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SCOTT OXFORD 01.943 [music] G'day I'm Scott Oxford and welcome to BrandJam, the podcast where we jam about brands because Brand is our Jam. [music] Today I'm jamming with George Zdanowicz, the CEO of Enhance Research and the President of the Australian Data and Insights Association. They're Australia's definitive organisation that represents the businesses that work in the space of market research and insights. George doesn't look old enough to have spent the last 25 years in the research and insights industry, but he has two adult sons to prove it. He started his career managing research on the client-side and moved across to the agency-side around 15 years ago. Prior to this, he spent 14 years in telcos and IT&T with brands like Optus. Very heavy B&B focus in the last few years there. He's been leading Enhance Research for the last 12 years, and he and his team have been commissioned by clients to put the campaign and creative work of my agency through its paces with end users a few times recently. We passed with flying colours, I'm glad to say. So a lot of that work is in the behaviour change space, which is something brands often need to do, too. But also in customer experience, brand, and a comms focus as well. His work sees him working regularly across multiple brands, and across creative agencies, strategy, and media agencies, so he sees the full gambit of approaches to brand and advertising. He's also a mad keen cyclist and like me, he's working on his yoga. It must be men of a certain age kind of thing to do. He never set out to work in research, research found him, and it was love, and the rest is history. George, welcome to BrandJam.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:38.218 Thanks, Scott. Good to be here.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:40.409 Let's start with an obvious question. Why does a brand commission research?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:46.110 Oh, there could be any number of reasons, really. But I think the most obvious reasons are generally to better understand their customers, or their potential customers, their markets, and where they sit in the overall scheme of things.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:59.709 Yeah. And what sort of methods do you use to do that? I mean, customers certainly go about their everyday lives, and they think and they feel, and they have attitudes and ideas, how do you get that out of them?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 02:12.245 Well, there's the researcher's tool kit. The insider's tool kit is pretty varied and pretty big today, packed full of a whole bunch of different sorts of methodological approaches that you can apply. And I think the best practice research is effectively applying the best approach to the situation that you're in. So that could be anything from a traditional qualitative or quantitative approach through to analysis of some of the data that the brand or the organisation might have on their customers as a first port. Or it could be sort of a bit of listening out there in the social space, or it could be a bit of observation. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you can actually help brands to better understand their customers. It's putting those different approaches together into a best fit that is, I think, the skill.

SCOTT OXFORD 03:01.517 Yeah. Well, I remember my first introduction with the difference between qualitative and quantitative. And for members of the audience who aren't super familiar, qualitative is qualifying what people believe, and quantitative is the numbers, and can you tell me about the reason we go out to quant? Why do we go to quant when we know what people feel, isn't that enough?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 03:26.585 Sometimes it is. But often you need to know perhaps how many people or what types of people feel that way, and you need to quantify it. So quantification is something that has its place and is something that is really important in terms of understanding the magnitude of feelings, or the levels of perception, or whatever it might be. The levels of awareness, for example, if we're talking about brands. So you need to get a sense of who is our target market, and how many of them feel or behave or act in a certain way.

SCOTT OXFORD 04:02.377 Yeah. And that phrase is statistically sound where you got to enough people so that you can really confidently sort of know that what your focus group feelings is shared by the masses.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 04:16.131 Yeah. The old statistical significance is something that people often raise. "Was that a statistically significant sample?" Well, any sample can be statistically significant effectively. But it's just what conclusions you draw off the back of the differences between different cohorts in that. So it's one of those fraught areas that people often like to talk about from a research perspective but is really just one of those things that a researcher will consider when putting something together. And we then don't really need to talk about it again. As long as we've designed something that's appropriate then we're going to capture a valid perspective.

SCOTT OXFORD 04:51.958 Yeah. Absolutely. And it sounds like it's pretty bespoke for every situation.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 04:57.062 Yes and no. I mean, that tends to be the way that we work. We would design a piece of research to fit the challenge or the particular need of that customer or that client. And that's often going to bring together different pieces which might be fairly similar to things that we've done before. But as a small to mid-size business, we don't have a bunch of products we just pull off the shelf and say, "Well, we'll just implement that for you." So I think to get the best insights, the most meaningful insights they have to be designed-- that the approach needs to be designed with the business objectives in mind and taking the context into consideration. The context is important in research.

SCOTT OXFORD 05:33.917 Yeah, so if it's-- yeah, so a new soft drink, will people like it? Well, that's qualitative. And will enough people like it so that they actually-- they can make a profit and get the sales that they want? That's the quant really. Is that a simple way of looking at it?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 05:49.389 Yeah, to a degree. Yeah. Yeah. It's really sort of quantifying if you're talking in that particular example. I mean, we don't tend to do much work in that sort of space, in the sensory space with taste-testing and that type of thing. But if we're talking a new product launch, for example, and we're talking about if a client of ours or an organisation is thinking of launching a new product into the market, so you can qualitatively explore some of those elements of the product just to see how they resonate with people, whether they're important, how they react to certain things. And then you can take that out to a bigger sample just to see whether there actually is a market for it out there or how big that market is or what are the particular leaders from a coms perspective or a messaging perspective that you maybe need to employ to actually address that particular market or that segment of the market?

SCOTT OXFORD 06:35.077 Yeah. And certainly, the space we've both worked a lot in is the behaviour change space which is-- behaviour change is a huge thing for brands particularly if you're wanting to change a category. But in behaviour change, it's often deep-seated attitudes around behaviours. And so if we're wanting to help someone change a behaviour you've got to try and get inside their head. How do you get-- I mean, I know that that's the art and science of market research. But how do you get inside people's heads?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 07:05.994 Yeah. Well, yeah. It is a challenge. and I think the best-- and there's a whole lot of behaviour change theories and models around out there that you can sort of employ to different levels. But effectively, I think running successful behaviour change campaigns boils down to a couple of-- a few critical issues and that-- the first one is understanding the audience, understanding the market, segmenting the market effectively. I mean, who are we-- who are we talking to and what are the-- who are the different segments within that space? I can use an example of some work that where-- an area that we've worked in which is in the smoking sensation space, so anti-smoking type work. And I know you've had some experience in there as well.

SCOTT OXFORD 07:47.730 Yeah. We did the quit campaign for about eight years back in the day.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 07:50.686 Yeah. So if we talk about-- if we have an objective which is to encourage people to stop smoking but our audience may not necessarily would just be all people who smoke. How do we define a smoker and what are the different characteristics of smokers? So segmenting that smoking population is important because going out with then a single set of messages around anti-smoking may or may not resonate with different segments of that smoking population. So it's further understanding and segmenting the broader population that we have. Even when we've already got a pretty narrow population that we think we're starting with, it's really understanding the individual groups within that and then what resonates-- what are the reasons they smoke? What are the barriers to them stopping smoking in that particular case? And then, how do we address those? Either through messaging and coms and/or support services and more tangible sorts of things.

