The intersection of data, insights, AI & the future of marketing

[01:56] Paul Yocum: Steve, thank you very much. It's great to be here.

[01:58] Steve Phillips: Yeah, same here. Hello. Okay, Paul, let's start with you. You recently went through this major to organizational shift where Insights became what you describe as Switzerland inside the business. The objective truth at the center of decision making, what drove the change and what's actually changed in how marketing and Insights now work together?

[02:18] Paul Yocum: Steve, thanks. It actually goes one ladder up from that where we're as a company step changing our brand building muscle, right? And really ensuring that we bring out the craftsmanship of what is brand building. And as a part of brand building, it's just absolutely critical that Insights, or may I even call it consumer learning and knowledge, becomes a real craft — I use that word, a real expertise that we have in the business — and that needs to sit alongside the core marketing groups of product marketing or content marketing or shopper marketing. And as I use that word, Switzerland, it's because we need what I call agents of truth. Right. The consumer is the boss. James is out in Indonesia. He spent his morning talking to our boss in the shopping environment. And that's so critical because the marketers — yeah, I want them to have a bias, right — they're going to come in and believe that every package or every product or every claim they're making is absolutely the best and is going to just knock it out of the park, as they say in American language. But here James and his team are also then sitting at the table as the voice of the consumer, and many times having that expertise in terms of the research that needs to be done, the knowledge that we gained from that, we can turn to a James and his team and say, "Okay, okay marketer, I know you love your pack, but what did the consumer really say? What's really in the head of this consumer?" And so a bit of neutrality is why we coined that term Switzerland. And I think it's really a good balance, and it's something that is absolutely a way forward for us.

[04:02] Steve Phillips: And tell me a bit more about the transformation internally from a branding perspective. What are you trying to do differently than you were doing say two, three years ago?

[04:11] Paul Yocum: A couple of fronts. One is just taking a consumer first. We have had a tradition, and there's nothing wrong with this at all, in terms of a little more trading led. Some of it's — our categories are not as involved as other categories in the personal care space — and it's really now moving into a more longer term mindset, especially on the innovation front, as we take our brands and plot out how do we go from good to better to best in terms of our products and architecture. So that timeline is important that we look out. But again, it does come back to the core craftsmanship of marketing, and really that's building demand at every level. And it starts again with the consumer and the insights that James and his teams help us to mine and to turn into action.

[05:03] Steve Phillips: And that must be exciting for you, James, to be part of that decision making structure.

[05:03] James Mackenzie: Oh, absolutely. And it's, it, it's brilliant to see, and wouldn't have — have great support from Paul and great support from the business to do that. It's, it's brilliant to have that ability to sort of be the influencer. I always talk about insight — I'm a massive football fan, right, I always talk about insights — it's our job in the team to pass the ball to the people to score the goal, right, which means we need to pass the ball at the right time, at the right speed, at the right part of the field, to allow people to go on and do what they need to do for the rest of the team, and having the independence and the support to make those decisions. Sometimes that advice is welcomed, right? Sometimes it's great. As Paul was saying, marketeers inherently have a bias to their claims and their products and the things that they love. And sometimes they, they like what we've got to say because, you know, they're, they're fairly close to what the consumer wants, that emotional need or that functional need. And sometimes it's harder, right, because it's not what they want to hear. You know, it's different to their perception of what they're trying to build. But having that support and having that independence means that the balance of the times when it's — when it's easier to hear — and the balance in times where it's more difficult to hear, land equally as effectively, right? And that's the importance — insight is here to influence. It's not here to set the agenda. It's not here to be the ultimate decision maker. But having this support structure allows us to do that, whether that be in the UK, Indonesia, whether it be with our US teams, et cetera.

