What'cha Drinkin'? with Kathryn Korostoff
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. We have launched this series of interviews because while we’re all social distancing, it doesn't mean that we can't still be social. Today, we are very lucky because we have a backstage pass and get to party with the rockstar herself, Kathryn Korostoff, founder and president of Research Rockstar. Hello, Kathryn. How are you?
Kathryn Korostoff:
I'm doing, I'm doing well. Thank you, Steve. It's great to see you.
Steve Quirk:
Yeah, great to see you. So, let's cut right to the chase. What are you drinking?
Kathryn Korostoff:
So, I'm wondering if you can guess from the color here.
Steve Quirk:
It looks like either something with pink lemonade or grapefruit. I'm going to – vodka may be in it.
Kathryn Korostoff:
If it was after, if was after five. Okay, if it was after four, there would be vodka, but right now it's a little before then. It is.
Steve Quirk:
Oh, there you go. That is a perfect drink to be having. Unfortunate these times.
Kathryn Korostoff:
And it's good with vodka, by the way.
Steve Quirk:
Oh, I'm sure it is. I am sure it is. And I'm sure it still has all the great effects that you need it to have with an added bonus with a little vodka. Well, I am drinking a New Glarus Brewing beer. It is an employee-owned and this one's called Spotted Cow, one of my favorites. It's an employee-owned brewery in southern Wisconsin and they only sell the beer in Wisconsin. And so, you have to, as someone from Minnesota, we have to cross the border to get this. So, if anyone goes to Wisconsin, we tell 'em, go get us some spotted cow. It's good stuff.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Now is that an IPA or more of a lager?
Steve Quirk:
This one's more of a lager. They have all sorts though. They have everything from, I think they go from a pilsner all the way up into the darker beers, which I tend to stay away from cause they're too heavy for me. But if you're in Wisconsin, highly recommend you try the New Glarus Brewery selection of beers, Spotted Cow is my favorite.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Excellent.
Steve Quirk:
So, tell me a little bit about, at Research Rockstar you provide training to both individuals and teams. So, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing your students and team managers, what type of skills and education they're looking for.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Yeah so I’m glad that you made the distinction between the students and the team managers because sometimes what I hear from the individual students who sign up for training is a little bit different than sometimes what I hear from the team managers who are sending a whole team to us to have a whole team go through a training program. But I will say that the big trend that I see is about this sort of bifurcation, I get cases where people are looking to go much deeper and become more rigorous in specific areas. So, for example, even just talking about pride and true survey research, people who may have learned about survey research on the job, but they know they never really learned a lot about scales. They know that they don't know what the current research on research is about how to present online surveys in a way that's going to mitigate the risk of any data quality issues.
So, they're looking to get a lot more rigorous in their use of survey research because again, if they just learned on the job, they very often came into a situation where they were basically given some templates, they were given some past questionnaires, but nobody really ever taught them about all the different choices. And so what happens with a lot of these folks is that they end up getting maybe negative feedback from colleagues or even clients because they churn out these surveys that are just full of five-point scaled questions and they don't use any other types of scales and aren't always making the best choices. So in some cases it's people who are looking to just become more rigorous with their use of traditional methods like survey research or looking to become more rigorous in their use of qualitative methods and so on.
And then I have this other extreme of people who are more working into roles where they have to be more of a methodologist where they are looking to be somebody who can do a good job of being presented with a business challenge or an issue and come back with a recommendation plan, a methodology plan that might use one or more data sources or methodologies which I think is really interesting these days when people are mixing different methodologies because these days, so many organizations have these complex information ecosystems.
If I'm the CMO of a big company, I've got 50 different data-related advisors all recommending different data sources, all recommending different methodologies. And so, I really enjoy working with researchers who are like, I know I need to be competitive and be valuable in an environment where there are just so many different options. So that really is interesting to me that we have this bifurcation. The people are looking to be the hardcore, rigorous experts and maybe specialists and then the people who really want to be the methodology experts.
Steve Quirk:
Great. And so, people obviously want to learn about your offerings and the education you have to offer. They can go to researchrockstar.com, correct?
Kathryn Korostoff:
Yep. So, researchrockstar.com is our main site. So, as you may know, we have two divisions. We have a training division and a staffing division. And then our training store is training.researchrockstar.com for people who just want to check out all the courses and all the memberships. And there's also some free samples up as well.
Steve Quirk:
Oh, that's great. Great. So have to make sure then that our subscribers go and check that out, see what she's offering.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Yeah, we've got some topics that are really new that I think are really cool. We just introduced a course on sampling and it's a real practical course, so we’re calling it a sampling practicum. So that's a relatively new course for us. And we've also been seeing a lot more demand for client management and client skills. And so, we've recently revamped our client management course and it's just trying to keep up with what the different things that people need. And of course, our data fluency course, which speaks to that whole topic of in market research, if the only thing you're offering to people is surveys and focus groups, you're really putting yourself into an increasingly narrow niche. And there's so many methodologies within the marketing research world and also the adjacent data specialties that I really want to make sure that people learn about all the options out there. I don't want a Research Rockstar student to ever be in a situation where they maybe get shot down on a methodology recommendation because all they're recommending is surveys and focus groups, and somebody else came in with a plan that included maybe combining survey data with the transactional data or behavioral data or something else, you know. I really want to make sure that our students understand what all of the different data sources are that they can tap into.
Steve Quirk:
Yeah, I think that's great advice is to make sure that you've got the right skillset for today. So very, very important. So, we like to have a little fun with this as well. It's always great talking shop a little bit. So, we always like to, we got a box of questions and I'm just going to randomly draw one out here. People can get to know you a little bit better. Your question is, if you could have another career, what would it be?
Kathryn Korostoff:
I would say I would love to work in a national forest.
Steve Quirk:
Wow. That would be nice. That would be really nice.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Yep. Yeah, I can really see myself in a national park or a national forest, probably a national forest. They tend to be a little less crowded.
Steve Quirk:
Yeah, there you go.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Yeah.
Steve Quirk:
That's great. Super interesting. Well, I appreciate your time today. It's been great catching up with you and hopefully we will get to see each other soon in person. Fingers crossed.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Yeah.
Steve Quirk:
But thank you, Kathryn, for your time, and make sure you check out her website researchrockstars.com.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Excellent. Steve, can I make an offer to your subscribers?
Steve Quirk:
Sure.
Kathryn Korostoff:
I would like to offer, I'm going to give away 10 free passes for 60 day access to the Research Rockstar training portal. And we'll put it up with a coupon code, we'll just call it Drinks. Drinks. And if people come over and they sign in and they use that as their coupon code, they will get a free 60 days.
Steve Quirk:
Wow. All right. There you go. 10 people, you better act quickly. That's fantastic. Thank you very much.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Oh, you're welcome.
Steve Quirk:
That’s great. And I'm sure right now people have got some time on their hands and it’s the perfect time to increase your skill level, learn something new
Kathryn Korostoff:
Without travel.
Steve Quirk:
That's very generous of you.
Kathryn Korostoff:
Oh, you're welcome.
Steve Quirk:
All right. Well, thank you very much for joining me and having a cocktail with me, and hopefully we'll do it in person real soon.
Kathryn Korostoff:
I hope so, Steve. Thanks. Stay well. All
Steve Quirk:
Right, you too.