What has been the client or researcher response to Insider Insight? Was there pushback on the informality, the value of findings, or the small sample sizes?

Yes, across all three dimensions. Researchers were the toughest audience because the method removes the controls they rely on: a recruiting screener, a moderator's guide, and a structured interview order. Early on, Mona had to replace more traditionally trained researchers with people who had Design Thinking backgrounds. The bigger mistake was presenting Insider Insight as a standalone method that produces answers. Reframing it as a tool to generate better questions for follow-on research significantly improved acceptance.

Do you follow up with the same people from Insider Insight sessions, and do you use those outputs to shape the questions for follow-on research?

Both happen, and every combination in between. Using the outputs to shape follow-on questions is the more common path. However, when a particular participant's story is compelling, the team will go back to that person and schedule a structured one-on-one with a researcher. The insiders themselves are connectors and bridges, not researchers, so the follow-on session looks quite different from the original conversation.

Can Insider Insight outputs also help define or refine target audience segments?

It has done that, though the small sample size limits confidence. In one current project, a healthcare client had divided users into two belief-based segments that were treated as fixed opposites. The Insider Insight conversations revealed that people's beliefs on the topic shift day to day and are not as binary as the segmentation assumed. That did not produce a new segment definition, but it surfaced a dimension the team had not considered.

What are the logistics around compensating insiders and providing instructions?

Incentives are market-defined and vary by project. For a layoff study, nearly everyone the team approached already knew several recently laid-off people and was willing to have the conversation with minimal incentive. Instructions are kept to an absolute minimum: name the topic and almost nothing else. It took a year to reach this conclusion. The more instruction insiders receive, the less natural the conversation becomes. Some transcripts will be poor data, and that is acceptable.

Are there written resources or a guide for researchers who want to try Insider Insight?

Not a published guide. Mona mentioned a roughly one-hour webinar on the methodology that she offered to share with attendees. The method itself is central to what Motivate Design does, so direct conversations with the firm are the most practical path for teams that want to try it.

For virtual Friendship Groups, has using Zoom breakout rooms been considered?

Yes, that approach was specifically confirmed as a direction the team is exploring. The broader challenge is making the Zoom session feel less like a research study and more like a social gathering. Current experiments include requiring a shared virtual background as an opening activity and scheduling sessions around a social ritual such as drinks.

Why We Hoard Toilet Paper: Using Insider Insight to Study Crisis Consumer Behavior

Mona, founder of Motivate Design, presents a qualitative study on toilet paper hoarding during the early weeks of COVID-19. She uses the study as a practical demonstration of "Insider Insight," a fast, conversation-based discovery method her firm developed as an alternative to traditional interviews and focus groups. The talk covers the method's origins, how five real conversations revealed emotional and social drivers behind hoarding, and where Insider Insight fits within a broader research process.

Key Takeaways

Toilet paper hoarding was driven by comfort-seeking, fear of social exclusion, and a desire for control, not rational supply concerns. None of the five participants reported thinking about supply chain or effects on others.
Insider Insight works best in pre-discovery, before you know what questions to ask. It generates new curiosity and better questions for follow-on interviews or surveys rather than replacing them.
Letting people have natural, unstructured conversations surfaces things respondents will not tell a researcher directly. The gun safety study showed that a key campaign statistic felt like a parenting insult, something that never appeared in formal research.
Less instruction produces better data. After a year of iteration, Motivate Design learned to give insiders a topic and almost nothing else. Detailed protocols turn conversations into bad interviews.
Insider Insight is most valuable as an ongoing drip of information, not a one-off project. Some clients use it to continuously surface new questions across multiple topic areas before deciding which to turn into full research projects.
Small samples (five to ten conversations) are appropriate at this stage. The goal is to open questions, not close them, and findings must be validated through structured interviews or quantitative research before acting on them.

Questions & Answers

What has been the client or researcher response to Insider Insight? Was there pushback on the informality, the value of findings, or the small sample sizes?: Yes, across all three dimensions. Researchers were the toughest audience because the method removes the controls they rely on: a recruiting screener, a moderator's guide, and a structured interview order. Early on, Mona had to replace more traditionally trained researchers with people who had Design Thinking backgrounds. The bigger mistake was presenting Insider Insight as a standalone method that produces answers. Reframing it as a tool to generate better questions for follow-on research significantly improved acceptance.
Do you follow up with the same people from Insider Insight sessions, and do you use those outputs to shape the questions for follow-on research?: Both happen, and every combination in between. Using the outputs to shape follow-on questions is the more common path. However, when a particular participant's story is compelling, the team will go back to that person and schedule a structured one-on-one with a researcher. The insiders themselves are connectors and bridges, not researchers, so the follow-on session looks quite different from the original conversation.
Can Insider Insight outputs also help define or refine target audience segments?: It has done that, though the small sample size limits confidence. In one current project, a healthcare client had divided users into two belief-based segments that were treated as fixed opposites. The Insider Insight conversations revealed that people's beliefs on the topic shift day to day and are not as binary as the segmentation assumed. That did not produce a new segment definition, but it surfaced a dimension the team had not considered.
What are the logistics around compensating insiders and providing instructions?: Incentives are market-defined and vary by project. For a layoff study, nearly everyone the team approached already knew several recently laid-off people and was willing to have the conversation with minimal incentive. Instructions are kept to an absolute minimum: name the topic and almost nothing else. It took a year to reach this conclusion. The more instruction insiders receive, the less natural the conversation becomes. Some transcripts will be poor data, and that is acceptable.
Are there written resources or a guide for researchers who want to try Insider Insight?: Not a published guide. Mona mentioned a roughly one-hour webinar on the methodology that she offered to share with attendees. The method itself is central to what Motivate Design does, so direct conversations with the firm are the most practical path for teams that want to try it.
For virtual Friendship Groups, has using Zoom breakout rooms been considered?: Yes, that approach was specifically confirmed as a direction the team is exploring. The broader challenge is making the Zoom session feel less like a research study and more like a social gathering. Current experiments include requiring a shared virtual background as an opening activity and scheduling sessions around a social ritual such as drinks.

