106 – Dawn Cunningham – Consumer Insights

Larry Gordon: [00:01:06] Welcome to episode 106, the sixth episode, first season of the What The Risk Podcast. This episode is going to focus on customer insights. The key topics we're going to cover is understanding your customer better, identifying market opportunities and what the impact is on the entire business, not just on the product or the marketing department. Now we all know customers drive our business and strong, resilient businesses have the ability to identify changes in the market, changes in our customer behavior and changes in their needs. These companies are able to pivot and deliver products where the customer's needs are. On the other hand. We've all seen companies that go out of business that stay true to their single product that they started with and don't want to change or don't want to understand the change and meet the customer's needs. This lack of shifting is a key risk that leads 34% of new businesses to fail because their product market fit just isn't right. Now, customer insights is not just about what customers want today. It's about understanding the trends. It's understanding the customers needs and understanding what might take place in your segment in your product industry as you go forward. This is going to be key and critical. The bottom line is when's the last time you or your company spent the time and resources and really looked at your customers, their current needs, their potential future needs, and what those trends are and really defining the customer problem that they're trying to solve with your product.

Larry Gordon: [00:02:52] Our guest today is uniquely qualified to unpack a lot of this and understand what the risk moments when it comes to the customer insights so we can learn and expose our business blind spots through this risk management approach before our customers find a better solution elsewhere. Dawn Cunningham is our guest today. Dawn is over 30 years of customer insights experience and currently is working with Civil Insights out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She's formerly the chief insights officer at 3M where she introduced and built out the Customer Insights discipline. Prior to 3M, Dawn worked at General Mills, including the joint venture with Nestle on their international brands. She's worked on brands that are currently in your pantry and refrigerator at the moment. In addition to building out brands in large, complex companies, Dawn has built them in smaller, more nimble and entrepreneurial organizations where she focused on new product innovation, brand building and customer experience. We're fortunate to have Dawn with us today. Dawn, welcome to the What The Risk Podcast.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:03:56] Thanks, Larry. I'm excited to be here today.

Larry Gordon: [00:03:58] Well, great. So as we do the the episode, I want to make sure we get everybody the foundation. So can you talk to us about what a Consumer Insights person does?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:04:10] Yes, absolutely. There's lengthy descriptions about what a consumer or customer insights person does. But the most basic thing that you want to think about is that an insights person helps you understand what your consumers or customers want and need, even if they don't recognize that they need it so that you can create products and or communications that are relevant to them. This can be I mean, that really right there, that is the most basic definition of why you would employ the the an expert that does consumer insights. But those can those creation of products or communications. It can be short term. It can be long term. It can be what products do I need to be putting into the marketplace in five years time? What products do I need to be putting in place in two years time, and how might I need to fix the products that I have in market today to make it even more relevant to the consumer's changing demands? The same with communications. You can think about what you need to be saying today that is most relevant, as well as thinking about where your comms creative strategy needs to go going forward.

Larry Gordon: [00:05:28] Well, that's great. So can you tell us about the kind of products you've worked on, both the packaged goods and other things just so everybody has some context?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:05:37] Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned it earlier that a lot of the products that I've worked on are probably in your pantry or in your office drawer today. But there are others that are much less well known within the CPG or consumer packaged goods space. I've worked on such well known brands as Cheerios, Yoplait, Pillsbury Progresso Soup, Airborne immune supplements, Post-it notes, Scotch tape, and the three M brand itself. This is mostly been in retail but also in B2B in areas such as restaurants, hotels, schools, the military. Et cetera. At the three M company where I spent the past ten years, I had the opportunity to work across dozens and dozens of industries. Three M plays in over 100 industries. So it gave me the opportunity to work on three M products in areas such as health care, personal safety, which we all know about now since Covid and masks, for example, in a number of other products in the construction industry, electrical industry, food safety, electronics, aerospace. And that list goes on and on.

