Quarterly Review, Q2 2024

Join us for this Quarterly Review episode as host Thor Olof Philogène revisits some of the highlights from recent episodes, exploring the varied and rich perspectives of the brilliant insights leaders who’ve joined the podcast this quarter.

Stay tuned for the next season of the Consumer Insights Podcast coming in August.

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Spreaker. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor:

Hello everyone and welcome to our Q2 review here on the Consumer Insights Podcast. I’ve been fortunate enough to have even more incredible conversations with a variety of insights leaders over the last few months, so I wanted to take some time to dig in a bit deeper and really uplift some of the moments that have stuck with me. So without further ado, let’s dive right in. We kicked off the quarter speaking with Deepa Iyer, Senior Director of Market Research and Data Science at Fossil Group. I think my conversation with Deepa really highlighted the variety of hats that insights professionals, and brand-side insights leaders in particular, need to wear. It’s not just about designing and developing research, but also managing projects from start to finish, communicating those findings with stakeholders, all while thinking strategically and taking the extra mile. It’s no small order. Having started her career in consulting, she applies a consultant mindset to help her tackle the variety of responsibilities insights leaders have. So naturally, I asked if she could share a few tips about how to apply the consultant mindset on the brand-side: 

The three main things that I would recommend is Be curious, don't forget your entrepreneurial spirit. This allows you to think outside of the box and come up with creative solution. And second in this is the most important thing, the brand side experience is a marathon and not a sprint, progress may at times feel extremely slow. But that's okay. Think of yourself as if you're steering a very large ship. And that cannot be done overnight, I would focus on bite sized recommendations that can be implemented, because those small bite sized solutions can go a long way. And lastly, always approach insights with humility and empathy to drive change within the organizations. Have a dialogue with your stakeholders so that you can get them as excited as you are about the incredible work that you have done

Thor:

I think Deepa also touched on something really important here when she said that the brand-side experience is a marathon not a sprint – and that progress can feel incredibly slow. She also reminded us that insights work is ultimately about driving change through humility and empathy. And this is something she returned to at the end of our conversation in a way that I really appreciated:

When you're working on the client side, you have to see yourself as someone who is influencing change, or driving change, and that change management are driving change is incredibly difficult. You may be the smartest person in the room, you may know the data inside out, you may have a perfect model. But if you're not able to communicate that, or if you're not able to extend across a table and have a conversation with the other team members, you're not going to be able to drive change. So anytime you are sharing your insights, my one piece of advice is to approach it, that humility, approach it with empathy, and have a dialogue. It's not about the other person, the other team is wrong. And you're right. But it's really about how can your analyses, help the business make a better decision, and you are in it together.

Thor:

I just loved that last bit - “It’s not about the other person, the other team, is wrong, and you’re right. But really it’s about how can your analyses help the business make a better decision? And you are in it together.” I think with that comment she offers a very concrete way of improving collaboration, while also maintaining respect for the expertise that insights teams bring to the table. Which is why it felt incredibly fitting when I spoke with Michael Nevski, Director of Global Insights at Visa, about the importance of communicating the value that insights teams bring to the table – because far too often, the insights function can be seen as a cost center. So I asked him to share how he would advise other insights leaders to influence relevant stakeholders in the organization to help shift their perspective on this:

Number one, and the very first step you need to educate and explain your business partners and show that value you can bring to the table. Whether it's marketing product sales, not only say we do this, this and this, and we kind of provide the guardrails for your research or for your projects. You're really educating them on why it's important to work with us as a function, what we can do for you as a business partner and show actually by, let's say, delivering the results of your research, but also helping them to action out those results, to execute those campaigns, to integrate that in the customer journeys or touch points. And it's a very important first step. That's where your business partners start realizing, okay, maybe there is a value there, they're not just a necessary evil, like a expense but they're really helping us to be more efficient, to be more productive, to be more successful in terms of building those relationships with our customers because they delivering those strategic insights, which I actually incorporate in our day-to-day work.

