Best Consumer Market Research Tools – Field Agent with Rick West

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand with guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey product launchers, Tracy Hazard here with my sister in law and fabulous market research co host today, Lara Hazzard. And we're really excited to bring you some company, a brand, a tool, a great group of people to work with that we think is going to really change the way you mine for data. Right. The way you probe customers, the way you ask questions, the way that you get the right people to evaluate the right products. Remember, because we're always talking about right market product fit here at product launch hazards because it is the biggest risk factor in a lack of success on your path to product launching. So with that being said, we are bringing in Field Agent and Field Agent is a company. I'm going to let them really explain how they came about, but I've actually worked with them in little bits and pieces before. They actually had this tool that they call Field Agent and so they've been in this market information, this market data gathering for big brands and for mass market retailers for quite some time.

Awesome.

So Laura, take it away for us.

Are we passing the torch? Awesome. Thank you, Tracy. So yeah, I'm so excited to have you guys here. Talk about research, my favorite topic. So why don't you kind of kick us off. As Tracy said, I want to hear in your own words who you are, give us the background, tell us kind of all about you and then we'll dive into the details.

Sure. So I'll talk to your listeners about field Agents. I tell people that we started out during the pre selfie era. I want you to think way, way back when you had a smartphone but it didn't have a camera on the front. And that's around 2009. At that time we were a boutique research agency doing the classic qual quant type of work but really wanted to use technology to enable us to create different solutions for our clients as opposed to become this tech company. So if you think back to that time, 2009, 2010, we launched this app called Field Agent to allow us to do mobile specific research. And what we started to realize is in its very basic form is that we became the location based survey monkey. So when someone wants to do a passive survey and just tell me what you Think, well, that's great, but what if I told you that we could survey people who could touch your product, could use your product, could purchase it, could receive it, could engage it, they could capture videos and really play with it and really give you near real time feedback to your product. And that was really the thing that launched us, is to go from that passive recall to eliminate passive recall, to jump right into near real time understanding what goes on with someone's products. And we haven't looked back for eight years.

I love it. And that's definitely the future. I've seen more and more of this kind of online research, both from a qualitative and a quantitative. And I love you guys because you offer both. I mean, we're seeing more and more of the qual coming online, but I love that you can turn both qual and quan. I know you have lots of features and different things. So let's kind of talk through.

Well, hold on a second, Lara, because I just dawned on me as I was like thinking about what I said that I failed to say that. Our guest is Rick West. Like, we forgot to say your name and then you didn't say it and that is so terrible on us. We just jumped right into your company and your cool tools.

We all know each other. I know.

So, hey, Rick, welcome to product launch hazards.

Yes, definitely. Thank you for Tracy and I'm Laura. So some of our audience is just new to market research. They kind of know they have to do it. They know focus group surveys. When you say mobile research, can you talk to me on a very basic level, what that looks like?

Sure. From our perspective, what we tell people, especially those that are entrepreneurs trying to figure things out, the worst people to talk to is your brother, sister, spouse, aunt or uncle, or maybe even.

I say this all the time.

The worst people you can talk to. Right. Then the second kind of worst people you talk to is the survey that goes out into this nowhere land. It could be in a warehouse full of people that are providing you feedback and you really don't know who they are. And so we come in from a mobile perspective and offers a couple of things. The first thing is that mobile phone that's in front of you. It really does become kind of an identifier, almost like having each phone has its own version of a Social Security number. The first thing it does, it allows us to ensure that you don't have five different accounts on the phone so I can validate who you are. I know who Laura is, what she's thinking about, and When I start to qualify things from a screening standpoint, that mobile phone allows me to capture things in a different way to screen you. So for example, I'm looking for an organic food purchaser. Well, of course I'm an organic food purchaser because I buy spinach in the plastic container that says organic. Well, we would come alongside, say, hey, from a pure screener standpoint, why don't you go through your home and capture every item in your home that's organic. When I pull that data back in and I realize of the 20 items you've selected, you have the 10 core ones I'm looking for, that screener that qualified you as an organic person is much richer than you saying, of course I'm an organic person. And the mobile phone, which is so important, validated it through the picture, the video, the gps, the time date stamp that really brings that richness or robustness in because you can't scam it, you can't fake it. And it's that near real time engagement we're talking about.

