Ponderings from the Perch

Hosted by Little Bird Marketing & C-Suite Radio

Business Arts DesignInterviews guestsExplicit

Website RSS feed LinkedIn

Episodes

460

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Conversations with Priscilla McKinney, founder and President of Little Bird Marketing, an award-winning agency specializing in content marketing, lead generation, branding and design. As a CEO and serial entrepreneur, Priscilla's topics range from marketing best practices, the "stunning discomfort" of entrepreneurship, market research, her love of the autoharp, and other marketing oddities.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

September 4, 202631 min

Conversational Research Panels for the Win!

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 experience as though the two live in different departments, when the person on the other end never makes that distinction. "When I'm doing customer facing research, I want to also make sure I'm giving the best experience I can," Reid explains. "Because every brand interaction is a customer interaction, regardless if it's research or not." Soon the recommendation that sends a customer to a brand will come from an AI agent instead of a search bar, and that agent will have already formed an opinion about the brand before any human customer weighs in. Brands that treat market research insights as a static report will find out how that opinion got made only after it is too late to shape it. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: Priscilla McKinney here! I am very excited to tell you about my book:  Collaboration is the New Competition: Why the Future of Work Rewards A Cross Pollinating Hive Mind and How Not to Get Left Behind The book's chapters are designed to be time-efficient, ensuring busy professionals can easily integrate these transformative ideas into their workflow. From discussing the state of affairs in business to providing fundamental strategies and seven practical anchors for staying on course, this book offers a fresh perspective and a competitive advantage in today's complex business landscape. Visit priscillamckinney.com for more information. Ever feel like your company is sitting on a goldmine of opportunities, but they keep slipping away? Most companies already have their next big win hiding in their database. Little Bird Marketing's Revenue Sprint is a proven system that works backward from your revenue goals to create a focused plan for building a sales pipeline and predictable growth. No massive budget required—just strategic execution that delivers measurable results. Ready to turn missed opportunities into new wins? Click here and build a predictable pipeline for sustainable growth.

August 14, 202637 min

The Truth about SEO/AEO/GEO/AIO and More

*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 became a one-platform carousel. Generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) crept in under different names long before anyone agreed on what to call them. Sidebar: Priscilla is a HUGE fan of Andy’s LinkedIn newsletter and highly, highly recommends that you subscribe! You’re welcome.  Interestingly enough, they point out that tThe real research most companies need is already sitting untouched, in a folder of recorded sales calls. Maybe that is not where you were expecting the fix to your SEO/AEO problem, but think about it. Every real objection, every phrase a prospect uses without being coached into it, already exists on a hard drive somewhere, closer to the truth than anything guessed at in a persona meeting. Most of it will never be opened. Instead, this is a goldmine for understanding what content should be created for your website to be found or cited!  "If you're trying to get AI to recommend you, you write stuff that has nothing to do with keywords at all," Crestodina explains. "You write stuff that's like buyer questions, real buyer questions." Again, you’re welcome.  Some brands are already being recommended. Others are being quietly skipped, by a system built more on AI search optimization (AIO) than on any keyword they've ever ranked for, and most marketing teams have never sat down and questioned it. This conversation gets you started on the right footing to solving this serious challenge. It will also help you sleep better at night.  Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: Marketers, raise your hand if you're tired of AI buzzwords with zero practical takeaways. Yeah, we thought so. That's exactly why ⁠Insights Marketing Day⁠ exists.  Mark your calendar for September 18th in Chicago, where you'll learn straight from marketing heavy-hitters like Andy Crestodina, Paul Kirch, Marc Hans, Kristi Zuhlke, Heidi Dickert, and yours truly, Priscilla McKinney.  And right now, before summer wraps up, you can save two hundred dollars on your ticket with our Early Bird special. Just use promo code EARLYBIRD (all one word) at checkout. But hurry, this deal won't last.

