organized.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:40.158)

Yes.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:44.957)

Yeah, more.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:50.462)

Mm -hmm. Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, and it goes back to some of the points you made earlier about having a culture of collaboration and communication and making sure everyone's sharing the information they have. So this was super informative. Thank you, Cynthia. I love, again, I love the side of the business that you're into. And so thank you for sharing. It's a really great insight. Great. Well, thank you. And hopefully we'll have you on again. Thanks. All right. Take care.

 

Cynthia White (26:10.399)

You're welcome.

 

Cynthia White (26:15.455)

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

 

Cynthia White (26:20.095)

That would be great.

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Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth!

In this episode, "Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market," host Kerry Curran welcomes Cynthia White, president of Ceatro Group. They explore the critical junctures where companies often face hurdles, from the initial stages of product development to bringing a product to market. Cynthia shares insights on how her firm intervenes when products underperform or companies struggle to meet market demands.

Join us to discover how strategic thinking and deep market understanding can turn potential failures into resounding successes. If you're ready to unlock the secrets of accelerating your product launch and boosting your company's revenue, let's get started!

Podcast transcript

 

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth!

I'm your host, Kerry Curran, and this episode is, “Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market” With special guest Cythnia White, president of Ceatro Group.

In this episode, we'll explore the critical junctures where companies often face hurdles, from the initial stages of product development to the final steps of bringing a product to market. Cynthia will share insights into how her firm intervenes when products underperform or when companies struggle to meet market demands. We'll discuss real-world examples of how strategic thinking and deep market understanding can turn potential failures into resounding successes.

So, if you're ready to unlock the secrets of accelerating your product launch and boosting your company's revenue, let's get started! 

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:02.398)

Welcome Cynthia. I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about yourself and your company.

 

Cynthia White (00:08.511)

Sure, thank you so much. I'm Cynthia White. I am president of Ceatro Group. We are a management consulting anthropology firm. And our specialty has been helping companies understand the people that matter most to them, whether it be customers, employees, or supply chain partners, and figuring out what that means to their strategy, service, experience, product, financial strategy, sort of playing the middle between the market or the humans and the business to make sure the whole, both the company and the people get more value out of it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:44.542)

Excellent. And so I know we've had a few conversations about a lot of the research you do and the partners that you work with. Talk a bit about when companies and brands tend to call you in and what are their pain points or questions they usually need help with.

 

Cynthia White (01:04.095)

Sure, so specifically for us. We are usually joining companies, the most ideal scenario is when they are just starting the exploration for a new product or service. That's the exciting stuff because you start early and you stay with them through the whole thing. That's not usually where it happens. Usually they call us in because they've heard that we can help them solve a problem that they haven't found another solution for. And that is usually that there's a product or a service or an experience in the market and it's not producing what they hope or the customers have been complaining or something shifts in the … 

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:14.782)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (01:36.593)

… market and they need to make a big change. So in the scenario of service development, it could be anything from fixing a customer service strategy. Right now we have a client for whom we've been with for three years where during COVID they recognized that their in -person customer service experience in apparel wasn't going to work well due to COVID and already the changing landscape and they needed a better direct and digital service and experience strategy.

We have a few other clients that we're working with now in the tech space who are launching new products or product feature additions and they want to understand more about how it will land or they want to understand needs and gaps. Right now we're putting together a proposal for a company that wants to transform their post login experience and that means understanding what customers may or may not want from post login. Of course, companies always think if they build it, the …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:28.862)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (02:36.305)

… customers will come, but that almost never happens. So we try to do that early work with them to also see what is worth creating based on the money they need to make or the goals that the company has, not just the customer's goals.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:50.974)

And so how often do you find that they have a product in mind or a solution and they can't quite find the right market or they're asking you to identify, come up with something that just might not exist?

 

Cynthia White (03:06.495)

You know, I would say over the last three decades, it's transformed to be less about early research and needs development and more about getting this thing to market and we have an idea of what will happen. 

