70 — Electrifying Insights: Exploring Automotive Electrification with Ben Lundin

Karen: 00:00:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the GreenBook Podcast. I’m Karen Lynch. Happy to be hosting this episode today when I get the honor and privilege of talking to another one of our Future List honorees. Today, folks, I have Ben Lundin with me. He is director of consumer insights at Escalent, and he is focused on the world of automotive and electric mobility. I’m going to let Ben tell you a little bit about the program, EVForward, that he leads there in the consumer panel of qualified new car buyers.

Ben: 00:01:05

Really looking forward to chatting with you today. Thanks, Karen. Thanks, Natalie. I really had a good time at IIEX North America in Austin. This was good to get some facetime with you guys down there.

Karen: 00:01:18

Yeah. Loved it. Thank you for speaking. Again, congratulations on being an honoree. I think one of the things that cannot be downplayed enough is how important it is that you know about yourself that you stood out from a crowd, and we really have a very special list of individuals who are moving and shaking in our industry who are doing great things. I really do want to take that moment and say congratulations. It’s a well-deserved honor. When you found out you were getting that recognition, how did that feel for you? What was your thinking around it?

Ben: 00:01:54

Yeah. It caught me by surprise. Right? I had been with Escalent for around a year or two, year and a half about, when my—the head of the automotive team approached me. He said, “Hey. I want to nominate you for this award. I think it would be good for you individually, professionally. Good for us as a company.” I was like, “Oh, me? Okay, cool.”

Karen: 00:02:50

Yeah. I think that’s great that they did. To those people listening, I think one of the things that we have to recognize or share out on this episode, as we do with all the others, is it really is the individual that stands out. Yes, they helped. Your company helped you put that package together, but there’s something about you and your background that makes you particularly special. It’s the things that you’re doing in your career to really make a difference, and that’s what we like to spotlight here is how you’re making a difference. Before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your role. Then we’ll dial it back a little bit to talk about how you got to that role because there’s probably some very specific career steps you took along the way on a very interesting résumé, if I might add. First, tell us more about what you’re doing.

Ben: 00:03:34

Yeah. I work on Escalent’s automotive and mobility team, and I focus wholly on the electric vehicle marketplace. What I mean by that is it’s a consumer marketplace that we manage, and we operate and ask questions, too, throughout the year. It’s 60,000 different new, qualified car buyers and shoppers who are expected to buy a car in the next 5 years. Since we have this group of people, we can ask them questions throughout the year about everything related to shopping for an electric car, owning an electric car, thinking about an electric car, what their barriers are, what their benefits are, and the things that are holding them back. We have this research platform that I manage and I lead, and I work on projects throughout the year that’s related to this community that we—that we manage.

Karen: 00:04:28

Yeah. It’s incredibly cool. Again, I want to talk a little bit about that because I personally could probably be—couldn’t be on your panel because I am a researcher, but also personally could be on your panel because not only are we probably going to be buying a new car again in the next few years, but we have thought about electric cars. What I want to talk to you about are some of those things. I really want to talk about range anxiety, which is something I read on your LinkedIn post or on your LinkedIn page.

Ben: 00:05:14

Yeah. Range, we find, is often the top barrier that people have when thinking about an electric car. Right? The charging infrastructure in place isn’t as prolific as gas stations, so people think about EVs in the way that they think about fueling up a gas car. Right? If I’m going on a six-hour road trip, are there going to be places for me to plug in and drive away? Right? Then, at the same time, it takes some time. It’s not like a five-minute trip to a gas station. It takes 15, 20, 30 minutes to get the adequate range that you want in that car. Right?

Karen: 00:06:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s really cool to think about. Like I said, it’s—my husband—my husband had a Prius for a hot second, and he’s really—he’s—it didn’t fit him. If you know my husband, you know he is not short or small by any means. The whole Prius thing did not work for him when he first got into one. Yet, now, things have changed over the years where now it’s all we’re talking about. Every time we go to Whole Foods, I’m like, “Look. We could be charging up. We should be—could be charging our electric vehicle right now, Tim.”

Ben: 00:07:15

Right. My career journey almost was roundabout, so to speak. It wasn’t exactly clear-cut. I was never really an auto guy. I grew up in a household that had a limited financial situation where I drove secondhand cars my whole life. I never really spent money on new cars. Right? Driving was, for me, it’s—a car gets me from point A to point B. That’s the way I’ve always navigated owning a car myself. Right?

Karen: 00:08:40

Zip. Yep. Zipcar.