And I love that I want to qualify that really, because this is really, really powerful. And this is why a field agent has for quite some time been my number one recommended tool to use in this process is because of that. Specifically because we want to know, when we look at product market fit, when we look at the two things together, we want to know that people are actually going to buy. Not that they like your stuff, but they will actually buy. So if they're already buying these types of things, if they already have, because I'm not in my office, kids in their home of the right age and they buy products for them all the time, then we clearly know that they're the right audience for you because they are going to, they're possible for them to shift their dollars to your brand. That's what we want to know, will they do that?

Right?

So this is so essential in the process. A lot of the tools that Rick was kindly referring to that are out on the market and being nice about it, I mean these are like registered people who make their money by actually responding to these. Now, not that there's anything problem with compensating people for participating in focus groups and everything, but when it's their profession and then they're not a match, so they're just giving you information back so that they can get their money or their points or their discount or whatever it is that they're doing, they're not providing you the valuable information. You should be basing potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of future product development and inventory on.

Right.

So that's why it's so critical that we listen to what Rick is saying here, because this is what makes field agent very, very different.

Yeah. And I think you touched on something really interesting, Rick, because the screener, which I've talked to some of my clients about, is so critical. But it's most of the time when we're doing a quant survey, self reported. So, like your example. Oh, yeah, I buy organic food, of course. Like, I just think I do. I don't actually. Which doesn't help you when your product's on the shelf. So I think that's awesome. So we don't have to clean out respondents. I've talked to some of my clients about how when we look at your quant data, we got to clean some of them out, because it's what Tracy's talking about. Not real responses, not responses. So with your program and your panel, you're getting actual real responses that are direct to the product. So how big is your panel? Talk to me about who's on your panel and what pool do we have to choose from?

We. Right. So in the United States, about 1.2 million people. We probably have a couple hundred thousand that are truly active. What we don't do from a panel perspective, we're not paying people to keep them active. Okay. So we're not cranking through that. And the second thing is we get about 4 or 5,000 organic downloads a week. These are individuals that have heard about our app and what we do. So we're constantly getting freshness coming in. Now, we're also in eight other countries, couple other languages, but primarily, let's think about North America, Canada, Mexico, U.S. u.S. Specifically, about 1.2 million. So we tell people that we'll never be a representative sample. Okay. Not everyone has a smartphone. Makes sense. But because of the size we have, and if you look at our demographics, we would argue that we do scale nationally, a great national representation. And for many people, they're looking for everyday individuals that are engaging. You may or may not be surprised at how many mother of twos that we have. That we have people that are Hispanic, that are visiting bodegas every single day, that are engaged. I mean, so when you look at 20,000 people that are Hispanic, you look at the hundreds of thousands of moms that we have. When you go through this, you realize it really is a good national sample.

I love it. And I've talked on some of my other videos about defining who your market is and really going direct and learning exactly who. So a lot of the people who are creating their products now with us are working to define those. So we have the sense and we can go direct to you and go, this is exactly who we want to talk to and who we're listening and what we learn about. Which is great because we can really focus in sometimes representation is not necessarily what we need. We need to learn about moms with 2 year olds living in warmer climates or whatever it is. So you have a vast panel and it's with the phone. Anyone can download this app, right?

Yeah, well, we do not dip below 18 for a multitude of reasons. So if we needed to engage kids, we have moms or parents that engage their children for some pieces. But we really do try to stay at 18.

Okay, all right. So that's sort of the who. So we're 18 and up. But we could potentially get some kid tween research through moms and dads. Right. Okay. So we have a big group and then anyone can down they need a cell phone. Right? So anyone, is it just on the cell phone or is there another way to access.

Well, any type of smart device so they can use an iPad to be able to go do that? We choose not to go down the computer route for a multitude of reasons that we could talk through later. But for us it really is that mobility of having your phone so that I can engage. If you said try this product out in your garage and you say, well I don't have a computer, I don't have a phone, I can't.

You can't do it? Yeah.

You can't do it. Right.

So you've touched on that methodology like an in home use test. It sounds like I refer it to as an IHUT in some of my other videos. So that's one of the methodologies. You can handle that just to kind of over you and correct me or redirect on how you handle it. But we tell people to buy the product or maybe one they already have, they bring it home. And what can they do with your app while they're experiencing at home?

