Why Market Research Still Matters: David Donnelly on Trust, Language, and Understanding What Customers Really Need

Market research secrets, what customers really need versus what they want. Welcome back to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Anthony Pearl, and today I am sitting down with someone I’ve known and worked with for 25 years. David Donnelley is the founder of Instinct and Reason, a market research consultancy that’s worked in 45 countries with everyone from Fortune 500 companies.

To federal governments. David’s about to reveal why businesses fail when they listen to the wrong audience. The difference between transactional and resilient trust and why customers don’t want to lose weight. They want to look good. We will explore how language can make or break your business and why climate change became toxic terminology for farmers and how tourism Australia’s controversial campaign succeeded globally, but failed spectacularly at one point in Japan.

So this is an episode packed with information for small and medium businesses, right through to large businesses. David has so many amazing insights, including stuff about his PhD that he’s done that’s gonna fascinate you about the Boomers. This is an episode not to miss. Let’s get into biz bites for thought leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, and I am truly excited to have my guest here today. We have known each other, I think we worked out for about 25 years, and we’ve done lots of work together over the years, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to speak on the podcast.

So David Donnelly, welcome to the program. Thank you Anthony. Would you like me to do a little intro? I’d love you to introduce yourself to the audience because while I know you, everybody else doesn’t. So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about you? Great. Just a snapshot I’m a career market researcher.

I I came from South Australia where I did my business degree at the Elton Mayo School of Management. I was a graduate into the Commonwealth government and I worked with ministerial committee looking after government communications. Was poached into a big consulting firm. Worked for a decade with a great company where I learned my craft as a market researcher, a great Australian company that had a massive network across Asia.

So we did a lot of international work as well as local work. And I loved that until that business was acquired by a big global company, at which time I decided to start my own consultancy called Instinct and Reason, and for 20. Three years now. We’ve operated in Australia and around the world. We work with big multinationals on pricing research brand research and communications research.

Mainly for new products that have been launched in different countries. We’ve worked in about 45 around the world. And in Australia we have a lot of work in the agri sector, the tourism sector, and the public sector for. Services Australia on customer set. But yeah, I’ve got a 30, 30 year career in market research and I understand Anthony will be talking market research today.

Absolutely. And I think it’s such a fascinating area. And it’s interesting to me as well. We were talking just a little bit before we started recording and I’m wondering. How much research people are doing now or if they’re just relying on AI and Google and how that compares to what actual research looks like.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting. Question. Anthony and I look, because I’ve been around for so long, I think it’s worth just putting it into context. So yes, I joined in the early nineties, the market research industry. A lot of our work then was just a lot of brand tracking, a lot of customer satisfaction tracking, so people monitored how the world was evolving.

We also did strategic work, so it could be a new product, it could be a new audience. The question was how do we market into that audience really? That strategic work is still ongoing. I’m not really sensing any reduction in that. Certainly there are downturns in in times like we experienced over the last couple of years where the economy’s been running pretty well at break even not really growing.

Research is one of those. One of those spends that you can put on hold is discretionary. So we did notice a little bit through 23, 24. It’s been quite challenging. But yeah, that strategic work around a new product, a new service, what do we price this at? Who do we go after? What do we say to them?

That kind of strategic work is ongoing. Things do change. So the advent originally say around, the middle of the first 2000 tens that we moved to big data. So a lot of businesses thought we don’t need to track or monitor anymore. We’ve got big data, we can see what’s going on in real time.

Isn’t that great? Yeah. But that doesn’t, that tells you about your customers. It doesn’t tell you about the rest of the world. So you become a bit myopic and, and you miss out on what’s going on. So yeah, research has been quite resilient because the world keeps changing. Anthony, as I think you probably realize and all of your listeners probably do too, every day there’s a new bit of gardening to do.

I think, generally speaking, a lot of business in my mind, don’t value the research as much, and the big business definitely does because they know they have to do it. But I think there’s this gulf in a lot of small to medium businesses that often go out there and create new products and services and sometimes new businesses.

