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Welcome to Dig In, the podcast brought to you by the minds at Dig Insights. We're interviewing some of the most inspiring brand professionals in marketing, innovation, and insights to discover the story behind the story of their most exciting innovations.
Jess Gaedeke (00:34)
welcome to Dig Inspiration.
I recently interviewed Tina Lambert, CMO and author of the book Innovation is Ugly. And we have a lot of innovation experts here at DIG, but I could not miss the chance to bring you Paul, our CEO, our co-founder, someone who's been innovating since the very early days to talk about innovation. Keep going, go on.
Paul Gaudette (00:52)
Keep going. 20 minutes
of just going on.
Jess Gaedeke (01:00)
But
thanks for joining, Paul. This is going to be fun. I mean, do we ever not have fun when we chat?
Paul Gaudette (01:05)
Yeah, no, we always have fun when we chat. Always. Always.
Jess Gaedeke (01:11)
for joining. This is going to be good. one of the things that Tina talked about that I really, it resonated with me was this idea of killing the middle.
is basically taking those ideas or those innovations that are sort of in the middle of your priority list and just getting rid of them. So what do you think? Agree, disagree, discuss.
Paul Gaudette (01:28)
I don't disagree with that. I think it's just a matter. It depends on the culture of innovation that you have at the organization and how much resources you have in time. I think when you talk about big bets, it is time intensive and so you are obviously putting a lot more faith into something that may or may not work. You don't necessarily know the outcome. You're actually called big bet for a reason. Whereas the small incremental ones I think are you're kind of banking on those ones to be more successful.
Now, sure enough, not everything's going to be successful, but you're trying to bank on those to be somewhat successful, incrementally, small little wins. And so a focus on that totally makes sense. I think where where Tina is right is that middle part can get really stuck in between the I don't necessarily know if it's going to work. And at the same time,
it's not too big of a bet that I'm going to dedicate enough resources to it. And you actually aren't able
provide the attention and the focus that you actually need to make those actually successful. They get lost.
And kind like a middle child, probably gets lost too. I mean, I wasn't a middle child. I was the youngest, but you know, feels the same. But that idea of if you don't necessarily have the confidence that something's going to
Jess Gaedeke (02:28)
Thank
Paul Gaudette (02:35)
you also don't have the resources to invest in it and lagging deep on the big bets. So
appreciate her perspective on the idea of if you're going to focus, take a look at the prioritization across your innovation hierarchy.
and those that are in the
think you gotta place either they're big enough a bet that you're gonna put the resources behind it or you kill
I don't know, what do you think?
Jess Gaedeke (02:53)
Well,
I found it
Paul Gaudette (02:54)
what do think?
Jess Gaedeke (02:55)
helpful to think about my own to-do list and say, OK, these are the things that absolutely have to happen because they are significant bets and big deals. And then there's these small things I can just get done and sort of get out the door. And then it is that middle that brings me down. mean, that's the stuff that stresses me out much more. And I've looked at that middle and said, you know what? These are like,
for delegating to someone else. they're, they could need to get done, but I could probably delegate. So I found it helpful. But the other thing that you said that kind of, you know, sparked me is, you know,
Paul Gaudette (03:17)
Mm.
Jess Gaedeke (03:25)
quadrant map in upside that shows the performance of things across those two dimensions of interest and commitment. And you know, my favorite quadrant, you know what it is?
Paul Gaudette (03:35)
Niche.
Jess Gaedeke (03:36)
Yes, it's niche because those are the things that were engaged. say niche, ⁓ but those are the things that can just be super incremental and they're not always going to be the biggest launches, but they can matter a lot to a smaller, very passionate group of people.
Paul Gaudette (03:38)
or or knit niche. don't know how do you say it?
Yeah, I think, yeah, that makes a good
Yeah. Sometimes when I look at that chart and there's that ones that are like high interest, but not necessarily like there's something about them that isn't really winning versus other ideas. You know, I could almost argue that those are the ones that are in the middle. Like they take more time. They take more investment. You kind of, you want to make them win. And it's, that's where I get back to like the resourcing. You want to make them successful. You want to make them be a winner, but you end up spending so much time on them to try to get them to be a winner.
that it's just you might as well have just killed the idea in the first place.
I I so I appreciate Tina's perspective on it to me as a matter of focus, resources and.
the ROI really on how much time you're going to spend on that middle versus the perceived outcome or the anticipated outcome.
Jess Gaedeke (04:33)
Yeah, yeah, well said.
So Tina shared in our conversation the story of the Turangos launch, which happened to be a failed launch during her time at P &G. She actually had props, Paul. She had like the old canister. She came to show and tell. It was really cool. And obviously, you and I have been a part of consulting around a lot of innovations throughout our career.
Do you have any memorable ones that you can share, either big successes or failures?
Paul Gaudette (04:59)
were prepping me a bit on this and I remember looking at this question being like, well, I can't like talk about like client failures. And you know what the interesting thing is, is that I can't, there's nothing memorable to me that was a failure from the client side, which is actually pretty good for the fact that, you know, maybe it's just cause all the work that I did with clients ended up being successful. I don't know. Probably. But I, you know, I think one of the,
Jess Gaedeke (05:17)
Totally. I mean, you work out.