Larry Gordon: [00:06:46] Well, that's great. So when we we have people that on the line today listening to us that are business leaders in both product and services. Is there a difference between how you do consumer insights for products versus services?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:07:01] Actually, the difference in approach varies very minimally due to the products or service in which you are playing. All of what I just said a moment ago, those various industries from food in your pantry to to aerospace, the approaches or the methodology to identifying customer or consumer insights is pretty much the same. Where the approach does change is mostly due to the business question that has been asked or that needs to be answered. Is your question about products? Is your question about needs? Is your question about the future or a problem that you're having today? Those are the kinds of questions that will definitely vary the approach. It can also vary based on your own resources or your constraints. How much money and time do you have to invest in the learning? But most importantly, I think the approach can vary based on the risk associated with knowing or not knowing that answer. So, for example, are you planning to spend significantly behind whatever the answer is, or is it more of a nice to know? Is it something that you're pretty comfortable with? But you just want to confirm our investors asking for evidence of your business's due diligence and likelihood of success? Those are the types of questions that also will change or can vary the approach based on that.

Larry Gordon: [00:08:35] Okay, that's great. So you're clearly passionate about all the things you've done over the years with Consumer Insights. Tell us what you're working on now that excites you.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:08:46] Well, while it's not really new news to everybody, it still is to somebody, to some teams. And I enjoy working with organizations on something that I was really, really passionate about and that I focused on a lot for the past 5 or 6 years at three M, and that is helping organizations move from a more traditional market research collection model to more of an agile market research through the use of technology and platforms. These platforms dramatically improve productivity and efficiency and efficiency. But importantly, and this is where the real benefit comes in, it requires change management by the people involved, not just the consumer insights experts, but the recipients, the people who need to absorb the information. And the idea is that it moves in a much more fast paced, less perfect world. And I think that this is really exciting for teams or businesses that are smaller, more entrepreneurial and maybe have smaller budgets. It's an idea of continual learning as opposed to big buckets of learning in points in time.

Larry Gordon: [00:10:03] Okay, good. So when we think about all the things you've done over your career, what are the lessons learned that you had the most value from that really has helped you either kind of pivot or do an inflection point in your career or that really helped you leverage. What are your biggest lessons learned?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:10:22] Well.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:10:23] I would say that while it's a little bit embarrassing, probably because I pride myself in understanding the people around me and looking for, you know, unstated insights. But when I first moved to three M, I had only been at three M for less than a month. The chief technology officer called me to his office and said, I need you to fix the innovation process. And that was coming from the company who prided themselves on being the innovation company. And I was new there. And so obviously the first thing I had to do was start by understanding what the current process was, where there were trouble, where it was or wasn't delivering the outputs that the CTO wanted, and, you know, just why it wasn't working. Where might the broken points be? And I had a lot of innovation experience from my previous from working at General Mills and also at Airborne. And so we I went about looking into the process and finding opportunities where things could be a little bit better. And once I discovered that, I packaged it up nicely and started to deliver that news about what was broken and what could therefore be fixed. And I learned very, very quickly that I did not yet have the credibility. To be in this company and in this space and be talking to hundreds and hundreds of people about how their current system was broken. I was asked to fix it, but I needed to do a better job of understanding the audience and understanding that the way I had communicated.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:12:18] Results are learning for 25 some years previously wasn't the same at this company. That wasn't a marketing powerhouse. They didn't have customer or consumer insights, and they really at that time didn't have many people coming from the outside in leadership positions. So I learned very quickly that. You really needed to. Take the time to know your audience and it just sounds so obvious. At the beginning. I said It's embarrassing now. I thought I knew the audience. I had had a similar audience for some 30 years, but it really was different and I hadn't noticed that. You have to tailor your message for acceptance if you're planning to make change and to drive change, you have to be able to lay out the opportunities in the current process in a way that is acceptable. And to do that, I trialed and pivoted and morphed space safe spaces. I sort of retrenched, found small groups that were in a way safe or friends of insights or had some experience, you know, similar experience previously. And I tried different ways of talking about it. It was such an important message coming from the very top of the organization. I knew I had to get it right. So time, second time through, when I was really ready to roll it all out, I had a much better approach and a much more acceptable, I think, a message that was easier to accept and hear.