Because they feel it’s the right thing without actually doing the market research on what the market actually wants and needs. Is that something that you’re seeing perhaps more of, that people are being more opportunistic in the current environment? I think that’s always been the same, Anthony Entrepreneurs.

Have a go. And they sometimes trip over and fall in their face and they get hurt and, there’s a big cost in doing market research. It’s been quite expensive. All of our clients of Blue chip, massive multinationals, federal governments, state governments, they try to do the research to get things right.

‘Cause they can afford to, and they can build it into their whole business models. It’s really hard for SMEs. To find that money to throw at a market research problem. So entrepreneurs are very reliant on their own gut instinct. And it’s interesting, our company name is Instinct and Reason, the reason being the research.

But we acknowledge, even, if you if you’re thinking about the future it’s a, it’s an instinct as well. And a lot of entrepreneurs have that and some of them don’t. But it’s a risk. You’re taking a risk relying on your own perceptions of the way the world works. But I would to say, you can still do your homework.

You can still do your homework, and I guess there are some emerging technologies that are really worth knowing. So market research is about talking to potential customers and finding out what they need. So even small and medium enterprises, they can spend time. Talking to their target audience about what they need.

And you should focus on what they need. Not what they want, but what they need. And if you’re making something that if someone needs, you’re gonna be pretty close to the right thing. So talking to people is the way to go about it. And we’re still doing, by the way, a lot of that Anthony third of our work is.

Focus group discussions, online forums, one-on-one interviews. We’re still talking to people to learn about what they’re, what they need. I think that’s such an important and fascinating area. And I recall a project that, that we worked on together some years ago now, where the case was that the.

Management, were listening to the wrong audience and got the right audience into a focus group. They said, let me at them, let me tell them what they really need to be doing. And it was quite fascinating how that. That transpired. And I see that in a lot of, I, I guess a lot of not-for-profit organizations, which this one was, that they were, they tend to listen to the bureaucracy, to government, and often to people who are not necessarily in high profile positions saying, oh, we like this, and suddenly that’s taken as gospel.

Where instead of listening to the research groups and the people that actually are in the core area of who you’re delivering to, and that’s a I see that as a temptation for a lot of businesses as well, that you listen to, you might listen to your peers or you might listen to your family, but are they actually the core audience of who you should be doing your research with?

Yeah. That’s really marketing 1 0 1, isn’t it? That the first question you ask is who is my audience? For this idea I’ve got and like all of us, we tend to rely on history to inform the future, but not necessarily is that always the case to be true. So finding out, segmenting the market and finding out who your potential customers are is the first step.

And then talking to them. I can tell you a little story that, that, affected me a lot. I went to the Global Market Research Conference once in Berlin and a gentleman spoke and he had made the movie, the Life, the Lives of Others. One Can in 2007 or oh eight or something. But he he made this beautiful movie, this amazing movie and nobody would distribute it.

They said there’s no audience for it. And they said, we’ve tested it. So they brought into their audience testing a random group of the US market, and that stuck them in the audience and people didn’t like it. But then somebody in the marketing research team said, oh, we should we should expose this film to people who have a degree.

And of course. People were well educated, really understood this story of the stary living in the roof, spying on people and in East Germany. And it ended up winning Kahan. It ended up being distributed, but it was only ’cause they worked out. There was a particular audience for this film and others would not appreciate it as much.

I think that’s interesting that. People delving into this whole idea of talking to the right people and finding the right differences. I think that it’s, it, movies do it quite well. Then traditionally have, and I’ll never forget, I was actually in I’ve been taken to my parents to the, we went to the US and one of the film studios and they had just done the testing for Fatal Attraction.

And there was an ending to Fatal Attraction. And the market research when they played it out meant that they no, it’s gotta change. And they went and re-shot the ending to that movie as a result of it, because I think they had it as I, I think Glenn close’s character might. Survived.

