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In this week’s episode, we sit down with Tim DeGennaro and John Ferreira to discuss the shifts in the world of market research and methodologies that 60% of the worlds largest brands are using to better understand consumers and win when it matters most. If you like our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a rating!

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Transcription:

Bill Gullan: Greetings one and all, this is Real-World Branding. I’m Bill Gullan, President of Finch Brands, a premier boutique branding agency, and thank you for joining us. Spring is springing. We’ve said that before, but we hope that this is happening in earnest, as Philadelphia amasses yet more professional and Collegiate championships. That’s what we are now, the city of champions. At least, that’s the theory. Except for hockey, I suppose. So anyway. Glad you’re with us.

Over time we have periodically, in addition to all the interview work that we do with folks who are brand and business builders across different types of companies that we that we know or have come to know, every now and then we will separate the insights and interviews with members of our team. I always enjoy those, because it’s a format that is a little bit different and a little bit more textured I think than the day in day out interactions where we’re all running to serve a client or were going from point A to Point B. So such is the case today, where the bulk of our conversation is going to be with Tim DeGennaro.

Tim is new to Finch, he’s Associate Vice President of Insights Communities and Research Excellence, which is a mouthful but it also, I think, indicates all that Tim does and brings to this. Tim has been brought on from an organization that he’ll tell us about that was sort of a pioneer in the insights community space to really oversee our fast-growing FinchSight research community offering, both in terms of managing folks who are part of that process now as well as enhancing what we do and growing what we do.

And then, we brought back John Ferreira. John’s title at this point is Senior Vice President of Insights and Innovation. He’s been with Finch for about five years after a decade at Campbell Soup and his Wharton MBA along the way, and John’s voice will be familiar to those who are avid listeners, and he’ll fill in.

But gentlemen, happy to have you. Thanks for coming.

Tim DeGennaro: Happy to be here.

John Ferreira: Great to be here.

Bill: We are one office over, so it wasn’t-

Tim: Don’t come here often.

Bill: It wasn’t that hard, scheduling-wise. So let’s start with Tim, and John obviously fill him as you indicate your experience being a consumer or a client of insights communities in your role with Campbell’s is so helpful to us. But Tim, give us as we often start a bit of a twirl through your own background. I know you’ve been a research guy the whole way, but tell us about.

Tim: Yeah. Well, I’d say my path in insights actually started in a Waldenbooks in a mall at age 17, when I had to decide what I was going to do with my life because college was coming around the corner. So I went to Waldenbooks, I opened up a book about careers just to see what was out there. And I asked my dad, “What I want to do is I want to use information to influence decisions, and I can imagine myself presenting that information to people and kind of helping them choose what to do.”

And he goes, “Oh that sounds like market research.” I mean, he’s an engineer.  I don’t know. So-

Bill: He drives a train.

Tim: Yeah, so we went to the market research page, read the description, and I said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. Got it.” First try, first try.

Bill: That’s good.

Tim: So we started looking, well what kind of degrees do you need? And looked it up, Business degrees help. Can do a lot with a business degree, four years of school, then I emerge at Forrester Research. And Forrester Research at the time, was split into half research around the marketing profession and consumers and the other half is around technology. So I was in our technology group, and I started out as just a research associate. Understanding how research is done, how it’s presented, how to use it, and kind of went up the chain from there until I became an analyst.

So at Forrester analysts are sort of the product. They’re the people who have a coverage area of interest that they research, and essentially, it’s self-conducted research. So I was doing self-driven research on a space of technology management, both quantitative and qualitative, so talking to technology professionals, surveying them, and creating my own syndicated research outputs, and doing research based consulting with the variety of clients.

Bill: And that was primarily on the B2B side of technology, is that right?

Tim: Yeah, that was B2B. And at the time, at Forrester we were talking a lot about the age of the customer, and how if you didn’t understand your customers your business was not going in the right direction. And I believed that. I was part of communities, just around you know different points of interest for myself and saw how businesses were interested in those communities and listening to what people were saying about their products and trying to understand that their consumer, essentially, in a more profound way so that they could build better products and services for them.

