#52 Why Understanding the Customer Is The Key to Great Experiences
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The most important thing is that person. What really matters is the person and that experience. You need to really understand your consumer cold. You need to know who they are. Sometimes people aren't always able to articulate exactly what they want to, which can be tough.

People may say they want one thing and really you give it to them and it's, well, not that way. Not quite that. So it's an art and a science. And how do you find the balance between the analytics and the people?

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we are joined by Gina Hardy, the Chief Marketing and Experience Officer at Chamberlain Group. Gina has a broad experience leading marketing and customer experience at companies like Drizzly. We're also part of Uber, Tonal, as well as quite a bit of experience at PepsiCo. So we're really excited to dive into her experience

understanding and experience in really refining analytics and combining the power of brand to create a great customer experience in the digital first world. Gina, how are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me today. Excited to be here. Yeah, we're so excited to have you. So you're an

Your history, your background is so broad and you've worked at companies, like I said, such as PepsiCo on the Gatorade brand and all the way to where you are now at Chamberlain Group. And you've worked on many different products and types of products and industries in that time. I'm curious to know a little bit about what drove you to join Chamberlain Group, which is a very different product than what you have had experience with in the past.

It's a funny thing, right? You never know where your career will take you or where you will go. I spent a majority of my career at PepsiCo. You're talking about snacks and beverages. I worked on the Gatorade brand for many years.

Sports drinks was what I talked about all day long. And it was kind of wonderful at the time. I used to play sports growing up. And so it was a dream job to be working with athletes and working on a brand like that. And as I moved along, I entered into the tech space a few years back, worked at Tonal and Drizzly, as you mentioned.

So really understood how amazing the tech space is because you can change so much with software and coding in a very short amount of time. And so as you think about customer experiences, the exponential speed in which you can change and deliver is so fast. And I've always found that fascinating. And I think from a life stage perspective,

I have a family now. I'm not playing three sports a year. So being able to join Chamberlain Group and help the company go from a legacy hardware company with LiftMaster, a brand that many people know have in their garage,

to a smart home company run by software and our MyQ platform is very much my speed at this life stage. Being able to keep track of my children coming in and out of the home is a need that I have today. So I've been very lucky to sort of align my personal values in life stage to what I'm doing at work. And so it's been really fun. That's amazing.

And I also love your title, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer. And this is kind of a broad question, but in your opinion, what do marketing and customer experience have in common?

So much. So much. The biggest thing is a human, right? It's a human. And, you know, marketing, I think of sometimes as you're trying to acquire someone or retain someone and you're thinking about

campaigns or channels or media. But when I started my career, I started off in consumer insights and analytics. And so I was in people's homes doing ethnography research, doing survey work. And it was there that I really understood that the most important thing is that person, right? We

are sitting in offices sometimes talking and pontificating about things, but what really matters is the person and that experience. And starting off my career that way really helped me understand you need to really understand your consumer cold. You need to know who they are. Sometimes people aren't always able to articulate exactly what they want to, which can be tough. And

People may say they want one thing and really you give it to them and it's, well, not that way. Not quite that. So it's an art and a science. And I think that's just a really beautiful merging to be able to think about both. And how do you find the balance between the analytics and...

And the people, like you just said, some people will say they want something, but actually want something different. How do you approach that? Because it's such a big problem that I know so many leaders face where we say, well, the data is saying this, but we're hearing them say this or vice versa. How do you find that balance?

You know, this is where it gets fun into the data and the art and the science. This is why I love marketing because in a day I would be doing both. You're talking about modeling and then sometimes you're talking about feelings in one day and colors and stories. And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

One thing I learned, too, is the research matters, obviously, but also the way you gather it matters. You need a toolkit of just different methodologies to really get to the real answer. You want to do ethnographic research just to observe people. That's where you can really understand, huh, that's interesting.