And that's a reality of what's been happening even more so than COVID and even more so in the tech space, especially software. There's a lot more, you know, our smart people have an idea or we have this addition to our tech that our capacity allows us to do. We're going to make it go find someone that it's for. And that is a challenge. We sometimes, we do go to market, to work, but typically what they're actually asking is before going to market. They've got the product and they know someone should have needs that it fits and they ask us to go find the target that has those needs and we wish they will have pulled us in for needs identification before design or with much more conviction on who they designed it for so then we could do the go to market step. You know there's ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:53.022)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (04:08.991)

I think you and I have been talking as we prepared for this about different languages in this space. Just this morning we were talking about audience targeting versus customer needs versus market needs. And there are many different points in product or service development or campaign development or a product relaunch where you need information about the market. And each level of information is different during each stage. And...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:13.694)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (04:35.647)

Typically, when you already have a product fully baked or a service, we'll just use the product, but we mean services or experiences too. When you have that fully baked, you're ready to say to someone, okay, go make some campaigns or go launch this. And that's a really great place for tactical, go to market. We're going to test this, we're going to test marketing language.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:48.318)

Right, right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:55.774)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (04:56.287)

And then way up in the front, this sort of fuzzy front end of innovation or product development is where we do more platform work or strategy work to understand who is actually for or what needs are in the market that would lead to something that you'd be capable of making. And then there's all this stuff in the middle.

 

Cynthia White (05:14.527)

The worst case scenario that happens a lot is when someone comes to us or any other consultant and they say, I have a concept. Can you go test this concept? You know, the concept is this glass case. Can you go test it and tell me the response to it? And if we come back with bad responses, they say, well, no, the responses are supposed to be good. So we often say, well, let me see the research that led you to this glass case. And they say, there isn't any. And that's where we're sort of stuck in this loop.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:41.278)

Yep.

 

Cynthia White (05:42.399) 

When it comes to a feature change or an additional product, that can be okay, because you've already done all the work ahead of time. But if no one did the work to know why this was important, except that you had a hunch, what we often tell companies is that if you had a hunch to make something, but you don't know who the needs are, you better be ready to invest a lot in marketing and thought leadership, because you're going to have to create a market. We just had to have this conversation last week. We tested a concept that was fine.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:48.478)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (06:11.103)

The clients would accept it, but they didn't think it had enough. It was too much risk for what it was worth. So it would probably fall flat, but it wouldn't kill anything. And our advice was if you think it's important, then you better invest in thought leadership to create this foundation that it's going to land on. Cause otherwise the market's not excited about it and you're about to put development dollars to it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:28.734)

Right, right.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I often remind brands or companies that why would you create a product or solution if you're not going to invest in marketing it and matching that customer with the need and convincing them they need your product? And your deeper side of it is your ...

 

Cynthia White (06:47.903)

Mm -hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:58.43)

… creating products before you've identified the customer and what that need is going to be. And it just reiterates the need to pull in this kind of strategic thinking earlier on. And, you know, and you're talking about different ways to build market research and build awareness and thought leadership for your product. And that all ties back to having that more comprehensive strategy of.

 

Cynthia White (07:12.383)

Mm-hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:28.03)

Something meeting the customer's needs and then making sure they're aware of it and that demand and that you have the solution for them.

 

Cynthia White (07:37.087)

We see the opposite too. We work on products or feature changes, especially on websites or digital tools. We work on any kind of product, but specifically when it comes to a digital change, we'll often see a company over invest in research on what is a table stakes like digital feature, like sorting or customizing. And of course we'll do the work with you, but we wish you were investing in something bigger because this customizing is going to pass. People are going to want it, but ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:42.334)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (08:05.471)

That's just something you don't have to market, right? We wish that companies would decide early on whether they're about to make a tiny incremental change or they're about to make a significant change. And if they're about to make a significant change or launch a significant innovation, then they have to be running the business case along at the same time as product development. And that's where we ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:07.742)

Right.

 

Cynthia White (08:30.047)

We see lots of companies doing it lots of different ways and strategy is usually involved, but there is a belief I'm not sure how we all get there, but we believe too much of our own stuff like if I make this they're definitely going to use it and there will be a business case.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:45.598)

Yes, because I like it, so everyone else is going to like it.

 

Cynthia White (08:47.775)

Right. And we are advanced in technology and many times it is true. And it is quite hard to get market feedback on something that the market hasn't even imagined. We're seeing that right now with AI. Everyone, AI, no one has any idea what they're talking about when you do research in AI space. They all think it's going to be amazing. Years ago, we did some work in public safety and it was when the show 24 was out.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:52.19)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (09:14.783)

And I hadn't watched the show, but we were interviewing firefighters and police officers about what new technology they would like. And they had been watching that show. It was very popular. And so they were coming up with ideas like, I want that thing where if you have a loose finger or thumb, you could just put it on this thing and it identifies the person. How often do you have a loose finger or thumb? And they were like, no, it never has happened. But their imagination is so far out. It's the same with AI right now. But …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:38.846)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (09:42.111)

… even though it's hard for them to dream about the future, what we hope to do is get customers' reality today, what they have coming, and then use the smart solution maker's future -looking information. So the company is the smart solution maker. We don't expect the market to tell us what to make, but we expect the market to tell us their context and also what they respond to, and then mix that together to come up with the product and the strategy that's right to go forward.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:47.902)

Right, right.