Session Notes

The Personal Story That Started the Study

Mona opens with a first-person account from March 13, 2020. She walked into a Duane Reade in New York and found shelves fully stocked with toilet paper. Despite having roughly 12 rolls at home, she felt an immediate, visceral urge to buy more. Her rational mind said no; her fight-or-flight response said yes. The tension she felt, and the similar stories she heard from friends and colleagues, prompted the study.

About the Researcher and Motivate Design

Mona's background spans human factors, NASA (Hubble Space Telescope control room redesign), observational ethnography, and 11 years running Motivate Design.
Her research philosophy centers on pre-discovery: listening without a hypothesis, observing in context, and resisting the urge to prove rather than learn.
Motivate Design developed two signature methods: Friendship Groups (launched about eight years before this talk) and Insider Insight (about three years old at the time of this talk).

The Two Methods: Friendship Groups and Insider Insight

Friendship Groups

One respondent brings two friends or family members into a shared session. Motivate Design runs Design Thinking activities and observes the interaction between participants. The core insight is that what people tell people they know is different from what they tell a researcher. Examples include studying how high-net-worth individuals think about mobile banking and understanding the role of brand values in Chick-fil-A's New York launch.

Insider Insight

Insider Insight was built as a faster, cheaper alternative to Friendship Groups. Motivate Design maintains a network of "insiders," people who are already in the world and connected to the populations worth studying. They are given a broad topic and minimal guidance, then go have natural conversations with someone in their life who fits the criteria. Those conversations are recorded and sent back for analysis.

Typical sample size: 10 conversations. The toilet paper study used five as a demonstration.
Turnaround: insiders can often find and speak to someone within 24 hours.
Best fit: pre-discovery, when you do not yet know what questions to ask.
Not a replacement for interviews or surveys. It informs and sharpens both.
The method took about a year to get right. The key learning was to give insiders as little instruction as possible so the conversation stays natural.

The Toilet Paper Study: What Five Conversations Revealed

Five insiders each found someone who had bought 25 or more rolls of toilet paper at once and had a conversation with them. The findings below are drawn directly from quotes and audio in the study.

Finding 1: It Was About Comfort and Control, Not Toilet Paper

Your gosh darnit if having toilet paper gives me a little bit of relief from this insanity then I'm gonna have toilet paper. If I have 15 cans of creamed corn that I don't even like in the pantry and it makes a little bit of comfort in a very uncomfortable world right now, so be it.

Kim (respondent) frames the purchase as a way to create a small pocket of certainty when everything else felt uncontrollable. The object mattered less than the relief it represented.

Finding 2: Social Contagion and Panic

Another respondent described being swept into the buying behavior after colleagues at work started talking about it. The conversation escalated, she panicked, and the purchase happened in a state closer to fight-or-flight than deliberate choice. Rational and emotional thinking were in direct conflict.

Finding 3: Survival, Status, and Not Being Left Behind

An audio clip of a husband and wife conversation revealed a third driver. The husband reasoned that if toilet paper becomes scarce, it could function as a barter item. He also described not wanting to be the person who failed to act. The conversation progresses from family protection to status and power.

If toilet paper is being coveted so much and I bought a lot, never know. What if this whole thing turns worse than we thought it would and now there's no more toilet paper. Now you can use toilet paper as a barter system.

Finding 4: Blaming Social Media

One respondent (Evelyn) spent about six minutes discussing how a false or amplified social media post started the entire chain reaction, and argued that platforms should verify content before it spreads. She positioned herself as a victim of misinformation rather than an irrational actor.

Finding 5: Fear of Social Exclusion

Kim, in a separate conversation thread, initially resisted buying extra toilet paper. Over several days she felt increasingly singled out as the one person who had not acted, and eventually bought in specifically to avoid being seen as the person who got it wrong.

I'm gonna have to be the one that was the only one without toilet paper. I have to go beg all my friends. I'm not gonna be that person.

What None of the Participants Mentioned

No participant mentioned supply chain, impact on other shoppers, or the broader panic the buying behavior might cause. Every rationalization was framed around personal or family wellbeing, status, and emotional relief.

What Comes After Insider Insight

Structured interviews or quantitative research. The conversations open questions; follow-on research closes them. Insider Insight almost always functions as part of a one-two punch.
Refined survey questions. Knowing what language respondents actually use and what topics provoke strong reactions allows teams to ask more targeted, less biased questions.
Prototype or design sprint. Some product and design teams move directly from Insider Insight findings into a design sprint, then validate after prototyping.
Ongoing intelligence stream. Some clients treat Insider Insight as a continuous feed across rotating topics rather than a single project, deciding afterward which threads become full research initiatives.

Case Study: Gun Safety and the Ad Council

Mona shared a second example. Motivate Design worked with the Ad Council on understanding why parents keep guns loaded and unlocked in homes with children. Existing research had identified a statistic, eight children die per day from guns stored this way, that the campaign was built around, but the campaign was not gaining traction.

Insider Insight conversations, some conducted by insiders who were themselves gun owners, revealed that the statistic was actively resented. Respondents interpreted it as an accusation of bad parenting. They told each other, in unguarded conversation, that they had taught their children proper gun safety and the statistic invalidated that effort. This reaction had not surfaced in formal research settings. Once identified, the team was able to return to survey data and ask directly whether the messaging felt offensive, and respondents confirmed it did.

