AI Knows Your Customers Better Than You Think (w/ Russ Evans, ZS)

In this episode of Inside Marketing with MarketSurge, Reed Hansen sits down with Russ Evans, Partner at ZS, to explore how AI is fundamentally changing consumer insights, brand strategy, and customer experience.

Russ leads ZS’s B2C practice, working with Fortune 100 brands to turn massive amounts of data into actionable insight — and insight into real business growth. This conversation goes beyond AI hype and into how brands can actually use AI to uncover hidden truths, map better customer journeys, and connect brand health to revenue.

If you’re a marketing leader, strategist, or founder trying to make sense of AI’s real impact on customers, this episode is required listening.

💡 What You’ll Learn:

• The biggest misconceptions brands still have about AI-driven insights
 • How AI fits into the modern insights workflow (and where humans still matter)
 • Why unstructured data is a goldmine most brands ignore
 • Real examples of “unknown unknowns” uncovered through AI analysis
 • Common mistakes brands make when mapping customer journeys
 • Why most journey maps fail — and how to fix them
 • How to actually measure brand health in a way that connects to revenue
 • What agentic AI means for the future of marketing and insights

👉 Key Highlights:

✅ AI as an Insight Engine – How brands are using AI to ask better questions, not just analyze data
✅ Hidden Customer Behavior – Why observation beats surveys in uncovering new opportunities
✅ Journey Mapping Done Right – How to turn journey maps into living, operational tools
✅ Brand Health Metrics – Why too many KPIs kill clarity (and what to focus on instead)
✅ The Next Wave of AI – What autonomous AI agents mean for insights teams

📈 At MarketSurge, we help you turn data, tools, and ideas into systems that drive real growth.
If you want marketing that’s smarter, more connected, and built to scale — you’re in the right place.

🧠 Want to talk strategy or see it in action?
🎯 Book your 15-minute Value or Free Coffee Call:
👉 https://link.marketsurge.io/widget/bookings/15minutevalueorfreecoffee

🔗 Guest & Resource Links

🌐 ZS Consulting: https://www.zs.com

🔗 MarketSurge Links

🌐 Website: https://marketsurge.io
📘 Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100035121171654
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsurgeio
🐦 X / Twitter: https://x.com/marketsurging
🎙️ Podcast: https://marketsurge.transistor.fm/

Creators and Guests

Host

Reed Hansen

Reed Hansen is a seasoned digital marketing executive with a proven track record of driving business growth through innovative strategies. As the Chief Growth Officer at MarketSurge, he focuses on leveraging AI-powered marketing tools to help businesses scale efficiently. Reed's expertise spans from leading startups to Fortune 500 companies, making him a recognized authority in the digital marketing space. His unique ability to combine data-driven insights with creative solutions has been instrumental in achieving remarkable sales growth for his clients. ​

What is Inside Marketing with MarketSurge?

Welcome to Inside Marketing with MarketSurge — your front-row seat to the boldest business insights, marketing breakthroughs, and entrepreneurial real talk.

Hosted by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at MarketSurge and a digital marketing veteran who's helped scale everything from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 giants, this podcast dives deep into what’s really moving the needle in today’s marketing world. Find us at Marketsurge.io

Each week, we’ll break down the latest marketing and business news (minus the fluff), explore tech trends you actually need to know, and feature unfiltered conversations with the most interesting minds in entrepreneurship and marketing.

Whether you're a founder, a marketer, or just a curious hustler looking to level up, this is where growth happens—loudly, smartly, and with just the right amount of sass.

Subscribe, tune in, and let’s scale something legendary. 🚀

Speaker: Welcome to Inside
Marketing With Market Surge.

Your front row seat to the
boldest ideas and smartest

strategies in the marketing game.

Your host is Reed Hansen, chief
Growth Officer at Market Surge.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Hello
and welcome back to Inside

Marketing with Market Surge.

And today we're joined by someone
who sits at the intersection of

data, consumer psychology, and the
future of AI powered marketing.

It's Russ Evans, partner at Zs, a global
consulting powerhouse with over th.

13,000 employees across 35 offices.

For more than two decades.

Russ has helped Fortune 100 brands
build stronger, smarter, more human

centered customer experiences.

He leads Zss B2C practice where he
focuses on helping brands turn raw

data into relationships, insights
into innovation and customer

behavior, into bottom line growth.

And today we get him all to ourselves.

Russ, welcome to the podcast.

Russell Evans: to yourselves
for better or worse?

Yes.

Yeah.

