Bridging Barriers: Dawn Carr's Mission in Black Consumer Research

This episode is brought to you by Petty Professor | Cozy Rebellion in Session™

A fearless career leap, a devastating family loss, and a mission to change how brands listen—Dawn V. Carr brings all of it to the table with clarity and heart. We welcome the founder and CEO of Mahogany Insights to explore why so many products miss the mark for Black consumers and how better research—not louder marketing—solves the real problem. Dawn breaks down the difference between counting people and understanding people, showing how qualitative research, cultural immersion, and culturally fluent moderation turn stories into strategy.

We dig into the structural reasons behind dissatisfaction: Black Americans make up a far smaller slice of most research panels than we are of the population, and that gap cascades into misread insights, misguided campaigns, and products that feel like they weren’t built for us. Dawn’s solution is Mahogany Minds, a national panel designed to bring more Black voices into studies at scale with fair compensation and thoughtful recruitment. She explains how intersectionality matters in practice—Black and immigrant, Black and parent, Black and high income each carry distinct needs—and why the generic “multicultural” label erases meaningful differences across ethnicity, region, and culture.

Along the way, Dawn shares the human story behind her method: caregiving for her mother, rebuilding as a single mom, and choosing entrepreneurship as a form of activism. We talk about trust and betrayal in brand relationships, why context makes data honest, and how 10x thinking can change not just a company’s goals but the infrastructure built to reach them. If you care about DEI, consumer insight, brand strategy, or simply want products that truly reflect your life, this conversation offers a playbook for doing the work with rigor and respect.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Your support helps more listeners find conversations that move the culture and the market forward.

Check out Dawn's top 5 books to read for your New Year's Book List! 

Tune in to find out why she considers them great reads!

A Happy Pocket full of Money
Mastering Fear
We Shoul

Chapters

• 0:00 Guest Intro: Dawn V. Carr’s Journey
• 3:42 From Marketing To Market Research
• 10:15 Grief, Caregiving, And A New Path
• 16:55 Cultural Immersions Around The World
• 22:10 Single Motherhood And Rebuilding
• 27:40 2020 Pivot To Black Consumer Insight
• 34:45 Why Representation In Panels Matters
• 42:20 Building Mahogany Minds Panel
• 49:05 Interpreting Data With Cultural Context
• 55:55 Trust, Brands, And Betrayal

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:25

Hey, what's up, good people? Welcome to Top Five DEI. I'm Dr. J, and I'm here with Dr.

SPEAKER_01: 0:31

Carlos Miller, the petty professor. And I'm Nurse Ty. Tanae Lambert.

SPEAKER_00: 0:36

Thank you for joining us for today's special guest. Dr. Miller, the petty professor, connected us with this connection. And after reading about her, I was like, we were all like, yes, we think our listeners would definitely find her story, her experience so interesting. So let me dive in and tell you about her. Dawn V Car is an award-winning black consumer expert and the founder and CEO of Mahogany Insights, a market research firm dedicated to helping brands authentically connect with black audiences. I love the name of the Mahogany Insights. That's a great name of a company. With over 25 years of experience spanning CPG, healthcare, financial services, and technology, she has worked with Fortune 100 companies to uncover deep cultural and behavioral insights to drive business growth. Her clients have included PG, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Amazon, the WMBA, Disney, Kaiser Permanente, and many others. Before launching Mahogany Insights, Dawn spent a decade in marketing brand management at Procter Gamble and Fritolake. She later served as a cultural immersion consultant, working on projects in six out of the seven continents as a lead black consumer research specialist at one of the largest market research companies in the world. At Goldman Sachs 10K Small Business Recipient, NASDAQ Milestone Circles member, and MR2 Female Founder Award Honoree. She holds a Bachelor's of Science in Economics from Spellman College, HBCU, and an MBA in marketing from the University of Notre Dame. Dawn currently resides in Dallas, Texas and has a young daughter. Dawn is also an active member of several civic organizations, including Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated and Junior and Junior League of Dallas. In 2023, she was inducted into the Harriet Tubman Society at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dawn, welcome to the show, Dawn.

SPEAKER_03: 2:41

Hello. Thank you so much for the invitation. And I just am so excited to get to talk to you guys today. It's it's just an awesome topic.

SPEAKER_02: 2:51

So well, we're we're lucky to have you. One thing we often say with all of our guests, because we know maybe a little bit about them, and then we hear your bio and we're like, what they did this too. What they did that, oh my god, yeah. And so so hearing all of that, this next part as we get into the questions makes it even more exciting. And I get the privilege of asking your first question. How did you get into your field? Please tell us about your journey, Don back then, on the journey to Don today.

