MRMW NA 2019 Conference Series – Rob Pascale - MAi Research

Happy Market Research Podcast

Welcome to the MRMW NA 2019 Conference Series. Recorded live in Cincinnati, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Rob Pascale, President and Chief Analytics Officer at MAi Research.

Contact Rob Online:

LinkedIn

[e-mail]

MAi Research

[00:00]

My guest is Robert Pascale, MAI Research. You can find him online at MAI Research.com. Love the .com by the way. They develop custom market research solutions to address important challenges. Now, this was a really interesting episode for me ‘cause I have five kids, and he uses as an example diapers. And one of their customers is a diaper company. And they were trying to figure out how to punch through from a messaging perspective. Originally, the context was all about leak prevention, but after using their proprietary text analytics, which leverages a Bayesian model, they actually discovered that diaper rash was a bigger driver of consumer intent. And communicating about the gel protection inside of the diaper is what would actually drive oversize returns. Now interestingly enough, after that company changed the messaging, Shzam! It actually took place. I hope you enjoy this episode.

[01:02]

My guest today - Rob Pascale, MAI Research. Does it stand for something?

[0106:]

Marketing Analysts Incorporated. Initially, that’s what it was.

[01:10]

Got it.

[01:10]

But recently, I guess maybe about ten years ago or so, we changed it to MAI Research.

[01:17]

I like it. Yeah, IBM kind of did that. M/A/R/C Research, who you might know, Merrill Dubrow, they did that as well. And we are at MRMW. Ironically, I don’t have any idea what that stands for. Do you?

[01:28]

I don’t. [laughter]

[01:30]

Anyway, we’re live here in Cincinnati. What do you think about the show so far?

[01:33]

It’s been good. It’s been good to reach out and let people know about what we’ve been working on. We also have a spin-off that we’ve been working on, which is Pathfinder Analytics, which is an analytics division that we’ve added into our... We’ve kind of broken out from being just an analytics department and really focuses on four primary areas, which are text analytics, which is more focused on understanding the broader ideas that people are talking about rather than trying to bring it back to absolute definitions of words. So we’re getting more of you can pick up some slang that way; you can pick up what are the ideas people really care about and how the words relate back to those ideas.

[02:16]

I had a boss who used to say, actually I had a client that used to say, so yes, a boss: “I want you to do what I mean, not what I say.” Is that kind of getting to the point of the sentiment and text analytics that you’re doing?

[02:29]

Yeah, and actually it’s not sentiment analysis, which does try to assign different degrees of emotion or excitement, things like that, to definitions of words. And so, what we’re doing is actually just letting the connections between the words people use in context define how the words are used. So we’re not going back to dictionary definitions; we’re not applying any kind of bias initially. We’re letting people just however they speak defines the words.

[02:57]

That’s so interesting. So, it’s kind of like Brama in that you define it by what it’s not. Give me an example of a project and the outcome of that example.

[03:06]

Sure. So, let’s see. There was one that we did where we scraped online reviews. This was for a diaper product. And what we were able to find out was that when people talked about leak protection, they actually talked more about the softness of the diapers than it was about the actual leak protection itself. So that actually changed the way the client thought about softness....