Field Agent's "Tie Talk": Mobile Research Pioneer Launches New Podcast

Mobile market research is revolutionizing the way companies collect information to solve their pressing business problems. As mobile auditing and research continue to take the world by storm, Field Agent is excited to announce a new podcast aimed at exploring timely issues and important trends in the field of mobile market research.

“We care a lot about our clients and agents,” said Cory Nelson, host and producer of Tie Talk. “So our podcast will present an opportunity to share our industry expertise as well as offer exclusive interviews and company news. Podcasting is another meaningful way to engage with the Field Agent community.”

“Tie Talk,” now available for subscription through iTunes, will address a wide range of topics:

• Insights from original research conducted by Field Agent

  Trends and events in the fields of mobile auditing and research

  News on the Field Agent company and culture

  Relevant information about the market research and retail industries

  And, always, upbeat and engaging conversation.

  Nelson explained, “We aim for the content to be transparent and insightful, while not taking ourselves too seriously.”

  The first episode, “Field Agent Uses Field Agent,” describes how the world’s first mobile market research company uses its own platform to create appealing, high quality marketing content.

  As explained in the first episode, Field Agent invited its network of 600,000 agents to submit name suggestions for the new podcast. The winning entry, “Tie Talk,” was submitted by Chris from Texas, who won a $50 Amazon gift card for his suggestion. Congrats Chris!

  ---

   

  Transcript: Episode 1 - “Field Agent Uses Field Agent”

  Cory: Hey everyone, this is Cory from Field Agent and today we've got Kate Beebe.

  Kate: How's it going? Glad to be here.

  Cory: She is Director of Marketing with us. Before we get started, this is our very first podcast and we haven't named it yet, but more on that later. Before we talk about anything else, let's just give a quick run through of what Field Agent is, so Kate, can you walk us through that?

  Kate: Sure. Field Agent is a market research company with our main platform being mobile. We have an app in the App Store and the Google Play store. We have 600,000 users on the app, which is pretty cool because that's actually your customer. Essentially, we have two main areas that we focus on. One being research, that is, what are your customers thinking? Do they like the packaging? If you have a new idea, you can run it by them to get reassurance.

  Cory: Yeah, just general feedback on anything. On concepts, on packaging design, you name it.

  Kate: Yeah, it's great. We also do physical auditing. If you go in the store and you want to know if your product's on the shelf. Well, you can't be in all two thousand stores, so we can send out our – we call them agents, our app users. We send our agents into the stores and they can capture photo, video. It's not limited to stores. We can actually time how long it takes someone to get their food or their coffee. Then we can ask them what they think about it. We call that an intelligent audit, where we combine both research and auditing. It's pretty cool. We are able to do so much with our app that we haven't even tapped into it's full potential yet. So, yeah, there's your quick overview of Field Agent. There's obviously more and we can go deeper into that as we have more podcasts.

  Cory: Great, yeah. Let's dive in a little deeper to the marketing area within Field Agent. Field Agent's only a little over five years old and the marketing department is much younger than that even.

  Kate: Yes, we are only a year and a half old.

  Cory: Wow, that's pretty new. Still pretty new at this.

  Kate: Yeah. Definitely evolving as we go.

  Cory: Give us a quick history maybe.

  Kate: Sure. I came in May 2014, so about a year and a half ago. I had one intern, and guess what? My intern had a PhD. Can you believe that?

  That's crazy. It was Chris and I in the very beginning. We literally had the question, what can we do with this marketing thing? It's kind of funny because, coming from a design background, I really wanted to challenge myself. I did so much research...email marketing, what can we do? It was mainly email marketing in the very beginning. We created, I think, six different emails for back to school and our main focus was on retail and CPGs. When they set the store, it is usually in the beginning of the summer for back to school. No one's really talking about back to school because they just started summer, but in CPG land it is all about back to school in June. We created these very “outbound-y” emails, these very sales-driven emails. Basically, marketing our product and not really solving their problem.

  As you can imagine, I came in and thought, "Oh yeah, we are going to come in here and we're going to get a 100% click rate, 100% everything. We are going to make a million dollars in the first month." We just had the highest hopes, we thought we were going to just kill it. We were so wrong. We were under industry average by many, many percentage points.

  Cory: By a lot.

  Kate: They did not like our outbound content.

  Cory: We learned from it.

  Kate: We definitely learned from it and ...

  Cory: Now we are more inbound.

  Kate: Yes. We are purely inbound.

  Cory: What does that mean?

  Kate: I had done some research. Online we found HubSpot, which is a company who has a great philosophy, all about attracting the customer. Diving deep into HubSpot's philosophy, which is inbound marketing, we discovered that many customers don't even know what their problem is.

