Wired for Research with Jennifer Avery of Universal Destinations and Experiences

Bill Gullan

Greetings one and all. It is I, your raspy, sore-throated host, Bill Gullan. Thank you for joining Champions of Purposeful Change.

 

I’m the President of Finch Brands, a premier boutique brand consultancy and research supplier. And we’re grateful to have you with us here. We’re really starting off ’25 with a bang by hosting Jennifer Avery.

 

Jennifer is the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Insights at Universal Destinations and Experiences. We’ll talk about theme parks. We’ll talk about her career journey, her academic interests, how we normally do.

 

We’re going to go through it all. And I think you’ll really appreciate Jennifer’s perspective, her candor about research, about our industry, about how you need to be wired to thrive in this profession. And she also tells, gives her take on smart research versus dumb research, as well as the opportunities for technology and a whole bunch more.

 

So enjoy Jennifer Avery. We are so grateful to have Jennifer Avery with us, who’s the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Insights at Universal Destinations and Experiences. Jennifer, thanks so much for your time.

 

Happy to be here. Excellent. Let’s start where we normally do.

 

You had a cultural anthropology interest all the way back academically, which I should call you Dr. Avery on here, given the PhD program and whatnot. But tell us about sort of where it began and take us, if you wouldn’t mind, through sort of the career journey that’s led you to where you are at Universal.

 

Jennifer Avery

Sure. I think my market research career is like a lot of people’s, kind of accidental. I’ve met very few humans who always dreamed of being a market researcher and had a very organized plan for doing that, even up to the college level.

 

So yeah, I did have a PhD in cultural anthropology. My intent when I started that program was to be a professor, you know, in a traditional academic environment. But something happened along the way.

 

When I was in graduate school, I took a side gig for a shopper insights firm. They had started advertising on a graduate listserv, like our email messaging distribution. And they were looking for ethnographers, they called them.

 

Really, it was field interviewers.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

And it was the strangest thing. This company would ship you overnight, like a Palm Pilot. And this is in the very early 2000s.

 

So this is probably innovative technology. And on the pilot was programmed a survey. And there was a protocol and a training and they would send you into a store that they had, you know, partnered with, right, and give you a set of instructions.

 

And those instructions usually were something like observe shoppers in a certain category, because the client was, you know, of course, you know, a very specific category, generally in the consumer packaged goods space. And you would wait in the wild for the shopper to show up and you would surreptitiously observe them according to the protocols. And then when they were clearly done, you know, having selected a product and moving out of the aisle or finish their browsing, even you would pounce on them in a very awkward fashion and say, hey, I was just sort of stalking you in a research fun kind of way.

 

Will you consent to do this 10 minute structured interview? And I’ll give you, you know, a $10 incentive or something.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

And so I thought, very, that’s very curious. At the time, I was looking for a company to study my area of concentration and my program was anthropology of work. Right.

 

And I really wanted to get into a company to study a company as if it wasn’t a kind of tribe or culture. Right. So I thought, I’m gonna go work for this company.

 

I’m gonna make a few extra bucks. The pay was actually like probably 30 percent higher than the hourly wage for a graduate assistantship.

 

Bill Gullan

Right.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

And all I can do is humiliate yourself and drive out to a 7-Eleven in Valrico or whatever and, you know, cost a bunch of construction workers, you know, ask them why I didn’t buy a Dr. Pepper. And I’m an introvert by nature. So this was, you know, pretty miserable work.

 

But I’m also a very responsible human. So I did it. You know, I made my quotas.

 

I did well. I wrote up good reports. And eventually I made kind of my way into a more permanent position.

 

So that company recruiting and training, staffing, doing analytics on the side, and finally negotiated a full-time position from them. One of the conditions for my full-time employment was that the company would let me study them like a culture. Cool.

 

And they didn’t care. They were like, fine, whatever. And 10 years later, I actually finished my Ph.D. I got so sucked into actually the work of this company. I just really enjoyed it. I found myself kind of fascinated by corporate America and just like the whole culture of this. I was just actually pretty good at it.

 

You know, it was just like a really suitable fit for my temperament, like way more kind of in a very overt fashion and kind of like brutal and cutthroat in a way that I kind of appreciated. So I just really kind of got into it. And I was promoted multiple times.

