Bant Breen:
Melva is the Founder and President of the Marian Dupree Group. I am excited to hear the latest with the Marian Dupree Group. Tell us a little bit more about what you guys are focusing on these days.
Melva Benoit:
We focus on the place that brings me the most joy, and it’s taking sort of the last bits of traditional market research and insight, and turning them on their head. Especially inside of media and inside of the business. Market research is a lot about how do I get to the answer to a question in the fastest way possible? If you’re trying to answer a question for business, there’s been a lot made about actionable insights. In the class that I teach at Pepperdine, this is the way I explain it to my students. Research starts with a question. What’s the question, then we go find data. We dig for data, whether we create that as proprietary data, we analyze the data, and then we present our findings. Then from our findings, we go to the implications. Then where it gets to be sexy is I want to tell you an amazing story with these implications as my stakeholder as my client, that now you can go and act as a business. When I say hundreds and hundreds of insights and actionable insights, it’s only an actionable insight. If I can inspire you with the implication, I can tell you a story in such a way that you’re like, “Oh, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to do X.”
Bant Breen:
What are you most excited about? What’s giving you the most kind of pleasure or joy these days?
Melva Benoit:
What I’m most excited about is now that we have complete computing, that can take in massive amounts of data, that someone like me, that’s much more interested in the recipe can sit down and think about how to mix these datasets, how to look at signals, and then come back in redefining certain types of metrics. I’ve jumped back for a second, one of the most fun things I had at Fox when social media came along, was not data that we could try and transact on and we used it for marketing prep. Can we make sense of this data that’s available to us? Because it’s a lot of and we don’t need all of it. I just need to figure out what pieces and what kinds of questions can I answer with this. Then to go a step further, can I create a metric out in the marketplace that we can that can influence a transaction to transact on and so we were able to come up with a social measure with an outside company that we want to research for? Salespeople were able to take that measure and command hundreds of millions of dollars from people and never have to transaction against that measure. When you begin to understand that sometimes you don’t want to transact exactly on the number but you do want the number to influence a transaction, then how does that look? Once you get to transacting against the number, then all of your energy goes towards making the number grow so that you can make more money as opposed to influence which is a little different, then you never have to worry about how that number grows, because you’re creating the value against the number, not the number itself creating the value.
Bant Breen:
Melva, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to: