Research Partners:
Kevin Duke has a long history of storytelling and looking for the context on nearly everything. From collecting and retelling stories for the Center for Southern Folklore (his first job after college) to conjuring stories about products for various advertising agencies, Kevin has always focused on WHY things work they way they do, and WHY those stories matter to people.
For marketing–or indeed, any motivation– it’s not enough to “translate” something so that the “man on the street” can understand it. What matters is showing the person on the street how it connects to them. Engagement is the key.
After years of wondering “Why do people do what they do, buy what they buy (or don’t), or believe what they believe,” Kevin was happy to become associated with the company “The Right Brain People,” and spent over 20 years working with them– and with other research companies focusing on emotional motivations. Research experiences ran an extraordinary gamut, from cars, credit cards, and pharmaceuticals to olive oil, coffee, cat litter, and garage door openers… and to a range of topics that are more about people than products: Death, religion, cancer, abortion, charitable giving, and more… connecting with people’s minds and hearts and often hearing “Thank you” from respondents at the end of an interview.
Kevin’s skillset includes listening and actually hearing what is being said (“listening between the lines?”), plus gently asking hard questions, discerning patterns and analyzing their importance, then finding ways to turn “bad news” for clients into productive action steps. He used to joke “magic tricks and bottle washing,” but one client told him it was “magic” that he could turn a 3-4 hour presentation/discussion session into a vibrant, company changing experience instead of sleep inducing torpor. (Kevin mixes and mingles quotes where it aids the process, and might include George Carlin and Donald Rumsfeld in the same presentation!)
For recreation, he spends time with history, baking, cat whispering, and camel riding.
Peter Ceren has a lifetime of experience observing deeply and storytelling in many forms, as an advertising photographer and videographer, and also as an author. In each of these, he has found a way to satisfy his deep curiosity about the way things work, and the way the human mind and emotions direct decisions and behavior.
He enjoyed the challenge of being flown into a new city to spend a day observing something new and getting to the essence quickly to find the best way to communicate something that he knew nothing about the day before. He gained a reputation with art directors for always delivering something fresh and powerful. He trained himself with this approach to observation and rapid insights that has served him well in other explorations throughout his life. The mysteries of the unknown and what lay beneath the assumptions fascinated him. He explored the psychological subtleties of photography and video and the power of storytelling and then used all he had learned about people into the long-form storytelling of fiction.
About the same time, he began working as a senior analyst with a national psychological research company, The Right Brain People, and explored new techniques to very quickly get to the deeper stories hidden in people’s psyches. He calls it spelunking into the darkness of hidden memories, and by exploring individuals, he gained more insights into the overall context of the way people think. During his 18 years with that company and others, he got deeper insights into the way people make decisions. The main theme of his life continued, exploring the unknown and quickly getting to the essence with surprising insights. He would describe his specialty among the teams as, “In an organization that prides itself as thinking outside the box, I am the one who says. ‘What box?‘ ” But there was more than just this to his research. He has an uncanny ability to get people to trust him and let down their defenses to share things that they had hidden even from themselves. Honest empathy engenders trust.
His other great skill is his highly refined intuition that targets the small hints of something deeper to explore inside people’s stories.
His books explore the unspoken essential truths in human relationships. Relationships are made of decisions; decisions are created by emotions. Relationships are not just between humans, but organizations and products as well. It is all connected. It nestles in the wider context where the senseless makes sense.
In his world of exploration, the ultimate context surprised him when one of the books he wrote that was partially set on a ship in the Spanish Armada ended up connecting him with a team of archeologist divers who were searching for that particular lost shipwreck from 1588. They invited him to join them in their search off the west coast of Ireland.
Always the hidden mysteries and questions. Always stories built in context.