Larry Gordon: [00:13:50] Well, that goes to the culture of how do you build a culture of the customer insights? How do you bring together the the observations and the feedback from your customer into a central place to be able to leverage? So that's a great, great example. So when you think about how to build culture repeatedly at future companies, what's your key message on that one based on your lesson learned?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:14:22] Yeah.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:14:23] Well, the first lesson is that it has to start at the top, meaning the CTO asked me to do this. But you know, of course there's 95,000 employees, so it wasn't going to be announced across the entire organization. But generally speaking, in a smaller, more nimble organization.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:14:45] If.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:14:45] That were known that the second, the most important person in the company, really, from a hierarchy standpoint, wanted an individual to look at and explore an entire process that was near and dear to the hearts of people come that message needed to come from the top. Otherwise, what happens if you hire somebody to go and change manager to start a consumer insights program or to talk to customers and bring that back? They will spend. You will waste money and that person will waste time spinning their wheels, trying to bring messages back that might fall on deaf ears or to people who don't understand that there's an overall strategy or ask. So I think that's the most important thing, is to really have a connection at the top of the organization, announce that you are going to be more customer centric, engage in consumer or customer experience. Et cetera. So that the organization. Becomes open to to learning and hearing about things differently.

Larry Gordon: [00:15:51] Well, I think that's really good insights because I've seen organizations that one person is pulling the oar in one direction and everybody else is pulling oars in different directions. And without that buy in that said, okay, we're trying to do this together to reach a common goal. Less about fiefdoms, less about different motivations, but more about kind of one goal. And without the pride of authorship, but more a pride of where you go makes a difference.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:16:20] Yeah, it.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:16:21] Does.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:16:21] Absolutely.

Larry Gordon: [00:16:22] So when we think about that and we have. The consumer insights is not necessarily looked at as a risk to an organization. They don't talk about it in the risk sense, but if you don't do it right, it becomes a real risk. And so can you talk through some of the things that you've seen from a risk reward perspective that kind of play into kind of why you need to be doing this and kind of what the risks are?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:16:52] Right.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:16:53] First, I'm going to reframe a little bit what you just said, if I may, Larry. Sure. Um.

[00:16:59] Just you don't need to think about risk management of your customer insights program. You really should be thinking about the risk and reward or risk management of accurately knowing and understanding your customers today and where they're going tomorrow. That is what if you have a commitment or you or you make an investment in customer or consumer insights, That is what it provides. Okay. So now with that kind of is there anything beyond that that people should be thinking about kind of having a bit of a checklist or how do I think about this? Right. Absolutely. Well, some things are, you know, at the foundation of your business or of your business's strategy, strategic plan. It needs to be built on a foundation of understanding your customers or consumers needs. That includes the marketplace. So you want to.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:18:00] Make sure that you have done some due diligence to understand what your customers or consumers are doing, what the need is that you're trying to solve, and that you can solve it better than their alternatives. And some of their alternatives might be a competitive product, but sometimes it's a hack completely different. For example, at three M, command strips are something that's a very popular product. And this is a product that you hang on the wall. You it's removable. You have tape, you put it on the wall, you can hang pictures, heavy pictures even from them. An alternative to that is a hammer and nail. Not another product that hangs next to it, you know, in in Walmart or Target. So you need to really think about the problem that you're solving. And if your companies, if the foundation of your company is built on inaccurate understanding of those needs, it's really can send you down a completely different path. And as horrible it is to hear something you don't want to hear, it is much more expensive and horrible to figure it out two years down the road when you've invested a lot of money in your business, perhaps engaged R&D and and started manufacturing to then realize that it's wrong. So I think that's one of the biggest risks when I think about especially smaller companies and companies just starting out.