Such a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Great way to start the day.

It's a Friday when we're recording and I
know that Friday in the consulting world

is often like a regroup day, and so I
appreciate you spending that with us.

So let's start at a high level
what is the biggest misconception

that brands have about using ai?

For consumer insights and maybe let's
think in the context of late 2025.

Russell Evans: Yeah.

I, I don't know how pervasive
this misconception currently

even as of maybe a year ago.

I think there was still a healthy
dose of skepticism that AI had

a role in generating insight
and knowledge and intelligence

about customers and consumers.

And I suspect that's been
fairly put to rest here.

And so it's a matter of where,
not if perhaps it, it has become

a pretty, ubiquitous tool across
the process to generate insight

about customers and consumers.

Everything from, even figuring out what
question to ask in the first place.

To, okay, I'm asking a
question, what data do I need?

And then the analysis process itself.

So ha, happy to elaborate on where
that's happening, but I don't know that

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: And fear even that
I saw even as of, a year ago is

really all that present anymore.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge:
Oh, that's good to hear.

So maybe we can get a
little bit more specific.

So in the Insights workflow and
regarding the use of ai, what do you

think has most dramatically changed
and do you think there are parts of it

that it should not replace currently?

Russell Evans: Yeah,

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: it could always
get better, but, do you think there's

some specifics we could talk about?

Russell Evans: sure.

Yeah.

Happy to.

To get specific across
the workflow itself.

And I think there's good examples
of brands of all sizes playing, and

maybe that is a misconception too, is
that, oh, it's very expensive and I

need a enormous team or a tech team
or a lot of investment to use some of

these tools and approaches, which I
think is less and less true as well.

I'll back up to that very
first step of even look, what

questions should we even ask?

There are a lot of great tools
and approaches now leveraging

AI to help even inform that.

A lot of larger enterprises, for
example, have invested in knowledge

management platforms help curate and
gather all of the things they already

know, whether that's past market research
or other analytics that have happened.

those have gotten much better with
the introduction of generative

ai, in particular in being
able to respond to questions.

I wanna know everything about my brand
awareness or about this audience.

Here it is, and it's all
synthesized and summarized.

So you know what you're starting with
as a way to figure out what gaps remain,

what questions do I need to still ask,

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: On a smaller scale,
just going into your favorite LLM chat

interface and brainstorming about I
am this type of person in this type of

role, what questions should I be asking?

They've gotten quite helpful in a
thought partner kind of capacity.

Okay, you've got that question.

Getting data the next step.

Lots of tools and capabilities these days.

To democratize things that were either
previously, quite expensive or required

more advanced knowledge to really execute.

So for example, tools like Bolt Chat and
Outset that have really helped brands

of all sizes do qualitative research
quite efficiently and effectively

where you as a human can say, here's
the types of things I'd like to know.

And then AI will help drive a
conversation at scale with a lot of

whoever you're trying to go talk to.

And it's not as clunky as you would think.

Like they've gotten pretty sophisticated.

And those are, affordable, easy to
use tools that have really opened

up access to new sources of data.

On the kind of quantitative side,
there's similarly, platforms that

are now built for kind of lay people
who don't have a PhD in, insights or

marketing to be able to go and field
surveys in a very AI augmented way.

Site X is one that we work
with a lot, for example.

And then there's a lot of tools out
there that can help unlock data that

maybe brands have been sitting on,
unstructured data are full of insights.

Zs does a lot of this with tools we've
built to go into long form social media

types of data or product reviews, which
are just full of rich information.

About who people are and what they
want and why that stuff out there

is either doing it for them or not.

Previously pretty hard to unlock with
kind of older generations of analytics and

classical ai, but pretty easy to do now
even with just off the shelf kind of LLMs.

a lot of these tools now then,
I've got the data, but like I

need to do some fancy analysis.

They're starting to have that built
in a very easy to use fashion.

So like even copilot in Excel
is getting pretty decent for

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: of run of
the mill sorts of analytics.

then as you push that process further,
I think AI has gotten embedded in

helping to come up with implications
or I just did a bunch of analysis,

what does it mean for my brand?

You can

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: you know, data and
outputs of analytics exercises

into, again, just chat GPT or Gemini
or whichever platform you use.

I want a war

You about competitive scenarios.

Pretend you're my competitor and
I'm this brand and I might do this.

What do you think?

And you can get really good, maybe
not final but good starting points on

implications for you and your brand
and, whatever you're trying to do.

But to your original question, I
still think the role of humans in

this process is absolutely critical

AI for all it can do these days.

