Merrill Dubrow: My name is Merrill Dubrow, CEO of M/A/R/C Research. I'm a 35 year veteran of the research and insights community and the host of our podcast, On the M/A/R/C. On the M/A/R/C is focusing on executives and thought leaders in the world, sharing their insights, strategies, and personal experiences. I promise this podcast will be filled with tough, pointed questions with real, insightful, and emotional answers. Today's guest is Kathryn Korostoff, President of the Research Rockstar. Kathryn, I'm excited to have you. Welcome to the On the M/A/R/C Podcast.

Kathryn Korostoff: Thank you, Merrill. It's great to be here.

Merrill Dubrow: So I've got to tell you something, it's very interesting because when I was living in Massachusetts, we didn't really know each other, but we have a ton in common. I was heavily involved in the MRA, the local Boston chapter, I know you were a president of that. You've worked at Chadwick Martin Bailey, they were one of my first clients in Massachusetts when I was working for a different company. And I love Anne Bailey Berman and Judy Melanson and Mark Doherty, so I'm kind of jealous that you got a chance to work with all those folks every day. You got – you went to BU, I can spell BU, so we've got that going for us. And not to mention, I grew up – and you probably don't know this – I grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts, which is right next to where Southborough is. And I still have my – you're gonna get a kick out of this – I still have my Southborough 1987 softball champs jacket. That was the best softball team I ever played on, we were like 24-0. So we've got a ton of things in common, so welcome.

Kathryn Korostoff: Well, thank you very much. And those are some really good overlaps, I've got one more for you.

Merrill Dubrow: Okay.

Kathryn Korostoff: I know the number 56 means something to you.

Merrill Dubrow: It does. It does. I will be doing – we've been in business 56 years and I will be doing 56 podcasts this year.

Kathryn Korostoff: Well, I have been in life for 56 years.

Merrill Dubrow: Oh, wow. That's great. Unfortunately, that – I'm a little older, but that is great. Congratulations. So we've got that in common too. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit, just frame your career a little bit, and then have it lead up to Research Rockstar and talk a little bit about what you're doing now.

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah, absolutely. So I had founded Research Rockstar Training and Staffing ten years ago because I really wanted to help anybody who wanted to be a research rockstar be a research rockstar. And the reason I was really passionate about that is that, previously, I had run a market research agency called Sage Research. That was an agency I had actually run for 13 years that I bootstrapped. And you had mentioned Chadwick Martin Bailey, I actually – I had actually existed, I had a transaction, I sold that company to Chadwick Martin Bailey. And, in fact, some of my old team members are still there. The gentleman who was my right arm running research is still there as the research director of their tech division, so it's really nice to see that longevity there.

Merrill Dubrow: Wow. I think I sold to you guys many, many years ago. That's incredible.

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah. So it was a great experience. I was really fortunate because I got into the market research agency business with a very specific angle on technology. And when I started that, that was in the early '90s, it was actually the beginning of, really, the Internet as we know it today. And, so, we were the first research agency that was really bringing true primary research methods to a lot of these IT and tech companies, they weren't really there yet. In the early '90s, a lot of market research, true primary research, was actually very much consumer oriented and very consumer product oriented. And, so, we were really sort of right place at the right time. I was the first one to really start promoting primary research to a lot of these tech companies. And, so, we really got our foot in the door with some really awesome companies as the Internet was first taking off. So we had an amazing client roster and it was a really great experience. But even then, I could see over the course of the 13 years that I built that company, I could even see just going through that process of building from 0 to, when we sold the company, I think I had 16 employees. And you saw a lot of changes in the market research business in that space. And one of the big changes we saw was increase in complexity, more data sources, more methodologies, more best practices. When I first got into this industry many years ago, about 30 years ago, if you knew how to do some basic statistics, if you knew a little SPSS, and if on top of that, you were a true trained focus group moderator, you were like the golden unicorn. You could do no wrong. You got tons of work. But those days are gone. And, so, it's not enough just to know about surveys and focus groups any more. But, back then, it really – it was a different time. So what's been interesting to me in the course of my career is seeing how things have changed so much in terms of all the things people need to know about in our profession. And, again, having been in – run a research agency, I really got to mentor my own employees and, frankly, coach my own clients about adapting as things were changing. But I did forget to answer one other part of your question, you'd asked about how I'd gotten here. Before I actually started a research agency, I had actually been client side. So I have been on both the client side of research and on the supplier side of research as it were. Which is something, by the way, I often recommend to my students at Research Rockstar. When I'm talking to our students about their own career planning, I point out that there's really advantages to having experience both as a corporate researcher and as an agency side researcher.