August 7, 202627 min

How Customer Insights Drive Smarter Market Segmentation

*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 you want to achieve," Sabin explains. "You really need to be listening deeply and hard to what the customer and consumer wants." He says this from years of experience of getting it right and getting it wrong, and all he’s learned along the way.  Sabin underscores the importance of solid behavioral research. Retailers keep asking what landed in the basket. Few of them ask why that hand reached for it in the first place, and that's the question with the actual money attached to it. Ignore that for long enough and a category that felt bulletproof for a decade goes quiet, and by the time the dashboard notices, the shopper has already found someone else who asked first. If you’re in charge of marketing, manage a category or answer to anyone in the insights function, this episode is a must listen!  Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell Sponsors: Marketers, raise your hand if you're tired of AI buzzwords with zero practical takeaways. Yeah, we thought so. That's exactly why ⁠Insights Marketing Day⁠ exists.  Mark your calendar for September 18th in Chicago, where you'll learn straight from marketing heavy-hitters like Andy Crestodina, Paul Kirch, Marc Hans, Kristi Zuhlke, Heidi Dickert, and yours truly, Priscilla McKinney.  And right now, before summer wraps up, you can save two hundred dollars on your ticket with our Early Bird special. Just use promo code EARLYBIRD (all one word) at checkout. But hurry, this deal won't last.  This isn't a conference. It's a marketing advantage. Grab your tickets at ⁠InsightsMarketingDay.com⁠ Priscilla McKinney here! I am very excited to tell you about my book:  Collaboration is the New Competition: Why the Future of Work Rewards A Cross Pollinating Hive Mind and How Not to Get Left Behind The book's chapters are designed to be time-efficient, ensuring busy professionals can easily integrate these transformative ideas into their workflow. From discussing the state of affairs in business to providing fundamental strategies and seven practical anchors for staying on course, this book offers a fresh perspective and a competitive advantage in today's complex business landscape. Visit priscillamckinney.com for more information.

July 17, 202626 min

Driving Consumer Insights from Quantitative Research

*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 take responsibility for whether the people answering the questions actually want to be there. "It's not just about quality," Wilson explains. "We want to make sure that those people who get through are engaged. In order for the end client to be happy, the respondents need to be happy."  For the EMI team, client and respondent happiness now depend on a single company designing the study, running the sample, and writing the report. That is either the most efficient thing to happen to research in years or the quiet end of a check nobody built a replacement for. And it is not just a short-term view they’re taking. EMI runs its own research on research. Their annual comprehensive report on the people taking its surveys includes tracking exactly where they start dropping off, and more. The full report is a doozy. Take a look at the data yourself in EMI's Sample Landscape Report. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell Sponsors: Marketers, raise your hand if you're tired of AI buzzwords with zero practical takeaways. Yeah, we thought so. That's exactly why ⁠Insights Marketing Day⁠ exists.  Mark your calendar for September 18th in Chicago, where you'll learn straight from marketing heavy-hitters like Andy Crestodina, Paul Kirch, Marc Hans, Kristi Zuhlke, Heidi Dickert, and yours truly, Priscilla McKinney.  And right now, before summer wraps up, you can save two hundred dollars on your ticket with our Early Bird special. Just use promo code EARLYBIRD (all one word) at checkout. But hurry, this deal won't last.  This isn't a conference. It's a marketing advantage. Grab your tickets at ⁠InsightsMarketingDay.com⁠ Ever feel like your marketing plan is just... meh? You've got the pieces, but are they really working together? We often find that even when companies are doing the right things, they may not be doing them in the right order. The results are, well, no results. Curious how you can effectively evaluate your marketing efforts? Want clarity on your next best strategic move? Take our Marketing Assessment Quiz and in just minutes, discover exactly where you stand – and where you could be going. Click here and take the quiz today and don’t leave success to chance.

July 10, 202616 min

The Humanity Gap: What an Expert Content Creation Agency Owner Knows about AI

*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 any of them that could only have come from you.  "AI doesn't go in until the human insight is already there," McKinney explains. "It's never the author." AI has never watched a campaign completely flop, been kept up on a Sunday night, or had a hard conversation with a client about why something did not work. That lived experience is exactly what your audience is scanning for in your B2B content marketing, even when they cannot name it. And it is exactly what shapes how the best content writing services partners decide where human judgment belongs in the process. But no matter who is writing, one thing for certain is that you must properly understand your audience for the piece to resonate. Before you take a step further either building out a better LLM for content creation or sitting down to get creative from your own human brain, winning marketing copy is based on solid persona work. Call it a buyer avatar, ideal client buyer persona or ICP, but do the work to understand their life before you craft one sentence. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: Marketers, raise your hand if you're tired of AI buzzwords with zero practical takeaways. Yeah, we thought so. That's exactly why Insights Marketing Day exists.  Mark your calendar for September 18th in Chicago, where you'll learn straight from marketing heavy-hitters like Andy Crestodina, Paul Kirch, Marc Hans, Kristi Zuhlke, Heidi Dickert, and yours truly, Priscilla McKinney. And right now, before summer wraps up, you can save two hundred dollars on your ticket with our Early Bird special. Just use promo code EARLYBIRD (all one word)  at checkout. But hurry, this deal won't last. This isn't a conference. It's a marketing advantage. Grab your tickets at InsightsMarketingDay.com