Larry Gordon: [00:19:36] So when we think about that, there are people always have perceptions and sometimes those perceptions are correct, sometimes they're not. So I want to touch base on really kind of myth busting some of the common misunderstandings.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:19:52] We call it bias, right? And and there's bias that, you know, you have and there's bias that you don't even realize that you have. And so that is.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:20:03] One.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:20:04] Of the most important reasons why it is beneficial to utilize a person who is an expert, somebody who's classically trained in doing market research, consumer insights, customer insights, etcetera. Because. What you it's hard to understand if you're not classically trained. Is that really boring? Things about designing market research are what helps with the the making sure that the results are fair, if you will. It comes down to the design of the of the study itself, the sample. How are you going to reach the right people and who are the right people? How are the questions written and in what order are they written? The choices of answers. I mean, a normal typical person doesn't know the pros and cons of a five point scale from from least don't like it at all to like it very much to a ten point scale. There are massive differences, the weighting of the data afterward. So that's what I, I always say customer. Consumer insights is an art and a science. The science part of it is all of those things that I just described that is what you get a benefit from when you use an expert. The art part comes in how you listen to people in actively listening in, not interjecting your own bias, not getting pushed by what you know you need to do to get your bonus right, but listening and also the interpretation of data. So oftentimes people think research is slow, it's expensive and it's inaccurate. Like it's just a survey. We hear all about the election polls being wrong and anybody can do it well using the right experts. It doesn't need to be any of those things.

Larry Gordon: [00:22:03] Okay. So if I think about the perception of big and slow versus kind of quick and nimble, if you're a company that's under $10 Million in sales versus a bigger one, tell me about the differences of the program and how you would implement that, because cost has a big impact in terms of the budgets and the speed to market.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:22:30] So one thing I love this question because, you know, I'm asked it all the time. One thing that we don't often realize is that within every 10 million or $20 billion company, there are lots and lots of smaller businesses and brands. Some are huge, some are small, some are startup, some are well established. There isn't one giant pool of money that everybody can pull from at will. So even at these larger companies, there are big brands and there are small ones. And believe me, the budget that they have to spend is allocated appropriately to the size of their brands and businesses. The consumer insights work that does get done, as I said this previously, always needs to be aligned to the size of the risk. Is this a well known territory that you're entering into? Perhaps you already have a product and you're trying to come up with a second kind of product line? Are you? Do you understand the space in which you're entering that's lower risk? Or are you forging new waters and you don't really know where you're going? Much higher risk. I would be likely to recommend research that's more robust when you're forging into an area that is new to you, or will you be investing a significant portion of your budget to this, to whatever you learn, to communications or new products or product changes or or no, are you not? All of that will help you working with an insights expert determine the trade offs of the cost of more robust to less robust research?