And it wasn’t necessarily the good guys don’t win. Nobody likes that in a Hollywood ending, right? They want the guys to win. And, but it’s interesting that there’s a lot of lessons in all of that for people is what to, what is the expectations? I often refer to, interestingly enough, the bit of research that we did.

Back in the early days when we were working together and it was with a funeral company for those that are are listening in. And we often did surveys of all of the various people, the various clients that that were had. And it fascinated me that cleanliness of funeral vehicles was always a huge impact if they were bad.

It just always showed to me that there was an expectation of people saying, we expect the funeral vehicles to be clean. So you got no bonus points if they were clean. However, if they were dirty. Or something was wrong with them, then it completely changed the way people felt about the entire service that was being done.

Everything else could have been perfect, but the vehicle, which there was an expectation that it would be clean, wasn’t, and therefore all the results were terrible as a result of it. And I think that’s that, that always taught me a very important lesson about what are the expectations of your audience that you have to meet.

And then what are the things that you can, that will make that difference in a positive way? Yeah, and look, that’s one of the, I know we’re talking to a lot of SMEs here, but it’s one of the important things in marketing is these are these hygiene factors they’re called, and they’re things that if they’re not there.

You’re not gonna make a sale because they’re just meant to be there, but they’re not gonna differentiate your product in any way. And it’s, they’re not gonna give you any value add to the brand. And then there are the things that will, and you need to keep an eye on both of these things to, to make sure you’re successful.

Absolutely. Look, David, I wanted to, I think one of the things that we need to get into is some of the actual research and the impact that it’s, that it has. Because even though there’s some things that are being done at a high level for bigger business, there’s a lot of things that.

Other businesses can learn and we have a range of people listening to us from all types of businesses. What are some of the lessons, particularly around branding, that you are seeing at the moment from research and the impact that it’s making? Because I personally believe that trust has never been more important a factor for brand building than it is at the moment.

And I think that’s gonna continue to build. And how people build that trust is going to make a huge difference. Yeah we see the same mistakes being made by brands every day. The what I mean, contemporary issue was yesterday Microsoft was taken to the court by the ACCC for just upgrading our to pay for copilot.

And if you didn’t go into cancel, you never got the message that said. You could you could not pay the extra $50 a year for your Microsoft subscription. That kind of duplicity really damages brands. So when we conceptualize trust, and I do agree with you, it’s a really big issue at the moment, and I’ll come back to why, but when we conceptualize trust with brands, we talk about it in two different ways.

So people to engage with a brand, have to trust the brand to do the job. So this is what we call the transactional part of trust. So in other words, do I trust you to organize a funeral? Do I trust you to look after my money? If you’re a bank, do I trust you? If you’re the federal government and you’re providing me a Centerlink service or a Medicare service, do I trust you to do the job?

But that’s not really enough. And the reason I alluded to the Microsoft. Issue is they’ve lost what we’d call the resilient part of trust. So that is not that can they do their job, they do their job fantastically most of the time. So that’s not the reason. But if I want to trust Microsoft to look after me as a customer and have my interests at heart, I now know their motivations is just to make money.

They really. Don’t care about all of those SMEs out there that had this Microsoft product and got ripped off by putting their prices up by 45% and not giving anyone an option to make a judgment on that. So when we talk about resilient trust, it’s people make a perception of your motivation as a business.

Are you looking after me, the customer, or are you looking after yourself? If you’re looking after yourself, I will never. Trust you truly. I might think you can do the job, but I’m not gonna trust you truly. And then also what goes with that? There are two other aspects, which is integrity. In other words, do you as a business, do what you say, or are you saying things in marketing just to keep me as a customer, but they’re not necessarily true? Or you don’t necessarily follow through. So motive, what’s your motivation? Do you speak with integrity? Do what you say. And then there’s this ethical element that’s entering into. This resilient trust too, is what’s your underpinning belief about humanity almost.

And what people are looking for is, you have to be able to argue that whatever decision you’ve made, ’cause not everything benefits every customer, that it’s been the greatest good for the greatest number that ethical element is in your DNA as well. So the brands. Who remember that and wanna have that resilient trust.