Merrill Dubrow: I totally agree with you. Do you think it's easier to go client side to supplier side or supplier side to client side? Because I have an opinion, I'm just curious on what yours is.

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah. I think that there are challenges with both those transitions. That's a really interesting question. I think that, for a lot of folks, going from client side to supplier side can be really painful. And, although I think that may be changing. But in the old days, before ten years ago, if you were on the corporate research side, chances are that, while you may have been an extremely knowledgeable market research professional, you probably weren't – you were probably working with a lot of partners. That is, you were managing the projects. You were consulting on the methodology design. You were navigating with your internal clients and stakeholders, but you weren't necessarily the one who was actually doing the recruiting or doing the data analysis or moderating the groups or anything else. You were primarily a project manager. Again, a huge skill set, very valuable. But, then, when you go into the agency side, there's a lot of value placed on people who know software, who get hands-on, who are actually either doing the moderation or literally doing the recruiting or doing the questionnaire design or doing the programming. It's just a different kind of skill set and it can be, really, a hard challenge for people who may have been in a – more of a project management role to now be in an environment where they're expected to do a lot of stuff hands on. And, as you know, a lot of research agencies run lean. So, if you work in a market research agency, you don't necessarily have five people that you can delegate stuff to.

Merrill Dubrow: No. You're 100 percent right. I mean, to me, if I had a choice and if people could go to the client side, which on their first job is probably going to pay a little bit more, probably gonna get them a little bit more of a bonus or a sign on bonus. Overcome that, I think you're better off going to the supplier side for a few reasons, number one, it will allow you to work on a lot of different verticals and a lot of different – and with a lot of different clients. I think you have much more of a chance to get pigeonholed with regard to working on the client side starting out then you do on the supplier side. I think if you give it a couple of years, convert over, I think you're in a much better position, you frame your career a little bit more. I think you can see how a – different clients have been set up, how they work well with suppliers and their partners. To me, it makes sense doing it that way. And it also gives you a chance to work, really, hands on with research. Most clients, not all, but most clients rely on their research partners and suppliers for all of that, whereas, when you're getting out of college, I think it'd be great to jump into the data and really put together a report, put together a presentation, review tables, come up with what are the ah-ha moments. What are the takeaways, what's the top line look like? And I think you're better off doing that first.

Kathryn Korostoff: I think that's a really great point. And I hope you don't mind a friendly disagreement.

Merrill Dubrow: Sure. Please.

Kathryn Korostoff: I would have 100 percent agreed with everything you just said ten years ago. The caveat that I would say now is that there's been a lot of upskilling within the corporate insights functions over the last several years. And, at first, it was – felt very much like outliers, like there are a handful of organizations here and there that were doing more work in house. But, really, in recent years, it's – I've seen a very big shift. And where, yes, the insights teams that are on the corporate side, yes, they still have vendors that they rely on for certain types of projects, but I know a lot of teams that are doing more research in house. So I agree with you at the high level that starting off on the vendor side or the agency side can give you a breadth of skills and experiences that will really serve you well when later going to the client side. But I would be loathe to generalize that people on the client side these days don't get a lot of hands on, roll up your sleeves research experience because I'm actually seeing a lot of that. And the thing that they get that, sometimes, the vendor side folks don't have the luxury of is that when you look at the insights teams at brands these days and how they are staffing and upskilling and working with their internal clients and stakeholders. You're seeing a lot more collaboration. You're seeing a lot of more cross-functional team work, where the insights team may be intersecting with customer analytics or other behavioral or transactional database type folks. And, so, they're getting an opportunity the folks at the research agencies don't always get, which is getting to work with a wider variety of data sources that may exist within the brand and, also, having that opportunity to be collaborative with those different areas to try to solve the business problems.