[06:49] Paul Yocum: One more analogy. I just came back from the US in the last day, and I had the brilliant opportunity to spend a morning in a wolf, wolf endangered center in the middle of America. Fantastic. And if you enjoy nature, it's just mesmerizing, these wolves. And we had a fabulous guide that guided my wife and myself through this private tour of this wolf sanctuary. And I liken that a bit to James's organization. That tour guide was fantastic. She was able to guide us and point things out. But the takeaway from that day was mine, right? It was my interaction. So if I'm the marketer, I still have to get and extract out with the consumer — what are the insights? What do I do with that knowledge? What do I turn it into action on behalf of my brand? How do I find ways to get my brand closer to serving the needs of the consumer? But this tour guide was so instrumental in helping that whole thing come together. And it made me think of how we can leverage our insights teams even more.

[07:58] Steve Phillips: That's brilliant. So as the tour guide Jones, there's a lot of excitement in our industry, as you know, around speed — faster research, faster feedback loops, faster decisions — and we can enable all of that. But how do you balance that need for speed with the need for quality and rigor in the insights themselves, to make sure the decisions that Paul and his team are making are the right ones?

[07:58] James Mackenzie: Yeah. And the speed that the industry, the sector, the technology is changing at is difficult, right? It's difficult. And, you know, you almost have to evaluate on a daily basis at the moment how am I going to — what am I going to do today, what am I going to do tomorrow? But I think fundamentally it's about having some principles, and at the heart of it, for me, the growth in tech, the growth in AI, is about getting to the human quicker. Right. It's not about replacing the human. It's not about taking that consumer out of the loop or taking that shopper out of the loop. It's about getting to them really quickly. I think that's the basic principle that I try and hold myself to, and try and hold the team to, try and hold the insights function to. And once you set that as a framework, and once you set that as a sort of "how do I get to the human quicker," what that allows you to focus on is: does this give me the richness that I need? Does this give me the, the, the, the level of insight? Is it easy to understand? Is it simplistic enough? Can I compare it with other points of data? So I start to build the story and start to build the, the tour, right? How do I, how do I build, what are the points of interest through that? And I sort of think about tech in sort of three ways, really. How do I use the tech to create the survey, create — answer that, you know — create the questions that I want to answer quicker? How do I use the tech to make the human have the best experience when they're answering those questions for me? And how do I use the tech to really quickly summarize what the outputs of that are? And if you think about it all the way through the line, that allows you to get to that human quicker. And that allows me to give Paul's team, the marketing team, my colleagues, and not just the marketing team, the commercial team, the acquiring management team, the finance team, answers to questions quicker, but with the human at the heart of it.

[07:58] Steve Phillips: That's great. And Paul, from the marketing side — you know, when we started out in our careers, a typical project would take five, six, seven, eight weeks, right? Particularly if it was overseas, it might take 10 or 12. And some of these things that James is turning around for you now are taking days and not months, right? Sometimes it's weeks, not months, but sometimes it's days. How does that enable your marketing teams? How does that change the way that marketing works?

[10:58] Paul Yocum: It's great — it's actually could be even hours, Steve. I think sometimes the way this goes, I think in addition to the speed, the part I really enjoy is the quantity, right? So now, in some ways, I use that silly term of qualiquant with James these days, because the world of qualitative was that focus group of eight decades ago that would, as you said, take weeks — when you had to spend money to get it written up, et cetera, et cetera, and you weren't even sure how biased it was that night that it happened. Here — through techniques, you're able to not only get quicker, but to 2, 300 individuals, 2, 300 consumers, in the comfort of their home, where they're, as James says, not worried about being dragged home because there's three kids waiting, et cetera. But it's that type of depth and speed that I think go hand in hand with where things are emerging. The other part, as we get into the speed, or even what I call the breadth of how an AI is helping us, is the conglomeration of all the data, right? So it's not only having the 200 or 2,000, it's now, how do you synthesize that at a speed that is unprecedented? And I think that's the other piece — as well as the current tests, it also goes backwards. And James, you know, we're working on a, you know, internal, where we want to be able to conglomerate all the research we've done over the decades and really make sure we have that at our fingertips as well.