’cause that allows you, in the modern world to have a cocker. Things can go wrong and people will still trust you. ’cause they think your motivation is for them. They know you do what you’re saying and they think your motive your ethics are the greatest good for the greatest number. And so you see Microsoft just trash that in one day.

And if people have a choice to get away from that brand, they will. And, you don’t want to ever lose those things. So research can be around those factors and trying to understand how that’s happening. And research can be really simple sometimes, Anthony, we had a project, and I hope this this doesn’t go too far, but if we have Chatham rules here, but the Royal Australian Mint were told a few years ago.

That they had to stop using packaging that wasn’t recyclable. So this was a Department of Finance edict to the entire Commonwealth public sector. That packaging that was a one-off use could not be used. So they turned all of their beautiful packaging for their collectible coins into bamboo packaging, nice and recycling.

And of course, all the collectors hated it. They absolutely hated it because they store these coins and they, and of course a little bit of research on our behalf said they’re not really one off packages. Those, that coin will stay in that box for probably a hundred years. It’s not going into the bin when it arrives.

It’s being there for a hundred years. They didn’t know that. But the raw men did not realize that the packaging, they hadn’t done the research with their customers. They hadn’t asked them, what do you do with the packaging? Sometimes they don’t even open it. They just want it pristine. Yeah.

So anyway, sometimes just, very ba, it’s really important to keep asking good questions of your customer. That’s all I would say to people. You don’t need to do any fancy research, but you do need to keep talking to your target audience about what they need and what they do. So you need to understand their knowledge, their attitudes, and some of their behaviors.

And if you understand that you’re much better placed place to provide what they want, what they need. Yeah. I like that and it’s something that I know I’ve given that advice to many people over the years. I recall one time working many years ago massage therapist that I knew, and she was offering half hour and one hour massages.

Now what. After asking a few people that she realized she was missing out on was the lunchtime market. So people get an hour lunch and an hour massage is too long, but a 30 minute massage feels like they’re not getting enough value because they just want 15 minutes to be able to, grab a sandwich and a drink and get back to the office.

So they really wanted 45 minute massages. So after asking a few people. That’s what she did. She implemented the lunchtime, 45 minute massage and suddenly she was booked out lunchtimes every day. And it’s simply by asking the right questions. And I think that’s important as is language though too, isn’t it, David?

I think getting the right language that resonates with people can is also a valuable bit of research. Oh yeah. Tone is everything. And we do a lot of work in comms, just trying to get the right tone. That I guess demonstrates, that you are interested in your customers, that you are seeking feedback depending on how you speak.

Whether you speak adult to adult or you’re speaking adult to child. You have to be really careful about how you go about that or people people struggle. And sorry, my mind’s gone to another anecdote, but it’s quite, no please share it. It’s not quite a it is actually OnOne, it’s actually a very good illustration.

A few years ago I did the strategic work for Tourism Australia on their global tourism campaign and it led eventually to the campaign, which some might remember called, so Where the Bloody Hell Are You? Yes. And the whole idea of this was was, we’ve got the party together, we’ve got the place together, we’ve got everything together, but you’re not here.

And this was very much an Aussie saying, right? So when we say we’re the bloody hell are you, if you say that to an Englishman, if it’s an Englishman, says that to an Englishman, that is a reprimand. When an Australian SE sends it to somebody, it’s not a reprimand. It’s saying, we really want you here. Why aren’t you here?

Yeah. It’s a totally different meaning. And I was doing focus groups in London talking to people and I’d got a British moderator to do the groups and I was just watching and they didn’t like the idea ’cause they were hearing it through his English. Tone and his voice. And so I jumped in and did the groups and it instantly changed, even the English knew the brand.

This is the way Australians talked to each other and talked to the world. And so that campaign actually resonated really well for people who understood Australians and understood that’s our way of being friendly. And it is one of the big brand attributes that when you come to visit Australia.

