Uncovering Unique Insights | Matt Sadler

The role strategists is one that is not known too well. Who are they? What do they do?

I interviewed Matt Sadler of Mother out of London, England to learn what strategists do and how they secretly rule the world :)

Keep reading to learn about the unique ways Matt collects data for his strategy sessions and the mind blowing fact he learned while working with Reeces UK.

Q: What does a strategist actually do all day?

Every day is different, which is one of the reasons I love the job. As I say, one of the things that I didn't want to get into management consulting, did want to get into the creative world, is it's more fun, it's more varied, and your days are never the same and always different.

Broadly speaking, what a strategist does is like creative problem solving. So working out how clients can best achieve their objectives using creativity and then kind of expressing that in a way that can guide a creative team in a really inspirational manner, to absolutely smash that goal in the best way possible.

Then helping to guide and shape the work. Helping to unearth any kind of insights, audience insights, or research insights, or brand insights, or cultural insights that can uncover what the right direction is and the best and the most exciting direction is.

Then working with the team to craft the campaign and making a case for it as well.

Crucially, in a world where you can do anything, our job is to help make sure that we do the right thing, the right way and the best, most exciting way possible for the best possible returns for that brand and that business.

Q: What does the creative problem solving process looks like for you and your team?

I mean, it's a big old question. I'll try and give you a brief answer, but one that touches on some key points.

The first thing you do whenever you're kind of confronted by a new challenge, whether it's a new client, existing client, try and understand as much as possible, both in terms of the rational and emotional issues that you're facing and like really understanding the problem is a crucial first thing.

It's not always immediately clear, but if you can really get your handle on it and express it in a simple and inspiring way, then you're in a much better place to solve it.

Whenever you start working on a brief, then there's always a period of immersion, like swimming around possible bits of information about it. We may well get a bunch of resources from clients, but even if we do, we'll always do our own digging and research.

You're looking generally for ideas that are relevant to the audience, that are distinctive to the competition, that are authentic to the brand, and that kind of resonate in culture, that have something about them that kind of sparks with the now.

Traditional strategy and strategists is often talked as being like the voice of the consumer and the audience and having audience insight is really important.

We talk about finding true insight and not just what we call insight. So an insight is something that's a truth, but it's kind of a bit watery and a bit wet and a bit bland, as opposed to an insight, which is a surprising truth, something illuminating that maybe is inherently and instinctively true, but not immediately obvious.

Q: Could you give us an example of what a strategists would do for a client when it comes to research, strategy, etc?

Example 1

Let's talk about KFC. For KFC during COVID would have been like, oh, it's covid and there's a pandemic. Eat some chicken, feel good. Our finger licking good chicken will help you forget the pandemic.

That's kind of a an insight and it's true but it's not particular, exciting or interesting. Whereas the insight for the work that the KFC team at Mother did during COVID was actually that Covid makes KFC's slogan of its finger licking good a health risk, because of course, this is a time when we should be sanitizing our fingers.

So actually what the team did was they ran actually a global campaign to find a new slogan for KFC during the pandemic. They blurred out the old slogan and at a time when other brands were playing the violin of sadness. During COVID actually KFC brought Banjo and brought a bit of lightness and fun and joy, which was what everyone needed at the time.

It's all about finding the insight and then executing, finding the spiky way of expressing it. The audience insight, super important, but actually brand insight just as important and sometimes starting with the brand can lead to stuff which is more different than the competition.

Everyone's got the same audience, you start with the audience, it's more likely that you'll wind up somewhere that's closer to your competition. Actually, if you start with your brand and then work back around to your audience, think about what makes you special and different, then you can get somewhere sparky or spiky.

Example 2

So for example I work on Reese's in the UK. There's a very simple brand truth about Reese's, that what they are passionate and obsessive about is putting peanut butter in stuff, putting peanut butter in chocolate, they'll put it in anything because they know how delicious it is.

Actually, there's a human insight we uncovered about called dynamic sensory contrast, which is why chocolate is really good, but peanut butter and chocolate is mind blowingly amazing because of this scientific phenomenon called dynamic sensory contrast.

Which is where you combine things with contrasting textures and tastes like smooth, creamy chocolate and kind of sweet, creamy chocolate and crunchy peanut butter sends your brain into fireworks. So we kind of started with the brand thing that makes it really special.

But then obviously, the next step, and the crucial step, is to execute it in a creatively brilliant way. And that's where we work with our amazing creative department to bring that to life in a kind of a way that will just put a smile on people's faces.

Q: How do you go about revealing important consumer & audience insights?

Well, there's a variety of tools we can use, obviously, these days one of the simplest that anyone can do, but still often super useful beyond talking to people or doing some kind of official bit of research, is there's an awful lot you can find out on the Internet these days.

There's an awful lot that's written about and one of the things I always like to do, it's just a personal thing, but I recommend it to other strategists as well, is I always look at why people love stuff and why people hate stuff as well.

So I always search for often those two things, you can do it on Google, you can do it on Twitter, etc. It's very interesting. There'll always be someone moaning about something or raving about something. Find out why and sometimes it just, as I saying, uncovers these little gems and nuggets.

In this case, it's like I found an article about scientific reasons why Reese's is so incredible and it is the scientific basis to the taste explosion that everyone has when they try it.

I also deliberately try and go across a lot of different platforms because then when you're telling the story of what you think people should be doing and why, actually a really rich and varied collection of sources and storytelling elements is super useful and super powerful.

Ideally with actually a bit of a mix of kind of qual and quant and if you don't have official data, you'd be surprised what you find out if you type in survey about x. There's been all kinds of surveys that have been done, so you can often find helpful numbers that can dramatize either the scale of a challenge or an opportunity.

Q: What is one piece advice for someone who would like to be a world class strategist?

It's that classic be interested, be curious, go do weird things, go have strange experiences. Go learn odd stuff because those kind of strange experiences will make your work really well.

If you have the same inputs as everyone else, you have the same outputs as everyone else. So yeah, just go do interesting things, different things. Go watch weird quiz, go read weird books and go play weird games. Actually, it's been one of my hobbies for the last few years is I don't get much gaming time.

I've got kids, but I've been finding all the really weird games on the App Store and there are loads of really cool, original, different, inspiring, strange games out there that again, just kind of spark thoughts in your heads and just kind of encourage your creativity.