VOICE Round-Up: Bree Glaeser from The Mars Agency on integrating consumer insight into the voice design-build process

M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y-E-S-I-S-T-I-X-T. It's Machine Learning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Bree Glaser at the 2018 VOICE Summit. The largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Bri is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research, and design. Bri is from the Mars Agency, where she's leveraged her formal training as field researcher at Harvard Medical School and Parsons into the world of consumer insights and strategic global marketing. Bri has helped to build voice assistants that help people navigate brick-and-mortar stores and it's clear her thousands of hours of fieldwork have paid off. This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning. Bree Glaser.

Feels like voice could clear away a lot of the gunk that's built up between brands and consumers. Someone can say, show me a 60-inch TV with the widest sound spectrum and the deepest black and white range. You know, so they're a hardcore—

Yeah, that's an excellent shopper right there. Old-time, old-time movie, you know?

But instead of having to go through pages and pages of specs, they can walk up to a wall of flat screens and give that command, and then the 3 models that meet the spec are highlighted.

Yes.

You know, a snappy tagline and a shiny Instagram ad, it's not gonna overcome that.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. In the case that you illustrated, that is somebody who knows what they want already and then voice can meet a need, the need of navigation, make it a lot easier to find something quick, especially in the aisle. I think there's also going to still be a role for education and getting the shopper to that point of knowing what they want, which could happen at home or could happen at the shelf.

But it could also be the shopper saying, "Show me the TV where the Maltese Falcon will look the best." Yes, exactly.

Exactly. So you have to be able to give people the information they're looking for without depending on them to, like, really know what they're looking for necessarily.

Give me something that's like this other thing that I like. Yeah. This is like, this is my favorite thing.

Yes.

Give me the item, give me the product, show me a brand that's going to best perform for what I love the most.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the promise of voice for brands, I think, and the challenge, because you really have to have products that are delivering on the need that the consumer is asking for, or you have to do work of explaining or somehow getting them to understand what that need is. Or, you know, maybe you'll realize that your product isn't delivering on a need, and that's why it's not organically getting discovered on the platform. So It's gonna be a big challenge, I think, for brands going forward to continue to, or I should say, just to win in a voice-first world where Alexa's gonna be recommending one or two things to me every time I ask for a product.

So how do you talk to a brand about that's how the decision-making process starts to evolve in the voice world?

I think in a way I've seen brands actually being pretty good about— they recognize that voice is a new territory and they don't know what they're doing or how to win on that platform necessarily. So they're willing to take the advice of working in a cross-functional interdisciplinary team and hearing basically what we have to say about how people are actually using voice. They're just very open at this point. But I still think that you have to coach them into accepting that it's an iterative play. And what you do now is not going to deliver that big ROI that you're maybe accountable for. But it is in the long term. So you have to get started now so that you can get the data, so that you can make something better, and so that you can have that really refined skill and voice presence and potentially refined product portfolio way down the line when voice commerce is huge. In a sense, we're lucky it isn't yet so that they can do the work to get there.

Getting people to understand today that you have to bake error into the intention— Yes. —is such a shift to the contemporary, especially American, business mindset. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it absolutely is. But brands are a little more accepting of it because penetration is kind of low with smart speakers right now. So they're like, "Okay, if we're going in and we're gonna reach 30 million people, then," you know, they're just more willing to, before it's 300 million people, to make mistakes. So I think that we have a little bit of runway, which is helpful. As long as we can get them to do it.

One of the things that you're really focused on is building these mental models for the shopper. Can you describe what that looks like? 'Cause that is such an interesting concept.

Yeah, in a way, I don't think it's that different than some of the things that we've been doing at Mars or Mars has been doing before I joined, which is like identifying the decision hierarchy for the shopper, right? If you're at the shelf, what are the different attributes of products that you're prioritizing and how do you make a decision? So that's, it's kind of an adaptation of that, an evolution of that that goes a little bit further.

I'd love to know how that translates into a voice application, because that definitely doesn't sound like tree flows.

It's interesting you say that, because to me it is the basis of the tree flows, but I think that I do that whole process maybe a little bit differently than others. So, I mean, for me it's about— the mental model gives you just a sense for where you need to go first, and then you go into a tree flow that reflects that mental model, and then you go into a script that So there's all these different stages that the mental model informs, I would say. And I think you have to do testing and you have to make sure, are we actually meeting that need? A big part of the development process for Smart Isle, this product that we made in retail, was me working really closely with the developer. And I think I've heard other agencies say that that's really important as well, in that you have to make sure that just the way it's coming across and exactly the way it's been written is delivering on that consumer intent that you identified in the mental model over here. So it's like your anchor. What are the real tangible benefits that you've seen? Yeah, I think it informs a few different things, starting from that mental model of like, what are we going to ask? And then also dialogue, how are we going to ask it? So I could give an example. When we were intercepting shoppers, figuring out how they shopped in the store, spirits category, we learned that people would generally say, "I'm looking for something that's similar to my favorite," which is like, you know, you wouldn't just guess that. So we learned, okay, we're going to make a path that's kind of about matching based on what you currently drink and what your favorite is. And then also from having those conversations, I learned that that's how people would say it too, something similar to my favorite or something like my favorite. And so you can ask it in that way that feels really natural. So those are two dimensions, but there's also gives you the opportunity to identify like the mindset of the audience and build some personas and figure out, you know, where's the best opportunity. So, you know, in the case of a whiskey shelf, you see everybody from novice to expert shopping, and you can't build something that necessarily helps all of them, but you have to figure out what is the best target. You figure out sort of what your key like design statement is out of that.

Thanks for your time, Bri.

Yeah, thank you. It's been great to have you here. Thank you.

Thanks for listening, and we hope you'll take a second and share this episode with other members of your team. And make sure you check out the other chapters from this week's episode. We have an interview with Kathy Pearl from Google, and these two conversations show us a lot about the role of deep consumer insight in the design, build, and integration of voice products. Actually, make it easy on yourself. Just subscribe so you never miss an episode or a chapter. That way you can be the first to stay on top of this field and help shape the conversation at your company. Get in touch on Twitter @Assist. DMs are open. We're super interested to hear who you think should appear on the podcast. Machine Yearning is made by Paul Chufo and Michael Alsesser for Limina House. Have a great day.