Tends to be a lot friendlier than if you go to London, for example, when no one talks to you. But on that one we had a bit of a failure in Japan, so the agency had translated. So where the bloody hell are you into Welcome. To my blood soaked hellhole, which as you can imagine, Anthony didn’t go down, even in Japan, didn’t go down very well.

No. So we had to work on that translation and get the tone and the language right. It’s so easy to make. Translation is one thing and I always find that fascinating. There are many examples online where. You translate something from one language to another and then translate it back to see how distorted it can become.

And ’cause there are some things that don’t translate, but I think also, I know an anecdote that I heard from many years ago was about someone who’d written a book. And originally it was about how to help women lose weight and it just didn’t go anywhere. And what he found out from the research and subsequently changed it was women don’t wanna lose weight.

They want to look thinner. Yeah. And so it, it completely transformed just the change in language transformed what the success of his book and subsequent things that he were. Oh, yeah, that’s a, but that’s understanding what people need. I guess that returns us back to that theme that when you’re talking to people what do they really need?

Do you need to lose weight? No I wanna look good. I want people to look at me and not think that I’m, I’m not on top of everything. I’m okay. And it’s really digging deeper and not taking things on face value. So people will give you a direct answer and when they give you an answer to this question about what do you need?

Just beware because they’re giving you an answer that, that they’ve overlaid that with, does this make sense? They don’t wanna seem. Weird, right? So they’re gonna give you an answer that makes sense. That’s partly true, but not necessarily the whole truth. And so in market research, we use a lot of techniques to get below that crust and into what’s really going on.

But the example you give is a great example of what people really wanted. We saw this in our work with over fifties. People wanted because people with older people were saying as they come into retirement, they wanna get fit, they wanna go to the gym, they start exercising, they watch their weight and they do all these things.

But when as we dug down from, oh, I just wanna be healthy. I want to get the most outta the rest of my life. No, they wanted to look good. It was exactly the same as yours. These people wanted to look good. And and when you understand that, then you can talk to them and you can create products that they want.

It’s absolutely critical. I think there’s two things that I learned out of that as well. One is the fact that. The language can also change. So that was from a few years ago in terms of, looking thinner versus losing weight. But it may be that now it’s better to look good, is what is more important than looking thinner.

And it may well be that the content or the product and service that you are delivering may not actually differ as a result, but the language around it can be also important to how that plays out. Yeah, I mean it happens in that this issue happens in almost every project we’ve ever looked at. In my view.

The language comes back. One really clear piece of work we did was around working with farmers and we were out, sent out to talk to them about, how can we help farmers mitigate the impact of climate change? We were dispatched from federal government agency to find out the first thing we found out is, don’t you dare mention.

The word climate change ’cause I don’t believe in it. So we were not going to provide them with any help to deal with climate change. ’cause they simply did not accept it. And this is going back a few years and it’s changing, but it’s still, as you can see from Barnaby Joyce, it’s still out there in, in regional Australia.

They don’t really want to take climate change. So we start to talk about, what are you seeing? And they talked about the climate’s becoming more variable, and people had come to these focus groups with, here’s the rainfall records on my property since 1828. You have the big journal every day being recorded.

He said, I know. It’s becoming more variable, but it’s not climate change, right? So we needed to change that whole communication strategy around, look, how can we help you cope with climate variability? All farmers accepted. Oh yeah. It’s getting more variable. What can you do for me? So yeah, you’re so right.

Language, language is crucial. And that’s why you need to talk to your customers. What language are they using? So you can, because that’s so important, right? That it that it, yeah, sometimes phrases that start off meaning one thing, start to carry baggage with it and you, as soon as you say climate change, it doesn’t matter who you are, whether whatever your thoughts are around climate change, there is a huge amount of baggage that comes with that term these days.

And a, I think, that little subtle variation of climate variable. Yes, that makes more sense and seems to talk more specifically to it. And right now that doesn’t have any baggage as a term. It doesn’t mean that it won’t do in the future. Yeah. And then of course you dig even deeper. ’cause you’ve gotta say why is that?

