In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Deborah Walker, Director — Consumer Insights at The Michaels Companies, Inc.

• Why insights professionals should be at the forefront of decision-making
• The power of taking a “MythBusters” approach to insights work
• Strategies to tackle analysis paralysis and unlock powerful insights

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Spreaker. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Consumer Insights Podcast. Today, I'm excited to have a brilliant insights leader joining me for what I know will be a wonderful conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Deb Walker, Director of Consumer Insights at Michaels, a leading North American arts and crafts retailer. For the past 30 years, Deb has made her passion for customer insights into a long and fascinating career. From new homes to diamonds, from brick and mortar to dot com, she's used her areas of expertise and research, database analytics, and direct marketing to unearth consumer nuggets of truth for several organizations. Thank you so much for joining me, Deb.

Deb Walker:
I love being here. Thank you for inviting me.

Meet Deb

Thor:
Now, in order to kick things off, could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your company, and how you got to where you are today? How did it all begin?

Deb Walker:
Well, wow, it's a long road. As you said, 30 years.

It's hard to believe 30 years, because I feel very young. I feel like I'm 35. And so how did I start that when I was so young? But it's been a wonderful path and a wonderful progression, but the beauty of the insights world, and if you really love it, the beauty is you wake up still 30 years later and go, wow, I can't wait to get to work.

All right, so I've had my start, it was in home building, as a one man show doing analytics, doing field work, doing focus groups inside homes, various stuff like that. Then I moved my way to Diamonds and worked for about nine years for Helzberg Diamonds, which is a retailer that sells fine jewelry in the United States. And then I've worked for an interactive agency a long time ago and worked for various top 500 companies across North America and Canada. And then I had my own consulting business for nine years in which I helped work with various companies on an ongoing relationship with database analytics and research. And now I'm at Michaels. I was brought to Michaels about four and a half years ago to really start the primary research function from the ground up. Believe it or not, a company the size of Michaels, 1,300 stores in North America didn't really have insights in house that way. And so I was brought here that long ago to build it from scratch. And so I've had a wonderful time building the insights function out and really turning it into something that is more of a must have function in the company versus a nice to have function.

How to define an insight

Thor:
Wow, what a journey. Now with that journey, I know our listeners are eager to hear how you would define an insight and tell us throughout those different industries. Has that definition changed over the course of your career?

Deb Walker:
To me, an insight, I'm kind of rudimentary. You know, I went to school, I did not study insights. I did not study that I had two classes in marketing research and consumer behavior total. So everything that I've learned has been on the job of doing and learning from some of the best that's out there. So to me, an insight is really where you look at the surface of something and you're scratching and digging below that surface to find the essence of the information and the being underneath. So don't take it at surface level, dig a little bit deeper inside the information and you find that what I call an aha moment or you get a light bulb that just lights up in your head going, wow, I hadn't thought of that. And to me, that's an insight.

It could be anywhere in life. It could be in the data, it could be in the numbers, it could be coming through, opening comments, reading facial expressions on people as they talk to you about certain subjects. I always think of it as like a pig hunting truffles, you know, how they just have that little sixth sense in the nose, and they start nosing around in the dirt to dig underneath the surface to find these nuggets of yummy goodness. And so I think of that as what insights are for me. And as far as have they changed over time,

I think insights are always that "Aha!" moment where you dig deeper, but the method of how you retrieve them has differed over time.

I mean, you think about, I was about to say, when I started, it was back with phone interviews, mall intercepts, door-to-door research, and now we've gone so much farther away from in-person focus groups, online applications, ethnography, digital ethnography. So the methods are different, but the insights are the same to me. The insights definition, that stayed the same. That really has stayed the same to me. Getting below surface level, digging deeper. The method of extraction, some of those insights, now that's what really has changed.

Thor:
And you also have a lot of experience building insights functions from the ground up. Can you tell us more about how you've developed your process and what you've learned?

Deb Walker:
Absolutely. This is actually the third time building the primary research insights function from the ground up. At Michaels, we started with almost nothing, and we branched it out into a full set of qual, quant, insights community, brand health, voice of the customer, and social scraping. So we have a lot of different arms underneath this, and it's been built slowly over time. We didn't start out with all of that. We have built it over time. And I think when you come into an organization, not everybody has a door open and you have a desk and you have this beautiful budget that's so rich and these awesome tools to use right from the get-go. When you're really building this from the ground up, you have to work for it. You have to work for it. And so there's a few things, if somebody is walking into the role and they are a little bit constrained on what they have available to them or the funds that they have, but they know that they can give good insights.