So, I believed it and it was an area of interest for me that I would rather be working with consumers, rather than just technology professionals.

Bill: Sure. So you did about seven years, I think, at Forrester. Forester’s a venerable name syndicated space and a really probably great place to start a career.

Tim: Amazing, yeah.

Bill: In terms of rigor and as well as amplifying the sound of your voice and the work that you do, the fruits of your labor. And so from Forrester, where to?

Tim: So I was lucky enough to have someone from Forrester who had switched over to C space. So at the time they were called Communispace. Communispace was actually, I think they’re kind of the pioneer of the MROC space, the market research online community space. They really defined the category. What it was, how to use it, and were continuing to define it at the time.

So I talked to someone over there and they said well yeah I want you to send me the resume, I’ll send it to some people, and I started talking with them and I was really interested with the work they were doing, about how it was really trying to understand the customer at a profound level in order to drive decision making.

Bill: And so Communispace later rebranded as C Space, your tenure was from very early 2014, late 2013, until just a little while ago. Tell us a little bit about the types of clients you worked on there and the types of initiatives that were close to your heart as you really learned your craft in the communities business over that four year period.

Tim: Yeah, I worked with a lot of clients in the Fortune 500 space. So, I mean names such as Heineken, Dos Equis, or two more recent ones I’ve worked with banks such as US Bank, and have done some work in Pharma with Sanofi Aventis and some diabetes drugs. It’s been all the way to Twitter. So, social media. So it was a very wide range of clients, with a very diverse set of needs around their customers.

I think some of the things that I really enjoyed working on there were projects around understanding what consumers really think about your product. How they really view in their life. What use does it really have? Or even just understanding a segment and bringing them to life a little bit more, and you know in some loosey-goosey, cheesy way, but really digging into who are they as people and what are our unmet needs that we don’t know that we can we can fill those with new experiences.

Bill: What is it about the community’s methodology, from your perspective, that uniquely enables you to do that?

Tim: Well I think if you think about research traditionally, it’s very much okay, so we need to meet to schedule this. We need to approve this survey and we need to send it out, and when it’s got 600 completes, it’s over. And that’s the way a lot of research is, it’s kind of one and done and goodbye.

We never talked to those people again, whoever we did research with, the customers, consumers, whoever. And we have to get it really right the first time. It’s like so there’s never any room to play, its always do what we’ve always done and ask the same questions you’ve always asked, and if you ask the same questions over and over again you get the same answers over and over again. You never learn anything new. So there’s not a lot of actionable research that necessarily could’ve been doing that.

But communities allow you the flexibility to play. I mean these people who have agreed to be in your research community are there for the long term. I can talk to you today, I can survey you today and follow up with you tomorrow. I can launch a survey to this community, watch it in real time how the data is coming in and say hey that’s not yielding anything we need to pivot, and we can do that really quickly.

So that gives us the opportunity to be flexible, to play, to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes, to try new things and see and get new learning. So, it’s really the flexibility and the forgiveness, I think.

Bill: Yeah, that makes sense, and when you think about major processes, that I know that we and you use communities to support, innovation is one where you don’t just ask questions once and build a product, and it’s a raving, wild lunatic’s success.

I mean, it would seem like not only the ability to go back to people tomorrow but the ability to incorporate their feedback into subsequent stages in a process, and then go back to validate that you’ve heard them correctly and continue to use their input as you go down that funnel into something that’s market ready.

Tim: Yeah. It’s really about bringing consumers in, so that they can be a part of any decision that you need to make … Which is what consumer centricity is. It’s about bringing them to the core of your business, so you need to be able to do that easily. And that’s what communities let you do. And you know there are clients that will, they want a community because they have a very diverse set of research needs that they need to handle. And communities are very helpful for that, as well.