So a couple things. If you've got that classic path to purchase carrying it through and we would tell your clients right now, the people that are listening to this is that it is important to have them as they're progressing along that path to do some pre shop when we capture where they're looking, are they online looking at something? When they go to the store, what does it look like on the shelf? Why do they choose Certain things give us some perspective. Again, we're eliminating recall as they go. Then they bring the product back home, they're trying it, they're engaging. And a couple things happen with that. There are many people that will purchase a product, try it, but how do I know they didn't return it?

Good question.

Yeah.

Were they happy?

How do I know that they used it? And so when you bring in the video aspect of things, I actually see them consuming. I can actually see them using or trying to break it. I can see them putting inside of a certain place inside of their home. So not only can I confirm by a receipt that they purchased something, but I really do know that they used it, they engaged it. Because I have time date stamp. You know, we talk about people straight lining on a survey, the same thing happens. I now know that over the course of two days they engaged your product five, six times at three or four minutes per time. So you really begin to understand that, wow, that person really did use it as opposed to they just answered a survey real quick because they had the product on their person. So those are the types of things you begin to engage. But there are some products that you're saying, I don't want you to bring it home, I want you to go out and go consume, I want you to go out and go use. Whether it's something that happens at an event or it's something inside of a quick serve restaurant or inside of a local restaurant or a coffee shop. Now we can actually take that same methodology inside of a coffee shop where they're engaging something. So that's another aspect of mobile research that really allows you to take it a step further.

Yeah. And if you're watching the video, you can see Tracy and I smiling because this is just magic to researchers ears. You have quant data. It sounds like we're going to pull in and understand the counts and get scores. And also so much quals, so much richness, especially if you're going to buyers or investors. You can show them photos and videos of people engaging with your product, getting excited about it or perhaps it sounds like, and I want to hear more from you about this going in store and maybe a product is missing. So talk to me about some of the methodology about going into the store and just some of your observational research.

Yeah. So we have three primary pillars that we engage in. We've been spending time today talking about the research pillar. The other pillar is around audits. It's just basic observation. Is the product in stock? Or better yet, I'm looking at the product on the shelf. Tell me about pricing. What did you think about the cosmetics? What do you think about the kids toys and the various products that are there? How is it priced? What did it look like? Was it in stock? Was the display up? And then the third pillar that we engage in is mystery shopping, which is really, really important because now I'm talking to an associate, and I said, well, tell me about this product. And next thing you know, I realized I've talked to 10 stores and everyone's selling against me, and I had no idea. And I have to plan for that. So those are the other two pieces that happen in store all the time. Observation and mystery shopping, or that experience piece that we can offer.

That's great. And the observation piece, just for those who've listened to some of my past videos, is really that secondary research and kind of getting the lay of the land. It takes a ton of time and energy to go in and see what's on shelf, what do things cost, what's missing? Help you understand packaging and placement. And I think a lot of that when you're launching a product can be helpful just in your knowledge. Tracy, I know you've done audits like these as well, and it's very time consuming.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's good to touch on, because there are some things here, especially when we do products that are assembled by the stores, which can happen when we do larger items like setups that have a point of purchase. So, pop, we talk about that if you guys are at that level, but when you do it, sometimes they don't get set up right. We used to have silly things like bar stools that happen to have armrests on them in Costco. And the armrests would be upside down. They would be assembled backwards. So, like, you really couldn't get yourself up onto this giant bar stool. Right. It was like you couldn't do it, or they'd forget to put the little ring in the front for you to step up. So if you're five' two like me, you can't even hop up onto the chair because they assemble the sample wrong. And so that's what's showing. So there's no wonder the store isn't turning that the items aren't selling, because that's wrong. So doing audits on that is very, very important. But I also think we have assembly issues with many products or setup use issues sometimes, especially with electronics or kids toys. And you've got some of these setup things that need to happen and it seems clear to us, as designers or as inventors of these products that it works. But following instructions is not actually a core competency of any consumer that I've ever met. And I've been doing this for 26 years, yet they don't actually read the instruction sheet until something goes wrong and they're like, I don't know what to do.

And then, yeah, it's not working, it's taking too long.