Friendship Groups: Logistics and Adaptation to Remote

In-person sessions aimed to feel like a party, not a research facility. Venues included restaurant back rooms, lofts, and a penthouse for high-net-worth banking clients.
Sessions were booked for two to three hours. Two hours is now the target because three-hour commitments are harder to fill.
The facilitator's role is to create the conditions for participants to drive the conversation, not to moderate tightly.
One variation involved mixing clients and customers in the same session, including shared field trips, which produced useful but distinct dynamics.
Remote adaptation is in progress. Early attempts on Zoom defaulted back to feeling like focus groups. The team is experimenting with virtual backgrounds as opening activities, social rituals, and other elements to recreate a sense of lightness and informality.

Pushback and Lessons Learned

Traditional researchers were the toughest audience. The lack of a screener, a structured guide, and controlled conditions felt too loose.
The early framing of Insider Insight as a standalone method was a mistake. Positioning it as a tool to ask better questions, not to answer questions, improved adoption.
Giving insiders detailed protocols produced bad data. Less instruction consistently produced more natural and more revealing conversations.
Some transcripts will look like trash by conventional research standards. The team has learned to distinguish actual noise from content that simply feels uncomfortable to analyze.

Transcript

Read the full transcript

all right hi everyone I'm Erika Clancy I am a project manager at accelerant research thank you to everyone who's just tuning in to join us and for those who've been with us throughout the day it's been a really great conference so far and excited to have this next before we get started I just want to give a reminder of the ground rules please keep in mind that we're at the mercy of the technology here we're all working from home and getting used to that and learning how to use all these different platforms so please bear with us if any glitches occur we are recording these sessions so if you miss anything we are going to be posting these so you can tune in and get anything you may have missed please remember to be respectful to everyone presenters and attendees alike we're all taking the time out of our days to join in so just be respectful but we do still want you to keep engaged with each other virtually connect and network you can send questions through the Q&A function of zoom and you can also use the hashtag QV I see 20/20 on Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with us and each other throughout the conference is still using this as a great opportunity to stay connected and network with each other so now I'm going to hand it off to Mona she is the founder of motivate design she's gonna be talking to us about me over we why we hoard toilet paper which is really relevant at a time like this so with that Mona thanks so much for joining and the floor is yours thank you very much so I'll go ahead and share my screen hi everyone it's really nice oh you have to stop sharing I guess and then yes give me a second to organize sure and pull this up all right so hopefully you can see that we good yep we're good okay awesome so I thought I'd start with this story a personal story and how I got into thinking about this particular question I'll take you through the methodology that we use which is different than what you are maybe typically used to it's a form of qualitative research that focuses on conversations and we ran five only for this study that I'm going to be presenting to you today mainly because I wanted to show you what you can learn with five it's just like a taste of a finding if you will and then we'll talk about what we typically do with things like this and with qualitative research samples that are so small of course we validate so we'll talk about all of that in this time and then I'm really hoping to spend a good chunk of this in QA so if you have questions please keep them coming on the chat it can be about the method about the findings about the story that I'm about to tell you whatever you want and I'm happy to answer those so I'm going to take you back to March 13 can't believe how much time has passed right between now and then about a month ago my husband and I went out and we're on our way back home and this Fulton Street Duane Reade was open and so I walked in I needed to get out so for something like that and I saw that the entire shelf was full of toilet paper and I remembered this feeling you know we had I don't know maybe 12 rolls of toilet paper at home I hadn't gone out and bought anymore but I was hearing all of the hype around buying it and you know people were telling me they couldn't find soap they couldn't find hand sanitizer and so I see this mecca of toilet paper and immediately I felt like a gut level and a heart level like clenching and it was this weird feeling of like I need to buy that I need to buy that right now and my brain wasn't necessarily working at this time you know my brain is thinking I have 12 rolls of toilet paper at home why would I need to buy more but it was like my body my fight-or-flight that was telling me I need to get this and I need to buy all of this like every single one of these things and take it home and so I am staring at the Shelf hi I'm almost frozen like really not sure what you do because I couldn't justify buying it but I had this like incredible urge to buy it and so I'm staring I'm looking at it I'm calculating 512 rolls it's maybe 12 weeks maybe it's 10 weeks I don't really know for a whole lot it seems like a long time should I get one should I get not and my husband / and he just looks at me looks at the toilet paper he sees me staring at the toilet paper and he says what are you doing like I think I need toilet paper I don't know why I think I need it and he's very logically just his personality he says well we draw and of course a whole other side of me got triggered at that point about who's smarter and who knows more and you better not make me feel stupid you know but like it turned into this like emotional experience staring it's a only one I can do dive out of doing read and I look at him I'm like what's gonna happen if we run out of toilet paper and he said I don't know we'll just like take paper towels and put them in water like come on let's go and you know of course that's the voice of reason looking for the rational voice they're telling me but I could was so surprised by my experience there because there was all this emotion inside of me about did I do the right thing am i taking care of my family am i gonna look stupid that came up for me and so I thought about that and then I talked to friends and colleagues and clients about likes with steel with toilet paper why is everyone buying toilet paper and it was so interesting the response that I got mostly people would laugh and go yeah it's crazy but I bought something so I'm like why why like how many do you buy and you know it turned into 25 rolls 50 rolls I go every time I go I buy and I really wanted to know why I really you know it's part of my qualitative afraid I really wanted to know you know why aren't we hoarding in toilet people not just buying you know one or two but like why is all this happening and these kinds of questions where I'm not sure what I'm gonna get out of it are my favorite you know I'll tell you a little bit about myself so you have some context but my background I would say right now is this it's combination of design research and entrepreneurship and creativity you know bringing these three things together is what I do it's what I love to do and so when a question like this comes up and when the psychology people is changing so rapidly like it is right now I mean my fascination and my curiosity goes sky high so we'll share what we did what we found and you know start a little bit with me so by background I kind of fell into research I had a human factors degree and in the degree you did learn how to do research but it was primarily observational you know most of the work that we did this ethnography like shot belongs or ride-alongs to really observe how people interact in in environments