And then there are also the clients who have maybe one large work stream, so they need to innovate a new product and they’re going to start at zero. And we’re going to bring these community members with us from ideation all the way into execution of the product, into messaging of the product, and we’re bringing them along the way and interacting with them really bringing them in and creating with them.

Bill: Right. For those some of the big brands that you mentioned, who presumably some were onboarding during your tenure at C Space, what did they do before? Was it just a string of traditional research? Did they go without? How did you manage to change their research programs?

Tim: I think going without is probably the more likely scenario for a lot of our clients, and it’s amazing. So, you would be talking to a research or insights team, whoever was managing that community relationship with us on the client side, and all of a sudden people from you know app development would be talking to them and saying, “Hey, can we use this to …”

These are people who never had a research budget before, they don’t know how to talk to consumers, but they need to because consumer centricity is a real thing. Yeah, so it kind of opened up the possibilities throughout the business to actually bring the consumer and to decision making. So a lot of folks were going without and now they didn’t have to go without.

And it could be as simple as just asking them one question discussion, do we go this way or do I go that way? Or what do you guys think about this, to the consumers, and that’s helpful. It’s better than nothing. Or it can be actual structured research around … So, for the example I had app development, that could be you know a full deep dive into the user experience, and what needs to be improved and why, do we need the design, etc.

So a lot of it was going without, others … and interrupt me if I’m going on too long here. But I think others, it’s around cost. So what they were doing was every single time they needed to survey consumers they would draft a survey, they’d finalize it. They’d have to recruit, it’d have to go out, and you know one of our clients told us this used to take them eight weeks and now they do it in one week.

So it’s from time and costs. They’ve just really enjoyed community versus the way they were doing before.

Bill: So for some folks it makes one program more efficient, and for others it adds a learning capability that they previously never got. Which, both of which are powerful, it sounds like.

Tim: Yeah. Well, the efficiency piece is one reason, it’s another reason beyond cost why some people go without consumer insights. You need to get something done and there’s no time for research. So, the fact that you have a community of people essentially awaiting their next task is okay, we can do this today. All right let’s go. So, they enjoy that.

Bill: Well, and you made the point earlier that the traditional form of research, it seems like it’s transactional in some ways. You’ll pay somebody to have a qualitative research interaction or in order to complete a survey or whatever, and then they stroll off into the sunset. And you try to make sense of it, and if you have other questions to ask you bring back other people.

So it sounds like there’s efficiency both time and cost benefits to community. There’s additive decision support benefits for those who may have been going without. And then there’s the actual quality of the insights, sounds like it has the potential at least, if well managed, to be deeper and more substantive.

Tim: Yeah. I mean I think about our differentiator here at Finch Brands, we’re really focusing more on what I would call full service plus. So, there are communities out there where you can have that transactional relationship if you’d like, and you hand them the survey and they hand you back a bunch of charts, and it’s on you to figure out what this means and so what. And now what?

So you know the other thing with Finch Brands is we have a background of brand consulting. So, we can really partner with people, with our clients, and understand more about what their needs and challenges are. I mean as I say you know you come to us with the problem and you don’t have to do research. We will figure out how to do it, and not only do we know the research but we can look through that the data analyze and understand and apply it, the results, to your business.

So a lot of what you might get at other more research-based firms, I think, is going to get the researchers view of what you should do next, which is … it comes from a good place but it just doesn’t come from a place of real knowledge or a consulting background. So, we can add that additional element of having a right to say, ‘So what, now what? This is what you need to do, based on our consulting backgrounds.’

Bill: Sure. We’ve used the word surveys a couple of times here, but there is certainly a quantitative component to what communities have the capability to offer. But talk a little bit about, if you wouldn’t mind, about the different types of research and then we’ll get into some tricks of the trade over time.

Tim: So I think surveys are a no brainer. There are obvious, I’ll get into it later, but I think we view surveys as a vessel for gathering information. How I use that vessel is up to me, and we can talk about that more.