They forgot their key or their child forgot their key during the day or, you know, and these are things you may not be able to articulate. On the quantitative side, though, there are ways and methods that you can uncover the driver beneath the driver. You know, people may say, I am healthy. You look in their fridge, maybe that's not the case, right? So there's just different methodologies that in the toolkit that I've learned to really just, I guess, triangulate what

what you're hearing to really observe, to ask directly, to use different methodologies that may get to the driver behind the driver. And I think you need a wide variety of ways to get to that because you could jump to the wrong conclusion. Yeah. It happens if you just ask people sometimes. And also when it comes to just asking, because asking feels it's kind of the most obvious way for us to gather that information. But the way we ask a question is

can drive the answer significantly. And so I think it's something that we need to be so conscious of is how are we framing this question and how are we actually inviting what's under the surface to come forward in a way where the person answering doesn't necessarily, they might not even know that we're

trying to uncover something, right? So I also love what you're saying about the ethnographic aspects of it. Watching people, witnessing how they're actually using a product, a service, a tool,

is so insightful because they will say something that may be very different in their actions. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Have you had any eye-opening experiences with that recently or in the past that you could share? I think, right. So here at Chamberlain, as I mentioned, we're trying to get to that holistic software experience, right? This is, it needs to feel software.

seamless. And we would hear that in our focus groups, right? I want this to feel easy and seamless. And one important thing is, and I learned this early on in insights training, which may seem basic, but it's always to ask for the why behind the initial response. It's, I like that this has this feature. Well, why is that? Why is that important to you? Until you kind of ladder it down and

to the feeling. A lot of times it's a feeling, sometimes it's irrational. I think any of us as consumers, as we shop, I, of course, maybe because of what I do, but I spend time reverse engineering, why did I make that decision? What was it about this product that made me choose it? And often it can be wrapped up if you ladder yourself down in an emotion. Well, I bought this because I thought it would be easier to use. This one looks more complicated.

So just even that art and science of how the packaging is presented, the words you use need to matter as few as possible, hopefully. And so getting down to that feeling while you also understand the harder features and things you're trying to convey is so important. So I think it's about that laddering and getting to the emotional core of it. Yeah. And I can imagine, you know,

As the world changes, as technology is changing, as businesses are getting smarter and more advanced, there's a lot of changes that are happening. And I'd love to get your take on what you foresee in terms of how customer experience is going to evolve in, say, the next five years. I think this is working for a tech company, too. It's particularly salient to think about customer experience and how fast it's going to move.

When I think about it from a lens of us here at the Chamberlain Group, we're about intelligent access. So you think about it. Today, we have openers for your home, for a commercial space, but we're evolving, as I mentioned, into this software ecosystem to let you into your home. And when you think about experiences, I can't think of anything much more archaic than the fact that we carry keys around.

And it's kind of hilarious to think about. That's so archaic. Hundreds of years, I don't know, we've been using keys. And I shudder to think about my children, once they're able to kind of come and go freely, keeping those around and making sure that they have them. And so it's just this sort of hilarious thought that

We are in this industry that is so not as established, right? It's not as much of something when you think of the smart home category, that's the top of what people are using today. Yet we have this archaic behavior that we're thinking about. And so that is the context in which I think about the question, which is where are we going in the next five years? And other important context is you think about who's buying homes today, right?

The millennials are up to bat, right? And they are a group that has

not their entire life, all of them growing up with technology, but very comfortable with technology. And then you think about the Z and even alpha after that, it's just going to be what the expectation is. And that brings me to the thought of it's about expectations and expectations of that group. The bar is very high. If you've ever watched linear television with an alpha, gen alpha, and they're surprised that there are commercials,

You understand.

how high the bar is, right? So there's going to be a high expectation of the setup has to be so simple. Of course, the product experience needs to be so intuitive. It needs to be even smarter, right? Anticipate my needs before I even need to tell you would be where the bar will be. I know I'm raising some of these children, whether I like it or not.

So I think the need to continuously research that user experience to figure out how you can stay ahead of all of those steps is so important. And it's only going to accelerate faster and faster as this awesome group ages and is making buying decisions. Yeah.

You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with my brother, Eric Wood, who used to work at Rivian as the VP of user experience. And we actually did an episode. So if anyone wants to go and check that out, it was really interesting to hear about the design decisions that they made when they built Rivian, which is a new electronic off-roading vehicle, like trucks and stuff. And they eliminated the key completely.

completely. And when they were building that and it was something that he had to fight for because everyone's like, how can you just not have a key? How can you just walk up to it? Totally. And your phone opens like that's not going to work. And so then they had to build like a fob that there's no actual key. Right. And we've gotten to the point where we now have the technology where we can say this thing isn't actually serving us.