The first thing I did walking into Michaels was schedule interviews with various stakeholders in the company. So people from the merchandise group, people from marketing, from store operations, from e-commerce really meet with each individual and dig in deep, find out what do they know about the company, what do they think and hold true as facts. And then you also just absorb, seek to understand where they are, maybe where some pain points are for them. Some ways that you can, which is my number two of my five step program, first is seek to understand. Second would be identify some quick wins. Where can you come to play and do some DIY? Agile insights that give some fast reads on situations. I'll give you, for instance, when I was at Michaels, I was a couple months in, and my vice president at the time came to me and said, hey Deb, can you write down a few questions somebody might ask if they're in a store talking to people about the new maker space that we have in stores? Maker space is this area set aside within a store that people can actually work on creative projects or layout, you know, items for making a floral wreath, you know, so they can get a feel for things, so they can actually use tools inside the building to create and make. And they were new. There were three different locations within the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And they wanted to send various executives and just grab people and ask them a few questions. I'm like, hold on, wait a minute, what do you want to know exactly, and how are you going to use this information?

So digging in and getting more details, I said I have an alternative solution. They came to me on a Tuesday, the grand opening was on a Saturday, right? Very short window. I was able to work with a vendor partner to do a pop-up shop-along community where we recruited people specifically to go see this new space and experience it and then come back and report on it in more of a bulletin board community style. And the information was rich, it was robust, it really helped take it to the next level. So that would be identifying some quick wins. They were like, wow, you turned that around in a week. That's so much better than our executives going, asking questions of customers. Then the third step would be have a leadership microphone. Somebody in the executive suite that truly believes in insights. Let them be your champion. Let them open doors for you, right?

You don't always get an open door to talk and have conversations with some of the executives there to find out what is really going on. You need that leadership role to help open the doors, give you strategic vision. You're new to the company, might not always know, so you have that strategic vision that they're giving you. Then you can start to set out some longer term strategic research plans. The first things that we did at Michaels would be what we call customer journey mapping. So when somebody is in an arts and crafts category, say painting, what does it look like all the way from when they get that inspiration moment, right, through learning how to make the project, how they go about buying the goods to make the project, how they share the project with others. So learning that whole journey, where are the pain points and where can Michaels play? We started leveraging those within the company to really dig in and get more details for those executives. So opening the door with your executive microphone is one of the biggest things that you can do there. And then number four on my list to be developed some really tailored insights packages. Who is the audience metabolizing this information? Make sure you're presenting it how they like to receive information. That gets through quickly. And then be an open book. Any research that you do, it shouldn't be just for that exact team stuffed in a drawer somewhere. It needs to be out and about. Research libraries, huge. Access for all who want, huge. You make sure that they can find the things they need, have it easily indexed and make it accessible to all. And then the other thing is develop readouts. We do a monthly town hall. We've been doing this for about three years now where we invite key executives to come here, all the nuggets that we learned over the last month. And we've gone from probably 10 or 15 people looking very bored in a room to now over a hundred people that come every single month looking forward to it. So those are my keys to help build insights.

Thor:
That's amazing advice and building on those learnings, but taking a different perspective. What are some of the common mistakes or pitfalls you would say to avoid?

Deb Walker:
I think the biggest pitfall is when we get to that last part where you're starting to churn out some good insights and not being consistent with the things that you do, not consistently putting things into a library, assessing it, making it accessible to all people, and then also like the monthly town halls, a lot of people are like, why would you even bother when 10 people show up, they consistently kept doing this? and that is what really gets you more ingrained. So if you're not consistent, don't bother.

Thor:
That's fantastic advice. Now, a common challenge for insights function is being seen, and you mentioned it before, as a nice to have rather than a need to have. Why do you think this is the case?

Deb Walker:
Yeah all those years that I've been working in various capacities, whether working for a client or working at a corporate office. I have seen over the years where usually research follows up already a big strategic decision. We're gonna move forward with this. Oh wait, but we might wanna get consumer insights around this to validate, yes, we're doing the right thing. So it's already been decided we're going this path. Let's do this research to validate that. Well, on the good side, somebody would say, great, it validates what we're thinking, this is awesome. And if it's counterintuitive to it, that gets either put in a drawer or the trashcan, they just like kind of ignore it. And so sometimes people are just looking for insights to be that follow-up. And I think what you need to do is get in front of the strategic initiatives and be a large part of something that is coming up, right? So getting in front. Like I said, I always ask executives, what do you want to know? How are you going to use it? You know, and develop research plans around this. What are the big pain points coming up? Don't always chase, but put yourselves in front of things, right? And I think that's one of the biggest keys on that. And then, yeah, I mean, that's one of the biggest things.

Thor:
That's fascinating advice. And how, do you have any stories to share? Because I think that in theory it sounds, yes, of course I need to get in front, but how have you gone about solving, solving this challenge during your career?