Thor:

He makes it sound so straightforward, right? I loved where he was going with this, and I wanted to dig deeper. So I asked him what he thought insights leaders should look out for when taking on this endeavor:

Once you tell yourself, I know it all. I've done it all. I don't have that natural curiosity. I don't want to learn something new. That's number one wrong because you become very complacent. And once you become very complacent, your function can be quickly looked at as an obsolete. So as something extra. Number two, not only being humble learning but really providing that value, as I said. So even if you meet with your business partners and you're trying to educate them and trying to share, it's more about exactly not being direct teacher, but being more of a sharing source where you feed that information and show value for examples instead of just telling them, this is how you do it. So be humbled about it, but also listen and learn. So you have two ears, one mouth. So that means you listen more than you talk. Although I talk more right now, all right, so because you're interviewing me, but that's the second factor. And number three, really surround yourself with smart people, people who are smarter than you, people who are much more capable, people who you can learn from. While you can be a leader but you can rely on those and play by those skill sets and their strengths and passions on your team who can actually support you with different phases of your research or relationship with your business partners because somebody is very strong about third party data. Somebody can be very strong about the methodology max deep for conjoint. Uh, conjoint, excuse me. Or somebody is very good about the quant versus qual, right? Writing a discussion guides for ideas of focus groups. So those aspects are very important, but I think those three factors helps you to not only build successful and fruitful relationship within your large organization or small organization, but it helps you to build a relationship with the research community, with your suppliers and vendors, right? So to build that ecosystem and integrated system to really deliver value for your organization.

Thor:

I think Michael’s answer here provides a lot of nuance, and it was really interesting to see how his answer overlapped with my conversation with Deepa. Both of them underscore the importance of curiosity but also humility — that even when you’re communicating the value you bring to the table, you need to stay curious about what you don’t know. Because without curiosity, as Michael pointed out, you become complacent. And complacency can easily lead to the insights function being seen as a cost center.The notion of cost efficiency was something that I also discussed with Stephanie Hutchison, Principal Divisional Strategy Consultant at Health Care Service Corporation. Except in this conversation, we spoke about it from the perspective of how to stretch your research dollar: 

I think that when you work in market research, whether it's client side or your vendor side or even in academia, you tend to kind of see the qualitative and quantitative research as the more scientific hard science pieces of the information and really seem to be the sexier part of research. You get to do focus groups, you get to talk to business leaders within the organization doing in-depth interviews and or outside your organization talking to different experts. But I think that, you know, the big spend dollars that go along with those, working with vendors and things like that, really make that kind of a more attractive kind of fun piece of the work. Whereas sometimes secondary research, looking at what research somebody else has done is maybe not as fun but it is a really great way to stretch that research dollar. You can get a lot more for your money when you're looking at syndicated research. As we move into areas where companies have more and more big data, we have all of the client companies have rich data, stores that they can use rich data that they can connect to and actually incorporate that big data into what they're looking at for their organization and leverage that versus going to another resource or doing new research. One of the most powerful things in research that you can get is what a consumer's actually done, like looking at the actual consumer behavior rather than asking someone what they might do in a hypothetical situation. So I think it's definitely important to take advantage of those situations when you have that available. Leverage that data if you have it available within your organization. Don't neglect that. Look at the syndicated research that's available out there. There's a lot of people doing a lot of good things. It will give you that base so that when you build the secondary, I'm sorry, when you build your primary research projects, your qualitative or your quantitative research projects, you're starting with that base of knowledge that you already know. And then those are building blocks. And you can use those and take the research even further and really find out what you need to know.

Thor:

Stephanie made some excellent points there, and I think we see the humility aspect shining through as well from a different angle – appreciating the work that others have done and leveraging that to deliver value, while minimizing excess spend. She pointed out a major strength of syndicated research as well – its ability to show you what consumers have actually done to help build a stronger base for your primary research projects. Stephanie and I also spent time discussing another area of passion and expertise of hers – future trends work. I loved her answer when I asked her about common misconceptions surrounding future trends work. This was what she said:

I do think that it is something that really hangs a lot of people up, that they think that they have to know everything about the future. They have to have a crystal ball. They have to know what is going to happen in the future before they put something to paper, before they present something. I think it's important to not get hung up on that or you'll never get something out for someone to look at and react to. I think it's important to understand that it's looking at patterns. It's looking at different things that are happening in the market, different market actors and what they're doing. You know, industry as a whole, what things are happening in other industries, what things are maybe happening globally, that all set the context for that and help tie to the intersection of how the consumer is going to interact with your market and interact with your company.