SCOTT OXFORD 08:50.943 Yeah. Well, I know the work we did on Quit, initially, it was with 18 to 24-year-old women and then it widened out into the similar age group including men as well. And that age group, it was-- the focus groups were fascinating because you discover that an ad that works on a 45, 55-year-old and one of those ones that reminds you of the horrors that await, it has a completely different effect. And one of the key things I remember very clearly hearing over and over in these groups was that young women in particular saw those ads - those horrible ads - and it made them feel kind of guilty and stressed and they would go and smoke more. And so an entirely different approach was completely mandated by the research, which is that-- that was all around inspiration. Because in fact a lot of that scary stuff was down the track, and right now, there were whole other factors, like getting a girlfriend or the cost of it, which for a 50-year-old might be manageable but for a 20-year-old isn't. And we learnt all of that through focus groups.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 09:54.256 And yeah just understanding, using that particular example, why a particular segment actually smokes. So you may be talking to a segment of longer-term smokers who have been smoking for quite sometime and the reason that they started smoking might be very different to the reason they're still smoking now. Or you might be talking to younger people who are perhaps at the beginning of that smoking journey and what is it that's encouraged them to smoke. And we can use an example of some work that we've done here in Queensland in that space years ago where some of the motivations for smoking were very different for young woman, for example, compared to 40, 50 year olds who'd been smoking for quite some time who perhaps wanted to give up. There aren't many smokers out there who don't want to quit at some point. For some people, that's right now. For some people, that's in a few years' time. But the motivations and the barriers are quite different for those different audiences. So what we found, for example, with some of those longer-term smokers was that smoking was becoming a bit of an isolating behaviour for them because a lot of their peers and family members had since stopped. They don't smoke anymore. And these people were on their own almost--

SCOTT OXFORD 11:04.408 Not social anymore.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 11:04.408 --in the workplace and in the family situation. And off the back of that, the All By Myself campaign sort of came about. And I think it's a good example of understanding some of the issues that are relevant to that particular segment and then good creative being able to take that and run with it and create something that is actually meaningful that can drive some behaviour. And then when we looked at younger female smokers, for example, smoking is not an isolating behaviour, smoking's a social behaviour and people smoke in groups and so there's no point in going to them with messaging around, "I'm all by myself smoking," because you're not. You're smoking as a group. There's also no point in the limited point I suppose in talking about some of those sort of health warning type messages around that you see on packets with other health warnings and some of the more shock tactics because there's a sense that we acknowledge that if we're still smoking in 30 or 40 years time. These things are probably going to irrelevant. But we're 18 years old now and we're probably going to be-- we'll have quit by the time we get our first-- by the time we get pregnant or by the time we decide to start a family. So we don't have to worry about those sorts of things. So messaging in that sort of traditional space, again, doesn't resonate with that particular audience.

SCOTT OXFORD 12:19.171 Yeah. And the really interesting thing is is that on the flip side of it, tobacco companies, who are very limited in their promotional capabilities now, would be doing exactly the same thing to understand exactly the same category to have the opposite effect because they're interested in promotion of smoking. And I guess, they got the odds in their favour in some ways because as much as the laws-- the gift of addiction, I guess. But I'm really interested-- so that's flipping over to that sort of product side and where we talk sort of brands. And I'm really interested [in?] and I've always found in my practice that behaviour change around preventative health and those kind of things actually informs massively the brand, sort of establishing brand story, and marketing sort of brand in terms of [change in?] categories and understanding how people think about a certain category in order to then really inform and help you flip a category on its head and--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 13:17.332 So yeah, understanding those markets. Whether you're trying to tap into a market or whether you've got an existing market or a group of customers, it's really understanding that market, understanding the segments within it, and then empathising with them I think is critical from a behaviour change perspective. Being able to empathise with your audience. Again, messaging from a behaviour-change perspective that can be quite dismissive of a particular audience is not effective. You need to be able to empathise with the audience and understand, particularly when we're talking about preventative health and those sorts of issues, why do people behave in this way? Why do they do these things that we're trying to change the behaviour in? And why does that deliver some sort of benefit or value to them, whether it be real or perceived? And if you can empathise enough and understand what that is, then you can sort of build messaging and build brands, build approaches, that can actually address those enablers and those barriers.

SCOTT OXFORD 14:16.773 Yeah. Well, for me, part of my passion around brand is centred around this idea of brands being able to build trust and particularly before a person talks to a person. So when a brand is out there and it's relating, it's trying to draw in and create-- for those brands that do actually have person-to-person. I buy from plenty of brands which I'll never meet a person. [We won't do that?]. But there's got to be some trust built there. And surely, in order to build trust, you've got to understand what trust means to your target market.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 14:48.993 Yeah. And trust is an important element of a brand and of a brand promise. And you can almost equate it to the concept of value and value for money. So effectively, why would somebody choose to buy a particular product or a particular service? And the reason is it delivers some sort of value. So what you get balances out what you give. So it's effectively, you've almost got your price-quality tradeoff. But within that, what you get, you've got the brand, the attributes around the brand, you've got the trust in the brand, and then you've got the tangible delivery, from a customer experience perspective, from a product performance perspective, from a whole bunch of different other aspects to it. And so if you can understand that value tradeoff, that value dynamic, and where do those tangible and intangible elements of the product or service and brand sit and what weight do they carry, that's where you can build successful brands that are desired or--

SCOTT OXFORD 15:52.284 So if we look at the customer behaviour, which is based around fulfilling some sort of driving need that they have. Is research more about finding out what a customer needs rather than what they want or is want proven just as powerful?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 16:16.307 Well, there's probably a whole bunch of elements in that. So certainly understanding needs. And if you take it back to some of the basics of marketing, marketing should be about sort of delivering to people's needs effectively and designing products and services that meet needs that people have. Often we're talking about products and services or brands trying to meet needs that perhaps don't exist yet and so that becomes quite challenging. So I think the elements of research that are important are understanding those potential needs, those unmet needs that people have and where brands can actually help to meet some of those needs.

SCOTT OXFORD 16:55.659 Some of the most powerful customer data I've ever worked with is around customers who were customers and no longer are and have left and around the regrets that they have and what they thought they were going for when they left [inaudible] something else. And so for me, regrets really taps into certainly wants but that sort of need where you're kind of-- because you want your brand to be medicine, not vitamin. You want it to be as essential as it can be to someone and so--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 17:29.440 Yeah, and that's a legitimate, I think, objective but it's sometimes not achievable depending on the category that you're in. And I think sometimes as marketers we fall into the trap of expecting our brands to be too much. And I suppose needing to understand what role our brand can actually fill in a customer's life and not necessarily trying to go too far beyond that.

