In this episode of Retaili$tic, Philip Moore shares his eclectic background spanning over 30 years in academia, retail, research, and broadcasting, and discusses how his experience informs his current work at Coresight Research. We explore the evolution of consumer behavior, retail strategies, and innovative data tools shaping the future of retail industry insights.
Key topics
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and episode overview
02:11 Philip Moore’s background and early career
04:16 Transition from radio to market research
09:40 Circuit City and the electronics retail model
13:39 The DivX experiment and content licensing
19:47 Building CarMax and the used car market
20:12 Circuit City’s decline and CarMax’s success
25:05 Coresight’s consumer survey and data insights
43:21 Future AI tools and store intelligence platform
Dana (00:00)
Hi everyone, welcome to Retaili$tic with Deborah Weinswig, brought to you by Coresight Research. I'm Dana Miller. I'm sitting in today for Deborah. This week we're gonna flip the script. Our guest is a familiar face, Philip Moore. If you haven't seen him before, you know him as the voice that introduces Deborah each episode, but Philip is actually our head of data and market research.
We're gonna talk about his eclectic background, which spans over 30 years in academia, retail, research, and broadcasting. But before we meet with Philip, here are a few highlights of this week at Coresight Research. How our value, convenience, and scale powering a $1 trillion market. Our report of the week coming out is the market navigator on the US mass merchandisers, warehouse clubs, and discount stores. We're breaking it all down. It's also grocery shop week in Las Vegas. Really exciting.
one of our analysts, Sujette, covers all three days. We're gonna be hosting our executive leadership dinner on Wednesday, and we're publishing a Simbei Infographic, an Instacart presentation, as well as a T-Mobile cybersecurity report. We also have fresh US and China consumer survey data, a look at China's AI superpowers. We have Friday's subscriber call on new SIP features and the US and UK store tracker data.
Then on Monday, September twenty-eighth, we're in Nashville for the Corsite Conference, which we're really excited about and you'll hear more from us then. But let's get into it
Hey Philip, how are you?
Philip Moore (01:27)
Hi Dana, it's good to see you.
Dana (01:29)
So good to see you again. Really excited about this episode. I think a lot of the time viewers don't get to see a little behind the scenes of who's creating the Retaili$tic podcast. so really want to take this episode for people to get a feel, a story of where we come from and our involvement in Coresight Research.
To kick it off, would love to hear more about you, your experience, where Coresight came into the picture. And then we can get a little bit deeper dive into the product that you have built within Coresight and the relevancy, especially coming up this week with the two largest conferences, essentially with Grocery Shop and Coresight Conference.
Philip Moore (02:11)
Sure. Well, my story starts a long, long time ago before most of you were born. I was actually
Dana (02:21)
A ninety sixer, so probably.
Philip Moore (02:23)
yeah. I maybe before your parents even met, but I was born in Houston and actually was you know on in the college preparatory track.
in the Houston magnet school system, but it was still public school. And I was in the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, I took an early version because my dad was a lecturer at the University of Houston. He arranged for me to take the SATs early. And so I got an invitation to go to college two years early, well, you know, instead of 11th grade. But I actually
Dana (03:01)
My mom did the
same thing, honestly.
Philip Moore (03:03)
Yeah. I was actually
at the time n you know, a little burned out on school. And so rather than go into college, I started working in radio. Oddly
Dana (03:16)
Mm.
Philip Moore (03:17)
enough. So I started at
Dana (03:19)
I can hear it. have the radio voice.
Philip Moore (03:22)
Well, yeah, so I started in radio at like sixteen years old and
I just stayed in it. I was in radio for eight years. I started just as a promotional intern and worked my way up to operations manager. I put stations on the air in Portland, Oregon, and St. Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas. And you know, during that period of my life I got married, had my first child. So I was know, I was essentially a radio programmer at 24 and
That was about the time that the FCC was getting deregulated and Viacom and Cap Cities and all these giant media conglomerates were buying up stations all over the country. And as you might imagine, the salaries were getting decimated as all of these jobs were getting consolidated. So I went back to college with a wife and child and
got my degree in economics and then did a little bit of marketing for a medical devices company after I graduated and then got sort of sucked into graduate school. and so I got my first masters at ninety-six while I was at both undergrad and grad school. I worked in
survey design and statistics. I was the subject matter expert for the School of Social Sciences at Rice University when they were converting their SAS from the mainframe over to Unix servers. So my job there, my graduate student job was to convert all of the code that had been on the mainframe into syntax that would work on a Unix machine.
Still dating myself. But anyway, when I graduated, when I graduated with my master's, I got a job in market research at at a company that, provided market research services for commercial entities. I worked on some funny, funny projects and some, you know, some very important projects. We helped PGE figure out how to do segmentation on their allocation for electricity to industrial clients. And we worked on
How to fix Hewlett Packard's in-jet printer, which started screw streaking. didn't understand why they had why they had made a design change that made the product worse. So we did focus groups around the world. I went to Germany and did focus groups in Germany. so it yeah, I've done
Dana (05:47)
So interesting. Like would you
s it's like working with those in Germany also for but you are still selling like HP for the US, no? Like you're just using Germany as a focus group?
