What'cha Drinkin'? with Cheryl Stella Dalisay
Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Hello everyone. Welcome to What’cha Drinkin’? with Quirk’s Media. My name is Emily Koenig Hapka and I'm the digital content editor at Quir’s. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Cheryl Stella Dalisay. Cheryl is an independent consultant, founder of Stellar Strategic Services and an active member of the QRCA. Good morning. How are you doing, Cheryl?
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Doing great. Great. Thanks for having me.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Thank you so much for joining us. So, since this is What’cha Drinkin’? right away, what are you drinking this morning?
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Well, I have a dark Starbucks roast in one of my favorite cups.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
I love it.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
And it's actually got a little secret inside. You can see that, but the little giraffe head as you drink it down.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's so cute.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Yeah, and it has my favorite creamer in it, which is like a Q2 MCT oil protein mix.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Nice, nice. I usually drink coffee in the morning, but I decided to try making my own iced green tea latte with matcha powder. It's pretty good. This is my second attempt. It definitely needs some work, but I have time. I do have the cute straw. I don't have the fancy latte cup, but I do have my cute reusable straw.
So Cheryl, we first connected a few years ago when Jeffrey Wu made the connection between us regarding an article for Quirk’s. He recently told me that you will be cochairing the 2021 annual QRCA conference. The annual conference was actually one of the first marketing research industry events that I attended and it was great. It was an amazing experience. Qualies are so warm and welcoming and it was a great way to start my world of marketing research. So, I wanted to hear how you got involved with the QRCA.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Well, actually that's an interesting story too. When I first started in the industry, I was working for Energy BBDO in their marketing research department. And we occasionally had two moderators coming in and various different things. And I had experienced a specific moderator who I developed a really good relationship with and she had introduced me to somebody else. And that person became my mentor for a number of years.
I was a young whipper snapper coming fresh out of school and she had been established in the industry and she introduced me to QRCA the very first year that I went was in Beverly Hills at the Beverly Hilton. Ran into a couple different celebrities from an event that they had going on there, but from the very first year that I started with QRCA, that first year, I had helped what is a really good friend of mine and cochair, the online special interest group Regina Naz. And she and I did the dining rooms for that very first year and I've been pretty much involved ever since.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That is so awesome. It's wonderful to hear about the community, specifically around qualitative.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Yeah, you have people who are very, very willing to share their knowledge and help people along. If there's something that we don't know, we've got a huge community of people we can go and ask, get second opinions about or brainstorm different project ideas look for different facilities and markets. I mean, so willing to share and I think that's unlike a lot of other associations where maybe it's more about networking and this is networking of course, but there's just really this desire to help each other and make qualitative research a center for everybody.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's absolutely wonderful. I love that. Moving on a little bit to your personal work. So, I understand you've been in the industry, the insights industry for some time but you're also involved in digital marketing strategies. Could you talk a little bit about those?
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Yeah, absolutely. Digital marketing strategies and marketing research go hand in hand and it's all about strategy. And strategy is all about consumer research and understanding the person and the buyer and the personas. I mean, you heard the word personas and marketing a lot determining what the consumer path to purchase is and their journey. I mean, you've heard about journey maps and all those things.
A lot of the research that you do on the marketing research side is research that we need to do in digital marketing to understand, especially in the innovation where I spend a lot of my time with, new product development the agile marketing techniques and the agile research techniques go hand in hand. So that kind of speed innovation, the growth mindset of being able move a product along, focusing on certain tweaks to a different product are the same kinds of things that we do in digital marketing as well. So that strategic direction and the strategic guidance is what I focus on and it's what I really love and understand, the consumer.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. So, before we wrap up this short interview, I wanted to ask you one fun question. I'm just going to draw one out here. All right. So, if you could have another career, anything, sky's the limit, what would it be?
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
I think I would be a chef.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Oh really?
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Yeah. For a time period, I had thought about going back to culinary school and when I was thinking about it, it was a huge expense and I had four little children and I figured that probably wasn't going to go at that point in time. But I love to cook, to create that way. And so actually what I'm doing right now is taking an online cooking class with my daughter.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's awesome.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Yeah, so that's kind of fun. We're doing it through Zoom. She's out in Dubuque, Iowa and I'm here in the Chicago area and she and I get on Zoom and we watch the class and that's pretty cool.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Oh, that is so cool. That's such a fun way to connect.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
It is. It really is. And I actually learned, I mean, I'm not going to tell you how old I am, but how years of cooking good Italian family that I come from, lots of years of cooking under my belt, but I'm still learning something every week and I'm doing it with my daughter, my eldest daughter. So, it's really fun.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's so awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us and with our listeners today, viewers I guess I should say. And I hope you stay well.
Cheryl Stella Dalisay:
Cheers.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Cheers.