And there are better ways to do it, but we need to think outside of the box, not just doing what we've always done. And I think that these new generations you're explaining are really calling us to think about things in a new way, in a technology driven way. This is the first generation that is evolving.

fully never not had the internet be a core part of their being. And it just, I think there's so much we can learn from these younger generations as we look towards what is the future of marketing and customer experience and product development.

Talk to the kids. They're just going to have such high expectations. I know it. And I do think it's good when you think about something like MyQ and our experience. If you hand it to someone, can they just figure it out without needing instruction? These are all things you want to look for because technology can seem daunting. It can seem hard. It can be a barrier. So making it easy, making it seem easy before you purchase it, after you purchase it,

actually having it be easy is so important. And then that's table stakes now. It's anticipate even further than that. And so that will be the fun part, I think, as we move forward. But I also think it's kind of confusing for us data-driven folks to use data to predict. And maybe you have different thoughts on that. I'd love to know, how are you currently using data as you look towards the future? Yeah.

Yeah. So along those lines, when you think about smart home, you need convenience. And

There are people coming in and out of your house and things going on. I'm definitely in that life stage now where I have a dog and kids and stuff's happening. And so as we look at our features that we're launching in MyQ, it's very steeped in that AI and learning experience. So specifically, how can we make a notification even smarter instead of it just saying there's motion?

we will have an auto detection feature. So this is specifically a car versus an animal detection feature. I now live in the suburbs. Skunks are a thing now, which I didn't realize would be such an issue. I didn't realize they were so, they can totally mess with your lawn. And I want to know if there's a skunk in my yard for many reasons.

So these are features that we'll be launching because everything needs to be smarter and needs to tell you more. And so the fidelity of that information is thanks to the input of the AI capabilities that we have on our platform. And this is, you know, of course, we're just scratching the surface. Yeah.

And then how do you turn that into marketing? Yeah. So the funny thing is sometimes the coolest features can be hard to explain. And I'm thankful for my time in consumer packaged goods because decisions happened so fast.

If you go shopping, there's so many options and you make decisions quickly. And so through that really got a good muscle for, I need to be able to understand what this does in

Five seconds. Yeah. And so we spend a lot of time looking at how we can convey that information because technology and something like MyQ can do so many things. There's so many features. What do I tell you about it? How do I make it super easy to understand? That's compounded by people are different. Not everybody has the same needs. Some people love tech and smart home tech.

and want their Roomba to connect to the washing machine, to connect to the... And some people don't want that. Some people just want the simplicity of what it can offer. So you need to know that. And you need to know the needs of those different groups so that you can, one, create a product that serves that need. We're not all a monolith, of course. But then on the marketing side, it's how do I message it? And that, again, comes back to just really knowing your consumer cold.

and making sure you're building things they actually want is so important. Like you said, communicating it to them in a way where they can easily understand it, which is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you have a complex product to whittle it down into a few words. Easy things are sometimes the hardest thing to do.

So the amount of time we will spend to get to a statement or something pithy is a long process, but it's worth it because then it's easily people say, oh, okay, I understand what that is. I'm interested. I'd like to learn more. And it's important to pay attention to. Yeah. I want to take a trip down memory lane with you for a moment and talk about some of your past experiences in marketing. And I know, for example, you...

were the CMO at Tonal and I believe you won some awards for some of your campaigns with LeBron James and Serena Williams. Tell us a little bit about those campaigns and what made them so successful.

So obviously building on the experience I had at Gatorade, when I joined Tonal, Tonal is a revolutionary product. And for those who don't know it, it is a strength training, connected strength training machine, which runs with magnets and AI, essentially, where it can create weight seemingly out of thin air, but not really. There's a lot of components behind that make it work.

And so you can imagine as a marketer, how do you convey that quickly, the magic of this? And so you naturally ask yourself the question,

What can aid in that as well as you're a new brand and I need to drive awareness of a product. And often you might find yourself saying somebody with high awareness can help you do that. And so that led us to at the time, LeBron and Serena. And there's always a philosophical question, I think, overall in marketing, which is,

There's this bifurcation that's come up of this idea of brand versus performance marketing, which I like. It's a blessing and it's a curse because really all marketing is

And talking about the experience can drive sales and can drive growth for your brand. There's this bifurcation that I don't think necessarily needs to happen. And so as a CMO, what happens is you can make these investments working with LeBron. And when you look at creative like that, we're not telling you much about what it does.

