Interview with Olivier Blanchet, Co-CEO, and Richard Bell, Managing Director, USA of PRS IN VIVO

For the past few months, I’ve been primarily focused on the GreenBook Podcast as the primary vehicle for discussions regarding insights and analytics topics, but occasionally the CEO Series of interviews is a more appropriate venue, as evidenced by today’s new entrant in the series.  In this far-ranging conversation with Richard Bell – Managing Director, USA, and Olivier – CEO at PRS IN VIVO GROUP.

For those not familiar with the company, PRS and IN VIVO used to be two separate companies. PRS was started by Elliot Young in 1972 as a spinoff of McCann Erickson’s research arm. It became the very first market research company to introduce eye tracking to the market. PRS became so well known in the industry that it became the global gold standard for packaging design – so much so that PRS became a verb amongst corporate researchers: “Did you PRS that yet?”. Meanwhile, over in Paris in 1989, 2 gentlemen (Eric Singler and Alain Silvain) from General Mill’s Yoplait Division became frustrated with traditional research and began a deep dive into behavioral science . . . eventually leaving Yoplait to form IN VIVO. In 2016, PRS and IN VIVO merged to form PRS IN VIVO.

In our conversation, we not only get an update on the business after the refresh they started a few years ago but also dive deep into the importance in a post-pandemic world (with a still unfolding long tail of implications) of understanding consumer behavior in whole new ways. PRS IN VIVO is well positioned to be a guiding force in helping with navigating this new reality.

Richard and Olivier were truly engaging and insightful interviewees, and our discussion had many implications for the industry as a whole. I think you’ll enjoy it!    

Transcript

This text has been edited for clarity.

Lenny Murphy: Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy back with one of our GreenBook interviews, different than the podcast. Most of you now are probably used to not having to see my face, so I apologize in advance that this time you do have to look at me. We’re going to do an interview because we think that this is going to be fun.

So, my guests today are Olivier Blanchet and Richard Bell from PRS IN VIVO. Welcome, gentlemen.

Olivier Blanchet: Thanks for having us.

Richard Bell: Thank you.

Lenny Murphy: It’s good to have you here. Appreciate it. And I’ll set the context here, right? PRS IN VIVO is a company that’s gone through some changes, some evolution, in the past few years. Anyone who pays attention to the industry has probably gotten some pieces of that, and through that evolution and that process, I think, are really reemerging with a new vision, a new focus, and kind of stretching their muscles.

And I think that a great conversation to have about that, as we see many companies going through different types of journeys of transformation. And this was a very specific one that some companies go through and come out the other side in far more interesting ways. So hence, this conversation. And rather than me kind of putting out this high-level view, maybe, Olivier, if you want to maybe talk a little more about that transformational journey of the past few years, just set a little more context, that would be great.

Olivier Blanchet: Yeah, sure. And I’m happy to bring a bit of French accent as well—

Lenny Murphy: [laugh]. Class these things up, right?

Olivier Blanchet: [laugh].

Lenny Murphy: It just makes it so much better.

Olivier Blanchet: —to this interview. [laugh]. Sorry for that. Yeah, well, I would try to make it short. But yeah, I think this moment was good for us, too, as I said, to have a step back, and it’s always good to have this moment in your life to have a step back.

And basically, we worked with a design agency, so we put ourselves more in our clients’ shoes. And we worked with the guys from Elmwood, and we thought that, who we were, who we are, and what we want to do, and what we want to say to our clients. And basically, we put everything we do—we think we do well on the table and realized as a company we had really good experts in shopper, of course in packaging, historically PRS IN VIVO are pack experts, but also in NPD. We have a fully validated model for NPD in product and pricing. And when we put all that together, we realized it’s what makes a purchase and a repurchase in FMCG work.

And so, we can also call that a habit loop. And we think FMCG is only about habits, or mainly about habits. And if we are the company who can build strong habit loops for their clients, and we think sustainable habit loops for the client, then we are a good company. So, this is where we are today, building this company really strong at guiding shopper, buying a pack, having a great product experience at the right price, and building a very powerful habit loop for their clients. So, that’s the journey we are in.

Richard Bell: It may be helpful for the viewers to understand PRS in the bigger context of things. So, we are part of a group called BVA Family of research agencies. And we span many different sectors and PRS IN VIVO represents mostly the FMCG CPG sector. But I think what makes BVA so unique compared to other organizations is that every single one of our sister companies is really behavioral science. And, yes, it’s a catchphrase [laugh] for many companies, and many companies do it well, but too often enough, we know that there’s a lot of lip service paid to it.

So, that’s one of the things that we leaned in on. That’s our core offering, at the end of the day. Especially with the BVA Nudge Unit, which is just loaded with behavioral scientists. And so, we spend a great deal of time internally making sure that our team, our staff, all of our insights folks, are deeply rooted in behavioral science understanding and application. And that runs the gamut through all of our services, no matter what it is that we do, whether it’s packaging, or whether it’s category management, or shopper insights, we focus on behavior.

And so, to that end, you know, our internal rallying cry has always been, “Behavior first.” Because as we all know, consumers as the old saying goes, “Consumers are their own worst witnesses to their own past behaviors and future behaviors.” So, the best thing that you can do is just watch them and observe them in the most natural setting that you can possibly create.

Lenny Murphy: Now, I’m glad you brought that up, focus on behavior because I know that Eric Singler, one of the co-founders, right, if I recall correctly, he had set up the Nudge Unit, I think was the called almost single-mindedly focused on applied behavioral science for your clients. So, not just collecting the information, but leveraging that to understand behavioral insights and applying those to change behavior in very specific ways. Is that an appropriate assessment? Did I miss anything in that?

Olivier Blanchet: No, that’s right. And just to close the loop, that Eric is the founder of PRS IN VIVO who originally, you know, built this retail labs to observe and find the ways to influence shoppers at the moment of purchase, and went step by step. He really got into it, loved it, up to yeah, creating the Nudge consulting arm of the BVA Group. And it’s exactly about that: in-depth knowledge of how we make decisions as human beings to be able to create for us the best packaging, the best shopper activation, that we know will have an impact on behavior.

Richard Bell: You know, and just to follow up on that, Lenny, what’s interesting, I think in our industry, is obviously the trend to go online—digital first—has been going on for quite some time now, and while there were a number of organizations that were doing live shopper labs, those are few and far between now because, quite frankly, it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, it’s exhausting, it’s a lot of work. And a little while back when the industry was kind of going through this change, and especially with Covid when you couldn’t do anything live, we made the decision that no, we’re actually going to stick with this because, at the end of the day, you can’t be behavior-first unless you’re really testing live. And so, I think when you asked about you know, what’s making PRS IN VIVO unique today, that is definitely something that stands out because it’s few and far between, the organizations that are doing that. And of course, we do that—the lucky thing for us is we do that all over the world. It’s not just a US thing. It’s very much involved in Europe and in Asia, our Asian offices as well.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the things that’s always impressed me about the company was that global scale across the board. And yeah, it is hard to do in person, for sure. And I think that globalization is—or global reach is important because maybe here in the US, we think of it was being digitally first, but that is not necessarily the case in other markets, where you know, in person is still, even in the era of Covid, is still a dominant model overall. The channels may be different, right?

Or maybe not the—channel is not the right word, but the path to purchase may be different, but the end result is still an in-person experience overall. Can you talk a little more about that? And actually, let’s frame it up in this era of Covid. Because you guys, you went through the transformation process, and then came here came Covid, right? [laugh]. And what are you seeing now, two years later on that dichotomy of, kind of, digital-first versus in person? And what does that look like from a global perspective? For whoever wants to answer it.

Olivier Blanchet: So—

Richard Bell: Mm-hm.

Olivier Blanchet: —I can start but, I think what’s important each time is to avoid the, you know, generalization of, oh, it’s all going digital. And then we look at FMCG, and you look at countries and you look at how people really shop, and in the end, you see—I don’t have the last figure, but I think globally it’s, like, 90% of purchases are still made in physical stores. And of course, it’s less in Asia; it’s more in Europe; probably in the average in the US, but a huge majority of purchases are made in physical stores still, for FMCG. So, you can’t rush on digital first or digital solution. Yeah, it’s simpler, it’s probably higher profit rates, but if you really care about your clients’ business questions and predictive power of the behavioral research you make, it means you still have a lot of business questions that will be better addressed in a physical store.