SCOTT OXFORD 17:51.835 Yeah, yeah. Certainly, I think the [drive of founders?] and new ideas and businesses and the passion of businesses can be possibly seeing them as God's gift in fact when it's just a handy nice to have kind of thing. So I imagine research is really helpful in helping someone know their place.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 18:14.221 Well, I mean, that sounds a bit harsh, but it's really understanding where a brand or a category even sits in terms of the level of importance to people. But there are always-- it's helping to identify who are those segments in the market or in the population for whom a brand like this or a category like this is important. And what's important to them in terms of a brand like this or a category like this and actually then being able to leverage that. Really understanding your customers and your prospective customers is something that research can help you with and as I said there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can do that.

SCOTT OXFORD 18:52.247 Yeah. It sounds like an extremely powerful way of getting inside the heads when you can't possibly go out and meet and-- I think the other thing I've often said to [inaudible] clients of ours which is that I say, "Have you done any research?" "Oh, we surveyed our customers or we talk to our customers all the time." And I think there's huge value in that. That having those conversations because they are real. But there is human beings involved and human beings don't want to hurt your feelings. They don't want to-- they want you to feel supported and sometimes they just don't want confrontation. And for me, I've found research is a powerful way of separating your audience from you so that they can just sort of speak their mind. Is that what you find?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 19:40.189 Yeah. I mean, research can be really valuable and really understanding what's going on and why it's going on. But again there are different ways of doing that that can deliver better outcomes than others. If organisations are constantly talking to their customers, that's a great thing. But then be aware of the limitations of that. We've had, having worked in a B2B situation where we'll have organisations where they say, "Yeah, our sales managers just gone out and spoken to all of our customers, and this is what they think." And yes, and that's an important thing to do, but you also then need to bear in mind that the customer is talking to the person they know to be the sales manager, as opposed to necessarily providing unfiltered feedback. Sometimes they do, depending on the type of customer you're talking about, sometimes they don't. So to your point there in terms of avoiding confrontation and that sort of thing. So a good insights person should be able to design you an approach that would best achieve the objectives that you've got. So if your objectives are to understand why your customers are doing something that they're doing that you don't want them to do, or why they're not doing something you do want them to do, you can design up an approach that fits the customers you have. B2B is very different to B2C. We could be talking to very senior executive decision makers within large organisations and they have different ways of conveying the messages that they want to convey. If you do work in government, you're sometimes talking to stakeholders. And then you start to get politics playing a role in that as well. And if you're talking to consumers of a consumer facing brand, again you've got a whole bunch of other challenges that sort of throw themselves up in that space too.

SCOTT OXFORD 21:29.698 And those are the pitfalls, I think. And I understand why people would want to conduct their own research and even moderate their own focus groups, but my experience is it's really hard not to lead the witness when you're doing that.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 21:47.660 It's a skill and research is a profession. You mentioned in the intro I sort of fell into the industry and historically, our industry, that's really what it's been made up of. It's been made up of people who have fallen into research. I mean, when I started my career, there was no formal research training you could do. You couldn't do a degree in market research. You couldn't even do a degree in marketing when I came out of uni. So people tended to navigate their way, or fall into this industry, and it's fascinating the different backgrounds that people bring to the discipline of research and insights. I used to have a slide that I'd present, I've done a few university guest lectures and those sorts of thing, and I'd created a slide where I had all the different qualifications of the different member of my team, and without names or positions and just all the different backgrounds that people had. We had some people who, and increasingly you get more people from a more tradition career path, which might be business degrees, or psych degrees coming in to research, but going back, we've got people who had PhDs, and engineers, and scientists, and people with criminology backgrounds, or hospitality backgrounds. I came to research from a communications background. I was planning to be in comms and PR but ended up in research. And I think that sort of richness of experiences is something that is actually-- because what our industry does is attract people who are curious, and who are interested in finding out why. Why do people do things? Why do people say the things they do? Why do they do the things they do? And it's that inherent curiosity, I think, which makes a good insights person, or a good researcher. I've done some analysis of our industry and I think there's probably never been a better time to be somebody with research and insights skills, whether they be working for an agency like mine, or working for an agency like yours, or working for a brand in a client organisation, working in a consultancy. There are so many roles available for people who can translate data into meaningful insights and that's never been a more sort of powerful tool or an important role I think as it is now and it will be moving forward.

SCOTT OXFORD 24:20.579 Yeah. The rewarding thing for me as a creative is knowing that in a different life I could have either been a journalist or a psychologist, I could have-- because I'm curious and I'm deeply interested in how people think and feel and make decisions and all of that. And I have colleagues across neuroscience and traditional psychology. But for me, the great reward was not only having creative that I had written pass through focus groups where people totally-- or even the quant as well where people completely loved it but also then having psychologists from the client's side saying, "Oh, that completely conforms to this theory. And you've done that and that makes sense. And that's all right," assume that you've referenced that. It's like, "No. Actually, this came out of my absorption of it in my gut." But it's nice validation. And I've always thought, "I'd love to go and do psychology or something like that." And I guess I probably don't need to really. But there are plenty good psychologists around. And I just probably need to stick to-- stick to my lane. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. And I love that idea that we can employ the understanding of human behaviour but from all different disciplines from a very deeply scientific way and from a more creative communications way.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 25:37.400 And I think if we're talking about-- if we're talking about campaigns, communication, creative, I think-- I mean, I really admire the creative process. And it's something that-- I'm not a creative. And I'll readily admit that. But I think the best creative partnerships that I've seen that I've worked with both from a-- when I've been on the client's side and now on the agency side is where creatives are able to translate the insights about the customer or about the market or about the brand into something meaningful. That's fantastic.

SCOTT OXFORD 26:11.383 When they connect.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 26:11.594 When that magic happens it's like, "Okay. Here are some insights we've been able to derive from the market or from the customer base." And they take those and they translate them into a creative idea. And when that works and it clicks it's fantastic.

SCOTT OXFORD 26:26.448 Yeah. And for me, I've always loved working with really good formative research, the research that comes first that you work from and respond to.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 26:36.150 And to be honest, I mean, my perspective is I think that if you're going to do any research along the communication journey, getting that understanding upfront is critical. If you can do that and you do it well then a good creative and a good strategy person and a good media person can translate those insights into something that you can take to the market whether you go back and test it later on or evaluate it later on but--

SCOTT OXFORD 27:04.003 But if you start with evidence, compelling evidence that has been gathered in a rigorous way, in a rigour, again, one of those classic ones around market research to me is that there's rigour in this process. And I have to be honest and say I've really admired the researchers I've worked with where I've sat behind the glass and watched a focus group and watched just-- watched its magic happening where you have a whole bunch of personalities. You've got a very loud-- that you've usually got the very loud, opinionated one. You've got the very quiet one. And somehow to be able to manage to be able to draw out, involve everyone and draw everyone without ever leading them to get an unbiased response I think is the art and why I'm-- and why I love research is that I in return respect what they do and value working with what they do because it just sets me up for success. And that's what we all want. We want the work to work.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 27:59.375 That's right and that's-- there's nothing more frustrating than when something doesn't work perhaps because it hasn't been based on a good foundation or it hasn't been translated or or in a worse case where a decision is being overwritten by a committee somewhere, that says, "No. That's not the approach that we're going to take." So that's a little bit frustrating but I think--

SCOTT OXFORD 28:27.453 You've done your bit.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 28:28.720 Well, but you want-- you want it to succeed.

