What's your why of what you do?
Why did you choose to be a,
and call yourself a biologist
and get into this profession per se?
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's one of the most common questions I get is,
you're a psychologist, how did you end up in marketing?
And it really relates to my why.
I love psychology.
I studied psychology for many, many years.
And realized that I didn't love being a therapist.
And so I wanted to find some other avenues
for applying what I know and what I do.
And about 30 years ago or so, I led my first focus group
and I really fell in love with that process.
The ability to understand people,
in particular, I think the thing I didn't love
about being a therapist was the focus on pathology.
What I enjoy is focusing on really understanding people,
putting ourselves in their shoes,
understanding their situation, their lives,
their dreams, their challenges,
and then creating, working with teams to create approaches
that are better, faster, more efficient,
more enjoyable for people.
So that's when I really made my transition into marketing.
And specifically, about 20, boy, 24, 25 years ago,
started working in what's now known as shopper marketing
or commerce that is really focused on consumer behavior,
purchase behavior, and understanding why people choose
and buy what they do,
and understanding how we can help make experiences,
products, brands better for them.
And so for me, it really is about using what I do
to go beyond insight, go beyond data,
to really understand people from their own perspective,
on their own terms, so that we can be as effective
in helping them as possible.
Do you have a particular story or something
that you'd like to share behind you or why?
Yes, I think there's a couple.
I'm gonna start with one that was a success.
We can maybe talk about one that I learned from
as a failure later, but one that was really a success
is we had a, you know, in the early days,
particularly of shopper marketing
and shopper and consumer psychology,
we had to do a lot of teaching,
a lot of explaining what we do and why it's so important.
And I recall we had a large CPG company
coming to visit our offices,
and they weren't really convinced
that this was something they needed to focus on.
And so they said, we're gonna give you one day.
And in that one day, we expect you to convince us
and make a compelling case that we should invest
in these services.
And I'll never forget, I was in the room
with my CEO at the time, and he's like,
yeah, absolutely, we can do that.
Chris, it's on you.
I was like, oh my gosh, all right.
And so I was really tasked with coming up with something
that would have a real impact
to really help these high level,
I mean, these were C level, VP level folks
really understand what was going on
with their consumers and their shoppers
in a way that would be compelling and impactful for them.
And we batted around some ideas,
maybe we could do some store walks with them
and go check out the shelves,
or maybe we could bring in some shoppers
that they could kind of shop along with.
But I really thought that that wouldn't have the impact
that we needed.
It's one thing to talk about issues and challenges,
it's an entirely other thing to have to be in the shoes
of that person and struggle with the same things
they struggle with.
And so I really racked my brain around like,
how can we do that?
And so I created something called Chopper Passport.
And Chopper Passport essentially is a role playing game.
We put together shopper profiles.
So we had different profiles,
some based on the company that we were working with
and others were a little bit looser.
And we broke them into teams of two.
And we did that for a very specific reason
because when you're in a team like that,
you have to communicate your choices.
You have to argue, have conversations,
make your case for why we wanna choose one item
over another.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.