 

So the money was good. You know, I was making way more than I was ever going to make as an academic. And by the time I was actually finished with my Ph.D., you know, I was just like, this is it. I’m going to do this now. Because one, I had not really done the things that I needed to do to acquire a tenure track position. I had published a bunch of stuff because I was working 80 hours a week for this vendor.

 

And I had a couple of kids during that time period, too, which made everything more difficult. But mostly, I just actually really enjoyed this side of the business. So, you know, I entered in accidentally.

 

I had ulterior motives. I did finish my Ph.D. out of spite because you don’t really need one, obviously, to work in this industry. And it’s certainly too late to go back now.

 

I’m on what they would call in academia, the dark side. Right. And, you know, I enjoy it.

 

Bill Gullan

Excellent. Well, my wife is a Ph.D. psychologist who stayed on, I guess, the light side if we’re the dark side. What is the through line?

 

I mean, you know, cultural anthropology, but an interest in the workplace into research. What are the kind of things about your wiring, I guess, that that make this and continue to make this fulfilling for you curiosity about others, about how decisions are made? Have you been able to ever sort of put your finger on why it lights you up the way it does?

 

[Jennifer Avery]

Yeah, I mean, one is just very pragmatic, methodological, right? You get certain methodological training as somebody who’s pursuing a master’s or a Ph.D. in a social science. So just being able to apply your knowledge of various quantitative and qualitative methodologies for data acquisition, data analysis is something that was attractive to me.

 

I mean, I always really liked being an individual contributor doing doing the analysis and the data collection. So lots of different social sciences do train people in those sort of methodologies and finding jobs where you can apply them. This is one of those jobs.

 

But then, yeah, the other side of it is just curiosity. You want to know why people do what they do. I mean, I think it is mostly just, though, the the thrill, the mundane thrill of being confronted with a business challenge or a research question and then having to figure out a way to get that information.

 

Right. That’s what I actually really enjoy, because, you know, writing a survey about corn chips or even theme parks. Right.

 

There are more interesting things to research in the world. Right. But I think the exercise of being given a question that is nebulous and vague and just generally fraught and then the challenge of having to figure out a way of like, how am I going to operationalize this?

 

How am I going to turn this into something that I actually can create variables out of in an appropriately reductive fashion? That is really fun to me. I really enjoy that part and I always will.

 

So it almost never mattered whether I was doing a product on toothpaste or hemorrhoid cream or any number of things that I ended up doing work on on the vendor side. It was the the act of designing the research that was personally most satisfying to me.

 

Bill Gullan

Makes sense. And so now in your in your role at Universal Destinations, part of the Comcast NBCU family, obviously a big, innovative player in that space. Could you sort of speak to what that means day in and day out?

 

Obviously, there’s a portfolio of resorts around the world and destinations around the world. You talk about rigor and methodological stuff. I’d imagine theme parks are at the sort of intersection of families getting value for the dollar in terms of smiles, also the connection to sort of cultural inputs and entertainment properties and it kind of sorted out for us and kind of the role you’re playing with you and your team day in and day out at Universal.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

Yeah, I think you’re hitting on the reasons why I chose when I went client side to work for a company like Universal. I didn’t want to go client side, but I didn’t as much as the thrill of methodological design, you know, was there, you know, how many times can you write a survey about corn chips? It’s got to get a little old.

 

So theme parks are amazing because there is so much to research. Like we sit in marketing technically. And because of that, we do all of the kinds of research that you would expect from a research and internal agency that services marketing clients.

 

So we track brand health and competitive brand health and we help our marketers with ad tests and ad performance tracking and we help our marketers understand our guest profiles and do segmentations and all of the kinds of things, you know, tagline tests and naming tests and just anything that a market could want. We do all of those things and those things are interesting. But we also work with our partners in operations, the people who actually run the theme parks, you know, so they want to know all about, you know, performance of, you know, their team members and providing guest service.

 

And they want to know, like, how guests are moving throughout the park and what they’re doing and how they make their plans and all those types of things. Obviously we work with Universal Creatives and those are kind of our, you know, our version of our Disney Imagineers, right? These are the people who actually dream up the amazing attractions that, you know, our resorts offer.