SCOTT OXFORD 28:32.328 Absolutely.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 28:32.590 If we're working on behaviour change stuff we want to see behaviour changes. It's not so much that we just want to do the piece and then walk away. We want to actually see it through and then hopefully be able to evaluate that and sort of give the evidence as to why that approach has worked so you can see something end to end. And I really love some of the clients that we work with for allowing us to be part of that journey from the-- from the concept stage right through to post-implementation to evaluation and then iteration and then going back again and taking it further and building upon the successes and the insights and sort of moving it sort of further along.

SCOTT OXFORD 29:10.580 It was very rewarding for us to know not only following-- there was a benchmark taken first. We knew what the market felt. Then to take a response after the campaign run and understand how many people had moved along those stages of change. So if they never thought about quitting they now were. If they had tried once they were trying again and if-- so we knew that it worked. But then six months later just to see if change had really stuck to go back and do it again which is so compelling to know that not only had it worked but it had stayed working. And that's rare and that's why-- it's rare. I mean, it's very-- it's very vital to that kind of behaviour change work.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 29:54.567 And being able to build on that initial success with further iterations I think is important as well. Behaviour change is an interesting space because you've got-- you may have a target audience or a segment or a cohort, whatever you want to call them that's there right now. But chances are there's going to be another one right behind them. So you might interest--

SCOTT OXFORD 30:12.340 And they change.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 30:13.283 Yeah. That's right. And their needs change, and perhaps some of the barriers, some of the motivators, some of the context. They change.

SCOTT OXFORD 30:19.754 Such a good point because I know-- as I said, we did two major campaigns over eight years, so the first one in multiple iterations and then four years in a whole fresh new campaign. And in that four year period, the exact same target group had-- not completely but they had shifted a lot. The first campaign was drama-based and it was recreations. And the second one was docu-based, talking to real people. And the same approach to research book one yielded an entire-- because in four years that age group had changed. They're a different generation even.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 30:55.437 And that's where also understanding the components, so when you're looking at-- you're looking at segments if you talk about taking a generational sort of look at things but not every 18-year-old is the same and values the same things and behaves in the same way. And so it's really getting an understanding of which groups, which segments within that broader group are we trying to address with this? Because chances are if you really understand it at a really granular level you're going to have different messages that are going to resonate and different approaches to deliver those messages for a whole bunch of different segments. Just because you got an 18 to 24-year-old group, for example, they're not ubiquitous.

SCOTT OXFORD 31:37.642 Yeah. And one of those segments is often the influencer. So a decision might be made by an 18 to 24-year-old. But there might be a parent, for example, who has a significant input into the more-- we see work in retirement age care where it's a person's choices around where they're going to live. But their child is actually heavily influential in that. And they're a tangible market that you have to message to.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 32:02.467 Yeah, that's a good-- that's a good point. Actually, and it goes back to that, one of the central tenets of sort of good research and insights is understanding who your customer is because your customer is not always the person who buys the product or signs up for the service, or whatever it might be.

SCOTT OXFORD 32:18.655 Yeah. And all the work we've done in schools, the biggest lesson we've learnt in a shift, over the last 10, 15, even 20 years, is now the child themselves had very little decision-making 20 years ago. And now, is an equal, if not even more significant decision-maker than the parent who's placing them and paying for that, so.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 32:40.595 Well, yeah, I mean, you can talk about marketing the children and that's probably a whole other podcast. But yes, the rise in sort of influence of young people and children in terms of making decisions about brands, products, services etc. is something that you really need to understand if you're working in that space.

SCOTT OXFORD 33:03.022 So, research delivers insights to a brand. You can not name names or sales specifics but have you got an example of somewhere where the research really packed a sucker punch back to your client, who just completely had no idea that the market felt a certain way?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 33:20.402 Yeah, there's probably multiple examples that we could point to-- that I could point to, where people are surprised. I mean, taking a step back, one of the positives, I think, when you see something like that, is it often suggests that the client has bought into to doing research or gathering insights for a particular reason. And it comes back to the fact that they understand that they're not their target market. Often, you see, and to paraphrase sort of Mark Ritson, I suppose, you're not your own customer, you're not your brand's customer. In that, often, and you probably would have come across it from a creative perspective, it's like, you may have a custodian within a brand, for want of a better term, who feels very strongly about, this is what's important because this is what resonates with them. But you are not your customer. And so really understanding your customer is important. And if you are working in a category where you've got nothing to do with the particular-- or nothing in common with the particular type of person or group segments who actually uses or buys your product, then that's often when you get those aha sort of moments, in terms of it's like, "I had no idea that they got this value from our product. That's fantastic." And that's what good research can do. What good research can also do is be confirmatory. It can confirm hypotheses that people have, "I'm pretty sure that this is something that they value." And the research can actually show that. And you go, "Okay, well, at least now we've got some evidence to use, to base our decisions on because we've been able to gather that evidence." So it can do one of a number of things, good research.

SCOTT OXFORD 35:09.240 What are the key things around brand? And I had this sort of headline, I guess, I wrote, which is, "You might not care about it but your customer does." This idea that the visual standards of a brand are not-- it's almost non-discerning, the business owner or the custodian just sort of, "Sure, the brand looks 25 years old but it doesn't matter. We just sell what we do and we don't have any competition or whatever." But the reality is there is, it's not just about fixing problems, it's about untapped potential. What are you missing out on? What aren't you getting? And I think that's, for me, the biggest surprise, is where people-- those aha moments you mentioned, where it's like, "Oh, people like it for this." And that suddenly opens up a whole new thing. And pharmaceuticals have one of those classic areas, where there's lots of famous pharmaceuticals-- I think Viagra was created for an entirely different purpose, and the research showed that it actually had the obvious one. And there's heaps of those. An antidepressant called Zyban that was used for smoking cessation because it took away those kind of things. And I I love it when the research we do is able to help not just align brand strategy with business strategy but actually even inform business strategy, which is what you're saying.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 36:24.570 Yeah. And stepping away, I suppose, from that scientific stuff but brands can deliver a whole bunch or help to deliver against a whole bunch of needs that people have. They can be functional. They can be emotional. They can be any one of a number of different sort of types of needs, so. And again, when we talk about branding, [that?] we've got functional benefits, which may or may not be important. We've got emotional benefits, which may or may not be important. And understanding the trade-off between those and what people value and what they don't value and what they value in the specific segments that you're really trying to get at is the main thing. Because chances are there will be a number of different segments in the market and you really need to understand who you're aiming at.

