“Redefining Success”

David Santee, President, True North Market Insights, thoroughly enjoys discovering “new” solutions. Along with his team, he is always searching for new and creative approaches, but never for simply the sake of being ‘new.’ ‘New’ by itself is meaningless. But if we can find better approaches that truly solve real issues, now that is fun. Fortunately, there are so many sources of information that can be explored to solve problems better,” says David. “Not everyone enjoys the ‘new.’ We need good people who love executing well, and building the right team with the right characteristics is essential.”

For David, Christ is his biggest role model, whose ideologies have helped David become a great leader. “He was a leader, a mentor, self-sacrificing, cared for others. One of my favorite verses is “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord.” If we truly do this, no client will ever leave and we will have more referrals than we can handle.”

True North Market Insights is a team of former client-side researchers building the firm they could not find while on the client-side. “Too many firms are content knowing how to collect and analyze data. But we should know something about the topics we are researching. For example, if we conduct a brand study, we should understand brand strategy. If we conduct an experience or satisfaction study, we should understand something about experience and loyalty strategy and tactics. If we conduct a pricing study, we should know something about pricing strategy. It is the combination of the analysis and this knowledge that lead to strong and valuable recommendations,” says David.

"Our current focus is better understanding how humans make choices and evaluations in the real world. Nobel Prizes have been awarded on this topic. We are finding that traditional research methods are not anything like how humans make these choices in the real world.“

According to David, a study by The Corporate Executive Board revealed that 82% of senior executives want market research to be a strategic partner with them. But only 23% believe that they are. There is a huge canyon between what decision-makers want and what they get from the industry. “Our focus is to help our clients become that strategic partner with their management. We want to equip our clients so that they can have meaningful conversations with the management with real insights instead of only data and tables.” He adds, “thus, our data is not about just providing data. It is truly about providing better insights and delivering it in a way that enhance our clients ability to create change within their organizations. This is the ultimate goal – it’s not about a method, it’s not about more data, it is about helping our clients become a strategic partner with us by their side. If we do that well, we will have been successful.”

The client is paying for insights, not data. If we find we underbid on a project, that is on us. We don’t charge more. That is our mistake. But when this has occurred, they have found their clients very grateful for the effort, insights, and demonstration of partnership. All of True North Market Insights' approaches lead to a better ongoing relationship with the clients. As one client put it, “what we like about True North is that you don’t put us in a research methodology box. You think through what we need.” As stated before, these approaches are not about simply being different but better serving their clients with more actionable and predictive information. That is what True North Market Insights strives for. That is how they define success.

Our current focus is better understanding how humans make choices and evaluations in the real world. Nobel Prizes have been awarded on this topic. We are finding that traditional research methods are not anything like how humans make these choices in the real world. Our methods have not changed in decades. This leads to bad data and bad decisions. “We evaluate brands in isolation on a ton of scales And so we can compare the brand to others, we will ask respondents to do it again 2-4 more times,” says David. “But behavioral economics is telling us that humans don’t evaluate things on scales and we don’t evaluate options in isolation. We have been testing a new approach that we are very excited about.” IE