Q&A with 2024 Client/Supplier Collaboration award winner, Catapult Insights collaboration with Delta Faucet Company
Editor’s note: Catapult Insights’ collaboration with Delta Faucet Company won the 2024 Best Client/Supplier Collaboration award during the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards’ virtual celebration on November 19, 2024. To learn more about the awards, visit https://www.quirksawards.com/
The two organizations have a long-standing partnership, with recent research resulting in the VersaCurl, an industry award-winning hair care tool. The tool was developed using various unique methods including a “culture and communication conference” that enabled the Delta team to learn about Black and Hispanic hair care.
Jill Miller and Justin Sutton, co-founders of Catapult Insights, explained the partnership the company has with Delta Faucet company and the project that earned this award.
“It’s quite an honor to receive this award from Quirk’s and we congratulate the other finalists for their accomplishments! We started Catapult Insights to do meaningful work and to be a different type of partner to our clients, and to come out on top of the Best Client-Supplier Collaboration category is as exciting as it is affirming,” Miller said. “Our message to anyone out there with big ideas and big hearts is to trust in yourself and you’ll go far. And find partners as great as Delta Faucet and 924 Cooperative!”
Describe the client-supplier relationship between Delta Faucet and Catapult Insights.
Justin Sutton:
We first met and started working together well before forming Catapult Insights, and from those beginnings Jill and I felt a strong bond with Delta Faucet Company. This relationship is exceedingly special and unique because of the curiosity and drive that both sides bring to the table. Those conditions are a catalyst that pushes us to think differently and be better, which leads to new and exciting ways to discover better insights.
A big piece of this is credited to the insights team Delta has curated. There’s an openness and lightheartedness they bring to the table that is so beneficial to the research they do. It goes so far in establishing real connections with people, and that opens such a fantastic opportunity to build empathy and understanding.
That culture bleeds into the rest of the Delta organization, as its internal stakeholders consistently demonstrate a spirit of caring for people, understanding real needs in the marketplace and making honest assessments about how the organization can make people’s lives better.
The specific work we do with Delta tends to be strategic and transformational – the types of initiatives that have long-term ripple effects throughout the business. Our team has been through innovation sprints, segmentations, new product launches and exploration of new and niche markets.
That consultative space Catapult Insights fills for Delta is why the team trusted us with the important work of understanding curly hair care needs and how the company’s expertise in water could intersect in the form of VersaCurl. We’re so grateful to have this level of trust from folks we respect so highly.
Being totally candid, this is a relationship that spurred us to start Catapult Insights in the first place so we could stretch our creative and consultative limits. It’s that level of special.
What research methods did your organizations use to gather insights from those caring for curly and coily hair?
Jill Miller:
The Catapult Insights team is approach agnostic, which is our way of saying research methods are not the pointy- end of our spear. We believe the method must be driven by many factors – the audience, the objectives, the questions, the blind-spots we must shine light upon, etc. In a way, the research methods are a pulled forward by the sum of these conditions and needs – then we start from scratch versus beginning with the traditional way research has been structured.
The story of VersaCurl is really interesting because it started in a very real, human moment. The team knew about the struggles and literal pains experienced by those with textured hair, a moment so often experienced in spaces within homes where Delta products are already present. Delta’s intrinsic urge to help begged the question: what can we do to make people’s lives better?
That simple framework is where VersaCurl was born, and our work began to help Delta explore what that looks feels like. It was critical for us to ensure even folks without curly hair – like myself – listened and learned from those who do have unique hair care routines and pain points. Much like Catapult Insights’ approach to research design, so too was Delta’s approach to product design, allowing human-centered design and design thinking to guide VersaCurl’s development.
One unique approach we devised was a ‘culture and communication conference’ that enabled the Delta team to learn about Black and Hispanic hair care. If you’ve ever been to a big industry conference you might be familiar with tracks you can follow to go deep into certain topics. Catapult Insight joined forces with 924 Cooperative to set up something similar with concurrent empathy sessions among various cultural groups, each led by a facilitator also representing Black and Hispanic voices.
We involved a large group of Delta stakeholders, everyone from product to marketing to leadership, all joining in the spirit of creating a meaningful solution to real people’s needs. This team was able to select a track of consumer voices to follow, and some stakeholders became “ambassadors” going deep with one group while others became “diversifiers” by empathizing across consumer segments. It all came together in a series of engaging activation sessions wherein stakeholders had special assignments tied to the tracks they followed.
That was one small piece of more than 10 distinct research engagements in the broader program we designed with Delta. Ultimately, there were a multitude of approaches we used in order to explore consumer realities and devise a go-to-market strategy that makes sense for consumers and our client – everything from attitude and usage, home use testing, concept and message testing, subject matter expert interviews, pricing research and more.
What is the key to a great client/supplier collaboration?
Justin Sutton:
We talk about this a lot at Catapult Insight. We believe that there are many suppliers in the world capable of executing research – so how do you stand out?
To serve as a truly collaborative partner and consultant requires more than the research chops we have practiced for decades. We found that it requires trust, intentionality and flexibility.
Trust is a big concept in the world of insights. Researchers in our clients’ organizations know the importance of their work and the consequences when things go unexpectedly wrong.
In the consulting world it’s important to treat every project like it’s the project. We adopt our clients’ challenges as our own and consider the stakes to be off-the-charts regardless of the scope. Like Delta, we do this with a light-hearted demeanor, but it means that we bring single-minded focus and leverage our expertise in the field to ensure success, because our clients’ successes are our successes. Trust lives at the intersection of expertise and the will to do great work.
Intentionality is about creating the right conditions for collaboration. Although research is one of Catapult Insights’ primary tools, we also have a lot of experience practicing innovation, ideation and solution development. That work requires a lot of intentionality to bring together the right people, the right environment and the right process to position us for success.
It’s similar in the research space, because while collaboration could happen randomly, it’s much smoother and more successful when your team has a plan for how to collaborate.
For Delta and the VersaCurl work, this meant intentionally thinking through the stage gates and steps required to build a body of knowledge about curly hair care. It was a journey that involved many stakeholders, so we helped ensure that Delta’s teams not only had the insights they needed individually but also understood the broader picture of why VersaCurl is important. Doing this properly meant well over a year of projects designed to get to know people, gain perspective and empathy and put our hearts into creating a solution that meaningfully addresses peoples’ needs.
Flexibility is crucial because it embodies the mind-set that learning journeys are iterative and therefore should evolve. We were doing a home-use test and learning so much about how people use VersaCurl, but the team challenged itself to push further and ask ourselves: Are we really learning everything to get this product just right?
That’s when the decision was made to shift plans and add an in-home component to the HUT to learn up-close how people installed, used and experienced the hair care tool.
Catapult Insights prides itself on being a nimble partner capable of pivoting to enhance the work we do, and in the end, this worked out beautifully and delivered much more complete and deeper behavioral insights for the Delta team.