and my first job was at NASA helping to redesign spaces like the Hubble Space Telescope control room and it was very clear to me you know when I ask people questions about what they wanted or how they wanted things organized even the smartest people arguably in the world you know people who work at NASA weren't quite sure what they wanted but I could see where things weren't working for them where they will work around where they were taking too long to do something where there were a lot of errors and so my experience in my background in research is primarily in this realm of observation and not necessarily asking questions though of course I have done that through surveys and you know everything quantitative and qualitative but but the thing that gets me excited I would say is is really I'm listening and observing and not having any hypothesis and being in that pre discovery phase so that's where I expect my time you know from this time which is about 1998 and on most of my background has been in research I was a research associate than a research scientist moved up to a project director and I share that with you because I only got to do research for a couple years early on in my career and then most of my career has been spent explaining to people why they need to do research a certain way you know and project directing was the beginning of that and you know since then I moved more and more into the business of research and why we do it when we do it how to do it so that we have the information that we need and the last 10 years since I started motivated design 11 years well since I started motivate design it's the research and this entrepreneurship that's come and blended together you know how much do I need to prove and how much do I need to learn and I think those are two really cool and different spaces to play in you know how much am I going to follow my gut and how much do I need to see data and entrepreneurship has really challenged some of the things that I learned and things that I thought I knew when it came to research because of time money resources and so most of the the thinking for the last 11 years has been how to create methods that work for the entrepreneurial thinking that we tend to work with we do work with large clients but they tend to want to do something new and different when they're working with us and so the two methods that that I'll talk about today we did the second one but this is like the mother of the second one that came to the predecessor of the one that we'll talk about today one was friendship ruse which I'm sure you all are doing some version of we started doing them about eight years ago and it was a method where we asked one respondent to bring two funds or family members into an experience with us and most of these were done in person though we're now figuring out how to do them on zoom' but they would come into a room and we would conduct Design Thinking activities with them and it was the interaction between people that we were really fascinated with and the kinds of questions that we used friendship groups for were a little different and the interaction gave us a different lens into the answer so one of the first ones were how high net-worth people think about saving money and what they actually need to see on their mobile banking platform so again remember eight years ago this is all fairly new and what rich people tell rich people is very different than what rich people tell a researcher and that's what we learned in doing that you know they open up and there's some funny jokes and there's some things that they wouldn't want to share because they would don't want to be judged that came out of the friendship groups so really fascinating another one was working with chick-fil-a and launching the New York chick-fil-a branch and you know this is at a time where there were some value values that were being discussed and you know what's the role of that you know when you have a very strong founder and a CEO expressing a set of values how does that play into your likelihood or not or or unlikely to visit a particular brands experience and a friendship group was a really great method for that so you know doing these a couple times for many years we picked up on this magic that happens when people who know each other connect with one another and they talk to one another and what comes out of that I I want to say before we go on a pub we say it a couple of times it's not that this is finding something that's better than traditional research many to many many many times I am telling clients I actually think an interview is better than a friendship group or what we're going to talk about with insider insight but when you want to hear that interaction between two people who know each other it's a really fascinating methodology to use and again if you have questions on that I'm happy to answer them to chop them over and we'll cover those towards the end the method that we did use for for what we're about to talk about is insider insight so this method is only three years old it's still toddler and it came about as a faster and cheaper way to do friendship groups you know the way insider insight works is we have a network of people that we go to and these people are activated on finding truth you know they're really excited about having conversations with people in their life we give them a topic it's a very it's a topic that's broad but they're a very limited number of questions that go with this topic and we ask them to go and talk about it so for example in this case it's why find someone who bought more than 25 rolls of toilet paper and just find out why like what were they thinking how was that going no judgment no like larger protocol from there no real recruiting screener you know literally it was find somebody who you know who bought 25 or more rolls of toilet paper at once and have a conversation with them where this fits in the overall process is we like it very much in the pre discovery like before I decide what questions I want to ask in an interview or before I decide what questions I want to include in a survey on this method kind of slots right in there does it replace anything that you're currently doing for some entrepreneurs I think it has but you know other than that I think the only thing it replaces is is not doing but for the most parts really complementary and you'll see I think in in just a moment what I mean why I like this method um you know like I told you from the NASA days I have been trained essentially to be in the wild you know I like being where people are in their homes in their workplaces and seeing all of the context around them and how that influences the behavior that they have and that's the way we've done qualitative but recently with with some of the projects that we were doing I would say maybe five or six years ago when that nog Rafi started to become less and less of the work that we were hired to do I think it moved in-house or was being skipped because it took a long time um I wanted to figure out a way to still get that quality of data but without bringing people into what I called the zoo you know that the one-way mirror room or in interaction with us even and again this was inspired from the friendship groups where I know people act a little differently when their friends are around I know what anecdotally you know having done it for the eight years and so I was trying to replicate that magic but in a quicker way and that's where we came up with insider insight where we have people who are already on the ground and they can have conversations with frontline workers right now because maybe they're married to them or it's their father or it's their child or it's their you know they can have conversations with people who got laid off we were just asked to do a project to ask about what a bad layoff is and instantly like within an hour twenty-five people said I know people and I can have a conversation within the next 24 hours so it's incredibly fast because our insiders are already in the wild and they connect us to the people we want to study in the wild recording conversations and sending them back to us for our analysis and remember it doesn't replace an interview it's not even an interview it's a conversation and you'll