Deb Walker:
Yeah there's one case that we're working on right now. So it's fresh, it's hot, it's ready to go for you. And so we have a kids department, right? So we have a brand called Creatology that is based for kids that are, I guess, one to about eight years of age. And so the kids group was looking at what do we do for that group that is anywhere from nine to 18, this no man's land that nobody age group. And so what I got through sitting down with one-on-one meetings, I continuously have stakeholder meetings every single month, and working with the kids team on this, they really wanted to solve for this. So let's devise a research plan. We did a variety of steps to really seek to understand that age group, the in-between zone, where we don't really have anything for them, what's going on with this. And so we did some qualitative work through some focus group boards. We also did some shop longs inside stores where we had parent and child doing more digital ethnography inside a store. So we had some questions, they'd pull it up and they'd answer the question to show what they're looking at inside the store and how it made them feel. So we had that tween group of you know eight to thirteen year olds in store shopping and telling them what they think and feel. We followed that up with a very large quantitative study about two thousand people, their parents of kids anywhere from two to eighteen years of age, talking about the progression in arts and crafts and creative space. We found that there's like a huge gap. Children love it. They really love it. It's like, um, up to about five years of age, they're taking it. Then they start having different things that come along the way that kind of push arts and crafts and creative projects off to the side. They have sports, right? A lot of kids get out, go out for sports. Video games. The greatest times suck up ever. You know, a lot of parents like anything but the video game, anything but the video game. And so occasionally some of the youth come back around somewhere in their teens and they get back into the creative space. But we found there's like a void within this group that doesn't really engage them enough to get them to pull through and put aside some of the sports or video games or things like that. So the next step in this process is really digging in more to what do we do? How do we create things that excite them? Whether it's creating something to decorate the room with or, you know, individualized customized little pencil pouches, things that really excite them and are new age and trendy. So we're creating things like that.

Thor:
That's a great story. And I know if we switch gears for a bit, I know you've also done some really fascinating work around myth busting to find out who the real customer is. Could you tell us a bit more about this?

Deb Walker:
Yes. Oh my gosh, my family and I, we are the biggest nerds, geeks, whatever you want to call it. We'll own it. We love it. I've got STEM kids. I've got two daughters in college. One's in med school. The other's studying biology. I'm talking about ultimate nerds here, right? And so growing up, we'd watch various TV shows that maybe not all families do. And there was a show that was on the Discovery Channel for a good 15 years called MythBusters. And I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I know, right? Everybody listening to the podcast, if you haven't seen an episode, dig in. It's addictive. But what was cool about it is that the two special effect guys would take common facts, quote unquote. Um, and then they would try to either prove them through scientific effort or disprove them, bust them up. And so when I first got to Michaels.

Thor:
Oh, I remember it really well.

Deb Walker:
I had those interviews like we talked about, right? Meeting with the various individuals. And one of the biggest questions like I would ask would be, who is the customer? And I would get some people regurgitating back what they thought it was, older female, kind of casual creator, maker, hobbyist. They don't really use the internet at all. They really wanna go to the stores and see things. I'm like, how? How'd you know? You know, that's always the biggest question. Now they're, how do you know that? Right, right. And so they're like, well, you walk in a store, you see a lot of that group of people, you know, or they would use some database markers around this, looking at the demographic information to your database. There's various things that they kind of piece together to get this thought process. And so I talked to a large group of those individuals and to find out what their thoughts and feelings were. And I'm like, huh, it gets me thinking, why don't we test this to know for sure? These are all kind of small little bits and pieces kind of pulled together. Let's do some actual research around this to find out who is the customer? What is it they want? What is it they need?

And so we went about the gender, and they thought it was about 80 - 90%, or closer to 90% females. So in order to test or possibly myth bust the overwhelmingly female thoughts of our customer base. We went and did a nice brand health tracker to really dig in. So we looked at a Genpop rep study of the people in the United States who purchased arts, crafts, creative project supplies within the past 30 days. And we paste the brand tracker out well enough. We put it over about a week's timeline to give people equal opportunity to fill a survey out. So we're seeking to understand who are the buyers of these project supplies. And the reason we spread it out over time is everybody knows when you do an online survey, the first ones to grab and gobble up the survey are probably the boomer women, you know? It's like it's just, it's a known fact. So it's harder to reach the Z's, it's harder to reach the men. So we deploy sample that's rep of the population and give all the entities the time they need to access the survey and take it. So, you know, quickly close it after a day, hey, we got our 2000, we're good. You know, and so with that, we are able to really glean out some information that it's more like 35% are men, 65% are women.