It's not telling you it does these specific features. It's meant to intrigue you. It's meant to tell a story. It's meant to have a sticking place in your mind that you can't forget. And to this day, when I talk to people and I say I worked at Total, like, did you do the LeBron campaign? Because it's memorable. It's telling a story. And I think the net net of a lot of our human experience is storytelling, is storytelling.

That's how people remember things. Eighth grade, I placed in my science fair for my project, which was mnemonics, which was I taught more people how to memorize more states in alphabetical order by telling a story.

than just memorizing a list. And that was so fascinating because that's how you remember things. And so learned an early lesson, I would say about that power, but really fun to be able to tell those stories.

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Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Maybe even about your eighth grade mnemonics?

project, but how stories help people to remember. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah. So I think just even there's science and research on this as well, right? Not just my eighth grade science project, although I learned it scientifically, right? That the memory structures are more solid if you are told to it in a narrative form.

Right. And it reminds me of some of the classes you take in high school where it sounds like the peanuts teacher where you're learning math. Maybe that was just me. But when I was told the story, I remember it. We all remember the narrative of our favorite movies. We all remember, unfortunately, you know, some of the lyrics to our favorite songs and not calculus. Right. There's a reason for these things. And so that is very true in math.

marketing. It's very true because there's people are bombarded with messages every day. We all are now it's on our phones. We're getting push notifications and you really need to stand out. And that's what people remember. And really where the challenge becomes is how do you marry that with something more informative?

Because in the earlier example, we weren't telling you exactly what this thing does. You're going to want to know that though at some point. So it's about how you construct the marketing plan to intrigue and drive awareness. But then I'm going to set it up so that I tell you specifically what this does. And that's where we research. That's where we look at of this ecosystem of products we have.

what are the most salient things that you're interested in that I need to tell you first? So it gets more educational as you go down. And it's really just kind of the symphony that's really beautiful to balance when you're trying to build a brand. Mm-hmm.

That's so great. And I think it's something that we can all be thinking about as we are communicating with customers, whether it is in a campaign or emails or whatever it is to really bring that storytelling into the fold. Do you have any examples of recent stories that you've implemented in your marketing or customer experiences? Yeah. I mean, I think from

From a storytelling perspective, we're still on the journey with MyQ. It's a product. We're coming out with additional products. So we have previously owned the garage and we have smart locks for your front door. We are just launching an outdoor camera. We've launched an indoor camera. And so now we have the full ecosystem. You can access everything.

your entire house, all the access points and monitor it. And now it becomes, how do we tell you that story in a way that's just super easy to understand, right? And using the very easy language. So we're spending time on that mid or bottom funnel language that you would use. What does this do? What is this? And now we have to graduate to the more emotional storytelling. And that's what we're doing. The journey we're on haven't launched all that yet.

But learned those tools in my past, definitely at Gatorade, when you see the people screaming in the locker room, right? It's about

not just about what the product does for you, but how it makes you feel, right? So that's the evolution that we're on. But you brought up a good point, which is every touchpoint of the experience is an opportunity to do that. Sometimes I think touchpoints are overlooked. Email could seem a little boring, but if you have the right tonality, if you don't make it, the biggest win could be this doesn't feel like marketing. Right.

Right. This feels like something I would want to read or know. Those are very interesting. And I think good goals for you to have to think about how every touch point can be, just not feel so like you're being marketed to like a real experiences is a really good goal. And showing value in that is that if there's, if a customer is spending time reading your email or text messages or whatever it is,

does it provide them with some value? Is it educational? Is it entertaining? Is it informing them of something that they really need to know that is connected to their needs? We have to be thinking about that because we live in a world where there is so much communication sent to us and most of it

Is for the company, not for me. Correct. Correct. I mean, I do buy things that way. Yeah. But there are a lot of tools that you can use. And, you know, in our case, there are, we work with content creators. And I think they're wonderful because they make content for the platform way better than you as a brand can sometimes, right? They know how to reach an audience. They know how to tell a story.

And a lot of times you have to be willing to let go of the reins a little bit of use these exact points and do all these things. You have to kind of just...

hand over the reins and let them go a little bit because they're going to create something magical that you want to engage with. And I think that's been a fun, newer places as we've looked at marketing and experiences that you can deliver. Amazing. So I want to talk a little bit about Chamberlain, the Chamberlain Group's employee experience, because I know that you have been recognized as one of the best places to work.

