What'cha Drinkin'? with Morgan Molnar

Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.

Steve Quirk:

Hello and welcome to another edition of What’cha Drinkin’? I'm Steve Quirk, president of Quirk's Marketing Research Media. My guest today is Morgan Molnar, director of product marketing, SurveyMonkey Market Research Solutions. Hello Morgan and welcome to What’cha Drinkin’? Let's just start right off with what are you drinking?

Morgan Molnar:

Well, Steve, thanks for having me. It is nine in the morning, so I've got some decaf coffee here. I'm a decaf person.

Steve Quirk:

Decaf.

Morgan Molnar:

Yeah. I have enough energy to get me going and that's all I really need. But say five o'clock comes around then I'm probably not drinking coffee, I'm drinking something a little bit stronger.

Steve Quirk:

I'm having a Cameron's Coffee, which is a local brew, and I'm having it in my London cup. So, every time I travel, I go to Starbucks and they always have a city series and I buy the mug of the city I'm in, so.

Morgan Molnar:

Oh, that's great.

Steve Quirk:

The other thing I like about Cameron's Coffee is they come in these little pods, which are completely biodegradable.

Morgan Molnar:

Oh, that's great.

Steve Quirk:

So, let's talk a little bit about SurveyMonkey, it was originally a DIY survey platform early on where kind of anyone could log in and create a quick survey. It's no longer that. So, talk a little bit about the history of SurveyMonkey in what it is today compared to what it was when it started.

Morgan Molnar:

Sure. Yeah, I'd say backbone of our company is still that DIY survey platform where you can come in and create any flexible survey you wish and send it out to whomever you need to reach. I mean, we started over 20 years ago now in 1999, which is crazy to think. Wow. I've been with the company five years, so I've seen a good amount of transformation and I work squarely on our market research business leading product marketing for our market research solutions so I've been in some really fun, innovative rooms where we've thought up some of the next big things to hit market research. 

When we think of our suite of solutions, we've got our global panel, which is SurveyMonkey audience, and we founded that in 2011. So, it's been around for almost 10 years and that is really just our integrated panel. We've got our own sources, but we also integrate with some of the marketplaces out there. We pull it right into that SurveyMonkey survey platform and it's DIY, it's automated, you can launch a survey to anyone around the world, super targeted over the years, built in more and more features into that. If you think about international reach, we integrated to get that global scale of over a hundred countries. That was back in about 2016/2017. We're putting more features like census balancing and custom screening questions with incidents, rate estimations and things like that are in our tool today. So, I've just seen it transform, which has been really exciting. 

Last March, so about three months ago, we launched our new expert solutions for concept and creative testing. So, this is us getting into research automation, building in expert methodology and powerful analysis capabilities to really take your research to the next level. You don't have to be an expert per se because we've built all that goodness in there for you for concept and creative testing. But if you are a research pro, then really what it does is it speeds up that time to insights. So, you can walk away with scorecards with stat testing, AI-powered insights and presentation reports in an instant. I launched a project, I've been doing a lot of these projects lately, but launched one just about a couple weeks ago that fielded and had my results and all of my automated analysis in under an hour, 56 minutes. I timed it, of course, because I wanted to see, but it, it's really, really powerful and I'm just really excited to be working on this team that's creating such great innovations for market research. And I mean, I'd say DIY, the transition to DIY, has been a trend that's been around for some time as technology has gotten better and better in our industry.

I'd say that it's really tough to transition to DIY and I've worked with a bunch of clients who've tried to make that leap. And so, the other thing that we offer at SurveyMonkey is some light research services to help you make that transition, whether it's onboarding your team, helping build out custom survey templates and question banks and a little bit of light services as far as translations and getting you going with your research. But we really try to empower organizations to take on more of an agile DIY approach to their market research.

Steve Quirk:

Tell me a little bit, speaking of DIY and people adapting it, I know you guys done some research with the state we're in with COVID-19. Have you found, what are the findings of that as it relates to DIY?