hear some of that in just a moment so let's stick into the topic and again if you have any questions on my background or or our approach to research or how we did the research stick them all on the chat I'll definitely make sure I answer those either during the session or if I have to after I'm happy to do that um so Cove idiots just saw this and it is such a perfect perfect little meme that went through my Instagram but one of the definitions that this person came up with I wish I was smart enough to have come up with this a person who's ignoring social distancing protocols which we are all not we're here in our quarantine and learning which is awesome and then a stupid person who hoards groceries needlessly spreading cope in nineteen fears depriving other others of vital supplies see that guy with the 212 paper rolls that's a Cove idiot so what is this about you know why are people buying toilet paper and more importantly why are they buying so much of of it you know and hoarding it that was the question that we wanted to answer and before I dig into how we answered it I think it's always fun to put this in the context in your own in your own mental makeup around how you would normally answer this so if a client asked you like I want to know why people did this what method would you use you know would it be a survey would it be a focus group would it be an in-depth interview kind of think that through because I that's something I'm curious about as well again added into the chat cuz I am curious where what this is anchoring against for us this felt very much like an insider insight project because we don't know why we don't know who did it we don't know why they we don't know who they were with we don't know what else they bought there's so many things that we can hear in this story that we don't want to close it in quite yet we want to keep it broad and that's one of the criteria that we use for figuring out if something is good for inside or inside so some of the things that we found here and what I've done is I just pulled five quotes for us to look at remember this is only five people and I would say our general insider insight projects are 10 people so it's really small samples and when a client wants to do more we encourage them to do 10 see what comes up and then make sure that we're still asking the same question for the next 10 sometimes we are and you know it's completely fine and we brought in our sample sometimes we learn something a little differently a little different about what we want to study maybe we fine-tune or figure we should be using a different word and that's really valuable because we were off in a direction and we got course-corrected fairly quickly so in this one it's Kim who says in a world of uncertainty where every day the world is changing normal distance is no longer normal can't go work can't go out and there's so much uncertainty favorite part your gosh darnit if having toilet paper gives me a little bit of relief from this insanity then I'm gonna have toilet paper if I have 15 cans of creamed corn that I don't even like in the pantry and it makes a little bit of comfort in a very uncomfortable world right now so be it and so from here you'll see that because we're not in an interview we can't probe you know we can't go in deeper to understand this that in the other that's this is almost exactly what happens when we're looking at transcripts and listening to audio from insider insight where we hear what they talked about and what it does is it opens up more questions so what new curiosity comes from this quote for you you know for me I had written it down because I knew I'd be going super fast today like what does she mean by extreme uncertainty you know what's not changing in her world what's changing too fast in her world what does fast mean in her world what makes things uncomfortable what steel feels comfortable what things do they do weather what things does Kim do whether she's comfortable or not when was the last time she was uncomfortable what does she do that what can she learn from what she did that she said then 15 cans of creamed corn like more please on that so many things we could probe into we can understand more so what insider insight and some of these things that we'll be talking about today do is it opens up more questions and those questions are the ones that we then put into a more structured interview guide or into the survey but already from here we're hearing about her need for control her near need for comfort and her need to put things in her home that give her a sense of sanity and comfort and ease and that's what this was about for her it wasn't about the toilet paper it was about relieving that ease and it sounds very much like my personal story right and how I felt this this anxiety come up just by seeing the toilet paper and the toilet paper signaled everything that I was seeing on social media and hearing at work coming to life right in Fernie following the heard especially when stress so yeah she started it started it and then everyone else started talking about toilet paper and this was like the bigger discussion that they had in the workplace and before I knew it I got swept at move all these pictures stuff I got swept up and then I panicked man I panicked um again what curiosity does this bring up for you I am fascinated about this panic you know and I want to know like more about these feelings that were going on and why she called it panic and why the panic even happened in the first place so hopefully you're starting to see already yes we're seeing that it was other people having this conversation that led her to feel like oh my god and in panic mode fight-or-flight I go out I just do you know I am NOT thinking as much and you remember that story right my emotional my rational were were at odds with one another um when we're in survival mode we're gonna go with the thing that makes us feel better we just heard about that in the previous session as well two o'clock with markets so you know what does panic mean and really diving into that and it's not about toilet paper it's about what other things are causing us panic and how do we know and deal with panic that is the more interesting question we protect and it's really about survival of the fittest is another finding that came out on this one I'm gonna play give me a second to organize this sorry I was playing around with the slides and move them so I just have to play it from here please fear sorry before I play that um there's two things I want to have you listen for one is of course what he says he hasn't responded he's a person that were we're studying who went out and bought more than 25 rolls of toilet paper but there's another component that I for those of you who have the research background which I'm assuming many of you do my geek out with me on um remember these are relationships that already exist and so part of what we're doing is leveraging that and of course there's bonus of course there's bias between two people who know each other having a conversation about a topic that we want to study but this is a conversation that we think of it more less like we're bringing the conversation to us and more like we're giving a seat at their table so this is a husband and wife which you'll I think be able to tell pretty quickly in the interaction and you'll hear that she does not um you will hear that she does not ask questions in an open and a non leading way she does cut him off she does laugh that's something that he says obviously these are the things that we would definitely not do if we were running a study in in a lab but you'll see kind of what happens as a result of that natural interaction first being closed and not having the access to the toilet paper or the fear of seeing everyone else buying the toilet paper and realizing there may not be any love for you to buy from me I'd rather buy everything that I can to keep my household and a status quo it's because in a circumstance like what's going on now you can kind of have to look up to himself but what about the people who maybe were in line behind you that needed toilet paper did you think about anybody else do well what was racing for your mind when you I saw the people in front of me had large amounts of toilet