It doesn't understand your brand
or what you're trying to do

or why you're doing something.

And so as an orchestrator of that process,
with some kind of domain expertise,

whether that's related to insight or
marketing or sales or what, whatever.

Still need to be at the helm to say, yes,
these questions are ones I could ask, but

it's this one that I actually need to ask.

Yes, this is

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: I could use,
or that is an analysis I could

do, but I don't need that.

So orchestrating that
process and then ultimately.

Doing something with it.

I still think is a,
thankfully, very human required

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that makes a lot of sense.

Is it, I think you've outlined it really
well that, aI does enable people to scale.

There, there's so many tools
that are, that were previously

unattainable or un unaffordable that
now are available to SMBs and, and

I think that's pretty dramatic now.

Maybe just like story time.

I'm just curious, I know you're, you
work with NDAs and confidentiality and

if the answer's no, that's totally okay.

But do you have, since you work in the
world of like unstructured data and

gathering insights, have you, found
anything in this recent process using

these, using the vast amounts of data.

Any surprising hidden truths
that you've seen AI driven

analysis, uncover for a brand?

I, and I'm heavily caveating this knowing
that you work with sensitive information,

but any coming to mind as anecdotes.

Russell Evans: the facts to
protect the incident, so to speak.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: that's one of the
advantages I think of using AI in a,

in an insights generating capacity.

It used to be that, if you wanted to
learn about consumers or whoever they

were, your customers or prospects,
whoever you'd have to think of

questions to go ask them in many cases.

And AI increasingly lets you
observe, in, in, in meaningful ways

without having to lead the witness.

And so you know, listening and observing
and capturing all of those kind of

bottom up signals and context, you can
uncover a lot of unknown unknowns that

Have even thought to
ask about in the past.

And for example, we've worked with
a lot of organizations in the food

and beverage space and there's all
sorts of weird stuff people do with

food that creates opportunities for
brands that they didn't know about.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Okay.

Russell Evans: for example marshmallows,
like not a category I had thought

a lot about, if I'm being honest.

I was pretty clear on what you do
with marshmallows or so I thought,

but one of the things we found
was the little mini marshmallows.

People were taking them in
their cars and using them as a

portable sweetener for coffee.

'Cause it doesn't really matter if
they go stale, I'm gonna throw them in

liquid and have them dissolve anyway.

They taste good.

They dissolve easily.

They're portable.

And that was just a whole new way to
use marshmallows that, our client in

that case had never really thought of.

If you look at

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Interesting.

Russell Evans: common now
too, protein in coffee,

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: be early in the morning.

I'm giving you two coffee examples.

Like the whole subcategory.

Now there's whole products really designed
for, protein that, that is in coffee or

mixes well with coffee and other liquids.

But that was a trend that you could
pick up on using AI years ago when

it was, some wacky genius somewhere,
thought of putting protein powder

in coffee and talked a lot about it.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Nothing.

Russell Evans: And so

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: you can go through
these AI approaches and find those.

Hidden gems a lot easier before you
would've even known to ask about something

in, in more traditional approaches.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

And so building off that customer journey
building and mapping is really critical.

I think that's an end goal
of a lot of these endeavors.

And.

I think as you said, like AI helps
you ask what you're not seeing, are

you seeing any common blind spots that
some brands are having when they're

mapping their customer journey?

Are they has this been revelatory that
like brands really just don't think about

the point of sale or something, or like
for, just for instance, what's, what step

of the journey have they been neglecting
that AI really help them figure out?

Russell Evans: Yeah.

I am a huge nerd and so journey mapping
is a passion of mine because I think

it's one of those tools that brands.

Every brand of any size or
industry or category should have.

But it's, and I don't even think
brands would disagree typically but

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Sure.

Russell Evans: one of those
areas where they're often not

very effective and they're

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Ah, okay.

Russell Evans: ways.

And 9,099 of them are not terribly good.

And I'll happily geek out about that,
but, of the myriad things that I commonly

see that are maybe problems with journeys
an altitude and structure problem.

Pretty common.

A lot

Have a soup of journeys.

They've built them over the years.

Different parts of the businesses have
built different types of journeys.

Some of them are high level, kind of
broad customer experience oriented.

Some are micro journeys.

They don't connect with each other, and
they're causing just chaos and confusion.

And so I think that's one of the
bigger problems is just journeys.

How do you start with a singular,
overarching view of your

relationship with a customer.

