S5 E5: People-Centric PR with Jen Belcastro of Escalate Strategies and Bill Southard of Southard Communications

Adrian McIntyre: 0:00:01

From the Public Relations Global Network, this is PRGN Presents. I’m Adrian McIntyre.

Abbie Fink: 0:00:07

And I’m Abbie Fink, president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:00:28

Our guests on this biweekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications, and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

Abbie Fink: 0:00:48

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now let’s meet our guests for this episode.

Bill Southard: 0:00:59

Hi, I’m Bill Southard. I’m the founder and CEO of Southard Communications. It’s an agency that I founded 30 years ago. We are primarily focused on business to consumer marketing across a broad range of industries and categories, including toys, games, consumer electronics, beverage, alcohol, personal care, and health and wellness.

Jen Belcastro: 0:01:19

Hi, I’m Jen Belcastro. I am the founder and president of Escalate Strategies. We are a consumer insights and brand strategy agency located in sunny Panama, although we do have capabilities all around the globe. I actually started Escalate with the vision to help companies really build and fortify winning brands that truly make the world a better place.

Jen Belcastro: 0:01:40

And so we do partner with clients, helping them put people front and center of driving really all marketing initiatives. Also, we are part of a vetted network of marketing services agencies, whether it’s PR, creative, digital, experiential, et cetera. This allows us as a team to really take clients on a seamless journey from insights that drives strategy and then strategy that actually comes to life in a meaningful way for our audience, our people.

Abbie Fink: 0:02:09

So Jen, and part of the bio that you shared for our prep for this was putting people’s voice at the heart of marketing and brand strategies, which seems like that should be obvious that, you know, whether we’re B2B or B2C, we are we want people to take action. But the fact that you’ve called it out must mean that that’s not always top of mind, is considering people’s voices at the center of their strategy. Can you talk a little bit more about that and really how you kind of came to that recognition and why you wanted to do something about it?

Jen Belcastro: 0:02:42

Definitely. That’s a great question. First of all, I’m, by education, a cultural anthropologist. So I’m always curious about people and what actually makes them make the decisions they make. And unbeknownst to me at the time when I got my master’s degree, I did not know that I would spend, you know, over 20 years doing, I guess, what we’d call applied anthropology and really learning what makes consumers or customers behave the way they do. You’d be actually amazed as to how many companies do not really put people first at all.

Jen Belcastro: 0:03:14

They actually talk about their products and services more as widgets. And there are two critical elements of success in terms of growing that winning brand that get lost when clients talk and think about their own portfolio of products or services. And those two things are, one, the importance of brand, and two, the power of people. And those things are deeply connected.

Abbie Fink: 0:03:37

Well, first of all, I have to come. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a room with two cultural anthropologists. So Adrian, you’re going to have to pop in and say something because that’s just...

Adrian McIntyre: 0:03:46

It’s inevitable at this point.

Abbie Fink: 0:03:47

I know, it’s true. But Jen, if that’s such a, you’ve discovered this idea, but why is it, why wasn’t, is intuitive to us that we should be really thinking about the who before the what in anything that we’re doing, right?

Jen Belcastro: 0:04:02

Right. I think while it might be intuitive to us it’s not intuitive to all and i think that potentially it’s a it’s a, milestone that might be a barrier in a timeline to either launch a new product or a new innovation. Or it’s just you’re so focused on the product or service that you don’t recognize the importance of the actual brand and really tying it all together. If I can give some like really staggering statistics, I think over 80% of people will buy a brand that they feel a connection with over a different brand. And they’re actually willing, the overwhelming majority of that 80% are willing to pay more to actually do so.

Jen Belcastro: 0:04:45

So it’s really important that companies don’t lose sight of that importance of brand and how to bring that into the conversation because people want to connect with brands and not just connect, they want to emotionally connect. It boils down to that emotion. And in order to really discover what that emotional connection is, we have to talk to them. We have to go shopping with them.

Jen Belcastro: 0:05:06

We have to sit down in a group of their peers, or we need to survey them. But at some level, we need to hear their voice because at the end of the day, people have stories to tell and as social media would, you know, justify, they will tell it. So we’d be remiss as a company not to hear what they say and really customize our brand to what they are wanting.