Other things we can do are just basic discussions, so let’s just have members of a community debate a topic. So, one thing we’ve done in the past for your client was around, ‘Do you prefer bottles or cans.’ So we put them in a debate club, and we assigned them sides. Are you side bottle or are you side can? Now argue it out.

Bill: That’s fun.

Tim: And it was really interesting to watch them look at what are all the real benefits of bottle versus cans that you might not have gone if you just asked them, ‘Do you prefer bottle, can, or why?’ A lot of people would just say I like bottle because it’s heavier or I like can because you can bring it around, but when you structure a discussion that way you get a lot of other benefits that you might not realize that you have.

Other things we can do is we can send people on missions. So, our communities have video and image upload capabilities, fully mobile, too … So you can send a customer into a situation, ask them to document the experience. How you use that is up to you. One of the kind of earlier examples I recall we did was sending people into a retail environment and just have them document what are the ups and downs.

And you saw people showing you how well the aisles are really tight in these stores or they don’t keep up this section and it’s always that way and you start to get kind of feedback on what that experience is like from the lot, all the way through checkout.

Other things we’ve done with it are just to try and do some Trend spotting. So sending people out to their Fourth of July parties and asking them what’s the trendy new food and drink items that you’re seeing at these parties, you start to realize well there’s a lot of fruit beers and different healthy platters so perhaps the Fourth of July party is changing. So what do we do about that next year?

So it’s an interesting way to try to get a front row seat of an experience that your consumers are having that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get.

Bill: Perfect. Bringing John in here, and then, Tim, I want to come back you’ve written this wonderful blog post about different ways to structure research activities to yield genuine insight beyond just asking people. You know if I asked you a direct question you answer it, but by asking you to look at things a little bit differently. We as professional researchers can extract the information. We’ll get to that.

John, your experience with communities dates back to your time on the various brand management teams at Campbell’s. What were you and your colleagues doing, before communities came into your life from a research perspective? Were you going without? Were you doing things more traditionally? Was it some blend? Talk about this from a client perspective.

John: Yeah I would say it was both. Certainly, we did a lot of standalone primary research. It took a long time to do that. So you know you have your question and then three weeks, four weeks later you get your answer. So, it’s quality research, but it definitely held back the speed of decision making on our teams.

And then there was also smaller stuff that we never got around to, and we had to just make subjective judgments. Projecting what we thought consumers wanted, which oftentimes you’re right but sometimes you’re not. And even those medium sized bets that you’re making can be critical to the business, especially where I come from in CPG where you’re looking for every avenue of growth possible.

And in larger firms, research budgets are getting cut. People are asking more of research departments, so that need to grow and innovate is stronger than ever, but at the same time the resources available are smaller, so communities were playing an important role there in trying to give us another outlet, where the company was making one big significant investment, and we would then have some access to that even if we weren’t doing as many standalone research projects.

So it was definitely really helpful, but it wasn’t a perfect solution, and in the marketplace it remains an imperfect solution. Some of the things that I experienced were things that we heard from other people within our network who we know have communities across our base, and really the first issue was that sample sizes tend to be small. And that’s okay if you’re envisioning your community being much more of a qualitative exercise, which is an important part of any community. But if you’re trying to do quant and you’re getting back survey sample sizes of 70 responses, you’re getting a lot of false reads, potentially, in what’s coming to the surface within those surveys, so that was one issue.

Another was with some of the bigger players out there, and I definitely experienced this, some of the people servicing your account are kind of grown up within the organization. They were great at managing the community but they might not be fully schooled at all the principles of research. So when they’re the ones that are helping to create draft questionnaires or they are the ones doing you know top line reports for you to save some time.

It’s definitely in some cases it’s not as efficient of an investment as you think because you have to spend time really working with them to get it up to the level of quality that you would want as a client-side researcher, and there are certainly people that are just you know all stars in those roles. But I found it a little inconsistent, and we’ve heard that.