 

And, you know, they are great clients of ours who ask, you know, for human insights in terms of why people want to go on whatever rides they want to go on and what drives satisfaction in those rides and, you know, what, you know, what can we can we glean, you know, from innovative ideas and how do we know if something’s going to work, right? They engage us on, you know, certain questions like that, you know, but we’ve got hotels and there’s research to do there. We’ve got food and beverage.

 

There’s research to do there. There’s shopping and retail. There’s research to do there.

 

There’s vacation planning. There’s research to do there. There’s an infinite variety of topics in the space.

 

So even after 12 years doing this, I certainly know a lot about theme parks, you know?

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah, yeah.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

I probably know more about theme parks than, you know, most people you’re ever going to meet, right? But there’s still a lot more that I could know, you know, and that is actually very exciting and interesting. So I do work for the parks.

 

I directly oversee consumer insights for our domestic parks. So that is Universal Orlando Resort in Orlando, Florida, and Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles, California. I have great colleagues and partners at our parks in Beijing, Singapore, and in Japan.

 

So while I do not oversee those functions, we have a lot of best practices sharing. We work in partnership on joint projects, these types of things. My organization has a somewhat of a global role in kind of being a consultative partner to some of our RCI and strategy groups in the broader global parks.

 

We are unusually a DIY function, a wholly DIY function.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

So we have gone to considerable trouble over decades, really. This preceded my involvement at Universal, building up the structure to, you know, gather surveys, build databases, build recording engines. We do all the analysis ourselves, you know, all of the, you know, conjoints ourselves, all the segmentations ourselves.

 

Like we outsource literally nothing. I have an ethnographic division that focuses on qualitative that, you know, I have seven PhDs work in my function. So we are a very well constructed do-it-yourself, you know, fully in-house sort of operation, which makes us, you know, fairly neutral, I think, in the industry.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah. Makes sense. And having a practitioner, I mean, you mentioned earlier wanting to go client side and starting your career, at least on the dark side of your career in a supplier role.

 

Could you, but then you talked also about the incredible diversity of things to study, how you never run out. So, you know, the old sort of trope, the great thing about agency side or supplier side, as you work on all these different kinds of things, the great thing about client side is, you know, depth and impact and other things. But it sounds like, I mean, could you speak about just within your career and sort of how you see the differences between the two and how that sort of played out for you?

 

[Jennifer Avery]

Yeah. I mean, we only know what we know. So I’m sure I’m going to say something that, you know, your listeners will be like, that’s totally wrong, lady.

 

And maybe I am. I’m somebody who definitely does not like job. Right.

 

I mean, I’ve been here 12 years. I was at my supplier agency for almost 10 years. You know, and prior to that, I was a kid working in school, working at Walmart.

 

Right. So, like, I only had two thrown up jobs in 25 years in this industry. You know, and that is because, you know, wherever I go, I tend to do pretty well.

 

So, you know, I stick around, but also because I really have a strong belief that good research is not just a handful of methodologies that you have in your pocket, you can apply to any domain, but it is a substantive body of knowledge that you possess and that you bring to the table whenever you do a project like every project. That’s kind of a problem with the industry. It’s sort of like every project exists on its own in this sort of vacuum.

 

And that’s just really weird to an academic, you know, where all knowledge should be cumulative. You know, so right now I have so much invested in my cumulative knowledge as a theme park expert. You know, not that I couldn’t go work somewhere else I could, but it’s like I would have to start all over to become an expert in that space.

 

You know, I could do quickly enough, but, you know, I just when you’re talking to an academic, they’ve generally studied, you know, a domain or two or three their whole lives, right? So I kind of feel very strongly about that. And it’s one of the many reasons I stick around.

 

I mean, Universal is also a great company to work for. So there’s that as well. So my experience on the vendor side was incredible.

 

It taught me so much. I mean, I highly recommend to especially, you know, some of my more junior team members who are like not sure this is the life for them, right? They’re not exactly sure they want a career in market research.

 

Like my advice to them is go work for a vendor. Like you’re not going to, do you really want to sharpen your knife? I mean, you can do it under me, like I’ll sharpen it for you.