And then you can double and triple
and quadruple click into parts

of it, they should nest into each
other in a structured way so that

they all speak to each other.

That tends to be a big gap.

Not being too myopic on just the things
that I do today is another challenge.

I

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Okay.

Russell Evans: brand in the, travel space.

I'll say a couple.

I guess months ago at this point.

And I'm paraphrasing, something to
the effect of our journey starts when

that traveler gets to the airport.

And I was like

Like I, I'm a traveler and my
journey certainly starts well

before I arrive at an airport in

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: influence how I think
about brands in that space, or whether

or not I'm going to use one or the other.

so

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Huh.

Russell Evans: about the things
you literally do right now, you're

probably missing a lot of opportunity.

Upstream and downstream of those in ways
that are actually really relevant to you

that you could be doing at something.

If you're only focusing on channels and
touchpoints that you use today, you may

be ignoring the fact that your customers
are doing a whole lot of other stuff

that influences how they think about you.

So

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: sure.

Russell Evans: big one.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: I.

Russell Evans: How brands activate
journeys, I think is another

kinda pain point I've seen a lot.

So knowing the customer's and what's
happening with them super important of

course, but that's only half the equation.

If you don't then look at

Half, which is what are we
doing across that journey in a

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: methodical and
purposeful way, what are our objectives?

I know what the customer's trying to do.

And

Have

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: but what are we
doing about it in a way that brings

together all the parts of your
organization or whatever that is.

who needs to be capturing data here
so that we can use it down here?

What tools and tech do we need to be
creating an experience here and here?

What

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Right.

Russell Evans: matter across
that whole experience?

How are we gonna measure ourselves?

Which actually is another challenge
too, now that I'm on a roll.

I'll pause, I promise.

But

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: No.

Keep rolling.

Russell Evans: KPIs in a way that you can
track these over time so that the journey

doesn't become this kind of static thing
that lives on a shelf, but it really

should be the framework that the whole
company's using to drive engagement.

And it should be

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: breathing and
updating and like, how are we doing?

We've improved this part
because, and we know that because

there's a KPI here that, that we

You know, changing all
agreed that's the right KPI.

And so

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Right.

Russell Evans: a way to actually.

View the journey as a living and
breathing kind of blueprint for

Business.

I think is another big miss
for a lot of organizations.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

You've been doing this for a long
time working with consumer insights

and have probably been aware of.

The vast amount of the data,
the our increasing ability to

work with it and analyze it.

Do you see, and, current
and I'll just go back.

I used to work in the tech
space on I was selling like SAP

Hana and was very familiar with
what IBM was doing with Watson.

And the hope was even then
that they were gonna uncover.

All sorts of insights, just by you threw a
bunch of unstructured data at it and, the

hope was that tech would just sort it out.

Fast forward to today we're
still getting pieces out of that.

Do you think, how realistic would it
be in the near future that AI can be

somewhat proactive, that we can just
throw ma massive amounts of data at

it and that it can extract insights
That it how how do you feel about

that potential in the next few years?

Russell Evans: I think,

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Here we go.

Russell Evans: I'll, I guess
bullish in the context of your

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Okay.

Russell Evans: may a

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: less bullish in the
context of career of stability for me.

But I think we're already
seeing that to a large degree.

With guidance today,

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Sure.

Russell Evans: AI can be even out of the
box, but it can be, even loosely trained

pretty good at extracting insights.

When it is told what types
of insights to go look for.

Where I think we're starting to see
in more sort of the term of the day,

ag agentic AI where you've got now
specially trained, agents that are taken

off the shelf and given a little more
guidance and training and honing to, to

do a certain thing a little bit better.

And now those are starting to
work together in more workflows.

I think it requires even less
guidance from humans about,

here's what I'm trying to do now.

Go do it, please.

so you could probably fast forward not
that far in the future, a year or two year

from two years from now, when the agents
are going to be more capable, but they'll

also be coordinating with each other.

Like a, terminator sort of style
but, following directions from

some human but now working with
each other to conduct bigger and

bigger exercises with more autonomy.

and I,

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: those exercises could
very easily be insight generating,

here's a bunch of data I wanna know,
generally these things have at it.

I think we're already seeing that today.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Okay.

I think that's intriguing.

I, probably exciting for some and
less exciting for others, but I'm

I, that's good to hear from somebody
that's immersed in this every day.

Now.

Can you tell us a little bit about
maybe let's jump to the, some of the

questions I had about like brand health.

So there's a lot of metrics
around brand health.

Like some are quantitative the
number of followers your, what your

ratings are cus consumer sentiment.