And basically, what we want to say is, “Let’s see the business question. Let’s see the best way to address it. If it’s physical store, let’s go for a physical store.” Maybe we will do that in one major market, not all markets, we will find the best, cost-efficient way to do it, but let’s have, yeah, behavior first, predictive power first, before our problems, our internal problems. So, I think what we have seen, yeah, in the end, after all these years—and I think the figures show that now is—of course, Covid, pushed people to buy online more, a bit more, and now this is now kind of, at a plateau, and we see a lot of people who still want to go in physical store. So, if that’s the way they buy, let’s replicate the way they buy.

Richard Bell: Yeah. The—Olivier said, you know, at the end of the day, the client comes to you with the question. Sometimes they asked for a specific tool, but you’re always try and pull back and say, “No, what’s the question? What’s the potential opportunity?” And so, we don’t simply just say, “Okay, we got—you know, that looks like a nail. Let’s take out our hammer.”

Sometimes, the business question and the timeframe, and the budgets are such that, yes, it makes absolute sense to use an online tool for this. In other cases, or even in that same case, they may want to do something that doesn’t have the extended timeframe, and so on. But if it’s a big bet, if it’s a major packaging change, there’s no doubt that we’re going to recommend a more intensive live, and if we can, full-blown retail lab we’re where we can see it in person. Because sometimes those big bets are billion-dollar bets [laugh]. And you just can’t mess around. Online, it just not going to cover off on all the questions that you have.

Lenny Murphy: Well, and so for the audience who watch regularly may say, you know, “Lenny’s got a different background.” And we were talking before and we just moved to rural Kentucky, bought a small farm in rural Kentucky. And so, that’s my background is different. But here’s the point: I’ve also noticed from a trend perspective that there has been a fairly significant migration of consumers from urban centers, even suburban areas, into more rural areas where the retail we’re buying is just different. So, right, I can’t order Kroger delivery [laugh] at my farm, you know? I’m lucky to get Amazon.

And so, my shopping behavior is different. We are shopping at smaller, kind of, mom-and-pop localized retailers for FMCG. And my understanding is that is not a unique Lennie thing, but that is a trend that is occurring overall. There is a mig—A diaspora out into more rural areas, which is creating different opportunities for a different experience, different shopping experience overall, that is not digitally centric. So, it’s simply—I mean, I’m running on DSL here guys. So, [laugh] it’s a very different thing.

So, I use that as an example of—are you seeing that with your customers? Are you seeing that, you know, the major manufacturers are recognizing that, you know, it’s not all about New York, Chicago, Atlanta, you know, and understanding those, but there is a different path to purchase, now? There’s a different shopper experience that is not about big box retail but is a very specialized and maybe smaller—artisanal for lack of a better term—shopping experience. I’m just curious whether you guys are seeing that.

Olivier Blanchet: Yeah, I think Covid participated to that fragmentation of shopping. So, people realize that stores in their street, or, you know, they went back to their butchers or fruit and vegetable stores they just ignored a few months before. So, I think we see, yeah, a lot of different channels. Home delivery is not new in Europe, but has grown a lot in Europe with Covid as well. So yeah, you have new channels.

You have the organic stores in Europe are so that our different stores, smaller stores, different brands, it’s not the usual Walmart and Target and so on. Or Carrefour in France. So, you have now, kind of, multiplicity of ways to buy FMCG. And I think, to us, it’s the same. When clients come, we have a lot now—more and more—clients coming for this organic kind of stores.

It’s a totally different context and the best way we say we can take on it is through replicating each time, the new context, the best way to predict what is going to happen there, we tell them, is to observe shoppers in that environment, replicate that environment, know the mindset of shoppers, what they have in mind when they go in the stores, and replicate that when we do a research. So, to us, it’s a very positive time, you know, when things change, and you have new stuff because behavior is the best way to tackle change anyway. So yeah, a lot of changes, but very happy to observe that.