Merrill Dubrow: And, no, I think you're right with that 100 percent, and that there's some good takeaways there. So let's talk about training today. Obviously, with COVID-19, how has that changed the way that you're training some of today's research rockstars? I mean, has – have you added some new courses and training sessions that, maybe, you didn't have three months ago, five months ago, Kathryn?

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah, so we haven't actually changed our topics because we already have a catalog of 28 topics. And, so, some of our newer topics that we've added are like our Sampling Practicum, our course on Mobile and Online Qual, etc. But, over the last few months, I haven't felt compelled or seen demand to add new topics, however, I've been lucky because my team here that runs the training portal, we've been working on advancing e-learning for a long time. So, by coincidence, a few months ago, we had actually transitioned from our old learning management system, or LMS for those of you who know about virtual learning and such, to a new LMS to better serve our students. So we were at – we actually had just done this when all this horrific stuff started happening. So we'd already done the upgrade to better serve our e-learning customer, but that's what we always have done. I've always been in the e-learning business, I don't do in person training. So all ten of our instructors and myself, all of – we do all of our teaching in a virtual classroom. And we've always had some students who attend those e-learning sessions live, that is they show up, say, for four consecutive Thursdays, meet the other students and the instructor in the classroom for, say, Intro to SPSS, hypothetically, right? But we've also had a lot of students who choose to just do the recordings, they don't want to attend the live sessions for whatever reason, maybe they're international and it's just time zone differences. But we have a lot of students who have always chosen to take the courses just on demand, so they don't attend the real time sessions, they just watch the recordings. But everybody gets the lectures, the assignments, the quizzes, the final assessments, etc. So we've already been in e-learning, so it wasn't that hard of a transition for us.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great.

Kathryn Korostoff: The only thing that I will say is that, for a while there, we had actually been seeing less demand for the real time sessions and more demand for on demand, people just doing it on the recording. But since COVID-19, we've seen a bit of a switch. We've seen more people who want to attend the live, real time sessions.

Merrill Dubrow: What is your – if you had to give me your top 2 best sellers out of the 28, if I heard you right, you said you have 28 different training sessions, 28, probably, modules. What's the top two?

Kathryn Korostoff: so we have 28 courses. In terms of sales, probably Market Research 101, just because so many – we get a lot of team managers who send their teams through that to – as a level set. That is, they want – a lot of times, we have team managers who have market research teams and insights teams where the employees have come from a lot of different places, some of them have had formal market research training, many of them may not have. Some of them might be newer to research. Some of them may know about qual but not quant, or know – they know about quant, but not qual. And, so, they run people through the Market Research 101 program as a way to sort of get everybody to have the same language and the same basic set of foundational knowledge. As for number two, that's really tough, but I would definitely say one of the next ones is our course on writing quantitative research reports.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. So are people – with COVID-19, we're smack, I guess, you could say in the middle of this, hopefully we will be past this as things open up more and more with each day, we'll be past this soon enough. But a lot of people are gonna be rebranding themselves, in my opinion, whether it's switching careers, maybe market researchers going to brand marketing, or marketing come in to market research. I assume you have a number of courses that they – at different levels, right?

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah, absolutely. So our courses are all labeled as either level one, level two, level three, or all levels.

Merrill Dubrow: And a level one, is that starting out in your career? And level three would be –

Kathryn Korostoff: – Yeah. That's – no. Yeah, so level one is you don't need to – anybody can take this course, there's no prerequisites. And level two is, for example, in our Questionnaire Design 201 course, we want people to have some survey research background, otherwise they're gonna get a little lost. And, then, level three are sort of the advanced topics that we really – are better for people who have significant experience. And, but we also have a bunch of courses that really can be for anyone, for example, we have a really popular course on Client Management Skills.

Merrill Dubrow: Is that possible? Can you actually do that? Can you manage clients? Wow.

Kathryn Korostoff: Yes, you can manage clients, but you have to be very proactive and deliberate about it. And it's really funny because in market research, even people who were trained on the job, a lot of us were trained to do the methodology, but very few people were trained on how to run successful meetings, how to plan and execute a successful kickoff call, how to make a great first impression. And all of that stuff is part of client management.


