Part 1: Universal Destinations & Experiences - The Social Labor of Market Research

Automatically transcribed

Aaron Hill: Welcome to the Real Research Podcast. I'm Erin Hill and I'll be your host for today. In today's podcast, I'm so excited to talk story with a couple of my longtime friends, Jennifer Avery and Laura Dulude from Universal Destinations and Experiences.

Jennifer is the Senior Vice President of Strategy, and Laura is the Assistant Director of Global Strategy, and both are heavily involved in Universal's research for projects that span the globe.

Welcome Jennifer and Laura. We're excited to have you here. Tell me a bit about Universal Resorts and how each of you ended up there.

Jennifer Avery: Um, sure. Uh, so I've been with Universal, since 2012. Um, my current title is, vice President of Strategic Insights. I run, consumer insights for the organization for the domestic parks. So market research, essentially primary research. And I also run a global strategy team that focuses on market intelligence, um, demand modeling and business case analysis.

Uh, started with Universal as a senior manager, occupied multiple roles, mostly in the research field. an anthropologist by disciplinary training. so that's the kind of anxiety I bring to, this kind of work. Laura, how about you?

Laura Dulude: So, I'm Laura. I, started my career at Universal, working for Jennifer back when she was a senior manager, on the consumer Insights team. So my background is in market research, but as she said, now I work on the strategy team. So I'm more often a client or a stakeholder on survey research than I am actually directly involved in the day to day these days.

I was at Universal on the Insights team. I left for several years and worked, on the supplier side at Chadwick Martin Bailey, which is a custom market research firm. Jennifer called me up after Covid and said, Hey, I know you don't like alligators.

Do you wanna keep living in Boston but work at Universal? and I said A thousand times, yes. So that's what brought me back.

Jennifer Avery: Yeah, when Laura left, it was one of the saddest days of my life, and when Covid made hybrid research possible, I thought, I'm gonna get Dulude back, and I did.

Aaron Hill: Yeah, so Laura, how do you keep involved when you're not at the parks?

Laura Dulude: Well, it's a lot of hearing from other people. So right now, as you know, Aaron, we know you're a fan. we're opening a new theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe. we were not asked to say that on this podcast. I'm just saying it.

Aaron Hill: I think it's gonna be fantastic.

Laura Dulude: So we're opening this new park and, for several weeks. we've been in team member previews, so people have been going to the park and kind of reporting back to me on, What the experience is like, what are the best attractions? What are the things that were the biggest surprises, the exciting stuff.

I also travel down to Orlando three or four times a year. stay for a week or so just to spend some time with the team, do presentations in person, anything that I kind of need to be there for.

Jennifer Avery: When Laura comes down, everyone gets really excited. She's like a celebrity, Laura Wheat. cause it's kind of like a celebrity guest in town and we all kind of deviate from our normal schedules and, uh,

Aaron Hill: she

Jennifer Avery:

Aaron Hill: her security detail.

Laura Dulude: That's right. let's make it sound like that's how serious it is. Yes. I

Aaron Hill: parkShe kind of slips in and out of the back

Laura Dulude: Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Hill: That's awesome. All right, so tell me, tell me a little bit about, how you guys are structured. 'cause you guys are a little bit different than a lot of companies because a lot of companies will outsource a lot of the research or all of the research. How do you, how do you get structured. what makes you choose your structure instead of other ways that you could do research?

Jennifer Avery: Yeah, so both on the insights and the strategy side, we are a DIY organization. It's always been that way. I mean, that's how it was when I first joined. I think part of the reason is just it's a legacy from in park intercept research, back in the old days before online panels. All the research was intercept research.

And if you work at a theme park, well, it's just right there. And you can send people out there and do intercepts. it becomes much more cost effective if you have a labor pool on site doing that work, if it's consistent enough as opposed to outsourcing, you know, to a field agency. And so my suspicion is that, you know, I kind of evolved from there.

it's just a place where it makes sense organically to have, kinda institute resources. One of the reasons why when I left the supplier side and took this job is because it was a DIY function. I had no interest in being, you know, not that's a perfectly acceptable life for many.

But I didn't wanna be a liaison between my end clients and some expert research vendor. Like I wanted to be the person doing the work still. I mean, at almost every level, um, we're all individual contributors, you know, to some extent. so that's just a strongly held belief. And the same is true on the strategy side.

We could outsource this type of stuff to the McKinseys and the bas and the PWCs of the world. but we prefer Laura to do it to, to forecast impossible business situations. There's just not a lot of expertise on the supplier side to theme parks.