 

But I mean, you will really go through some kind of hazing on the vendor side and your eyes will be open to like so much more like breadth and scope of what the industry actually is like that what even if you hate it, it’s like it’s really good exposure, right? So there’s a lot value there. And of course, it was interesting to work for so many different clients.

 

And it was great to be able to travel to all these different client headquarters and meet so many people. That was interesting. But even if you develop really strong relationship with your clients and do multiple projects for them, I always felt you’re still not one of them.

 

You know, you’re never really privy to the detail on exactly how the research was used. And so much of my job now is less about a specific project, but more figuring out how to bring insights to the broader organization. And my brain is a lot, you know, consumed with, you know, the politics and the social dynamics of my organization and how I can help my team negotiate and navigate that space so that we’re using insights the best way.

 

And that is nearly impossible for a vendor to do. And you’re not even aware, probably to a certain extent about ineffective your research really is, because you don’t have, you know, that access. Also, it just so happened, and I think this is not universal, but relatively common on the vendor side.

 

I mean, that’s a sales gig. And the higher you go up, the more they want you to be a salesperson.

 

Bill Gullan

Sure, sure.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

And I was a salesperson. You know, they use the sales guys, I love them to death, they used to drag me around all over the country, you know, trying to talk people into buying our stuff. And I would be their little stunt, like nerd person, right.

 

And I sold a lot of work, because, you know, I’ve been pretty compelling. And, you know, clients can smell a sales guy coming a mile away. But, you know, I was the good.

 

So, you know, I was, I was effective in that space, but I didn’t enjoy it. Like, I didn’t want my career ascension to be dependent on being a salesperson, I’m a researcher. And on top of that, especially if you work for a small to midsize company, like, the economics are real.

 

And having to make those sales so that you keep that company afloat is like a pressure that you just, you know, you got to, you got to know it and feel it to believe it. And that means that you oversell, and you overcommit, and you overwork people, you know, so my dissertation actually was written about the company I worked for. And a lot of it is about how hellish the hours are when you’re in that vendor side, and how little control you actually have over your, your work life balance, because, you know, the livelihood of the entire company is really dependent on the work that you do and making more sales.

 

And that was great in my 20s and early 30s.

 

Bill Gullan

It’s not something I would do again, in my 40s and beyond. Yeah, you would you kill, no doubt. To that, to that point about impact, and the unique ability that those on the client side have to, to see work through as well as understand all the dynamics, you originally came to our attention, one of our team members attended a talk that you gave at one of the industry shows, I think in the last year, and your topic, I won’t even sort of try to remember exactly word for word, what the title of the talk was, but the gist of it was the difference between real research and, you know, cover your butt, or more political or sort of less, you know, check the box.

 

Could you expand a little bit on you also talked about how certain pieces of research, and it may not even be based on how they’re constructed, or how great the slides look, really have a profound and cumulative impact on a knowledge estate within a company and have impact. Could you talk about sort of what that what that thesis was, I guess, of that talk, and also see, because it seems like something you’re passionate about.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

And this is my my all time favorite topic. I mean, I kind of make it like a hobby or a habit of going when I go to these conferences of doing a talk like that, you know, because I’m not really allowed to go to conferences and talk trade secrets, like information about universal like that would get me fired in a heartbeat. So I tend to give more, you know, kind of whatever you call them, like think pieces, you know, I put together something that’s like intentionally a little provocative, that kind of pokes, pokes us as market researchers in some of our more spaces.

 

And I just I enjoy it, I find that, you know, there’s a certain segment of the population, I’m sure who’s very offended by the things that I do and say, but there’s another segment of like, those are my people. They’re like, that’s the fun of it. Thank you for speaking what we all think and feel out loud so we can talk about it.

 

So that’s, you know, it’s kind of like a shtick. That particular talk was actually inspired by one of my all time favorite books by the late, great anthropologist David Graeber. And the book is called Bullshit Jobs.

 

And I highly recommend it’s an incredible book. It’s so fun. And this is an incredible author, incredible anthropologist and academic.

 

But in that book, he actually has a thesis that, you know, a huge percentage of the time spent by white collar workers in the Western world, whatever you call that, are engaged in work that is absolutely not necessary. But if they all stop doing it tomorrow, the world would be no different. And the part, per his definition, that makes the work bullshit is that the person doing the work knows it.

