Ep. 8 – How Listening to Customers Drives Business Growth with Josh LaMar, CEO of Amplinate

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Happy Market Research Podcast, your favorite plays for strategy stories and insights from the world of market research. Brought to you by your host, Dan Fleetwood. (upbeat music) - Hey everyone, welcome to the Happy Market Research Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Dan Fleetwood. And today I have a very special guest, Josh Lamar, who has been an industry, I would say icon, or you've been an industry for a long time, Josh. And I love your history of how you started at Microsoft and then you moved to France and everything. So for people that don't know you, can you give a little bit of background about who you are, what you're doing, and just let people know more about you before we get started with the conversation? - Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for having me, Dan. I'm excited to be here. I have been working in the UX industry for over 20 years. And the last six of them, I have been running my own company, Amplenate. But I've worked in big tech mostly at Microsoft for 12 years. And I also worked in one of the banks that went under during the financial crisis. So that was a really fun thing. And then going back even further, I actually have a background in music composition and English poetry, and then kind of later shifted into research in UX. So yeah, that's just just a little bit about me. And then I've been living in Paris for the last six years. - That's awesome. I love your history. Like that's so from music composition to research to you. Wow, that's amazing. I don't know if we can dive into all that on this one, but I would love to talk about that more at some point. So anytime. - All right, so let's talk about some industry trends and insights. So you have this preeminence unbound framework that centers on making customer insights the engine for growth. How have business has shifted in recent years when it comes to customer centric strategy and research? - You know, it's really interesting because I started developing this framework because I've been working with Jay Abraham directly for the past three years. And if you don't know Jay Abraham, he's known for a couple of things. One, his concept of preeminence and what he calls the three ways to grow a business. But he's also the coach of some other very famous people including Tony Robbins. And Tony Robbins teaches the three ways to grow a business also during one of his business mastery courses. He calls it 101010. And the 10 comes from this idea that if you were to get more customers and increase by 10%, get people to pay more for your product or service, also increasing by 10%. And then the third way to grow your business is actually to increase the frequency of purchase. So if you can increase that by 10%, it's not a linear scale of growth. It's actually an exponential scale. And so that's where you get to this level of business growth that becomes really important and powerful because as Jay would call it, it's geometric. And it's not just linear. And so as I started working with Jay and I was working initially on my own business, but then it started to make a lot more sense to actually work with other CEOs and entrepreneurs to apply this framework because that is actually where it gets really interesting because in order to get any one of those things to increase, you actually have to understand your customers. But wait a minute, that's what I know. I've been doing that over 20 years. So UX and research, market research is really the catalyst to unlocking the secret to building a preeminent business. - I love that. That's so important, especially for researchers and probably most people listening to this podcast are researchers. So I'm sure they love to hear you say that research is at the heart of it, right? If you don't understand your customers, then it's hard to do the 10, 10, 10 framework. What are you in terms of understanding your customers in regards to the framework? What are other specific tactics or research methods that you utilize or is it just across the board and you're kind of holding on to different businesses? So I love to talk about that for a little bit, if you don't mind. - Yeah, yeah. No, I think, honestly, the starting point for most CEOs and entrepreneurs is looking at it from this lens of business growth. How do I grow my business? And that's where Jay's framework really comes in and says, okay, well, you can try to get more customers. You can try to get them to pay more for your product or you can get them to purchase or use your product more frequently. So if we look at those, the starting levers, this is where CEOs and entrepreneurs are at their mindset. So from a research lens, then we can start looking at it and say, okay, you want to get more customers? How do we get more of them? Well, we first have to understand who they are in the first place. So then we go back to, okay, let's interview them. Let's just talk to some of them. And I think that when I'm working with other CEOs, the thing that immediately clicks for them is, oh, this is how to get there because they start at the goal. The goal is get more, grow your business. - Right. - The how you get there has to become a, oh, we have to talk to your customers to understand what provides them value and then really lean into that. And so for a lot