Laura Dulude: That's what I was gonna say is I think when you're, when you're working in an industry like CPG where there's a more established understanding

of how the business works, it works to outsource, but in our case, theme parks is just such a niche weird, industry. I mean, the industry is themed entertainment really, and there just aren't as many, suppliers who are gonna have the depth of knowledge that we can have by spending years researching theme parks specific.

Aaron Hill: And there's probably not a lot of sharing going on, so

Laura Dulude: no.

Aaron Hill: there was consultants that couldn't accumulate knowledge like you can in other industries.

Jennifer Avery: no, and, and while we do compete with, you know, many theme entertainment categories and subcategories and leisure options and amusement parks, let's face it like. We're thinking about Disney most of the time. You know, that's, that's the game we're in. It's, it's thinking about us versus them in, in a certain kind of way or, and just it's too small a world to rely on suppliers to have that expertise.

Aaron Hill: Yeah, and a lot of times when people are substituting other goods, it's. Completely different categories. it's you or a cruise line or a new refrigerator.

Jennifer Avery: Right? Yeah. I think we do the work better, so why would I pay somebody a lot of money to do something that we can do just as well, And once you build up the infrastructure, it's much cheaper. You know, there is a certain amount of work that it takes to get the survey platforms and the analytical platforms and certainly the labor long term, like we can execute things at anywhere from a sixth to a 12th of the cost of a supplier in some cases more, depending on what kind of work we're talking about.

Laura Dulude: It's also volume because I mean, we do a lot of research and I think the company as a whole has become very dependent on survey research. and, and so just the fact of how much we now do means that outsourcing would be.

Aaron Hill: Yeah.

Jennifer Avery: so that's a note to the people listening. Her suppliers Don't call me. I will ignore you. I'm the worst conference attendee. It's like people. So sad trying to sell me stuff and I'm like, Nope, no, thanks.

Aaron Hill: Yeah. I think that is an interesting point though, because I think a lot of times, you know, we see a lot of different research and sometimes it's successful because you've brought in people that are experts in doing the research. but sometimes I look at it and, it's very clear that the consultant that was brought in knew the market research side of stuff, but they didn't know your industry, and so projects aren't as successful as they could have been because they didn't know what questions to ask.

Jennifer Avery: Yeah. I mean, and generally what they do is they ask you for all of your research, you know, and it's like, what am I hiring you for? I mean, I think that's an interesting thing about the industry in general. I come from an academic background where yeah, you might learn certain methodological skills, statistical skills, whatever.

But if you come from an academic background, like what you also learned is the content area. You know, you tend to have some sort of specialization in. Some things, some subject matter. And it's weird the way the private sector market research field is organized because we act as if people can sort of bounce from category to category. Just carrying with 'em their methodological expertise and while there's some benefit to, you know, getting somebody fresh from the outside of the different point of view. it always strikes me very odd that, you know, we think people can do research when they're not. Subject matter experts in the content area because how do you even write a good survey if you don't know about the domain? problem that we have when we hire new people. It takes a long time to become an expert in something. I think we have a very long tenured team because we privilege subject matter, expertise in content, sub knowledge, you know, as a, as a, just a motivation for being here. I mean, when I think about going and working somewhere else and all the work and time it would take me to become. Expert in some other category, like it's so exhausting that you know, might as well just stay here.

Aaron Hill: So when you guys are hiring new people, uh, do you look for people, I mean I've seen some industries where they're like, Hey, we don't want somebody that's a huge fan of this 'cause it tints their, their, perspective. And other times I think maybe you guys were being a fan and being involved in it is a good thing.

So how do you balance that out?

Laura Dulude: I would say, I think anytime you're, working in consumer research, you have to keep some kind of distance, like you said, because you have to be the voice of these people who are not thinking about this category. All day long. I think about some of the conversations that I had with clients when I was on the supplier side in financial services or in health insurance, where they were just so deep into the details of these things and I went, you talk to the average person on the street who's a consumer of your products, and this is not how they're thinking about them at all.

The same is true for us. But that's not to say that, we don't hire people who are fans. it would be really hard to do that, particularly in a market like Orlando where so much of the entertainment is this industry. but it is something that I think we talk about a lot is trying to keep that perspective of, a normal person in the outer United States, which is our term for anywhere outside of Florida.

Or outside of California, depending on which park we're talking about. the average person in the outer United States is thinking about our parks much less than we are on a daily basis. actually earlier, Aaron, when you asked me how do you keep up with this stuff when you're far away?