Larry Gordon: [00:24:18] Okay, So if we think about that, who in the organization should be the around the table? Because my perception is and maybe I'm different than most is beyond just the marketing people. It's beyond just the advertising people, but it becomes an engineering kind of everybody that is going to touch a product from sourcing to delivery. I mean, help me understand who should be around the table.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:24:45] Right?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:24:46] Well, first of all, the first person who needs to be at the table is the business leader, regardless of their function or responsibility, who commissioned the work? They have an invested they had an invested interest in learning about that. The others who should be around the table. I, I my opinion is that it's all the affected parties or functions or capabilities. So in that sense it depends, right? It depends on what the output of the research was. For example, if you discover a product issue. And maybe that's not what you were looking for, but you discover a product issue. You want to have your technology people or your R&D folks at the table. If there's an issue with pricing, you want to make sure the PNL owner and finance and perhaps sourcing purchasing are at the table. So in some ways it depends a lot on what you learn in the research. And I have an example here that I'd like to just share with you. Oh, we'd love that. Yeah. Okay, great. This is an example on Hamburger Helper, which is a product line at, at General Mills, a big product line at General Mills. And at at one point in the process. And what I'm about to share has been publicly shared by General Mills. That's why I can talk about it today. Okay. So Hamburger Helper had an opportunity to determine how they can get more value out of their product offering. That sounds like an obvious question that a business leader might ask. It's also very big and broad. And so the team, the Hamburger Helper team went down a path of describing and defining what consumers value in Hamburger Helper.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:26:42] And to do this, they relied on any old research that they had. Sometimes when you do market research, you ask open ends or people offer their their verbatims or their comments. Typically you scour those comments for whatever the purpose of that particular piece of market research was. But usually there are lots and lots of other comments in there that you might have passed over because they weren't relevant to the point at time. So if you pull out old research, you can read through comments and look at results with a new lens. Now I'm looking at this specifically to find indications of what consumers value about my product. So you scour old and existing research, you talk to anybody in the company who touches the consumers. Maybe you have a customer service person who answers the phone. You probably have somebody in sales of some kind and you talk to them with this hat on about what it is that consumers value. One of the things the team, the Hamburger Helper team discovered was that. Consumers really didn't care much at all about the shape or size of the noodles that were inside of the various Hamburger Helper flavors. So there are many, many, many flavors, you know, dozens, a huge variety of flavors. And in some you had maybe an elbow macaroni and others you had, you know, a spiral noodle. Et cetera. Et cetera. To consumers, that didn't really matter. So Hamburger Helper walked away with this learning that.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:28:31] Um.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:28:32] Consumers don't value that very often and look across the portfolio. So in this case, they included R&D, supply chain manufacturing because lines would change if you change the products sourcing and of course the owner and the marketing team right to discuss. And through this learning, the team was able to drastically reduce the the sizes and shapes the variety of sizes and shapes of noodles that they offered, which improved their ability to procure at a better price, buying the same, buying more of the same product, simplified the production line with fewer noodles, having to come through different lines as well as they were able to make sure that the noodles nested more properly or nested in better in a more efficient manner and they were able to reduce the packaging size by one third. And that had all huge environmental impact as well because it's less space on the shelf, less weight on trucks or more packages can go on trucks. The retailer could use less, less space in their both in the in the supply room as well as on the shelf to sell the same amount of product. So you can see that they might have gone to learn something. But based on the learning, there were many, many parties that came to the table to hear the results and to act upon the results to make them a reality.

Larry Gordon: [00:30:03] Well, I think that's a great example of kind of involving everybody that touches the product when you have that opportunity and that's discovered. So the as a business leader watching this podcast and they're like inspired by, okay, I can potentially save money by getting the the right consumer insights and they want to start a program. Do they start it kind of internally? Do they get a fractional person? Do they say, okay, who's out there from a consulting group that could come in? And because they have to think about their culture too, and how do they start that program?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:30:42] Well.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:30:43] What they want to do is find resources that can help them determine what the best path is forward. So first of all, they can call me, right? I'll have my email. It's Don Cunningham at Cunning Insight.com And I can help people start to wade through the questions that they have. Two resources that I really have always relied on. One is the Green Book. It's an individual who. Who. Collects all different types of suppliers and vendors across the United States primarily. And groups them into different sorts of practices and methodologies. And what what they. If they if they have a certain type of expertise, specifically the Green Book Organization, once a year creates what is called the Grit report. Grit. And it talks about who's leading whom in what types of market research. So I really love those two things. And also there's the Insights Association. They have all kinds of places to to go to for help people that you can talk to to get some guidance in what direction you should go. I highly advise people to not just DIY it because you can end up just wasting money. You might spend less than you think it would cost to engage with a with a person who's classically trained. But in the end, if the insights are wrong, my I. I believe that. Bad data is worse than no data because if you have it and it's a number or a fact written down on paper, a lot of people take it as truth and you run. It'd be better to say that's something we don't know. So if you do it, if you DIY or you know you don't have an expert, if you have an expert, great to DIY. If you don't have an expert, you can easily spend more money or get bad direction that will cost you more as you go on.