Thor:

I really appreciated what she highlighted there about not having to know everything about the future. That rather than wait, you should go ahead and put something on paper and get that conversation started. She also highlighted how important it is to broaden your scope of vision – look at the market, at the industry, and maybe even the globe to find the patterns that might help you predict what consumers are going to do next. And in my conversation with Nick Rich, a Global Consumer Insights and Analytics leader with over 25 years of experience from companies like InterContinental Hotels Group and Carlsberg, the importance of context was also something we discussed. Except this time, we spoke about why it’s essential to have a full understanding of the business context– to see yourself as a business intelligence expert. Nick put it this way:

It goes back to really understanding that we are business intelligence experts. As insight leaders, it's not just about the next research study, you've got to understand your business top to bottom, you know, and I always ask that my teams really understand how our business makes money in all its different myriad ways. And you align your business context, your insight context to delivering on that. So insights priorities have to be the same as the business, we cannot have different priorities from the overarching goals and ambitions of the business as a whole. So I'm always you know, first to say, as an insight leader, make sure you fully understand how the business makes money, really understand the objectives for growth going forward, and make sure you're prioritize your in site resources and activities against that. And everywhere I've been, the first thing I've done is make sure our performance analytics is the first thing we do. So whether that was a Carlsberg. And IHG was really uncertain. Okay, what tools do we need to protect our existing revenues, and then introduce the elements about how we're going to discover new growth pools. So we're really getting building platforms that absolutely put finance front and center, which was quite an alien concept for some market researchers. But it was certainly beneficial. 

Thor:

One thing that I really loved about that answer is the emphasis on shared priorities – it made me think about the empathy, curiosity, and collaboration that we covered in the highlights from previous episodes. It also made me return to the variety of skills that insights leaders need to have in their toolbox. We spoke about that earlier, and I think it seems to only be expanding. This is something that Nick alluded to in our conversation as well – he’s a strong believer in the importance of talent development. And something that I thought was really interesting was how he spoke about the relationship between technological advancements and upskilling: 

The world around us is obviously changing. But I think it's us as individuals, just being very cognizant and aware, aware of what is needed from us. You know, I'm glad we get to talk about talent, as much as all the disruption that's happening to our businesses and our industry, because it's ultimately the human element. So you know, for all the technologically advanced advancements and all the belief that data is the kind of new oil and data will provide all the answers. Analytics will help us harness that, tame it, manage it, get value from it. But currently, you're still going to need the human impact to understand context, inject common sense, apply it and make change happen. And so from an insights, perspective, and insights professional, think we really need to be aware, and very self aware of the skill sets we have. And so I talked about this business intelligence expert, as opposed to market research manager, just be very conscious around what that actually means. And what are the skills that we need to improve upon to make that happen? Because I think you you need to be a much broader and much broader understanding of your business environment, your peers, your colleagues, your ways of working than just, you know, producing and managing the next market research study presenting it and going on to the next thing, I think we just have to be much more horizontal than we've perhaps been before. I've always talked about insight teams, being horizontal functions, not vertical ones. Insights aren't just for marketing. They're for the whole business. 

Thor:

That last bit there is one that I keep coming back to – “Insights aren’t just for marketing. They’re for the whole business.” I think that comment points to the tremendous opportunities and challenges facing insights teams right now. There is the opportunity to impact the whole business, but that can also be quite challenging when juggling all of the other priorities that insights professionals are expected to be on top of my conversation with Bonnie Chiurazzi, Director of Market Insights at Glassdoor, was a really great way to build on those ideas because we spoke about the pressure of “the perfect insights fairy tale”. And as Bonnie pointed out, perfection isn’t necessary to create real impact:

Lately, I've listened to a plethora of incredible insights, presentations, from conferences, and webinars and podcasts. And it's always as well resource insights team. And they share how they leveraged a new technology in just the right research methodology that allow them to deliver just the right insights to their stakeholders at just the right moment to make a huge impact to their consumers. And the grand result was this better product or better experience or better sales are all the above. And it's like a perfect insights fairy tale. And I truly I love that journey for them. And I love to hear those stories. But that's not how I'm living my life, consumer insights at all. And if there are any people like me out there, I just want them to know that they're not alone, that they should feel ashamed that there's other kinds of insights work that's happening in the world. So I wanted to tell you about some of the work I do and the impact that I make. And it's not this perfect fairy tale. But, you know, the real world contributions I'm able to make do have some real world implications. And they do help my stakeholders, they do help the business, just not in that perfect way that we all aspire to sometimes. 