  Our market is so new, that we are able to actually identify problems that they don't even know they have. We can offer solutions to those problems without even name-dropping ourselves. We say, "Mobile technology and crowdsourcing is the easiest, the fastest, the most affordable way to get insights from your customers or to see your shelves." We have a lot of content that we can create for these people. Even if they don't choose Field Agent, they'll know the best way to solve their business problems.

  That's really the most important thing is the customer. Is the customer excelling in their job? Are they excelling in their company? We just offer a step up for them, that they can go above and beyond their role and provide hard data on decisions that need to be made.

  Cory: Okay. With this new inbound method, it's a lot about creating your own content right? Where do those ideas come from? How does Field Agent come up with ideas for content?

  Kate: Well, it's interesting because we focus on problems and I mentioned before that they don't even know their problems. We're actually still trying to identify all the problems that our customers face. We offer solutions. We have the most intelligent people that work on our teams. We have experts in research; we have experts in methodologies. It's really, really fascinating to even sit down and talk with these people.

  Cory: We can create those educational pieces just by talking with our co-workers, right? What about more of the studies that we launch?

  Kate: Yeah, we use our own app and we think about those problems and those solutions to the problems, we think about seeing in the store. Halloween is right now. It's in the store. I've seen candy everywhere, I've seen costumes, and you know what's funny? The wig section – The wigs are everywhere. I wonder if the wig supplier even knows how crazy messy the wig part is.

  Kate: We can create a study based off of, how clean is the wig section? We send our agents in, they take pictures, and we can send that information back to the supplier and they'll know exactly what they need to do to fix the problem.

  Cory: Getting things out of stock or priced incorrectly, we can do jobs for any of that.

  Kate: Right, so anything in the store and that's just an audit example. While they are there we like to go ahead, we call it an intelligent audit, killing two birds with one stone, we get the research part of the audit as well. We ask them what they think. What's the selection like? What do you think about the selection? Did anything catch your eye as you were walking to where you needed to go? Oh, you had to get towels? Did you stop anywhere along the way? What caught your eye about that particular product? We create these studies. We publish them on our blog. We create reports around them.

  It's really exciting that we can use our own tool to actually create our content.

  Cory: We are sending in our agents to do our own marketing studies. Is that for free? How do we get people to do this for us?

  Kate: Yeah, no, it's definitely not free. We pay our agents every time they give us a piece of data. We pay them. It's not free on our end, but it is really affordable. Think about traditional research. It takes a long time and it's really expensive. For us, we go into our Do-It-Yourself platform, we create our own study questions, our own requests for photos, video, time studies, or whatever it may be.

  Sometimes there are different parts to the job where they go home and then they answer more questions after they leave the store. It's definitely not free. We have set aside funds in our budget to do these studies, but it's really not much. It doesn't take very long to do these studies. We run one every weekend and we get data. We run it on Friday, we get data on Monday, then we publish on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

  Cory: We get nationwide coverage on these?

  Kate: Oh, absolutely. We can choose what state, what city, what store ...

  Cory: Can you imagine trying to do just our marketing team research much less real world scenarios? Can you imagine getting that data nationwide over the weekend using any other platform?

  Kate: It's crazy. It's actually unheard of and that's part of our job is to make it known. Make it known to our customers that this is an actual possibility in that it's not too good to be true. It's interesting really because we have the research part, we have the audit part, so we speak to operations, logistics people, we speak to researchers, and sales people, but we've never really spoken to the marketer.

  I think it would be really great if people used research methods to create their content instead of just guessing. I've always guessed and I've always thought, Oh this would be fun to write about and I've written about it, but having research to back your argument or...

  Cory: Not just any research. Not just asking your ten closest friends what they think about the new iPhone or whatever, but you can ask people all over the country.

  Kate: Exactly. Back in July, we did a study on controversial topics.

  Yeah, with the new gay marriage law, we thought companies are speaking out. I think Oreo in particular; they had an Oreo with rainbow filling…But how do customers feel about a company taking a stance on those issues? We sent out a study and we sent out a study across 18 consumer segments. A consumer segment consists of a female with children in the age range of this and they shop here. We had 18 different segments. We got the data in in two hours. Two hours. A thousand responses in two hours across eighteen segments. That's insane, that's crazy. That right there just shows how fast it is, but also we gained a lot of insight on customers and their beliefs.

  Cory: Give me the top two takeaways from that? What did we find?