SCOTT OXFORD 37:14.185 Yeah. Yes. Yeah. When you talk about it this way, it's ripe with potential to go far beyond marketing and far beyond brand. And again, if brand is the conversations that people have around our product or our business, tap any way you can tap into those conversations, and that's what your industry does.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 37:38.020 I mean, and where I love what we do and the industry that we're in is that we help a number of different clients in a number of different categories to deliver things to their audiences and to their markets. And whether that be in the public sector, it's quite heartening when you actually see behaviour change stuff work. Because it's effectively stuff that's for the greater good. And I love working in that space. I really enjoy being able to see outcomes where people have-- if we use smoking as an example-- we've worked in areas like sexual health as well. So if we can-- HIV. We can see testing rates change and we can see infection rates change. You can't necessarily put that down just to the research that we've done and the communications but you're part of that bigger picture and if you can see that tangible outcome, it's really heartening to be working in that space. Equally, we might be working with an organisation that's trying to sell products. And when you can actually see their sales data change or when you can see their customer experience or customer satisfaction scores change, that's heartening when you see that coming as a result of what you've been able to deliver. We can't take credit for it but we can contribute to their success.

SCOTT OXFORD 38:56.936 Yeah. And look, I think it's like anything. There are times when you can actually take a lot of the credit and there are other times, yeah, where it's just-- it all depends on the situation. And I know that there have been brands I've worked on who've chosen not to do research and have paid the price. And there are others who've changed their whole strategy around, in one case, how they treat their people because the brand research actually said to them, "Your brand doesn't really matter to us. It's the person we deal with and if that person leaves, we're going with them." And that was transformative not to their marketing but to their internal brand, certainly, and the way they treated their people.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 39:41.376 Well, I mean, and again, with some of the experience I've had in the business-to-business space, it's exactly that. Particularly in business-to-business services where the relationship often exists with the people as opposed to with the intangible brand.

SCOTT OXFORD 39:57.828 People are the brand.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 39:58.915 Yeah. And it's interesting sometimes-- and this is where research can be really quite useful. It's really understanding to what degree the people have an impact on the customers' overall [perception?] or experience with the brand, but then also when you look at it amongst-- people talk about doing 360 sort of measurement type stuff, but again, a good example was in a services-based organisation where you had a sales force relationship sort of management type group, and then you had an operational type group who were responsible for delivering the service and the product for the tangible installation and billing and all of the operational stuff. And so you had the operational people had a view of the salespeople which was that, "These guys are just saying anything they need to-- anything they need to say in order to get a sale," and the salespeople were thinking about the operational people that, "These people were just roadblocks [laughter] to us signing up more customers." And then when you try and reconcile their views and then you look at-- compare that with what the customer thinks, and then they actually saw that this group-- their perception of this other internal group was much worse than the customer's perception and vice versa. So you try and get them all on that level playing field, if you like.

SCOTT OXFORD 41:21.237 And that, presumably, results in work focusing on the internal brand rather than the external brand.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 41:26.891 Well, yes. You've got that, and there's a whole other arm of research, if you want to call it that, but in the whole employment engagement and internal space. And it is-- it's adjacent to, but also part of what we do as an industry. We've got clients for whom we measure internal employee engagement and employee satisfaction. A lot of work-- a lot of clients, particularly larger organisations, look to get an understanding of their internal [comms?] and how that's viewed across the organisation or whether that's [crosstalk].

SCOTT OXFORD 41:59.801 Particularly now with remote work. I listened to a podcast yesterday interviewing the Atlassian guys, and they were talking about before COVID, 500 of their five and a half thousand workforce worked from home, then suddenly, 5,000 were. And the interviewer, this Guy Raz, who was sort of saying, "Does that-- what about the campus idea? You know, the social aspect of it?" And he said, "Oh, we make sure we get together, but when we get together, we don't get together to work. We get together to build relationship and to build team and to do PD." And that was a real light bulb moment for me around this idea. But how important in a remote work world that we've moved into to-- you can't walk past someone and see someone looking unhappy when they put on their game face for a Zoom meeting and that's all that you see of them in a day. You can miss stuff, and so it striked me that this internal research is going to be more critical than ever.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 42:55.740 Yeah, and is-- I mean, sort of-- and I think the eyes of the business world are on Atlassian just to see how this sort of plays out as an example with the recent changes they've announced to work. But again, managing as a leader of a business, engaging your team, managing the culture, managing learning and sort of delivery of learning and training. It just-- it's a whole different world. And research can help with that. I mean, depending on the size of the organisation. And I don't envy some people in Resources-- Human Resources [learning?] a development type teams in massive government departments or corporates right now and trying to wrestle with some of those issues, because it's a whole new way of doing things, yeah.

SCOTT OXFORD 43:46.845 Yeah, it's a COVID world problem. I'm wondering, in terms of focusing on a positive out of research, we talked around the wake-up calls before, but what's the biggest win you've ever seen for an organisation out of research, where it just-- I know you say before, you've been very humble, "We can't take credit," and the like, but there's bound to be an example of something you've you guys have uncovered and been able to deliver an insight that smashed it out of the park for a client?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 44:18.627 Yeah, well, in some of the shorter term successes, they're often in the communications and advertising space where we can see some insights that have turned into some creative that's done its job. But there's also some of the longer term slow-burn stuff around, say the customer experience. So a lot of research is done to understand the customer experience. You may have a set of customers, and organisations, and brands want to understand all the customer journey. What's the journey they go through before they come in and when they're in with us, and then even when they exit us, potentially, if they do? So measuring and understanding that customer experience and when you've got some longitudinal data, which we do with some of our customers, some of our clients, where we can actually see, we've been able to identify these particular issues, and they've taken them away and we've worked with them to try and identify action plans and changes in operations, or changes in communication, or even changes in pricing, that address some of those issues. And then you see your customer experience numbers change and then you see their retention numbers change. And they come to you and say, "Our churn data is looking good now. Whereas 18 months ago, we were having too much churn, and we've done research to try and address that." So those sorts of examples are quite heartening when you see that. And we've done some examples in the really highly competitive spaces, like telecommunications is a good one, where you're talking with mobile plans and contracts and those sorts of things and being able to see retention rates improve over time. Energy retail's another good example, where it's such a competitive industry and people are always out there with offers, but you can sort of see the experience, sort of improving and the measurement showing that it's improving and it's actually translating into better retention outcomes.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 46:21.915 From an acquisition perspective we also-- there are nice ones to see where you've worked with the brand and we tried to target some new customers and you see the new customer success rate coming on and sort of increasing and that's really nice. Then you've got those behaviour change ones are great, I mentioned the smoking example. That was just so heartening to be involved in a process like that where we could identify insights for these two very different segments. We had good creative that was done to address those. The creative was effective. It was successful. You're able to see some tangible outcomes through the evaluation. And there's another client we work with, again in the public health space, but having worked with My health for life for quite some time, which is an initiative that sort of involves organisations like Diabetes Queensland, The Heart Foundation, The Stroke Foundation and a whole bunch of other public health organisations and this is a behaviour change program that's sort of targeted at people at risk of chronic disease. Historically, from a public health perspective, we address the problem from the back end. Somebody gets heart disease, somebody gets diabetes, we tend to address it then.