 

Cynthia White (10:10.367)

… and know if it's going to be a big difference or a small difference, and then calibrate all your business expenses against that and your resources against it. And that also means to be ready to kill the idea if either the product track or service track or the go-to-market track don't support it. So you sort of see it coming in at to-go-no-go points where either could kill it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:30.174)

Mm-hmm. All right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:37.15)

Yeah, no, I remember we were talking about that and the importance of just even having that communication between the two teams and that often it does kind of end up siloed and to your point of not being able to make progress because there's so much information and feelings and opinions, so …

 

Cynthia White (10:55.391)

Yeah, I mean, some companies have gotten quite far ahead with research by creating research and strategy teams, UX teams, UX and design teams. But what we see is that those teams aren't always thinking about the business side. So we've gotten far ahead on making sure we're thinking about users, especially in tech. We've gotten farther ahead thinking about design elements to make sure it actually lands correctly and looks good.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:58.974)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (11:24.607)

But often companies will put the business resources, and that could be any, it could be finance, it could be marketing, they put them on the end of product development, and we really like to see them running along the side. Yes, the idea has to come first. And you see in some industries like pharma, they work on a molecule for eight years before a product even starts to come out, and so it may not be appropriate to always have a business case.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:30.814)

Mm-hmm. Right, right.

 

Cynthia White (11:52.223)

… eight years out, but that's one of the only industries, maybe semiconductors in which that happens. Others, you want to start running thoughts and testing ideas along the way. Also, so you know what resourcing you're going to need to have, because you may have to staff up to get it done.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:01.598)

Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah, and making that one year, three year, five year plan as part of the process as well. And you'd shared a good story of just building efficiency in a process where you had a client who would set themselves up to be able to do eight ideas instead of one at a time. I want to share that a bit.

 

Cynthia White (12:16.031)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that was a number of years ago and it was a consumer electronics company and they historically had gotten one amazing product out a year in this space we were working in. And the way that they worked is that they had very smart scientists, electronics scientists that would come up with an idea. They'd sit in the concept of an ivory tower and then when the idea got birthed, the rest of the teams would pick it up.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:50.685)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (12:57.855)

… and run with it. And sometimes the idea would then die with the team that couldn't sell it right before it ever got produced. And they had already done a product development process in place. They had just finished that. And then they realized actually it was the front end of idea management that was the problem. That they didn't have a culture of which the idea came out to the world, the internal world early enough. So they had us build an idea management system.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:20.638)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (13:25.727)

That ran a gating structure with tech or R&D and business running at the same time. Now, if the business track was feeling more negative about it than the R&D track, it didn't necessarily kill the idea at that gate. But it put enough doubt in that at the next gate, if business was still feeling concerns about it, they'd have to have a very serious conversation about it.

And they told us a few years after that the outcome was that the first year they had that running, they got nine ideas out. So I don't think they were expecting that, but it got more, the scientists realized they had to get more ideas into the front of the funnel for the amount that was going to kill it. And they were able to get a number of different variants out of the same product at the same time. And that's what the market was demanding at the time. And they had competitors that were putting out variants that this company didn't believe in.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:00.894)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (14:18.623)

They didn't believe in color changes and things like that. And then all of a sudden, here they were making color changes because they could see the business case.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:19.262)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and the market demand. So it's all tied together. No, it's definitely interesting. Can you share a bit about your process in kind of how you're getting into these consumer market data points?

 

Cynthia White (14:41.503)

Yeah, so we do a lot of B2B work. We do consumer work, but one of the areas that there's a real challenge in learning is in B2B, because how do you know what those companies are doing? But in either case, from a research point of view, we use qualitative interviews, we use some ethnographic out in the field work, we use a lot of digital tools, and then we have a few quantitative partners where we'll do survey work and other kind of work, some panels and things like that.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:05.31)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (15:11.711)

And that helps us continue to measure whatever it is they're measuring all along. When it comes to that fuzzy front end, what are the needs? That is mostly qualitative work. What we really want to hear there is we want to, we want to be on the shoulder of the person while they're doing it, because we don't want them to tell us what they need. We want to observe something, bring it back to the team, have the team read the quotes, watch the videos, whatever it is we're bringing back.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:20.062)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (15:40.863)

Stand in the shoes of those people and then ascertain their needs or needs that they're willing to solve. We also use a lot of work that might be secondary or produced by somebody else to understand. There's no need to rework if you don't have it. There's some industries in which there's great data, like in supermarkets, the data just, you can just buy IIR data, it's there, you can use it that way.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:45.182)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (16:07.295)

But in B2B, it's not quite so easy. So we think there's a few types of insights that should be coming always, that you should always be feeding it. That almost never happens. Usually a project team will start and they want everything in a week and a half. And this is a long process. So what we wish companies had, whether it's B2B or B2C or government, is a constant amount of information about statistics. How many people own these kinds of cars? What's the age of drivers? We work with a bra company right now.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:20.862)

Mm-hmm.