  Kate: You know what's interesting is that even when customers don't take a stance on something, that justifies a reaction. Forty-one percent of people said they would stop buying from a company that missed an opportunity to take a public stand on an issue they consider important to them. That's really insightful. I didn't even think that was an option. That's just one of the surprises along the way.

  Another interesting fact we found is that people are more likely to stop buying in disagreement of a company’s stance than to actually start buying because they support something. That means if I am buying from a specific company and they announce that they believe a certain way or they have an ad out that portrays a certain belief that I don't believe in – Our studies suggest that I'm more likely to stop buying from them than to start buying from a company that I don't normally buy from, but they believe the same way that I do. Does that makes sense?

  Cory: Interesting. Yeah.

  Kate: Yeah. That was pretty interesting. I kind of see that. I kind of believe that. It's more of a reassurance thing sometimes for businesses to see.

  Cory: Now we have data for them.

  Kate: Exactly. We also have an international study coming up. We are getting with our international partners to do this study. Yeah, it's along the lines of global perspective, how does it change across the world.

  Cory: This will cover our partners’ agents and their own countries right?

  Kate: Yeah, yeah.

  Cory: There's about 200,000 of them?

  Kate: Yes. That makes our total around 800,000 global agents.

  Cory: Great, well thanks for talking with us today, Kate.

  Kate: Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been fun.

  Cory: I promised earlier that we would talk a little but more about our podcast name...Thinking through all these agents we keep talking about and our capabilities, we thought why not let you guys decide.

  Kate: Crowdsourcing our name.

  Cory: Crowdsourcing our name, so we're putting out a job on the app under ‘Just for Fun’ where you can submit you're own name for our podcast and the winner – What's the winner going to get?

  Kate: A $50 Amazon gift card. Do you know what that can buy?

  Cory: Fifty bucks. Fifty $1 things. Two $25 things even.

  Kate: That, or I don't know if you are a Walking Dead fan, I am. I don't have cable.

  Cory: Fear the Walking Dead's our new thing.

  Kate: Ohhhhh. That too, so you could buy the season coming up on Amazon Prime. If you're not a Walking Dead fan, just pretend I said something that you like.

  Cory: Yeah. I bet Amazon has something that you like.

  Kate: Oh, yeah. Definitely. All right, and since we are talking about marketing today I'm going to go ahead and give my marketing plug.

  Please subscribe to our podcast as well as our blog which is blog.fieldagent.net. We have really interesting studies and updates as well as company and culture posts. You can get to know our company as well as what we can do. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

  Cory: Alright Kate, thanks for that. We will be announcing our next episode via those channels. Be sure to subscribe and follow and be on the look out for our next podcast.

  Kate: All right, thanks for tuning in and remember, data drives decisions. We'll catch you next time. 

• Insights from original research conducted by Field Agent

  Trends and events in the fields of mobile auditing and research

  News on the Field Agent company and culture

  Relevant information about the market research and retail industries

  And, always, upbeat and engaging conversation.

  Nelson explained, “We aim for the content to be transparent and insightful, while not taking ourselves too seriously.”

  The first episode, “Field Agent Uses Field Agent,” describes how the world’s first mobile market research company uses its own platform to create appealing, high quality marketing content.

  As explained in the first episode, Field Agent invited its network of 600,000 agents to submit name suggestions for the new podcast. The winning entry, “Tie Talk,” was submitted by Chris from Texas, who won a $50 Amazon gift card for his suggestion. Congrats Chris!

  ---

   

  Transcript: Episode 1 - “Field Agent Uses Field Agent”

  Cory: Hey everyone, this is Cory from Field Agent and today we've got Kate Beebe.

  Kate: How's it going? Glad to be here.

  Cory: She is Director of Marketing with us. Before we get started, this is our very first podcast and we haven't named it yet, but more on that later. Before we talk about anything else, let's just give a quick run through of what Field Agent is, so Kate, can you walk us through that?

  Kate: Sure. Field Agent is a market research company with our main platform being mobile. We have an app in the App Store and the Google Play store. We have 600,000 users on the app, which is pretty cool because that's actually your customer. Essentially, we have two main areas that we focus on. One being research, that is, what are your customers thinking? Do they like the packaging? If you have a new idea, you can run it by them to get reassurance.

  Cory: Yeah, just general feedback on anything. On concepts, on packaging design, you name it.

  Kate: Yeah, it's great. We also do physical auditing. If you go in the store and you want to know if your product's on the shelf. Well, you can't be in all two thousand stores, so we can send out our – we call them agents, our app users. We send our agents into the stores and they can capture photo, video. It's not limited to stores. We can actually time how long it takes someone to get their food or their coffee. Then we can ask them what they think about it. We call that an intelligent audit, where we combine both research and auditing. It's pretty cool. We are able to do so much with our app that we haven't even tapped into it's full potential yet. So, yeah, there's your quick overview of Field Agent. There's obviously more and we can go deeper into that as we have more podcasts.

