Strategic Experimentation With Heather Myers on PR Patter!
Julie:
Good morning, everyone, and Happy New Year. It’s great to be back here in January after a little bit of a break. I’m Julie Livingston, president of Want Leverage Communications. I am delighted to welcome you back to PR Patter, my semi-weekly show where I chat with the amazing people from across my public relations and marketing network.
Julie:
Today is no different. I’m delighted to welcome Heather Myers. She is a strategy nerd. I guess I have a lot of nerds on this show. I’ve said that before about people. She founded Spark No.9 to answer the question everybody wants to know before they launch: Is this strategy going to work?
Julie:
Before Spark No.9, Heather was a senior executive at Scholastic—I was also there many years ago—and Universal, where she worked on strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and new ventures, and saw many strategic ideas get stuck on the shelf. That must be familiar to a lot of you out there!
Julie:
At Spark No.9, Heather and her team partner with companies with big growth agendas to innovate better and faster through a powerful experimentation approach that combines design data and the scientific method. So welcome, Heather. What a great background you have.
Heather:
Thank you.
Heather’s Background
Julie:
So, Heather, you’re somebody who thrives, who sees solutions and opportunity in a variety of business challenges. You help companies and people turn those challenges into opportunities. So, can you just tell us a little bit more about your backstory and how Spark No.9 came about?
Heather:
Absolutely. So I will say I was incredibly lucky in my first job, which was for a strategy consulting firm called L E K.
I can assure you that at the age of 22, I had no idea what business strategy was, but I give L.E.K. full credit for seeing something in me that was a fit there. But anyway, L. E. K. set the stage for the rest of my career, definitely by sort of teaching me about how to think and build arguments.
So, some really good habits of mind. But I fell in love there with the idea of strategy. Especially when it was supported by data.
So L. E. K. was all about data before it was a thing. Like one of the partners in the L.A. office where I worked for a while had a vanity license plate that had the words data driven on it, like they were all in on the data thing.
And I think that sort of combination of strategy and data. You know, it became kind of the core to me of how to approach strategy. So when I worked in larger companies like Scholastic and Universal, I did indeed kind of see and have big strategy ideas that were put on the shelf.
And listen, for very good reasons, right? Like a lot of those big ideas, they’re risky, right? Like, who wants to bet your next few quarters on that?
So when I left Scholastic, I did a bunch of consulting, and I eventually stumbled on a formula that I think we’ll talk a little bit more about. But it’s really, how do you bring data to strategy in a way that isn’t fraught with opinion and gut feel and so on, but great data that is believable and, you know, as much as possible, inarguable.
And so that was the birth of what we do at Spark No. 9, which we’ve been doing for almost a decade now.
Julie:
That’s great. How’d you come up with the name?
Heather:
Oh, gosh. So, at the time when I had left Scholastic, I had been working in an era of the kind of media and entertainment business that was tumultuous, right? The Internet had sort of turned content on its head.
So a lot of the work I did, unfortunately, was not the big growth strategy stuff. Although I kept trying to do that. A lot of it was selling a business, closing down a division, firing people, and merging things.
And really, I just wanted to focus on growth. And so I was like, all right, well, Spark is all about ideas and growth, but of course, there are a lot of Sparks out there.
So, you know, we always kind of joke about it; we test at least nine things every time we test. Hence, part number nine.
How is Heather Innovating with Strategic Experimentation?
Julie:
That makes perfect sense. That’s great. So, how are you innovating the process of innovation?
Heather:
Yeah, really good question. So, let’s say, you’re thinking about launching something new.
So, it might be a new product, maybe it’s a rebrand, maybe it’s an existing product that needs to find some new audiences. Whatever it is, you need to know more, right? So, usually you do some market research.
You might do focus groups, or user interviews, maybe some surveys, maybe some discrete choice analysis. So many of those are forms of research that have been around for about a century; focus groups were invented in the 1940s.
They are all terrific ways to understand attitudes, but to understand opinions, maybe to understand the interpersonal dynamics of a bunch of strangers in a focus group room, but you know, you’re not planning to sell your product to groups of strangers, essentially. You’re planning to reach people online, right?
And so the work we do at Spark really sort of innovates that innovation process by putting the research where people are and where people find out about new stuff. So, what we do at Spark is we use advertising as a medium for experimentation.
Many people think of an ad as a way to pitch a product or reach existing customers and build awareness. And that’s true. But we at Spark also think of each ad as a collection of variables.