And I'm curious to know how you have gone about fostering a culture that prioritizes both innovation and customer experience as well as the employee experience and having people actually want to stay and be there along for the ride. I love this question because I think it's so often overlooked. You think about...

creating a great experience probably needs to start with yourself, you know, as a company. And one thing I think Chamberlain Group has done a really great job at is making our company values very front and center. It's not just on the wall. It's something we talk about in our team meetings. It's in our town halls. It's very present. And our values really just are

lived here, which is great. So the idea of being creative, that's one of our first, which I love as a marketer that it's creative, right? Making sure that you're challenging the status quo though, not just creative for creative sake. You know, we're telling stories, but how do you really challenge assumptions? Being bold is another one. So how can people speak up

and be bold to say we could do this a better way. Those are all very important. And I think we need to live and breathe them and we do. And then passionate is another one. When you think about what makes a great experience for people, and I've heard this from talking to folks on my team and looking at the feedback is we as a leadership team need to create an environment where people feel empowered to speak up.

and say the idea. Because if we don't create that environment, people aren't going to say things. They're going to, you know, if you're constantly saying, we could do this new innovative idea, if we're not willing to listen and if we're going to shoot it down, then people aren't going to want to speak up next time. And that's the environment. It's very important that we build. And I think as I've been here has been something that's been very special about this place. So really, I think the best brands are

And internalizing that and hiring for that and looking for people who are passionate about what they do and not afraid to say bold things. You have to hire for it. You need to live it. So I think that's important. And some of the best companies I've seen do that. What practices or principles do you implement or showcase in order to create that space where people feel like they can be bold and share their ideas? Mm-hmm.

You have to give them a couple of things. One I mentioned, but as a leader, and I know when I started here, one of the first things that I said in my introduction meeting was, if you see something, say something. And that means, I think we've all been at places where you maybe couldn't

say the idea, or maybe it wasn't even necessarily explicitly stated, but you had ideas and you felt like you couldn't express them because you were scared to. And one thing I've noticed as I've become more senior in my career path is you would get survey feedback and you'd see people sort of anonymously saying or grumbling about something or saying we could be doing it a different way. And you're like, well, why not just say it? Why not just say it? So you have to create that

safe space. And even in my first meeting, that was one of the first things that I mentioned is I'm not going to take, I'm not sensitive. I'm going to listen good, bad,

ugly. Tell me what you think. Tell me your ideas. And it starts there really. And then the second thing is creating a forum in which to, to give that feedback back. So we have surveys that we send out so people can also continue to and honestly give feedback if they want. They don't want to do it face to face. That's okay. I think those two things are super important. And as a leader, just saying,

Great. Like, let's let's work at work on that. So that's been sort of, I think, the key to how I've approached it. The one thing I would add is that when people give you feedback, we have to acknowledge that they gave that feedback.

Yeah. Or else they were like, why did I just spend that time giving you feedback for it to go into it? I don't know. What do they think? Then they're going to have anxiety about it. Right. It's true. It's true. I think we've all been there before. You have an idea and you need to acknowledge it. And whether you do it or not, just even acknowledging it and entertaining it is important. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I know I am a leadership coach and I often have some of my clients say like, oh, my team's giving me all these bad ideas. Yeah.

And you're like, they're just not getting it. And there's a disconnect there. But we want to make sure that we are encouraging ideas to come because in the sea of bad ideas, there might be some really genius ideas. And we need to create the space for them all to come out and then also use it as a point of education for our teams to say, OK, this isn't going to work because of these reasons. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So we give them that feedback. There's a thing you didn't know about that was happening and maybe why we can't do that now. But yeah, a hundred percent agree. It's just so important. And it's where so many smart ideas will come from, especially your client facing teams, the people who are facing your clients day in and day out. Yep.

They know, or they have a lot of ideas of solutions to some of your problems. Yeah, you bring up a good point, which is the feedback loop, right? So, and it doesn't all have to come from your team. Absolutely not. I've had great ideas come from the least likely places sometimes, you know, people who have nothing to do with marketing. But hey, did you think about maybe you should approach it this way? I had so many experiences where that happened. Yeah.

making sure that you're talking to your sales team because they're getting information every day about what's working, what's not. We have a fabulous customer experience, customer care team. And they're kind of at the front lines of what are people asking questions about? What are the themes that are happening there? And you have to tap into that information and feed that back to the organization. It's really important because there's kind of a goldmine there. You just need to create the bridge.