[12:34] Steve Phillips: And does that change the way you can do your brand building, or does it just speed that up, or does it enable you to work in a different way?

[12:42] Paul Yocum: James, you want to comment on that? I'll do the same. But what's your observation?

[12:47] James Mackenzie: I think it allows us to — it allows us because the richness of the data, it's this balance between, if not just the speed, it's the richness. So, so let me just come back a little bit, a little bit to what Paul was saying before, to help answer that question. We've got difficult categories to do qualitative insight in, right? Because they're very personal. They're really, really personal. How you wash your kids, right? How you wash and bathe your kids, how you put self tanner on yourself, how you wash yourself, how you wash your hands after you use the toilet. All of these are quite personal things, right? And speaking truthfully about them can be quite vulnerable, right? It can be quite vulnerable as an individual. And as Paul was saying, there are inherent biases in focus groups, and there are inherent time challenges in focus groups. But fundamentally, we've all been in those environments where somebody says something and you as an individual go, "Ooh, I don't do it that way. Am I weird, or are they weird?" Well, I'm not going to chance my arm by speaking up and saying that what I do is weird when I might be the normal one. So what, what I sort of — and I love and fully, fully endorse — Paul and I have lots of conversations about qualiquant. I, you know, I love quantitative data, right. And I love the fact that we can turn qualitative research into quantitative data now. Right. It's really, really fantastic. But the fact that we can do AI led interviews of our consumers at the moment of usage, in their homes, in a protected environment where they don't feel vulnerable, improves the richness of that data. And because we got better, more better quality data, and we're doing it quicker, that feeds naturally into brand building, right? It feeds really naturally into not brand building in a sense of "I want to take advantage of a tactical moment in time," but I want to get my colleagues closer to how consumers are using the products in the moment of need. And doing it in, in a way that is democratized and easy to use is fantastic. So I see that the platform that we use for online qual — what I see time and time again is my marketing colleagues going back into that platform and really analyzing the data, not once, not twice, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 times. And it becomes part of their way of operating, right? So going back to my football analogy, I haven't just passed the ball once to give them an opportunity to score the goal. You're continually playing the ball, but you're playing it when they want it, right? You're not guessing when they want it. You're not guessing how they want it. You're not guessing what format they want it in. You're giving them the ability to provide better emotional and functional needs within the brand.

[12:47] Steve Phillips: Yeah, I was going to say this richer contextual data, which it was hard to get years ago — and I still remember running focus groups at 8 o'clock in the evening about breakfast cereal, it's so out of context — and so this richness of data, does it inspire marketers in a different way? Does it improve the product, the packaging, the advertising that you're doing because you understand them so much better?

[16:34] Paul Yocum: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think what's happening now is — and back to the speed — the word is this constant iteration, right? And it's a bit like the golf analogy: if you keep taking the practice swings, you're going to get better. And I think that's the other part. If you think of the old world of you did the research, you had to wait, you then got a report, then you got to come back together — like, there's this continuous flow now, right? And I think creativity is also a spark many times, and it is in the moment. And I think that ability to be literally analyzing the data, having a conversation, tweaking things, learning again, tweaking things — I really find that, I think that's inspiring to the marketers because they're seeing their changes, they're getting reaction, and we're, you know, obviously you have to cut it at some point and say, "This is what we're going to take to the market." But, but I really find that ability to, to have more, more iteration is just fantastic and real time. It's — it's almost now in real time.