 

Cynthia White (16:36.127)

And even the changing size of breasts and the average bra, that should just be information that the product development team always has. You shouldn't have to go out and get that just because you've decided to now satisfy a different size of person. So you should think of the information that's coming as, what's the constant data that should be running all the time that everyone should be able to know what's happening in this area. And then there's this early stage of stuff that's more platform or strategy work.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:40.926)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (17:05.407)

We think of it as like 12 to 18 months out or semiconductors should be a couple of years out, but you're sensing, you're exploring, you're trying to figure out what people are doing so that you can get ahead of the curve. And then there's all the product data. So we see companies that are very successful at this constantly mining their own product for data and their own sales for data and feeding it back to their product teams and making their product teams accountable for reading it and consuming it, right?

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:05.502)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (17:35.359)

We had a client, as an example, we were doing an MRI improvement project. We were trying to improve the MRI experience without touching the machine. And I don't know if I was telling you this story, but we sat down with the executives afterwards to present the opportunities. And I said, well, I assume you've all been in the MRI machine because you can just sit in it without having any medical costs or anything, any need, any radiation.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:40.734)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (18:01.151)

Not one of them had been through the MRI machine. So here they had invested in a project to make the experience better, but we all know if you've had one, the experience is terrible inside that machine and the anxiety that builds up as you try to get there, right? So we also try to get our executives and all their teams to experience the things their customers are experiencing. And that's another thread of insights. Now, no one signs up for all of these things, but our goal ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:09.63)

Yes.

 

Cynthia White (18:27.807)

Over multi -years with clients is to get them to think more like this, sort of the undercover boss scenario. They don't have to wait. It's not one person's job to understand people. I mean, often we do see it living in marketing or we see it living in some independent organization. But I've seen more and more in the last few years, product teams who you'll say, well, what's the customer like? And they'll be like, they'll turn to their person from design and say, what's the customer like? I think it needs to be everyone's job.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:32.638)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (18:57.279)

So there are other sources. I mean, I think the first thing we'd want people to do if they were doing this on their own is to look at competition and to go out and just read as if you were a customer. That costs nothing and that is what everyone should be doing. If there are competitive demos out there, you should be getting them. If you could go shopping in a store, you should be doing that. That just should be table stakes for any job that you can try to stand in your customer's shoes as much as possible.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:57.438)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Yeah, no, thank you, Cynthia. And I love the research aspect of it. And I really do see the connection between kind of obviously you're involved more earlier in the process or ideally earlier than the process than the marketing team as they're developing the go to market strategy. But so many similar points to knowing your customer, knowing what their problem or pain point is that you're solving.

To make it better and it is that customer or audience research as we call it at RN to make sure that you are creating something that's needed and doing it in an efficient way. And I have one last story that I loved that you shared and it's from a few years ago but the cell phone antenna.

 

Cynthia White (19:55.679)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (20:05.407)

Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (20:11.655)

The antenna jewelry? Yeah. So we did a project. I was with another firm at the time, but we did a long project for a European cell phone manufacturer and they were having a requirements leakage problem in that the requirement would come in one end and by the time the product came out the other end, it wouldn't show up. And so we had two different product teams. One was an R and D team and one was a product. And the difference being that the R and D team was thinking about what was inside …

the brains of the phone and the product team was thinking about what was on the outside of the brains of the phone. And so we had a specific requirement that stood out as exemplary of their problem. And that was that one of their telecom partners had specified antenna jewelry. So I happened to have, it's not, yeah. Okay, so I happen to have a flip phone right here, but you may recall that these used to have an antenna that you could pull up on them. 

So it gets out the other end of the product development process. They take it to their telecom partner and they say, look, we've got your product. And the telecom partner says, but where's the antenna? And R&D said, well, we didn't need an antenna anymore. And the telecom partner pointed to this entire wall of antenna jewelry that they had recognized that teenagers like, and it was a big part of their selling strategy. Right. And so in that scenario, R&D killed a requirement.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:28.062)

Mm-hmm, the charms, yeah.