SCOTT OXFORD 47:48.101 Try and fix it.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 47:48.693 But from a preventative perspective, it's something that I think as a society, we've not been great at. And so this is a fantastic program that targets people who are potentially at risk. They're on the path to getting chronic disease. They've got a bunch of risk factors which might sort of mean that they're certainly at risk of some of those chronic diseases. And we can address those people through a behaviour modification program. So they're getting an intervention, effectively, whereby they can be working with dietitians, and exercise physiologists, and experts to help them to change their lifestyle and their life--

SCOTT OXFORD 48:27.748 Make the positive change happen if they want, for themselves.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 48:28.077 --and make the positive change. And having been involved with Diabetes Queensland, who are one of our key clients, from that initial idea and then trying to-- doing research to input into the design of the delivery of the program, we can't take credit for how the program's delivered, but there was certainly research insights that fed into some of the learnings around how they were going to deliver the program, and then watching that iterate over time. And then watching their successes in terms of the number of people who have come through the program, and then the evaluation showing that you've got a high proportion of people who have stuck with those behaviour changes over time. And they've had outcomes including weight-loss, including blood pressure improvements, and a whole bunch of other things, it's great to see that sort of thing.

SCOTT OXFORD 49:15.313 Yes, and I remember we used to say to ourselves on tough days, "We're creatives, we're not saving lives here." And then you go, "Actually, sometimes we are." You work in smoking cessation, you work in suicide prevention, domestic family violence prevention, all of these spaces, and the reality is, we'll never know, but the reality is, is that people are probably alive today who might not have been otherwise. And to have played a little role in that is an immense privilege for a communications professional.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 49:43.550 Oh, yeah. And the same thing from a research perspective. And like I said, we can't necessarily take any of that credit but we've been part of that. And that's one of the things that gets me up in the morning and coming to work, is the fact that we can work on these sorts of things. And I think one of the other things that I really love about our industry and research, is that I'm able to-- and maybe I've just developed this short attention span over the years, but I can spend a day talking with clients, or with my team internally, or externally, we can be talking to public health one minute, we can be talking about the energy market another, and then we can be talking about public transport, and then we could be talking about - what else are we working on at the moment - customer satisfaction in the hotel space, or something like that. And you've got so many different things to occupy you and to focus on. I find that really stimulating.

SCOTT OXFORD 50:40.125 Same here. I'm nearly 20 years in this business, in my own business, I have staff who are long term, and they have said if it wasn't for the variety, they would have gone looking elsewhere. We're talking 8, 9, 10 years. That's crazy for younger people these days, but they just said the job is different all the time. And that's it, and that's what keeps me going and, yeah, we're different facets of the same diamond, I think, what we do in this industry.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 51:13.274 And I can't claim to being an expert in anything, but I think I know a little bit about a lot of things, just through the different clients that we've worked with over the years, so.

SCOTT OXFORD 51:25.510 Yes, yeah. Enough to be dangerous, hey.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 51:29.011 To bore the pants off anyone at a dinner party or a barbecue, yeah.

SCOTT OXFORD 51:32.805 I was going to ask you, someone young listening to this, they're studying about your business in comms or marketing, or something like that, how do they find their way to research? How would you do that today?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 51:45.556 Yeah, it's a good question. As an industry we've been trying to encourage and build these pathways and so as an industry, I think we've been better at engaging with, particularly if they're in tertiary education, if they're at uni, engaging with universities and as I mentioned earlier, just doing guest lectures to undergraduates and postgraduate students in market research or social marketing type subjects, so they can hear from someone in the industry. As an industry we've got a professional association that students can join up to if they're interested but my encouragement to people if they're really interested in research and if they're curious-- and that's really what drives it. If they're curious about why people do things and why they do or why they think the way they think, then to sort of foster that curiosity through reading as much, consuming as much, content as you can. In this day and age, there is plenty of content out there. There are plenty of blog sites and podcasts and even vodcasts that you could be watching on a daily basis which can sort of spark that-- or help to fan that flame that they might have. But then the real, I suppose, encouragement is to reach out to people in the industry. Find them. Whether it be someone like me in my organisation or any of my peers in sort of our competitors' organisations or the association or even talking to brands and people they know within brands and trying to get a sense of what they're doing in the research space.

SCOTT OXFORD 53:34.316 Yeah. Well, as we've seen the demise, somewhat, of journalism in terms of the opportunities for journalists, it strikes me that journalists become that because they're curious and they're deeply interested in telling stories and in human nature. And there's no better way I've seen than sitting in a research room, hearing people tell their own stories, to draw something really meaningful from that.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 53:58.888 So a good researcher is-- and again, there are different skills involved in research. You're talking about focus groups and qualitative research. There's also quantitative. How do you design a questionnaire to gather the right type of data that you can analyse? Or how can you even model some data to tell a story? So I don't like to define the role of a researcher by any of those necessarily--

SCOTT OXFORD 54:27.256 Good point.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 54:27.256 --because it's a combination. But really, what makes a good researcher is somebody who can distil some insights from some data. Whether that be a massive sales data set or some social media data that they can get their teeth into or a questionnaire and the dataset that you get from a survey or just open-ended comments that you get from customer service phone calls, for example. That's all data.

SCOTT OXFORD 54:56.264 Reviewing transcripts and just--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 54:56.598 Yeah. It's all data.

SCOTT OXFORD 54:58.048 --drawing meaning from it.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 54:58.724 Yeah. So if you can draw meaning and draw insight from data, whether it be structured or unstructured, then you've got a role in this industry.

SCOTT OXFORD 55:07.797 Yeah. Nice. Well, I'll make sure there's some links in the notes to the association and those opportunities. I was going to ask you some of my classic brand questions too. We could probably talk about research all day but I--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 55:22.841 I do, generally. So I'm happy to step away from it.