**[17:39] James Mackenzie:**

And the qualitative work can presumably help create empathy within your teams for the consumer, which is. Always helps them build and, and that's why it's really important to talk to them at the moment of usage at home, right? And you do it on a platform where you are capturing that obviously in video. But it's really powerful to play that video to the marketeers, to the commercial guys, rather than. Here's a video of somebody sat around a focus group in Swindon, right? It's not in the right environment. You can tell they're thinking about picking their kids up, they. That they're worried about bedtime. You know, they're not as attentive and it's in a false environment. And there's always an element of doubt of whether that's true. I've never had, I've never had anybody in PZ turn around to see to me and say, once we've presented them the core research collected in this way, or even the quant research in terms of, you know, concept testing we're doing with 200 people, or would that be on an ad or would that be on a product? Turn around and go, well, I don't quite believe this, but certainly in focus groups, that's the commonality, right? People go, well, I don't believe this. People wouldn't be atheists because it's conclusive proof, right? The skill then comes in taking that bit of data and this bit of data and that bit of data and building the story. But you just wrote, you're just narrowing the road of opinion all the way through it and getting to the point of what, what is the reality? To give the marketeers the, the base to, to do what marketeers do really well, which is be creative, create new products, create new campaigns, you know, solve consumers problems.

**[17:39] Steve Phillips:**

It's great. So technology really sounds like it's enabling you to transform the way you work. It's improving the quality of the, you know, the insight that's being generated. It's improving the work that you guys is doing, which is brilliant. But you also not, you're also a very interesting company in that you're managing, you know, brands in very different markets around the world. And Paul P. Cousins operates across very different markets from the UK to Indonesia to Nigeria. How do you stay locally relevant in those markets without completely reinventing the business every time?

**[20:01] Paul Yocum:**

Great question, Steve. And we use a term on a daily basis called building locally loved brands. This is a company that has a bit of an eclectic portfolio. There is no debate about that. And I think that's part of the DNA of the 150 years of the company is Pattison and Zaconis P and the Zed. They were two gentlemen that started in the west side of Africa and I think we play into that now. I think we're getting very comfortable with having those locally loved brands that have been a part of the fabric of these markets for decades. We're not a company that says we're going to take one brand and stamp that in 50 countries. So what we have to do is leverage where we can. The scale of a James, he's in Indonesia right now and I view that as a lot of the how. Right. So how do we go about the insights? How are we going about the brand building? How are we doing to the product? We have a global R and D team that, that definitely supports each of the markets. So we're picking wisely where we can get some scale and obviously that helps on the cost front. We're not doing it, we're not going to slow anything down. But at the end of the day, you know, the morning fresh that is the, that is in the hearts and the souls of the Nigerian consumers is morning fresh there and it means something to them that's different than the one in Melbourne. Of course, course there's commonalities and we're going to find that and I think that ladders up to the category level. How do you understand dishwashing? How do you understand hand sanitizing? How do you understand children's personal care? And then we manifest that through our locally loved brands.

**[21:42] Steve Phillips:**

And James, you've talked about understanding what unites consumers versus what fundamentally differs market to market. Could you give an example of how these local nuances completely change product design, comms or consumer behavior?