Bill Southard: 0:05:28

Yeah. I think, Jen, also to add to what you’re saying, I think many clients think they understand who their audience is. And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they’re not. It’s always best to kind of clearly identify, you know, the audience. But the other thing that I found particularly important is even if you’re right about who the audience is, what’s the right message to send out to that consumer? It may not be the exact message that you think it is as someone who’s developed a product or sells the product or markets the product.

Jen Belcastro: 0:06:00

That’s exactly right. And I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve talked to clients and they say, more often err on the side of their audience is too narrow. So I like to call it, there’s target audience and then there’s the addressable market, right? So the addressable market to me is something that is broader than the ongoing hypothesis as to who your target audience or who your target customers or consumers are. There’ve been many cases where using just demographics alone, there are assumptions made about an audience.

Jen Belcastro: 0:06:32

And if those assumptions carry forward, the company’s actually potentially leaving money on the table by not really exploring not only their target audience as a homogeneous group, but within that, there are different, no market is homogeneous. There are segments within and learning how to really message and customize to, who your target audience is, but not as a homogeneous entity as a segmented one, one with priority segments and other segments that you probably maybe don’t want to invest in.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:07:04

John, it’s one thing for those of us who are people centered in our professional training and in our practice to understand intuitively that listening is the primary skill in communication. And that if you want to understand people, you have to ask them questions and then listen from their point of view, not from your own. I mean, that’s a core tenant of anthropology, this notion of relativism, not imposing your views on them, but trying to understand them from their own point of view.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:07:38

Is that hard to sell to a C-suite or to a marketing director who only sees an additional expense and thinks, you know what, we’re good enough here. We don’t need to invest in research. We don’t need to invest in focus groups. Certainly, we don’t need to invest in ethnography, where it’s just going to take you a long time to hang out with people and do that kind of approach. How do you create the business case for the type of insights that you can provide?

Jen Belcastro: 0:08:06

Well, one, you’re exactly right. I think it’s the reason why companies are so, they sort of skip the step of listening to people. I think one way is to get stakeholder buy-in up front by doing something small. It doesn’t need to be this massive investment up front.

Jen Belcastro: 0:08:24

My suggestion is always for companies that are maybe a little bit more averse to doing this step and talking to their potential audience is by starting small. And I always start with stakeholder interviews. So we start with interviewing the stakeholders of the company and identify ongoing hypotheses. What do you think your target audience looks like? You know, what does your brand stand for? What is your unique value proposition?

Jen Belcastro: 0:08:52

What need in the market are you addressing and who’s the audience? And we start with that and identify gaps. And I think once they realize that there are these potential gaps, a case can be made that, you know, let’s do something small. Let’s do a couple of video chats. And once they start to see the power of just listening...

Jen Belcastro: 0:09:16

I think that helps them in a sort of like small, like let’s take a little bite here and then, you know, you see the power of it and then move on. Because it’s really challenging to go to a potential client with this massive, you know, shop along sort of project, ethnography, focus groups, and then quantitative, all of it. When it’s really hard, it’s not necessarily a productizing where you could just say this is going to be the output. So just hearing one or two people talk about maybe the category or products or competitors.

Jen Belcastro: 0:09:54

That goes a long way in terms of helping socialize this concept of doing consumer insights research or customer insights research and putting people first.

Jen Belcastro: 0:10:05

And when they feel like when stakeholders feel like they have a sort of a buy-in to like maybe the survey and the questions and how we ask it, that interview serves two purposes it helps you know by get them sort of bought into the entire, initiative the research initiative but it also helps us understand what we need to ask and and how we need to ask it and how we need to actually design, the methodology to really answer those questions successfully because, you know, the better we’re able to do that. The more likely the organization will be in the future to keep, you know, to adopt that approach of people centric, people centricity.

Abbie Fink: 0:10:51

I was in a conversation recently with a client that is a nonprofit that has a board of directors that is determined to create a new program. And the organization is not entirely sure, the paid staff is not entirely sure that this new program is going to be successful. They’re not sure there’s enough need for it. But because it’s a board of directors and they’re, you know, we have to listen to the board.

Abbie Fink: 0:11:18

And my conversation was along these lines, but it was we want to do a small bit of research to determine if the program is viable as much to be able to say it’s not a product we need to bring to the market as it is potentially endorsing that it is. And I think that’s the this idea that we need to ask our potential customers, the people that might, whether it’s A B2B environment, business to business, or whether it’s a business to consumer, that we may think we’re the greatest thing ever, but that doesn’t mean that who we think wants it actually cares.