Larry Gordon: [00:32:51] Well, one of the things I want to do is get the references that you just mentioned. We'll put those in the show notes so people can look at that. So thank you. So what trends are you seeing currently out there in the consumer insights space?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:33:09] So. One of the.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:33:13] It's hard to call it a trend. It's more like emerging and and being adopted. And that is that whole area of automation and agile using platforms and and pushing some of the work that was traditionally done by a traditional market research vendor and making that easy for a practitioner to DIY some of that work in house, if you will, and makes it sort of foolproof. Now that is an area that is been around for more than decade and it's not easy to make the change the behaviors of the people both doing research responsible for research and those receiving research has to change. And so there's a huge change management component as well. So that is definitely a trend that is really well and formally adopted by several, but there's still an opportunity for that to be adopted by some. The more buzzworthy and new conversations right now are all around AI and machine learning.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:34:20] That's where my next.

Larry Gordon: [00:34:21] Question was going.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:34:22] Oh, perfect. Well, we're right on.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:34:24] So. As any change comes to any industry, there's lots of angst and there's a lot of people trying to use and kind of muddle through how AI can be used within the world of research. So I see it today as being really. A productive and efficient way to look through big, massive amounts of data. Even if it's historical data that you haven't used in a long time or a few years old to look through and, and isolate trends or themes or common words and to do some discovery from that. Um, I worry about AI eventually getting to the point where we're depending on AI to try to.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:35:26] Try to conjure.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:35:26] Up the.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:35:27] Meaning.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:35:28] Of what was basically the art, the art side of research. The good news is that in theory, I can reduce or eliminate bias unless it's built on years worth of of data that that it has consumed that is itself biased. But in theory, you should be able to make it unbiased as long as the people making it unbiased are themselves unbiased. So you get into that space. On the other hand, the art of it, which I think is still important, is. Having heard all of the angles of the question that the business leaders are asking and interpreting.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:36:17] The, you.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:36:17] Know, interpreting what consumers or customers have said and trying to make those things fit. So it's it's out there. It's happening. It's really great for some purposes. And there's still a lot of angst and figuring out how it's going to fit going forward. But no doubt it's a huge efficiency and productivity play in the in the case of big data.

Larry Gordon: [00:36:42] Well, very good. So what advice would you give to from a risk management perspective in your specialty on how to become or make yourself more resilient in your business? Because we know companies go out of business because they are not keeping up with the trend, being keeping up with the customer. Any any advice?