 

And that creates such a tremendous sense of psychological unease. Because as humans, like, we want to matter, like we want our work to matter. So like, the best thing to be is the kind of market researcher who is doing bullshit work, check the backboard and just have no awareness of it.

 

You’re like, you’re like in the Matrix. Don’t don’t eat the pill. Like you’re happy.

 

Do that. Live that life. But like, I personally can’t live that life.

 

And the most astute, you know, long lived researchers at some point in their careers see enough in the war zone to know that like, some of the questions we’re being asked are really kind of dumb. And some people are using us, not really because they’re trying to understand something, they use knowledge, but we’re being used for like political purposes, or we’re actually being used for vanity purposes, to look smart or good or win some sort of battle. There is, you know, and then there’s a whole side of measurement that is not just a consumer insights thing, but a sort of KPI thing, right?

 

Measurement for measurements sake. If it’s not measured, it doesn’t matter. You know, there’s all of this endless, mostly useless measurement that goes on in business contexts, I believe.

 

And so, you know, another talk that I’ve given with my colleague, and the director of my ethnographic program, Dr. Kate Brosford, you know, it was about quantification culture within our own organization and how, you know, defaulting to quantified measurement when we’re talking about human issues is sort of a performance that we put on. And sometimes we talk about the statistic or the measurement, as opposed to the thing. I’m very fond of saying to my clients, we have a CSAT, it’s called GSAT, guess satisfaction, we have a survey, right?

 

As you expect, we might, we have lots of metrics. It’s a great survey, beautiful data set. I can talk to you about the ins and outs and what causes all sorts of theme park behavior for days and days and days with it, right?

 

But on a weekly basis, a lot of these KPIs are not that interesting, you know, because they move seasonally, or based on huge, huge factors that, you know, for the most part, we don’t have control of, like- Rain for days, yeah, rain for days last week. Yeah, right, weather, stuff like that, right? It’s frankly, kind of obvious, but I learned over time that just the act of putting out that data weekly was almost an act of violence against the organization, because it caused organizational reactivity, it caused pointless conversations, right?

 

It caused people to pay more attention to GSAT than guest satisfaction. And so I’m really fond of saying GSAT is not guest satisfaction. GSAT is a metric, it’s a proxy, it’s a valuable tool, but let’s not sacrifice ourselves on the altar of this KPI.

 

We’ve got, like, real things to do here, right? And it’s a very weird position to be in. I find myself to be the person in the organization almost advocating against using data, which is insane, right?

 

Probably not advisable for most people. But, you know, when I read Braver’s book, I thought this is true. He has a whole category that he calls box checking.

 

And plenty of people’s jobs are in the box checking category, but market researchers are among them. And again, that is defined by him as, you know, work you do, you know, for the sake of saying you had done it, but having no other specific purpose, right? So the talk I gave essentially was a how to avoid the trap of box checking, you know, a set of principles and guidelines that you can enact as a market researcher or leader of a team to identify box checking when it is happening and to prevent it from happening, or in certain cases, when it’s necessary, how to manage that in a way where you don’t hate yourself and just feel demoralized.

 

You know, if you’ve taken that pill and you’re out of the matrix, there’s got to be a coping mechanism for those of us who are like, very aware of how BS, not just market research, but all of it, all that stuff.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah. Yeah, right.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

PDF reports. And that’s what it is. It’s the office space environment.

 

And I choose to look at dead in the face, talk about it, you know, talk to my team about it, sort things out, you know, because I think otherwise, we’re just all engaging in an endless performance. And that is, you know, kind of a drag and a bummer.

 

Bill Gullan

Life’s too short, careers are too short. To that point, in the previous episode, I was sitting around with a couple of Finch colleagues, and we were talking about, you know, sort of what’s happening in the industry and in the world. And we were talking, not surprisingly, as everyone is about kind of the what we’re seeing is the two extremes, it’s like the middle is hollowing out on the extreme technology and AI is, is making certain things possible.

 

On the extreme other end, nothing will take the place of human experience and observation and some of those really immersive methodologies. And it’s the stuff in between some of which may be dumb research, that that seems to be diminishing. And I’d love to get your take just on kind of AI and technology in general, without disclosing anything proprietary.

