Kent Stones's Email & Phone

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...