reveries.com - andy greenfield - marketing research

JANUARY 1997

Andy Greenfield is hell-bent on accelerating turn-around times. He assiduously employs an unusually large number of moderators. He exclusively recruits researchers who are -- first and foremost -- marketing people.

The result, he says, is not just information but insights and actionable solutions.

Andy Greenfield's offices at Greenfield Consulting Group overlook Westport Connecticut's Saugatuck River. All right, so he's across the street, but the view is spectacular just the same. It's the morning of Christmas Eve and Greenfield has just recovered from the flu. He's laid-back but tightly-wound, energetic yet relaxed. He's an open- collar man in a necktie world.

Only a former philosopher could derive strength from such dichotomies.

And perhaps only a philosopher could take the route Andy Greenfield has traveled to get to where he is today. In true Socratic style, he says it's the journey that counts.

I was originally a philosophy teacher at Brown University where I did my graduate work. They loved having me there for a number of years because my classes had the largest enrollments by a factor of two or three. But since I wasn't a world- famous scholar they ultimately were not interested in giving me a permanent job.

Typically, Ivy League schools will hire their own Ph.D.'s if you're in the sciences because they think you might have a microchip or a cure for cancer up your sleeve. In the humanities the most you might have is a good argument. They can't make any money out of that.

I was also teaching skiing in Vermont and got into a bad skiing accident. I was assaulted from the rear by a young lady and they had to put some plastic in my shoulder. While I was recuperating, my grandfather, who was a successful businessman, lured me into New York City to work at his ad agency.

It was a small agency, and so I got to wear many hats. On my arrival, my grandfather sent me to The Gene Reilly Group, which was one of the original bastions of qualitative research. I was trained for three months and made director of research at my grandfather's agency. I was also doing account work and new product development work for the agency's clients. These were the days when agencies were repositories of marketing brainpower and research smarts.

I was going to be a doctor until I realized that taking all those chemistry courses would be an awful lot of work..

Two years into my tenure at the agency, our largest client, Champale, asked whether I could go work for them, on loan from the agency. So I went there and headed up their new product development efforts. I was lucky enough to have developed a product called Golden Champale, which became their biggest selling product.

About a year and a half into my time at Champale, I decided to leave to start my own business. My friend, Peter Hauspurg, thought we should go into the limousine business. This was around 1980, when New York was getting into its go-go years.

I researched the limo industry and determined that there was an interesting marketing opportunity because there was a little incongruity between the types of individuals using limos and the types who were providing limo services. There were these very successful individuals in business, the arts and entertainment, being serviced by a highly unreliable and relatively downscale group.

The result was, in my judgment, an opportunity to provide a service that was somewhat more closely matched to the needs and expectations of the clientele. When I told my grandfather I was leaving Corporate America to start a limo business, he said, "Andy, it's a dirty business, I'd think twice about going into that." I, in my infinite wisdom, replied, "Grandpa, I saw no evidence of that in my research." Grandpa, who almost split his gut laughing in response, smiled, and said, "Did you think you would have?"

We started the limo company, and in the space of thirteen or fourteen months, built it into the number three limo service in New York, a distant third after Davelle and Fugazy. We called it Essex Limousines. Our slogan was: The only way to get there, once you've arrived. We were actually the first tenants at Pier 62 -- 23rd and Hudson, called the Chelsea Piers now. There were millions of vacant square feet. We could go out on the piers and throw Frisbees. The only things in there were the pigeons.

Then we received a call from what we can in retrospect call "the boys with the bent noses" regarding our business. Net, net: We were contacted by an organization that indicated a strong interest in becoming our "partners." In the interim, every Friday, one of our stretch limos was the "beneficiary" of vandalism.

We worked with the District Attorney to see if we could put these bad guys away. It quickly became apparent we were dealing with professionals. We subsequently decided to "sell" our business to an individual who years later was gunned down, apparently by other individuals in a similar business.

My learning from this: Always listen to your grandpa. From a business perspective, I did learn an immensely valuable lesson. While the competitive topography of the limousine industry was immensely attractive from one perspective -- it's penetrability -- I had failed to ask a second, equally important, question. That is, why the competitive topography was so favorable.

Subsequent to that, when I was assessing businesses to go into, I did my best to make certain that if indeed they looked penetrable, that the reason had to do with issues that I could address without having to wear a bulletproof vest. I called this my business school. It was the short program, 14 months at approximately 20 times the cost of the normal tuition. However, these are lessons that have stood me in very good stead for the following 15 years.