 

But one of the points that John made, in a job hopping era, though, you and I are both excluded from that, but in a job hopping era, one of the promises of AI is to reduce the amount of dumb research you do. And by that dumb, it isn’t the CIA, the CYA, as much as it is the same study four years in a row, because they’re different stakeholders who didn’t read the previous three monotonous stuff. Yeah, asking the same question again, because all the stakeholders have changed.

 

And, you know, they need to do it themselves or whatever. Thoughts on AI generally, or, and then general, and then beyond that, it’s pot, you know, it’s potential, as an antidote, to some degree, at least to that knowledge estate problem, the cumulative nature of that may be lost in a rapidly changing, you know, job hopping, kind of department or era.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

I mean, there’s so much in this space. I mean, yeah, first, I mean, I always approach this stuff with a fair degree of skepticism, because for those of us who’ve been in the market research industry, for many, many years, like you’ve seen stuff like this before, you know, there was there was a time when people were like, Oh, that’s it, surveys are dead, because we have neuroscience, right. And now we’ll just be able to track eyeballs and measure, you know, skin conducted when you know what I mean.

 

And then we don’t need to do these surveys at all. And that turned out to be patently false, right? Sure.

 

This is, I think, similar to that, but very different, right? Like this, this is real, like anybody who is using, you know, these, these, these and stuff, like knows that this is like a magic, that is, is clearly, like, very qualitatively different, right. And so there is like tremendous opportunity there.

 

So I mean, I am looking at it, my team is looking at it as a way to avoid drudgery, front work, routine monotonous tasks, like why employ a human to do something that’s boring, and that can be done over and over again, when you can make it efficient using AI. So we’re really looking at that space. And I’m not worried about it so much as like, you know, a threat to like human jobs, only because there’s so much we could actually be doing with our real useful brains, right, that just, you know, to be able to get rid of the drudgery, and we are really looking in that space, you know, whatever we can automate, we’re going to be looking to do it.

 

And there are there are pathways, you know, to do that with AI. And if you’re not looking at that, you know, I think it’s you’re really a silly person, you know. That being said, like, we’re not there yet.

 

And I think what’s most irritating about this space, and this isn’t necessarily evil, the industry is just, I mean, I’ll call them wise, but you know, probably more like over promises that all the vendors are making, because you know, they just crawl right out of the woods, and everybody’s got an AI layover everything they saw, right, right. And they don’t tell you the truth about it. You know, they don’t tell you, like, what it actually does, and what its limits are.

 

They sell it to you, and they act like this thing, I mean, I’ve talked to multiple vendors who are like, we have end-to-end reporting engines, you know, we’ll write your survey, and we’ll get your survey fielded, and we’ll synthesize these data sets, and we’ll run all these banners, and we’ll write a report, and we’ll output reports, and you don’t need any humans at all. I mean, they’re making those claims. And whenever I say, okay, show me, here’s a data set, let’s see, you know, all it really does is spit out the most superficial sort of insights that, again, are fine, and probably will do a lot of the box checking.

 

You know, so I do think that when you do have to box check, when you are sort of just providing data for the performance of providing data, so it seems like you’re productive, and your clients feel like they’re getting something, you know, they’re not looking too deep, and not thinking too hard, these outputs are fine. And I remove, like, some of the qualitative analysis from this, you know, because I think that the synthesis of video, and the synthesis of transcripts, that’s just super useful, you know, to real qualitative researchers, very efficient, you know, but I am talking about, like, the human insights and synthesis and analysis. I mean, you know, from what I’ve seen, for the most part, it does a great job at generating mediocre insights.

 

Bill Gullan

Right, right.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

I mean, I think, I mean, you’ve heard this before, like, chat to VTs, it’s like asking a C student something, you know what I mean? And so like, that’s the kind of work you’re getting, you’re getting C student work. Tragedy is that C student work passes for okay work in a lot of veins.

 

So I do think that if you’re working for an organization that is pretty uneducated about what really good data looks like, you could actually get some of these tools and trick a lot of people into thinking you’re doing a lot of really great work. But, you know, so my perspective on it is I’m looking to reduce drudgery, reduce repetition, you know, save resources, and even save labor where I can, like, why wouldn’t I do that? But yeah, I mean, at least so far, like, these things don’t show even the most minute chance of replacing the seasoned researchers on my team.