Why is that baggage there with climate change? Of course if you accept the premise of climate change, then agriculture’s contributing 20% of the CO2 to the problem. They. Didn’t know how they could fix the problem. I don’t want to be labeled as the person who’s creating climate change and my business, I don’t know what to do with it to actually prevent that.

So yeah. So we talk about climate variability, so we can avoid that. Neg all those negatives and just get on with the job about what can we do. And I think one of the other important lessons, I wanna come back to that in a second, but one of the other important lessons that I don’t want to lose from all of this as well is that to be cautious of groups.

I think one of the very the lessons that I learned very early on in watching you and your team doing market research was when you’re in a group scenario. The loudest voice can often transform what the rest of the group is going to say. So you want people to often write down if they’re in a group situation, their opinion first, so that you can see what happens, because it’s amazing how.

You can do this in any discussion where you’ve got a group of people and you say something and people start, oh, saying, start nodding their heads saying, yes, I was gonna say that, but were they really going to say that? Is that what they really thought? And I think that’s important as well to understand the difference between what actually is a, there’s variables of opinions that have versus where the group takes you.

Yeah, that’s, look that’s true. Group discussions can be can be challenging. Some people just have verbal diarrhea and the moment you say something, it comes out and then everyone is processing that. And also people in Australia particularly don’t wanna be rude to people. So if somebody takes a position they could.

Might decide, look, I don’t wanna, I’m not here for a fight, so I’m just gonna keep my position to myself. So yeah, we often would say, listen, we want you to write down your first impressions, but let’s write it down and then we’ll discuss it as a group. Is a simple technique that often works to make sure you’ve got both.

It’s also really useful, Anthony. It’s not the reality in the social worlds we live in. People do talk to other people. And they are influenced. ’cause not everyone has a strong opinion on anything. So there’s still legitimacy in understanding how that happens. But yeah, it’s also to find out what do people think themselves?

You need to understand both the social dynamics and people’s underlying. Knowledge and attitudes. And I wanna draw now back to what you were just talking about in terms of climate as well, and something you was talking about earlier in terms of trust and and as well, is that business, I think more and more has to look at the impact that it’s making and eve and try and find some counter way of making it a positive impact to make people feel good about what they’re.

Might be able to contribute as well. I’ve talked on this program previously about organizations like B one G one, where you can easily, it’s for small business to be able to make an impact and counter it with whatever they’re doing. And we’ve had Paul done on the program in the past, so shout out to Paul, how important are you seeing that impact?

But large businesses are almost being forced to do it. But. How successful is that? Look, we just finished a project for Australian Ethical Investments it is, it’s interesting how keen it’s important to find the key messaging that re resonates. So let me start, make sure I come back to Australian Ethical, but one interesting project, just to give you a flavor is.

We were looking at going into the World Trade ne negotiations, we being Australia, and we had to work out who paid the CO2 for airlines flying in from Europe and North America. Who pays for that? Who’s creating the CO2? Is it Australia who gets the tourism benefit? Or is it the citizens of Germany or whatever?

So we did a study where we said, okay, what if we had to charge you $50, 50 euros extra for your flight to Australia? As a carbon impost, so we could spend that on planting trees or whatever we’re doing to mitigate that CO2 that you’ve spent you’ve produced coming to Australia. And so we measured the impact of the 50 euro impost, but then we put in some positives.

So we said, what if we told you that 50 euros wasn’t being it wasn’t being spent on CO2, it was being spent on planning. Native forests in Australia. So all that money would go straight to native forests to compensate for the CO2 that you produced. And so we had about, I can’t remember now, an 8% drop in demand with that 50 Euro price hike.

But we are able to get all of that back, but simply putting it in the context of how we’re gonna spend that money. To mitigate that CO2, so that messaging. So we went into the World Trade Organization saying, we can afford to pay this because if we promote it properly, we’re not gonna have any loss of demand.

