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After graduating from business college in 1982, Kent spend eight years in customer service and pharmaceutical sales before discovering his true calling - consumer research. After completing a grueling year-and-a-half of graduate school, he’s applied his craft to understanding the B-to-B world of chemical sales; new product development and customer satisfaction modeling in pharmaceuticals; leading a multidisciplinary research team at a major mutual fund company; introducing rapid prototyping methods in a new business design team; running his own research company; and lastly, finding where he was meant to be at Callahan Creek, digging into why consumers do the things they do. Some of the companies he’s worked with over the years are Dow Chemical, Marion Laboratories, Abbott Laboratories, Heineken, American Century, Tropicana, Coca-Cola, Miller Beer, MBNA, CommunityAmerica and Children’s Mercy Hospital.
A classically trained researcher, in the late '90s Kent underwent a research “midlife crisis.” It was becoming increasingly evident that the traditional way of conducting research wasn’t delivering the kind of breakthrough thinking that clients needed. A lot of introspection and a great mentor led him to understand there were a lot of social forces that influenced consumers’ behavior, and that our cognitive processes worked in such a way that we couldn’t rely on our rational explanations of our behavior. So he studied (and still does) the social sciences, anthropology, cognitive science and documentary film, to name a few, to make sense of the myriad structures behind what drives us. He loves to tell a great story and if he could, he would be a documentary filmmaker. But, with two kids in college...
Kent on shopping: "My biggest soapbox about shopping - and just about any other consumer behavior, truth be told - is to not jump to conclusions about what people say or do. I’m not saying people are trying to intentionally deceive you when they tell you what they do and then behave differently. It’s that because there are so many subconscious influences to what we do, and our noggins are so obsessed with making sense out of everything that our brains will make things up to create order and sense, and we mostly don’t realize it is happening. My passion in life, and fortunately my job, is to observe something and figure out what is influencing it behind the scenes. As Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently said, 'What we see unlocks what we cannot see.'”
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