Steve Mossop hung up his scuba gear 15 years ago to focus on raising his family. The father of four discovered kiteboarding in 2013.
Business is soaring for Mossop’s Yaletown-based market research firm, Insights West, and he relishes the chance every day to delve deep beneath the surface and learn what makes Canadians tick.
“I was fortunate that I found something that I actually liked to do and had a passion for early on,” Mossop said inside the office of the red brick building. “That set my career path. Most people don’t get that privilege; they tend to jump around and try different things. I’m one of those anomalies that picked a profession that I love.”
Before he graduated in 1990 with a marketing degree from from Simon Fraser University (SFU), Mossop put his scuba-diving skills to work for the Regional District of Mount Waddington and North Island Mariculture Association. It was another kind of drink that led him to become a market researcher, rather than enter the creative side of the industry.
As a co-op student in 1985 with TNS Canadian Facts, Mossop distributed cola bottles marked A, B and C to taste test participants. Coca-Cola (Nasdaq:COKE) was testing the waters before it launched a new formula. New Coke turned into one of the biggest marketing blunders in history.
“They simply asked the wrong questions,” Mossop said. “They asked about taste; they did all these blind taste tests.”
Mossop graduated from SFU in 1990 and spent five years at TNS Canadian Facts before joining Angus Reid’s research firm in 1995. In the transition, he said, he learned the first big lesson of his career – that leadership and momentum are vital to sustaining a business.
“It just showed me the huge difference leadership can make in a company. Here’s an older-style company that’s really gone down the tubes versus Angus Reid that became quite successful. I watched the dynamic of leadership and learned from that.”
Mossop spent a dozen years leading the western market research division for Reid and later Ipsos Reid. For six of those years, he said he was in the office next door to Reid, who recently described himself in the Globe and Mail as a “dictator.”
“Angus Reid has a ton of strengths,” Mossop said. “He’s a visionary and a motivator; he is a bit of an ass, but you learn from the best parts of them, not the worst parts of them.”
Mossop said he prefers to bring people together in a collaborative, democratic fashion – conscious differentiation, he added.
In 2012, he and some of his closest co-workers left Ipsos Reid to start the new shop in Gastown. It was something Mossop had been thinking about for more than five years.
Half of the 20 people he employs were drawn from Reid alumni. His nephew, Andy Mossop, also works at Insights West.
“I always had confidence I could do it, but big companies tend to tie you up with great positions. They pay you well, they reward you well – it’s very hard to leave when that’s happening.”
Under Reid, he had responsibility for offices as far away as Houston.
“Right now the vision is more boutique-style. I spent 20 years on planes and I’m not really interested in flying to Toronto for the 100th time. It does limit the growth as to what I can do here, but that being said, once we hit that plateau, it may be a natural evolution to go south or east or west.
“Right now I’m enjoying the western market in Calgary and Vancouver. I’m content where we are.”
Last fall, Insights West moved to SmartPoint Research’s Yaletown focus group operation in a friendly takeover. Mossop said the companies’ long-running alliance made for a relatively quick negotiation. It also allowed Mossop to make Insights West a full-service market research agency that is on track for $3.5 million in revenue this year.
SmartPoint president Sam Rai, who spent three years at Ipsos Reid while Mossop was there, said it says something about Mossop that clients and staff would follow him.
“He was at one with the staff, never mind what level they were,” Rai said. “The numbers speak for themselves; his company has grown, a lot of clients, a lot of business. His staff is pretty large, compared to what he began with.”
Mossop boasts a multicultural online pool of 30,000 people to draw upon for Insights West research, including surveys conducted for Business in Vancouver. The days of telephone surveying are almost gone. Some 45% of homes don’t have land lines anymore; in the under-34 age group it is 60%. Twenty-five per cent of those filling out Insights West online surveys do so on their mobile devices. Insights West also boasts a track record of surveys that have predicted the outcome of the last eight elections in Western Canada, including Vancouver’s 2014 mayoral contest and last year’s TransLink sales tax plebiscite. When talking elections with Mossop, the conversation naturally drifts to the 2013 surprise win by the BC Liberals. He said Insights West conducted a poll 10 days before election day that suggested the undecided vote was leaning toward the Liberals, but the company didn’t do a last-minute poll like others. The victorious Liberals have frequently mocked pollsters since, but Mossop said the industry didn’t really get it wrong. It is just that there was a massive, unpredicted swing on the final weekend, when the Liberals made a blanket advertising buy.
“There was a radical turn of events, and a 10-point swing in the numbers can make a difference between a success and failure. Pollsters don’t typically get it wrong. It’s very difficult to predict what people will do in the future, and [during] that time lag between the time you talk to them and the time they sign the ballot, a lot can happen, especially in a volatile race.”
With about 200,000 surveys on 250 topics analyzed per year, Insights West collects a lot of data that helps profile trends affecting the province. First and foremost, Mossop said, British Columbians “have a unique view of the world and ... like to keep things the way they were for various reasons,” hence the opposition to major new projects.
“We’re always against stuff, like against the viaducts being torn down; we were originally against the Olympics,” he said. “We’re a province that seems to be opposed to stuff. Opinions do change, but that’s a trend that’s entrenched here that a lot have a hard time understanding from Toronto or elsewhere.”
Mossop said the access to so much technology and the seemingly never-ending delivery of content mean we’re living in the age of the sound bite. He can see it manifest in the complete inability of his four children to switch off technology.
There will be a growing reaction to the content onslaught, he predicts. Many respondents no longer read daily newspapers or watch TV news, helping foster an environment of misinformation, he said. He points to a poll from April 1, 2013, one of his favourites. Of the 867 respondents, 38% believed a cure for cancer exists, but Big Pharma is suppressing it. Another 20% believed lotteries are rigged. All plus or minus 3.3%, 19 times out of 20, of course.
“They get their news from Face-book, so we get this plethora of radicalized views, from hormones in milk to organics to what’s good for you or bad for you. A lot of them are misconceptions. There’s this vast amount of false knowledge.”
Insights West clients range from Save-On-Foods and the University of British Columbia to Mountain Equipment Co-op and the Vancouver Canucks. The hockey club frequently calls upon Insights West to poll fans about things such as pricing and food and beverage quality. Sometimes Insights West is asked for feedback on players.
“They’re constantly monitoring fan sentiment and trends,” he said. •