The father of my partner in the limo company was Arthur Hauspurg, who at the time was chairman of Con Edison. After the dust settled, he said, "Boys, I'll give you a little lesson my father gave me. As long as you don't take off your tie, you can't get into very much trouble." Down on the pier, running the limo business, we weren't wearing our ties very often.

The sports I like offer the choice between coming off your bike or jet ski at high speed and the pleasure of a well executed turn or jump.

After this, I went back to Vermont to reconnoiter, having piled up approximately a quarter of million dollars in debt. I was advised to go to the individuals I owed money to, most of whom were family members, on bended knee and tell them there was little chance that they would ever see their money.

Given the fact that interest rates at this time were in the area of 18 to 20 percent and since my last salary was only $17,500, the chance of me ever paying interest back and being able to pay for food, clothing and shelter was slim. Being stubborn as I am, I rejected the advice to default on my loans and within four years had paid everybody back with interest. It required working seven days a week for those four years.

I received a call from Gene Reilly, who at this point had a company of 16 moderators doing primarily qualitative research. Since I had expertise in the alcoholic beverage industry, he asked me to consult to them on a project for Molson. For the next year and half, I worked as a consultant to Reilly, developing a close relationship with Molson and some of their other clients.

After Gene Reilly died, I left the company and started the Greenfield Consulting Group. That was in September of 1983. Greenfield was formed around one guiding precept. The idea was to bring marketing brainpower to bear on a range of problems that historically had been addressed primarily by psychologists, sociologists -- i.e., marketing researchers. That's who was doing marketing research.

I felt it was time to make the word "marketing" a more important part of marketing research. A key motivating factor in my decision to start a marketing research company, rather than go into the advertising business, gets back to the issue of competitive topography.

All things being equal, I believe that it's always preferable to compete against people who are not as well equipped as you are. Rather than compete in the advertising arena, which was populated at the time by bright, marketing thinkers, my preference was to compete against qualitative marketing researchers, most of whom had a relatively primitive concept of what marketing and strategic thinking was all about. I mean no disrespect to the founders of our craft.

I like Socrates because he believed that life is not about arriving at a particular goal or destination, but rather the path or process to get to a desired goal.

A further, and equally important, reason we started the company had to do with unmet consumer needs -- that is, having been on both the client and agency sides I was massively disappointed with the quality of marketing insight brought to bear by the marketing research people we had hired. That's on both the qualitative and quantitative sides.

As such, it seemed to me we had all the key ingredients required to build the business -- unmet consumer needs, favorable competitive topography, and a relatively low cost of entry. Not to mention a field that was projected to grow for the foreseeable future.

The culture, the working environment, here is what I'd call "relaxed intensity." We're casual but highly focused. The people at our company all have somewhat of an edge to them. We work extremely hard, we are task-focused rather than clock-focused. We are all driven by a desire to offer the best product in our field.

But we're equally interested in working in an environment which is non-corporate, loosely structured, in which moonwalking down the hall is viewed as an appropriate prelude to a meeting with a client. We'll walk around singing, dancing. The old adage, "work hard, play hard," fits very well with the individuals here. We have about thirty people.

About two years ago, a young fellow who was still in college at the time, named Hugh Davis was working for me. Hugh, along with one of our senior executives, Jonas Wagner, started talking about the opportunity represented by doing marketing research on-line.

I, who still believed the abacus would make a comeback, told them to feel free to investigate. The next thing I knew, Hugh had submitted a business plan to Microsoft for us to be an Information Content Provider on the Microsoft Network. Much to our surprise, our proposal was accepted and we became one of the original ICPs on MSN.

I had no idea of what it would ultimately cost to truly be in this business in a meaningful way. We realized very early on that the key to our success was going to be our database -- in particular, having the ability to interact electronically with a large number of consumers across a wide variety of demographic and behavioral categories. At this juncture, we believed that the only way to have access to a large number of consumers was via the on-line services.

My, how the world has changed! Two years ago, the Web to us was just a three-letter word. Within six months of beginning our relationship with MSN and attempting to develop a relationship with Prodigy, we began to smell the coffee, which smelled very much like the World Wide Web. We shifted our focus to the Web, built a Web site that incorporated chat rooms, which we use as focus group facilities, and began sourcing our database members directly from the Web.

We currently have built the world's largest interactive database, comprised of over 130,000 households worldwide. We maintain 70 fields of information on each member of our database . About seventy percent of the database is North American households, which historically is where we've conducted our business. We will be broadening our database-building efforts considerably in 1997 as our on-line and traditional research efforts focus increasingly abroad.