SPEAKER_03: 3:27

Yes, and you do not know the story, Carlos. This is gonna be brand new for you, because the so much of this story is so intertwined with what was going on with me personally and how I really fell into market research. So we talked about, you know, I went to Spelman, I graduated from Spelman, I took this route. There was kind of two routes you could take at the time if you were an econ major at Spelman. One was investment banking, and the other one was management consulting. And so I took the management consulting route and thought, like, oh, maybe I'll do this forever. And ended up going back to business school, got my MBA, and then started at Procter Gamble doing marketing and brand management. And I really loved the idea of doing marketing. Like what's interesting is that they take these kids that are like in their early 20s and then they put them on brands, these billion-dollar brands, and they kind of let you sort of like play, like play CEO with these big brands, right? You get to try all the things that work and things that don't work, and it's fun, but it's a lot of pressure. And so I was doing that. I had I had gotten promoted and I was up for promotion for director, and they put a pause on all promotions. This was like, I don't know if you remember this or you were even their cross, but it was they put a pause on all the promotions, and I thought, okay, I can either do another role or I can take a year off and find something new to do and then come back in a year and then get promoted. So I decided I was gonna take a year off. And it was called my no fear, all faith tour. And so I was gonna go do all the things that I had always wanted to do, but was afraid to do. So it was things like I was gonna go to Ghana because I wanted to go and spend some time in Africa. I wanted to sell timeshares in Mexico because how many times had I ever gone to someplace and I was like, I just want to stay and sell timeshares and live on the beach? I was gonna teach English in a Spanish country. I was gonna go get my Somolier license in Argentina. This was my plan. It was three months of rotation. And so I got to Ghana and I was working there, and I fell in love with the work. I was working for as a nonprofit. I was working helping launch this family planning and resources, that kind of stuff. And it was amazing work. I was working with my old marketing director there. She had gone and started it, and then she left and they gave me the job, if I wanted it, as country director for this nonprofit in Ghana. So I was like, yes, this is what I was meant to do. I thought I was meant to do this no-for-all faith tour, but maybe I was just meant to get to Ghana and live here and make all this impact. And so I flew home to pack my bags to go back to Ghana full time. And it was my birthday, I remember, and I sat down, I was with my mom, and she told me that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer while I was going. And so, and she begged me not to go. And what's interesting about that time, like I still remember it because I didn't really believe her. Like I knew what she was saying was true, but I'd never had a loss before. And so I couldn't process losing my mom. Like, I couldn't process that. And so I remember thinking, I don't want to stay here. I want to go back to Ghana and live the life that I thought. But long story short, I ended up staying in Oklahoma and taking care of my mother. So I went from Cincinnati and doing all this PG stuff to Ghana and doing this amazing stuff and getting to be this country director potentially to living in the living rooms of my mother's 1,000 square foot apartment taking care of her and my 80, some almost 90-year-old grandmother at the time. And so that was kind of like what happened. So I ended up at that time thinking, probably two weeks into it, that, you know, I am not a natural caregiver. Yeah, like that is not my that's not my strength. That's not what I do. Okay. So two weeks in, I was like, I have to figure out something else to do. And I had always been exposed to market researchers on the marketing side at PNG. And so I reached out to a company. I knew that one of the big pluses about doing market research is you could live anywhere. And that was so rare at the time. And so they hired me. They were like, oh, you can work however much you want, you can live anywhere you want. You kind of get paid for what you work, so it's fine. And so that's how I fell into it. And then my mom passed away about two months into me getting into market research. And I was like, I love it. Like it's a really good mix of the things I loved about marketing and the things I loved here. And so that's how I started in market research. And yeah, and then from there, I started doing cultural emergence. So I would take people to, you know, China, I took people to Turkey, to Mexico, to Brazil, all over. And it was what they were paying me to go to these great places, go in people's houses. It was just the most craziest thing ever. And I always had cultural emergence, and I loved the idea of connecting on a very human level. And I felt like at that time I was going through the most human experience that pretty much all of us has or will go through, right? Like losing a mother. And it connected me in a way that I just loved. And so I started doing that, and I thought I would do that forever. And then I got pregnant in 2019, or 2018, I got pregnant. And then I ended up separating from my mother, my daughter's biological father when I was eight months pregnant. And then I was like, oh my God, how am I gonna do this job? I'm traveling all over and I'm a single mom now. And so I moved from DC to Oklahoma. I had nowhere to live. I was living on, I slept on the couch of my siblings for a while. I stayed with my dad for a while. I ended up getting in Dallas, living with my sister, literally, my daughter and I sleeping on this little blow-up mattress for a while. And I cried every day of 2019. She was born in January, from January 1st through December 30th. And then I was like, okay, I'm gonna round it out. You can cry one more day, and then you got to get it together in 2020. And I was like, 2020 is gonna be the best year ever. And then 2020 came. I enrolled in a program at Harvard to get my master's in sustainability. And then, and I was doing this great project with Starbucks, and I thought I'm gonna go this route. I started getting into Black communities and sustainability because it's such a big part of understanding low-income communities is a big part of trying to tackle sustainability. And so Black communities are often put into that. And so that's how I kind of started, and then everything blew up, and all of a sudden, everyone, there was no travel, and everyone was like, we need to know about black people. We need to know about COVID, we need to know about George Floyd, we need to know about elections. And I just got really, really deep into doing black consumer work because that had been also part of my background. And then in 2021, I was, I just want to do this. I just want to do, I want to focus everything that I have done for the past 20 years. I'm gonna take all of that knowledge and I want to help figure out how there are better products and services for us. And part of that was because I have my daughter. And I was like, I don't want her to live a life where she doesn't see herself in all of the things. And I don't, I'm not an activist in the same traditional way I wasn't out on the street protesting or anything like that. But this is my form of activism because I do get a seat at the table, right? And so that's really what started Mahogany Insights. I just want to do exactly what I did before, but I just want to focus on helping companies and brands and people understand who we are at a real level and create things that really speak to us and for us. So I end up here.

SPEAKER_02: 11:17

Oh my gosh, Dawn. Okay, you're right. I've not heard this story. That's my story.

SPEAKER_00: 11:23

Your journey, but it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 11:26

Like amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 11:28

Yeah, you need to write a book about your story too, honestly. I mean, that because that's very so inspirational.

SPEAKER_02: 11:35

Truly.

SPEAKER_00: 11:36

Wow, wow.

SPEAKER_02: 11:37

I can tell Nurse Ty, I was watching you. She was talking, and I could see you. I was like, I know, I know our resident and health equity expert wants to jump. I I can say you see you wanting to jump in.

SPEAKER_01: 11:48

Like, that's amazing. Like the work that you do. You say you don't, you're saying like I'm not this, I'm not that, but all along you're doing it. And so with that, I'm gonna that leads perfectly into the next question.

SPEAKER_02: 12:02

Pick me, pick me, pick me, pick me, petty professor, pick me first.

SPEAKER_01: 12:06

Pick you first, yeah. Okay, go first.