 

Bill Gullan

Certainly, certainly.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

Not, not a, not a, not a scratch on them. Like, there’s just no competing with, right, you know, a human who’s actually really educated in the space and understands the difference between good and bad research. You know, I’ll watch it with interest.

 

You know, if it replaces all of us one day, I’ll be like, oh, look at that. That’s interesting. But it ain’t there yet.

 

It just isn’t.

 

Bill Gullan

No, a lot of it’s vapor. Yeah, at this point.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

But it’s a great, I love it as a think tool, right? I ask co-pilot or chat to be team half a dozen questions a day at least. As a thought partner, as somebody just to idea, generate, you know, it’s so freaking useful.

 

You just have to treat its answers with discernment.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah, of course.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

And that’s why it’s dangerous. All these vendors saying like, oh, it’s gonna, you know, synthesize these responses and it’s gonna, I mean, that only passes for like a useful deliverable, I don’t know, audience that’s like ignorance of the subject matter. Anybody who knows anything about the space is going to be like, that’s obvious, that’s wrong.

 

That part’s good. But if you’re not that person, how do you know?

 

Bill Gullan

Right. Someone has to operate it. You don’t.

 

Yeah. And harness it. Right.

 

And someone who has enough perspective. I mean, I love it too. But then I’ll search for things that I know a lot about.

 

It’s like people talk about the media. I’m not going to bash the media. I respect the media.

 

But it’s like when they do a story about something you know a lot about and you realize how off they are.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

That’s what it’s like. That’s what it’s like. So I think it’s going to be great for doing superficial research.

 

And it’s a tragedy that superficial research passes for good research in so many domains. And I think it’s going to be abused in that capacity. I really, really do.

 

I ultimately think there’s a real risk that it will diminish our value because it will seem too easy. I mean, I saw a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know who it was.

 

It was some vendor basically just saying, you know, this is going to do all your research for you. Research is over. And I mean, that’s personally offensive to me.

 

Bill Gullan

Right. Well, we’re not quite ready for it to be over. Right.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

Yeah. I mean, at the same time, like, look, if we don’t actually do good research, we deserve our pay. You know what I mean?

 

If you can’t actually demonstrate the difference between your output and what these AI can produce, you deserve to lose your job.

 

Bill Gullan

I mean, there have been certain, I won’t name names, but certain organizations that we’ve worked with where, you know, a new leader came in and they’re more big data than primary research. They’re more, you know, they don’t believe in quality and things like that, that on its face is absurd. But I mean, it’s not a, it’s not a unique mindset.

 

I think it’s a harmful mindset. It’s a mindset that deprives an organization, but, you know, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard it. Yeah.

 

As I want to keep my promise to you to get you out of here, let’s kind of land the plane with, you know, you talked about your career and other things and how you were seeing it early on and how, you know, certain things you mentioned that you counsel, you know, junior folks on your team and others along the way. Let’s, are there for those who may be in our audience who are kind of starting out or starting over, I know that nobody, not nobody, but almost nobody dreamt of a market research career from the, from the professional cradle, but those of us who are in it have fallen in love with it for a variety of reasons. Any words of wisdom that you would share with someone who’s, who’s early in their career path, who has an interest in research, but hasn’t necessarily taken the steps.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

I mean, I’m not really, I’m so bad at this. I mean, and it’s just because I have like a very, very sort of elitist extreme point of view on this, you know what I mean? So like, I wouldn’t say it’s advice, but it’s mostly just like a warning.

 

It’s, and that would be just like, know who you are, like know who you freaking are. So like, if you want to be somebody who, you know, kind of superficially understands methodology, you know, thinks you can, you can, you can bring a guy with a business degree off the street and you can write a survey, you know, next day and it’s all fine. Like this industry is maybe for you, you know what I mean?

 

Because you can build a pretty great career being fairly superficial about how you operate, you know, and you don’t, and if you’re really, you know, a stickler for method and rigor, it’s going to be challenging to work in this environment. It really, really is. It’s frustrating.

 

And, you know, honestly, the advice is know who you are too, because no matter what you say about researchers getting a seat at the table. And I think, you know, after 12 years at Universal and my really good team, I have a really great boss. We have a pretty good like internal reputation and a lot of, a lot of influence.

