Re-learning the audience in an age of distrust with Martin Eichholz and Katie Buckley
Martin Eichholz and Katie Buckley, Managing Partners of our US consumer practice, recently joined Stephanie Vance and Molly Strawn-Carreño on aytm’s podcast The Curiosity Current to talk about consumer trust, AI, and what still has to stay custom.
Martin comes at research from segmentation and statistics, Katie from qualitative strategy and culture.
You can watch the full discussion below, or listen via Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Watch the full episode
What’s covered in the conversation
If you’re being asked to prove where AI fits in your research budget, and to keep answering harder questions about your consumers at the same time, this one’s for you.
Why businesses still need custom research
Pulling on recent client conversations, Martin points to the growing importance of closeness to the business, to the stakeholders, to the history of the brand, and to what can and can’t be said in a room.
Balancing automation with human depth
Why custom research is the fuel that goes into the automation engine, rather than the thing it replaces.
The age of distrust
Losing control of the narrative, and what it takes to reassess every touchpoint, including the AI surfaces where being mentioned first matters far less than how you’re described.
Getting executives close to the consumer
The distance between the people making decisions and the people they’re making them for, and what happens in a room when an executive hears it directly.
Re-learning your audience
How dating apps and a move back to meeting people offline show a category shifting underneath the questions still being asked about it.
Moving past the linear consumer journey
Why the five-phase journey survives when people now buy in 30 seconds while sitting in front of the TV, and what measuring touchpoints instead would tell you.
Protecting the next generation of strategists
What happens to the apprenticeship when AI takes the technical work juniors used to learn from, and why business acumen now has to come earlier.
Listen on the go
Work with the team
Bring Martin and Katie’s thinking to your brand.
If any of this lands close to a question you’re sitting on, talk to our US consumer team and we’ll take it from there.
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