Morgan Molnar:

Yeah. Well, so I think some of the same trends that we've been seeing over the last several years are continuing and probably accelerating during this time. We did a study back in March right before everything hit shelter in place and all that. And then we did another study in May, and we're seeing some of those trends pick up. So, I mean, sadly with the state of the world, business budgets are being hit so we've seen that, at least in the U.S., one in five market researchers have told us that their budget's have been cut significantly due to COVID-19 and the transition there. 

But the way that people are combating that or coping with that is not necessarily to do fewer projects because there's still, and probably even more so, a need for market research right now to understand the changing consumer landscape and behaviors and sentiments. So, what we've seen is about 41% are expecting to increase their use of DIY tools, 47% expecting to increase their use of online surveys. But that actually is the opposite. When we're looking at working with full-service vendors, 34% say that they're actually going to decrease their use there. So SurveyMonkey’s actually really well positioned to help researchers who are needing to do maybe quicker more cost-effective research but still get the quality insights that they're looking for from a large agency.

Steve Quirk:

Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah, it's certainly seems like everybody, and every year you always hear it's like they need to do more on less budget it seems.

Morgan Molnar:

Right. I know. It's a constant mantra, right? Yeah. Do more with less. Do more with less.

Steve Quirk:

Yep, exactly. Well, let's do something a little fun. I'm going to ask you a question here. So, if you were not in charge of the product marketing there at SurveyMonkey on the market research side, what would be your dream job? Of course I know that this is already kind of one of your dream job, but what would you be doing if you weren't at SurveyMonkey?

Morgan Molnar:

And this is skillset excluding? Doesn't assume I'm an expert at whatever this is.

Steve Quirk:

Correct. Anything you could do.

Morgan Molnar:

It's funny, I just wrapped up watching the sixth part Disney Imagineering story. It's a documentary on Disney Plus right now and it goes through in depth how their Imagineering team comes up with all the ideas for their parks and their attractions and rides and experiences. And I really think that that group is at the forefront of a lot of really cool stuff. Robotics, animatronics with all their puppetry animation is just fun. And some of the thrill attractions that they come up with. I was just actually at Disneyland in January and got to ride some of their new attractions, Star Wars. Oh my gosh, why am I, the Star Wars land? But why am I blanking on what it's called? Anyway, I'd say it's a great blend of creativity and technical skill to see what they've done with these parks and it would just be a really fun job to create joy and experiences for people all over the world. So, I think if I weren't in market research and marketing, I'd probably want to have my hand in that somehow.

Steve Quirk:

That is super awesome. That would be a very fun, fun.

Morgan Molnar:

I could tell it would probably be pretty grueling if you're trying to get something to work and it's just not working. How do you problem solve that? But I think at the end of the day, just seeing the faces on children, families and people who get to experience the magic that you create, it would just be really rewarding.

Steve Quirk:

Yeah. I think to me, what's really amazing, but just about Disney and their parks is to me, they really are one of the first customer experience companies where, I mean, the smallest detail is all about the experience that the customer has and leaves with, truly amazing. So super, super fun stuff. Well, thank you Morgan.

Morgan Molnar:

Of course.

Steve Quirk:

Great to chat and have a cup of coffee.

Morgan Molnar:

Cheers.

Steve Quirk:

Next time, hopefully we'll be face to face and we can actually have one of those cocktails that you had. We'll find a bar and we'll get them to make one. That sounds fabulous. 

Morgan Molnar:

Yeah, that sounds great. I'm bummed that obviously the Chicago Quirk’s event ended up getting turned virtual, but we'll be there in July.

Steve Quirk:

Yep. So, make sure to check us out. 

Morgan Molnar:

Sure, check them out.

Steve Quirk:

All right. Well thank you again and have a good rest of your day.

Morgan Molnar:

Thank you, Steve. You as well.

Steve Quirk:

All right, take care.

Morgan Molnar:

Bye.

Steve Quirk:

Bye.