Philip Moore (06:00)
We did so the question was they had made this design change in the inkjet printer. And essentially what they did was to make it look more s you know, more sexy on the desk, they took
Dana (06:10)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (06:10)
away this plastic piece that used to sit over the paper. And what was happening was dust was dropping on the paper because they took the dust cover off to make it look more sexy.
Dana (06:18)
Mm. so it's like
Philip Moore (06:21)
And the paper would go through and all the dust would build up on the ink head and then it would just streak the paper and they
wanted to figure out, should they just take the printer off the market and redo it? Or could they figure out a way to deal with consumers that they could give them some kind of utility that would fix the problem and at the same time use up a bunch of the ink cartridge so the consumers would have to buy more ink faster.
Dana (06:46)
Right.
Philip Moore (06:47)
And that's funny. The American consumers were like, sure, just send me the thing. I'll run I'll push the button and run the y re
Dana (06:53)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (06:53)
the routine. and then the German customers were like, Nine, you send us fix it or you send us, you know, isopropyl alcohol and a cotton tip
Dana (07:03)
A new one. Yeah.
Philip Moore (07:05)
swab and we will fix it ourselves. So
Dana (07:07)
It still
I feel like stands true today, having like worked with
Philip Moore (07:10)
Yeah.
Dana (07:12)
like living in Paris and like looking working with like a lot of the neighboring countries to France, they they still operate like that. If we have any German
Philip Moore (07:19)
Yeah, yes. So
Dana (07:22)
viewers also would love to get your take on this.
Philip Moore (07:24)
Yeah.
So we so that was just one of the fun projects. We also figured out where Subway should put their stores. You know, we did all kinds of really interesting work. And couple of years after I
Dana (07:38)
Which year was that?
how many stores did
Philip Moore (07:39)
that was nineteen ninety-nine, got my decades wrong.
Dana (07:41)
they have at the time?
Philip Moore (07:43)
Subway, they had tons. Yeah. They were working on
Dana (07:45)
so
Philip Moore (07:45)
their franchise model. And so they were we did a lot of consumer research to figure out where where a new location would would likely be successful. So we were talking to to people who, you know, bought fast food and were healthy focused and
This was before the whole Jared thing, so there were still there.
Dana (08:06)
Wait, fast
food, healthy, focus. Like it's such like a it doesn't this kind of like idea I feel like doesn't essentially exist today. Like Subway was probably like the most like cutting edge of the time. Obviously I'm familiar with Subway from like early two thousands, but like now you don't look at a subway in the same kind of I'm healthy. Like 'cause I feel like so many of like the facts started to come out. Also interesting that even back then we were still trying to figure out where do you place the right
kind of restaurant or fast food to match the market. And like I know we work with also Placer AI, and that's the exact same technology that X amount of years later we're still trying to find a solution to.
Philip Moore (08:48)
yeah, there's lots of awesome sources, which I also worked at in my next job. So after I left that boutique market research agency, I got hired by a company that most most people should remember called Circuit City. hasn't been that long since it's been gone. Yeah, well,
Dana (09:03)
Yeah I remember the logo
Philip Moore (09:08)
Circuit City had grown and had stored out the entire country. They were
They were essentially growing and the stock value was grow growing by adding new stores. Their comp sales were flat, but they were growing revenue by adding locations. And they were getting to that point where it was becoming obvious that they could not maintain the save level same level of growth because there weren't any more markets left. They had essentially stored out the higher the stored out the entire country. So they started looking at alternatives to the electronics retailing.
For the company, they had more money than they knew what to do with. So they were trying to figure out, you know, where can we go next? And they had two, they had three initiatives. They were looking at because their business model was to was to look at highly fragmented retail models and figure out how a big box solution could use scale to essentially disrupt that model. So they were looking at furniture retailing, because a lot of furniture is sold through my mom and pop in
Dana (10:07)
Hm.
Philip Moore (10:08)
regional stores.
They were looking at used car sales, because car dealerships were, you know, the same model as old electronics retailers, a locally owned, smaller without national chain affiliation. This was back before the current model. And then they were also looking at
Dana (10:27)
It can I ask you?
Philip Moore (10:28)
this new technology of distributing video. They they like this one because they were an electronic store and they thought this would be a great distribution system.
What they were going to do was they were going to put video content like movies onto these discs that you could go and you could buy a special player from Circuit City and then you could go in and rent the movie on a disc and take it home and play it on this special player
Dana (10:57)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (10:59)
that they sold. they called it they called it
Dana (11:01)
Pre Netflix or pre Blockbuster?
Philip Moore (11:05)
Blockbuster was around. This yeah, this was called DivX
And they were going to they thought they could displace Blockbuster with this model. So
Dana (11:15)
okay. would
you say though back then people were replacing like their like PC computer all their technology as like often as they do today? Like how often was it that someone was going in to buy an entire new like desktop display with the keyboard and the mouse and the monitor and like the actual computer model?
Philip Moore (11:35)
yeah, the computer replacement was same model. We were right in the you know, Moore's law was still in place and if you
Dana (11:43)
Hmm.