Thor:

I absolutely loved listening to Bonnie talk about this because I think it was such an important reminder. And so naturally, I asked her to share some of the strategies she uses to create impact under less than perfect circumstances:

The number one is definitely building relationships, it was immediately obvious to me that I need to seek out the people in the organization who are believers and insights, and actively sought to amplify the voice of our consumers and our customers, and all the work they're doing. And luckily for me, I found them in every business unit, and I do everything I can to answer their burning research questions so that they can help me promote the value of insights throughout Glassdoor. So that's sort of the long game strategy. And then the second strategy was a really hard lesson for me to learn, but it changed my life at work. So I'm a design thinking junkie, one of the main premises of design thinking is that you test your product with an audience you believe is going to be an early adopter, like your super fans. So I apply that to my work. So my strategy is to build for my fans. And I used to always want to win over the research curmudgeons the people who kind of ask a dog whistle question, in a research kickoff meeting to just kind of signal fail and really believe in this and they're not sold, that these results are going to help them and so I would bend over backwards to, to make the research work for them as much as possible, even sometimes at the expense of the stakeholders who I knew were most likely to apply the research. So now when someone appears disinterested or makes dismissive comments in the kickoff meeting, I label them as a late adopter, and I don't build for them anymore. I will answer their questions, I will hear their insights, I'll take their feedback. And if I can't, I'll implement it. But I won't put them above the people that I know are my superfans. And I know when to amplify the voice of our customers.

Thor:

“Build for your superfans!” I love that – and I think it’s a great example of how to generate real impact without getting caught up in trying to achieve perfection. And creating impact is really at the core of insights work – it’s the ultimate goal. But as I’m sure you know, it’s also a multifaceted endeavor. This was something that Jascina Simeon, a Global Head of Insights & Customer Experience, who’s been in the industry for over 15 years, most recently at  888||William Hill group, also shared her views on:

I think it's first of all is about the curiosity. We have the mandate and the license to go and, you know, discover and trial and test and get learnings across, you know, like talk to other leaders or other people, right, to understand. So it's like, kind of like, you know, you have that license to bring back those insights to the business. I think for me also the insight is not just about research or market research, the insight is across. It's within your financial results, it's within your data analytics and your consumer data and the way that people react to product is also within the expertise across the business. And it's kind of like being more open to what that means and this holistic approach and view more than thinking the expertise remain within a traditional insight team. The other thing is around AI, where I feel like, you know, anything around machine learning, AI is kind of like taking it as a positive, taking it as a added value to the insights, like, you know, how can we use it so we can code verbatims quicker, get sentiments faster, you know, being able to dig into loads and loads of, you know, feedbacks from customers and get the themes through quicker appreciating that your confidence in the data, while you would tend to go for 95-100 percent, well, would a 90 percent or 85 percent be good enough with the decision making and bearing this in mind when you communicate this data back or when you take this in consideration?

Thor:

I think Jascina’s answer there really nicely weaves together a lot of the themes that have come up over this past quarter. That it’s essential to be curious and open, not just with your stakeholders and consumers, but with technology – and even more broadly, to uncertainty. And when she summarized what she wanted us to take away from her episode, she added in another layer that has really stuck with me:

It's about being able to discover and being open to what the outcome looks like is putting your ego aside and literally listening. I think this is very important, the listening part and the ability to translate the information in a certain way that would be digestible, but also being able to bond back on some ideas or being able to go back and validate on health. And be brave, I would say, you know, like right now, it's the time to be brave and bold and just go for it and bring this insight, which is so much, you know, research and asked now and people are relying on it because they don't know anymore. I decided this last year, can't do it now, I need insight, what's next? It's literally, it's the time to bring insight to life and make it really actionable.

Thor:  

“Be brave.” We speak about the importance of curiosity frequently on this podcast, and we’ve often spoken about taking risks. But we don’t speak very often about being brave. And I think that’s something we should speak more about. Especially in times like these when there is so much change and uncertainty around us. Because being an insights professional isn’t easy – it’s a career that requires (among many other things) constant adaptability, a broad skillset, and the courage to make decisions under imperfect circumstances. And so I wanted to end this episode by tweaking a question that I ask many of the guests on this podcast – what’s one takeaway that I have gotten from this quarter? It’s hard to limit it to just one – but if I had to summarize, I would say that it’s becoming more and more apparent to me what a balancing act a career in insights is. It’s about staying humble and curious, while at the same time not mistaking that for underselling the value that you and your team bring to the table. It’s about embracing a variety of research methods, data sources, and technologies to help you build the best picture possible. But at the same time, remembering that best doesn’t equal perfect. And it’s about looking to cultivate meaningful relationships with all of your stakeholders, but not at the expense of your super fans who can help you maximize the impact of the work that you do. If there’s anything hosting this podcast has taught me so far, it’s that insights work is challenging – but there’s no one more qualified to face these challenges than insights professionals. And so I hope that you’ve enjoyed going back through these episodes with me, and I hope that it’s been a reminder of how brilliant the insights community is. We’ll be back in August with a fresh season for you – and I hope you find some time this summer to recharge, whenever you are. And as always, thank you so much for joining me today.