So intuitive understanding of how they're going about it can help you write the instructions properly, can maybe put a warning at the beginning, get them to realize before they make that mistake, get really frustrated and decide to return your product because it's broken or it doesn't work. And so getting the ability to, in that sense, take it home with them, do a video, watch them do it, and go, I thought this was really clear, but it's really not. And I'm seeing it again and again and again in here. And yes, some people get it, but then that's not acceptable. So our use experience of a product is really important. And that's why going from the in store audit all the way through to the in home, it's like a broad expanse for really growing a big brand. A brand with full service here. And then the other thing that I just want to touch on really quickly is I'm going to do a little Facebook Live to actually demo it, because I don't have the items between me. But I did this as an example to show them how bad data happens. I'm working on a book called the Product Launch Code, and it's about launching our process for it. And the big section of market proof is at the beginning, so there'll be that big section there. I'm working on this book and I decided to do a cover because I kept seeing people in my network posting their books up and saying, what do people think about my cover? And I'm like, oh, this is horrible market research. Stop asking your friends and family, right? And so I decided to do it. So I did a black cover and a white cover, and I put them up side by side on Facebook. And I said, I'm launching a book. What do you think? And I didn't ask a question. I did it all, like, the wrong way to do it on purpose. And of course, because of the way Facebook truncates it, you don't even see the whole book cover. You see like a thumbnail of it, two thumbnails side by side. It's not even the whole cover. And so Most people, I guarantee, just started typing in the comments. Didn't even open up the image to, like, look at the whole cover. Said, I like black, I like white, I like this, I like that. And like, they were giving all this opinion, and then they were giving opinions about what they. They thought. I had a barcode kind of thing on the COVID about what they thought of that. And then once one person would comment, they'd all, like, start going off on it. And only one person in all the comments made a contextual comment. And that was like, what do you mean that I know? I was like, it was so important. He says to me, you didn't tell me whether or not you were going to sell this book on Amazon or on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Because if you're going to do Barnes and Noble, you don't want a black cover. Because when it's on the shelf, it disappears. Black disappears, and it looks like a hole. And I was like, that's the answer. I was waiting for somebody to say, right, somebody with insight. And that's what you really want, is like, if you're going to have your book on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, somebody walks in the store, they can't even find it because the color of the COVID disappears. They take a picture of the shelf going, I looked for it for five minutes, I couldn't find it. And that is useful information that helps you make decisions.

Yes. I bet everyone that commented doesn't go to Barnes and Noble.

No, they don't.

We care.

Right? And the one comment they were making is that, keep in mind that you're looking at the COVID blown up on your phone like it's the full size of your phone, if you actually look at the image. But that isn't how you shop on Amazon either. It's like a tiny little thumbnail with the title next to it. So the title's extremely apparent, even if it wasn't totally as big as it should be on the COVID which I agreed, it actually graphically wasn't big enough. But even if it wasn't, it wouldn't have mattered in that shopping context. This is where we get that contextual information that Rick is providing and Field Agent does for you is so critically important into making choices in the design, in the packaging, in the features, in the instructions, in the pop, in all of those aspects of it. So the earlier we can get information either about our competitors, if ours isn't actually on the shelf yet, and then how we can comp against it once we get to the Shelf like that whole process, help us develop a better product that sells better. And at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to sell more.

Yes, definitely. Well. And I like the action. So I want to talk a little bit about how do we get all of our inventors and entrepreneurs downloading your app and engaging, because I think that we've obviously established how rich this information is going to be. So a couple kind of just very specific questions for you, Rick. So which stores available on your platform and are there limitations if a store.

Is operating in the United States? The answer is yes. Okay. There's not a zip code that we couldn't reach today that you were looking for some information from the store.

So mom and pop store down the street that's selling my handbag. We can do that.

Got it. So literally someone could log on to our website today. They could go in and say, here's an address of mom and pop store in San Diego. Mom and Pop store in Boise, Idaho. Here are the three things I'm looking for. And if you could take a picture of this, swipe your credit card, $10 later, sometime this afternoon, tomorrow morning, you get a photo back with your questions answered. You're done. It is that quick and that efficient. If you have an address, we can go find it.