I think sometimes that's an advantage to me because when you live in Orlando, it is just so much part of. Your life, particularly if you work at a theme park to be going to theme parks, talking about theme parks, seeing news about theme parks. And so you get this mindset of, well of course, you know, this new character meet and greet is all anyone's talking about.

and that's not at all the perspective people are having in the outer United States. When often where I live in Massachusetts, I talk to someone and I say, I work at Universal. And they go, oh, what's it like working at Disney? There, there is that, lack of understanding. but certainly we hire a lot of people who love this industry, are absolutely here for it.

I mean, there's some people on our strategy team who are just die hard lifers gonna be working in themed entertainment their entire career. And then there are other people who've, yeah, I.

I'm probably gonna keep working here because I like having this expertise. and for me it's kind of the same thing. I enjoy learning about this category and I like riding a rollercoaster as much as the next person, but, it's not.

it's not a super fandom, but there's a variety and actually we have someone on our team who hates theme parks would not go to them if she did not work at them. so she definitely is good at keeping that external perspective.

Aaron Hill: Yeah, which is an interesting thing because if you're new and getting into this stuff and you get a job offer for a category that you're like, Hmm, I'm just not excited about that. You can have a really successful career researching things that you're not particularly interested.

Jennifer Avery: Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of our inherent culture. we wouldn't discriminate against somebody who's a theme park enthusiast, clearly, but, two things. One, if you're in a research field or in a strategy field, trying to seek the impossible goal of objectivity is something that we do like managing bias. thinking about alternative explanations, that is just like a standard operating procedure for us. if you think something great, but questioncome at it from another angle. Ask what evidence do you have for your belief? So we have a very kind of empirically oriented, function that seeks to, validate and question and operates with a high degree of, skepticism.

And at the same time, I. the people who do the best here, I mean the people who worked the longest here, these are inherently curious people who are fascinated by almost anything. when I worked on the supplier side, it was mostly CPG, and I used to work on projects where the subject was flipping corn chips, or hemorrhoid cream, or all sorts of incredibly mundane. Possibly boring stuff. And I always found every project to be interesting. Every question is a challenge, just the how do we operationalize these variables? How are we gonna, structure this complex question into something reductive but useful? There's an inherently interesting task no matter how seemingly boring the topic might be.

And the best researchers are people who are fascinated by almost every topic, but also fascinated by the process of discovering knowledge. So you know that that's much more important than your expertise or a lack of interest really for us.

Aaron Hill: yeah. My career, it is been kind of fun because I get to see tons of different projects on tons of different things. So, for every theme park project I have, I have one on like, uh, roofing system fasteners, you know,and you look at it, you say, oh, that's, that's boring, but, but. As a researcher, it's really fun because, well, how do you even get ahold of these people, who's using roofing system fasteners because they're tough to get ahold of. So how do you get ahold of 'em? How do you make sure you've got enough sample? How do you focus in on the things that are important to them? And so there's all sorts of stuff that goes into the questions that you have to answer before you can even put together the survey. So,there's some of the most fun projects have been weird topics.

Jennifer Avery: Theme parks as a category I think is a little unique. And I'm sure there are other categories like this, but what one thing that's great about it is there's like a lot of different sub-domains to study. So I mean, the obvious thing is attractions and you know, roller coasters and stuff, but you know, there's a whole marketing organization that needs all of their traditional brand and profiling and segmentation work.

There's all the food and beverage and the hotels and just the trip planning and. the post vacation behavior. So in, in terms of like all the different sub subjects that there are to investigate, there's actually many domains that we've barely even scratched the surface of investigation on, just because there's such a multitude of, of things to uncover with theme park.

So, I mean, me and Laura have been doing this for a decade. I'm not bored, you know,

with content yet.

Right. So there's just, there's more to learn. I mean, it might be a, I think it was, it is attractive as a category to work at, you know, for that reason, maybe a little bit different than some more singular categories.

Aaron Hill: Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, you guys are most other categories. So you've got your, the shops in there, so you've got CPG, or you've got the same problems the CPG companies have. You've got banking because you've got, you know, credit card offers that you make to people, gift cards, the, everything else like that.

You've got, you know. App development and all the UX that goes into that. And so, yeah, I mean, you're a software company, you're a bank. you could do almost every category of research out there working at Universal. And then

there's all the internal, you know, there's all the HR research and how do you like your job and how do we structure the job so that we get the best people And yeah.