**[21:42] James Mackenzie:**

Yeah, it's fascinating because you look at, you take something like washing, bathing, big part of our business, right? You know, whether that be shower gel or body hair and body wash or shampoo in Indonesia, on the outside of it, you look at it and go, functionally, it's a really functional category. You know, people wash and bathe and it must be the same all over. And actually, when you look at it from an insight perspective, when you look at this above category, this core human behavior, right, there is a ton of things that when you talk to consumers, those emotional cues are the same. Mums all over the globe are really wired and tuned into the washing and bathing of their kids, especially their young babies and their young kids, as protection. It's about care and the emotion and protecting and making sure that that child is clean. Not because society deems they should be clean. I mean, that's a big influence, but because they want them to be healthy and they want them to look after it. And there's a big thing about that sort of washing and bathing being connected. There are a load of other societal pressures about, you know, being clean, you know, you know, turning it to work and not having body odor, all that sort of stuff and all of these emotional things that the need to feel refreshed in the morning, you know, I need that, that, that boost in the shower, like a morning espresso in, in the shower, to wake me up, to give me that zip, to kick start the day and get me ready for it. That, that those human behaviors, that human condition, that that psychological approach is really, really consistent all over the globe. But fundamentally, then you look at countries like take the UK and Indonesia, there are some real differences. You know, I'm sat in Jakarta at the moment, it's been 36 degrees here, it's really humid, it's hot and sweaty. You two are both very happy that you're not in the same room as me, right? But that drives a lot of behavior. People in Indonesia wash them both twice a day, right? So versus about once a day in the uk, right? So all of a sudden there's the volume comes into play, right? The volume and the size of the pack is far more important in Indonesia than it is the UK because the veracity of which I get through that is quicker. Plus also in Indonesia, showers are a really, really foreign concept, right? Baths are a really, really foreign concept. 97, 98% of the country have a thing called the back Mandy, which is the cold water scoop wash. The label, you might have seen it on tv, you might see in various, you know, travel programs, if you're in the west or whatever. Now imagine washing and bathing your child before bedtime in the uk. So all of us who sit in the uk, or even, you know, major Western countries like the us, have a view that I wash and bathe my child. I put them in some water, right? Whether that's hot, lukewarm, whatever. And I've got this, this dilemma of kids don't want to be washed, but I know them, I want to be washed. And this, this, this challenge is I need to make that environment fun for them. So I try and remove some of that tension before bedtime. Now, imagine in Indonesia, where most people have a tiled sort of wet room with a scoop wash. Your kids are running around, right? They're not, they're not in this bath, they're not there. But you have the same tension. Mom and dad wanting them to be washed, kids not wanting to do it, mum and dad wanting to do it. And you can't keep them in a bath, right? And you're pouring water over them. So how you understand these functional differences, and you're doing that twice a day in Indonesia, right, because of the heat, quite often more if they've been out and about and been playing and got. Got dirty and filthy. So you have to look at this of how do I solve the functional needs as well as how do I solve the emotional needs? And that takes you well beyond just the formulation of the product. It takes you into the size and shape of the product, takes you into the volume, takes you into the shape of the dispensing, how you get the product out of that. And that's the bit that I find really absolutely fascinating.

**[21:42] Steve Phillips:**

Fascinating is it's, it's the things that are the same that unite us, but how we then again pass the ball at the right time to help our brand teams get the right product size, pack price, you know, is, is the fascinating journey we're on as a business. So you, you've also, we've, we've discussed this. The difference between the consumer and the shopper. So you have the nuance by market, but you also have the consumer versus the shopper. And how you manage that.

**[26:51] Paul Yocum:**

How does.

**[26:52] Steve Phillips:**

It sounds like you've been looking at the shopper focus today? How do you think about that difference and manage that difference from an insight perspective?

**[26:52] James Mackenzie:**

Yeah, it's it's, it's really fascinating. I think, I think every single FMCG business I've ever worked with, every single retailer I've ever worked with often gets consumer and shopper confused, right? Quite often. It's really easy to say the word consumer when I mean shopper and shopper when I mean consumer. And I think there's a sort of, there's a high level thing which is how do you try and get a bit of discipline in the organization to say do I actually mean consumer or do I mean shop might be the same person, right? But the mindset is different and the things that influence them, where are they in that journey? So we have a very, very simple path to purchase model which is how do I map out the that consumer journey from the consumer need, how that's influenced by trends and fashions through to the activation of that through to the decision to buy it, through to who's going to buy it, am I going to buy it myself or, or is somebody going to buy it on my behalf through to then, you know, shopper channel, do I get it online, do I get it offline, what's my mission, et cetera. And I think that that that sort of simple framework helps the organization set that discipline of where am I, where am I thinking about that in that. And there is a specific call out in that between consumer shopper and once you start to sort of break that out and you start to look at where your various bits of data as an insight person are, they sort of start to fall naturally along, along that path to purchase and then you can start to break down what are those emotional and functional needs, right. And where are they? Are they at shelf, right? What is my need? You know, what problem am I trying to solve for? How do I make a product stand out on shelf? How do I, you know, how do I fit something that is perfect for a back. Mandy in Indonesia, big and stocky, doesn't get knocked over and kicked by the kids into a small convenience store. You're looking at this today where the shelves are this big, right? And you start to think about that as a shopper piece and you sit that in context and contrast with what you're trying to do to solve the consumer needs. But it's about language and it's about mindset and it's about the consistency of asking that question. I think my prior to stay one of my proudest days in pz. I don't think I've said this to Paul, but was I remember seeing our CEO talk After about a year of I've been in the business and we were doing a big business sort of quarterly review and Jonathan said the immortal lines that we've got to service both our shopper and our consumer, I was like, right, I'm done now. Right, I packed up. I've got to that point that if I could influence the CEO to see that. Brilliant.

