Do you have a particular story or something that you'd like to share behind your why?
Yes.
I think there's a couple.
I'm going to 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 market
marketing and shopper and consumer psychology, we had to do a lot of teaching and 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 going to 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 the 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, you know, 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.
You know, 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 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 want to choose one item
over another.