SCOTT OXFORD 55:25.927 No. It's awesome. It's a great intro but also some great depth. And what I love about our chat today is that it shows that it's a really powerful thing. And if it's commissioned well and it's used correctly, it can be a super, super weapon for a brand to be able to transform the way they relate to their audience, their customers. And to me, that excites me.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 55:58.546 And not that I'm encouraging people not to engage agencies like mine but it can be done in-house as well as long as you've got the right people designing and doing things in the right way. And this is one of the trends in our industry that we, as agencies, are dealing with, is that you've got this shift to-- and technology's enabled it. We can do a lot more ourselves now not without having to engage professionals or experts outside to do. So through survey tools and qualitative tools and a whole bunch of other bits of research technology, people can run their own stuff in-house, and I'd encourage that. What we want is more people tapping into and understanding the customers and the markets that they're operating in. That's the overall goal. But it takes time and it takes a level of skill to do that and this is one of the challenges. And we do have clients come to us and say, "We've done all this stuff in-house and now we just don't understand it and we're a bit more confused than when we started with." And so it's nice to be able to then come in and help them set something up so that they can then move it on themselves sort of moving forward.

SCOTT OXFORD 57:14.316 Well, certainly, and I know, in our agency, the strategic work we do around drawing insights from research is a huge part of what we do, making sense of it before we hit creative and really making sure we understand that. And I think, yeah, there are times when budgets just simply don't allow a formal market research program. They just simply don't. But there are ways and I think it's coming down to those key tips I think I always say which is don't lead the witness. You need to work very hard to not get the outcome you're hoping for because you've asked the question in a way that actually gets you the answer you want to hear. I mean, that's the greatest unintentional danger of doing that. And the other one too is that just make sure you're measuring it correctly. Surveys have their place. Absolutely. Powerful. But there are things that surveys teach you and there are things that they don't. And you've got to know which is the right tool for the right job.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 58:11.831 And in where we are today, we've got more data available to us than ever before and surveys are a great thing and they are still a big component of the research market, but there are surveys-- we don't necessarily need surveys anymore to tell us the what. It depends, but we've perhaps got other data out there. So going back 20 or 30 years the sorts of questions we were asking in surveys, we perhaps don't need to ask them anymore in terms of what you've done, did you do this, did you do that. Because we can measure that through other data that we might have, whether it be digital data--

SCOTT OXFORD 58:51.406 And not invest in research you don't need to do.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 58:53.829 But it's doing the right research as opposed-- so it's taking the insights from whatever datasets are available to you, and if you don't have a dataset that's available to you, then that's where you point your primary data collection.

SCOTT OXFORD 59:07.523 Yeah, absolutely. Our whole methodology is based on beginning by assessing what you know and what you don't know And then the don't know requires research.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 59:15.314 Yep. You don't want to reinvent the wheel and you also want to take heed, take advantage of prior learnings and insights, at least make an educated decision about why you're not proceeding down a certain path.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 59:32.168 We often see organisations say we tried this a few years ago and we dismissed it then. But we need to have that conversation about well, is it appropriate that we try it again now--

SCOTT OXFORD 59:40.815 Has the world changed since then?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 59:41.886 Exactly.

SCOTT OXFORD 59:42.616 Yeah, it keeps turning.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 59:43.739 And it's nice, looking back over the years, looking at areas that I've worked and done research in where they're ahead of their time effectively. When I was at Optus, there was some product stuff that we were developing there which was ahead of its time in terms of a product offering in the business to business space and it's effectively where cloud computing is now. But the market wasn't ready for it. And also the networks that carry traffic just weren't ready for it at the time. So it's bandwidth and capacity and that sort of thing.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:16.296 Yeah. Cool. Cool. So I want to ask you my pet questions. I want to know-- we're talking brand. Brands are all around us. You're wearing them, you've lived them. Do you remember a time, maybe in childhood, or do you remember looking back in your past where you first became aware of a brand, or a brand first hooked into you?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:37.346 Yeah, when you-- I was listening to a couple of the other podcasts and hearing some of the stories. I mean, I was a child growing up in Australia in the '70s and '80s, and it was probably the golden era of the jingle, if you like. I know you've had this conversation, but [laughter].

SCOTT OXFORD 01:56.468 Big part of our industry.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:57.970 Yeah. But again, that was, as a kid-- and I think I've-- I was a bit of a TV fan. I remember, as a young kid, and so I can probably recite a whole lot of jingles and ads from those days, perhaps appropriately or inappropriately, I don't know. The fact that I can still sing, "I feel like a Tooheys or two," and I was probably only about eight years old, I think, when that first came on. But so I've got that association from a brand-- well, with a whole bunch of different brands. Your Meadowleas and your Tooheys and your--

SCOTT OXFORD 01:01:41.973 Stuff you saw around your home?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:01:43.118 Yeah, exactly. But I was trying to think about, well, when did I first become a conscious brand consumer, almost, and I think it was-- and again, growing up in a sort of middle-class sort of household, we didn't have-- we weren't a brand name sort of household, necessarily. And I remember my Mum asked my grandmother to go out and buy me a pair of sneakers for school sport. Sneakers is what you called them back then. You probably call them trainers or runners now.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:02:16.755 Joggers, yeah.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:02:17.509 And so my grandmother took me out shopping, which was embarrassing enough as a 10-year-old or whatever, but I was insistent that I wanted a pair of Adidas sneakers. And up to that point, my Mum had just been buying me generic Grosbys or whatever you got and I never had the brand name sneakers. And that was my first recollection of sort of actually being insistent around a particular brand. And I remember my grandmother bought them for me and then went back to my Mum and said, "You owe me an extra $10 because you didn't give me enough money. He wanted these really expensive shoes." And I can't tell you what it was about those Adidas shoes that I really wanted, but that was that. So that was the first time. But then I remember, I suppose, the first time from when I started having a bit of-- I shouldn't say, "Income," but I was working part-time from a fairly young age and had a bit of pocket money and really wanted a pair of Billabong board shorts because that's what I would see in Tracks magazine and surfing magazines I was buying at the time. So I remember, I'd sort of identified with the Billabong brand for some reason. Perhaps because of some of the pro-surfer sort of spokespeople that they had at the time, but that is something that I was really drawn to. And I still remember really being proud of those first boardies and just wore them everywhere. Wore them to death until they were completely faded and you couldn't even tell what they were anymore.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:03:53.774 Yeah [laughter]. Yeah, it's the peer influence, certainly, which is-- wherever it is in your school or in your area. I think that has a whole role to play and for-- in my school-- because we're the same vintage. And in my school, it was Reeboks and that little sort of Union Jack on your Reeboks, the plain white Reeboks. And we had to have white shoes for something or other. I never got my Reeboks, but. And my Mum and Dad listen to this podcast and they're going to say, "Oh, you're telling everybody all of the stories about what a deprived childhood you had. You didn't have all of that." But I think there were so many aspirational brands even back then. Impossible to keep up with now but back then especially. And I think the moment that you do get something-- and for me, it was a denim jacket. A Just Jeans denim jacket. We were away on holidays at Caloundra and my parents gave me-- it was about $50 I think at the time, which just carrying it was pretty amazing. I must have been a young teenager and walked down to Just Jeans and bought myself that. And I walked back along the waterfront at Caloundra and just felt like a million bucks. And sometimes, the harder won, the longer you wait, the more it means to you. And that's the status that it plays, isn't it?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:05:11.449 And I also remember brands, which I perhaps had no affinity with otherwise, sort of coming into my consciousness because they associated themselves then with stuff that I had an interest in. So good example is I was a bit of a cricket tragic when I was a young kid. Loved my cricket. Wasn't very good. I played a bit of cricket. I wasn't really good but I just loved cricket. And there were two brands that stand out. One was McDonald's. And we weren't a McDonald's family so didn't really go to McDonald's much. Wasn't a big fan of McDonald's. But you could get a cricket poster of the World Series teams if you came in and recited the, "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun." And so I learnt that and went into the McDonald's and said, "I'd like to get the poster." And they were handing it over and I said, "Don't I have to say the phrase?" So I remember that. And then, again, associated with cricket, Ardmona canned fruit. You would have to collect labels and send them away and get these cricket cards. And I did that. I hated canned peaches but I made my mum buy three tins of Ardmona canned fruit every year for three or four years just so as I could send the labels away to get cricket cards. So--