Philip Moore (11:43)
went if you went two years you and you were an early adopter, it was time for a new computer. So yeah, we were in that cycle that same cycle. it slowed down a lot since then 'cause the computers just you know, the hardware got bigger and better than the user could manage to to to tax. So
Dana (12:01)
For sure. But it was
such an event then. Like I remember having like lined up on Black Friday to go to like a Best Buy or whatever to try to get that deal on like a Black Friday. And you're buying so much hardware equipment that like
to switch everything over actually felt like it took a week. You had a specialist come in to do it for you. I was obsessed with computer games as like a seven year old and like was just always like on a computer because I loved like video games and I definitely come from like a Nintendo sixty four generation as like a three year old. But like I remember it was such an event versus today it's like anyone can go in and they buy a new MacBook laptop or like HP and they can do the entire transfer themselves
Philip Moore (12:48)
Yeah. my nephew was our was our family's computer specialist whenever
Dana (12:52)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (12:53)
it's somebody he built he used to build, you know, desktops from the motherboard up. So he was one of those geeks that could help you get your new system set up.
Dana (13:03)
What does he do today?
Philip Moore (13:04)
what does he do? T he's an engineer. Yeah. He went and got
Dana (13:06)
Makes sense.
Philip Moore (13:08)
his civil engineering degree and he builds bridges and things like that. so
Circuit City hired me, but they didn't hire me for Circuit City. They hired me for one of these new divisions that they were trying to experiment with. the the furniture experiment didn't last. I think they maybe played around with it with one test store or something.
Dana (13:25)
Mm.
Philip Moore (13:26)
But they did they did do the Divix experiment. They developed the technology and they started selling the players and trying to rent the thing. And they had some licensing agreements with Paramount and some of the big, you know, movie.
production houses, Columbia, I think, Warner Brothers. Some of those fell through about the time I got there. and it and it became a content licensing issue. They had the stores, circuit city stores all around the country. They had the technology. They were manufacturing the players. They had, you know, they could move the content onto the the discs.
they had the whole billing thing, automatic billing. You hooked your player up to a modem, and when you played the movie, it would automatically charge your credit card 50 cents. You know, you didn't have to pay to get the disc. You just
Dana (14:13)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (14:13)
took it home and played it and automatically got charged per play. so that was all in place, but then the content providers started getting a little weird about exclusive. I think Netflix was coming along and Netflix was talking to them at the same time.
And so they were having to make a choice between the Circuit City Divx model or Netflix, and the big ones went with Netflix. And so Divix was kind of hung out to dry. I wasn't involved, luckily. I was in the other
Dana (14:40)
Yes. Yeah.
Philip Moore (14:41)
part of the company which was experimenting with used car sales. So
Dana (14:46)
That's like I get like the kind of match, but that to me is so separate for used car sales versus like use the like I guess tech sales.
Philip Moore (14:57)
Yeah. Well
the whole the whole thing is it it was almost like a a business school case study. Circuit
Dana (15:03)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (15:03)
City came in and they were like stereos and you know cell phones. There weren't cell phones at the time, but stereo stereos, record players, you know, home electronics are all getting sold through these little, you know, crazy Eddies and you know mom mom and pop's little local electronic stores. And so they said
We can, you know, we can scale this, we can get better sourcing deals. So we can get a cheaper wholesale price for these if we buy at scale. And so and we can even get big enough where we manufacture our own products, you know, white label vertically integrate. And so they said, Well, the business model says if if the amount of money that we can make on a better margin because we can lower our wholesale prices.
will allow us to suck up all the customers from these little mom and pop they'll never be able to compete
Dana (15:57)
Mm.
Philip Moore (15:57)
with advertising you know it's just economies of scale issue with any kind of retail. So so that was Circuit City's model. And they said we're out so we've done this. We've we've proven that this this works with electronics. What other retail verticals have this same model where the products are being sold by
smaller local mom and pop kind of stores that we can have better sourcing, et cetera, et cetera. So, know, they initially thought about new cars. They were initially gonna go get into the new car business. And what they quickly found was that state franchise laws were
Dana (16:35)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (16:35)
so locked down that there was no way they could get into new car sales. I mean the the new car dealer
in denton texas is also the head of the Lions Club and his brother is on the state legislature and his uncle was the governor and you just can't you can't break that model the the dealer franchise laws for new cars in states is is definitely locked down so there's
Dana (17:02)
Still to this day, you would say.
Philip Moore (17:04)
yeah to this day i mean tesla essentially tesla had to say we have to
We have to have our own owned
Dana (17:11)
Mm.
Philip Moore (17:12)
dealerships. We can't we can't license the v you know the the ability to sell Tesla through franchise dealers because of these franchise dealer laws. Ford tried to move in this space and they got, you know, they got crushed in lawsuits and things. So only a brand new vehicle brand could
s do what Tesla did and sell direct to consumers. so they couldn't do new cars. Circuit City couldn't do new cars because of the franchise models. And so they said, well, we could do used cars. The used car dealerships are even more fragmented than the new car dealerships. You know, there's a million of these little guys and w and so
Dana (17:48)
Mm-hmm.
Philip Moore (17:49)
the issue was
What can we do and what's the real selling issue with used car dealerships? And they basically said that the issue with all these little mom and pop used car dealerships is the consumers don't trust them, and in many cases for good reason. So how do we build a brand that consumers could trust for used cars? And so that's kind of what I was involved with. Well, I did a lot of the consumer research, what we did a lot of the
Kaizon Toyota research on operations for how the we we as a brand could recondition the used cars to a level that they wouldn't break down. Like we could put a year guarantee on a used car and basically you have to go through with the very careful inspection and and fix the problems that need fixing before you put the car on the front lot. You know, this total reconditioning process
That we were doing on the inventory to get the cars to a place where they could be relied upon and and guaranteed. and then we could even
Dana (18:52)
Amazing.