People will still come. So yeah, you can, the way you position something, the key message that you attach to an act or a service or a product makes the world of world of difference. And it was interesting with Australian ethical because everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. Every super fund is saying We do ethical investing, right?

Just click a button and 20% of your investment goes to ethical. Australian Ethical only do ethical investments and telling people vaping, doing this for 40 years, completely re. Rechange, the rechange, the context. ’cause people said, oh no, everyone’s only been doing this for 10 years. No, they’ve been doing it for 40 years.

They know what they’re doing and they make their ethical investing high return. And it’s like those couple of key messages completely reframe consideration of where you’re putting your money for ethical investing. Yeah. Key messaging is one of the important things you can get out of market research.

And it often changes the end outcome. There’s so many more things that we can talk about, but I want to bring up your PhD and we were talking a little bit before we started the podcast about it, so maybe frame it for everyone what the PhD is in, because I think this is an important area for people to understand.

’cause there’s a lot of businesses dealing with this generation that you are focused on. Yeah. My, my area of investigation was migration. And in particular I looked at the, so in migration there’s four questions. Who migrates? Where do they migrate? When do they migrate, and why do they migrate?

And we know lots about from our demography. So if we’re just thinking about Australia and migrating around Australia, it’s a very important question. A lot of our productive jobs, our great GDP is happening in the pilborough or. In South Australia, in the desert, a lot of it will be a alala.

We need people to leave the cities and go and make money for the country, right? So migration is very important. We knew a lot about where people went and when they went, and we knew a little bit about who they were from basic demography. So the data comes from the census. The data comes from the wonderful Hilda study we have going in this country.

But nobody knew why. Why do people up and move? And and I just dunno how far I go with this Anthony, but for 150 years, excluding forced migration let’s just park that, but for 150 years people say people migrate because. Benefit. I’m gonna be economically better off, better job, better work better, better quality of life.

It’s an economic reason. That’s why people go for 150 years been shown. That’s not the only reason why people migrate. So I was able to to look at this issue from those perspectives of who and why, because my company had been monitoring the baby bubble trend. And we’ve been asking baby boomers, what do you wanna do with the rest of your life?

And we had this great long list of 40 things, 30 of which were, I wanna read more. I want to plant a garden. I want to, spend time with my grandkids, all that traditional stuff. And we had 10 items that were, I wanna move to the country. I wanna move to the seaside. I wanna learn a musical instrument.

I want to design a house and build it. I want to go back to university, I wanna fall in love again. We had 10 of these young adult aspirations, right? And what we found was that people who wanna migrate, so if we look at these 40 things, we look at these 10 things, 70% of baby members didn’t wanna do any of those 10 things.

They were very happy with traditional, traditionally getting older, but 30%. I wanted to do one, two, or three of those big things. And so there was this, there’s this real divide amongst people, baby boomers of just aging traditionally or wanting to go back and relive their adult life again. And of course, it’s those people that wanna really live their adult life also wanna move.

They want a new chapter in their life. They want to go and do the things they didn’t do or do them again or whatever it takes. So anyway in my study that was, has run for 15 years, I was able to ask 4,000 people living in cities who said they wanted to move to the country. Did they?

And I went back to them six years, between six and two years after when they said it. And I found nearly 400 people who said I moved. Wow. And I said why did you move? And we were able to explore, a very contemporary framework around why people might choose to, to up and move, particularly at that stage of life.

Anyway, it’s a bit about it. No, it’s a big decision. And I think what’s interesting about it as well is the impact that has on. Businesses that are feeding that generation as well, you know that they’re that they’re working with them and whether it’s an employment situation.

There’s some still employed at that in the boomer generation, but it’s also products and services that, that generation buys also is impacted impacts businesses around. So it’s a fascinating area to understand. The psychology of all of that. And I think what interests me in that space as well is how that’s probably a newer trend in Australia, whereas I look at somewhere like the US for example, where.