SPEAKER_02: 12:09

I just gotta say, everything that you describe your entire journey. What I what I heard was how you were driven, these compelling visions were how they were shaped at first about what you wanted to do for you if you could live a life without fear and all about faith. And then you took this faith move that was probably a bit uncomfortable. Forgive me, I'm not trying to project, and you took care of your mother, the person who literally gave you this legacy, this vision, right? You took care of your mother, and at that time you're like continuing to birth more visions, then you're giving birth. And oh my God. I saw I'm just I'm seeing all these different connections from your mom, your daughter, the people who were around you as you were making these decisions. And might I say, even the connection back to Mother Africa, that's just that's just these are just all of the connections that are stirring up in my spirit as I was listening to you.

SPEAKER_01: 13:10

Yeah, real quick.

SPEAKER_00: 13:12

Yeah, I was gonna say the same here. And I think there's some honorable because you know, my my my mom, she passed from cancer too when I was in my 20s. And I know how hard that is for you at that age. You know what you want to do. You had to make that tough decision to say, you know what, I'm gonna stay and take care of mom, right? But you know, but God opens doors no matter what decision you want to do when you're on the right side, right? And so had you not done that, that decision to take care of family first, you know, faith first, family first, it opened up the doors of what you're doing today. I mean, that have independent, having your own business, helping other people, helping businesses understand certain demographics of consumers who historically we know are usually left out and underrepresented or exploited, right? And so I just want to say that that that that was very striking to me. That's that's especially that resonated with me because I also have a parent who died from cancer, my mom. And so uh that was very special to hear you share your story.

SPEAKER_03: 14:15

And I think like, thank you for that. I I think that's the part that I think is why I love my job so much because when you do the work that I do. So sometimes when people think market research, they think more of the data, like the statistics, like 20% of or 88% of whatever, and that is market research, and it's the great part of my it's good. But the part that is the interesting part is the part that I didn't remember. But I really love like the part that I do is on the qualitative side. So it's going into homes and spending, you know, time with people and hearing their stories and bringing richness and context to that, those data points. That's what I love. And in doing that, I over this time I've talked to thousands of people all over the world, right? And one of the things that you know is everyone has a story. And so, even though what makes us there's these things that make us unique, there are these universal things that make us human, like having to bury a parent, right? And having having loss, having heartbreak, having moves, having love, like and having, you know, babies, there's just so many things that bring us together that are just universal, those emotions, those feelings, and it helps ground us in so many ways. And that that is, I mean, the best part of what I do is being able to bring that like humanity into the data and the numbers, into the reason why we should be doing the work that we do, right?

SPEAKER_01: 15:37

Like so, yes, and Carlos is giving the yes, because I feel that as well. The the reason of what we do, the the reason behind what those numbers mean, right? And how they truly impact us.

SPEAKER_03: 15:53

Yes, yes, because I think sometimes people hide behind the numbers. I mean, I know it doesn't matter. Numbers are great, yay. Yay for numbers, they give, they they help highlight certain things, but people can hide behind the numbers because what I've also seen is numbers can you can look at a number any way you want to tell whatever story, but when you can really connect, like what I try to do is I try to make those clients when I talk about like I get a seat at the table, like I literally get a seat. These are decision makers deciding what products go out, what advertising goes out, if that advertising is gonna work or not. And when I talked about why I made the decision I made, part of it was that like I'm we I live in Texas, I'm raising a young black daughter in Texas, and I know that in so many spaces, she will not be represented. She may not even be respected at the same level. Like, there's so no matter what I try to do and shield her from, there are gonna be some pockets of people who will make her feel less than. And what I get to do is I get to be in spaces that get to tell a story that allow people to think differently about what they put on TV, what they put on, you know, media, what products show up, who shows up on packaging and what types. And that gives validity to all of our stories, right? And that's just such a fascinating, wonderful space to get to like have the privilege to walk a little bit in. Um, and one that my lot of people don't even know about, you know, or don't even think about in this way. So it's yeah, like I don't think about it as DEI. I'm always like, I'm not a DEI, but I am. But it's it's just in a different way, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 17:33

So in that vein, I what we would like to know um an accomplishment or project or event, even though you say it's not DEI, what is it something that you've helped to plan or work on or that you're currently working on that you're really proud of and that you believe is important to share?

SPEAKER_03: 17:54

Yeah. So I worked on a lot of projects for clients and corporations and all that stuff. And there's the last stuff I could share that's like case studies. But what I really want to talk about is something totally different because, you know, so when I started Mahogany Insights, which was September of 2021, I started it because I had done, I wanted to go work for a company that dealt with book. I didn't want to start monk. I am not an entrepreneur, or I would have said that before. I was not an entrepreneur by nature. I want to work for a company that already has everything in place, right? And so I was looking for a company that did that work. And there are lots of multicultural agencies out there that do market research, but almost all of them are rooted in Hispanic work because back in the day, Hispanic was always needed because there was a language barrier, right? And so people knew there was a difference with Hispanic culture because there was a there was this language barrier. So there were a lot of agencies that started in the 90s, even in the 80s, kind of addressing that need. And then like black people or black consumers sort of became an add-on to that, but it was never really central. And I wanted, I know there's a lot around doing research with black people that inherently is a little bit different, mostly because of the fact that we don't just open up to everybody that comes into our house. And how you talk to me is different than how you might talk to somebody who doesn't have the same skin color that me, that I don't know is an ally or not, right? And when I go to do research, I might only have an hour. I can't spend 45 minutes trying to convince you that I didn't vote for Trump in some kind of way, right? For you to like be able to let go, I can just walk in and you sort of already know we already can have a vibe, right? And so understanding that there are just these different needs was a big thing. And the other piece is that market research has such a big, it plays such a vital role in how the world sees us. Because we tend to blame brands and we blame advertising and we blame all of these things about not blame, but we'll say all of these things like how we show up and we see an ad that looks a certain way, and we're like, oh, we don't see ourselves reflected, or there are no products, there's no, there's not enough skincare products, or enough, you know, makeup, or et cetera, that works with us. Well, a lot of times that stuff comes from what people learn in market research. So they will do market research studies and they will say, the people want this and therefore we give them this. The people like this, and therefore we give them that.