Philip Moore (18:54)
offer the extended warranty. So we you would get a seven-day no questions asked return policy. If you know you drove the car home and you didn't something wasn't right, you can just bring it back for a full refund or exchange. And then we there would be a 30-day warranty on the car itself, and then
you could buy a extended warranty up to, you know, multiple years, just like on a new car. so that was the business model. That's how you say, okay, well how do you how do you produce a consumer offer that would allow people to be trusting and buy a used car instead of a new one? Because obviously there's a lot more value and you drive a new car off the lot, it you lose fifteen percent just when you cross the curb.
So that was the that was the model and it was seemed to be working. so that I worked there for eight years and turned it into the largest used car retailer in the world.
Dana (19:43)
Still to this day didn't know that Circuit City used to sell used cars. Like how long to
Philip Moore (19:47)
Well, they never s
they they never sold it under the Circuit City banner. They called it Carmax.
Dana (19:53)
why didn't you lead with that?
Philip Moore (19:57)
So I helped build Carmax. So that was what
Dana (20:00)
my god. If you are now just getting into this episode, like this is the point. Like we need to edit in the beginning. Okay, that makes sense. I thought this was a failed story. This is not a failed story. This is still in existence. that's wait, so Circuit City
Philip Moore (20:12)
No. yeah, Carmax Carmax is rockin'.
Dana (20:17)
still exists.
Philip Moore (20:19)
Nope. Carmax outlasted Circuit City.
Dana (20:22)
Wait, they it was their like child's and they sold it off. When did they sell it?
Philip Moore (20:24)
They s they s yep. They spun off they they
spun it off with a sa a separate stock op option. it was I think October two thousand one, maybe something like that. So
Dana (20:38)
and Circuit City died when RIP. y
Philip Moore (20:40)
Not long after.
Yeah. Best buy ate
Circuit City's lunch. Best Buy came along. The stores were cleaner. The the one of the things that that's interesting
Dana (20:53)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (20:53)
with for retail, Circuit City's comp plan for their sales associates was partially commission based. So if you worked at a circuit city, you were always, you know, you were attentive, but you were always trying to upsell because you made more money. And then they were the other thing they did was instead of trying to manage inventory.
With price promotions, they tried to manage inventory with sales perks. So if they had too
Dana (21:18)
Mm.
Philip Moore (21:18)
much of a product, theoretically because the product wasn't popular, so it wasn't selling, instead of reducing the price, they would tell the salespeople you get an extra 10% bump if you sell one of these units. So what happened was the salespeople were pushing the products that people didn't want to buy.
Dana (21:36)
Then they receive it and they're like, I don't trust this salesperson. I remember also the bundle deals were so big then. Like everything
Philip Moore (21:43)
Yeah.
Dana (21:43)
if you buy this, you get this for free, which would just force my mom to like just continuously buy things that we didn't even didn't know how to use.
Philip Moore (21:52)
Yeah.
So Best Buy came along and while their sales associates were not as attentive because they weren't getting commission, they were friendly, they were available, and in many cases they knew what they were talking about. Initially when Best Buy first started, they had a really good associate training program. So you if you asked somebody a question, they would actually know the answer. Probably know, I'm not sure
Dana (22:14)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (22:14)
if that's still the case, but at the time it was a completely different shopping experience. You know, Circuit City was
you know, it was like walking into a used car dealership when you
Dana (22:24)
It was very
salesy with like the red versus I think also with Best Buy, it was starting to shift as like more tech was coming out that it was turning into like a consumer market, I would say, that like as the consumer can educate themselves. They didn't need to lean on the sales associate as like experts in of the field. Like
Philip Moore (22:42)
Right.
Dana (22:42)
ever there was so much more information available as like things started to pick up that like now you owned your own tech. Like you could figure out
Even as like again as a twelve year old, like I I think I got my first I like my first flip phone was a razor in fifth grade. And I got my first iPhone in eighth grade. And like once you and I had an eye touch in sixth grade. So like I already knew how to download apps, like again, playing games, take a photo. Like you're starting to use it and be able I think also Apple introduced this whole concept of like it's in the hands of the user.
And like we're gonna give you the software update. We're gonna allow you to like plug it into your MacBook to figure out what the next iteration it I guess would say would be. And then it completely ruined the model for those sellers. And you realize, yeah, you didn't need to go into Circuit City. And like especially if you didn't like those people, you never had to deal with them again. And then slowly I'm sure Amazon came out and was like, you can just buy a lot of these things online.
Which it's
Philip Moore (23:43)
That was huge. Yeah. Between Bus Buy
and and Amazon, Circuit City was dimmed. So they didn't last much past the, you know, the internet rolling out and all that stuff becoming available
Dana (23:52)
For sure. Yeah.
Philip Moore (23:55)
online. But you can't buy a used car online, so so's car.
Dana (23:59)
You can't?
I feel like Craigslist you can buy a used car online. Or like Facebook Marketplace you can.