Merrill Dubrow: Yeah. No, you're right. Can you give us some more – so, for some of the listeners that, maybe, not have had an opportunity to be part of – has gone to one of your courses, is there a best practice or, you know what? In order to manage client kickoff calls, one of our secrets is blank. Can we just – just give us a little morsel. I don't want you to give away all the secret sauce, but just a little one.

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I really enjoy teaching in this class, although we're – so I taught it the first few times we taught it, we now have a new instructor on it. But one of the things that I really like is we have an exercise that addresses making that great first impression. Now, I know this sounds trite, but it's really not. I see way too many meetings where a researcher comes into the meeting or comes into a presentation and they are not putting their best foot forward. They're not making a great first impression. As researchers, we have a tendency not to be great marketers of our own skills and capabilities. And, so, what – one of the exercises we do that really helps these students is we actually give them an exercise where they have to create an introduction script. So it's sort of like this hypothetical case, you're role playing, you're going to be going into a meeting with a new client and it's a kickoff meeting and you want to make a great first impression and you have to introduce yourself. Of course, you don't want to spend a lot of time introducing yourself, you don't want to come off as being a little bit of a megalomaniac or something, but you need to make a precise, confident introduction. And what do you include in that introduction? How do you establish credibility and portray yourself in the right way? And, so, what we do as a way to help people articulate how they want to be perceived and make a conscious choice about how they want clients to perceive them is we use celebrities. So we use celebrities who have different sorts of personas, in terms of how they communicate and their credibility. So we use Neil deGrasse Tyson, we use Oprah Winfrey, we use Branson, Steve Jobs, a couple of other very well-known celebrity folks because it's sort of like, if – it's like, how do you tap into your inner Oprah to make a great first impression? Or how do you tap into your inner Neil deGrasse Tyson to come off as the sage who is a credible source of reliable information? So that's one of the things that we have in that course [AUDIO SKIPS] I really enjoy.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. No, that's great. I'm a little – I must admit, I'm a little bit disappointed you didn't say Mark Wahlberg or Ben Affleck, or Matt Damon, all from Massachusetts, come on. All from Massachusetts. You went in a little different – so let me ask you a question. I'm gonna give you an option, pick the number four or the number five.

Kathryn Korostoff: Five.

Merrill Dubrow: Give me five words, in your opinion, five words that describe today's Research Rockstar.

Kathryn Korostoff: All right. Well, the first one will be informed.

Merrill Dubrow: Informed is on the list. What else? Give me four more.

Kathryn Korostoff: I would say data-fluent, which, by the way, could be qual, quant, and both. I would say articulate, organized, communicator. Now, I know I didn't give you a parallel list of words, but –

Merrill Dubrow: – But it's interesting because, to me, those are all great words. I think the last one might be the most important because you could have great thoughts, but if you can't communicate them effectively to a client, to your internal teams, you're not gonna go anywhere, which is interesting.

Kathryn Korostoff: Yeah.

Merrill Dubrow: Let me switch gears for half a second, Kathryn. Did you always – I mean, look, you taught at BU, right? You're an adjunct professor. You now own a training company. Did you always want to – did you always like to teach?

Kathryn Korostoff: I think that it was part of why I was successful when I ran an agency, was because I always spent a lot of time with my clients teaching them.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. That's great. So were your parents – did you get that influence from them? Were they teachers back in the day or no, you just...

Kathryn Korostoff: No. No, not at all. I just – I have a slightly – a slight academic bent, I think, just mentally. I like factual information. I like to read research. I spend a lot of time on Google Scholar. I just, I'm always interested in figuring out what the current best information is on any topic. So, and one of the things that I found early in my career was that in the market research field, a lot of people have learned on the job. But they never learned, maybe, some of the factual information about why we do certain things, or they may not know what all the options are. Because, on the job, they were trained to do questionnaires a certain way and they didn't know, there's these other options for questionnaire design that I never even knew about. And I love having that ah-ha moment with people, where I teach them something and they're like, oh. I've been doing surveys for ten years and I never knew that.

Merrill Dubrow: Yeah, that's funny.

Kathryn Korostoff: And it's a very – it's very fulfilling. It's a very exciting moment.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. Kathryn, I can't thank you enough for today. I really enjoyed our discussion. This is the On the M/A/R/C Podcast. My name is Merrill Dubrow. Have a great day.

Kathryn Korostoff: Thanks, Merrill.