July 3, 20261 hr 8 min

IIEX EU Flyover

*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-nowhere problem, and the brand tracker that has not meaningfully changed in decades are not separate issues. The tension underneath is the same. Speed is being delivered, but confidence is not keeping pace. The organizations most likely to get this right are the ones willing to slow down long enough to ask what is actually inside the tools they are trusting with their most important decisions. As Adam Bai of Panoplai explains, "We always want [clients] to ask the next question, which is ‘What do you mean by that?’ and , ‘How are you measuring it for our use cases’? And the answer is always gonna be nuanced." The data feeding those decisions still comes from real people, but the trust placed in the systems built on top of that data is outpacing the willingness to question them. That gap, between adoption and scrutiny, is where the real risk lives. Few in the industry are willing to admit how wide that gap has become. Here’s your perfect networking opportunity! Connect with the professionals featured in this episode;, their LinkedIn profiles are linked below. Let them know Little Bird Marketing sent you their way: Imran Choudhary of Latana, Mathis Anselme of Verso, Robert Robinson of Market Logic Software, Levi Pither of Escalent, Adam Bai of Panoplai, Chris Sluder of Opinions LTD, Joseph Jackson of Tremendous, Dale Evernden of Rival Technologies, Nadine van Rooyen of WEX, Leander Wandsøe-Isaksen of GetWhy, Elliot Kim of Checkbox, Gav Holt of Verve, Lidia Palmi of Wonderflow, Trip Gorman of Listen Labs, Summer Bell of Coca-Cola, Michael Aragon, MD of Outset.ai, Kate Mazourik of Caplena, Wilko Rozema of Dynata, Martin Dewhurst of Kantar, Keith Allen of Hotspex, Amishi (Shah) Takalkar of Nailbiter, and David Cousino of Convotrack.ai. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: Marketers, raise your hand if you're tired of AI buzzwords with zero practical takeaways. Yeah, we thought so. That's exactly why Insights Marketing Day exists. Mark your calendar for September 18th in Chicago, where you'll learn straight from marketing heavy-hitters like Andy Crestodina, Paul Kirch, Marc Hans, Kristi Zuhlke, Heidi Dickert, and yours truly, Priscilla McKinney. And right now, before summer wraps up, you can save two hundred dollars on your ticket with our Early Bird special. Just use promo code EARLYBIRD (all one word) at checkout. But hurry, this deal won't last. This isn't a conference. It's a marketing advantage. Grab your tickets at InsightsMarketingDay.com Tired of generic marketing firms that don't get market research? Say hello to Little Bird Marketing, the revenue generation company of choice for the market research industry. Our "peeps" understand market research inside and out. We know your buyers, craft meaningful messages that move them to buy, understand the competitive landscape and where you fit in the market. We get the industry - from qual/quant to emerging technologies. Why settle for getting the job done when you can soar with marketing that drives real revenue? Click here to get started. Tired of outdated survey methods while AI transforms the industry? The 2025 Sample Landscape Report from EMI Research reveals which synthetic respondents match real humans, the risks of high-frequency survey takers, and how AI is revolutionizing data collection. Industry leaders trust our insights year after year. This isn't just another report - it's your competitive advantage. Click here to download your free copy today. Your research success depends on it.