Ben: 00:08:41

Right. Those sorts of companies. The car’s sitting there, and you can go and get it, drive it, and then put it back, and somebody else can take it. Right? I was looking those new age, new era transportation paradigms that were developing. I was doing that for about two years and then got recruited to Escalent to work on electric vehicles. During the interview, I talked to my superior, who was Mike Dovorany at the time, and he was like, “You have a—definitely have a different background.” I was living abroad for a long time. I had a bunch of different jobs in different countries, got this degree in economics, and stumbled into auto.

Karen: 00:10:13

That’s so great. I have a couple of follow up questions for you. The reason I’m asking these is because there are some magical lessons in what you were talking about that I want to tease out for our listeners because a lot of the people that pay attention, especially to these episodes with our Future List honorees, they’re paying attention to their career and the trajectory of their career. A lot of people talk about how do we get into this industry, for example, so I love that you’re brining a perspective like, “Hey. I didn’t plan this. Right? This is what happened.”

Ben: 00:11:05

Yeah. I think, in all things career, it requires an open mind. Right? No one has a clear-cut path in anything they do. You might see someone who you think has every idea in the world, and they’re heading in the direction that they envision, and they’ve always wanted to go in that way. I’m more of a skeptic, and I think that people figure it out as they go. It’s never as clear-cut as I want to go from where I am now to this point. Right? There’s all sorts of paths you can take to get to that point. It’s never a clear-cut way to get there.

Karen: 00:12:19

Yeah. Cool. Yes. I’m with you 100 percent. Also, shout out to your hiring manager at the time, who had said, “I don’t want somebody with that industry experience.” Right? He wanted that outside lens. Talk a little bit about getting inside his head at the moment but also what you learned about it. Why that brought such value to the team.

Ben: 00:12:40

That’s a great question. I think Mike Dovorany was the hiring manager. He now works for an AI start-up, so he’s doing research on artificial intelligence in the cockpit. Anyway, he had worked for auto companies for a long time. I think some of the times you can get stuck into traditional ways of thinking, whether it’s about engineering and it’s about the way people have thought about cars forever. Those sorts of preconceived notions that you can carry with you, especially when you’re super ingrained in the industry, and you love it, you breathe it, it’s everything that—you care about it more than anything. Right? Those thoughts can create biases that, I think, at the same time are beneficial in some respects but can hold you back in thinking about people who aren’t necessarily thinking that way. Right?

Karen: 00:14:22

Yeah. I love that ability to look critically at trends, at patterns, at things that we see in research, for example, so at the individuals about their buying patterns. I think critical thinking is one of the skills that we don’t allow enough time for in our day when we’re doing the analysis that we’re doing or we’re doing the strategic planning that we’re doing. I could go off on a tangent about critical thinking, but in my head right now, I’m thinking back to your degree, your master’s in economics. How have some of those skills that you practiced in academia—and I think you were also graduate assistant—how were some of those skills transferred over into this insights field?

Ben: 00:15:04

Yeah. I think most of it is basically synthesizing data into a clear, comprehensive, and direct language. Right? Oftentimes, if you’re really into data, you might not have the skill set to communicate the findings in a way that’s digestible to a layman. Right? I think my degree helped me synthesize large data sets in a way that’s communicative, compelling, and educational. Right? I think day-to-day, that’s what I do at Escalent all the time is you take huge data sets. You take qualitative, quantitative data, and you have to find the trends, and you have to find the story that exits, whether it’s telling truths that you already know or whether it’s truths that you never would’ve thought of. Right?

Karen: 00:16:34

Yeah. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that because I think there’s a lot of people that wonder if they can move into this industry from an alternative background or something. Not everybody who graduates graduates with an MBA in marketing or what have you. Not everybody who starts in this industry comes out with that degree that seems like it’s a direct fit as opposed to plenty of people who get there in an alternative way. I love thinking about that.

Ben: 00:17:27

Yeah. We call it the shift towards electrification or the shift towards electric mobility. At the same time, we don’t really have a broad-sweeping reference point. It’s the phase of adoption, right, that we’re in. Drawing into this, I can go into EVForward, the project I work on, and how it came to fruition and why it’s important. Right? EVForward, as I said, is a—is a consumer, new-car-buyer panel of 60,000 people across the US and Europe. Originally, it was created to understand the next generation of electric vehicle buyer. Right?