And also price. The incumbents that have been out there for a long time. It’s definitely an efficient investment if you’re reallocating funds from standalone projects into a community. But it’s a big one. And you know budget, as I mentioned budgets are under pressure every year, so that that was something that was always kind of … as we went up and up for renewal, something that was a big discussion. And there are definitely big, significant investments with some of the larger players.

Bill: Right. And so those were reactions I think that I recall we used pretty heavily in terms of constructing the Finch Brands approach to communities, in terms of being responsive to areas of both strength and opportunity, in terms of how communities were created in the past.

John: Yeah, our three points of difference here are we open the gates, so sample size and the size of your community can be what you want it to be. And you can do robust quantitative research within our communities, we staff it with people that really know research and really get brand strategy. For example, one of the stars on our team has a master’s in marketing research. She’s really well schooled in that, and that’s the kind of thinking that we bring.

We certainly, every day, because we’re a brand consultancy, have a whole array of brand strategy frameworks, and we get business because many of us have worked on the client side. So we like to think that the level and power of the recommendations that come out of our research is of a higher tier than most market research suppliers. And also, we are a lean brand consultancy, so we don’t have you know a whole wing of our office full of people with PhD’s that are making huge salaries with overhead that we need to cover and charge through into our communities.

Bill: Or huge server farms, with slinging code and-

John: So we can offer also, we think an overall better value of giving you a better product but also having it fit more or nicely within your budget, and really our vision at Finch brands is to help brands win when it matters most. And this is an important extension of how we’re able to help that conversation, and the longer that we’re working with the client as a partner understanding their business the more powerful our recommendations can be.

We know off of this year’s most recent research report online communities are the number one most adopted emerging method for research, but that number one is 60 % of major brands are using communities. So on the one hand, there’s 40 % the market that still isn’t out there, and we’re trying to address some of these pain points that may have kept them on the fence and bring this to a broader audience, and also for brands that maybe are using one of the larger players, give them an alternative that can offer them more value.

Bill: Sounds great. So Tim, you wrote this blog post, and I think the … there wasn’t really an assignment, but the thrust of it is, it’s called 5 Surprisingly Effective Ways to Gather Insights from Online Communities. What it really is, is a couple of tricks for how to approach research or ask questions or charge a group of people so that they yield the greatest amount of analytical value. You want to quickly kind of take us through what these ways were? Kind of where this came from, what the value is.

Tim: Yeah. Just give you an overview of them. So, I think when people think of research they think there’s quant, and then there’s qual. So that means you do focus groups to form hypotheses and your punches and then you survey it to validate what you think you’ve heard. And that’s research. I disagree with that. I think that’s an old way of doing research.

And not to say it’s not valuable, and not to say that that isn’t a sort of scientific method of approach research, but with communities you can go beyond that, and for a lot of folks it’s hard to know where to go. It’s hard to know what to do differently if you’ve been doing something the same way for a long time, so that was the point of the blog post.

And the primary way of doing this. The primary point of the blog was there’s just a different way of thinking about things, and it’s about not asking things so directly. And this was something we encountered a lot in the past, particularly around consumer products, for example, of trying to understand what role these products play in people’s lives. Where the white space is, what challenges they’re solving. What are the jobs to be done that these are filling?

So I’ll give you the case of an obvious one, is beer. So if I were to ask anybody, “Why do you drink Stella? Why do you drink Heineken? Why do you drink whatever beer it is?” The answer you get back is because it tastes good and it’s a good price.

That is so not it. There is much so much more beyond that surface that we need to understand, because that’s going to impact our messaging and it’s going to impact varieties that we launch underneath that brand.

Bill: Totally, but why do you think it is that it’s hard to get an answer to that question that’s helpful? Is it because consumers want to be seen as rational? Is it because there’s a subconscious dialogue going on? Why does just getting someone in a room and asking them tend not to go as deep as we would want to?