**[26:52] Steve Phillips:**

Finally, Paul, I'll start with you, but I'd love your thoughts on this as well. James, we've described the transformation, you've described it as building the plane and whilst flying it. When you look two or three years ahead, you'll have been building more of a plane and flying it for another couple of years. What do you think will separate the organizations that successfully adapt to this new environment from the ones that fall behind in a couple of years? What is it that distinguishes the winners and losers and particularly with a focus on the combination of working together between marketing and insight?

**[30:30] Paul Yocum:**

Yeah, it's a good question, Steve. I'm going to go back to the last topic a bit because I think that is a piece of what's transforming, I think at exponential speed. I think we're at a real tipping point. And we talked this consumer and shopper and James used the path to purchase. I find this path to purchase is narrowing in terms of the length of. Because you have the agentic world that's coming upon us and the consumer now can really go in the fingertips or in a voice recording asking questions to AI friends, you know, who they might be called, whether that's a Claude or something else. And they're getting answers that they're looking for. They're already synthesizing again. We used to talk about path to purchases bouncing around. It wasn't linear. I get that that's. That was the day. But now this is. While it still may be a bounce, that bounce is so narrow now that I can go from I thought about buying an E bike because I'm going to be biking this summer in the hills of Slovakia to getting a full list of where now, where, what retailer within a 10 kilometer radius and who has it in stock, Honestly, I mean if you keep doing the right prompts. So we talk the transformation and building the plane and I think that will be a big piece of separation is what categories, what manufacturing categories which lead you to the brands are going to be a part of that journey. To have the right data in the right place to be feeding that, whether you call it an algorithm or ecosystem. I think those brands are really going to be there because the consumer shopper now gets tighter.

**[32:10] Steve Phillips:**

Yeah.

**[32:11] Paul Yocum:**

And I think that's exciting. I think we're going to see another channel shift. We're already seeing that at some parts of the world. And the brands better be ready because there will be brands ready. And part of our journey, James, is how do we ensure our brands are fully ready and ahead of that curve. And that's why we're working with companies like yourself, because that's how do we stay ahead in a world that's changing at exponential rates?

**[32:42] James Mackenzie:**

I had an economics professor when I was an economics student a long time ago, and he stood up, I think it was probably lecture one or lecture two in my first year. And he said, right, we're going to make a massive assumption here that all consumers can see all prices at any one time, but don't worry, that'll never happen. Right. And jump Forward sort of 30 years. That model is in the bin already because of smartphones and access to data and is only going to get faster and faster and faster, I think. In terms of building the plane, what does it look like? I'm very fortunate that my, my background is a mix of insight, client side, insight, retailer side, but a lot of it is in tech. So I'm really comfortable with the moving goalposts of tech. Right. And I'm very comfortable in an agile working. I'm very comfortable in that sort of startup mentality of there's an mvp and that MVP might be great today and it might not be so good the next day. How do people see value in what the change is and see it for the continual improvement it is and the continual ability to help them do their jobs better? And I think that is something that we absolutely need to have at the heart of the pilot's manual. Right. And that's really the thing for me, as Paul said, insight is almost a bit of a specialism, as a bit of a sort of expertise. So, you know, it's not. I don't want my brand colleagues, I don't need my brand colleagues to sort of get into the nitty gritty of how we get to serve. I need to help them understand the why and I need to help them understand what that future looks like and make it as accessible and democratized and as supported as possible so that we get the best out of it.

