Why People Buy: What Customers Really Want and Why Most Ads Miss It

about.

Isn't it interesting when it comes to traditional market research, at least from the experience that I've had in the last two decades that I've worked in literally social listening market research, there's only two almost like categories.

There's always the qual and the quant.

And then you have the surveys, the focus groups.

Then you have, it's almost like this very nuanced, but in a way very black and white.

And then as a strategist, you have to then go to your clients who are multi-billion dollar companies and say, well, 500 people responded X. Yeah.

So maybe we should tweak the product in order to answer their thoughts and their desires.

But then you still have that constant question at the end of the day, which is did we make the right decision by providing this strategy? What does Hootology do when it comes to strategizing hand-to-hand with your clients? So if I understand correctly, you guys have a wide variety of services based on at least the website that I looked at.

How do you guys interact with the clients in order to make sure that the decisions they make are data-backed but also innovative, which you just mentioned with AI? What does that process look like?

Well, first off, I love how deep your knowledge is in terms of understanding that trade-off of that surveys or quantitative research and qualitative research that might be focus groups or individual interviews.

And really that piece where you're like, I sort of felt it in your voice where it's at the end of the day, we're still guessing, right? And that guessing as a researcher is something that I always had discomfort with and wanted to keep trying to fix.

So much so that I taught a graduate level global market research course at NYU for seven years.

And in my seventh year... quit because I could no longer look my students in the eyes and say that that survey research or that focus group research or interview interviews that you're doing is going to serve you well in your decision-making careers from from here on forward so we have completely reinvented the way to merge both of those two things in a completely modern experience so where people do spend their times no matter what generation they're in today is on social and Right? Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, it's not for us to debate here today.

And in gaming, right? So even Gen X boomers, 80% are still in some form of gaming, whether it be Wordle or just interacting with our Uber app or our Lyft app has all become gamified.

So we wanted to modernize the experience so we could say it makes sense that people are spending their time doing this.

I'm not sure it makes sense if you're getting a survey data back that we accept that someone spent 15 to 30 minutes or 10 minutes or eight minutes taking a survey in 2026.

I don't know the last time you took a survey or anybody you know took a survey.

which makes us go, who is taking that, right? And then the limitation of both of those things, the bias on both sides.

And so as we started to question over the years, how could this be better?

It

was, what if we had a quantitative sample of people in this virtual, gamified, social media-like environment, and then we were able to use their voice So to have that focus group mentality where everything, whatever's on your mind gets to come out.

And then we use that to find what the answers are and the truth for those folks.

Because that survey you're talking about, right, you might have 80% who chose one option, but that option may not even be in the top five if we actually listened to the people and how they wanted to express themselves.

So

we built that, and that's Hooks.