Paul Gaudette (05:24)
One of my memorable projects was even just looking at salty snacks. And again, this is good. Kind of goes back to those incremental ideas.
the relationship between texture and flavor and brand and trying to really understand the elements of how do you win with the customer?
for me, the idea and it wasn't like it was a big aha moment, but the idea of the organization saying finally realizing that
If we almost just try to cannibalize ourselves and launch flavors that may be specific to one brand, but could actually transfer over to other brands,
you're doing
maintaining the consumer within that portfolio as opposed to losing them. Competitive private labels come in, they're kind of copycatting some of these flavors. And it was almost
shift in the organizations from the mentality to say that this flavor
in this brand don't always have to go together. This flavor, this texture, this brand, this combination doesn't always we can actually leverage the assets that we have within those three elements and trade them off against each other and still now have more occasions for the consumer to come into our
that was I mean, again, it's not like it's like a mind blowing idea, but it was more of a shift in the mentality. And a lot of that was what I appreciate about it was that it was consumer driven.
The idea of you understand the consumer, understand the behaviors, really taking that data and figuring out, how do we actually think about our business slightly differently as opposed to and we are we're guilty of this ourselves. And when we talk about innovation, this is where I tend to get to
even as a research company to think that, you know, we need to do more research with our clients. We need to ask them more questions just because the clients come to us to ask questions about their from their consumers. We need to do the same. And a lot of times when you end up talking to yourself as an organization,
you end up missing the thing that really will drive innovation or drive success.
And sometimes that's just a shift in the mentality. And when you hear it from a consumer, it really changes the way you think of your business.
Jess Gaedeke (07:20)
Yeah,
good about that. You're good about reminding us, have we gotten client feedback on this? Is it worth putting in front of a couple of clients? We're really good at that. In fact, I think that's the way you just get bonus points in a meeting is we just add that comment. We just say, should we get client feedback on this? just, yeah, that's it.
Paul Gaudette (07:33)
That's all I, yeah. Yeah, if someone mentions it, I'm like, promotion. Give that person a promotion.
Jess Gaedeke (07:40)
of the innovations I was a part of early in my career, and I took this learning to like our own innovation,
was a food company that had developed this technology where you can have this microwaveable tray, right? This they get like a microwave dinner or whatever. But it had like green beans that would be perfectly cooked and crisp. But it also had like a lasagna situation. And then it had ice cream.
And so this technology
put it in the microwave and the ice cream would still be perfectly frozen when you pulled it out of the microwave. So it was a really interesting technology, right? And we tested the heck out of all these prototypes and it just kept failing because turns out people don't care. Like they don't want to have this tray come out of the microwave. It's weird to them. know, like it was just a really interesting learning that you can have the coolest technology sort of like the
Paul Gaudette (08:09)
YET
Jess Gaedeke (08:28)
the snazziest thing and it's reminding me a lot of like all the AI innovation that fatigue that's happening right now because if you don't focus on what the consumer actually cares about, then you're really spinning your wheels on something that you might think is cool, but you need to like really get outside of your own head and outside of your own kind of team, you know, input to get consumer feedback. So.
That's one that I learned from early on is just make sure you're not just chasing this shiny objects, right? That you're innovating with purpose and that you understand the client benefit and that remains the North Star. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Paul Gaudette (09:02)
Yeah, mean, there's
that can go into in terms of you know, packaging failures and things where there's,
why something failed in marketing. It was because it changed really the brand, the asset of the actual brand itself.
I think sometimes that's undervalued. And when we think about innovations is like how you maintaining the essence of what it is that people are buying, but then adding kind of something to it. can you know? And it could be
an incremental opportunity for that brand or it could be a brand stretch into something completely new. But all of those things, there needs to be fit. There needs to be purpose. There needs to be consumer benefit and the need that you're satisfying. And that's why I love the work
Futures and Innovation team does because they also help to kind of look at those things and say how far can a brand potentially go in these different territories?
Let's think about those territories and then let's leverage our internal teams and technology to test those territories. So I think there's some ways we can really
Really good feedback. But iteratively and figure out like the most successful incremental innovations. You know, I feel like I feel like cyber like cyber. Everyone talks about how like Elon Musk was talking about Cybertruck and
Jess Gaedeke (10:06)
Yeah, yeah, they're girls.
Paul Gaudette (10:13)
He said something about like not doing consumer research because he got in and you know Cybertruck is like.
not doing well and it kind of shows you. yeah. no. Like the guy, you know, they had estimated they built a plant that had production of 250,000 vehicles per year. I think there were like 20,000 in terms of sales per year. Like there's, there's some sick. Yeah. And I'm not saying that, you know, he didn't come up with a cool concept and all that stuff. It's
Jess Gaedeke (10:19)
Is it not? I haven't tracked this. mean, I
Paul Gaudette (10:39)
the level of demand to meet that cool idea.
So that's where research really kind of helps.
Jess Gaedeke (10:43)
Yeah.