So it's, it's fascinating.

Jennifer Avery: Yeah.

Aaron Hill: All right, so, Ed. Sheran and I was watching a documentary on Edge Shear and a couple months ago, and he made a statement where he kind of said that he writes a song and it's his until it gets released, and then it kind of gains a life of its own. And it isn't really his anymore because other people interpret it, attached their own emotions to it. Uh. Et cetera. And it becomes its own thing, right?

It goes out and it's no longer really his song because other people have attached other stuff to it. It's symbolic of their relationship or whatever. you ever see that happen to your data? where you gather data, you know why you gathered the data, and then you release it and, Sometimes it becomes a beautiful thing and sometimes it becomes a monster and it transforms itself and you lose control of, what its original intent was.

Jennifer Avery: You wanna take that one first?

Laura Dulude: Yeah, you're asking us that question 'cause I'm sure that happens to every researcher or every analyst who's ever put any data out there. yes, definitely that does happen. I mean, we do our best to structure our presentations in a way where. It's really clear the intent behind the data we're giving.

because I think the way that that happens the most often is people will take a number out of context, particularly if they don't understand, the mechanics of survey research. So you'll see people comparing, you know, top box on a Likert scale to. Selection in a multi-select, question, comparing those numbers directly because they don't necessarily know where they came from.

They don't necessarily understand that survey data is not, a black and white. This is a fact. This is another fact. Let's compare these two facts. so that is probably a common way that that happens. And again, we sort of try to mitigate that. I think one of the things that, Helps us mitigate it is, Jennifer herself, because she's in a lot of these conversations, where people, may sort of come back with, research information where they've lost some of the intent and

context behind it, and she can kind of bring us back to, okay, but the reason we said that was this, it wasn't to take it in this specific, other direction.

Jennifer Avery: sometimes, but probably not most of the time is the truth, you know? having been in this industry now for 20 years. one of the things that I'm also been studying and my whole team is looking at is organizational culture and the meta study of how people use data and how organizations make decisions. we like to think that, people. Make rational decisions and that in order to get an organization to move from, ignorance to correct decision, all we have to do is fill the information deficit and then the humans will make the rational decisions.

And of course that is a completely absurd thing to think that is not how humans decide things. It is not how change happens. And so, you know, most of the time we have kind of given up trying to police whether or not people are using data correctly because that is just a never ending frustration. Right. And we really think about. Persuasion, you know, to the extent that we can persuade people, and mostly we think about where are other people coming from? Like what are they trying to accomplish? You know, what is their value system in positioning, their pitch or you know, their, their research questions.

This way. There's generally always like a cultural question, a social question, a political question underlying any research question. And sort of unusually, I think we always try to unpack that, because clients, you know, frequently state their question like it's a research question, like they're just after a certain fact, but they're never after effect. They are after a weapon that they can use to position something that they're trying to push forward for the organization. And you can be antagonistic to that, which generally from my experience, does not make you very popular. Or you can try to figure out. what they're trying to accomplish socially and politically, and then embed yourself in that sort of thing.

So, you know, we really have worked hard in our organization to not just be these research and strategy suppliers. You know, we're not a McDonald's. You just can't come over here and order a strategy cheeseburger for Laura. You know? you have to work with us. Everything's a dialogue. It's a conversation.

It's a lot of work. some clients don't have time for that ' cause they got jobs to do and they don't wanna get mired down into like, how do you really operationalize this? And you consider the alternative hypotheses and how do you really know what you know? But we push that boundary as much as we can.

'cause what we're really doing is not filling information deficits. We are bridgi

lot of social work. People don't talk about this enough. It's a lot of social labor, to be a good research and strategy supplier. 'cause it's, it's really not about data transfer at all.

Laura Dulude: I think I have seen it that way in the past. Okay. These people come to us, they tell us what they wanna know. We go figure out the things they wanna know. But the longer that we've been doing this in the environment that we have, the more we feel the need to really drill down to, okay, like why, why are we doing this?

And what are the assumptions underlying it? not just. You know, as Jennifer said, you know, sometimes data can be this weapon that people want. so not just, you know, what kind of weapon are they looking for, but what have they assumed prior to asking for this weapon? So, I'm, that's gonna be challenging to come up with an example that we're gonna be comfortable saying on the air.

but I

Aaron Hill: no. Yeah. Hypothetical.