Abbie Fink: 0:11:53

And so I could almost see the light bulb go off in this conversation when they’re like, oh man, we have some opportunity here to really have something backing us up. If we come back and say, we don’t think this is the right idea today, or we don’t think it’s the right idea at all, But here’s some feedback from the people we think are going to buy it that says we’re not ready for this yet.

Abbie Fink: 0:12:16

Or they may be fully embraced, in which case in this particular environment, funding would be available and other things because they’ve got that that background. And so What I want to make sure we are talking about here is there’s certainly costs involved in doing active research like this and asking those questions, but it’s valid whether you are a large, recognizable brand or you are a small business or a small nonprofit to ask those important questions before you go and do anything and make a huge investment based on your own guidelines and your own organization.

Jen Belcastro: 0:12:58

One hundred percent. I agree. And just in terms of like examples, you can concept test an idea early stage to see is it go or no go? Or maybe if you’re later on and you do know that, okay, this is a viable idea, then it’s refining. You know, let’s see if there’s anything that needs to be optimized.

Jen Belcastro: 0:13:20

So whether you’re if you’re past prototype stage and you know you’re going to market, there’s still work that can be done in terms of, leveraging the communications and messaging and hitting on those important points that are meaningful, relevant, and that are going to strike up that emotional connection. Because we all know people have a very limited attention span in the world. Media is very fragmented. So there could be a case where you only have seconds to really make that punchy emotional connection on a new product or service.

Jen Belcastro: 0:13:52

I can also say I have definitely done concept testing where it has been a no, and potentially saved the company a lot of money in terms of proceeding with something that was just the market wasn’t ready for, or what they felt was solving, a need in the market was actually not at all. And.

Jen Belcastro: 0:14:21

It was pretty powerful. That was a big company, but it’s happened on the small side too, where, you know, somebody has an intuition and it just... Maybe it’s their, you know, idea, but might not be.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:14:35

You just reminded me of something that I had forgotten. It’s probably nine or 10 years ago. I had a client that I did a small consulting engagement for, and it was exactly what we’re talking about. There was a very specialized niche service that served a specific demographic. It happened to be academics, professors.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:14:56

And my client wanted to understand people’s motivation for participating in the program she offered and really get underneath the surface of things. And I said, well, let me talk to some of them. Let’s interview 20 people who have been paying for this out of their own pocket. Their university hasn’t been paying for it. And they’ve done it for three years or more. And I interviewed them. And what we found out was that the reason they were doing it was completely different than what she thought was the reason.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:15:24

In fact, the core benefit of the service was nice, but it wasn’t the reason why they kept renewing month after month after month. And it changed the way she started talking about and marketing her service. Have you, you and Bill worked together, have you, on projects and things from time to time, have you ever run into something like that where the research revealed something just surprising and it changed the way the business thought about what they were going to do?

Jen Belcastro: 0:15:50

Absolutely. I think in one example, this was a B2B product. The client was looking to potentially do some innovation work, wanted to expand the portfolio. And we did some research. And through the research, we identified an entire new audience based on how they were using this product, which is completely not what the product was designed for. I mean, they say research justifies 80% of what you know, but it’s in the 20% that really can launch you to success. And the 80% that you know, I mean, assumptions are made about the 20%.

Jen Belcastro: 0:16:24

And that’s where you could really go from good to great because there have been, other examples where, for example, you’ve excluded a small demographic. We’ll talk about spirits. A client assumed that somebody in a lower income group wouldn’t spend, wouldn’t necessarily trade up on spirits. Research has shown that that’s actually one of the categories or categories. Things that a lower demographic or somebody in a lower socioeconomic group trades up on because there’s badge value in having that bottle of, you know, that expensive bottle of scotch or something, whatever it is, on the shelf.

Jen Belcastro: 0:17:11

So by not even surveying them or talking to them, we’re leaving out an important, group or they’re leaving money on the table and leaving out an important group. And people are also very aware when they’re not necessarily the target of a particular ad campaign, too. So I think there’s also that potential of, almost damaging a group of people that you’ve already decided was not in your target market, but that was based on your assumptions.

Bill Southard: 0:17:43

Yeah. You know, Abbie, you know what’s really relevant if you look at the PRGN network that we’re a part of is that Jen and I started working together because we had a couple of clients based in Asia who had had a lot of success in Japan and were coming to the U.S. And basically underscoring the same messaging and the same audience focus as in Japan and even the same price point.