Philip Moore (24:05)
You if you buy a car online without test driving it, shame on you. You're gonna end up getting screwed because, you know.
Dana (24:11)
I've rented
apartments online without seeing them in person and I've only gotten screwed twice.
Philip Moore (24:17)
Well, okay. Well, when you get screwed
renting an apartment, you can always move out. When you get screwed buying a thirty thousand dollar car, you're hosed. So So
Dana (24:25)
Yeah. Yeah. No.
Philip Moore (24:28)
yes, I would definitely recommend test driving a car before you buy it, new or used. But
I mean
Dana (24:32)
But least like
all of that skill like obviously it didn't go to waste. Like you it's interesting, like back then using like consumer survey data, like understanding like the US like mindset, I would say, or like the shopper experience, like
We're still doing it today. and we're
Philip Moore (24:47)
Yeah.
Dana (24:48)
still using it, of Coresight, at Coresight. and I think if you can wanna go a little bit into how you built out our US consumer survey insights and how much of like a hands-on approach you have and like this deep dive into the behavior.
Philip Moore (25:05)
Yeah.
We do so yeah, when I was at CarMax we were surveying everybody who bought a car. we were using mail surveys at the time. yeah, so that was a a completely different animal because that's a census rather than a sample. So when
Dana (25:22)
Hm.
Philip Moore (25:22)
you send a survey to everyone who does something, you don't necessarily get them all back, but you get a you know, you basically get a strong representation of
what's actually going on and then you can use that to make decisions for your business. I came to Coresight between CarMax and and Coresight, I just realized that Coresight also starts with a C. So I was I was
Dana (25:44)
A C C
Philip Moore (25:45)
I was at Chili's. I s you know, my first my
Dana (25:48)
my god.
Philip Moore (25:48)
first job was at Chili's as a as a first bus boy and then ch and then cook. And then I was at then I was at
Dana (25:56)
That's
amazing.
Philip Moore (25:56)
CarMax,
between CarMax and Coresight I worked at Carfax. So it's all C's. Yeah. I mean at
Dana (26:01)
No, what?
Philip Moore (26:05)
Carfax, I did the I was also running c research. We had a usability lab, so we did a lot of product development research. and did a lot of the consumer research that led to the Car Fox trade character. So so the voice of
Dana (26:18)
Hmm. Did people love
a fox? Like where did that come from? That there was like an interest in a fox as like the main youth animated figure.
Philip Moore (26:28)
Yeah. The s
origin story of of the Car Fox is kind of interesting because we had a you know, we had the show me the Carfax ad campaign, which won, you know, awards and things, but a lot of car dealers would get it were getting frustrated with the number of consumers that were coming in and saying, Show me the Carfax before they would buy a car. And so
A lot of them, what one in particular, as sort of a joke, had his wife sew a little Car Fox t-shirt on a stuffed animal. And when people would say, Show me the Carfax, he would pull out the Car Fox and say, Here's the Car Fox. Just it was kind of a dumb joke.
Dana (27:07)
So random.
Philip Moore (27:09)
People and then he would show them the Carfax. you know, he would, you know, he was just trying to be funny.
Dana (27:14)
And then an
ad agency picked that up and they're like, That's Arn do you know
Philip Moore (27:16)
No, we heard about it. We heard about it. Yeah. No, we didn't have an ad agency. We we developed the
Car Fox trade character ourselves internally. We did work eventually once we got the idea that we were going to do this. We actually worked with the company that because the the original you may probably don't remember, but the original Car Fox was not actually animated. It was an animatronic character, like a Muppet.
Dana (27:42)
Yeah, it was creepy.
Yeah, no, I remember. I remember
Philip Moore (27:44)
So
Dana (27:46)
having like some of the stuffed animals in my house. I don't know how we got it, but like we had like the little t-shirt with like the fox
head.
Philip Moore (27:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we
once the ad campaign was rolled out, Carfax, produced a lot of those and gave them the car dealers the hand out because we thought the this idea of car dealers pulling out the Car Fox when they got asked for the Carfax was funny, a little bit kind of silly, but it also reinforced the idea that people would be asking for it, which was
Dana (28:16)
Mm.
Philip Moore (28:16)
really what we were trying to do build consumer pull, you know, car
Dana (28:19)
Mm.
Philip Moore (28:20)
Carfax basically follows the pharmaceutical model, you know. Ask your doctor about Claritin. No. Ask your car
Dana (28:27)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (28:27)
dealer for a Carfax. So that consumer
Dana (28:29)
So funny.
Philip Moore (28:30)
pull model worked spectacularly, and Carfax took off as well. But the other thing that I did there, back on, you know, relying more on my statistics back background from academia, was I built the Carfax Vehicle History Value Estimator.
So if you go
Dana (28:47)
Mm.
Philip Moore (28:48)
Carfax.com slash values and you put your license plate or VIN in, will tell you what your car is worth. Kind of like Kelly Blue Book, except Kelly Blue Book,
Dana (28:55)
wow. Yeah yeah.
Philip Moore (28:57)
Kelly's based on simple make model. Like if you have a, you know, a 12 year old Toyota, it's going to give you the same value for a 12 year old Toyota wherever you are. the Carfax value is vehicle specific. So we know
Dana (29:10)
Hm.
