David Cutler @Cook Unity

The Omnichannel Marketer

How this former Spotify exec uses data & consumer behavior to scale this subscription business.

On the latest episode of the Omnichannel Marketer, I spoke with David Cutler, VP of Product & Design at Cook Unity.

David started his career consulting with major CPG brands, helping them interpret big data sets to create better segmentation and advertising.

He went on to become a product manager for data products, with roles at Bloomberg and Spotify before landing at CookUnity.

CookUnity is a D2C meal kit subscription service that delivers restaurant-quality meals made by celebrity chefs.

It’s a marketplace where people can discover new foods and chefs can broaden their distribution outside of the traditional restaurant setting.

CookUnity helps chefs expand from their restaurant directly to consumers (or “eaters”).

The secret thread between product and marketing?

Consumer research.

To that end, David shared his “tripod of tools” for understanding consumer behavior that he learned from his days at Spotify.

1️⃣ Surveys, interviews, and focus groups to develop segmentation across your addressable market, i.e. not just your customers but untapped audiences.

2️⃣ User testing tools that capture and record user web & application activity - actual users talking through their experience and feelings.

3️⃣ Looking at user behavior and product insights from a data science perspective.

The result is an exhaustive body of research that maps out user personas, storylines, and daily usage patterns for each persona.

It’s a mission-critical exercise because customer behavior informs who, how, and where you target in multi-channel advertising AND the experience they have in the platform.

Ultimately, this research helps define what makes users happy or makes them churn, which helps create an amazing end-to-end experience.

For CookUnity, the journey is incredibly complex - going back and forth between digital and physical – while also including dining experiences that get rated digitally via QR codes every week.

Those feedback loops improve the meals and customer experience, i.e. feedback is used to tweak recipes.

CookUnity has added hospitality elements to simulate a chef talking about the meal or what happens when a customer isn’t happy, i.e. items removed from the bill.

I don’t know about you, but all this talk about dining experiences is getting me hungry…

Give David and CookUnity a follow to learn more about this exciting new service.

Thanks, David, for sharing your experience and customer research expertise!