I’m excited for Zappi’s next phase

Welcome to Ryan’s Rant, my weekly newsletter aimed at helping companies drive customer-centric growth.

If you missed our announcement earlier this week , we recently welcomed a new CEO, Aaron Kechley, to Zappi. I want to take a minute or two in this newsletter to expand on what this means for Zappi and in turn, for me.

Time for Zappi’s next phase?

If you’ve been following Zappi over the last decade, you know it’s been a journey (I talked through some of that journey in my recent article for my 10th Zappi anniversary ). From scrappy startup days to a more mature growth phase, we’ve learned a lot and come a long way.?

I’m so proud of all we’ve accomplished.?

But as we say all the time at Zappi: What got us here won’t get us there.?

That means we have to keep innovating and evolving to keep moving forward. And often that means bringing in new people with different skill sets to help get us to the next phase.

Aaron Kechley is one of those people. His experience with high-growth technology companies and data is what we need to keep Zappi growing. Aaron is a good man, a family man. He is smart, very data-driven and he understands industry transformation since he was an early entrant to the digital media industry. He will help us achieve our vision and potential faster.

And bringing him on will free up Steve and myself to spend all our time on what we do best. For Steve, that’s looking ahead. He’ll continue to advance Zappi’s use of AI technology and develop cutting-edge solutions to empower Zappi’s customers to stay ahead of market trends.

And for me, it’s spending my time making our customers more successful.?

Having just released our book, The Consumer Insights Revolution , I am excited to help drive the lessons outlined in the book — so that more companies can be at 85% insights satisfaction and see a 30%+ improvement in advertising while freeing up significant cost savings.

Our customers are our focus

It’s rare in business to have a true connection with your customers. And at Zappi, we do.?

Our customers are some of the brightest and forward-looking insights teams in the world. And I want to spend more of my time with them. I want to see more of them get promoted and awarded. As a result, we’ll see happier customers with faster growing share prices.

With Aaron here to help Zappi achieve our vision, I can focus on three main things:?

• Unifying our customer teams and connecting our customers to our business partners across Zappi systematically.??
• Setting us up with the infrastructure to make it easier for us to help hundreds more brands get answers to inspire, optimize and validate thinking with confidence?
• And ultimately, making our customers successful.

Helping to make our customers successful is the thing I’ve always been most passionate about. I love digging into the goals of insights leaders and understanding what keeps them up at night, and then helping them connect insights to make their organizations truly consumer centric.

That’s what Zappi is good at, and we’re poised to get even better at it with a clearer focus on systematizing that approach.?

If you missed it

Speaking of our great customers, I recently gave this interview with Stephan Gans, Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo. We talked about how companies can use insights to become more consumer-centric.?Take a read to learn more .