Philip Moore (29:11)
we know the zip code you're in.
what the market for your vehicle is in that zip code. We know the vehicle's history. So if your car's had an accident or a car you're considering buying has had an accident, hasn't been maintained versus one that's got a clean record and, you know, has a stellar maintenance history. Those are two very different vehicles, even though they have the same badge on them. You know, just because it's a, you know, a twenty twenty-four Ford F one fifty does not mean that the one's been one's been trashed and one has been well maintained and they're very different.
like in terms of the future of the car for you. So those have a different value. And because Carfax has all that data about the history of the car and how it's been maintained, we can make that differentiation. So that's what the Carfax value model does. And it's live today, so go use it. and then after Carfax we moved back. I was getting, you know, advanced in age and ready for a quieter life.
Carfax is in DC and my wife was commuting through DC traffic to work every day and it was driving
Dana (30:14)
Mm.
Philip Moore (30:15)
us all crazy. So she's from Oregon originally. So we moved back to our mountain retreat in Oregon, which is where I work from now.
Dana (30:22)
Amazing.
Philip Moore (30:23)
And but I moved back before I started working at Coresight you know, I was working remotely for Carfax for a little while, and then the opportunity came along and
Coresight needed somebody with my background to assist with a lot of B2B research. So the Coresight site has an advisory group, and I initially started at the advisory group working on projects
Dana (30:47)
Mm-hmm.
Philip Moore (30:47)
for big retailers on issues, virtually all kinds of issues. We did did a lot of pricing research, we did buy versus build for tech.
Dana (30:59)
Still
doing that.
Yes.
Philip Moore (31:00)
Well still doing that.
One really interesting project we worked on is understanding the impact of quick service delivery like Instacart, DoorDash, Uber Eats
Dana (31:10)
Right.
Philip Moore (31:11)
on the confectionery industry. If you think about the in grocery store experience, you come up to the cash register and while you're waiting in line, grab a Snickers or a Skittles or a Kit Kat.
Dana (31:24)
A Kit Kat, a magazine, a
gum, icebreakers.
Philip Moore (31:27)
Well,
when nobody is standing in line anymore because the groceries are getting delivered, the the impulse purchases from the from the checkout line don't get made unless
Dana (31:38)
Mm-hmm.
Philip Moore (31:39)
Instacart or DoorDash or Uber Eats can figure out some way to replicate that experience. And they weren't and may still not be.
So the confectioner brands were really struggling with what's going to happen when everybody's ordering their food instead of going to the instead of going to the store. so that was a a fundamental project we worked on. We looked at the usage of all the different quick service delivery products across like 50 different markets in the United States, which one had the best share and which direction were they going, and what were all of the purchase opportunities that people were ordering food versus
going and getting it themselves. So it was a really interesting project. yeah. We also did
Dana (32:19)
And this was post COVID. Yeah. And
Philip Moore (32:23)
a
Dana (32:23)
was there one area within the country that you saw like the most amount like I guess what was the highest like the red zone? Like with the highest pulsing that they were buying, like the most like Instacart.
Philip Moore (32:35)
obviously the Multmore urban areas, like we had
Dana (32:36)
The cities probably. Yeah.
Philip Moore (32:39)
stories from Manhattan of ladies that would you know, ladies that would order delivery from Costco for their heavy items, like you know,
Dana (32:47)
Yeah. You're yeah, it's
Philip Moore (32:50)
two two pallets of bottled water because they lived in a walk-up, and so they
Dana (32:55)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (32:55)
would use food delivery services to carry their heavy groceries.
Up five flights of stairs.
Dana (33:01)
Honestly, like
in the city that we live in, we do the same thing, which I get very annoyed with my husband with because I'm like, we can't be ordering water in Coke Zero on an Instacart. Like we need to walk downstairs and go carry it ourselves. But it's so true if like things are too h heavy and you're in a city, it's like you're factoring it's not like it's not money. It's like time and convenience and like
you don't wanna have to take a car if you don't have a car, like that travel like surge, i it yeah, sometimes it is way more convenient just to have s also like I don't wanna skip a meeting. Like I d I don't have a car, I can just like get in and like drive over to Costco or Trader Joe's. Like it makes sense. Like you you need someone to come deliver it in that sense.
Philip Moore (33:48)
Yeah, well,
it it enables a certain lifestyle to have someone who can
Dana (33:52)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (33:52)
carry forty pounds of water up five flights of stairs. If you can't do it, then, you know, you gotta find a solution. And if it's not gonna be a
Dana (33:59)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (34:00)
boyfriend or husband, maybe it's the Uber driver.
Dana (34:02)
It's
the
guy from wherever or the woman
Philip Moore (34:05)
Yeah.
Dana (34:06)
from wherever. I would say like my life goal is to just be able to have a farm and like grow my own. But I sound probably so like repeat of like all Gen Z of like I'm gonna live on a farm. I'm gonna have my own chickens, I'm gonna have my own cows, and I'm gonna have my own tomatoes and crops that I grow and that's what the resources I have.
