Operationalizing AI in market research: How Simple Modern balances automation and human judgment
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. For the full session, please watch the recording.
The drinkware category has seen a lot of change in a short time frame. A challenge that Simple Modern’s research tactics were not up for. So, what do they do about it?
In this 2026 Quirk’s Virtual – AI and Innovation session, Chris Hoyle, CMO at Simple Modern and Alfred Wahlforss, CEO at Listen Labs explained the solution. Hoyle explained he was looking for insights to be delivered quickly, have depth, be affordable and actionable.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody, and welcome to our session, “Operationalizing AI in market research: How Simple Modern balances automation and human judgment.”
I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm. Before we get started today, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion.
You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session, and you can use a Q&A tab to submit questions for the presenters during the session. And we'll answer as many as we have time for at the end.
Our session today is presented by Listen Labs. Alfred, take it away.
Alfred Wahlforss
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
So, what would you do? That was a big question that Chris asked himself.
If you didn't have a big market research budget, you didn't have national focus groups and still you had to make real marketing decisions with millions of dollars on the line. What would you do?
Well, today we're going to talk about that, and Chris is going to share what he actually did to figure this thing out.
I'm Alfred, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Listen. And one of us has a Swedish accent and one of us has an Oklahoma accent. And maybe you can guess who is who.
Chris Hoyle
Yeah, maybe by the end they'll be able to tell, Alfred. I bet it's going to be hard for them at the beginning.
My name is Chris Hoyle, as Alfred said, I'm the CMO at Simple Modern.
We're an Oklahoma based company and I went to the University of Oklahoma. Alfred went to Harvard, which makes sense that we would be partnering together because often the University of Oklahoma is considered the Harvard of Oklahoma.
I'm excited to be here with Alfred. And I just want to talk a bit about our experience with Listen and how it really benefited our business.
In case you don't know, Simple Modern is a national drinkware brand located in Oklahoma. As I mentioned, our mission statement is we exist to give generously. We are found in places like Amazon, Target, Whole Foods, Walmart, etc. So, we've got a national presence and have been around for a decade.
We got started on Amazon and saw great success there. But as we grew and as the category grew, I'm sure you've seen all kinds of changes in the category, we knew we needed to change. We knew that we were going to have to keep up with the times and we needed data and we needed to know the category and our customer really well.
Things were changing very quickly. Stanley was really growing like crazy and then Owala and just all sorts of change in the category.
We had economic uncertainty last year with tariffs where we saw our tariff rate go to 150% and customers were feeling that pain. We've got audiences that are different in urban areas or suburban areas or rural areas.
So, I knew that I needed more information if I was going to lead the marketing team forward.
So, what did I need from insights? What was I looking for and what do I continue to look for?
Obviously, it's depth. I want to know the ‘why’ behind the sales trends and decisions. Obviously, you can see something on a spreadsheet, but it's not super helpful if you have no idea why is that, why is that brand growing or why is that brand shrinking? Is it just retail price? Is it a product? We needed to know more about why we needed to find insights there.
We needed to get insights quickly. We were doing some research, but we were doing it. And really with the rate of change that was going on in the category, I needed to get information quicker if I was going to know where I needed to put resources and what messaging we needed to have and what products we needed to have next.
We are about a $250 million in retail sales brand. So, I don't have a major budget for a ton of research. So, affordability was really important for me.
Then I needed it to be actionable. I needed to know why I needed it quickly. I needed it affordably. I needed to be able to create action immediately.
So, we started partnering with Listen to try to get a lot of those insights that we were looking for.
Before Listen, it was really hard for us to understand the ‘whys’ behind what we were seeing in the category. What we were doing up to that point was we were doing customer surveys. We've got hundreds of thousands of people in our email list, and so we're able to ask them questions, but obviously that's a bit of a bias segment for people that have already bought our product and are already aware of our product. It was a little over index in Oklahoma because we do well here if we do focus groups, which we do and have done. They're not a great representative sample of the nation, obviously, and not quite as diverse of insights as we'd like, which led us to have to make too many decisions on our gut.
We were having to use a little bit of data and say, “I think this is what's happening in the category. I think this is where we need to go.” So, it was hard before Listen to understand.
This is one of my favorite quotes as it relates to that time. We would say this to ourselves all the time. Mark Twain said, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
We would ask ourselves, what are we believing to be 100% true that maybe isn't so? And so we were like, “We've got to do better than that.” We've got to find the ‘whys,’ so we aren't believing things that aren't really true.
So, Alfred?
Alfred Wahlforss
Yeah, thank you so much Chris. It's been super fascinating working together on this.
That Mark Twain quote was really illustrative of the problem that we saw when we were at Harvard and we were doing a research project on qualitative research moderated by AI.
We realized that surveys are great, but you don't get the ‘why.’ You don't get the depth.
And qual is also fantastic, but it's hard to scale. So, we realized that if you do both, if you do qualitative research at scale, you get the best of both worlds.
And that is the power of Listen.
Now from this research project, we have raised a $100 million, and we work with hundreds of enterprises, and we got invested from the first investor in Qualtrics as well. And so we quickly have built out this AI first, end-to-end research platform. We can go from coming up with the questions to finding the participants, to moderating the interviews and analyzing the data.
We're building out this platform, adding augmented users or synthetic simulated users as well in the future.
Chris Hoyle
You can see here, this is just a sample of the kinds of respondents that we have gotten from working with Listen and this sort of diversity of different backgrounds and ages. It's so helpful and they definitely have different needs.
So, it's been really helpful for us to understand all the people in the category and how we can meet their needs.