Great. That is great to know and very helpful because not everyone can get into Target right away. Sometimes we're starting small in the ground, regional areas. So how long does it take? So I've decided now all my stores, I'm really wanting to know what's out there. Maybe I'm doing some of that competitive analysis. How long? What's the process from start to finish?

Let's say that you wanted your large manufacturer today. I wasn't large enough that you're in some of the big box retailers or in even a Walgreens. You say, gosh, I'm in a thousand stores. If I just needed to check 50 or 100, I could probably have that back to you in a matter of a couple, three hours. Just that quick. What's more difficult for us is you said, hey, but I need this rural mom and pop store in North Dakota because we do crowdsourcing, it might take us a couple of days or a weekend until someone's shopping near that store. So it might take us a few days to go do that.

Which sounds so unreasonable.

Yeah. But for the most part, for your listeners today, they literally could log on today, and by the time they get up tomorrow, Morning. They'll have data on their dashboard for as few as one to as many as thousands of locations if they want to go capture that data.

Right. And I want to step in and interject to something here for. Because we have a lot of people who aren't even at the store level yet. You are competing against that and you are trying to get into that. It is critically important for you to do this for your competitors. I find too often that our entrepreneurs and our inventors and our startups here, they comp online. And online is not an indicator of what made it to store. And if your goal is to be a brand on the shelf, you better know what colors are on the shelf. You better know how they look on the shelf. You cannot make your packaging decisions and your decisions about color choices and features and everything from online data, because online data has actually more data. And so it's not reflective of what actually people are seeing. They see the side of a box and not the front of a box. Oh, well, my side of my box better be bigger, bolder, better make it more clear what it is. These are choices that you have to make in the development process. And so just because you're not on the shelf doesn't mean you're not ready to utilize what Rick is offering here.

Definitely.

Right. So what I would tell your listeners right now is that if they were being prepared to go sell an item into a specific retailer or a specific regardless who they were selling to, I would determine who that retailer is. I would use our application to go basically take a quick synopsis across the United States of the various shelf sets that they have. I would understand that coming in, I would also go talk to their core shoppers. If I was going to walk into someone. If I was in Florida and I was trying to sell into Publix, I would go talk to Publix shoppers. So when I walked in and talked to that buyer, I would say, here's what's going on in your shelf. Across Florida, I talked to 100 public shoppers and they said they would love to see a product like mine in this section. That's crazy, crazy data. As opposed to saying, nationally, here's what I'm trying to do. And nationally, I talk to people. It's not gonna work. You really do need to get down to that very specific level.

That is a really good point, Rick, because someone who says, oh, well, I'm already in like, a handful of Whole Foods, I could be in Publix, and they don't believe their shoppers Are the same profile. So until you have some data that shows them otherwise, they won't agree with you. They don't like to take a lot of risks on that with their shelf space. So you show them that it will.

Work, and I give an example for it. So if you think about being an inventor and you're always trying to figure out new ways to do things, we had a supplier that had bunk beds, and they're trying to figure out what's the best way for us to come up with a new way to put a bunk bed in retail. So we suggested, why don't you go out and find people that have kind of customized or souped up their own version of a bunk bed inside of their home? Because we all know when you get a bunk bed inside of your house, your child, or it was kind of this thing that you go create the next best bunk bed because you compete, you know, neighbor versus neighbor. And so we found a couple hundred people that had tricked out their bunk beds. And as you can imagine, they had drilled holes, they had added things from Xbox hangers to usb things, to lighting to drapes. And then they brought that information back in and they sat down as a team and started looking at the common themes across the bunk beds to really understand a what we could do, but more importantly, what was consistent. And you started seeing things like there needed to be a lighting option with all the different devices you have. You need to have USB ports to make that happen. But then you started to realize, gosh, I can't really ship all those areas. But wait a minute. Maybe as a bunk bed manufacturer, maybe I now can create accessories. And if I pre drilled the holes, Maybe I had eight, 10 different accessories that you could purchase that would simply fit into the bunk bed. A completely different conversation. As opposed to you sitting in a room and you just trying to figure out a unique way to put the bunk bed together. This gave them tremendous insight to be able to help them create something new at retail.

Yeah, that's awesome. And just you saying that, it's like, aha.

Of course, of course.