paper I saw it in my car that a large month I was behind me everyone says don't live in the past and looking in your rear-view mirror it's kind of frowned upon so I was looking straight ahead literal if you really if you think about it if 12 the paper paper is being coveted so much and I bought a lot never know what if it turns south this whole thing turns worse than we thought it would and now there's no more toilet paper now you can use toilet paper as a barter system okay cool with those necessities you can't hunt for now you can trim toilet paper for so I mean the interaction itself I think is actually even more interesting than the finding but the finding here you know you never know you never know and in the previous session we even talked a little bit about risk averse in domain gains and risk seeking and domains of loss you know this was in some cases the Valachi there's so many here right but in some cases it was like I have to look out for myself which is one of the findings if toilet paper is coveted and you just never know it could be a barter I could use it to make money I could use it to sell but there's like this moment of like I'm just gonna be smarter than everybody else that he has a little bit later on in and it kind of progresses even through the rest of the transcript is about 15 minutes all the conversations are about 10 or 15 minutes but it progresses even further to like I'm not going to be the idiot that doesn't have any and that's what this was about you know it was really about survival for me and my family but also power and status and not being left behind let me switch this back over alright so a few more we blame social media sorry I don't know why that's happening I saw Facebook friends in the US for example who were saying they didn't know where to get toilet paper they needed Sun they couldn't find any and then what were they're gonna wipe their asses with that could have been us you know I wonder actually if someone's gonna figure out the social media paper trail so they were talking about like who started this somebody started this and it's all their fault earlier on in the conversation and figure out how did that this thing Domino and focus on toilet paper I think you've nailed it I think that's what it is so this whole conversation was about being dude and it was like some person like there was a hoax and there was like this little thing that they said that there's no toilet paper and then all of us believed it and it's really all social medias all the rest there's like a good six minutes that goes into how this is all social medias fault and how we should really be be valid verifying and validating some of the things that we see before Facebook should be verifying and validating the things that are posted by other people before this person sees it and so this is one of the things also again I'm like I'm giving you the findings but I'm hopefully also giving you a little bit of insight into how to do insider insight conversations will go all over the place they are not linear and they don't follow our the protocol structure that we might be used to in a research guide but that is the point like this conversation evelyn felt like a victim and it was coming and a victim and a lot of things that were happening you know she actually did another session another conversation for us and got laid off and you could hear it again in in some of the conversation that she had there everything was not her fault and toilet-paper she now had too much and felt kind of stupid for having it and so you can you know we asked the question why did you buy toilet paper but the the richness that existed in getting the answer to that is is what I thought was just so beautiful about about using this method to answer it and then the last one is it was a way to attain power and we looted to that a little bit with the barter system and so this was a conversation that came had it's part of a larger a larger issue where Kim was going to work everyone else is buying toilet paper and she's like this is kind of crazy guys like I don't I don't really need toilet paper and then day two day three day four where everyone's like Kim doesn't have to all that paper didn't get toilet paper and you'll see here she says like I'm gonna have to be the one that was the only one without toilet paper I have to go beg all my friends I'm not gonna be that person Kim did you get toilet paper no Kim didn't get the toilet paper and it was like this big joke that was happening where she felt like she wasn't like in the smarter group and everyone else is doing something and so she then convinced herself you know what I think you're right I should control a little bit that I can control I hear you guys I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna get it so fascinating conversation because in her case similar to funny husband you know rationality was winning a front and then it just the the fear of being wrong the fear of not having it versus the gain of like having extra toilet paper that doesn't go bad so who cares in my house is all they were thinking about no one by the way is thinking about supply chain or you know anything that that or just a panic that this would induce in general for anyone else it was only about me it was only about do I have what I need to feel good about you know going through this uncertain time so typically what comes next like insider insight rarely is it's not one of those things that you do one off as a project and it never was intended to be it's a source of data and the data happens to be conversations and like I mentioned for the most part we would now go out and do structured interviews or we would do something more quantitative to validate some of these things that we found like was it about panic or was it about you know X Y X Y or Z so typically there is a research component that comes as a one-two punch with insider insight but not always sometimes at some of our clients have said I don't see this as much as a as a type of method that I add to my toolkit which is the way I thought of it it's more drip of information that I'd like to have ongoing and so sometimes I want to know about Mike sometimes I want to know about flowers sometimes I want to know about hair color and I have different questions and I want to keep asking questions and getting conversations coming through about these topics and then I'll decide what turns into a project that again wasn't my idea but I do like it I think it's a smart way to go and then I alluded to this earlier a third thing that tends to happen after insider insight less in the research community more in the entrepreneur community or the design community or product is they start prototyping so these this is called a research sprint and it feeds directly into a design sprint and they will validate after the designs for it usually um I don't know maybe I should take that usually back but the the validation would come after the design sprint and so it really depends on the culture of the organization the budgets the timelines what comes next but rarely are we saying like inside or inside you have everything you need go ahead I definitely would not say that but one of the things that I think has happened in every case that we've done and I can share more cases it's something you all want to hear is this increase in curiosity you know this I wonder what she meant by or I wonder if he would have done it this way or wonder what he thinks about X and that is dream for me you know I think a lot of times when we're working on projects we are up against such tight time timelines and such tight deadlines that we're going back to this proving mindset like let's just check this off figure out what we need to know make sure we're right move ahead and my interest has always been in the the learning the discovery the exploration the what are the things that I didn't think of and to me that's that is what in what insight means and so you know the more the more I confuse you but they kind of mean the more I can see you the more the more questions that come up for people as a result of doing this particular method I think the more successful the method was so I've ended um I'm I'm done with like the the presentation component like I said I want to make sure that