Yeah, 100%. Speaking of customer care, and well, not only customer care, but I know this is an area where it's used a lot. I'd love to talk a little bit about AI and how you are thinking about using or thinking about using AI in order to create a better customer experience and more effective marketing. Yeah, it's the topic du jour these days. And for good reason, for good reason. There's so much potential there.

Yeah, from a customer care perspective, we have used AI for a while now. We're already kind of on a few iterations past the earlier iterations of how we can implement software from a chatbot perspective. So how can, you know, end of the day, the goal is you just want your question answered as soon as possible. You don't necessarily even need to speak to someone for everything. You could just say, I have this question.

I need help connecting this to Wi-Fi or troubleshooting a different feature. And so we have spent a lot of time looking at the best possible AI solutions that we can have to help with that. And it's important because we're moving from a company that you may only have people calling in about garage door openers to now there's Wi-Fi, now there's tech. Now the questions are going to be more plentiful because there's more things going on.

And so definitely had to get ahead of that to make sure that we were keeping up with the influx of questions. You want to have that great NPS. You want to make sure that people feel satisfied and their questions are answered in a fast manner. And so AI has been a critical part of that. But I will also say it still has room to grow. It's not a silver bullet necessarily. I think the

There's a, maybe sometimes it's, we're really excited about something and we need to explore it, but it's not always the same as a high touch experience, right? And it needs to continue to evolve. So I think it's definitely a useful tool, but we still have, I think it still has room to grow. Oh, there's so much room to grow. And I also think for any company who's using AI, especially in a customer experience space or customer service space, there's,

It all starts with your data. It starts with the inputs that you're giving it. And especially as you're rolling out a new product, for example, you probably don't know what questions someone's going to ask yet. And giving that to a computer right off the bat

might not drive the correct answers. So we really need to collect data, sort that data, input the right data, and then keep reiterating. It is an iterative process. There is no one and done in the world of AI.

Correct. You try your best, but that's where the feedback loop becomes very fast, very quick. And to train, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I'd love to ask, is there a hard lesson that you've learned recently that you could share with our audience? Yeah, I think it's actually one we talked about earlier, which is taking the leap for building a brand is not always about

getting a click or a call. I think, you know, in this day and age and justifiably so, there is a need to prove investment, right? There's a need to show this is our investment and you get why. And I think it's hilarious being in this space because

you might get questions like how long until you reach this awareness level and people love the brand. Well, it's hard to say with humans exactly how fast that's going to happen. If we were accountants, maybe it would be different because it's more logical of a relationship. And so taking the leap for people

Really just going for it and something like a brand building campaign, which we talked about earlier for Tonal is a leap because you don't know exactly what's going to happen. You can't necessarily measure what the impact of that will be. And those types of experiences have taught me kind of nip it in the bud a little bit. Try and figure out earlier as you're talking to your CFO and others are going to ask the question. I've learned this now. They're going to ask the question, what does this get us?

And so try and find ways to make a connection between how driving awareness and equity do impact your bottom line. And this always comes up, right? How does a customer experience impact revenue? Well, we all know intuitively a bad experience is going to negatively impact you exactly how much.

Not sure. Could be catastrophic. Could be great. You want it to be good, right? It's very similar in you have to understand what those drivers are for your customer. What are the non-negotiables for them? What are their expectations? How do they want, what do they want this to do? How do they want to feel? And understanding all of that can actually help give you a map to make those leaps.

to take the plunge and to be bold. Thankfully, that's one of our company values. I was being bold. I was being bold. Maybe it didn't work, but I was being bold. So, you know, you have to know you're not going to, you're not going to,

always score either. So when you do something like that, you're making a bold choice, like telling a story and not telling exactly what the product does. Also have some plan Bs, have some backups. If this doesn't work, what are we going to do next? And

And so thinking through and wargaming potential paths is super important. So over time, that's sort of what I've learned and how you make those big swings and still get to where you need to go. You bring up such an important point around communicating the ROI, because what we're doing here is not there.

aren't always numbers that will show the impact. If someone sees an ad or has an experience with your brand and they don't buy that day, but they buy a year later, it's still impacting them, but it's really, really hard to tie those lines. And so I think it's always like choosing a metric that has some sort of impact and measuring that and putting it in a Petri dish, but also acknowledging that

we do have intuitive knowledge that these things have impacts that go beyond measure for better and for worse. A hundred percent. Can't measure everything. You want to. I do laugh though. I say, how many times have you discovered something and then immediately bought it in one sitting? Maybe once in a while and maybe once in a while, but there's a journey there and you

You may have different sources you want to look at and do some research or you talk to a friend. So there's so many different touch points that happen before you even get to experience the product. And that goes back to kind of understanding the consumer and what influences you. Right.