Are there popular metrics
that are overused or or on the

other side under-emphasized
that you think are useful?

I know brand health is hard,
difficult to quantify, but I'd

love to hear your insight on that.

Russell Evans: Yeah, I think this
topic has become a more popular one.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: of the, I don't
wanna say last stones on unturned,

but there's been a lot of other.

Things that brands do that have gotten
a lot of attention in recent years.

And, but like how I measure even what my
brand is or the health of my brand I don't

think has been given the scrutiny maybe
that, that other areas adjacent have.

I don't know that the problem is
lack of metrics to measure brand

health that I've seen anyway.

It tends to be the opposite,
which is we have too many things.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Too many.

Russell Evans: and those are
the ones you talked about.

But like also just all the broader
digital behaviors that could exist.

How many visitors am I getting,
how many searches am I getting?

All those types of things.

And you've got perception sort of
data that comes from like brand

trackers that a lot of, brands have.

Of, are you aware of me?

Are you considering me?

All those types of things.

How likely are you to buy?

Then you've got like stuff
I'm doing as a brand, like my

spend data and here's all the

I've deployed and the problem that
I've seen most commonly is that none

of these things talk to each other.

So I get six different views of what
my brand is and how it's performing.

And then none of those things actually
talk to what I care about, which,

typically is sales and revenue

Profitability because they all
live in their little silos.

And so

Thing we've been trying to do a lot more
of these days is how do you bring all

that together, so that you've got, I spend
money over here, it should do things.

Hopefully if I'm doing it

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: in customers
or perceptions in customers.

then that should ultimately drive whatever
business outcome, selling a thing.

Bringing all that data together.

Figuring out then to your point
about okay, in the hundred KPIs I

could care about which ones actually
matter, which are the ones that

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: do drive sales and then
building an ecosystem that lets you

have clarity finally about, I'm gonna
spend money here and it's gonna do this

to these KPIs the five or six or seven
that I actually have to care about.

then it should drive
sales or again, whatever

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: No.

Russell Evans: thing is
at the end of the day.

And having that kind of integrated
ecosystem, to finally answer questions

like, how much is my brand even worth?

Or should I be spending money
on brand building or sales?

Or my, my awareness levels went up by 2%.

Is that good?

Do I care?

Is that enough?

You can now finally actually
answer those types of questions.

If you bring all that
data together which is a.

Fairly complicated analytical exercise.

But even if you don't have the ability
to do that, I think just conceptually

thinking about bringing these things
together going through a brainstorming

exercise of all the ways that you
would want to measure brands and

being a little more comprehensive.

Then some tend to be
historically, it isn't just

awareness, it isn't just clicks.

But think about the all the ways that
your brand actually engages with your

customers across all the facets that
could influence them, and pick a KPI or

two from each of those different facets.

And now now, that's how
you understand brand.

It's not any one of those.

It's this holistic collection.

You can still do that exercise with all
the fancy math and analytics perhaps

to even start getting a sense for
how to think about your brand and how

effective we are in, in, in ways that
I don't see a lot of organizations

doing real effectively today.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Yeah.

No that's helpful.

Russ, I feel like I'm not
doing you justice in just 25

minutes or so of interviews.

I feel bad about that.

I also feel bad about the limits of my
understanding on this topic that I am.

I, I'm also just scratching
the surface of my questions.

You probably have.

Volumes of information that, that
we just wouldn't be able to get to.

But for people that are more interested
in learning and getting deeper with

you, where are the best places that
they could find you work with you or

the Zs practice to, improve their brand?

Get deeper customer insights, what
are the best ways to find you?

Russell Evans: Good old fashioned zs.com

is probably the easiest.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Great.

Russell Evans: There's a
lot of folks, by the way.

You're being very kind.

I think the translation for what
you said is, seem like you could

geek out for hours, and I don't

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Yeah.

Russell Evans: want to have that.

And so thank you for your you, you
were much more polite in how you

phrased it, but yes there's myself
and other geeks like me who would

To have those conversations.

So you zs.com.

Probably the best way to find this.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: Great.

Fantastic.

Russ, it's been a pleasure and I it is
nice to talk to somebody that's really

immersed in a topic like you are like
consumer insights and the way the AI

is affecting it's really where the
rubber meets the road, I think for.

The actual utility of ai not just
talking about it in generality.

So that's really helpful.

But thank you so much for
joining us today, Russ.

Russell Evans: It's been a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Reed Hansen, MarketSurge: I.

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