I'll say it's r really interesting also having lived in Paris for the last four years or so, it's not a thing at all. Like you were also they have Uber Eats Delivery. I think maybe one more. It's not like an Instacart, obviously. you're not buying groceries like that. Mm-mm. Your groceries are gonna go bad day of. Like you are walking outstairs and going to your specialty store of your fermoderie for cheese, your
a jardin de blah blah blah for your fruits and vegetables because you want one your friends with the people it's a pleasure for them to personally pick out your apples, the eggplants, like the tomatoes, blah blah. They hand it to you like so nicely packaged and you're getting something that's so fresh and it's the whole consumer experience of like physically going in in these like European towns and countries.
that you know it's getting it's grown local, it's already organic, there's no pesticides. and you are cooking a day of, like there is no I'm waiting to make this meal, I'm waiting to have this snack, which is a totally different mindset than the US.
Philip Moore (35:34)
You don't have an industrial
strength refrigerator and freezer in your apartment.
Dana (35:38)
my gosh, in my apartment, you walk into my kitchen, very, very small. And everyone always it's two drawers, like one on top of each other. People always open the first drawer, which is just for pots and pans. It's not a refrigerator. My refrigerator is under like the top drawer, which is like a tiny, tiny mini fridge that I can stick like milk and butter. It's so small, but that's so common. Like I don't have like
Ice, I barely have a freezer. I think it's like this big. you can't freeze anything. But like it forces you to go out and like France specifically really they help support the local market, I would say. And like the A incentivize even like employees, like I don't know the real rule, but I have friends that they get twenty five euros for lunch, like twenty-five euros for dinner, and they want you to go eat at the local restaurant. They want you to like buy local produce.
And people are just not consuming like that. They're not getting like things delivered unless also last thing is everything closes. You can't order from a restaurant past like eleven o'clock at night. there is no three AM munchies, like there's no convenience
Philip Moore (36:53)
Mm-hmm.
Dana (36:54)
store, like I want candy, like those things close and you have to wait till the next day, which it sucks if you're flying in late. you're not gonna have like
A late night meal, like you have to survive till the next day.
Philip Moore (37:08)
Yeah, it's a completely different lifestyle and and approach. America, we're about brute force efficiency, economies of scale, you know, deliver the highest best at the best price, you know, Costco, Walmart, Target, versus, walk down the street and say hi and get a tomato from your neighbor.
Dana (37:30)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (37:31)
So it's a
Totally different idea.
Dana (37:33)
Yeah,
definitely if you're listening in, leave in the comments what you prefer.
Philip Moore (37:38)
Right. Exactly.
so so that was the car fax experience before coming to Coresight was, a lot of statistics and and usability lab research and focus groups. And then at Coresight we do a d initially I was mostly doing in depth interviews with executives and B2B surveys and and forecasting and modeling on,
questions about market size and and buy versus build questions. What's the economic return on, buying a SaaS solution versus hiring developers to to build stuff internally. and then my role evolved because I started in the advisory group. I wasn't really part of the whole the whole syndicated research side, but they asked me to take that over
Coresight I'd have been running a weekly survey with consumers since COVID and I joined after that. But I took over the weekly survey and continued expanded that, continue to evolve that technology and be able to to get more out of the the work that we do. we survey 400 a representative population sample from the US adult population every week. 400 every week.
And we ask a set of omnibus tracking questions that can tell us where people are shopping and what they're buying. And
Dana (39:00)
Mm-hmm.
Philip Moore (39:01)
then we dive into some other specifics. when tariffs, you know, launched in April of last year, we started asking folks about tariffs and their their reaction and expectations about prices and how tariffs might impact things. We asked folks about the Middle East conflict and the gas shock.
We ask people about how they're shopping for specific products within verticals. So we have a regular tracking of things like shopping for luxury goods, shopping for jewelry and accessories, shopping for denim, you know, shopping for home improvement products, home goods. so we
Dana (39:36)
Right. Is denim just based
off like temperature? Like how do what ch like I guess your genes last longer, but like what factors into denim that that would be like a significant answer?
Philip Moore (39:49)
Well, Americans wear a lot of denim. So if you're asking about clothing
Dana (39:52)
We do.
Philip Moore (39:54)
in general,
Dana (39:55)
Mm.
Philip Moore (39:56)
denim is a big piece of that. But if you try to cover what the issues are with denim, both, you know, pants and and tuxedos made out of denim or whatever people are wearing these days. but you know, that's that's a whole nother issue. There's some specialty stores that you would
maybe not get coverage of if you were just talking about clothing in general. So we do a deep dive, you know, on occasion we do a deep dive on where people are buying denim. You know, it's a big part of the clothing inventory for good old Americans who like their jeans. and then
Dana (40:27)
So interesting. Definitely if people
I would say like giving a shout out to all the work that you do. And if people haven't heard about our survey data or haven't read about it, this is a great opportunity. Like dive in now, see even past ones and future ones that they come out what every two weeks.
Philip Moore (40:46)
No, we report on the results on a weekly basis. Every week. There's every week, yeah.
Dana (40:48)
Every week, yes.
Philip Moore (40:51)
Core site subscribers get a lot of data and information
Dana (40:54)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (40:55)
from their subscription. and then we do also we do annual surveys in addition to the regular weekly ones. So we do a big survey every year on holiday, you know, who's gonna shop where, what they're gonna buy, when they start shopping, how what their budgets are. We do a big survey every year on back to school so we understand that whole process of how the consumers are dealing with.
