Now that we have all done it, we recognise how easy it will be to jump into our second project.  There is a realisation that listening to information from the source smashes our internal bias and creates a rich internal discussion.  I have always been told in my previous roles that ‘you are not the target audience’ and Hearsay makes it easy to stay connected with customers.

Choose three words that describe your work life right now.

For me the one main word is ‘new’.  I’m in a new position.  Before Substance I worked for News Corp so moving from a large media organization into a small family run therapeutic goods business means I am on a high learning curve.

It has just been three months since I’ve put my feet under the desk, so I knew I would have new things coming at me. The timing was perfect for Hearsay from my perspective.

How would you describe your role and what you’re doing at Substance?

I have stepped into a marketing role. I am bringing to life a program of activity that will be executed in the new year.

The reason we used the Hearsay Platform was to understand the customer for a natural pain relief product and build those learnings into this activity plan.

How did you come across Hearsay?

It landed in my lap. The project had already been agreed upon but hadn’t actually started.

I feel very fortunate being able to be part of this part of the project – the market research investigation.  I was pretty clear that I needed to do market research and have that qualitative and quantitative research in hand before I made any decisions.

It would have been hard without Hearsay as we would probably have gone down a more traditional route.  I would have conducted quite a bit of desk research and relied on the internal knowledge of the team.  But this way the whole team could be involved and hear the customer with their own ears.

What would have been different in that more traditional approach vs using Hearsay to talk to real customers?

It would have been quite different.  There is a lot of established views in the business about what the market thinks.  It was great for all of us to step away from that and hear from real people about how they go about consuming natural pain relief.  Understand what the triggers are to buying this type of product.

How would you summarise the benefits the business got from using Hearsay?

What I was really surprised about was how quickly we heard consistent themes about what people wanted.   One of the concerns internally was if 10 interviews would be enough.  But it was and to my real surprise, it was within 5 interviews that we got this level of consistent insight.

And then on top of that there is a lot of aha-moments.  I was live tagging Good Points and Interesting Points at high frequency when I was the Observer (https://hearsay.io/features/).

Ultimately doing this work ourselves on the Hearsay tool took all the bias out of our internal thinking.

What was the feedback from the rest of the team?

To start with they loved the ease of it.  We logged in to meet our interviewees, we followed the script that was also on screen and we tagged our aha-moments.

I think everyone was a bit apprehensive at first about how this was going to work.  No one here had actually run research interviews before.

This meant that everyone wanted to be super prepared before we launched into the interview process.  We ran an onboarding session with Megan [Hearsay] which was super helpful and then we all got ourselves prepared for our first session.

Now that we have all done it, we recognise how easy it will be to jump into our second project.  There is a realisation that listening to information from the source smashes our internal bias and creates a rich internal discussion.

I have always been told in my previous roles that ‘you are not the target audience’ and Hearsay makes it easy to stay connected with customers.

That’s great.  We have other clients running their Customer Immersion Programs through Hearsay, engaging with customers monthly.   It doesn’t feel like a big commitment for the value you get.

No, and it’s just like a customer health check.  Constantly learning about their expectations and their path to purchase which is complicated these days.

In our conversations, one of the questions we asked was where do you get your information from and how do you educate yourselves.   What we expected was very different from what our customers were actually doing.

So overall how would you summarise your experience?

It was really positive.  The onboarding, the process of setting up a project and thinking about our hypotheses and burning questions was key to us getting the insight we needed.

Getting those consistent themes was really fantastic.  I don’t know if you’ve seen that program on channel 10, the Goggle Box.  It reminded me a little bit of that.  All these different kinds of people from all around Australia in their lounge rooms delivering their insight about the programs.

How do you see us being all the platform being part of your toolkit moving forward.

We have another round of conversations to do on this project.

But ongoing we think it is a great template for how we start to build and refresh our marketing plans.  All brands need to connect with their customers before we make any more decisions.

Thank you for talking to us Megan.