we have time for questions so I believe this will be a moderated component but I can also just read the chat if you need America whatever you want yeah so thank you mama that was so interesting really interesting to hear what other people are saying because obviously this is a I mean I'm thinking about it a lot why I'm buying so much toilet paper so I was so interesting to hear it doesn't look like we have any questions right now a little bit of chatter in the chat about people just really reacting positive positively this um I know you mentioned you have a couple other things you could dive into is there anyone that you want to use yeah no I'm happy to I mean this method has been like it's just been really fun to create it it's been really fun to use it so one of my favorite ones was on gun control and why people so we're working with the Ad Council to help them figure out why people keep guns loaded but unlocked in homes with kids and so they had already done a whole round of amazing research before and found that there's one statistic that really resonated with this group which is that eight kids die per day because of guns in homes that are locked and unloaded so you know and that campaign wasn't wasn't getting the lift that they wanted so they wanted to see is there anything else that we're missing is there anything else that we could learn so we did we did the insider insight project so again ten conversations I think we might have done a little a little bit more there and we all that's all we asked why you know how do you store your gun and what is a rationale for doing it and by the way I think just asking me in that way was part of the secret sauce you know there's no there's no judging there it's just like tell me what you do and tell me why you do it that way and the the interesting component is that we had some insiders were also gun owners and you know sometimes in doing research the researchers unconfident subconscious and unconscious influence is there and you know perhaps the this little addition of having to gun owners having a conversation also made a huge difference but what we found is that eight kids die a day was actually not resident in the conversations it's one of those things that they're like mm-hmm and then cameras off and when they're talking to their brother they're talking to a friend they're like I hate that statistic I hate it because it implies that I'm not a good parent do you think that my kid is not gonna listen to me I told my kid this is a gun don't touch the gun and I put it right in front of them and my kids always listen to me so if you're telling me I need to lock this gun away you're basically implying I'm not a good parent and that what I have done which is teach my kids good gun safety is not has not worked or I'm not doing a great job so there was like this very strong reaction that came from two people having the conversation about about about this and like again I don't I don't know how we would have found it you know even if I even if I came off as a person who had a gun or supported guns or you know like if even if I line did that whole thing I think they wouldn't have told me um and that's where it gets really interesting but now that I know it what we did is we went back into the survey and we asked like what do you think about this is any of this offensive so when we asked it more directly they're able to say yeah actually it is thanks for asking you know but like rated on a scale of one to five wasn't gonna get it right yeah it's almost like you're getting you never want to ask biased questions but now we're getting the right targeted questions yes yes all right now we've had a bunch of questions go ahead it's great we have one from an anonymous attendee what has been the customer response to insight groups was there push back on the informality of the value of finding sample size concerns etc yes 100% um unfortunately researchers were my toughest crowd you know so um the the people who really resonated with this method is that I'm talking about three years ago and then we'll talk about now that front up front researchers had a really hard time even the researchers that work at motivate had a really hard time with this because we're used to control we're used to a recruiting screener that tells me exactly who I'm going to speak to and a moderators guide that tells me exactly what I the order in which I'm gonna ask questions and so this is just like good luck can send me a send me an audio which did not resonate for a lot of people I just had to turn over quite a few researchers to ones that were more Design Thinking oriented then more traditional while I was creating this because it was just it was really hard to do yes absolutely it's completely new the mistake I made is I treated it like a standalone method early on like it was a thing that you could do and then you would have an answer and what I've learned along the way is it's a thing that you can do to ask a better question and that is an important learning that I didn't have when I first launched it yeah I'm great I live one from Susan she says she's met you for years back it's nice to hear you speak about insider insight and how that informs next research steps do you look to follow up with the same people from insider insight sessions and for use outputs from those sessions to shape questions which I think you've touched on we've been both yeah the second one is more common but we do have this like one-two punch that we do where we'll do insider insight and then inevitably like they'll want to talk to Evelyn you know and so we'll go back and say Evelyn can we schedule one-on-one with you with a with a researcher because again the insiders are not researchers you know there are people who are connectors they're bridges to two people that we know they have like as you've heard you know they have a really hilarious conversation sometimes where you're like what do you say that's what they say that's what's happening in dark you know that's exactly what's happening at their at their dinner table and so we'll pull them out and do something more structured so yes to both and every combination in between they're actually yeah another question along with students is do you also use that like what you find in an insider insight sessions do you use that to inform who your target audience is for that specific project and also for other projects um it has it's probably too small of the sample but but it has been helpful um to to validate or disprove actually some of the hypotheses and personas like for example I can't I can't talk about a lot of the details but right now we're doing a project where a healthcare company split their user groups into two and they're like people who believe this and people who believe that you know and it's their opposites and so we ask people like if you believe this have a conversation about this if you believe that have a conversation about that just got the fines today and actually this is not accurate and I used to believe this and then I have now I believe that but it changes every day and that's huge like so you know that kind of stuff happens where it's not like here's your new segment but oh I didn't think about I was thinking too black and white about who my demographics and psychographics are and this is an unveiling like a layer that I didn't think about that happens a lot cool yeah we're getting a couple questions about kind of the logistics side of this so how you're instructing participants or these insiders how they're being compensated what incentives are you offering things like that you dog Clinton's honestly depend on the project and how quickly we need to get it back for the client and how hard it is for us to get people like this lay off one it's it's kind of really sad to me but everybody knows like three to five people who got laid off and so that one like our incentives don't have to be as high it's kind of market defined we are working on that so I might have a different answer in a couple in a couple weeks on that one and look how it works the instructions um so remember this is the hardest part this took us a year to figure out so like you know now I feel great that I figured it out but like it took a long time for me to get my head around a