So, for example, you could test on a “coming soon” basis, different product concepts to kind of see which generates the most traction. Or maybe you test different branding to see what resonates with both your existing audience as well as new audiences.
Maybe you test positioning or a different creative style. Get the idea. But rather than sort of testing one thing in a binary way, which is how people often approach testing online, we test things in a multivariate way, meaning lots of different concepts at once, shown to lots of different audiences at just enough scale to generate statistically valid results.
So what we do is like a weird mix of creative, bringing new ideas to life, but also analytics and data, right? And measuring the response to those ideas. It’s a very different sort of less linear, more hypothesis-driven way of approaching innovation.
Where do You Find Customer Hotspots?
Julie:
That’s great. So when you’re launching something new, when you’re helping an organization launch something new, how can you find early customer hotspots that can be the difference between success and failure?
Heather:
So, great question. So when you are launching something new, frankly, whether you’re a startup or whether you are in a big company, you have a limited budget. So, how should you spend that budget?
If you can find the people who love whatever it is, you are pitching to them the most, they are the people who are going to buy it. They’re going to tell their friends about it. They’re going to be invested in it. Maybe they’re going to share your posts about it. Those are the people you want to find. The sooner you can find them, the more efficient you are in marketing and getting feedback on your sort of early product or position, campaign, or whatever it is.
And so testing is a great way to identify those subcultures, if you will, who are very, very invested in whatever your product or service offering happens to be. And a lot of people still test in terms of demographics, right? They’ll define their audience in terms of. Age and geography and, you know, suburb versus urban and so on, but, you know, the beauty of the internet is there’s so much more data out there, right? There are these rich data sets to describe these little niches.
These little kinds of audience subcultures can be very powerful in getting something new off the ground.
Why are Surveys Not The Answer?
Julie:
You know, you barely walk out of an office these days or a store or some kind of, you have some kind of interaction with organization. You’re suddenly barraged by surveys from companies you’ve done business with in some way. Why are surveys a poor substitute for measuring behavior, Heather? What have you found in your experience?
Heather:
Yes. I mean, there are a couple of reasons, and a lot of these are well documented.
They are not secrets, right? So one is that it’s very hard on a survey for people to predict their future behavior.
So if you’re doing a survey that’s very much about attitudes or opinions about things, that’s a great use of a survey.
If you’re trying to use a survey to understand whether particular customers or potential customers are going to buy a product, or like a product, or whatever it happens to be. That’s a little bit more difficult, right?
We are terrible at predicting our behavior. I would even look at polls from the last presidential election, right? Oh, my God. So, right. We don’t always do what we say we are going to do. And for many good, good reasons, right? Like we changed our minds or like we found a better product, whatever it happens to be.
So that’s one reason I think surveys are not so great in terms of making a big decision about moving forward. Um, the second reason is cost.
Like you just mentioned, you get these barrages of surveys. I do too. And a lot of them offer me a $50 gift certificate to buy something at Amazon or whatever it happens to be. So if you have to get, let’s say a thousand people in your completed surveys and you’re spending 50 bucks per survey, there’s $50,000.
You know what, you could take that $50,000 and you could test how to position your new product with lots of different discrete audiences. And instead of reaching a thousand people, you could reach millions of people. Think how much you could learn by putting different ads in front of those millions of people who I, of course, would chop up into lots of little sub-audiences so that you learn as much as you can.
So, you know, again, people think of advertising as a way to kind of get somebody to click and buy or, or, you know, do some sort of action, but advertising can also be an amazing way to learn a lot about what people want, what features, what value proposition works best, what positioning and so on.
What is Heat Testing?
Julie:
That’s great. You, you do something that I think sounds so interesting, and I’d love you to elaborate on it. What is heat testing? Like, how does your methodology differ from traditional market valuation, market validation techniques?
Heather:
Here’s what heat testing is. It’s basically what I have described to you already, which is, it’s testing multiple things in multiple ways with multiple audiences.
The result of that testing looks like a heat map. So imagine a matrix with the things you have tested and how you have tested them across the top and your audiences or subcultures, you know, across the side in each of the squares, the cells, there are results. Some of them are hot, hot, hot. That’s where you’re finding product market fit, right?
Some of them are cold; they should be, but it doesn’t mean they’ll never be your market. It just means they’re not going to be the place you should go 1st.
So that heat map is sort of the genesis of the idea of heat testing and the kind of places where you find that great intersection of those people who want your product. Those are your hot spots. And so those kinds of audience subcultures, if you will, those are the hot spots where you want to focus first. And again,
I think one of the hardest things when you’re an entrepreneur is you imagine that your market for your new thing is this big, and it probably is, right?