Dawn Cunningham: [00:37:05] I think a really raw piece of advice is to make sure. You are always engaging with your customers in an unbiased way and being in an active learning. For example, sometimes, you know, not calling them because you're trying to make a sale, but that you're truthfully trying to listen and to ask questions and to get at root cause or root meanings of comments that they say you can employ, for example, the Five Whys, which is asking why at least five times. And that can be used for problem solving, but it can also be used for a person to think more deeply about why they they made a comment. So making sure that you are really understanding your consumers or customers is one way to make sure that you are resilient. The second thing that I would say is to spend time imagining your future. So think about what your industry could look like in five years time, and you do that by considering. Competitors who might be entering or trying to enter by, of course, talking to customers or consumers and seeing if they're adopting any new, you know, hacks to getting your product or service done for themselves. The second area to make sure you're resilient is to always be having an eye to the future. So thinking about what your category will be like in, say, five years time, how your consumers or customers will be behaving, what their belief structure might be, how that might change what competitors are coming into the marketplace, what hacks your customers or consumers might be adapting in place of your product or service. And you know, an example that I love to use here is the taxi industry and Uber. You can imagine in the 90s, back when Uber before Uber existed, that if you thought about the taxi.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:39:21] Business.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:39:22] You thought your category was probably like taxi rides. That's sort of the category that you lived in. And people had two choices. I could either call a central taxi place and order a cab, or I could go out and hail, hail a taxi, and it was pretty limited. But somebody at Uber, I imagine, took part of an exercise to think about what could the future of taxi rides look like? And if they looked at all of the trends around them, the adoption of technology and software, phones and apps, and they looked at what people didn't like about taxis. Women sometimes felt unsafe. They didn't really know who that rider was. They didn't really know what direction they might be taking them. So looked at the issues too, and I imagine that they imagined a future that wasn't just taxi rides, but it was more like urban transportation or transportation. So they've just taken this small category and imagined it to be much bigger and they met some needs and solved some problems by using an app, the Uber app. Many, many problems were solved that I just described, but they also could think, okay, what else might be happening? Maybe we want to get into to shipping and other kinds of transportation.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:40:46] People need their dogs or their children or the elderly transported. What does that look like? And then, oh goodness, I see a future when we're driverless. What's it going to look like when maybe nobody has a car and people just call up, you know, they need a ride and a car just comes around the corner and it's driverless. So imagining that future allowed a company like Uber to say, I like this space. We're not there today. But my strategic growth plans and my innovation plans are going to be creating this future. I'm going to step in and disrupt this little industry and I'm going to be the ones to disrupt. So basically you either disrupt or you get disrupted. And that, I think, is a foundation of trying to remain resilient. Don't be afraid to look at who's coming after you and look at them very critically and see how people are changing. Imagine what it might look like in a few years time and then you figure out how to step into that space.

Larry Gordon: [00:41:54] There's some great insight and as people can relate to your examples, they'll be able to apply it and figure out what they're going to be doing. Now let's move on to the Blind Spot Insider segment of the show. This is where our guests answer questions that have been submitted by our listeners. This allows the listeners to submit questions, get different insights specifically to questions that they had that may not otherwise be covered in our episode. If you're not a blind spot insider, please go and registered at riskblindspots.com, that's plural because we all have them, riskblindspots.com to be able to submit questions for our guests to listen to the responses and to get exclusive content. So with that, here's our first question. Dawn, I want to thank you for all the time and energy you spent today with us, giving us the information, the examples. I think this is going to be really meaningful to people that listen to this podcast. So I want you to tell us how to reach you. So I'm going to do a recap after that.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:43:05] Great.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:43:06] Well, you can always find me on LinkedIn. Of course, you can reach me directly at Dawn Dot Cunningham at CunningInsight.com And I'm also currently consulting with a local consulting organization called Sevo Insights. S i v o located here in Minneapolis. But with consultants all across the US and around the world.

Larry Gordon: [00:43:32] Well, great. Thank you. I appreciate that. So let's recap the key takeaways that Dawn Cunningham gave us during episode 106 for Consumer Insights is really an approach to better understanding your customer. How to identify market opportunities and customer insights may have bigger and broader impacts to your organization than just the marketing team itself. And she gave us some really wonderful advice as to the blind spot insiders in the separate provided segment. So if you want to hear that, please go to riskblindspots.com register for the Blind Spot Insider. There is no cost to that and go to risk blind spots.com. It's plural because we all have them risk blind spots.com. So dawn once again I want to thank you for taking the. Time today and being with us and as we help our audience kind of expose those potential risks that can lead to what the risk moments, because we want them to get to the point where they have more. I have this victories.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:44:33] You're welcome.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:44:34] And thank you so much for inviting me to be here today. And I hope to talk to yourself and your audience members more as time goes on.

Larry Gordon: [00:44:40] Sounds great. Bye bye.

Dawn Cunningham: [00:44:42] Thanks, Larry. Bye.