SCOTT OXFORD 01:06:32.782 Powerful.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:06:34.232 --did it have any impact? Yeah. I mean, certainly, was probably a short-term uplift in purchase but it didn't have any impact on my longer-term sort of view of the brand.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:06:43.574 Well, not for you but your mum probably changed her habit and started buying Ardmona instead.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:06:48.705 I don't know.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:06:48.705 Just got in the habit of it.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:06:49.909 I reckon my mum could still have some unlabeled tins of Ardmona peaches in her cupboard somewhere. She doesn't chuck a lot of stuff away.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:06:59.379 That might be your ethnic background coming through--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:07:03.066 Yeah. [crosstalk].

SCOTT OXFORD 01:07:03.066 --there, potentially.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:07:04.476 So those are brands that you remember, that you connected with, and that elicit a response. But what about today? Is there a brand that you really trust, or that you even love, that's a part of your life, that you could not imagine life without?

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:07:21.322 Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. I don't know. I'm a bit cynical when it comes to brand having worked in this space. I mean, there are products that I love and then, perhaps by association, brands. So if you were to ask any member of my family, they'd probably tell you that Nutella is my favourite brand given the amount that I consume, but. Yeah. And I do love Nutella. And on every trip I've had to Europe, I've brought back a jar of Nutella from the country that I've been to because they still sell them in glass jars over there, which we generally don't have here anymore.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:07:58.761 No. All [the?] plastic now.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:07:59.819 Yes. But, again, I suppose, given-- you mentioned in the introduction [that?] I've-- one of those older guys who sort of fallen into the cycling--

SCOTT OXFORD 01:08:10.392 I was going to say--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:08:10.552 --sort of space.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:08:11.434 --it has to be something to do with cycling. Because they get you to part with large sums of money and there must be some--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:08:15.920 Yeah. They do. And what I love about cycling or riding a bike-- and I could even talk about some great research that we've done and in that space as well. And that was really fun, to do research on segmenting the Queensland population as far as their cycling attitudes and behaviour is concerned. But, for me, cycling is about that sense of freedom. Being on a bike is just like nothing else. And from a nostalgic perspective, bringing back those memories of childhood, of getting your first bike, and getting on a bike, and just being free to roam the neighbourhood, and go where you wanted to go. And that's something that I get from cycling now. But there is a cycling brand that I've chosen to associate myself with and I've got an affinity with the brand and what the brand stands for, and that's Rapha. And so I've gone all in. I've joined the club, and I buy all their kit, but equally, I love the community that it brings together. So I've ridden, when I've travelled the world over the last few years, when I've been a member, I've been able to meet up with people in these cities that I've travelled to. And I've been able to hire a bike there and just ride with a bunch of strangers who-- we're all part of the same viable club, and all wearing the same sort of kit. Probably spending more money than we should on it but the associations that I have with that brand are generally quite positive. And what it does, is it enables me to do the stuff that I love to do, which is ride.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:09:52.751 Yeah, yeah, and that's the--

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:09:54.989 And look good while I'm doing it.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:09:56.093 Yeah.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:09:57.021 As good as you can look when you're 50 plus years wearing Lycra.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:09:59.139 Well, well, look good to other cyclists, anyway. Yeah, look, I'm 50 next year and I've known for a while now that cycling's going to enter my life in my fifties. And so I've got this journey ahead of me, I think, to discover, because running, which is what I've done for the last however long, doesn't quite have the same thing. You want a pair of shoes that just fits, and it's good for you but it's not exactly the same brand. Yeah, cycling's powerful. I love that everything you've mentioned today, the first two episodes of this season, which you haven't heard yet, one guest talked about surfwear and the other guest talked about their Nikes. And so there are some real things that are in right of passage in childhood that we really connect with and that's the power of brand. Well, we could talk cycling and brand and particularly research all day and the reality is, we've only just tipped the tip of the iceberg on research and maybe as we find so often on this show, we might have to convene a part two and dip into some of that other great stuff around how brands track reputation, and track research, and do all that stuff. But we're out of time today, so I want to say thanks, George. It's been brilliant.

GEORGE ZDANOWICZ 01:11:13.496 Thanks, Scott. It's been a good, fun conversation. Thanks very much for inviting me.

SCOTT OXFORD 01:11:20.928 [music] So podcasts survive on word of mouth, so I'd love you to jump on your socials and share us around. You can find me Scott Oxford on LinkedIn, or you can follow brandjam_podcast on Instagram, and of course, subscribe on your platform, ensure you don't miss an episode. You can also visit brandjam.co, where you'll find the show notes and any links that we've talked about in this and every episode. And you can drop me a line there, or connect me up with anyone you feel should be a guest. And to finish a neat little quote about brand which I think is especially pertinent to the conversation we've had today. It's from Lisa Gansky, who is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. And she says, "A brand is a voice, and a product is a souvenir." And I think that's pretty pertinent. I'm Scott Oxford, thanks for joining me today on Brand Jam. Brand Jam is brought to you by my creative agency, New Word Order, who pay for it and give me the time off. My producer and engineer is Zane Weber. The music is from my dear old friend, Phil Slade. And our brand and all the work that you see that looks beautiful and reads beautifully, is by Andrew McGuckin, our art director, and the rest of the team at New Word Order. Thanks for joining us. [music]