unknown: 20:25

But what

SPEAKER_03: 20:26

What happens is that we are not in those market research studies as Black people. We are 14% of the population, we're in about 4% of the panels and databases that are used to create and send surveys to get that information. And we're also not represented, represented in that. So of that 4.2%, it doesn't actually look like the black America that is. It looks different. And so when they get learning, it's not necessarily what we actually think, which is why sometimes people are like, how did they come up with that? That is nothing like what I would have done. Nobody asked me. That's dumb. But how did that make it to the market? How did they do that? Well, they probably just didn't ask the right people. And so when I started this company, I started to really understand this myth that we're only in 4.2% of the databases. We are not at the table. So not only that, but if we get data about black people, the people who are analyzing that data and coming up with what to do, they're not black. So maybe they interpret that that right, maybe they don't, but that's how it goes. And so what happens is that we end up not being actually represented. There's this great uh study, McKenzie did a study a couple of years ago, state of black, I think it's state of black America, but there is a um there is a stat in there that says 76% of the products and services that black people spend their money on every day, they are significantly more dissatisfied with than white consumers. So if you ask a black person and a white person, anything from coffee to you know beverages to cars to whatever, anything, 76% of what you spend your money on, you are 76% more dissatisfied than a white person. And that was mind-blowing because we don't think about it. I just assume everybody is the same level of satisfied as I am. It's cool, but it's not like that. And the reason for that is because those products were not made for us. Like 90%, so think about this. Like, they didn't start actually doing research with multicultural consumers. That wasn't really a thing until like the 80s and 90s. Black people was like more 90s, 2000s. So if you are in a category that existed before the 90s, 2000s, that category was created without your voice. So it is therefore not surprising that the things in which are being used don't completely reflect us, right? Because it was created, wasn't created for us. None of these things were, right? And now great things that people are doing to try to like come back and force fit things, but at the end of the day, a lot of the roots of brands weren't really created thinking from a multicultural lens. And now we have to go back and force fit it. And you see it in all of the different things that are going on. So for me, that's a little bit of background. So for me, what I really wanted to do was focus on how do I get more Black people to do research? Because if I can get more of you to do market research, then you will be our voices will be more reflected. And it's kind of a no-brainer because you get paid to do it. So it's like you can come in and do my research and get$200 for an hour of your time. It's gonna be fine because it'll be with me or whoever. Like it's gonna be fun. And you get to have your voice heard. We get to be part of the conversation, we get part, be part of the narrative. We should just be doing this. This should literally be like voting. Everybody should just be registered to do it. So, how do we get that? So, we started a panel called Mahogany Minds, and and that panel anyone can sign up for, and it is meant to allow people to come in and be part of the narrative. So when we have surveys, we can send them out and we can pull Black America and get black people's responses. And that's it's something that I would do further. And I think everyone should have their voice, but for some reason, there are Hispanic panels that already exist, there are Asian American panels that exist, there's LGBTQ plus panels that exist, there has never been a black panel that has existed.

SPEAKER_00: 24:37

Seriously? Wow.

SPEAKER_03: 24:40

And when I would talk to people about why, because my first, I did not want to create the panel, just to be honest. I thought I would just get somebody else to do this for me and I would advocate for it. But what I would hear back is black people are too hard. We're too hard to find. We don't want to sign up for to do research, we're just too hard. And so what happens is that when clients want to do research with black consumers, they effectively have to pay a black tax because it costs more to find us. So you have to have to pay more to find us, or you have to take more time to do it, or you or you have to relax on the quality because there aren't that many. And so, or usually it's a little bit of all of them. So it's just it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of getting us heard.

SPEAKER_00: 25:28

That's that's so interesting. And I can tell you, I can be I'm to blame for that because when people come knock on our door or call, we're like, nope, we even have a sign that says no soliciting. But what's striking is you said it's not just finding them, but when there aren't people in these decision-making roles, the data can even be misinterpreted. I was like, wow, I hadn't even thought about that. That makes so much sense. And for the viewers who don't know, I'm looking at listeners. I went to Mahogany Minds, awesome website, by the way. I'm gonna sign up too. You said$200 for research. See, don't even know. I know, I know, I know. I know.

SPEAKER_03: 26:06

Yes, yeah. And so, yeah, and it is a it to your point about the what you just said is part of the problem, that there is a perception about what research is in our community. One is that they're gonna knock on our door and beg us to do it. The other one is that they're gonna use us some kind of way, and we're gonna be some kind of experiment, and there's all that, whenever we use those terms. But in essence, you can sign up for these databases. Mine is one, but there are a ton of them out there, and they will send you an email and you will take the thing. And if you qualify, you will get money. And if you don't qualify, life is life goes on, right? And so it just feels like something we just we have to do more of those. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say we want to have a voice at the table when we're actually not doing our part to be the voice. We can't pull it out of nowhere, right?

SPEAKER_02: 26:55

So well, one thing that we can do is make sure that when we publish this episode to have a direct link to Mahogany Minds to your website so we can encourage more people to share their voice and perhaps benefit not only the products that we see and experience, but maybe there's some other benefit too. So you you are doing some amazing work. I have so many questions, so many follow-ups. And so that everyone knows, I did tell Don that I would be I would work for her as a free intern because as scholars, we do research too. We love qualitative, and I I totally agree that you um a lot of our work sometimes focused just me too.

SPEAKER_00: 27:40

No, no, I just want to say that because I meant to ask you this before we started recording.

SPEAKER_02: 27:45

Me and my colleagues are actually interviewing women entrepreneurs, and so I'm gonna email you after this because we Yes, do it because we need to get your stories out there and involved in the research because we feel you. We have to there's there's such an absence of our experiences, our expertise, our likes, our dislikes. So with this rewarding work, I want to know what has been the most challenging and the most rewarding aspects of what you do.