 

Cynthia White (21:35.487)

That the customer had put in without checking with the customer or the account team. And of course, that was the problem we fixed. They shouldn't be able to kill requirements without negotiating requirements, right? But that also showed this distinction between what comes into a product closer to when it goes to market versus what goes into an R &D. And then how do you negotiate all those pieces to make sure it can still launch in the right way? And I think for one point.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:44.51)

Right. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:54.462)

I don't know. I don't know.

 

Cynthia White (22:05.471)

… to mention is that we haven't talked specifically about marketing, but we see marketing owning lots of different things at companies. And they obviously almost always owned the end. How do you get this out, whether it's a campaign or a launch or a refresh, those kinds of things. And they usually, but not always, own packaging as well. But sometimes they own all the product marketers are sitting with us at the beginning of the process.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:14.558)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:19.454)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:27.774)

All right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:34.558)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (22:34.751)

… as well. And so I think that's for a company to try to figure out what is strategy, when is strategy marketing? You know, have they pigeonholed marketing as just more calm at the end or could it be, and we don't have a stake in this. We, as a consultancy, sometimes it's the CMO, sometimes it's someone else, as long as the parts get in effectively where they need to get in and people aren't isolated from it. We have a client right now who,

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:41.47)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:45.054)

Right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:49.406)

Mm -hmm.

 

Cynthia White (23:02.655)

Will not bring sales into the research process. And we really want them there because it's account-based marketing. They do know things. Yeah, right, exactly. So I think those are, it's unique to every company who you bring in, but the important part is that you actively want to bring the market into what you're doing. And that it's, there's, I use this terrible example. It's sort of like if you got married and,

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:06.558)

Yeah, the first, yeah. The first hand, the technologies, right, right.

 

Cynthia White (23:29.471)

You didn't learn your partner wanted an open marriage until after you were married. You know, it'd be much better if you come, it would be much better to know ahead of time. Yeah, you may opt in, you may opt out, but at least you would know ahead of time. And so we always tell our customers, not always using that example, but we always tell them, you know, make sure you listen. You don't have to choose it. Is the customer always right? Like, no, not in your strategy. They're not. But if you don't hear them, then they and they are correct. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:32.702)

Yeah. Things to think about in advance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:49.374)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:56.35)

Right. If you want them to buy, you need their input. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (23:58.975)

You need to decide. And if you decide to go against what the market is telling you it needs, then be ready with your dollars to convince the market that they do need it. All right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:05.374)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, and I think that that's exactly right. And you know, that does tie it all back together. And that would be my recommendation for any company. It's, you know, make sure you're doing the research early. Like you said, don't bring us in after you have the product and you're trying to fit that square peg into the round hole. But I think you're bringing marketing to your point. It's like whether they're observers or just informed or actually part of.

the bringing the market data or the the audience data into that conversation. So yeah.

 

Cynthia White (24:41.115)

Yeah. I mean, I think we see the other end too, so we shouldn't leave that off. We see many companies who are not looping the market, market response data from marketing back into campaign data. So we work on that end too. And, and if you don't close that loop, then you just keep doing the same bad campaign. You know, the campaign is simply a product of a different sort. So if you don't, and that's what's so great about digital marketing is that data is out there for you to see what's happening.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:51.358)

Right, right, right. That's two to two. Yeah.



Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:00.702)

Mm -hmm. Yeah. You can optimize it. Yeah.

 

Cynthia White (25:10.943)

And then, yeah, you could, you can loop that back and you can loop it back to digital products quite easily more than you can physical products. So that's quite good too.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:20.862)

Yeah, yeah, it's all and again, it's all important to look at the data to incorporate the data and you know, break down the silos between the teams as well. So yeah, but thank you.

 

Cynthia White (25:33.119)

Yeah. And that leans on tech. Tech companies need to make it a lot easier for this data to flow. Like we shouldn't just blame marketers. This data is not connecting where it should connect very easily. Right. Like we probably did 2000 interviews last year and it's really hard to mine that data. There are ways, but it's not super easy. So it's not only to blame companies for being a little less organized.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:40.158)

Yes.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:44.957)

Yeah, more.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:50.462)

Mm -hmm. Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, and it goes back to some of the points you made earlier about having a culture of collaboration and communication and making sure everyone's sharing the information they have. So this was super informative. Thank you, Cynthia. I love, again, I love the side of the business that you're into. And so thank you for sharing. It's a really great insight. Great. Well, thank you. And hopefully we'll have you on again. Thanks. All right. Take care.

 

Cynthia White (26:10.399)

You're welcome.

 

Cynthia White (26:15.455)

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

 

Cynthia White (26:20.095)

That would be great.

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