**[32:42] Steve Phillips:**

Brilliant. I think that's a great place to finish the main stage of the podcast, but we always have a little lightning round at the end, so very short answers. I'm going to ask you a few quick hitting Customer insight related questions. We'll start with James. So James, what's one consumer behavior shift you think marketers are underestimating right now?

**[32:42] James Mackenzie:**

I think it is the role of influencers and how people are starting to cotton onto that. People are just being paid and it's just an extension of advertising. I think it's really easy to go. I will get influencers to do my job for me rather than thinking about how and the what and the why.

**[32:42] Steve Phillips:**

Interesting. And Paul, what's one thing AI has genuinely improved inside your organization beyond just efficiency?

**[35:45] Paul Yocum:**

Good one. So I think it's. I'll start with the word curiosity. I think it's enabling them to become more curious at a quicker pace because ultimately it's about the prompts and it's about that two way building whether that's with one of your agents or with whatever tool you're using. And I really, I really appreciate that. I see it already that they're becoming one more curious and again getting more clever and how they're seeking to unearth that insight.

[36:12] Steve Phillips: No, that is good to know. And James, what's one assumption companies still get wrong about global consumers?

[36:15] James Mackenzie: That consumers are the same in every country. Right. And you can take a big brand and push it out. You have to have this locally loved approach. You've got to understand what are those — we talked at length earlier about what are the differences between those functional needs in market.

[36:35] Steve Phillips: Paul, what's one insight or behavior you've observed in another market that completely changed how you think?

[36:46] Paul Yocum: So James alluded to — he's in Indonesia, right? The washing and bathing habit is not that of the west. In the shower world, this scoop washing has changed how we're looking entirely at this category now, from the dispensing mechanisms to the efficacy of the wash itself and the ingredients we're using. We've re-engineered really from A to Z how we're thinking, based on the insight that that is not what would happen in a London, with — I think it's 72%, right James? — of people that are scoop washing. So that transferability is fantastic.

[37:25] Steve Phillips: That's really interesting. And finally, I'd love you both to answer this one. What's one thing organizations need to stop doing if they want to make better decisions faster?

[37:39] Paul Yocum: James, I'll go.

[37:41] James Mackenzie: Yeah, you go first.

[37:42] Paul Yocum: Because I see it even in my own organization. I think we have to let go more. I think, again, I find myself prompting some of the newer folks in marketing to think like it's 2027 and 2028, because they're still not letting go of, "Well, we did it this way, Paul." Or, "You know, we have this kind of data from the—" No, guys, this thing is changing at exponential rates. You know what? I guess it was in that one famous musical or show called Frozen. Let it go. Just let it go.

[38:17] Steve Phillips: Guys, I'm going to have to really struggle not to agree with Paul on this, right? And I'm not saying this because he's my boss, but it's the sacred cows, right? You know, if I learned one thing from spending time in the tech world and the sort of agile startup mentality, it's almost forget what you did yesterday and cast off the shackles. Right? I'm definitely not going to sing "Let It Go," but it's a sacred character. That would be a great way to lead us out. Yeah, that would be great. This is definitely the difference between Britain and America, right? You know, one leads with Disney and one leads with a very British sacred cow.

[38:58] James Mackenzie: Brilliant.

[38:58] Steve Phillips: Okay, that wraps up this episode of the Inside Insights podcast. Thanks to James and Paul at PZ Cussens for joining us. If you'd like to contact James or Paul, you can find a link to each of their LinkedIn profiles in our show notes, or at insideinsightspod.com. Or you can visit the company website at pzcussens.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and want a regular stream of insights and inside knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app, or follow us on YouTube. Okay, that's all for today. See you on the next episode of Inside Insights. Thanks, chaps.