SPEAKER_03: 28:24

Yes. So I kind of think they're the same because so what we do, we strike this balance, right? So we'll go off, we do research, our goal, you know, maybe a client will come to us, for example, and say, uh, really, we want to sell more to black consumers. Maybe our we're just not in as many households as we would like to be in, or they're not maybe they're even declining. Let's say that they're declining. They used to buy us, now they don't. We want to understand this, right? So our job is to go in and really understand what's going on in the community, what's going on with you personally. It's a very personal thing. I may come into your home and talk to you, I may do it virtually over just one-on-one, or it might be a focus group. But my goal is to understand who you are so that I can tell the story. And so, what we pride ourselves in is trying to tell the story about these cultures. We don't just do black consumers, we do Hispanic, we do LGPT, LGBTQ, we do Asian American, we kind of just do we do what I would call traditionally undervoiced consumers. So if you are traditionally, your voice is not as strongly represented, we tend to focus there. And the reason we do it among stories is because these groups are undervoiced, their stories are just not in the cultural narrative. And so if I just do a focus group with you and I tell you and I ask you, do you like purple or blue? And everybody says purple, there isn't context in the cultural narrative about what may be behind what purple means, right? But if I give a little bit more context and I spend time with you and we talk about what does it mean? What are when you talk about being successful, what does it mean? What gets in the way? Give me some visual images that bring to life this stuff, and you start to see visually that everything that is around success or that's around protection or whatever, is all purple. And then I can talk about where that story comes from and you start to tell me these stories, that becomes something that then has an element that from a context standpoint can feel more authentic, right? And so we really focus on how do we tell those stories. But on the flip side, some of these stories are hard, y'all. Some of these stories, especially when we're talking about what's going on in the black community. I mean, right now I used to use Target, it was one of my main examples. I would use forever. And now if I say the word Target, I got to hide under a desk because it's so different. And I was trying to explain to someone that works at Target. I, you could have just called it, we could have predicted this, right? Because we know what that this is not just about what we buy in the store. There is so much context that's actually related to the fact that we have in so many ways been in an abusive relationship with corporate America for generations and generations, right? They have come, they have told us they were gonna do this, they have let go of this, they have used us, they have done all of these things. And so we are so on edge in how we trust companies and brands. And when we let you in, and it feels like you betrayed us, it's a betrayal. It's not just a oh, you changed tactics. It feels cuts to the heart of who we are. And what those are the stories that I love to tell, but it is challenging because everybody doesn't get it. It feels so natural to have a conversation with how you get it, right? But when you have never lived that experience, it doesn't make sense. So I have to spend a lot of time to tell the story in a way that someone who hasn't had that experience can actually empathize with. Because the goal is I need you to, I need to create a consumer that you want to root for as a marketer. If I don't create that, you will never try to solve the problems. I got to create this in a way that you look and you say, I want this person to win. And that's any kind of marketing, right? Anything we have to create our consumer targets in that way. And so balancing that can be really hard because we can have big problems or things that we're going through that I have to try to narrow into something that a marketer that maybe is from some Ohio small country town has no idea how to relate to, can look at and say, okay, this is something that my brand can solve. That's always hard.

SPEAKER_00: 32:37

I I love the the terminology we said we you want your consumers to win. Right? That perspective, that shift in how you really are focusing on the needs and the customers versus how some people think in business how it's exploiting the market, but you're you're looking at it from this perspective of the opposite of that. You know, how do we elevate the marketplace, right? And I know I know a petty professor wants to chime in on something that she heard.

SPEAKER_02: 33:04

Listen, every time he's a Dr. J said he saw my face light up. We try to look for what we call the word of the day. That we're gonna come back and educate the people, including ourselves. And you said undervoiced consumers. Yep, that's undervoiced consumers. We need to get a sound for that. You didn't like my authentic sound effects. You know what?

SPEAKER_01: 33:35

Perfect. Done.

SPEAKER_02: 33:38

Yeah, you you've educated us a lot, but that that was one that stood out to me, and I don't think that one has made it to the list yet of the NS the NSF watch list of things you can't say when you're describing marginalized populations. So we'll just keep that one going.

unknown: 33:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 33:56

Well, it's funny, I've tried a million different ways to talk about this crew because nothing feels right. Also, because you know, when I tell what I try to tell my clients, we do this usually before we do research. I take my clients through a come to Jesus kind of meeting. We just sit and then we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about what you call people, what you don't call people, this is why. Just go through this thing because I want them to feel comfortable asking me any question that they don't always feel comfortable doing in a corporate space. I don't work for these companies. I'm not in HR, I'm not doing you can ask me anything, and I've heard everything at this point, right? And so I try to create that environment. And one of the things we talk about is the fact that whenever I'm talking about any of these groups, we just in fact we just did a sizes the other day. There are 50, 11 terms about for these groups, right? And they just evolve and they evolve and they evolve. And it's this idea of almost know when you are in an undervoiced or a traditionally or an underserved type group because the terms have so much negative and positive meaning that they can't stay the same long term. They have to continue to change. So I'm gonna tell you this today in five years. Maybe we're still black. I don't know, might be something else about them. You just don't know because it's really, really hard because there's so much negative and positive that's associated with these. And that doesn't go away just because we changed the term. It continues to like live and breathe and go, et cetera. So, like under undervoiced became the idea for us because it's really about the voices that are out there and that we're not part of the regular narrative. And so, how do you try to offset that?

SPEAKER_00: 35:38

That's a great segue to the next question.

SPEAKER_01: 35:40

Dirstai, you want to which really it really is. And how does your own identity inform your work because it's all connected?