Karen: 00:20:12

I love the thought that—the changing face of who these buyers are from who they once were thought to be to who they are now. My analogy is a few years ago I worked at a full-service company, and we talked specifically to a group of clean-label enthusiasts, for example. They were doing things that were pretty—as you can imagine, people that are interested in clean labels and clean eating and, again, shopping at Whole Foods and looking for whole dietary changes that they could make to consume a certain way and reduce some of the chemicals that they were ingesting, et cetera, et cetera.

Ben: 00:21:23

The timeline here is all of our people are expected to buy in the next five years. Right? That’s always going to be future-looking. Of course, as I mentioned, environment matters a lot still. It’s an implied benefit when it comes to an electric car. Well, looking forward, we see a huge shift towards technology. Those people who were going to electric vehicles early where the early adopters, innovators, but it was environmentally-motivated. Now, it’s technology. If I’m paying a premium for an electric car, I want the latest and greatest technology. Right?

Karen: 00:23:25

This concept of being good for the—I want to do something that’s good for the environment, and I want to have the latest, greatest, high-tech, sleek, cool-looking vehicle. To me, that’s really interesting because, in my head, I don’t always put those two things together. I’m curious about what lesson there might be for not just the automakers or the dealers in thinking about that new person, but what other lessons are there, maybe, for other industries about shifting consumer profiles? Is that pairing manifesting in other spaces as far as you can tell?

Ben: 00:24:02

Yeah. That’s a good question. I think there are a lot of parallels in terms of the way you should think about your audiences and who buys your products. Right? We find with electric vehicle buyers, your traditional brand loyalist, those people who are always coming to you, supporting your brand, buying for generations, well, if you don’t have an electric vehicle out there, but they’re interested, well, they’re going to cross-shop brands. Right? Preparing for that shift. If you’re committed to a loyalist type of consumer, sure, that recurring revenue can happen for a long time if you keep producing products that are fitting their needs, but if all of a sudden you get stuck behind, and your audiences are moving in a way that you didn’t anticipate, well, how do you adapt?

Karen: 00:25:20

Yeah, yeah. Building on the idea of staying ahead of the curve and knowing your audience and all that, what are some other things that, whether it’s automakers that might be listening or, again, whether it’s a dealership or a tech company, what are some other things that they should be mindful of, lessons that you’ve learned in your industry that can be applied elsewhere?

Ben: 00:25:40

Tech companies like utility companies, any company that’s being challenged by disruption, it’s important to—in my mind, it’s to educate, and it’s to show your audiences that you’re moving in the direction they want you to move. Right? I think, tying this to electric vehicle hurdles and barriers, right, there’s a huge educational component to it when a paradigm shift occurs. Right? In the past, and I think this, maybe, parallels solar industry, right, so you have one way of powering and heating your home, and that’s oil and gas. Then the auto industry, it’s gasoline and diesel. Right? Then, all of a sudden, there’s this new option. It’s battery-powered or it’s solar-powered. Right?

Karen: 00:28:32

I love that so much, Ben because what you’re talking about, the idea of—I think you used the phrase hand-holding at one point also—the idea that this is a complicated purchase decision and a complicated life change for many, many people, as I can imagine. I keep putting myself in like, “Hey. What if we did go EV with our next car purchase? What behaviors will we have to change?” Causing people to change their behaviors is—or trying to nudge people to change their behaviors requires a lot more effort and a lot more on the part of the company that is trying to influence the consumer journey, the customer journey there. Is that the sort of thing that comes out in some of your recommendations when you’re working with clients? Do you help them along the way? Do you give them that stellar advice? Are you involved in customer experience work as well is my question.

Ben: 00:29:24

Customer experience is—it’s different than what we’re doing with EVForward. We tend to focus in on the actionable things automakers, dealerships, utility companies can do to educate those people. Right? We set up the guardrails and tell them, “Here’s what we’re finding. Here are the issue areas when it comes to education, when it comes to familiarity with electric cars, when it comes to exposure. Have they seen them? Have they driven them? Here are the things that are getting in the way. Here’s how you can educate. Here’s how you can inform. Here’s the way you can talk about this.”

Karen: 00:30:50

Yeah, yeah. It does. No, absolutely. I think it’s great, and I’m glad you’re doing the work that you’re doing. For me, I think about, again, macro trends towards sustainability in what’s happening and the steps that people are taking towards doing something good for our earth and for also leaning into technology. I keep thinking that that feels, to me, like those two—those two things I don’t necessarily link together, although that is certainly the macro trends that are happening all around. Right?