How did they not know this? But that's the reality. When you're laser focused in creating products, it is hard to understand what's missing or how to come up with something to beat the competition. Something we talk about a lot is staying ahead. Right?

And this is something that we do internally here for. For has design, for product design and development, is that our job is to find those insights and do that. And sometimes we cannot do it on our own. We require this kind of outside input because we need to validate what we see or what we think. We believe everybody needs power, but if they're actually going and drilling stuff to add the power, it's not only do they need it, it should have been done yesterday. And that should be a feature that is, you know, that is in the product. So getting that kind of information helps justify your design features, your value add features. And that's so critically important in the development process.

Now let's talk about the power of mobile. Reason this is so important is that you could have done this 20 years ago. No, but we would have been on flights, flying all over the country, spending a lot of money, would have taken us tens of thousands of dollars just in travel, just to get inside of someone's home. But what if I could do the same thing for you in a matter of days and bring that video to life inside of your organization? You take that 10, $20,000, put it in product design as opposed to airline miles. That couldn't happen 20 years ago.

Huge.

Well, you know what, let's segue to budget on that. Lara and I were talking that we'd really love to get some budgets in mind for people because we think they should plan properly. And that's our third step in our process and our 7P product development processes. We prove it, we priced it, which is a price matching is also something that your service can really help do to really benchmark and understand the competitors and then plan it. And if we don't plan our budget in right, we don't get to do what we need to do.

Right? Right, exactly.

Can you tell us sort of ranging wise what we should be directing people to save and budget for?

If I'm a do it yourself person, I'm really trying to figure out how to create product A. I'm gonna do my own version of infomercial, but I want real research over here. I think you can come into a project like this and probably get anywhere from 100 to 200 completes, which would be a significant number for a small startup to go do that. We think you can knock that out for six to eight dollars per complete. So I think if you're in that 1200 to $2000, you can get a significant number of completes and just understanding what people think about your product. Now for some folks, listen, I can't even afford that. I simply want to go to Google and ask some questions for a dollar a piece and talk to 200 people again. God be with you. If you want to go do that because you don't know who you're talking to, what you're going to get. Okay, just go knock that out. But the second part of that, if you think about a couple thousand dollars to make that work, you don't have to blow that all at once. Start out with 1015 completes. Just get 10, 15 random people across the United States in the 10 Southern or 10 Northern states you're going to engage in and just get some initial feedback. Start working through your product again and let this kind of weave itself into what you're doing. Then when you're ready to go, you could actually take photos of what you're doing. You can take different facets of it. You can take those photos, push it back out, ask people what they think, and ultimately get to the point where you've got some really robust information coming in.

At best, you have a non friends and family group of people that you are talking to. So rather than have those 10 or 15 people be the people who love you, let's have 10 or 15 people who might actually buy your product at the end of the day. Right. So that's a much better feedback loop.

Well, and I definitely talk about, as we plan out, our research plan is starting small. I love that. And that would be qualitative. For those who've been following along what I've been talking about. That's a small group. It's like a little focus group. It's not a significant amount to validate or prove a point, but it helps you tweak your questions, tweak a product slightly, maybe redirect even to a different store before you go, spend a couple thousand dollars. But I have to say, even a couple thousands is nothing compared to what you pay.

You're getting it wrong.

Yeah. And you know, compared to the big firms, it is very small. But I want to touch also. So you definitely have a lot of lovely qualitative features, but I know you provide the data too, and finding significant validation points. So talk to me kind of in a very tangible way how people will receive the results, how does the data come in, and how can they present it ultimately to their investor or their buyer?

Right. So if you were talking to an investor tomorrow, everyone has an opinion, they're going to walk in with their opinion. But now you're walking with some data points. But more importantly, with the data points, you actually have some photos or things that can bring things to life. And that's so, so important. The last thing I want to ask you to do is to go get 200 videos, it's way too much to go edit through that. But if I was trying to go raise money tomorrow, I needed to have seed money, angel money to come in or I've been having my project locally, now I'm talking to a buyer of a national location. I'm going to get real data coming in that quant data, a couple hundred people. I've got some photos that will visualize it. And then I'm going to ask you to get maybe two or three videos, just a few, and you put that presentation together. I'm telling you it brings it to life. Because you can argue with me, but you cannot argue with my core shopper because the shopper is always right. And when you see the passion from those photos and all it takes is one or two videos where someone's saying, oh, I love this product. It would be amazing if I went to Whole Foods or Aldi and bought this. And that's the smile on your face, that's what you need.