of them, okay, for some people, for some CEOs, it's just human nature. It's just, they just understand, like, oh, I have to understand my customers and they already talk to their customers. They don't call it doing research. They might call it R&D or they might just call it, like gaining insights. But the more the others don't necessarily do that. And so the conversation turns into, well, what do you know about your customers? What do you know about how they evaluate your product or service and where are the places that it makes sense to try to dial up one of these levers to get more of them. And so that's kind of this starting place. But I would say that if there's a method, it's a conversation. And it's an interview, if you wanna be more researchy specific, it's not just do a survey. And I think that many CEOs fall into the trap of like, oh, someone else does this or I could just do a survey and get the same information. And well, no, you can't. It has to be a conversation. - And what I love about that, Josh, is that you're tying it back to revenue. I think oftentimes research isn't tied necessarily to revenue or any point like that. So then it gets lost. And I think part of the conversation that I'm here in the research world is, how do researchers get closer to revenue or see that the table, if you will? And I think this does it well, right? 'Cause you're already tying it to the CEO that needs the research in order to increase revenues. So the fact that it's already been tied to revenue from Magikko is amazing to me. - Well, and it's probably the number one thing I would have told like junior researcher Josh that he should probably focus on. And it's something that I was very idealistic coming out of grad school and thinking that I was gonna change the world for the betterment of users all over the world and make product experiences delightful and solve people's problems. And yes, they have to do those things, but more and more, I mean, this has been a trend going back at least, I mean, more than 10 years, but you're really seeing it now when budgets are getting tighter, there are other tools that are out there that might be AI-led. And all of a sudden, we have to prove our value in some new way. Well, how do we prove our value? We tie it to a business metric that people care about. But those business metrics are all the same. It's getting more customers. It's the time that they spend with a frequency and it's the price point. So whenever we can tie it into something that we know that the business cares about, it makes what we're saying a lot more valid. And then we can approach it from a perspective of having a hypothesis that maybe if we solve people's problems in a better way, maybe if we solve more of their problems, they will pay more for the product because it does more than what it used to do. Sure, sure, no, that makes a ton of sense. And as we're talking about industry trends and insights, I don't think we can move to skip across AI. Like we did talk about it. I know we've been talking-- a lot of people have been talking about it, but it's definitely important. Obviously, it's changing the way a lot of researchers function and their jobs and so forth. In terms of AI, how important is explainable AI for researchers working with user data and insights? Do you have a take on that? I mean, I think that number one, we have to be using it. Because it can help make things easier, faster, quicker. It doesn't mean-- and the difficulty, though, becomes judgment. And this is where I love one of Jacob Nielsen's more recent articles where he talked about the three areas of importance for researchers in the future and the second one being judgment. You can get a lot of ideas from AI, but you have to have the ability to say, this is the good one. And I think that that's the space where we can use these tools. And we're going to get some cursory analysis. We're going to get some thematic trends rate. That probably saved a little bit of time. And then we can spend the rest of the time going deeper in ways that are going to be really meaningful. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. The judgment wanted-- actually, I love that. So this guy, Tim Sanders, who he's been on the podcast, but he's like, AI guru is like one of the smartest guys I've ever heard talk about a guy. And he always says, AI essentially is a prediction machine. It's used to help out with predictions, but you also need that judgment. So the fact that you tie in the judgment with the prediction is pretty-- I like that actually, that piece of it, that angle of, yeah, I can come up with all these ideas, but you as a human still need to figure out what one is best. So I think that's a great point. And then running, kind of switching gears a little bit, I know we want to hit on a lot of things here. So in running, and implementing, what trends do you see in cross-cultural UX research? So I know we've talked about a lot of things, but we'd be remiss if we didn't at least touch on UX and cross-cultural UX. Are anything like reshaping companies and how they engage with global customers? You know, I think when it comes to international and cross-cultural UX, it's really important to be open to being wrong and to be understand that your product might not resonate in another market, just because you translate it into another language does not mean that people are the same, that they have the same