Ben: 00:31:52

Yes. If we talk about the projects that we’ve done or the methodologies that we’ve employed—this is for those market research listeners—with the syndicated research study, obviously, we have a ton of flexibility in what we can do and what we test and how we test it. Right? A lot more so than a custom project or a client-led project. We can test things that might work or they might not. Right? Last year we had this fun project on battery electric vehicle products where we took this proprietary qualitative exercise called Evoke that then helped to shift it over into a quantitative analytic tool. You’re taking emotions, reactions, feelings, sentiments that people have about specific electric vehicles. Right?

Karen: 00:34:55

That’s cool. I love hearing you talk about research, especially knowing your background wasn’t necessarily in research methods. By that, I mean your education wasn’t necessarily in research methods. How did you get up to speed? I’m turning back to your career a little bit before we wrap. How did you get up to speed in research methodologies and learn the actual day-to-day tactics of conducting research? Did you learn on the job? Did you step outside for some continuing education elsewhere? How’d you get up to speed?

Ben: 00:35:24

Well, so, when I was in my master’s program, I took a internship for—with a polling company, so political polling agency. That’s where I learned, obviously, how to design a study, how to read the data outputs and crosstabs, how to find the story in the data, how to synthesize it, how to build chart deliverables, how to present it in a way that is digestible to the people that need to use it, and then how does it inform strategy? Right? The full cycle of working on political campaigns was really useful in heading into this direction because a lot of what I do now is similar to how we set up those polling studies. Right? With polling, it’s a lot more precise in how you have to reflect the overall market or state or nation that you’re polling. Right? With electric vehicle polling or research, so to speak, it—we don’t have as many strict stringent requirements in following that representative group of people. Right? The new-car-buyer audience is going to change, so we have to adapt our methodology, our waiting, our protocols, our quotas accordingly.

Karen: 00:37:32

That’s so funny because on this podcast, we—you are not the first person that started with some political polling that we have talked to collectively. What I think is really interesting about that is as people younger people—and we don’t necessarily have college students in our audience right now or graduate students. Some of them probably are in our audience. If there are people that have influence over people who are currently at the education stage of their careers, it would be really cool if everybody took a polling class. Right? To not just learn the steps but also learn how to find that story and how to ask the right questions. There’s so much to that. I think it’s great that you brought that up. Thank you.

Ben: 00:38:09

Yeah. I cannot emphasize enough how much you learn in a political environment like that. There’s a lot of scrambling. It’s so fast-paced. It’s pretty cutthroat. If you can survive and thrive in that sort of environment, everything else easier. Right? Every workplace—

Karen: 00:38:29

—yeah. Then you get to go, “Now, let’s talk about cars.”

Ben: 00:38:33

Right. Every workplace you go to is—it seems calm after that.

Karen: 00:38:37

Exactly, exactly. That’s awesome. Lenny and I always say this every episode we listen to. By the end, one of us is saying like, “Oh. We really need to be mindful of time.” I do promise that we’ll wrap this up at some point, and I’m looking at the clock. I want to now turn it over to you and find out a little bit about are there things that you wish I had asked you in our time together that I didn’t ask you about because I came super curious about certain things?

Ben: 00:39:02

I don’t think so. Unless you want to talk a bit more about electric vehicles or something like that.

Karen: 00:39:09

Well, it’s funny because as I was saying, I’m happy to talk about electric vehicles, and I know that’s in our brief, too, the role of them in the world. I find that really interesting because I have done some discerning on my end as I—as I shared about do we want to do that? My husband’s best friend lives across the street from us, and he has a charger in his—in his garage. He charges his electric vehicle. We’ve talked about it, but we are—we have never been necessarily in that, although we’re there now. The thing that I find most interesting about them is that discernment process, as you’re saying, is what people do find to be those barriers. I am curious about whether there are other barriers that other people experience that I’m like, “Yeah. I have that one too,” other than that charging dilemma.

Ben: 00:39:52

First, you already said range was one of your barriers. What else? You said charging. What other things are you hearing about electric cars that cause you to hesitate?

Karen: 00:40:06

All right. I’ll go there. I’ll go there. Somebody challenged me when I brought it up at one point about is it really better for the environment? Right? Are we really doing a solid? Are the batteries there, and the mining of those batteries, is that—is that really as good for us globally as we say it is? That’s on my mind as a question, curiosity.