Tim: Yeah, I imagine that every survey question as being as if you ran up to someone on the street and yelled in their ear, “Why do you drink that beer?” Like, wow. That’s kind of hard to form a really good answer, so I think there’s the … Number one, there’s the impersonal aspect of it, is they’re just going to give you what comes off the top of their heads. Real quick.

The other is that they want to be rational. People want to rationalize their decisions for everything they do even if decisions are emotional. And the other is I think that people have sensors. There’re things that they don’t want to tell you about themselves, that maybe they drink a certain brand because they are uncomfortable about their socioeconomic status, and this helps them feel rich. So, you have to get around those sensors.

Bill: So what we’re talking about with this example is sort of projective techniques to get at the heart of why people choose things that they may not even know about or want to express in the type of research environment. How do you do it?

Tim: Well, the projective technique is essentially having them imagine someone else making a decision. And you really structure your questions around guiding a respondent, not leading a respondent, but guiding a respondent to give them the tools to give you a creative answer.

So one of the things we did was have them write stories about a little blob character who was carrying this brand of beer to a party. Where is he going? What’s going on there? What are the people wearing? Why did he choose this? And then we do it for another brand and they get to write a story about what someone else is doing, which are projections of their own beliefs.

You might look at that and say okay, well that’s not quantitative data, you can’t validate that but you can. You learn from those stories they’re telling you about by reading in between the lines, and what are they. What is different about what they said about this beer versus that beer in their stories? And then you can actually go quantitatively validate those differences. So it’s kind of … it helps you form new hypotheses that you might not have had if you’d just ask the questions directly. And those can be really meaningful.

Bill: So some of the other examples within this individual desire to get more projective, writing a dating profile for a brand. Writing an ode to your favorite X Y or Z. The act of sort of depersonalizing it makes it more personal in some interesting way.

Tim: Yeah, it’s a safer way to talk about what you really think when you’re talking about what someone else is thinking that isn’t you. But, sneaky, it is you.

Bill: So by asking questions differently, it is your experience that we can illuminate insights that often stay hidden.

One of the great things about community here is the ability to be experimental because it’s not like you have a two-hour focus group, you can pay them $100 to participate and you cannot possibly spend 15 minutes on something that is a little bit different.

Tim: Yeah, and I mean I felt that, even going through traditional research projects, they come to those questions that might yield the most illuminating insight, and someone goes, “I don’t know what we are really going to get from this. And we have to shorten this, so cut it.”

And in a community, you can cut it if you’d like and do it later, or you can try it this time around and if it’s not working out, cut it, it’s fine. You can play. You can learn from it and you know maybe you have to ask it differently next time. But in either case, it’s a place to play, it’s a place to experiment, and forgive yourself if your experiment doesn’t go well because you didn’t pay for that question.

Bill: Learn from. Yeah. Another one that you only just alluded to earlier is the incredible capability of communities as a site for and a vessel for digital ethnography. What digital photography is, and how a community might seek to use it to get close, and then use these techniques to the greatest effect.

Tim: So when I think of true ethnographies, I think of shop-alongs, in home visits, which if you think about, they’re expensive. You’ve got to send someone out there you’ve got to schedule with someone, you’ve got to make sure they show up, and then you have to follow them around, and it takes a lot of time, takes a budget. And as we said earlier, most of the time we know we don’t have that time.

So, digital ethnography essentially allows you to be at an experience of a consumer without actually being there, by just giving them different tools that are enabled by a community. One example is the video and image upload, you can send people out on a mission to document the experience for you.

So, let’s say you wanted to understand what the experience of eating at a very posh wood-fired pizza place is like, because you want to replicate that experience in stores through a product you’re launching. You can have a group of people go out there, document their experiences, take pictures, images, answer questions about those images and videos, and as long as you direct them in a way where the mission is very clear, you can get a front seat view into what they enjoy. What is important about this experience, what it is like, what the imagery is like, fed back to you in the course of a couple days … from your desk, essentially. And you never have to get up.

So, it’s a lighter touch version of in-home ethnography or shop-along or things like that, but a lot less effort on your part and less time-consuming.