scenarios, behaviors. Think about the problem in the same way. That every single project we've done, we learned some cultural insight or nuance that changes the way that we have to recommend positioning the product in order to resonate with that market. I have a great story. There's one client that I'm not going to name. And we were doing some branding research, actually, on a particular new feature, we'll call it a feature, as part of their app. And they had a brand name for it. And I can't say what that is, but you know what it is. And they were testing that brand here in France. And what's funny is that French and English are very, very close. And yet at the same time, there are lots of words that sound like it means something, but actually means something different in French. Here's a fun example that it's not related to the study at all. The word to arrive in French is ahive. And in French, you would say like j'achieve. And it sounds like I'm arriving. In English, you would be like, "Oh, this person is just getting there right now." But in French, it means I'm leaving, not I'm getting there. - Too big, big difference, yeah. - Big difference, big difference. That totally happened when I was like texting a friend in French. And he was like, "Oh, j'achieve." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm not there yet. I'm going to be late." But then we were both basically getting there at the same time because I had left barely before, but he was just leaving. And so it's like, yeah, it's just like, this is the kind of thing that happens. It's called a false friend or a fosenny in French. But anyway, so we're testing the brand name in France. And it looked enough like in like a word that is, is an actual French word, but it was misspelled. And by misspelled, I mean, there was not an accent that should have been there. And so, and the words met completely different things. Even more different than the example I just provided. One of them was like in one topic domain and the other meaning was completely different. So they thought that it was this French word but misspelled when actually the English word would have been translated as a completely different word in French. And so there's these kinds of localization issues that show up every time we do international cross-cultural work because you really have to understand the market and you have to understand like what they're, what they think about when they see these words, especially with brand names. And they were really going to hell on keeping their brand name, but it just like it fell flat in France. Yeah, that's interesting. I wouldn't think about like the words being that similar, and then it has like these two distinct different meanings. But it makes sense when you explain it like that. So no, interesting, cross-cultural research in UX is always something that's fascinated me just from, you can have like, do you set your point like a great product but these slight little variations can either cause it to like skyrocket or tank. So it's pretty interesting. And what's cool there too is that it's not often like a big massive change you have to make. You just can make these little tweaks and or just approach the problem differently or prioritize some of the features over others that are different in the other market to resonate more with what happens in that market. And I feel like that's most of the time what happens. It's like, oh, we just need a little bit more flexibility to promote this thing instead of this other thing. As another example, we do a ton of research in Brazil. There was another app that we were testing and the local team just wanted to have more flexibility to promote content that was more relevant in Brazil. It wasn't like a massive, you know, a massive change. If they just needed a little bit more like control to make it feel more relevant and say like, oh, no, this topic is really important in Brazil right now because it's in the soap opera. And so the whole discussion, the national discussion is whatever the topic is. So if one of the characters on the soap opera has cancer then it's a discussion for the whole country on like, what do we do with cancer, right? And so they want to be able to have more control in such a way to promote those types of things as an example. - Yeah, that's cool. I mean, there's so many shows I feel like, but I like how there's one show that's kind of, you know, the whole country is just like focused on and that kind of drives the narrative. So that's interesting. - Yeah. - Interesting. Cool. What do we shift gears and talk about the book? I would love to find out more around it and talk about this. So as you mentioned, we have a book coming out with Jay Brom and you've been working on it with him. Obviously, you know, he's known for brands and locking exponential growth as we talked about. Is there an idea or principle from Jay that's had the biggest impact on how you think about market research and strategy aside from maybe what you've already mentioned? - The three ways to grow business was the starting point for me because as a researcher and well, as a new CEO and I started working with Jay, I had to kind of like learn how to think differently and this was a very easy framework of Jay's that I could just apply and go, "Oh, okay, this makes sense to me. I understand how to apply this, but I also because of my research background, I know how to inform how to apply this." And