Ponderings From The Perch

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by curioninsights.com. When your brand needs answers and not opinions, you need the smart team at Curion.* Most B2B brand teams don't have a market research insights problem; they have a wrong-question problem. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Christopher Brace, founder and CEO of Story Legacy, a qualitative research partner built around uncovering the emotional territory behind customer insights that get extracted from surveys, focus groups, and research panels but rarely explain why anyone actually buys. A brand can run a flawless market research insights process and still spend years quietly sliding toward the same shelf as everyone else. Industry data already places a significant share of grocery categories within two signs of stagnation, and that share is only projected to grow. By the time it does, the difference between a trusted name and whateve

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by EMI Research. Download their 2026 Sample Landscape Report today and see how AI will impact your next survey.* Two people can share a building, a bonus review, and every strategy meeting on the calendar and still not be on the same team. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney takes on the fault line running through nearly every B2B company, the one separating the CMO from the CRO. The CMO is bonused on brand trackers and marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). The CRO is bonused on closed revenue. That mismatch is exactly why a b2b lead generation program keeps producing the same argument, that marketing says the leads were delivered, while sales says the leads were garbage, and both are right because each side is measuring a different scoreboard. The disagreement keeps circling the same lead generation funnel long after anyone remembers what started it, and a fracti

Most surveys are designed for the researcher's convenience, not the person answering them. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Andrew Reid, founder and CEO of Rival Technologies, to get into what conversational, mobile-first research reveals about the space between what brands measure and what people actually want to share. Every reward a brand offers for a completed survey also opens the door to someone who has no stake in giving an honest answer. Money moves people who care about the topic, as well as people who only care about the money. Platforms rarely separate the two before the data lands in a dashboard. Research panels sold on speed and scale carry that same risk baked into the price. Treat a research interaction like a chore, and a brand quietly teaches its customers what every other interaction with that brand is worth. Reid has spent decades watching companies separate research quality from customer exper

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by The Logit Group. If you've got a market research project coming up and you want expert help, get a quote today.* Traffic used to prove a website's value, until it started proving something else entirely. Welcome to the fresh hell of SEO/AEO/GEO/AIO and plenty of other acronyms!  On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney talks with website expert Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, for a reckoning with what actually earns a brand a place inside an AI recommendation. Together they face the challenge head-on and deliver real insight about what companies need to know now and what they should be prepared to change in order to be discovered and cited on the internet.  There was a disturbance in the force. The metrics moved first, and nobody noticed. Featured snippets started answering the question before anyone reached a website. Video results quietly be

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by curioninsights.com. When your brand needs answers and not opinions, you need the smart team at Curion.* The shopper your spreadsheet thinks it knows and the actual shopper walking into a store are two VERY different people.  On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, Scott Sabin, a consumer and shopper insights strategist at Walgreens, talks to host and  Little Bird Marketing CEO Priscilla McKinney about customer insights, and why market segmentation, built on outdated shopper profiles, is not only wrong, but dangerous. Together Sabing and McKinney wrestle with the truth that a shopper's reasons for buying split and scatter in ways no dashboard fully captures. They discuss who brands chase last quarter's numbers instead of this moment's shopper, and that is what puts them behind. "It's important for brands to really be attentive to their customer and not just profit goals or not just what you've decided within your four walls that

*Help us shape the future of Ponderings from the Perch by taking our short, 13-question listener survey. We want to learn more about where you listen, how you listen, and what kinds of conversations you want more from the show. Click here to take the survey.* Why would a business built on staying out of the data start shaping it? Because neutrality no longer wins the work. Trust does. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Aron Wilson, director of research at EMI Research, a sampling organization now running full-service quantitative studies. Wilson designs the surveys, screens the respondents, and writes the reports himself, work that used to sit outside EMI's job description entirely. Staying neutral used to mean staying out of the process. The old approach meant blending the panels, handing off the data, with no stake in what it all means. Full-service work erases that distance. Own every stage, and you now must ta

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by The Logit Group. If you've got a project coming up and you want a partner who actually shows up, get a quote today.* AI content does not have a quality problem. It is an identity problem. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney explains something the content creation agency world keeps dancing around. The flood of AI-generated copy has not raised the bar. It has lowered it in ways that are quietly expensive, and most B2B brands have no idea how much it is costing them. The question to ask of any content partner is not whether they use AI (almost everyone does). Rather, ask where their human judgment lives in the process and whether it is shaping everything from the start or just cleaning up what was already built on a hollow foundation. If you want to know where your brand stands, pull three of your most recent pieces and ask honestly whether there is a single sentence in