conversation versus an interview you know you don't need to instruct people on how to have a conversation they like they're human they know how to have a conversation so like I don't need to tell you how to have a conversation with your best friend I just need to tell you to have a conversation about your best friend and the more I tell you the more it's not gonna be a real conversation so again took a year for me to figure out to shut up okay just have a conversation about the layoff have a conversation about you know whether you're buying toilet paper or not have a conversation about what's another one that's coming up the new entertainment like what you would what you bought for your home should be in your home and be isolated like what new things did you bring in to make that isolation easier right and like I don't need to now say like dude was it an electronic advice it was a kitchen was it's like I don't need all that which means that some transcripts are trash from a researcher perspective I would encourage you if you do these projects with us like we you know we do transcripts only so we're just providing the data to researchers and then the researchers analyze it we can help you analyze it but like it's way cheaper you just analyze it yourself so when you're looking through really make sure that trash is trash you know sometimes trash is just stuff you didn't feel like hearing and that's that's also been something that we figured out but the insiders have a conversation and that's it yeah less is more it sounds like and from lessons learned before we had protocols and it was like one of the worst interviews you've ever heard in your life and it was like hi tell me about your diabetes like you're brewing it you know versus just like go talk about diabetes see what happened yeah alright we have one question from Tracy fields she wants to know K talk more about the atmosphere of a friendship group gathering to collect insights how would you introduce it but we've kind of talked about this what type of invite do you send yeah okay so I love the friendship groups and it's gonna change a lot now you know like it's good so they were all in person before we have already started piloting remote one so I'll tell you about both the the in-person ones what we found is if it feels like a party they open up and it's like I can't believe we're getting paid to hang out that's what we were shooting before so we would do it in back rooms at restaurants we would do it in like really cool loft loft places a lot of the first ones we did or for a high-end bank and so part of what we were also doing is fitting in with the brand of the bank and making sure that you know when we invited ultra high-net-worth people it was not like to a focus group facility it was to like a penthouse and so that was really important the chick-fil-a ones we did in the back of the restaurant which was also really cool and so the space is a part of the experience which is going to be tricky as we've been you know pivot and figure out new things here and so you're coming in with your friends so we recruit one person and then the person that we recruit we ask them to bring two people that meet persona criteria that were also interested in studying so someone who manages them really well someone who never thinks about their money and you you know someone who has had type 2 diabetes for a long time someone who just got diagnosed you someone who beat cancer someone who has not beat cancer quite yet and is going through chemo and you and so all of those are what we're looking for and again you know you can imagine the space has changed dramatically based on what the project is we book them we used to book them for three hours and just give them a break and and all of that it just it's a lot it's a lot so two hours is what we're shooting for which goes so fast so I wish we could get the three but people just don't sign on for the three and it's the environment is very much you're not a moderator your facilitator and so you you know introduce what we're doing but they're driving and if they want to spend more time collaging something or doing a what-if session or you know doing creative writing exercise then you you modify quickly in the session and you let them feel like they're can in control of the experience we've had clients join so we've had you know like three respondents and three clients or six respondents and six clients those have been really interesting there I would not call those friendship groups as we've traditionally done them they're like some other steroids version of it but it was that was also like a variation that worked really really well so we had clients and and and customers go out do field trips and come back and talk about it hmm now all that sounds so interesting yeah this is I mean again it's a very niche I guess kind of research but I'm weirdly excited about what will happen after everything that's happening right now because I think people are changing so different like people are changing a lot and we don't know how when it comes to each brand and so I do think it's a really great time to be a researcher whatever research you know whether you're doing behavioral economics which was fascinating or you're doing this kind of design more innovation Eve research like what we're talking about here or traditional quant all of it is really exciting because nobody knows what people want now right yeah it looks like we one more question for Les Edwards and he says apologies those already mentioned but is there Dec or a list of resources for those that want to try their hand at this um well I mean we do it not really there's a master class that's available if you want to like take a class and learn how to do it but no not really this I mean we can put this deck up if that's what you mean or I could definitely talk to you about how to do it if it's something that you want to try and there's transcripts that you want us to provide but like this is essentially our bread and butter and what motivate is is doing primarily these days yeah oh yeah I know this is cool this is fun I'll take some want to know well these all these presentations be available to view after the webinars and absolutely you're recording all of them and we'll be posting them after the conference is over so everyone if you've been able to attend all if you haven't they'll be available if you guys want it I have this webinar I did it's like an hour long but it really digs into the methodology and breasts I was just I was obviously joking the it digs into the method of methodology and that one might be that might be a good add-on for this I'll try to dig that up and send it to you all great yeah oh it's Susan has a suggestion about the friend groups how you've hadn't had to move them virtual she has said what if you employed the meeting room feature of zoom to facilitate yeah Susan exactly so that's exactly it and so the other thing that we're we're adding in so remember it's supposed to feel like this party this thing that I would have done anyway and so when we did the zoom as if it was like a research study which is just like we just go back to that because it's what we know and you know not the right way to go but just say you know who are talking about safety and fear throughout the whole session today and we did it that way and it just felt like a focus group again huh so what we need to figure out is how to infuse more fun and more lightness into that zoom meeting so we're already playing with like maybe it's a virtual background that we're requiring everyone to do is the first activity or you know could we do it over drinks or could we you know so we're trying to throw in whatever can make this feel like I would this anyway that is the criteria for the friendship group that the the respondents leave and and really feel like this lightness towards the breath towards whatever brand we were talking about yeah great all right I think we got all of the questions cool I was so interesting thank Mike for your time when I really I enjoyed it so much I learned a lot I hope everyone else did too I hope so too and we it looks like there was some interest on the resources you were talking about so I'm sure we'll be in touch if they want to yeah totally thank you so much today