SPEAKER_03: 35:49

Yes, it's all connected. I am black, and but also, you know, even when we don't do just black, I mean, our our niche is that because no one else is filling the niche. I for firmly everybody needs to see themselves reflected in the things that they do and purchase every day. This just happens to be the niche that isn't being served, and we feel like we're in a unique spot to be able to serve it. But when I think about my identity, it's there's another piece of research that was done that talked about how 32% of white, and I think it's like 40% of Hispanic people see themselves, like they see themselves as white, or they see themselves as Hispanic. They kind of see themselves as their sort of race or ethnicity first. And that becomes like the main thing that they sort of define themselves as in terms of their identity. All the other pieces are left. But with black Americans, what they found was that 67% of us see ourselves as more than that. So we're black and women, black and women in LGBTQ. Like it's almost all kind of like we we sort of see everything together as this full identity. And I think that that goes into how I see myself. I am definitely black, I am definitely a woman, I am a single mom. I am, you know, I live in Texas, I live in a red state, I blah blah. There's all these other pieces that form who I am. And so when we look at how do we tell these stories and get these companies to understand these communities, it is from the lens of you have to look completely, because it's we the part of the thing is it is very different to be black and to be, and when you layer on like intersectionalities, right? But when you layer on black and you layer on income, for example, very different life if you're low income, but also very different challenges if you're high income, right? So like they both have these very unique challenges that actually are not the same, especially when you start looking at how you create things for them and speak to them. And so I try to bring in that context and into this piece. But I think the other part is that like we talk about identity. I think in getting into this space, when I I talked about before, when I was sort of in this moment of experiencing so much grief in so many ways, like the start of my research. But then when I started Mahogany Insights, I was grieving the separation of my of a relationship, right? And this like the restart. I think there's just a level of humanity that just is like so rooted in the work that we do. It just starts from there. Like I just know everybody has a story, and it doesn't matter who that person is, and that story, like if we get to it, just starts to unravel all of these pieces that start to make every other decision make sense, right? And so that's what I what I would say.

SPEAKER_00: 38:36

And it's so important to understand that story because we're typically when we look at um, you know, not underrepresented, what'd you say, underrepresented voices, right? Undervoiced, undervoiced, undervoiced consumers. Thank you. We we we treat them as a monolith, monolithically. And so I like the fact how you talked about this intersectionality, how we we we draw from these multiple experiences that shape our identity. And it's important for market researchers to know that. Wow.

SPEAKER_03: 39:07

Yeah, and one of the things we really to that point, like I when I first started, it's like everything was about multicultural. And I'm like, Well, what is that? Like, is everybody's not white? I mean, that's just that's such a weird. I know that the idea is we need a word to group these people together, so we don't have to write five five lines of stuff. But what happens is that when you give it a word like that, you assume everybody's the same. I have the same issue. We do a lot of um, you know, Hispanic work, and I have a lot of Hispanic moderators, but it is a Dominican person is so different from a Mexican person, is so different from Cuban, and then we group them all in Brazilian, they don't even speak the same language, and we group them all together and say it's a consumer group. And so we've even in that group, you know, in that, you know, when we talk about our Hispanic work, is we separate out. You have to do Mexican work differently than other work, right? And so trying to get our clients to say it's not just this one word and you group us together because we're all brown, somehow we're all the same. Our stories, our inherent cultural stories are different as well as our individual stories, but even getting that cultural story. And even within black, like what you'll see we do if you go through the mahogany lines and you go through the joiner is we ask ethnicity for black people, right? Because it is if you are as black, but if you are Afghanistan. American, you have a different story than someone who is first generation Nigerian in America, right? Like we're coming from a totally different space. And um and getting like getting our clients to see that and to see that the stories that can be different is important.

SPEAKER_00: 40:44

In your research, oh I'm sorry, Nursa, were we gonna say something?

SPEAKER_01: 40:47

I I was just gonna say how transcendent that topic is that that that um idea because you need to understand people and their story to get to the crux of any and everything. And as a healthcare provider, I'm just like you need to know because even within the white population, it's not all the same, right? And so people's individual stories play such a pivotal important role in hair, products, everything. And the what I see happening today is disturbing in that we have research and we know that this is necessary. And so I just thank you for continuing that work. Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 41:34

And I think sometimes what people people will um what I hear, at least on the corporate side, is that people feel like, oh, well, if it's individual stories, then I'll never come up with like a theme. I can never do anything with individual. And that's where the brilliance of like humanity, I think, comes in because you get people to tell you these individual stories. You come back and you listen. You maybe have sent three teams off and have talked to all these different people. You come back and you hear these stories, and all of a sudden there are these themes to the stories that are these connected lines that are cultural connected lines. Sometimes they are like nationality, American connected lines, they could be southern connected lines. Like there's so many different ways these connected lines come into play that are the things that root us in being human, right? So it's like we have these individual stories that are the things that allow you to empathize and to really tap into the emotion. But then when the work comes from, you take those 12 people, or however many people, or 30 or 50, or however many people you talk to, and you start to see the connected themes that roll it together. That's how you start to get to those insights. It's not, it's sort of the two together.

SPEAKER_02: 42:46

I I am just beaming with joy and pride because there, I think Nurse Ty said this earlier, there really is a thread that what you've said has connected to all of us. You know, we say Nurse Ty looked at things in terms of patient outcomes and the whole person, the whole patient, and she's cultivating the next generation of healthcare providers. And and I can't speak for Jason and I. Jason and I are both scholars, DEI scholars, but we we care deeply about those under un undervoiced experiences in the workplace. So we cared about shedding light in a very scientific and systemic way. And so I am just profoundly proud and happy for you and your organization and your firms and the work that you all do because people will not stop trying to understand consumers. They're not gonna stop marketing, they're not gonna stop producing products. So even if our research programs can get shut down, even if they tell us we can no longer educate about culture and cultural nuances and differences in higher education, we know that somewhere, somehow, you're gonna be educated when you figure out that this product is really for you or really isn't. I don't know. So that's that's what I get I get excitement about. The stories continue because they're real. They're they whether you want them to or not, these multi-layered, dynamic, prolific, deeply rooted stories of people just living and just being human exist, and somebody's gonna tell them in one kind of way or another.