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is sponsored by EMI Research Solutions. Download their seventh annual Sample Landscape Report, which examines how AI, fraud and structural shifts are redefining online samples.* Didn’t make it to Amsterdam? Here’s your recap. Made it to Amsterdam? Here’s your recap. What we heard overwhelmingly is that the future of market research is not arriving all at once. It is already here, already fractured, and already being negotiated in real time by the people building it. Host and Little Bird Marketing CEO Priscilla McKinney takes you on her conference flyover of Greenbook's IIEX Europe conference in Amsterdam, speaking with 221 industry leaders across market research, data science, and insights technology. The questions driving every conversation are the same ones keeping brand-side researchers up at night, and the answers are anything but settled. There is a version of AI adoption that looks like progress but functions like paralysis. Black box anxiety, the pilot-to-n

Brands don’t usually notice when their consumer has already moved on, and keep running on assumptions that are no longer true. Richard Heath, Chief Innovation Officer at Curion Insights, has spent his career building the internal conditions that make it possible to catch that shift before it becomes a crisis. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Heath to get into what those conditions actually require and why most organizations are further from them than they think. A culture of innovation is not something a company declares. It is something a company measures, and the distance between those two things is where most brand strategy quietly falls apart. Heath makes the case that without a structural, accountable commitment to trying things that might not work, innovation is just a word on a values slide. "Your consumers' needs have changed," Heath explains. "Let's innovate. Let's do something different to meet them."

*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by curioninsights.com. When your brand needs answers and not opinions, you need the smart team at Curion.* Anyone who’s ever been handed a glass of Tang under the guise that it was a glass of orange juice understands the subtle art of distinction between things that *seem* similar, but is definitely not the real deal. If you’re sipping on a cup of “of course we’re creating content” and wondering why it doesn’t taste like the results of a strategic content execution, this episode is for you. Priscilla McKinney, host and CEO of Little Bird Marketing sees you wasting your time with random acts of marketing and thinks you should stop. She makes the case for what a real B2B content marketing strategy actually requires. McKinney brings the full weight of her experience working with B2B companies to break down why most content efforts stall before they ever gain real traction. The problem is not a lack of effort. Companies post, publish, and produce and

*Help us shape the future of Ponderings from the Perch by taking our short, 13-question listener survey. We want to learn more about where you listen, how you listen, and what kinds of conversations you want more from the show. Click here to take the survey.* Your product score does not tell you what your consumer actually experiences. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Keren Novack, President of Curion, to pull apart what it actually means to be product-obsessed, and why the brands that think they have the data to prove product success are often the ones most caught off guard when consumers walk away. Product testing has always lived in a controlled environment for good reason, but controlled environments strip out the very conditions that determine whether a consumer comes back. Context is not a soft variable. It is THE variable, and the market research industry has been slow to reckon with what that costs brands

The bad actors in market research have AI too, and they’re using it better than most research teams want to admit. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Steve Male, EVP of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at Logit Group, to get real about what’s actually threatening market research data quality right now and why the industry's current response may be aimed at the wrong target. There’s a version of AI adoption that looks productive from the outside and creates serious problems from the inside. The companies treating AI as a magic bullet aren’t just getting bad results. They’re baking bad assumptions into every project that follows, and the flaw compounds quietly until it is too late to course correct. "AI is simply a tool in your toolkit," Male explains, "and if you're starting with an inefficient workflow or process, it's going to just amplify that." Trust is the thing nobody wants to put a number on, but it’s e

The research fraud crisis is louder than the industry wants to admit, and the companies still shopping from the same compromised sources are not solving it. They are funding it. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Jennifer Reid, Co-CEO and Chief Methodologist at Rival Group, to pull back the curtain on what it actually takes to build research panels from the ground up, and why that decision is more consequential than most brands realize. The assumption that mobile-first methodology is a workaround for younger audiences is flatly wrong, and Reid has the data to prove it. The pandemic quietly leveled the playing field in ways the research industry has yet to fully reckon with. Market segmentation built on outdated demographic assumptions about who uses what technology is quietly distorting the customer insights brands think they have. "The beauty of the mobile device is it's your mobile device. Psychologically, it is