Yeah. Some, somebody does a customer satisfaction survey and they come back with scores and. Say, see, people are upset about this because it,

Laura Dulude: But I mean, I think like more specific than that, it's, it's, there are things people believe before they even come to us. Right? They, like one of the things about large organization is there are a lot of different analytical groups, right? We, we are two of them, consumer insights and strategy and we sit in a particular place in the organization.

But, you know, earlier you were talking about. HR research, that's a whole separate team ux ui, that's a whole separate team. There's social media analytics in a separate place. There's, there's industrial engineering. There's all of these different groups that are all sort of holding onto like parts of the elephant of what's going on.

And so some of our clients will come to us and they've already seen analysis from other groups and have a particular. Mindset about what's going on in some area. So you mentioned dining, so maybe they come in and they think, people love mobile food and drink ordAarong because it's super convenient.

We can see more and more and more people are using it, so they must love it. And then maybe we go out and research it and we see yes, more and more people are using it because they're expecting it to be convenient, but maybe they don't actually love it. Maybe there are some problems with it. So understanding, why do you believe this thing that you believe is important for us to then be able to either corroborate what you believe, or sort of bust a myth.

so I think that's part of it too, is having those conversations about like, okay, so where did, you get this information? Why do you think that? and really interrogating, the root of the questions.

Jennifer Avery: it's very atypical. it's exhausting for us. It's exhausting for the clients. 'cause I think most of the time, you know, the expectation is you go to your research supplier, whether it's external or internal. You ask for something, you get it, and you go off and use that data, Everyone's happy, and we just don't function that way. Like if you want work out of us, we're gonna make you work for it. You know, we're gonna make you demonstrate that you've thought about the alternative to whatever you think is the truth. You know, that you are incorporating the perspectives of your stakeholders who should be incorporated.

We're mediators to a large extent, you know, so instead of just sort of fulfilling the wishes of whatever, a client, um, comes to us because the information we produce actually. Can and does live on its own in like the form of these like ridiculous PowerPoint decks. Who knows, like three years from now, that deck could be used by some other random person to accomplish X, Y, or Z. You know, we have to be, very aware of like the social connections, in terms of who might be, touching that data. And we take that responsibility, seriously, even though it's not actually prescribed to us. Yeah, but I think it's something that probably is only accomplished because we have been here so long and we have such good relationships with our existing clients and understanding that that's kind of the nature of, of how we're going to provide services.

I doubt it's very typical and in most internal research functions, and it certainly is not characteristic of the agency work, right? I mean, that's something youFrom an agency or supplier side, you know? 'cause in that case, it's like somebody came, you deliver and you have no idea how that stuff is being used. And you would be real surprised, you know, if you didn't know.

Aaron Hill: Yeah, and I think there's some ethical questions too. 'cause I mean, right now one of the things I worry about is, you know, we have these panels of people that we invite to take our surveys. And, you ask a bunch of questions that are, that have already been answered 15 times in previous projects, or, you know, we asked them the wrong way.

So it's a waste of time and we didn't get the data that we needed out of 'em. And it, it's, it's harmful not just for our research, but it's harmful because we've just wasted participant time that they could have been answering questions that we really need answered. And there's only a limited resource of, of people to answer those questions.

Jennifer Avery: I mean, one of the things that we do more than even work is convince people not to do work. You know, a lot times people will come to us, you know, 'cause what they want is data. And again, whether they wanna weaponize it or not, these are individuals seeking data for their individual. And oftentimes if, you know, once we investigate, they don't really need that data, you know, the answer is achievable through some other mechanism, you know, or they're not really asking the right question, or even their objective is sort of. In a very innocuous way. Nefarious, you know, so, you know, I think that's where we do the policing. We don't do the policing on the back end in terms of how people are using the data. 'cause honestly, like Ed Shean says like once it's out there, it's out there.

He's a, he's a wise man, but where we can exert much more influences on the front end. So we do a lot of work on the front end. And more times than not, that results in just not doing the work. I mean, the market research industry, and I think this is even more. Potentially dangerous with ai. I mean, the proliferation of useless information, which only serves to confound and confused people.

I mean, how many of us work in an industry where the clients beg you for the data and then, you know, a week later complain that they're overwhelmed by data, they want it all on a dashboard, and then they can't sort through all the dashboards. I mean, you know, just the sociology of quantification and just like the overwhelm and. Of the KPIs. I mean, it's a really kind of fascinating side to, you know, how data is used in an organization, but in a lot of cases the data is performative and not necessary, and we don't like to do that kind of work. We don't like to waste our time, we don't like to waste our respondents time. Um, so there's a pretty high bar in terms of getting work out of us, unless of course, you know. You're super high in the C-suite, then we probably have to just do it.