And especially because you're not talking about like it's not a real R E E L, right? It's not like that. It's real R E a L of someone actually using it in their home, standing there with their kids jumping all over it or whatever it might be. And that has way more power than just a testimonial or any kind of these flashy videos that you might spend tens of thousands of dollars. I've seen it done in addition, so doing something like this is much more valuable because it's valuable all throughout the process of giving you the right information and understanding your core shopper and then getting that data out to investors and or buyers. You're going to multi use this information?

Yeah, for sure. Do you allow people then? Is it just kind of a download of data? Are you creating reports or providing any consulting on interpreting the data? I know sometimes when we're comparing data, if you're not used to dealing with comparing groups, do you provide any of that insight and consulting to help people interpret?

Sure. And so we've come alongside people to do something as hands off, which means you can log into our dashboard, you can look through the photos, we have simple bar charts and graphics to show you how things look. You can also download a CSV file and you may be the person that's never met a pivot table you didn't like. You can download it in pivot table all day long if you want.

I love it. You're talking Lara's language now.

Tell me more, tell me more.

You download an SPSS file I just thought would drive you crazy with that one.

That's great. And that's very helpful if you're listening. If you are working with myself or another expert, we can help you interpret the data. And everything he's saying is very easy. We need Excel, we need the data photos. We can help sift you through, get through everything. One question on the front end though. Do you provide a template of questions or any type of resources of maybe like let's say we're doing handbags as I mentioned earlier. Do you have research already in handbags that you provide or could receive some context or.

No, we do some coaching on the front and back end. And so there are some people out there that said, listen, I've got it. I really don't need your help. I want you to be a data collection. Again, we are surveymonkey but location specific. I don't need your help. As a matter of fact, I would be insulted if you critique my questions. Okay. There are other people that are out there. So listen, I'm just getting started. I need consulting on methodology on the front and I want you to spoon feed me on the back end and just tell me what the data is saying. We can provide those services. Now from our DIY standpoint, we've got a staff on hand that can help kind of coach you through methodology. But if you really want us to truly design it on the front and back end, we provide those services as well.

It's great to know. Yeah, I'm just trying to get a full picture of where you can step in and really help everyone out and bring this to fruition and make it real. I loved your bunk bed story. I'd love to hear maybe one more story of a product launch just to put it in context, to maybe leave our listeners with, to get them excited.

Maybe something in food and beauty. Because that's like a very, very subjective area. And we do have quite a of our members are in those categories.

Okay, so use a food example. And so we had a client that wanted to use some chefs to come up with really unique items. And so they had chefs in a room going through the items and they wanted some feedback. So what we did, we had a two day ideation session. The very first day the chefs came in, they put these really, really cool items. We took photos of every item. We pushed that out at night. We had 20 concepts. We came in the next day and we had all those items rated and ranked with real feedback from listeners so that you didn't tell a chef that their baby was ugly, that their food tasted good.

Nobody's gonna buy that because a chef.

Is like a designer, it's like an artist. What we said was, well, these shoppers thought these five ideas were the best. These 15, maybe not so much because it's difficult when you have professionals trying to tell you what's right and wrong. We then took those five, we took the other 15 that weren't so good. We edited them, put it out again. By the time they flew out the next morning, they went from 50 items to 20, talked about the data, brought five heroes, took the other 15, launched again, and they left with 10 hero items the next day. It was all near real time because again, sometimes your general manager, your partner, they really don't want to hear you say their baby's ugly. But when a shopper says that, how can you say they're wrong? And so that's really, really important when it comes to food and artistic beauty type items. Because we're so passionate about it.

I love it.

So important.

And I think that's important too, because we have many people in our group that care so much about their products.

They're really passionate about their products. And we get that.

Us as the experts are kind of like, let's pause a moment and see what people think.

And this is really also, I think, the real difference between when we're talking about getting your big brand in store. And this is what Rick intimately understands from his experience. How long have you had, I mean, because the company that owns Field Agent or started Field Agent was a different name. That's how we met as core for research. Right. So how long have you been doing this?