Forever. Kids go to university and they don’t usually go locally, so it means that people travel and move. Interstate is a lot more acceptable and you just look at Hollywood movies all the time and the kids are away. They’re not living with you. Whereas our expectation in Australia is the kids, generally speaking, go to university within.

A traveling distance day to day of where you live, which is usually in a city. So it’s interesting that’s all changing. And I wonder as well on the back of all of that how much this kind of work from home idea as well as also going to impact future generation’s perception of moving away from the city.

Yeah. So Anthony, these are really great issues. Lemme start by saying the world. Changes. It changes a lot and you sometimes you need to take a bit of context. So if we look at Australia for example, we had a hundred years from colon colonization. We nearly everybody lived in the bush then we had a, the second hundred years post colonization where we became the most urbanized country on the planet with 70% of the population in five cities.

And now we’re moving into the third century and it’s reversing. So for between 1976 and 2016, the census shows that migration from cities to country was going down. And that trend was happening in the United States as well, and it was happening in Japan, and it was happening in Europe, and it was happening in the uk.

As we’ve gone through that digital revolution. We have become more stuck in place liking the benefits of the cities in 2016, four years before COVID, that trend started to reverse. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve emphasized that question about why did people, why do people migrate? ’cause nobody could explain this 40 year downward trend and suddenly it turned up.

Way before COVID and then it went into Hyperdrive through COVID where people left the cities and went to the country. And it has continued to grow post COVID. So something has happened, fundamentally happened now working remotely. I don’t think that caused it, but that’s certainly a massive enabler.

For sure people are very interested in that. And it’s enabling people to move and and particularly enabling couples to move. One partner might still and we talked to Anthony, perhaps I shouldn’t say, but you’ve just moved to a place where you couldn’t commute daily, where you could.

Lots of people do, but that’s tough. But commuting once a week, it’s absolutely fine. And so that’s opening up areas all around Sydney and Melbourne, allowing people to work. So my fundamental point is the world really changes and and you need to keep on top of this because you can’t always deduce why the world is changing.

So keeping some of those big macro pictures in your head is really important. David, we could talk for hours and hours. We have talked for hours and many times over the years. There’s a final question I wanna ask you, but before I do that, I’m just gonna remind everyone that we will include information on how to get in touch with David in the show notes.

I advise people who are interested in market research to definitely keep an eye on what instinct and reason are doing. They release lots of valuable information throughout the year, lots of global insights. That I know have I’ve been able to share with my clients over the years and give a huge positive impact on it.

And if you’re considering doing market research, definitely talk to instinct and reason. I know you, David, you and I have, as I said at the beginning of work together many times over the years, and we’ll continue to do but I just wanted to wrap things up by asking a question that I ask all of my guests which is, what’s the aha moment?

That businesses have when they come to work with you that maybe they didn’t expect they were gonna have in advance? I think for us it’s that multi-layered logic. Most of our work and that, and, they’re big budgets for big organizations, but you can ask a question in a group discussion or even an interview and you get a.

A response, which is true, but it’s not the whole truth. So because people are overlaying they’re overlaying, I wanna sound sensible and logical and smart. So here’s why I did that. It’s digging down gently underneath that and drawing people out to tell us why they really did it. It goes back to your point about I wanna look thin.

I don’t wanna look fat. It’s not that I want, don’t wanna lose. I like eating and I like the food and that’s not the problem. The problem is I want, I wanna look good to other people. And why? Why do they wanna look good to other people? You keep drilling down and I think the companies that love working with us love getting that extra layer of insight into why.

Fantastic. David, thank you so much. Amazing insights as always, and so many different areas, and I think there’s a lot of value that people listening in will get from the various stories and things that you’ve given us. So thank you for being a great part of the program. Pleasure, Anthony. Good luck to everyone.

Yeah. And to everyone listening in, as I said, information in the show notes and how to get in touch with David and instinct and reason, and we, of course remind you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we’ll see you next time on Biz Bites for thought leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites.

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