Greenfield Online essentially has been functioning as a trailblazing "David," followed aggressively by a number of Goliaths. The companies that we compete against in the on-line arena are ten to twenty times our size. While they can certainly outspend us, we intend to remain ahead of them using a combination of brainpower and speed. And some cash.

We are constantly confronted with a range of different consumer behaviors and with identifying the most effective means of influencing consumers.

I would distinguish The Greenfield Consulting Group in at least two or three ways. First and foremost, we have built a brand that is largely unconnected to a specific individual, namely myself. We are in contrast to most qualitative research companies, whose businesses are directly tied to a particular personality or moderator.

Second, and equally important, we distinguish ourselves by the level of marketing brainpower we bring to the table. Our company has been the beneficiary of the woes affecting or afflicting the advertising industry. Since the mid to late 1980s, we've been able to hire very, very senior agency marketing people who are simply tired of having the "Sword of Damocles" dangling over their heads. We could never have done this in the 1970s when the agency business was far more stable.

A third key difference has to do with size. We currently have eight -- and soon to be ten -- full time moderators. This enables us to accommodate virtually any timing requirement that clients have. Clients' preoccupation with speed into the market is an operating precept for the Nineties. Our company is uniquely positioned to accommodate this. On the on-line side, speed also is a key benefit.

We can execute extremely large projects virtually overnight. Imagine developing a questionnaire in the morning and having thousands of responses back electronically by the next morning. This enables clients to move with far greater speed than ever before and have their decision making backed by the statistical and projectible power of quantitative data.

One of the tools we've developed is called "SiteInsight." This tool is used to help marketers assess their Web site, both per se, and relative to key competitors. It can be performed in the developmental stage as well as after the fact. It enables the marketer to understand the consumer's experience of being at the site, the degree to which that experience is in sync with the marketer's communication objectives, and provide direction for how to optimize the experience. We think this is going to be an extremely important part of our business going forward.

Marketers are now beginning to realize that their Web sites have the potential to influence corporate and brand perceptions far beyond the influence wielded by traditional media. Consider this: A lucky marketer will have consumers spend, at best, thirty seconds viewing a commercial or looking at a print ad. Contrast this with consumers being able to wander around a web site for minutes, or hours. The result is that the Web site has an immense potential to influence how the consumer understands the company or its brands.

Our "SiteInsight" methodology also enables us to address what we are calling the "navigational ergonomics" of the site -- the experience of wandering around this cyber edifice. One cannot over-emphasize the degree to which the experiential component -- clicking, linking, sometimes struggling, digesting -- all the things that happen at the website -- play a critical role in what the consumer takes away from the site visit.

Clients are slowly starting to realize that the experience of visiting a site is considerably more than the sum of the site's visuals, and copy. They are now realizing that they need to develop, or employ, new evaluative models.

One of the lessons I learned early on is that the best way to grow a business is to hire people who are better than I am. I employ a key question during the hiring process -- I ask myself whether this person is good enough, so that a client who has previously worked with me and is now working with this new person, will ultimately request the new person rather than me. If the answer is yes, the person is the type of individual we want.

At this juncture in our company's history, I view my role as first and foremost being a talent scout. Finding, attracting and retaining world class people. The mantra we use during the hiring process, regardless of the department, is to "hire heavy." I've preached, since I founded the company, that excellence at every level and across every function should be the goal. We treat and value the contributions of our administrative and support staffs equally to that of our professional staff.

Being a talk show host is something that I am going to do before I am at the end of my path. I'm a little bit of an actor and a ham.

The analogy I use is that this company is like a car. It needs all its parts to function at optimal levels. The minute somebody thinks the engine is more important than the wheels...well let's see how quickly they get to the station without the wheels! We don't tolerate any of what I'd call the big company attitude of denigrating the administrative functions.
If you interviewed the key people here, my guess is that you'd find people who are passionate about their work, intensely committed to it and, more days than not, look forward to coming to work. That's the barometer. Do you look forward to coming to work? I'm happy to say I do. That's the sign.

Knowing that a big part of this is purely a function of luck, keeps me humble. That's why you see me knock on wood whenever I say anything remotely positive. If the river takes a slightly different turn, marketing research could become irrelevant to decision making. Or I might wake up tomorrow and a new technology has come and rendered everything we do irrelevant and obsolete. That's part of the motivation for our on-line practice, but also part of what keeps me focused.

You take your eyes off the terrain in front of you for more than a second or two, and you hit a tree or run into a dock. Or you get assaulted from behind.