KELLY REBMANN: If you don't understand why people do things, you have no chance of changing their behavior. What they do and why they do it is important because then you have to understand, what's the emotion? Can I hook into that, because it's meaningful.

What consumers do is, I think, the absolute baseline of what I need to know to be able to sell my product. I work in the pharmaceutical industry, and so I have a product, in this case, that treats head lice. So for me to be able to sell my product or show the value of my product to a consumer, I need to understand what they do when it comes to head lice. I need to understand behaviors.

Every decision I make is critical to understand how the consumers function. So in the case of the product that I'm working with now with head lice, what a mom does and how she reacts to her child having head lice is paramount. We know now that typically, she wants to keep that a secret, and so she hides, but there are several paths that she will take to have had head lice be treated. She can call her doctor. She can get online. She can ask a friend. She can go directly to the pharmacist.

That's important for me to know. I need to figure out how I can intersect that mom to get her to see my product and then choose my product, so it's critical for me to understand where she goes, where she goes the most often, how she makes the decision on what to treat her child with. If I don't understand that, then I have no chance of intersecting her, and then no chance of changing her behavior.

The biggest win-- well, I think the biggest win would probably be through-- we do rounds and rounds of market research. One of the things that came to light over various levels of research and us digging in and trying to really pull out insights from that customer research is that mothers are so ashamed of head lice and feel so dirty about it that they seek out other places. They don't go to their own doctor.

So it was critical for us. We're trying to intersect people, and we were working really hard on the professional side, and we were missing a lot of mothers because they would go to pharmacy in a different town. They would not even go to their own place, or they wouldn't call their own doctor because they were so ashamed and felt like this was a reflection on how dirty I am.

But that was such a big deal for us to recover that information, and we really did change a lot of our strategies. And I can say that we've met our goals in the second year, which were very steep, very difficult. And while I certainly think we still have a long way to go in terms of changing behavior, that was a huge win for us, and that insight from that consumer research that came-- we were able to act on that, change our strategy and our tactics.

So market research-- usually we call it qualitative and quantitative. So we do quantitative first, which is typically in an online survey. So we send out multiple online surveys to mothers. We're trying to get to mothers that have experienced head lice once, possibly twice, and find out, quantitatively, what did they do?

And then, once we have some of that information, we're looking for qualitative. Why did they do what they do? As a marketer, it's important for me to understand why somebody did something, why do they do the behavior that they do, so that I can try to tap into the emotional elements to change that behavior. When we do intersect that mother, we have a chance of getting her attention and giving her a really good reason to do something different than what she's about to do.

I think, as I said, marketing is just about creating value, but you have to understand there's no point in trying to market something if you don't understand what's happening now. So the very beginning of trying to change behavior is understanding what's happening. And so with your customer, with anybody who intersects or acts within the sphere of your product, you have to understand what exactly is happening. How often is it happening? What does that mean? What is the insight that you can drive out of that?

Once you understand that, then you have a chance to say, OK, what is the ideal behavior I need to see from that consumer or that doctor, Whomever? And then you have to chart the path of, OK, how far is that, and what is it going to take to go from here to the ideal behavior? Is it possible, and what are my strategic priorities to try to get there? What tactics can I employ?

But I can tell you after a 20-year career, and 10 of it being in marketing and 10 of it being in sales and management, I think there is one thing that stands out through every role that I've ever had, and I think it's particularly critical in marketing, is that the fundamentals are critical. They always use it in sports analogies and things like that. If you know how to do the fundamentals and you always get back to that, then you have a chance of being really successful.

It's not elaborate or magical, but the fundamentals like brand positioning, the fundamentals of doing a SWOT analysis, the fundamentals of trying to drive insights out of information-- all of that seems really tiresome, but I can tell you in the real world, we spend a lot of time doing what are the basics, and we do them over and over again every year, even though we think we know what we know. We do it again, and we do it again every year and have a fresh strategic plan every year. So it's worth-- it's surprising, but it's not magic. It's just do the work. But I think that's good advice for all the way around.