Julie:
I’m guilty of that.
Heather:
Yeah, we all are, and you should be. Look, if you’re an entrepreneur, you are visionary, and you need to paint that big vision at the same time, though, you need to be the technician. Who’s like, ‘I know my market is this big, but I’ve got to find those hotspots. Those people who want my product the most.’ First, um, because by finding them first, I’m going to be a lot more efficient. I’m going to build a fan base. And I’m going to give myself some time to kind of tinker with the product and make it awesome. I’m explaining something that lots of people already know. Right.
We just have a different way of getting there, and getting there really quickly.
How do We Make Demographics More Distinctive?
Julie:
So you talk a lot about target audiences, which, you know, more often than not are demographics, right? How can, is there a way to make that more distinctive?
Heather:
Yes. So I think we all have some level of awareness that we are being tracked online. And, you know, whether you want to be incredibly private or not, it’s probably true that a lot of the ad platforms know something about you, even if it’s just inferring that, I don’t know, you’re looking at new car sites all day.
Right. That rich set of data is an amazing tool for marketers and innovators to identify discrete audiences.
So let’s say you are launching a new beverage concept.
It’s targeted at a Gen Z audience who care a lot about sustainability. It’s a little powder-like tablet or something like that you drop in water. So you could just think about your audience as Gen Z. You could put some ads out there. Or you could let the ad platform sort it out for you. You would learn not a lot, right, about who your hotspots are, who is most interested in your product.
So, imagine instead creating a series of discrete audiences.
- Maybe there’s like the crunchy Zenz, Gen Z people who are like, I don’t know. Uh, drinking apple cider vinegar or something like that.
- Maybe there are very sophisticated Gen Z people who are really into the latest beverage.
- Maybe there’s another group of people who care a lot about sustainability, and they love the idea of being able to add something to water.
If you test your new concept with all of those different subgroups, you’re going to learn a lot about how your products should be packaged, what the branding should be like. You can just learn so much by identifying the people who want you most, and that data is out there.
It’s why when you’re on Instagram or when I’m on Instagram, you know, I get a lot of ads for shoes. It’s because they have tracked my behavior and they know in an instant. And it happened in an instant. So that rich data set is yours to use, right? And it’s incredibly powerful.
How Should You Use Your Data With Strategic Experimentation?
Julie:
I’m wondering how companies can more effectively use their data and leverage it to develop new offerings, you know, new products and services.
Heather:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I think back a long time ago to companies like Williams Sonoma, who used to use their data from their direct mail operation, from catalogs, and online shopping to figure out where to put their stores.
I think there are opportunities like that to dig into your data. Not just for geography and where to locate a store, but identifying things like product categories, where perhaps there is an opportunity to create adjacencies. I think the beauty of the world we live in today is that you can test those adjacencies.
So if you sort of see a gap in your product line. You can test an idea for a new product that’s “coming soon.” You know, sign up to learn when we launch and see from within your customer base, but then also testing beyond it, because I think that’s one of the sort of, balancing act – the balancing acts that many brands have to do, which is, it’s got to work with our existing customers. We don’t want to alienate them.
But of course, to grow, we need to find new customers. So that in my mind is how do we leverage our internal data to generate new concepts that work for our current folks, but also appeal to new audiences? That’s great.
Julie:
Thank you. I’m wondering, you know, I’m a publicist and LinkedIn expert. I’m wondering, have you ever worked with a public relations agency to leverage the results of any of the research that you’ve done? Because I have, I have done that in the past with market research firms. Wondering if that’s ever worked for you.
Heather:
It is a great point. We have not worked directly with a P.R. Firm, but true that a lot of the work that we do has been leveraged by our clients in all types of communications.
And again, because we can validate positioning and messaging and so on, our clients can feel confident that they are taking to the market a message that is going to resonate with the right people.
And I would say that’s the other sort of tweak here, which is, you know. The work we do helps identify which target audiences are going to be most receptive to whatever that message is right out of the gate.
Thank You, Heather!
Julie:
Great, Heather. This has been such a great conversation. I want to make sure that people know how to get in touch with you. What’s the best way? Is it LinkedIn?
Heather:
You can find me on LinkedIn. I am a big fan. Which I think is how I came across you, Julie, because you are there a lot as well. You can always email us at [email protected].
Julie:
That’s great. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Heather, and everyone else. I hope you’ll be back for another episode of PR Patter next week.
Heather:
I certainly will be. Thank you so much, Julie.