so that was really the starting point for me as a business owner to look at my business differently. And that's where I think the unlock comes when I'm working with other CEOs and entrepreneurs is that they see their businesses that same way. They're seeing it through this lens of growing the business and profit margins and things like that. And so I think that that was really the catalyst to creating the book in the first place because I understand now how a business person thinks and I also understand how a UX research person thinks. And this translation between the two became what the book is because the book is taking Jay's framework and then it's taking all of the my frameworks that I've been developing over the past 20 years on how to do research and how to connect the dots between what we do as researchers and what the business wants to do in the business goal. - Got it, got it. So do you think this is a nice supplement to Jay's research and does that, it's kind of a nice add on or is it a way to just think about like a portion of it where hey, if you do the research then you're gonna, it's gonna help you out exponentially even more or how do you guys see that corner of like, I guess that relationship between your framework and his. - They got married and had a baby. I feel like that's the relationship between the frameworks. - It's taking Jay's framework and taking my framework and then just kind of putting them together. And so one of them like Jay's framework is looking at the goal. If the goal is get more customers great or let's you say another one, if the goal is increase your product pricing. Great, how do you do that? Well, if you're a business owner, okay, I mean, I increase my product, but what are the levers that your customers think about when it comes to defining the value that your product provides and what gives them so much more value that they would be willing to pay more for your product or service? There are two ways that I've come up with. And I know that there's a lot of different ways to talk about innovation. But I actually like kind of for me, it breaks down into two big chunks. The first chunk is to identify whether or not your product or service is solving a problem that is already known in the industry or if it's a new problem. So if you're solving a known problem, you're probably already gonna have competitors that are out there and they're also gonna be solving that same problem. So you have to solve it in a new way. And that's where innovation comes in. This is where design thinking comes in. This is where looking at, and I use the iPhone as the perfect example of this. There are technologies that are already out and it's just a mixture of those technologies in some new way. And so when the iPhone came out, yes, we had touch screens, we had telephones, we had the internet and they were mixed up in a new way, had a baby and then we had this iPhone, which is this innovative app, innovative product, right? And all of a sudden it's so innovative that we had all the technology before, they're just recombined in a new way. So I like to think of it from the perspective of standing on the shoulders of giants, of technologies that are available right now are already the key to the innovative products of the future. AI is definitely a component of that. It is not, AI is not a product in itself, it's a tool, it's a technology, it's a hammer that you apply when you're building the house, but people buy the house, not the hammer. And that's how we have to think about that. The second way of looking at innovation, if you wanna charge more for your product, well, if you solve a problem that nobody else is solving, you're gonna be, that's the blue ocean strategy. You're really looking at it from the perspective of there's a problem in the industry that people have and I'm gonna solve it, but I'm the only person that's gonna solve it. My app will be the only thing that solves that problem. So if you can identify a problem that only you can solve, you can charge whatever you want for it. Like yeah, there's gonna be maybe pricing plans and tiers and stuff, but essentially the idea is like uncover what that is and how do you do that? You go talk to your customers, you go sit with them, you visit them in their homes, you look at the context of everything else that's going on in their lives as they're using the product or your competitor product and looking at it from the perspective of what's missing. What is still difficult, what's still a hassle to get around and then solve that problem. - Right, but that makes sense, I was gonna ask you, well, how do you identify the problem? But obviously you just mentioned it with customers and the blue ocean strategy. Of course, I love that analogy. In terms of applying Jay's framework to growth strategies like permanence and strategy stacking to research led businesses or UX teams, how are you applying that in a certain way other than maybe some things you've already mentioned or is it kind of that same framework? - So the framework is there and then I think that how you apply it depends on each business is different. So for example, I was working with a CEO of a company that sells fragrances and he had a physical store and he had retail customers come in. And then every once in a while, there were also some wholesale customers that would come in by fragrances and then kind of sell them out of their car. It was like