Ben: 00:40:43

Yeah. I’ve seen mining, battery disposal, material sourcing pop up as new concerns, relatively new concerns over the last year. Typically, the bigger concerns are is this battery going to last for the lifetime of ownership? Right? Auto companies are doing a pretty good job at guaranteeing those for at least 10 years to 100,000 miles. They protect you from full battery breakdown to crazy battery reduction and capacity. Right? Automakers are typically doing the job on that. Again, people have this relationship with their cell phone, where they see the battery slowly deteriorate over time. They think and they expect it to happen with electric cars, but automakers are setting themselves up in a way that they’re going to at least protect you for the typical lifetime of a car, around 10 to 15 years.

Karen: 00:43:43

I’m going to give you—give you praise right now for having—the last segment of this conversation—having the response of a true researcher. Right? You absolutely are like, “Hey. I don’t have all the answers, but I hear what you’re saying, and it’s not dissimilar to other things that I have heard. You are absolutely representing the voice of the customer or the potential customer, for that matter.” Answered like a true researcher, so really well done on that. How is the audience—I know you spoke at IIEX in Austin, and thank you again for doing that.

Ben: 00:44:25

Yeah. It’s funny. I think people love the topic, and I’ve talked to dealership organizations. I’ve talked to supplier organizations, so they supply component parts to automotive companies. I’ve talked to several types of organizations within the auto space, utility space, dealership domain, et cetera, and I think everybody is talking about EVs. Right? Everybody has their own ideas about why this trend is happening, where this trend is going to head, what’s holding it back, what’s causing it to start in the first place, and what’s causing them to proliferate? I think, at the end of the day, people like to talk about it because it’s so new. It’s fresh. It’s interesting.

Karen: 00:46:05

Well, I love that. Cars in general—and this’ll be it before we wrap—but cars in general, I think, are—they’re so interesting because they really—they are so emotional when you get to who am I? What kind of car do I drive? What image do I want to project out into the world? Lots of projective exercises from my past as a qualitative researcher is if X-brand was a car, what kind of a car would it be? We even asked that in our 20s. Me and a bunch of girlfriends of mine were like, “If I were a vehicle, what kind of vehicle would I be?” We asked a bunch of young men at a bar one time, and we all were labeled different vehicles. Vehicles have so much imagery and emotionality attached to them.

Ben: 00:47:16

That’s funny you ask. We get a lot of questions now about under-35 audiences. The best part, in my mind, is that they’re the most receptive. Right? They’re the ones who are—know other electric vehicle buyers. They know people who own one. They’re familiar with it. They read about it. They know the companies that are producing them. They might be a stockholder in a company. Who the heck knows?

Karen: 00:48:25

That’s so funny because yesterday I shared with my team, “Oh, look. This is my son standing in front of his car when he got it last year.” Totally relatable concept. It’s an extension of his personality, and I love that. Shout out to Gen-Z and anybody who’s paying attention to Gen-Z, as everybody should be, really. They are really a smart and savvy generation, man. They have the ability to research and to learn, and they have beyond the ability, also the desire to take those purchases really seriously. They’re doing the work. Kudos to them, man. They’re going to change the world.

Ben: 00:48:59

They might not have the disposable income of somebody that’s 55 plus, but as electric vehicles continue to proliferate, prices can come down. Gen-Z is going to be really on the table for any automaker that’s willing to capture them. They’re an important group. They really are.

Karen: 00:49:16

Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Ben, I have enjoyed this conversation so much. Thank you so much for your time. Any final words of—final words of wisdom for our listeners about being a Future List honoree and what other people can do to make the most of their careers?

Ben: 00:49:32

Yeah, no. That’s a good question. I’d say, if you’re early in your career, you’re early in insights, and you’re at an organization that supports you, that you’re proud to work at, and you’re working on a project that really makes you happy and makes a difference in either your world or in the world that you’re seeing out there, try to put yourself out on that list and try to get nominated. It’s fun. You get flown to Austin, you get your hotel paid for, and you get to present and talk to all sorts of interesting people. I don’t know. I think GreenBook, from what I know, is pretty cool place and pretty cool organization. Happy to be on the list, and thank you guys for taking the time today.

Karen: 00:50:15

Well, thank you for taking the time today. Again, thanks again for being one of our speakers. Kudos to you moving forward for the rest of 2023. Listeners, this is the portion of the program where I get to thank you for being here, for showing up week after week. I want to take our producer, Natalie Pusch. She’s a star and makes this happen, and I’m so grateful for her support and her partnership at work. Also, James Carlisle, our audio editor, thank you so much for doing what you do for us each week.