Ponderings from the Perch

Little Bird Marketing & C-Suite Radio

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.

  1. Oct 23

    How Customer Insights Professionals Network and Collaborate

    *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.* The competitor sitting across the room is not the biggest risk to your insights business. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Rianne van der Loo, managing director of the Data and Insights Network, the professional association that brings together agencies, client-side researchers and tech companies across the Netherlands. Van der Loo spent more than a decade at Google answering decision-makers' questions about data. Leading an association asks something very different of her, and of everyone who works in market research insights. Every firm in the insights space wants the industry to grow stronger, and almost none of them want to be the one who goes first. Sharing what works feels like handing over an advantage. Holding it back feels safe, until everyone in the room does the same. Guarding your playbook only makes sense if your competitor is the thing standing between you and growth. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market,” Rianne explains. “The risk is in not collaborating at all.” The cost of staying quiet never shows up on a single invoice. Customer insights lose their seat at the table one unclaimed decision at a time, and the people who understand the customer best end up watching marketing effectiveness measurement happen without them. An industry that refuses to share may find it has very little left worth protecting. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: 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! 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.

    How Customer Insights Professionals Network and Collaborate

  2. Oct 9

    Can We vs. Should We: Why SOPs Are Essential for Data-Driven Marketing Decisions

    *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.* The most expensive marketing mistakes rarely look like mistakes while they are happening. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney tells the true story of a postwar British plan to plant peanuts across three million acres of East Africa. Rusted tractors, Sherman tanks stripped of their armor, and giant ship anchor chains all appear, and every new purchase felt like progress. McKinney ties that story to a trap marketers fall into far more often than they like to admit, that mistaking being busy for actually making progress, and to the role a standard operating procedure plays in data-driven marketing decisions. Action brings relief, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. A team under pressure grabs the nearest tactic, posts more, signs up for another conference, crams the content calendar, and the motion itself starts to feel like proof. Nobody checks whether the soil was ever right. Most teams assume pausing to ask whether a plan deserves the budget is the risky move. Momentum looks like leadership, and slowing down looks like falling behind. So the satisfying question gets answered, and the uncomfortable one gets skipped. “When we have a problem, when we start moving on it, we all feel better, and we sigh with relief,” McKinney explains. “But feeling better and solving the problem are two very different things.” When nobody owns marketing ROI measurement, budget keeps pouring into campaigns no one can connect to results, and McKinney has a name for what that becomes. Skip marketing effectiveness measurement at the start, and the warning signs arrive only after the money is gone. Britain learned that the expensive way. Your last campaign that flopped is likely hiding the same lesson, along with whichever question your team always seems to skip. Anyone who struggles to ask the harder question before the money starts moving can get a head start with Little Bird’s 8 Essential Mental Models for Better Marketing Decisions. Music written and performed by Leighton Cordell. Sponsors: 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. 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.

    Can We vs. Should We: Why SOPs Are Essential for Data-Driven Marketing Decisions

  3. Sep 18

    Quit Basing Multi-million Dollar Campaigns on Bad Customer Insights

    *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.* Most B2B brand teams don't have a market research insights problem; they have a wrong-question problem. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney sits down with Christopher Brace, founder and CEO of Story Legacy, a qualitative research partner built around uncovering the emotional territory behind customer insights that get extracted from surveys, focus groups, and research panels but rarely explain why anyone actually buys. A brand can run a flawless market research insights process and still spend years quietly sliding toward the same shelf as everyone else. Industry data already places a significant share of grocery categories within two signs of stagnation, and that share is only projected to grow. By the time it does, the difference between a trusted name and whatever's cheapest that day will have already disappeared. "A brand sliding into stagnation doesn't happen overnight," Brace explains. "But what does happen is one unfixed business challenge after another." A wrong assumption about why people buy can quietly drain a budget for years before anyone catches it. It just resurfaces on someone's desk next fiscal year, dressed up in different language, waiting to be mistaken for a new problem. 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. 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.

    Quit Basing Multi-million Dollar Campaigns on Bad Customer Insights

  4. Sep 11

    Collaboration is not Geography: What CMOs and CROs Actually Owe Each Other

    *This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by EMI Research. Download their 2026 Sample Landscape Report today and see how AI will impact your next survey.* Two people can share a building, a bonus review, and every strategy meeting on the calendar and still not be on the same team. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO Priscilla McKinney takes on the fault line running through nearly every B2B company, the one separating the CMO from the CRO. The CMO is bonused on brand trackers and marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). The CRO is bonused on closed revenue. That mismatch is exactly why a b2b lead generation program keeps producing the same argument, that marketing says the leads were delivered, while sales says the leads were garbage, and both are right because each side is measuring a different scoreboard. The disagreement keeps circling the same lead generation funnel long after anyone remembers what started it, and a fractional CMO usually gets hired just to say out loud what both departments already sense but won't name, their paychecks were never pointed at the same outcome. "You cannot ask two people to walk into the same room and be on a team," McKinney explains, "when their paychecks are quietly telling them to compete." A closed deal that churns before the year is out serves nobody, not marketing, not sales, and not the client who signed in the first place. Retention deserves a seat at this argument instead of standing outside it, and until sales and marketing agree on the same target list before a campaign starts, sharing a building will keep getting mistaken for sharing a goal. 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.

    Collaboration is not Geography: What CMOs and CROs Actually Owe Each Other

  5. Sep 4

    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.

    Conversational Research Panels for the Win!

  6. Aug 14

    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.

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

  7. Aug 7

    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.

    How Customer Insights Drive Smarter Market Segmentation

  8. Jul 17

    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.

    Driving Consumer Insights from Quantitative Research
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Little Bird Marketing & C-Suite Radio
  • Years Active
    2014 - 2026
  • Episodes
    465
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    ℗ & © 2018 Ponderings from the Perch
  • Show Website
    Ponderings from the Perch