  Cory: Great, yeah. Let's dive in a little deeper to the marketing area within Field Agent. Field Agent's only a little over five years old and the marketing department is much younger than that even.

  Kate: Yes, we are only a year and a half old.

  Cory: Wow, that's pretty new. Still pretty new at this.

  Kate: Yeah. Definitely evolving as we go.

  Cory: Give us a quick history maybe.

  Kate: Sure. I came in May 2014, so about a year and a half ago. I had one intern, and guess what? My intern had a PhD. Can you believe that?

  That's crazy. It was Chris and I in the very beginning. We literally had the question, what can we do with this marketing thing? It's kind of funny because, coming from a design background, I really wanted to challenge myself. I did so much research...email marketing, what can we do? It was mainly email marketing in the very beginning. We created, I think, six different emails for back to school and our main focus was on retail and CPGs. When they set the store, it is usually in the beginning of the summer for back to school. No one's really talking about back to school because they just started summer, but in CPG land it is all about back to school in June. We created these very “outbound-y” emails, these very sales-driven emails. Basically, marketing our product and not really solving their problem.

  As you can imagine, I came in and thought, "Oh yeah, we are going to come in here and we're going to get a 100% click rate, 100% everything. We are going to make a million dollars in the first month." We just had the highest hopes, we thought we were going to just kill it. We were so wrong. We were under industry average by many, many percentage points.

  Cory: By a lot.

  Kate: They did not like our outbound content.

  Cory: We learned from it.

  Kate: We definitely learned from it and ...

  Cory: Now we are more inbound.

  Kate: Yes. We are purely inbound.

  Cory: What does that mean?

  Kate: I had done some research. Online we found HubSpot, which is a company who has a great philosophy, all about attracting the customer. Diving deep into HubSpot's philosophy, which is inbound marketing, we discovered that many customers don't even know what their problem is.

  Our market is so new, that we are able to actually identify problems that they don't even know they have. We can offer solutions to those problems without even name-dropping ourselves. We say, "Mobile technology and crowdsourcing is the easiest, the fastest, the most affordable way to get insights from your customers or to see your shelves." We have a lot of content that we can create for these people. Even if they don't choose Field Agent, they'll know the best way to solve their business problems.

  That's really the most important thing is the customer. Is the customer excelling in their job? Are they excelling in their company? We just offer a step up for them, that they can go above and beyond their role and provide hard data on decisions that need to be made.

  Cory: Okay. With this new inbound method, it's a lot about creating your own content right? Where do those ideas come from? How does Field Agent come up with ideas for content?

  Kate: Well, it's interesting because we focus on problems and I mentioned before that they don't even know their problems. We're actually still trying to identify all the problems that our customers face. We offer solutions. We have the most intelligent people that work on our teams. We have experts in research; we have experts in methodologies. It's really, really fascinating to even sit down and talk with these people.

  Cory: We can create those educational pieces just by talking with our co-workers, right? What about more of the studies that we launch?

  Kate: Yeah, we use our own app and we think about those problems and those solutions to the problems, we think about seeing in the store. Halloween is right now. It's in the store. I've seen candy everywhere, I've seen costumes, and you know what's funny? The wig section – The wigs are everywhere. I wonder if the wig supplier even knows how crazy messy the wig part is.

  Kate: We can create a study based off of, how clean is the wig section? We send our agents in, they take pictures, and we can send that information back to the supplier and they'll know exactly what they need to do to fix the problem.

  Cory: Getting things out of stock or priced incorrectly, we can do jobs for any of that.

  Kate: Right, so anything in the store and that's just an audit example. While they are there we like to go ahead, we call it an intelligent audit, killing two birds with one stone, we get the research part of the audit as well. We ask them what they think. What's the selection like? What do you think about the selection? Did anything catch your eye as you were walking to where you needed to go? Oh, you had to get towels? Did you stop anywhere along the way? What caught your eye about that particular product? We create these studies. We publish them on our blog. We create reports around them.

  It's really exciting that we can use our own tool to actually create our content.

  Cory: We are sending in our agents to do our own marketing studies. Is that for free? How do we get people to do this for us?

  Kate: Yeah, no, it's definitely not free. We pay our agents every time they give us a piece of data. We pay them. It's not free on our end, but it is really affordable. Think about traditional research. It takes a long time and it's really expensive. For us, we go into our Do-It-Yourself platform, we create our own study questions, our own requests for photos, video, time studies, or whatever it may be.