Consumers are not liars. They are simply unreliable narrators of their own lives, and the entire consumer research industry is built on the gap between those two things. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Rachel Buss, Vice President of Strategic Insights at Curion. With more than 15 years in consumer research, Buss works at the intersection of controlled testing and real-world product performance, helping restaurant and foodservice brands close what the industry calls the say-do gap. Her work connects customer insights to the kinds of decisions brands must make when a product leaves the lab and lands in the hands of a distracted, hungry, or completely unpredictable consumer. There is a specific kind of organizational pain that arrives when data confirms what leadership did not want to hear. Trend analysis points in one direction, the C-suite points in another, and the person holding the research sits in the middle,

Most B2B content fails not because of bad writing, but because of a misdiagnosis. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, Priscilla McKinney takes on one of the most persistent problems in B2B content marketing: the gap between what companies think is going wrong and what is actually going wrong. McKinney draws on years of auditing B2B content strategies to make the case that the real culprits are structural, not stylistic, and that most companies are solving for the wrong thing entirely. Hiring a good writer and hiring someone who understands your audience are not the same hire. Assigning a subject matter expert to a blog and getting content that converts are not the same outcome. The assumption that content quality is a writing problem is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps B2B brands producing work that is technically correct and commercially invisible. A content marketing strategy without a system underneath it is just scheduled output. The calendar fills up

Faster is not better if no one has asked what the speed is for. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinneyreturns to the floor of Greenbook's IIEX North America for Day 2 with seven more conversations with researchers, founders, and industry veterans on what it looks like when AI-driven efficiency meets the parts of research that have never been about efficiency at all. The promise of Day 2 at IIEX is the same as Day 1, and so is the tension underneath it. The industry is not short on tools that do things faster. It is short on clarity about what faster is supposed to produce. When the workflow compresses, something has to give. The question no one on the conference floor has fully answered yet is what that something is, and whether anyone will notice when it is gone. "We are literally saving people from all the monotonous and tedious work so that you guys can be real researchers," Dean Macko explains. "Really kind of soak yourself into

Innovation is only as good as the methodology underneath it. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney gives you a Day 1 overview of Greenbook's IIEX North America conference in Washington DC. She moves through the event to have open conversations with eight industry leaders. They discuss how AI, market research, and data quality connect, and what it means to design tools for an industry where thoroughness is essential. The innovation conversation at IIEX is loud and it is moving fast. What it is not always doing is asking who is actually doing the building. The platforms are multiplying and the promises are getting bigger, but a tool is only as good as the understanding behind it. Knowing what a research project needs and knowing how to build software are not the same thing, and the gap between those two things has consequences that do not show up in a demo. "I can tell whoever built this has actually run a project before," Jeremy Anto

Most leaders mistake visibility for volume, and that confusion is costing them. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Heather Kernahan, global CEO, founder, investor, and author of Unstuckable, to take on what strategic visibility actually demands from leaders who want to grow a business, not just a following. Kernahan brings 25 years of scaling businesses through transformation, as well as mergers and acquisitions. She currently leads The Content Bureau, a B2B content marketing agency whose clients include Google, Workday, and PayPal. Focusing on what your target audience actually needs is more critical than maintaining a full content calendar. Posting consistently, staying active, and keeping volume high means very little if the content is built around internal assumptions instead of real audience demand. The idea of moving away from generic and toward what’s actually true for people isn’t just a marketing principle.

The conference floor doesn't lie. Neither does the gap between what brands think they know about their consumers and what's actually happening. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney hits the floor at Quirks Chicago to do what she does best: getting the real conversations going. This flyover captures the ideas, tensions, and candid moments that don't always make it into the keynotes, from the AI measurement gap hiding inside the consumer path to purchase, to what it actually means to do research with kids, to a major industry merger that changes the terrain for data quality and platform integration. One fault line keeps surfacing across every booth and every exchange. The industry has never had more tools to study human behavior. Yet somehow, the most important signals – emotional, linguistic, behavioral – keep slipping through. Brands confidently measure clicks and conversions while an entirely invisible layer of consumer decision-ma

Every social media platform you are building on is someone else's property. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney makes the case that most B2B brands have built their audience strategy on land they do not own, cannot control, and will never get back if the landlord decides to change the locks. With long sales cycles and real revenue on the line, the stakes of that misalignment are not theoretical. They are already showing up in the pipeline. Follower count feels like progress. It produces real dopamine, real momentum, and occasionally real numbers. But the platform collecting that audience has its own business model, and it has never once been aligned with yours. A brand can go viral, hit a million views, and walk away with nothing to show for it. The companies that weather algorithm shifts are not the ones who mastered the carousel or cracked the reel. They are the ones who got clear on what the right metric actually was. "Social e