SPEAKER_03: 44:28

Absolutely. And that's why I had a lot of people ask me when all of the deal back in January, when everything was going down, how worried I am I worried, or what did I think the impact would be to my business? And I'm like, we will 100% see growth from this. I'm not even I am so remotely not worried because our business is tied to making money. And these companies can only make money if they sell to people. And guess what? The demographics are the demographics. You can do whatever you want to do and try to change what things look like. But at the end of the day, the demographics will show that there is a movement and growth in all of these different spaces, right? These undervoiced communities are now going to be the voices, and you can choose not to learn or you can choose to learn. And I think what we're seeing now is that companies are like, oh my goodness, we now almost have to course correct in another way, right? We got to learn even more. We got to go fix the damage that we've done. So that's exactly what we've seen. We've seen much more outreach than we ever thought. And I have made my own. It's now my I struggle with what how what is the role we want to be in this moment, right? Do we want to go and exploit this all the way? And I think there's a part that says that part of our mission is to get our voices heard in every single space and make it more accessible. But there's another part of our mission that says we have all of this stuff. There's a part of me that just wants to help entrepreneurs, small businesses know what they know. So, how do I create something that helps when these companies get pulled from a target and they have nowhere else to go because they didn't really have all the backbone? How do we help them? And so that's our other side thing that we're doing on this.

SPEAKER_00: 46:12

Yeah, these stories are so, so important, so important. Uh and so now we get to hear a little bit about you, understand your story more as we come to the the end and conclude with the top five questions, top five fave question. And Dawn, you asked us to ask you what are your top five books and why.

SPEAKER_03: 46:37

Okay. So I don't know if this is gonna be fun, but I love the kind of books that I love are really right now focused on how do I elevate, elevate our business, elevate mindset, whatever. So all these books are gonna be focused on that, but hopefully they will be helpful for y'all. So the first book that I love is called A Happy Pocket Full of Money, is by this guy, David Cameron Tikandi. And I love, okay, so it is like a dense book. You got to get the audio version and just read it and listen to it over and over again. But why I love it is that it talks about not just the physical aspect of wealth, but the metaphysical kind of take on wealth and that abundance and success is not just about, it's not just about getting rich, it's about transforming how you think about it. So wealth isn't just your bank, it's your state of mind and how you think about it. And I love that he connects it to quantum physics and this idea that reality and time is malleable, right? So people think, oh, it's gonna take me 10 years to do to become a millionaire, when in reality, it may or may not take that time. So this idea of connecting it to time and space is a really interesting concept, and also the idea that money is spiritual and that this and it's about energy. So energy has to flow. And so as you're you figuring out how you think about how you use your money, how you flow and let it sort of come back to you, I think is a really interesting concept.

SPEAKER_00: 48:05

So I love having vibrations, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_03: 48:09

So that's the first one. The second one that I love is one that's called Mastering Fear, and it's by this guy, Brandon Webb. He was a former Navy SEAL, just has great stories in there just because he was a former Navy SEAL. And just have you heard of this book?

SPEAKER_00: 48:24

I just learned about that book talking to somebody in the airport. He was uh he's a I think he's a Canadian police officer. And I was telling him about my daughter, and she lives up in Brooklyn, how I'm worried about her and protecting protection. He was like, She needs to read this book, and he was telling me about it anyway. I don't mean to cut you off. So it's so good.

SPEAKER_03: 48:42

Wow, it's a yes, it's a it's a great audio book. If you uh I listen to everything in my car, but because the way he tells the story, and it's just his stories are so good. But he talks about, you know, I guess being for me, being an entrepreneur, so much of it is overcoming fear. Every decision, everything is a risk, everything is you gotta put yourself out there, you gotta be bigger, bigger, bigger. And so it's constantly battling the fear of myself. And so he talks about this idea of fear, what it looks like, and how you kind of contain it and control. I just love it. It's really, really good. Okay, then the next one is a book called We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers. She is this black millionaire, and I her message is just her message is what got me to quit my company and start this company. So, and it's just it's her story really wrapped into this idea that I think sometimes for me, I have grown up with such money stories around the fact that it's not good to have, you know, poor black, bad people have money, and you know, maybe money doesn't come into our life in the same way, et cetera. And so this idea of someone taking a stand and say it is your right, it not only is it your right, it's our responsibility as a community, as a black community, to all become millionaires. It is because we're the only ones that are going to put back put back into this society in the same way, into our community the same way. So it's our responsibility to do that. So I love that book. And then the other one is called 10x is easier than 2x by Dan Sullivan. And it is this idea that incremental growth is people believe that incremental growth, oh, I want to get a 10% raise, is more attainable than saying I want to 10x my salary. But in reality, it's actually a lot easier to think about how you do something 10x than it is to do something at 10%, because it completely changes the game and the way you think about things. So this is how mahogany minds came to be for me because when I stopped thinking about how do I get more companies, I want to get 10 more companies to do black research to, I want to literally get 10x more people to do research. Like, how do I do that? It changed the game in terms of what we would what we would have to do and where we would have to place. So I love that one. And then the last one is called Profit First by Mike McCowlish. It's just all about paying yourself first in your personal life and in your business life, and that just transformed my business. And I went from oh, a little bit of profit to getting a substantial amount of profit just by following that discipline, paying myself first.

SPEAKER_00: 51:13

Wow, those are some awesome books. I I wrote, I've been writing them down.

SPEAKER_01: 51:17

I feel like I forgot a lesson.

SPEAKER_00: 51:19

I know, right?