  Sometimes there are different parts to the job where they go home and then they answer more questions after they leave the store. It's definitely not free. We have set aside funds in our budget to do these studies, but it's really not much. It doesn't take very long to do these studies. We run one every weekend and we get data. We run it on Friday, we get data on Monday, then we publish on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

  Cory: We get nationwide coverage on these?

  Kate: Oh, absolutely. We can choose what state, what city, what store ...

  Cory: Can you imagine trying to do just our marketing team research much less real world scenarios? Can you imagine getting that data nationwide over the weekend using any other platform?

  Kate: It's crazy. It's actually unheard of and that's part of our job is to make it known. Make it known to our customers that this is an actual possibility in that it's not too good to be true. It's interesting really because we have the research part, we have the audit part, so we speak to operations, logistics people, we speak to researchers, and sales people, but we've never really spoken to the marketer.

  I think it would be really great if people used research methods to create their content instead of just guessing. I've always guessed and I've always thought, Oh this would be fun to write about and I've written about it, but having research to back your argument or...

  Cory: Not just any research. Not just asking your ten closest friends what they think about the new iPhone or whatever, but you can ask people all over the country.

  Kate: Exactly. Back in July, we did a study on controversial topics.

  Yeah, with the new gay marriage law, we thought companies are speaking out. I think Oreo in particular; they had an Oreo with rainbow filling…But how do customers feel about a company taking a stance on those issues? We sent out a study and we sent out a study across 18 consumer segments. A consumer segment consists of a female with children in the age range of this and they shop here. We had 18 different segments. We got the data in in two hours. Two hours. A thousand responses in two hours across eighteen segments. That's insane, that's crazy. That right there just shows how fast it is, but also we gained a lot of insight on customers and their beliefs.

  Cory: Give me the top two takeaways from that? What did we find?

  Kate: You know what's interesting is that even when customers don't take a stance on something, that justifies a reaction. Forty-one percent of people said they would stop buying from a company that missed an opportunity to take a public stand on an issue they consider important to them. That's really insightful. I didn't even think that was an option. That's just one of the surprises along the way.

  Another interesting fact we found is that people are more likely to stop buying in disagreement of a company’s stance than to actually start buying because they support something. That means if I am buying from a specific company and they announce that they believe a certain way or they have an ad out that portrays a certain belief that I don't believe in – Our studies suggest that I'm more likely to stop buying from them than to start buying from a company that I don't normally buy from, but they believe the same way that I do. Does that makes sense?

  Cory: Interesting. Yeah.

  Kate: Yeah. That was pretty interesting. I kind of see that. I kind of believe that. It's more of a reassurance thing sometimes for businesses to see.

  Cory: Now we have data for them.

  Kate: Exactly. We also have an international study coming up. We are getting with our international partners to do this study. Yeah, it's along the lines of global perspective, how does it change across the world.

  Cory: This will cover our partners’ agents and their own countries right?

  Kate: Yeah, yeah.

  Cory: There's about 200,000 of them?

  Kate: Yes. That makes our total around 800,000 global agents.

  Cory: Great, well thanks for talking with us today, Kate.

  Kate: Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been fun.

  Cory: I promised earlier that we would talk a little but more about our podcast name...Thinking through all these agents we keep talking about and our capabilities, we thought why not let you guys decide.

  Kate: Crowdsourcing our name.

  Cory: Crowdsourcing our name, so we're putting out a job on the app under ‘Just for Fun’ where you can submit you're own name for our podcast and the winner – What's the winner going to get?

  Kate: A $50 Amazon gift card. Do you know what that can buy?

  Cory: Fifty bucks. Fifty $1 things. Two $25 things even.

  Kate: That, or I don't know if you are a Walking Dead fan, I am. I don't have cable.

  Cory: Fear the Walking Dead's our new thing.

  Kate: Ohhhhh. That too, so you could buy the season coming up on Amazon Prime. If you're not a Walking Dead fan, just pretend I said something that you like.

  Cory: Yeah. I bet Amazon has something that you like.

  Kate: Oh, yeah. Definitely. All right, and since we are talking about marketing today I'm going to go ahead and give my marketing plug.

  Please subscribe to our podcast as well as our blog which is blog.fieldagent.net. We have really interesting studies and updates as well as company and culture posts. You can get to know our company as well as what we can do. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

  Cory: Alright Kate, thanks for that. We will be announcing our next episode via those channels. Be sure to subscribe and follow and be on the look out for our next podcast.

  Kate: All right, thanks for tuning in and remember, data drives decisions. We'll catch you next time.