Who are you looking to to make the decision? And when you think about technology, these are higher involvement purchases. Usually it's not like the CPG days where it's a dollar and what's the risk? I'm going to try this new candy bar, right? So very different, longer purchase cycle, a lot of different touch points you might have until you ultimately get to where you want to go. And that's where understanding that journey is so important. And then educating your

your organization to say, here's what it looks like and here's where we are. We are here. It helps alleviate some of those conversations. We have two less questions for you that we ask all of our guests. The first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand or a company or a coffee shop that left you impressed. What was that experience?

You know, the one that always comes top of mind to me is I'm always impressed with brands that can sort of take a maybe more of a vanilla, less interesting category or experience and make it interesting. And I think the company that does that so well is Duolingo. I think Duolingo.

I have so enjoyed watching every bit about that brand from the product experience itself to how they show up. It is so fun. It is so engaging. It does not feel like marketing. When that comes through my Instagram feed, I'm going to watch it because it's an owl

it's a mascot owl doing something, it's hilarious. When you, I think about my app right now, I think the owl is sad because I haven't logged on. So-

I don't want the owl to be sad. I need to practice Spanish. But it's doing so in a way that is just so delightful and funny and from every touchpoint has really impressed me in how that brand shows up. And maybe I've gotten a little better at Spanish. Maybe. A little bit.

I love that you bring Duolingo up. We actually had Megan, a product designer at Duolingo on the show back in the winter. So if you're interested, definitely go and check out that episode because she talks about, for example, the owl. So your app will change depending on how happy you've made it. It's kind of like Tamagotchi. Yes, exactly.

vibes going on there. It works. It works. He's sad right now. He looks really sad and I'm going to open that and I'm going to practice Spanish. I don't want to disappoint him. As you should. It's just fun. It's just fun. And I think, you know, not everything needs to be utilitarian. It serves a utilitarian purpose in a way of learning a language, but you can make it fun and every touch point matters. And it feels like they've really thought through all of that.

Yeah. I think it's a beautiful case study in gamification that so many brands try to do and Duolingo, especially over the years. I've been a Duolingo customer for probably like 10 years now. My Spanish has not improved. I'm just going to say. Yeah.

but I love the brand. And whenever I go to a Spanish speaking country, I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this now. It has definitely helped, but it's been so interesting to see their progression over time and how they've really mastered that element of fun within their product and their marketing. They nail it. I agree. And so my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?

You know, this is a good question. I think from a building on what I mentioned earlier in the consumer, I say this a lot, but

Opinions are important, of course, but our opinions don't necessarily matter in that what matters is the perception of your customer. They are the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Right. So what they think is so important. And I can't tell you how many times in my previous experience you would walk in and hear people.

about we think this is a good idea. We think this is what our consumer will want. And that's one of the first things that I flag and say, do we know that?

Or is that a hypothesis? Yeah. If that's a hypothesis and it's important, we should probably just talk to people and all the aforementioned ways that you can do that. It isn't hard, right? It's not hard to pull these things together, to pull research together and to ask and to watch how people use things to make sure you're building the right thing, to make sure you're talking about it correctly. So the hypothesis versus fact, opinions versus who you're,

who you're talking to are, I think, something I definitely think everybody should take to heart. 100%. We have to speak to our customers. We have to understand what's actually going on for them. This is one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in my career is stop assuming that we know what the customer wants. We have to go and ask them before we go and spend a ton of time.

Correct. Building something out for them without actually knowing that this is solving their problem. So correct. Saves a lot of time. Yeah, it does. It does. It takes a bit of time, but it saves a lot of time in the long run. Totally. Well, Gina, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been so informative and inspiring and we really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. You are a business leader with vision.

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