What'cha Drinkin'? an interview with Jerry Thomas, president and CEO of Decision Analyst

By Quirk's Staff | May 10, 2023

Reading time: 5 minutes

Whatcha Drinkin With Quirks — What'cha Drinkin'? an interview with Jerry Thomas, president and CEO of Decision Analyst.

Abstract

Jerry Thomas, president and CEO of Decision Analyst, tells Steve Quirk why he thinks the marketing research industry has an opportunity to “make a great contribution to the U.S. economy” by helping companies and brands adjust their business models for the new, post-COVID-19 world. While the effects will vary by industry, product and consumer, Thomas feels it’s likely that many businesses will have to rethink everything they do, from product formulations to distribution networks, and researchers’ toolkits give them the unique ability to help guide those efforts.

Research Topics:: Brand Positioning Studies | Business Plan Development | Research Industry – COVID-19
Industry/Market Focus:: Consumers | Government | Research Industry
Content Type: Video

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What'cha Drinkin'? with Jerry Thomas

Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.

Steve Quirk:

Hello and welcome to another edition of What’cha Drinkin’? I'm Steve Quirk, president of Quirk’s Media. My guest today is Jerry Thomas, president and CEO of Decision Analyst. Jerry, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.

Jerry Thomas:

Thank you. Steve.

Steve Quirk:

I don't know, do you have a favorite drink you like to partake in?

Jerry Thomas:

Well, these days at my advanced age, I'm mostly drinking water, but I do grow some grapes on my farm over in East Texas and I have a weakness of squeezing those into a juice that the God's ferment. And I sometimes am guilty of drinking a little bit of that. So that's one of the things I drink from time to time.

Steve Quirk:

That sounds really interesting. You're the first person I've interviewed who has actually made their own beverage all the way. I guess you'd call from scratch, right? From seed. That's pretty impressive. That sounds awesome. I've actually got myself a RU and Coke Gold, which is my favorite. It's not expensive, but it's good.

Let's talk a little bit, COVID-19 is obviously having an impact financially on people, on companies, but certainly on people's emotional state, their psyche and it's something that I've heard that's going to affect certain generations who are at a development age. And so, I kind of want to get your thoughts on, how do you see this changing the consumer and people and what do they need to do and what do they risk if they don't understand the new consumer coming out of this?

Jerry Thomas:

The probabilities are that COVID-19 is going to have a significant and lasting effect on the human psyche, probably worldwide. It's not just the U.S. Certainly, as the Great Depression made this vivid impression on a couple of generations of Americans that lasted their whole life, COVID-19 has the potential to have that same kind of big psychological impact on the way that we feel emotionally about the world and the way we view the world. It's not as certain and as secure a place perhaps as we thought it was.

I think how these changing emotions and changing psychology affect the future is going to vary by industry. It's going to vary by type of product and perhaps even by brand within category. But the big implication of this massive shift in the way people are experiencing and thinking about the future is that we're going to have to go back and redo the marketing and the positioning and the branding and the messaging and maybe even the product formulations and the packaging and the distribution systems that we have relied on for the last 50 or 75 years. Those things all have to be reexamined.

I think the research industry, we're very unique in that we have a very broad toolkit of problem-solving skills. So we are better situated, better positioned because of that big technique toolkit that we have to solve these kinds of problems, where suddenly the paradigm is shifting in a way that no one really knows for sure how it's going to turn out in the future. I think in that sense, it's an opportunity for our industry to make a great contribution to the U.S. economy in helping companies and helping brands reformulate their business model for this new world after COVID-19.

Steve Quirk:

Do you think that the brands and companies, do you think they are there? Do you think they've recognized this yet? Or do you think this is something that, or do you think they're at the place like, oh no, we'll just go back to normal once we open up? Or do you get a sense that they're recognizing there is going to be a big shift?

Jerry Thomas:

Well, I think the more enlightened companies, those that have better leadership, I think are really beginning to rethink the future and trying to really understand what the long term implications of this blow to our economy and blow to our psyche means, and how we should react to it. It's like some people, or you mentioned Wisconsin earlier where they've opened it up and everybody's going to the bar, and you think, how could people do that? They're crazy. Well, there's some companies like that.

They're going to try to go back and do things just the way they did them and they're not going to work as well. They may not work at all. But I think the wiser and better led companies and better managed brands are going to go back to the drawing board, redo all of the basic research, make sure that they're positioning and their messaging and their product itself and their packaging or their service is all aligned with this new consumer psychology that will be, it's not fixed yet, it's still emerging. So we're going to have to be really studying this evolution over the next year or two to see where it's going to end up.

Steve Quirk:

That's great. Well, let's change from COVID-19 a little bit and take a little bit of a different angle here. I'm going to grab a random question out of our box of questions and you have gotten, name one person in history that you would like to meet and why?

Jerry Thomas:

Well, there actually are a large number I would like to meet, but younger. When I was younger in my career I was so impressed, and I'm not a Republican, but I was very impressed with Ronald Reagan. He came along and he had a positive message. The policies that he wanted to pursue were not necessarily optimal but he brought so much enthusiasm and positive energy that it literally helped lift the United States’ position in the world. It was just that positive enthusiasm, positive message, that uplifting leadership and being able to create that kind of positive mood in psychology was the greatest contribution, I think, of his presidency. A lot of people are smarter than Reagan, a lot of people who could have been more effective from a policy standpoint but he's always stood out in my mind because of this sort of inner goodness and this inner positive energy that really helped revitalize our country at the time that he became president.

Steve Quirk:

He's one of my secret heroes. I can't tell my Democrat friends that, but yeah that's really interesting. I tend to lean a little bit. I'm trying, I'm kind of in the middle. But yeah, he's certainly, his optimism, a fantastic communicator. And if you ever get a chance, I mean, you go back and read some of his speeches, which a lot of them he initially wrote, he'd have writers help him, but really good writer. Some of his speeches are just so eloquent and so well written.

Well, Jerry, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. Some really fascinating thoughts and hopefully really soon we can have a drink face to face. Take care, stay safe.

Jerry Thomas:

You too.