However, however, but wait, there's more. So, what we found is the average spend of these individuals when you look at the number of projects they make in the year and the average amount that they spent on their last project, we create a year-long value for them. Men were double that of women. Double. So you get a million women. Right, so it's like everything that we have been looking at within the company is like mostly focused on the women. But we can't leave the guys out. So now we have marketing programs that are focused on the guy, creating the guy in mind. We have new product categories that are more inherent to males working on, like leather crafting, woodworking. They're definitely into painting and drawings, a little bit more thicker, thicker implements for them to paint and draw with, because of bigger hands. Different things like that. It really had come to play for us. So that's like one, it's like, blew that myth up a little bit. It was like, yes, it's heavier female, but we can't forget the guys. So that's just one of the myths that we kind of busted out there.

Thor:
I absolutely love that story and that's such powerful advice. Now, if we take a look at a bit like the opposite of this, I understand that because this was really about lack of understanding, I understand that you see analysis paralysis as a common issue in the industry, could you tell us a bit more about what you mean here?

Deb Walker:
Absolutely. I think we all have suffered from it. Anybody who's really a numbers nerd, shout out everyone, right? Numbers. We love numbers. We love data. We love insights. You can drown in the stuff. You get so many survey completes. You've got so many open ends. You want to give them all full birth and understanding in there. You can really drown. Doing a full, complete, perfect... perfect, people strive for perfect, and there's no perfect. There's no perfect people. I tell you there's no perfect. So try for very good. Perfect won't get you there. But they will spend way too many hours and then have so much they're trying to synthesize through that they don't really get a report out in a timely basis and they miss their mark or it gets too thick, too stodgy, you can't really weed through it. I find the key executives really need a few things. Here's the topic we talked about, right? in the report. Here's the insight nugget, here's the application to the company. You know, if you have those three things in your report, I did on a big placemat table page up at the front, here are the key things. If you're going to read anything at all, it's that. So, if you're having trouble getting through all the information, think of the executive. They're going to have trouble too. So, it's learning how to pull back and accept about that 90 percent level. That's really good for business. It's not science here. We don't have to be perfect. We're not developing drugs. We're not doing anything like that. So if you get really good insights, you can move forward. So a lot of people have trouble with that and they get bogged down.

Thor:
Now Deb, I think you've shared some really powerful wisdom with us today. If you had to summarize, what's the one big takeaway you want listeners to get from this episode?

Deb Walker:
Wow. There's just so much, you know. I think the biggest thing is really trying to turn your department into that must have. I think, unfortunately, in the insights realm, you get somebody that has worked for at least 10 years, you go up to them, you can say, so how many times have you been laid off? Being real here. You know, there's so many departments that when times get bad, they think that the insights is one of the first things they can cut and to make yourself so viable and so important within the company that they wouldn't even think about that. So you should always strive, always strive to do that and you know being upfront getting in front of that project you know the strategic idea make sure that you're in front of that talking with them routinely once a month each of my departments once a month i talk to them find what's going on to see if we can develop an action plan around the future and then conducting that research read out the research every single time you would offer it the people can show up or they can't won't show up but offer a readout do not just send a report over talk them through it 100% on that. And then close the loop. That's one of the best ways to do it. Find it after the fact. How do they use this information? What other gaps are out there? So be in their face all the time. Turn it into that must have function in your company. No more laughs people, no more.

The insightful lunch

Thor:
That's great advice. Now, to end this podcast, there's one question I love to ask, which is who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

Deb Walker:
Tell you I don't know if he's necessarily insights or not the person that sparks that aha moment in my head and thinking differently...kind of like the MythBusters program. His name is Malcolm Gladwell – he's written several books and they just make you think and there's part of me that would like I volunteer my time to be free of charge a researcher for him.

It's so fascinating how he takes something at surface level and thinks and turns it in different directions to think differently. Powerful. I'd love to have a bunch of them.

Thor:
Now I would definitely drop on that conversation. Wow. This has been such an amazing conversation, Deb. Your perspective on insights is truly unique and I think we can all learn from it. Now I'd love to rewind and return some of the moments of our conversation that have really stuck with me. And for starters, you told us that in order to get to an insight, you need to scratch below the surface, like digging for truffles. Dig a little bit deeper, getting to that aha moment, the light bulb. That is the insight. If you need to build an insights function from the ground up, four steps, start with scheduling interviews with core stakeholders, what are their pain points? And two, don't forget to identify quick wins that can benefit the business fast. Three, make sure you have a leadership microphone. Identify your sponsor on the executive team and allow that person to guide you in defining the strategic vision and establish the strategic research plans. And lastly, four, develop tailored insights packages. Make sure you understand how people want to receive the information. And for whatever you do, make sure to build in consistency to your work. Now, to make sure you don't allow insights to only validate beliefs or strategies, try to find a way to get in front so you can influence those beliefs and strategies before they get defined. And lastly, never stop working on making your department an organizational must have. Now I know I've learned a lot from talking to you today, and I'm sure our audience has as well. Thank you so much for joining me.

Deb Walker:
Thank you so much.