their side gig. And as we started digging into like, where is the profit coming from? He realized that about 80% of his profit was coming from these wholesale customers that were coming in buying like five or six fragrances and they would come in every six weeks or so and come back and they'd just be selling them out of their car, something like that side gig. And then I started asking questions like, well, what do you know about this audience? Who are these people? What, why are they doing this? And it's like, I don't know. So then we developed a strategy actually around having his sales people identify who these wholesale customers were and then just talking to them. I mean, you have an interview, but like, it's an informal discussion. It's a conversation. Like learn more about the person. Why are they here? What are their goals? How can you support them in their goals? Because these are actually people that were all immigrants who were trying to do it and have this side gig and were just trying to support their families. And maybe they're supporting their families back in another country like Mexico, for example. So the more that we learned, we're like, wow, well, in the other, so applying the framework, we say, okay, well, how do we get more customers, pay more for the product or service, and get them to come back more frequently? We honed in on frequency and purchase price. So if you buy five fragrances, obviously, if you were to buy more of them and do it more frequently, well, he had on the side been looking at how the retail business was selling. So he knew all of the fragrances that were getting sold like really quickly. And so he created a box and it was a test product. There was a box of fragrances, but it was like eight to 10 of them instead of the five or six that they normally bought. But it was only the ones that sold the best. So then in this box, it was a higher price point, but he's like, I know they're gonna sell. He did the experiment and with like, I think six people and he had people coming back the next day saying like, hey, I'm out, I need another box. And that took the purchase cycle from six weeks to like a week or less than a week in this case. He actually had to pause the experiment because he wasn't ready to continue moving forward. But this is the type of insight that once you start digging in, you can really like dial up these levers and all of a sudden it's like really impactful very quickly. - Yeah, that's amazing. I love that. And he actually tested it himself too. So that's, I love that part of it. In terms of like, we have a lot of researchers on teams listening to this. And I know you and Jay, I think we'll talk a lot about adding outsized value to the customer experience. How can research seems to think about this or how can they step up and deliver that kind of value within the organization? Is there any strategies or tactics you might have around that? - You know, this is one of the things that Jay and I have in common and that really solidify the approach together. And Jay would call it falling in love with your customers. But what he means when he says that is that you go out of your way to ensure that you're solving their problem in the best way that you possibly can. And this is something that I believe all researchers and designers and UX people and market research people, like we all actually really care about making the experience good as good as possible for our customers. And this is the place where all of a sudden I was like, oh wow, we are saying the same thing in just very different ways because even with UX research and market research, like the more I dug into marketing, the more I realized that we all have the same goal. That's just that we use different words to talk about it because the disciplines are different. But the goal is the same. So how can we come together and align on what a good experience looks like because Jay teaches that when you really focus in on the experience and making sure that you're solving people's problems, they're going to pay more for it. They're going to be happy. They're going to recommend your product or service to other people. This is where I know the NPS is a very tricky subject. But this is actually the thinking behind NPS. Would you recommend it to someone else? Because there's a lot of other business data around referrals and recommendations. It is a strategy that Jay teaches in his work, often calls it one of them is the power of person on. It's the idea of having multiple channels of business and income coming in. And that works in your business. But you have different strategies to get more customers. And referrals is one of them. Well, how do you get more referrals? You have to have a product that's so good that people actually do want to refer it to somebody else. Right. They want to talk about it for sure. Yeah. Makes sense. And maybe that's not the Windows operating system. But in most of the consumer products, it's like, yeah, if it came up with a conversation, and I was like, hey, you know, I'm actually using this. And it's really good to tell you the two. Like, of course, we would do that. We do that all the time. Right. But the holy grail for business people. Yeah. And I love that. The NPS can be a contentious subject for sure, right? If you use it, do you not use it? And then people are like, I don't go around recommending operating systems to your point, you know? But