Do you cringe at the mere mention of the word, “insights”? What about its fancier cousin, “actionable insights”? We do, too. As a matter of fact, on this episode, we discovered that Moe has developed an uncontrollable reflex: any time she utters the word, her hands shoot up uncontrolled to form air quotes. Alas! Our podcast is an audio medium! What about those poor souls who got hired into an “Insights & Analytics” team within their company? Egad! Nonetheless, inspired by an email exchange with a listener, we took a run at the subject with Chris Kocek, CEO of Gallant Branding, who both wrote a book and hosts a podcast on the topic of insights!

Podcasts, Books, and Gen AI Roasteries Mentioned in the Show

• (Podcast) APH #076: Insights, Please. Actionable Ones! With Rod Jacka


• (Book) Any Insights Yet? by Chris Kocek


• (Podcast) (Podcast) Any Insights Yet? Season 2


• (Book) Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin


• (Conference) Canva Create


• (Movie) Widow Clicquot


• (Book) The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (P.S.) by Tilar J Mazzeo


• (Podcast) The Widow Who Disrupted Champagne (with Ben Walter) (tepidly recommended)


• (Gen AI At Its Best) Roast My Podcast


• (Gen AI At Its Best) Roast LinkedIn


• (Newsletter) Beyond the Mean – A newsletter by Juliana Jackson, specifically Attention Is Intelligence: What AI Gets Right (and what it never will)


• (Site/Newsletter) gatodo.com

Photo by Gio Bartlett on Unsplash

Episode Transcript

0:00:05 .8 Announcer: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.

0:00:13 .8 Michael Helbling: Hey, everybody, welcome. It’s the Analytics Power Hour, and this is episode 268. I was talking to the CEO of a company last week, and he said the problem he hears from his peers is we all have this data, but we still lack insights. It just so happens that a lot of us probably hear something similar to that all the time. In fact, this episode was inspired by a question from listener Christopher Lind. So thank you, Christopher. And I think in this conversation, we’ll have some interesting back and forth on this. We did do an episode similar to this one a long, long time ago, episode 67 with Rod Jacka. But I think it’s well past time.

0:00:55 .4 Tim Wilson: 76. Just to make sure that…

0:00:57 .4 MH: Yeah. Episode 76, like 1976.

0:01:00 .7 TW: They listen for the whole episode. They’re like, when are they gonna talk about insights?

0:01:04 .0 MH: Yeah. Anyways, that’s my cue to introduce my co hosts. Hey, Moe. Moe Kiss, welcome. How’s it going?

0:01:12 .7 Moe Kiss: Oh, pretty great. How are you?

0:01:15 .3 MH: Awesome. I’m excited to talk about insights.

0:01:17 .9 MK: I’m a bit riled up to talk about insights. It’s been…

0:01:20 .4 MH: I’m excited.

0:01:21 .3 MK: It’s a topic for me of late.

0:01:23 .1 MH: I think I’m also like that. So this is good. And Tim Wilson, welcome.

0:01:29 .4 TW: Hello.

0:01:32 .0 MH: Tim, I hope you can keep up today. That’s all I have to say is just listen…

0:01:35 .2 MK: No extreme opinions.

0:01:36 .9 MH: Yep, yep. Yeah. And I’m Michael Helbling, and we also have a guest I’m very excited about. Chris Kocek is the founder and CEO of Gallant, a branding studio based in Austin, Texas.

0:01:49 .9 S?: [0:01:49 .9] ____.

0:01:51 .9 MH: He’s also the author of the book Any Insights Yet? And hosts a podcast with the same name. And today he is our guest. Welcome to the show, Chris.

0:02:00 .2 Chris Kocek: Thanks for having me.

0:02:00 .7 MH: So this is exciting for a couple of reasons. So obviously, Chris, all three of us are sort of data and analytics nerds. You come more from a branding and positioning and marketing and strategy background. And so I’m really excited to contrast sort of what you’ve been gleaning and what you wrote your book on with sort of how we in the data space might like, sort of observe and talk about. So that juxtaposition is something I’m sort of excited to observe throughout our conversation today. But maybe as a starting point, what got you thinking about this in the first place? Why did this sort of become an area of focus and then that spawned the book and the podcast and things like that?

0:02:40 .4 CK: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I had written a book prior to this one called the Practical Pocket Guide to Account Planning.

0:02:47 .4 MH: Oh, I need that book.

0:02:49 .8 CK: And there was a chapter in it called Finding Insights. And it was a short chapter, it was like three pages long. And students and professors and professionals either wrote to me or came up to me after certain talks and they would say, oh, really like the book, but I wish that chapter were longer. So I said, okay, well, let me work on a second edition and I’ll make that chapter longer. And I started doin