Bill: Well we know that, yeah, we know that consumers document their lives through snaps and their Instagram stories and through … I don’t know how many times someone’s at a ball game and they show themselves smiling and they show everyone celebrating a home run and show what they bought at the concession stand and then they show everyone walking home happy. I mean, consumers have become sort of prepared and comfortable with how to build a digital scrapbook of an experience.

And the point that you made earlier about you know next Fourth of July festivities, if there are any retail environments or other sort of moments in their lives that are ripe for insights mining if we can sort of give them the right assignment.

Tim: Right. Yeah, and the assignment’s important. You know, if you go online plenty of people have taken pictures of themselves in a baseball game and at a Fourth of July barbecue, but they didn’t document the aspect of the experience that we care about. So, the mission helps them do that.

Bill: Okay. So I would certainly commend to those listeners of ours who are either operating or participating in online communities or considering it, or even approaching traditional research but trying to do it in a way that’s fresh, to read this blog post 5 Surprisingly Effective Ways to Gather Insights from Online Communities. I think communities are really effective venue for these, although this thinking probably helps no matter what kind of research.

Tim and John, are there any important closing thoughts related to Finch Brands about communities, about your experiences. Things we’re working on that you think would be fun to share. It’s been great having you both, and we’ve … just speaking selfishly, getting into the communities business has been so much fun for us.

I think we came at it because we had a bunch of clients who will come back again and again and we saw communities as a way to enhance the power and productivity of the research program, to turn the research programs from really a string of ad hoc projects into an actual integrated program that was efficient and was super effective and helped transform the way that insights could help them support key decisions. It’s been really, really fun to take that voyage, John, with you and now, Tim, with you.

Closing thoughts?

John: Yeah, I would just say that you know communities at this point have been around a while, and I mentioned that 60 % of larger brands are using them. And when they started software was really central point difference that was a big deal in making your decision, and I think what we found is the gaps have closed, and the software solutions across the different players are mostly pretty similar. You’re right if your solution does not allow you to capture consumer video, you should probably find a different one, but most of them do.

And really, I think the more important decision that brands should be making today is who’s helping to pilot this thing. Who’s your co-pilot in planning activities? Making sure you’re asking the right questions. Analyzing this in ways that your team either might not have thought of or might not have the time to be able to do, and someone who gets business and gets brands and can bring those next-level recommendations, that’s really the Finch Brands side, what we pride ourselves on in the way that we’ve designed a solution.

Bill: Yes. Great place to leave it. And John “the velvet hammer” Ferreira, putting in a plug for Finch Brands Which is much appreciated. Thank you. But either way, whether Finch Brands or no Finch Brands, or just some learning along the way for our listener base, we really appreciate Tim and John your time and insight.

Tim, welcome to the team and thanks for being with us today.

Tim: Thanks for having me.

John:Thank you.

Bill: So many thanks to John Ferreira and Tim DeGennaro for stretching out a bit in terms of their thoughts on communities and what we’re doing here at Finch Brands, as well as how to use them to the maximum effect. Really grateful for their collegiality and camaraderie as we deliver this to clients at Finch Brands.

Three ways, as always, to support us here Real-World Branding, I won’t belabor them, because we say them every week or every two weeks. One is to pop a rating for us in the app store of your choice where you get your podcast. Five stars if we deserve it. That’s what we hope, but we are told that doing that and subscribing … Clicking that subscribe button, again in the place where you access podcasts, both of those things, rating and subscribing, help us become known to listeners who would appreciate the content that we’re providing here in terms of branded business building.

And then the third thing is we would love as always to keep this dialogue going. Twitter is probably the best place, @BillGullan or @FinchBrands. We love ideas for future guests or topics to discuss or just general general feedback. We want this to be not only joyful, which it is, but of the maximum possible value to those who spend a bit of time with this every time one of our episodes comes out.

So, thank you again for listening and signing off from the Cradle of Liberty.