Richard Bell: Yeah, interestingly enough, Lenny, I’ve been working with our Asian office. It’s been—particularly in Shanghai—and the shopper behaviors in Asia, we all know, are totally different. And that the digital technologies are absolutely amazing. One of the things we’re working on is trying to sort out what’s coming, Europe, what’s coming to America. But to your point of moving away from the urban center up to the rural areas, what typically—what’s often happening in cities like Shanghai where a particular market can deliver products, within ten minutes of you ordering it, people are actually moving closer to those markets because you have to be within a certain number of kilometers of that store. So, I’m not necessarily suggesting that the opposite is happening in cities, major cities, in China, but I just find that dichotomy pretty interesting.

Lenny Murphy: Sure. Yeah. No, that makes sense—well I—yeah, the, I mean, closest store to us is ten miles away, so [laugh] unless you’re going to deliver in horse and buggy, right? I mean, there’s not going to get stuff. But I certainly am envious of that, sometimes. That makes sense.

And I want to be conscientious of your time and the time of our listeners. Because you do have this global footprint—so we are recording this September 12th. And it’ll, I’m not sure, obviously, when our listeners are listening to it, but it’ll go up here the next couple of days—and, you know, there is a lot of conversation globally, right now about food scarcity, you know, of concerns for, you know, of shoppers having access, not just to toilet paper like we all [laugh] went through in 2020, but kind of fundamental stuff of, you know, first, energy and food and et cetera, et cetera. Are you seeing that from your customers, that they are aware of those things and are doing research to try and understand the impact of this idea of scarcity and what that does to shopping behavior?

Olivier Blanchet: Yes, definitely. So, just to give you a bit of perspective, that back in December, we organized a webinar on the volatility of commodity prices with a trader, basically, commodity trader. And so, what we said to our clients is, “Prices are going to go up and down, and more open more and more down, and volatility is going to increase a lot.” Of course, we didn’t know about the war in Ukraine at that time, but that proved right very fast. And yes, we basically have a lot of questions now on—and that’s a very interesting point because I think our generation here has never lived with inflation, with price increase. We always had pretty low price, price stability, let’s say.

And I think a lot of our clients need some guidance on how to navigate this new situation. And, again, what’s interesting is we have a great network of partners, and we are—we have a lot of proposals out with partners who look at real panel data, and consumer data through loyalty cards. So, they have millions of cardholders they can tap into in terms of data. And we also work with a sister company here named Oaktowns looking at digital micro-communities who—and they can observe what people are doing today in terms of, you know, budget management, how they reallocate their budget because prices are going up.

And we at PRS IN VIVO, we coordinate that, we do a quant survey on top of that, and we are really able to understand in-depth what is happening. And when we track that over time, you can really anticipate the next step. But yeah, that’s a very important topic for our clients today. As I said, price is a very, very important part of the habit loop, and at some stage, if the benefit you get from a product is not worth paying that price, then you switch to unlabeled or whatever. And this is what is happening now. And we help our clients navigate that very unique moment, I think.

Richard Bell: Yeah. It’s such an important question. We certainly, I don’t think we can answer exactly how this is going to turn out, but I did see a statistic recently that said 1.8 billion people will be at food risk if Russia decides to clamp down on Ukraine wheat going out. So, it’s quite, it’s quite frightening.

Now, in China—again, going back to our Asian offices—because of all the lockdowns they’ve had, right because you can’t even leave to get buy water or any kind of food, what they’ve been going through is some sense of community buying. So, there’ll be one group of people buying a whole bunch of carrots, and other people be buying something else vegetable-related, and some people might be buying meat-related products. And then they do the community buying and then it all comes to their building, and then they have to divvy it up. So, there are changes coming. We don’t know exactly what they are, but we’re obviously keeping tabs on it.

And in fact, our offices have been communicating back and forth about just the inflationary issue because here in the US, the indications seem to be that it’s settling down a bit, but we’re hearing in Europe, especially in the UK, possibly greater than 20% inflation rates coming in 2023. So, you know, we’re on pins and needles when it comes to that and really trying to pay as much attention as possible.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, we could go on for a long time about all of that, but let’s save that for another conversation. I would like to have another conversation, actually, because what’s on me during this, and hopefully for our listeners as well, the work that you do is critical to the world. And now that may sound like I’m blowing smoke. I’m not, if you think about it, right?