We've been doing shopper specific research since 2001. So about 17, 18 years now.

Right. And so it's changed over time.

Right?

It's changed since 2001. Because, I mean, our websites were really different in 2001, I can tell you that, because I built one myself. It's very, very different. And so what we've seen though, shift over time is that we start using this online data. But the online data is it's funneled and it's channeled and it's algorithm to people. And so it actually is manipulative in and of itself. And so it doesn't really give a true shopper experience where a shopper, when you walk into a store, you're not being manipulated by all the things being pointing in your face and the stuff that's served up to you. I say if it's a self service proposition because we don't even have salespeople in most stores anymore. Right. So if you are not seeing what that was intended for you to see, then that's a perception problem we have to fix. And the only way to know that is to have them walk in there, take a look at it and they're like, I don't even find the product. I can't even see it on the shelf here. And that happens.

Yeah.

I'm sure you see that all the time.

Yeah.

Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that we really should know about you that you want to make sure our inventors have heard from you? Feel free.

I think the important thing here is this is not complicated and it's not expensive, but it's necessary. And so we tell people whether I'm meeting with a Fortune 50 company or I'm talking to an inventor that came into our office and said, hey, I need help. They said, listen, you have to begin with that shopper, right? You have to start it. And then nine times out of 10 they said, yeah, but I don't have 20, $30,000 to spend. I said, listen, back up a little bit. I'll take your $30,000. Let's be practical here, okay? Let's start out with some basic data, some basic information. And there should be no one here that's not willing to invest $500, $1,000, $2,000. Because if you're not willing to invest that, you ought to go home because you really have just started an expensive hobby that no one's going to follow. I mean, the best advice you receive when we were starting our business is that you're only as good as you invoice.

If it's not for that, it's an expensive hobby. So I tell people, if you want.

To sales receipts, right?

You want to do research to find out will someone buy your product and if they won't, why? So that you're not creating an expensive hobby that's really simply fun on the shelf and it's not going to be a long term proposition. Research will give you that. And there's no reason why you can't start out tomorrow using our application to go do that. It's so simple and so straightforward. We'd love to help them. As a matter of fact, I'm going to offer you something right now for all of your users that are there, okay?

If they send an email to infoieldagent.net we'll give them a $200 credit to get started. Okay. All they have to do is mention the podcast that they heard this on and we'll give them a credit to get started.

So you mentioned Product Launch Hazards. That's it. That simple.

I was just going to hope they would know what they needed to do.

Now that is really valuable.

Infoieldagent.net and we'll give them a $200 credit. And what that means is if you're wanting to do an in home use engagement, that $200 is going to get you about your call it 30 to 40 or so responses. It's that first little touch that you're looking for and would love to help your users.

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for making that offer, Rick. And what I want to also mention to our listeners out there and our viewers, because we do also have viewers here on Product Launch Hazard, so we do it in all formats, is that if you miss that, if you're driving in your car or whatever, you're just not there. This will be in the blog post which you can access at any time. So the links to the email address, all of that will be there so you can get straight into Rick and find him from there. So just remember productlaunchhazards.com and you'll be able to get there. And then what I also want to just say is that that's why Laura and I are here for you too. Because I could think about 10 different touch points that we could be utilizing Field Agent along the way in the process to be validating our choices that we're making from the moment we start with our product idea to validate whether there's value in some of the concepts that we're working on to will people buy this? Do we have the right package design? Do we have the right instructions? Like there's so many touch points along the way. So if you want a strategy session, Laura and I are here for you to help you plan this through. And think of Laura like your general contractor for market research because she's gonna help you formulate great questions, but she's also gonna say, you need Rick, you need to do this size, you need to do that size so she can really guide you along that way. That's why she's here for you. So please utilize your connection to her as well in that process because she is going to be the conduit to help you understand how best to utilize Rick Weston and Field Agent in your process. So that's why we're here for you, because we want you to make it to market successfully. We want you to preserve your capital along the way and utilize the capital you are spending to make the best decisions possible for product market success, for sales receipts, as Rick put it. And I love that for how you're invoicing. So please utilize us in that process. So thank you again for listening. This has been Tracy, Lara and Rick on Product Launch Hazards.

Thank you, thank you.

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