exactly. But if it does come up with conversations, like how many, like, for instance, we knew you brought up Apple earlier, but people love to talk about Apple. Like, no matter what if they're an Apple user, they love to talk about it. And I'm guilty of that as well. So it is interesting, for sure. Yeah. I think, you know, let's go ahead. And I know we have a ton of things I feel like I could talk with you all day. But I like to kind of start wrapping it up and talk about that, you know, someone wants to build a more customer-led research-driven business and become a pre-eminent, you know, in their niche. What's the first place or first piece of advice rather than that you'd offer? I mean, if they're doing nothing, then the first piece of advice is do something. And if something involves coming up with hypotheses around and questions and hypotheses around what value looks like to your customers and then digging in and trying to figure out what that means. Right. I think that it doesn't have to be rocket science. Like, yeah, we can do it better. Researchers are very trained and very skilled at doing this. But to start getting insights and start thinking about it as a process, as a way to gather insights that are going to help you improve your product, you can start with a really simple framework that I teach this at YOS. And that's identify your top customers, the people that buy from you or that you think are your target audience. And then just have a conversation with them, ask them what they like about your product or service, ask them what it could do differently. And then talk about what other problems they have in their life that maybe this product could also solve. You're hitting at the most important pieces of value. And that is the stuff that's causing people to want to use your product. And that's also going to give you the insight into how to adapt it and how to refine it over time to make sure that it keeps getting better. Makes sense. I feel like, if you had a billboard, Josh, you would put up there like talk to your customers. I think that's like one of the main messages of like just talk to you and see what's going on. Just start. Just have a conversation. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. It's OK. And then one final question for you. Are there any books or people you follow that hopefully due to inspiration either around UX or in your own life that you think it'd be good for the listeners to kind of check those people out? Yeah. I mentioned it in earlier. And if you're not familiar with Jacob Nielsen, he is one of the pioneers in the UX industry and someone that I've been following for the last 20 years. And I think that he's kind of exploded in the last few in a really good way because he's trying out AI in lots of exciting cool ways. And he's sharing a lot of insights, but also from the perspective of like, I've been in the industry for over 20 years. But he's been in the industry for over 40 at this point. So there are a few people that I can look up to and be like, yep, he's been there longer than I have in the industry. And I can remember, like I think that the shift that we're seeing right now with AI is the exact same thing that happened in the mid 90s with the internet. And he was there doing research on the internet when I was in high school when this was happening. So this is-- But I remember I remember seeing this shift where all of a sudden it's like, oh, we got to have a website for things. Well, what's the website going to do? I don't know. But it's going to be out there. And we're in the same spot with AI right now, where if you have to learn how to use it, you have to learn how to code in order to learn how to use it. Well, in the early internet, yeah, I learned HTML. My first job at Microsoft is actually as a web developer. And it's because I learned HTML. And that was my start. That was what I was getting into it. And that was back in 2003. And you don't need HTML to build a website anymore. And that's just the process of technology. I think Jeffrey Moore talks about it in Crossing the Casm, where the difference between the early majority or the mainstream and the early adopters is that the early adopters are OK with piecing together the experience in their brains, whereas the majority are not. And that's what's going on here. Like we have to maybe learn how to code things now, but we're not going to have to very soon. And with the rate of the shift and evolution of AI, it's probably not going to be 20 years like it was for HTML websites. And now not needing to know any HTML at all. Like it's going to be much quicker than that. Yeah, well, that's awesome. Those are some great resources that I'm going to check them out too. And Josh, do people want to find out more about your work? What do you do? What's the best place for them to find out more? Yeah, well, I have joshlamar.com. So that's an easy one. And there's also my company emplenate.com. That's actually amplify what resonates. Amplify and innovate what resonates with your customers. That's where amplenate came from. So-- I love it. --emplenate. And then joshlamar.com. Awesome. Hey, Josh. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. Really enjoy the conversation. And we'll have to do it again soon. Maybe once the book comes out, I'll be back on. Great. Thank you so much, Dan. I'd look forward to it. Awesome. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)