Aaron Hill: but they're more likely to be asking right questions. Right? Yeah. I think it's interesting to me how often, you know, just in life, if I had this answer, then it would be so much easier to make this decision that I have to make. And then you get the data and you're like, oh, that wasn't nearly as helpful as I thought it was gonna be.

Jennifer Avery: we've all been there.

Laura Dulude: We've all been there, and a lot of times the answer is it's complicated, and that makes it even worse, right? Because people are looking for this concrete, okay? I ask you this question, you're gonna gimme a yes or no answer. You're gonna tell me exactly what to do. So much of the time, there are multiple ways that you could deal with a situation.

Like I think about the problem of, optimizing price points and you think about, well, okay, we could price higher and get fewer people. We could price lower and get more people. And sometimes there are points where, it could work at a range of price points, right? that. Kind of thing, but more complex happens a lot because there's many different factors to consider, particularly if we're talking about, major investments.

there's a lot of different ways that you could get to success. And so sometimes those answers that people are looking for are not Very simple, very clear. most of the time they are. It really depends and it's kind of complicated. We need to talk more about what we want to do as an organization and what our goals are.

Jennifer Avery: And nobody really wants to do that 'cause everybody's just so busy. So is this a real.

Aaron Hill: Yeah.

Jennifer Avery: it's a pickle.

Aaron Hill: Yeah, coming back to, people doing what's optimal. You know, you said earlier, you hope that you give people data and they do The rational thing. Uh, and I think people generally do the rational thing, but the rational thing isn't necessarily based solely on the data. It's based on how much time I have to make this decision and am I gonna be able to get to my kid's baseball game?

Jennifer Avery: mean,

Aaron Hill: and it may not be the optimal one based the data,

Jennifer Avery: I mean, that's the thing too. I actually find as the years go by that the reliance on data has gotten to a point where I almost wanna counsel many clients. That they don't need this. Like, you don't need a study. You actually have other kinds of information available to you.

You could make this decision, but I think there's, something kind of going on on the zeitgeist where almost every decision needs to be quantified, you know? And with all the vendors out there selling that they have the answers to everything. And there's a model for everything that I think there's sort of a belief, particularly my people who are kind of like layman when it comes to analytics that you can analyze through every problem. And yeah, to an extent you can, but you know, there are limitations to what can be known, you know, particularly on a certain timeline. And there's a million vendors who promise that they can quantify everything. And, that's a lot where, you know, kind of our stressors lie as well when you have to say to a client like, we probably can't know this.

We're probably gonna.

Aaron Hill: Yep.

Laura Dulude: I think a really good concrete example of that is the idea of, how much money is it worth to raise our guest satisfaction rating by one percentage point. this is a question that actually comes up a lot because apparently. We hear through the grapevine that Disney has a number that if you can raise the, guest satisfaction survey results by one percentage point, here's how much money it's worth to the company.

you could imagine if you could actually get that information in a reliable way, it would be incredibly helpful in decision making because we're always having to sort of play off this decision of things that. Increased guest satisfaction often decrease, our returns. Like the park would be much better if you only let one family in every day, right?

Aaron Hill: Yeah.

Laura Dulude: We can't do that. So if you knew what that relationship was, then maybe you could make better decisions about staffing and about, you know, levels of attendance that we're willing to allow. But when we go and try and figure that out, and we actually have tried to figure it out more than one way, you get some very unsatisfying answers because there's not a good way to tie back what was this individual guest's experience.

What did they go on to do as a result of it? Because if you think about how frequently people visit our parks, it's very infrequent. So it's really hard to track,

that kind of thing. but that's a question that comes up all the time and people feel there must be a way to get to that answer.

There must be a way to know this.

Jennifer Avery: they know that Disney know it. And, and I will look 'em in the face and say, you know what? Disney doesn't know it. Believe me, I guarantee you. But when there's 25 suppliers saying, I could build you that model, you know, and I'm telling you that they're a liar, but you know, who's, who are you gonna believe?

Laura Dulude: But that'sThat's why people believe it's possible, because someone has said that it is. But

when you go in there as someone who actually knows how to analyze this data, and you look at it, you go, there's no way. I mean, I can get you a number, but it's not

actually the reality.

Vanessa: Also, don't forget to subscribe if you'd like to hear more episodes like this in the future.

Thanks again for listening. See you next time.