Speaking of research,
to take a moment to congratulate you again on the win that DIG earned, the ESOMAR Award for best use of data, right?
was tied to one of our methodologies
that really does work.
Paul Gaudette (10:56)
It's all of our wins, Jess, all of our
wins.
Jess Gaedeke (10:59)
a great example, right? Of how you can use novel methods to measure that demand so that you can be prepared for what you are going to sell and not be the Elon Musk.
Paul Gaudette (11:08)
Yeah.
Jess Gaedeke (11:09)
also talked about like how innovation teams should be structured. And she talked about the danger of putting innovation teams on an island. She said, sounds fun, but it's like the worst idea. So I'm just curious how...
You know, share with the listeners how we think about innovation at Dig. Where do the great ideas come from? How do we make sure that we're building a sustainable innovation engine? Talk to me.
Paul Gaudette (11:31)
Sure. What do you want to talk about? It's a, that one's a little, that one's tough for me because I think we've gone through so many iterations of trying to figure out the right way to innovate. you know, startup mentality, very entrepreneurial innovation comes from everywhere. That's a mantra we talked about all the time and try to get everybody to say, you know, everyone has great ideas and should share these ideas. And in part, we do that and we do that well in many ways.
Jess Gaedeke (11:33)
You
Paul Gaudette (11:59)
But I think where we fall down is not having somebody who's really in charge of driving innovation within the organization. Now, the one exception I'll say is our R &D team, under Joel Anderson, the data
department. I mean, they have mandates, and I talk to them all the time around, here's things I want you to really research and figure out and figure out how to solve. These are the kind of the big problems that we prioritize those. And so those are.
mission driven innovation opportunities. But when you think about like more blue sky opportunities or more just incremental opportunities that people are coming up with, we don't, we need to have a better system of trying to drive innovation. I
hear Tina's point on,
yeah, fun to have an island of team that this is the disruptive innovation team, or this is the,
innovation tasks force
But if there's nobody who's actually responsible and accountable for driving innovation inside the organization, then it tends to fall down because people tend to just rely on the things that they're used to doing. The one exception I think we're seeing right now is with the use of AI. So everyone in DIG has access to the chat GPT. And it's not necessarily innovation from a novel approach to things. It's basically leveraging tools in new ways.
to be more efficient at the things that you're doing. And people are using it in very cool ways. So it's innovation to an extent, but it's really ideas. How do we take a really cool tool and rethink how we do things in a different way? And that's still, that's very powerful because those ideas can get shared very easily. But I think from a large scale innovation,
platform and purpose, having somebody, regardless of they're on an island or integrated in the organization, having somebody
they're accountable for driving that, I think is important.
Jess Gaedeke (13:41)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there's the idea of delivering innovation and there's the idea of creating the perception and the market presence of being seen as innovative. How are those two things related?
Paul Gaudette (13:54)
I think our clients are pretty sophisticated enough to understand when, and especially they're, and they're knowledgeable and they've seen a lot of things. when you claim to be able to do something, they'll understand the level of sophistication behind it, whether it's actually true to what you say it is.
if it actually is valuable, if it meets a client need. So I think those things are very interdependent. think if you're gonna say that you're innovative, it's because you are doing things differently, you're challenging the status quo, you're coming up with different approaches, you're testing those things with clients, you're getting their feedback, they're part of that process, they're co-creating with you, and you're kind of making that part of your actual being, your mission. I think
There's lots of organizations, I think, that will try to say that they're innovative and it's flashy and flash, trust me, flash sells. But I think once clients actually see the substance behind it, more often than not, they're left underwhelmed.
Jess Gaedeke (14:48)
Yeah, I totally agree. They can see it from a mile away. And that's one of the things I think we really believe in, Is that it's one thing to be innovative and another to also be validated. So to be able to do both of those things, to be future proven, if you will, and important.
Paul Gaudette (15:01)
⁓
well done.
Yeah, and you know, these conversations, the thing is these conversations, sometimes they stress me out because then I just like, I realize how much work that there is still to
And everyone that's, you know, looks, you know, at what we're doing, I think externally, again, it's really hard sometimes internally when you just look at yourselves, but I hear externally from people externally that...
we are innovative. We're doing great things. We're truly changing the game we're doing. But it just never feels like we're it never feels enough to me. It always feels like, yeah, there's more we can do that we can be better at that. We can do things differently. Let's get more structure in place here and let's drive some real true innovations. And so these conversations always like give me like a little bit of a yeah, got a I got a you know, I'm stressed out. I to go back to the gym now because I'm stressed out. I got to go work off that stress.
Jess Gaedeke (15:53)
Well, I will say, I think you are a person that has an incredibly high bar. You have a very high expectation for yourself and for others, which is a good character to be in a CEO. But yeah, you really should feel good about the way we are seen externally. And I'm glad you get to hear that feedback every now and then because it's pretty special here at DIG. know, that's kind of a clever combination of a lot of cool things that are working.
Paul Gaudette (16:19)
Cool. Well, I'm glad that you're part of the team helping to drive that.
Jess Gaedeke (16:23)
Thanks, Paul. Glad to be here.