 

Right. But at the end of the day, like I’m not a dummy, like they can do everything without us. They legit could, they can make all the decisions without us.

 

You know, if our department was eliminated tomorrow, they would just be like, okay, I guess we’ll just make our best, our best guess. And, you know, a lot wouldn’t even change, you know, as a result of it, you know, and as a result of that, you know, if you’re working in market research, you know, you got to know you’re working in relative other functions in a corporate business is stigmatized, you know? So if you are like the most ambitious person, and if you’re about, you know, being, you know, seen and heard and, you know, having influence, if your ego and ambition is really all that important to you, like, you’ll pick a different field.

 

I mean, this field is for the cast outs, like it’s for the nerds, like it’s for, you know, the socially awkward. This ain’t for you, you know, go, go be a finance bro, like, you’ll figure it out, you know, right. I don’t know.

 

But it is a lot.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah. Yeah. It is for the people, though, like you, like me, who love to understand what makes people tick, who are, you know, when I can’t help, but I walk through the grocery store, when I’m really just there to get my list done, and feed the family for the week, to go down and look to the left and the right, and try to sort of retrace the steps of that box on the shelf as to what was the insight that led, and in some cases, there may not have been a good answer. But for folks who would have done it the way it was ultimately done, what’s sort of the chain of decisions that led to that new yogurt or whatever?

 

And you’re right, some of these categories are more interesting than others. But the kind of person who loves that, if they’re a workhorse and not a show horse, if their goal is, you know, big ideas and stuff, I mean, this maybe this is a place for them. I don’t know.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

Yeah, I mean, I would agree 100% with that. I mean, my whole leadership team is, is made up of people who share my intrinsic curiosity about things and a passion for understanding and just a fascination with mundane, you know, and that’s enough. Like, that’s, that’s what gets you up and you go to work every day for it’s like, okay, I’m gonna solve this problem.

 

Like, that’s what I get excited about. That’s what my leadership team gets excited about. It’s like, we’re gonna figure this out.

 

This is fun. So I think it can be an incredibly fun job, you know, incredibly, like cognitively rewarding.

 

Bill Gullan

Sure.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

You know, and really, I mean, people don’t talk about this enough. But as much as I say, like, oh, they could get rid of us tomorrow, because again, they totally could. And you should know that.

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

There’s actually a great part about that, because you’re not actually responsible for anybody’s bottom line.

 

Bill Gullan

Right?

 

[Jennifer Avery]

You’re not, you know, I mean, there’s deadlines and urgencies. But like, me and my boss have a joke, like, there’s no research emergencies, like any sort of research emergency, that’s a fake fire. That’s, that’s a made up deadline.

 

There’s no research emergencies. Okay. So like, there are plenty of jobs where you’re, you know, working late because you have to get your hands dirty, or, you know, really being responsible or accountable for a lot of really hard decisions, where we just kind of sit on the side and think thoughts and say, this is what we think.

 

And it’s kind of a privileged, ivory chair sort of existence in a way. And, you know, I think that privilege of being able to think for a living, you know?

 

Bill Gullan

Yeah, sure. Well, there’s integrity to that.

 

[Jennifer Avery]

If there is integrity, but I mean, there’s also like, I think people are some people are jealous of it. People are like, actually, I could just sit around and think deep thoughts for a living, like they pay you for that. I actually have to get this thing out.

 

I got to make this campaign. I got to go make these tickets. I got to go do this real thing.

 

And you just get to sit around and philosophize. Like, that’s not cool. I mean, so, you know, I think it’s really fun.

 

It’s the right job for the right person. But you know, you got to know who you are, you know, when you pick a job like this.

 

Bill Gullan

No, it’s perfect. And a great place to leave it. Jennifer, thank you so much for your time and your insight and your candor, which is so refreshing and meaningful to me and I know to our listeners.

 

And we’re really excited to have had this time with you. Thank you for having me. Many thanks to Jennifer for her time or insight and her candor, which is refreshing and highly valuable, I think, for those in the field and those interested in the insights field and those who really want to be champions of purposeful change, as this podcast is called.

 

As always, three ways to support us here. Way one, click subscribe. You will not miss a single episode.

 

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