Does working hard still help achieve your dreams? In today's episode, Alison Simpson, CEO of the CMA, interviews two strategists from Leo Burnett Toronto: Tahir Ahmad, Chief Strategy Officer, and Sarah Carpentier, PhD, Senior Strategist. Their focus is the 2025 HumanKind Study, revealing how Canadians feel about work and life. When 83% of people don't believe hard work will pay off, the connection between effort and reward has changed - and brands should understand why.

7085B3-CMAPodcast - Ep. 53 - Tahir Ahmad and Sarah Carpentier
===

[00:00:00 ] Presenter: Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMA CEO, Alison Simpson.

[00:00:27 ] Alison: If you're a marketer wondering how to connect with people who are stressed, uncertain, and frankly just trying to get through the day, well you are definitely not alone. Today, we're diving into Leo Toronto's HumanKind Study with Tahir Ahmad and Dr. Sarah Carpentier. Tahir serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Leo Toronto.

[00:00:45 ] Alison: He's also the original vision behind their highly insightful HumanKind study. It's research that delves into how Canadians are feeling and key trends, including what's keeping consumers up at night. And there are quite a few things keeping us up at night right now. Sarah made the leap from PhD student and management consulting to agency behavioural scientist a little over two years ago, bringing her doctorate in psychology to Leo Toronto, where she's a senior strategist and a principal force behind the HumanKind study.

[00:01:12 ] Alison: Now in its fourth year, the HumanKind study dives deep into the emotional undercurrent, opportunities and genuine challenges that are facing Canadians today. A few of the themes that we are gonna cover off include Social Stage Fright, Hustle to Nowhere, and Alexa, what is critical thinking. This year, the study also focused on younger Canadians, age 16 to 45, and took a closer look at newcomers to help uncover the emotional undercurrents that are shaping the next generation.

[00:01:40 ] Alison: It's also the second year that the study expanded beyond Canada to the U.S. to help us really understand how Canadians compare to and differ from Americans. Given the uncertainty with tariffs and the renewed Canadian patriotism, this view is both very timely and sure to provide some fascinating insights to make today's discussion both informative and actionable.

[00:01:58 ] Alison: Sarah and Tahir will also share what brands can do to help Canadians address their concerns and needs. Welcome Sarah and Tahir. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here today. 

Sarah: Thank you. 

[00:02:07 ] Tahir: Thanks Alison. It's great to be back. I know we did this last year, so super excited to share the fourth edition. 

[00:02:15 ] Alison: I'm looking forward to it too. Now, Sarah, since you're new this year and you have an unconventional path to our profession, uh, before we dive into the study, I would really love to hear what attracted you from being a PhD to the wonderful world of marketing and agency life, and also share a bit about what the transition's been like.

[00:02:30 ] Sarah: Oh, that's a fun question. Okay, so yeah, I think my day to days have changed a little bit. I definitely know a lot more cross industry jargon or I'm really, really collecting it as I go through life. But ultimately everything I've always done at school or at any point in my career is still always ultimately about understanding why people think, feel, and act the way they do, and then how I can use that knowledge to help, you know, improve lives.

[00:03:00 ] Sarah: So it really all ladders up to the same thing and it, we really understand how it all goes together. I left the PhD world, it was wonderful. But as much as I love research on its own, I really felt quite disconnected from doing something with what was being learned. So I wanted to kind of go out in the world a little bit and help share that knowledge with the people who can benefit from it.

[00:03:21 ] Sarah: And I think on face value, it can seem a bit out of place for a scientist to want to seek out working at a creative agency. But I know that if you listen to the data and if you listen to the science, then it tells us that human creativity is a really essential ingredient in really connecting people to ideas and creating new ideas that actually move people.

[00:03:45 ] Sarah: Right. And I really wanted to be a part of that. And when I heard about the HumanKind study and I met Tahir, and I met Ryan Roberts, our SVP of Strategy as well. I loved the way that they thought. I was like, they think like me. They get it. This isn't just something they say, this is actually something they really, really care about and live and breathe.