Bill Southard: 0:18:11

And when we looked at, in both cases, the product and the service, you know, the natural thing was this is going to be too expensive for this audience here in the U.S. And we need to and the competitive set is different than it is in Japan. And it went a long way to allowing us to convince that client to trust us. Right. That we know the U.S. market and the core fundamentals and messaging remained in place.

Bill Southard: 0:18:39

But we did, you know, we got them to lower the price of the product, got them to lower the messaging, to change the messaging, et cetera. So I know a lot of agencies in the network are helping other agencies in other countries. And I think that’s where It’s really important to understand that the U.S. consumer or the U.S. B2B audience is much different than the audience that they may be marketing to in Europe or Latin America or the APAC region.

Abbie Fink: 0:19:04

Well, knowledge is power, right? So the more that we know, and I think there’s certainly some stumbling blocks that we have to overcome when we’re talking about doing this work. But if we can get to the point where this information that we are going to gather helps us make better decisions, and ultimately, you know, you should then recoup this investment and see it as an investment. I mean, yes, it’s a line item expense, but this is really an investment in your offering and ensuring that we are putting the right messaging across, that we’re doing it at the right time, at the right price, all those things that we know to be really valuable.

Abbie Fink: 0:19:46

And we can certainly look at, you know, I think intuitively we know when we see something that we think missed the mark, you know, that, you know, if that’s the product they came forward with or that’s the brand’s, you know, advertising campaign or the messaging and that’s what they came forward with and we can see it’s Not resonating or products are off the shelf now because it didn’t work.

Abbie Fink: 0:20:08

There’s real value in making this be part of the conversation. Like we do so many other things and we advise clients to have these certain things as part of their overall marketing approach. Having this concept of, you know, research and really investing and to Jen’s point, getting to who about the individuals we’re trying to reach, what is their, what about them is what we’re trying to reach.

Abbie Fink: 0:20:38

And by doing that, you ultimately have a successful or increase your chances of that successful marketing strategy. And where I’d like to, you know, think more about is really in that, where in that conversation, when we’re talking to, either we’re talking to prospective clients or it’s a long-term relationship, do we remind them about this? You know, when is it appropriate to be doing this research?

Abbie Fink: 0:21:05

How along the journey, you know, many times during the journey, should we be asking these questions? It’s not just a one and done, but where else, you know, should we insert these kinds of conversations? And Jen, if you could, you know, share a little bit about maybe how we bring that to bear with the client and how we, you know, advise them along the way that it’s an ongoing effort as well.

Jen Belcastro: 0:21:28

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I always recommend and using the example that Bill just mentioned, if a product’s coming to market and maybe we’ve concept tested it and we’ve refined our messaging, well, we shouldn’t just leave it there. So the next step is that I recommend tracking the brand. It doesn’t have to be some massive investment. It’s doing sort of a light touch. Let’s look at if we’re driving awareness. Are our campaigns sort of moving the needle on the messages that we want to communicate?

Jen Belcastro: 0:22:01

And is it resonating among the target audience and how are we performing, I guess, throughout the brand funnel, from awareness all the way down to loyalty and how are we performing vis-a-vis the competition and where are there areas to hone? I think.

Jen Belcastro: 0:22:19

It’s very ongoing, like having that seat at the table all year round with the brand and watching how the brand is performing and what the target audience is doing and then annually. What? The target audience, what they demand in the category. So we do a statistical analysis once a year to say what drives purchase behavior or loyalty or some outcome in this category. And we do it annually because it usually doesn’t have much fluctuation within the year. But within one year, things do shift and consumer behavior and motivations do change.

Jen Belcastro: 0:22:57

So we run that and we run maps against that, like where is your brand positioned versus the competition? And what is that unique value proposition? Are you uniquely differentiated on what consumers demand of you? And that requires giving them a seat at the table year round. I mean, kind of like viewing people as a bunch of living, breathing partners that are sitting in that boardroom with you around the table, they should be there from inception of an idea or concept all the way, even if you’re a well-established brand through product line extensions or just even measuring the progress of your current brands and campaigns.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:23:42

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

Abbie Fink: 0:23:49

Episodes are also available on our website, along with more information about PRGN and our members, at prgn.com.