SPEAKER_01: 51:20

I got a class to take right now. So excited. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 51:26

But yeah, we got a workshop coming up. We might invite you back for a workshop. Top five special DEI special edition. Yeah, and the 10X is better than 2X. I like that. It reminds me of Vision too, about how they talk about folks who are successful think like 10 year, five years away. But for other, but unfortunately, you know, especially when we live in a uh place of scarcity, we're only thinking about the next day or the next week. And so it's hard to have vision to really pull ourselves up in out of situations into wealth. And so, but I never thought about it like that about just how you the the vision of the business, not just planning, but what does it look like? It's easier to plan for something large and something that's incremental. Interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 52:07

It's so true. It's so true. Like if you were to say whatever your goals are for your listeners or whatever for this podcast, if you add a zero to that and say what would have to be true to get that, you will just come up with totally different ways of thinking than you would in any other way. It is actually a really interesting exercise.

SPEAKER_00: 52:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: 52:27

Come through, come through, million listeners, come through. Yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_00: 52:31

Yeah, we had the zero today. Yeah, 10 million listeners today.

SPEAKER_01: 52:35

10 million listeners. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 52:38

Oh, Dawn, it was it was it was such a pleasure having you today. Man, this was this was very, very insightful. Uh, I've learned a lot. And it's and I was also interesting to see in uh how um Betty Professor, especially in your intro, her reactions, because every time we bring people on this show, especially people who we think we know, we learn so much more about them, right? And which which I'm sure strengthens our connections. And so that was it's it's always cool to see that and then to have that happen.

unknown: 53:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 53:08

Yes. I have so many follow-ups um that I can't get through on this call. So I'm like, that's fine. I know how to find you. And then but I hear the answers too. I will share. You know, I'll share.

SPEAKER_00: 53:22

I think we got time for like maybe one or two follow-ups, one or two, you know. If if I mean, well, it's up to our guests. I don't know. Oh, well, we are past the time because we're supposed to be, uh I think we're 15 minutes past the hour, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 53:34

Well, firstly, this is totally gonna be I'm like, I'm because again, I'm so proud of you, and you're doing the things that we care about that resonate with us that have been on my heart, um, and everything that you talked about. And I'm a new entrepreneur, my empreneur is I've had to pivot to figure out how I can still do meaningful work and still put food on the table for my kid who wants to play competitive soccer.

SPEAKER_00: 53:57

And so that's a yeah, that balancing act, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 54:02

Yes, I will be listening to these books. Um, notice how I said listen because listen has good. Everything here is a good audio book. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 54:12

It's game changer, right?

SPEAKER_02: 54:13

You know, game changer. I I am that person, I will I will buy the audio version and still also buy the flipboard because I want to touch it, I'm gonna take notes, I want to flag it. So I have both going on, but there was something that you had mentioned earlier um that I wrote down and it said um about so you had talked before about how you've done the cultural immersion, now you were really, you know, into cultural emersions, and that stood out to me because that's something that I have a desire and passion to get into. But then you also mentioned about how some of the marketers how they weren't asking the right question or weren't able to find the people. And then for some reason that just brought me into it as you were describing, how you go into the homes, how you have these conversations. If a person is not from the community in which they're trying to learn and understand, could cultural immersion that they actually cared about be a way for them to say, well, you don't have to have the same identity or the same story, but if you learned yourself in this way, then maybe you could connect on a deeper level.

SPEAKER_03: 55:24

I just wanted to see what you thought about that. Yeah, that's exactly why we would do the immersions. So I would take whether it's global, but also like in the US. Like we just did an immersion, I just did one over in November for PG. And it was in, it was cultural immersions into Mexican and Black homes. And we did fully immersive, like we spent a long time with consumers. We really got to understand who they are. We did things like we, you know, we had them take us where they go hang out. We did all kinds of things. We made sweet potato pie because it was like right around the holidays, and we made somebody's grandmother with her and put the music on, and she went into this space that like we could do because it felt so natural to her. Like that was just like a natural thing that she loved to cook and she loved to cook with her grandmother. And so let's do that. So, like, there are these really core ways that you can do immersions. And what's great about those and is that the whole goal is for you to know, for you to ask, like, what would Carlos do? Right. Like you want to get to a place where, as a marketer, maybe that's not me, but I want to know what would Carlos do. And as marketers, we do it all the time. Like we very rarely work on a brand that we are also use. Like it just happens all of a sudden, you know. You had a lot of men who worked on papers, for example, and the target were new moms. Like, and so understand or pregnant moms, you know, like it's understanding that you can do when you have true immersion, but the idea is to really immerse yourself in what that looks like. So when we would take people globally, we would usually have a day beforehand that would be just immersion in the country. So I would take, for example, we did one in Turkey, and Turkish women have a thing, it's kind of like a sorority. I could never, I would never be able to pronounce it in Turkish, but they are like these neighborhood women's groups. And so it's kind of like a sorority, like you have to get voted in, you can get blackballed out if you don't fit, but they get together and they meet like once a week and they do all kinds of things. And so we went and hung out with them and they taught me how to belly dance. It was super fun. But it was like you got to see what life is like, and so you walk away with that with an understanding deeper about who they are in a way that matters. But what I will also say is emergence shouldn't happen just once. You to keep it going, you kind of do have to pulse it out to make sure it goes around the organization. Yeah, they're super love emergence.

SPEAKER_00: 57:52

Well, Dawn, thank you so much for our listeners. Thank you so much. We got all the books, listeners. We're gonna have all that for you in the podcast notes. Also, to our listeners, if you could please like, share, subscribe. And also, we have some links to be in our mailing list. Where if you're on the mailing list, you'll be the first to know about our new episodes when they drop, and also get some new behind-the-scenes footage that we're gonna start creating this summer. So I want to say peace out from Dr. J and enjoy your day.

SPEAKER_02: 58:20

Appreciate all of you. Appreciate you, Don. Signing off from the petty professor.

SPEAKER_01: 58:27

Have a wonderful day from Nurse Tai. Bye bye.