June 26, 202630 min

Better Customer Insights Through Innovation

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." AI can process market research insights at a scale no human researcher can match, and yet some consumer shifts still catch the industry off guard. The GLP-1 shopper research Heath's teams conducted across the US and UK markets is one of them, and the buyer personas most CPG, food, and beverage brands are still working from do not reflect what has already changed. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsor: Ever feel like your company is sitting on a goldmine of opportunities, but they keep slipping away? Most companies already have their next big win hiding in their database. Little Bird Marketing's Revenue Sprint is a proven system that works backward from your revenue goals to create a focused plan for building a sales pipeline and predictable growth. No massive budget required—just strategic execution that delivers measurable results. Ready to turn missed opportunities into new wins? Click here and build a predictable pipeline for sustainable growth.

June 19, 202632 min

B2B Content Marketing Strategy that Wins

*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 still find themselves disconnected from actual business results. Posting frequency does not fix a foundational crack, and buyer personas gathering dust in a drawer are a symptom of a much bigger strategic failure hiding in plain sight. "Nobody wants to hang around with someone who's trying to sell them stuff all the time," McKinney explains. "Trust compounds over time into these business relationships." The SOAR framework is on the table here, and McKinney makes a case for why most teams reach for tactics before they have earned the right to. A framework applied without the right foundation is just another good idea that never gets off the ground, and that is the uncomfortable truth this episode refuses to let you sidestep. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: Ever feel like your company is sitting on a goldmine of opportunities, but they keep slipping away? Most companies already have their next big win hiding in their database. Little Bird Marketing's Revenue Sprint is a proven system that works backward from your revenue goals to create a focused plan for building a sales pipeline and predictable growth. No massive budget required—just strategic execution that delivers measurable results. Ready to turn missed opportunities into new wins? Click here and build a predictable pipeline for sustainable growth. Ever feel like your marketing plan is just... meh? You've got the pieces, but are they really working together? We often find that even when companies are doing the right things, they may not be doing them in the right order. The results are, well, no results. Curious how you can effectively evaluate your marketing efforts? Want clarity on your next best strategic move? Take our Marketing Assessment Quiz and in just minutes, discover exactly where you stand – and where you could be going. Click here and take the quiz today and don’t leave success to chance.

June 12, 202626 min

Customer Insights and the Power of Context

*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 in repeat purchase, in category position, and in their ability to read trends versus movements before it’s too late. "The only expert on your product is the consumer," Novack explains. "You've got to get the product in consumers' homes. You've got to get them interacting with it in context, in a way that is familiar and comfortable to the consumer." The macro pressures bearing down on consumer brands right now aren’t arriving one at a time. From shifting eating behaviors to private label brands that no longer feel like private label, they compound. A brand without a grip on real-world customer insights doesn’t just miss a trend. It misses the moment a trend becomes a movement, and those two things don’t feel the same until it is already too late to respond. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: Ever feel like your marketing plan is just... meh? You've got the pieces, but are they really working together? We often find that even when companies are doing the right things, they may not be doing them in the right order. The results are, well, no results. Curious how you can effectively evaluate your marketing efforts? Want clarity on your next best strategic move? Take our Marketing Assessment Quiz and in just minutes, discover exactly where you stand – and where you could be going. Click here and take the quiz today and don’t leave success to chance. Priscilla McKinney is not just a CEO; she is also a LinkedIn Influencer. The reality is that very few people are using LinkedIn efficiently or effectively, and if you’re not careful, social media can become a black hole. When you emerge, you find you wound up in a place you never intended to go and you’re wondering where all the time went. Time is precious, and trying to be everything to everyone means becoming nothing to no one. That's why she's developed a transformative 12-week course that goes beyond basic tips and tricks – teaching you how to build a strategic network and create stellar content that cuts through the LinkedIn noise. Click here to learn more, and sign up for a spot in her social influence course today!

June 5, 202631 min

Mastering AI as a Data Quality Tool

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 exactly what is on the line. When respondents become the enemy and detection becomes the whole strategy, the ecosystem that makes research worth doing starts to quietly fall apart. The brands writing big checks based on this data deserve better than a system that can’t tell the difference between a perfect answer and a real one. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsor: Ever feel like your marketing plan is just... meh? You've got the pieces, but are they really working together? We often find that even when companies are doing the right things, they may not be doing them in the right order. The results are, well, no results. Curious how you can effectively evaluate your marketing efforts? Want clarity on your next best strategic move? Take our Marketing Assessment Quiz and in just minutes, discover exactly where you stand – and where you could be going. Click here and take the quiz today and don’t leave success to chance.