You know, companies like PRS, and you particularly as leader in the category, are helping manufacturers understand how to get their product to consumers. And that product is, you know, primarily food [laugh]. That’s a big chunk of it, right? Things that we use every—not just, but things we use every day. And we are in odd times, you know?

As you said, we’ve never had to—our generation hasn’t had to deal with that. I remember the ’70s, but just barely, you know? I was still a kid. So, it’s important through such a period of continual disruption, you know, fragmentation, evolution for PRS IN VIVO to be a touchstone for us to understand. You have a unique lens into understanding what is happening and I appreciate that, so I will definitely have you back and talk about that.

Now, let’s set that aside for a minute—because that can also be a little scary [laugh] conversation—you know, let’s shift a little more optimistically before we wrap up. So, what’s next for the company, right? You went through interesting times; we’re all going through interesting times. Now, there’s some stability, we all hope. You know, we’ve all got kind of got our sea legs [laugh] under us with the world. What’s the next cool thing that you guys are going to do? Because I know you’ve done a lot of awesome things over time.

Richard Bell: Yeah. But before I let Olivia, take the cool part out of it—deliver that, let me talk about how we’re focusing. Because I think that’s, to us, it’s a significant shift. And that is the, it feels like the whole research industry is zigging, right? This digital-first, fast, furious, cheap, automated, do-it-yourself.

And we decided that while a lot of that stuff is table stakes, meaning if you don’t have it, you can’t really participate and you can’t be competitive. But our focus is on expertise. It is on understanding, you know, the three or four core pillars of who we are. We’re not one of the larger research global agencies; we were not interested in doing everything. We’re interested in doing a handful of things extremely, extremely well. And that is our main focus going forward, that we’re going to develop our core expertise better than anyone—at least that’s our competitive fighting spirit—because we think we can and we think that our behavioral grounding gives us that competitive advantage. So, now I’ll let Olivier talk about the cool stuff. [laugh].

Olivier Blanchet: Yeah. [laugh]. That was already cool.

Lenny Murphy: [laugh].

Richard Bell: [laugh].

Lenny Murphy: I love when Richard—[laugh] I love the zigzag metaphor of Richard. No, I think that’s exactly it. We know where we think we are good at and our clients, hopefully, say that too. But I think we can in the future really grow the expertise even more on what makes a habit loop for our clients stronger. And we think if we take more almost a social view at that is if you really do well—shopper, pack product, price—you can reach probably a more sustainable marketing where you don’t need to always push, push in terms of media—let’s call it like that—or support that is very costly.

And I think when we talk about resource and having to constantly support a product, if you are really good in your shopper strategy, in your packaging, in your product delivery, at the right price, you built a very strong volume baseline. And if you are really good at that, probably you can save money on your media, and invest in better products, better packaging. I think legislation is going to ask our clients to change their pack, change the product composition of products, and so on, and you need money to do that, you need to invest. And what we want to do over time is really to help our clients build these sustainable habit loops so they can really invest on what’s crucial for consumers. So, a lot of things will happen, but this is the big direction we are going down.

Richard Bell: Yeah. And we talked about the Nudge Unit earlier, and one of the things that we really enjoy doing is, unlike, you know, many of our competitors in this space who provide insights because we work with Nudge so closely, we’re focused also on okay, well, what do we do with this, right? What do we do with that information? Okay, we now understand how a consumer shops, right, from the omnichannel, all the way through to the actual purchase, all the way through to the actual user experience. Okay, now that we know that, what do we do about it?

And so, what we do about it is, in partnering with Nudge, we can start figuring out what are nudges necessary to change behaviors, interrupt the habit loop, and perhaps create even a new one.

Lenny Murphy: Oh, that’s great. So, gentlemen, this has been a pleasure. We could go on and on for a long time. As I said, we’ll definitely have you back; we’ll talk more. But it’s great to hear about the journey and where you are today and all the great work that you’re doing. So, we really appreciate it. Best of luck to both of you.

To our listeners, thank you for taking the time to spend it with us as we were jawboning here. Hopefully, you got some great insight and at least even a little bit of entertainment out of it. And we’ll be back again for another interview real soon. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Richard Bell: Thanks, Lenny.

Olivier Blanchet: Thanks.

End of Audio