[00:04:02 ] Sarah: And so I was really excited to join the team. 

[00:04:04 ] Alison: It's absolutely great to have you in our profession. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the HumanKind study today. So Tahir, let's start by having you share a little bit about the study and how it's evolved over the four years. 

[00:04:14 ] Tahir: It's pretty amazing to be here four years in, I guess, now already starting to plan the fifth year.

[00:04:19 ] Tahir: So the fifth edition is in the works, which is great. And I, I know that we did this last year and we've appeared, I think on the CMA conference a couple years in a row. So maybe there are some people familiar with the study, but, just to very quickly go, you know, to its, its origin. It really fell out of this need to have more Canadian research at hand and, and frankly, our philosophy at Leo is all around humankind and the intimate and deep understanding of human beings and what they need and want and what they dream about, fear and everything that they care about in terms of improving the quality of their life.

[00:04:56 ] Tahir: And, you know, we just felt as though we never really had this, you know, data that we could go to, uh, and mine that really reflects the mindset of the country. You know, we do research bespoke for clients or particular briefs, and so to truly say that we understand Canadians and human beings better than anyone else, you know, we wanted to create something more proprietary that we could draw from each and every day.

[00:05:24 ] Tahir: And so that was a bit of a fumbly way of saying how we got to the first edition. And it was very much a, off the side of the desks, you know, we just tried to pull together, uh, as much data as we could. And you can imagine that it's kind of like boiling the ocean. And so over time we've just gotten better and smarter and more efficient at distilling the findings into something that really gets at, uh, perhaps a sharper point of view and what Canadians are thinking and feeling and more

[00:05:50 ] Tahir: importantly, the way that brands can help solve for those problems and those needs in their lives. And so for this fourth edition, we did change things up a little bit, as you mentioned, off the top. We tried to focus on a younger demos, and Sarah, I'm sure will correct me, as she should, but it was 18 to 45.

[00:06:06 ] Tahir: I want, no, sorry, 16 to 45. 

Sarah: Sixteen!

Tahir: Yes. Yeah. Sixteen. First correction of the podcast. But yeah, so I, the 16 to 45, which is really intentional on our part because we've had so many conversations with our client partners around not just Gen Z, but even Gen Alpha. And I know that that age range doesn't necessarily tip into that demo, but it just helped us get to a perspective from a segment of the population that is typically hard to hear from.

[00:06:35 ] Tahir: And so it required a bit more effort and you know, a real conscious effort to hear from those voices because you know, as you can imagine with 16, 17, 18 year olds, they're not always so willing to share their point of view or what they fear in life or what they're going through. And I think that was like, what was really eyeopening for us in this edition is when you're starting to see the anxieties and the tensions that not only those of us who are

[00:07:00 ] Tahir: living life as adults with kids and the pressures of careers and retirement looming for some people, these are people that are really just starting out their lives and to have a better understanding of what they're already struggling with was really eye-opening. 

[00:07:14 ] Alison: I'm looking forward to diving into those results for sure.

[00:07:17 ] Alison: You also have a longer lens view, uh, and through four fairly tumultuous years, certainly COVID, post-COVID, now the economic uncertainty. So what are some of the key changes that you've seen for Canadians given how tumultuous the time has been? 

[00:07:32 ] Tahir: Yes. I mean, it's interesting. When we first started this, it was hard to get away from, uh, some of those more macro issues that people were struggling with.

[00:07:40 ] Tahir: Certainly COVID, we started it before COVID, we launched it during COVID. So what we were seeing in terms of feelings of isolation, concerns about, obviously health and safety were big themes in those first few years. And then, you know, last year we saw again the financial uncertainty really, um, be a big factor in people's lives and, and whether or not, you know, they're gonna actually have enough to even, you know, survive, frankly.

[00:08:08 ] Tahir: This year what we saw was this interesting emerging theme that was through all the different, let's call them sub themes o