They're back to school shopping decisions. we do tracking surveys on shopping events. So how are people planning on participating in Prime Day or the upcoming big deal days? we ask about singles day, which is more of an international thing, but people are starting to do singles day shopping events. We talk about all of the holidays. We ask about all the holidays. So we do a pre-post on
Labor Day, Memorial Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Easter, Valentine's Day. So we understand what people are planning going into, you know, months in advance of each of the holidays. We ask people about what they're planning to do. And then immediately after the holiday, we ask them what they actually did. So we get a good
Dana (41:58)
Yeah.
Philip Moore (41:58)
sense for you know, what people are are doing around holiday shopping events. So yeah, we really have a thorough understanding of the cons the US consumer, where they're shopping, what they're buying.
What's going into making those decisions, how their financial situation is impacting their shopping behavior. So we're a great source for that. And we've been, you know, historically we've addressed that with reporting. So we write a report every week talking about what's going on and what people are saying. But we are working now on developing a new product, a data product that will be more
of a of an experience where you can go in and get your specific questions answered. So rather than you know reading through a survey and trying to or reading through a report based on a survey and trying to figure out the answer to or the implications for a question you might have, this new s this new product will basically use our data resources and our artificial intelligence experience.
To let you go into this, you know, for for subscribers, will be able to go in to this product and say, what could I expect from boomer shoppers in in you know the Midwest when they're shopping for furniture in the next six months? You could ask a question like that, you know, and you and it would use the resources of our data
Dana (43:17)
I feel like yeah, this is a a first teaser.
Philip Moore (43:22)
you know, our five years worth of data and all of our understanding of what's going on and using AI modeling to infer an answer to a question like that. So, it's gonna be super exciting once we get that. We're in the process of building it. It's still months and months away, but that's kind of the stuff that that I'm working on right now.
Dana (43:41)
I'm wondering also, like we can discuss this if like for the future episodes that we film too. I think it's always helpful to get like user feedback and viewer feedback, listener feedback of what you would expect to get from a tool like this or
what kind of information that you would want to learn more about and how this tool could help you in your everyday business, which I'm sure also will survey people on.
Philip Moore (44:07)
Yeah.
Dana (44:08)
but super, super cool, like a really good teaser, really interesting. I think when I first joined Coresight there's also like a thought of my head of like obviously everything with AI is this like chat interface, this prompt interface and having gone through the Coresight
product and like reading through our research and I was like there has to be a way to aggregate everything that I can talk to an AI. I guess now I'll be an agent, but even like a couple months ago just an AI interface of like how can I take this information and not even predict but like try to understand like what led to what and what can the future outcome kind of look like. so really excited to hear more about that.
Philip Moore (44:45)
So the other exciting thing that we're working on and have built already, so this is not coming, this is here now, is our store intelligence platform. So this is one of the data products that that I'm responsible for. it's a a way to understand where all the stores are in the country. The we have the active store fleet for all the chain retailers, where they have been closing stores, where they're opening new stores.
and we have a new feature that I'll be demoing on our member call this week, which is we've built a mapping interface. So you can put in a latitude, longitude, or an address or a known store location, like the you know, Columbus, Ohio, Best Buy or whatever. And you can find it on the map, and then you can draw you can see what what else is around it, and you can then filter on different retail verticals.
what stores have recently opened, what stores have recently closed. We have all the demographics for that trade area. So you can get, you know, what's the distribution of age and household income and gender and ethnicity and all that stuff for for that specific trade area. So it's a it's a real fun tool to play around with and really useful if you're trying to figure out why a store yeah.
Dana (45:58)
Do I open my froyo store essentially?
Philip Moore (46:01)
If you want to open a new one,
like where would it work and what com competitors would be there and also like what's going on with the trends because our demo information is not just snapshot and time, it's trends over time. So you can see if high income households are shrinking
Dana (46:14)
Who's come, yeah.
Philip Moore (46:15)
or growing or whatever. So
Dana (46:17)
And who's
come in and out of like this one plaza in Aventura?
Philip Moore (46:20)
Mm-hmm.
Dana (46:22)
And do I replace them? Do I need to be like something new? Do I need to like have a rebrand or something like that? Really cool. definitely something I'm so intrigued and like super interested by. because I obviously love the shopping experiences and fascinated by from a real estate model of like who's coming in, who's coming out, and how
Philip Moore (46:40)
Mm-hmm.
Dana (46:41)
are we always reinventing ourselves? I will say also in Paris, the same thing. There's the two turnover for coffee shops.
and vintage stores and kind of these smaller pop-ups. It's like two weeks. Like it's a lot faster than the US. I don't think they're signing as long of I would say contracts or like leases. so I'm seeing stuff like coming in and out every like month, two months. It's it's fascinating. but really cool. I'm very excited about this, our new product feature.
Amazing. Wow. Thank you so much, Philip, for joining us. If you enjoyed this conversation, please check out our full catalog of interviews with retail industry leaders and set your notifications so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes. If you want more insights on the future retail, visit coresight.com
Just check out over ten thousand podcasts, webinars and reports. we wish you a wonderful week. Thank you so much for staying tuned to our episode. And if you want to hear more from us, leave a like, had add a comment, and hopefully we will chat again.