Catching Up with Carl Van Ostrand on The RIDE

Understanding consumer preferences and sentiment is essential for brands to build better relationships with their customers and better cater to their needs. Observing actual behaviors, however, can provide even deeper insights that companies can leverage to their advantage.

Recently, our very own VP of Data Solutions, Carl Van Ostrand, joined Adam Jolley and Adam Dietrich for a thoughtful discussion about market research on The RIDE, a podcast that strives to advance the insights industry. Speaking to DISQO’s analytics capabilities, Ostrand explained the significance of layering passive behavioral data sets with traditional survey data.

Carl expressed, “Being able to see what people are doing online is immensely powerful even on its own, just taking out the survey component entirely. Obviously, in marriage, they’re very powerful. But just on premise, digital activity can be used for a whole bunch of insights.”

Understand it, leverage it, and empower your clients to do more with it. That’s the motto Ostrand used to explain DISQO’s strategy in helping their partners best utilize the behavioral data available.

Here are some additional highlights from the conversation:

• Elevate your game & add value. Behavioral data is about understanding your audience on a deeper level, not just repeating information you already know.
• There will be some challenges. Behavioral data is not like survey data, Ostrand explained. It’s structured differently, looks different, and even utilizes different metrics you may not have considered previously.
• This is an opportunity to be more accurate. Gaining insights from surveys alone doesn’t provide a complete picture. The recall gap is a legitimate issue in the market research industry, which fails to piece together the difference between what people said they did versus what they actually did. Behavioral data can help quantify that gap to leverage more accurate insights for a brand.
• Data quality starts from the respondents. Data quality and ethical data collection are at the foundation of DISQO. Utilizing new data sets is an opportunity to “reframe the way we talk about accurate data”, because it starts from the people you gain the information from.
• Behavioral data can be future proof & less biased. Most market researchers want to adapt, and sometimes circumstances force an industry to shift. Luckily, passive behavioral tracking makes this technology more future-proof and less biased, adjusting to the ever-changing consumer landscape.

Interested in tuning in? Listen to the full episode on The RIDE podcast here.