2023 Year in Review, Part 1

Thor:
I also loved that Greg emphasized that both big “I” Insights and little “i” insights can have value for the business, but that you really need to understand what’s important to the teams that you’re serving. And in my conversation with David Allison, the Founder of Valuegraphics Research Company, we really dug into what goes into building that kind of understanding. From his perspective, going beyond a surface-level understanding requires learning what people value. He underscored that demographics only give us so much information about people—they tell us what people are, but not who they are. He explained it this way:

I think they still have a role to play, but it’s a limited role. I think of them as like, “Poor old demographics, we've been asking a whole lot of them for a whole long time.” You know, we've been saying that if we know the age, income, gender, marital status, and sexual preference of a group of people, we somehow know who they are. And we don’t.

We just know what they are. So let’s keep using them that way. I think about demographics as like anybody who’s old enough to remember going to the library and actually looking in the card catalog, those drawers that came out. And you’d flip through the card catalog, and you’d find a card, and it would give you the directions for what shelf in the library the book is that you’re looking for.

So demographics are like that—they’re like the Dewey Decimal System of the insights world. They say, “This is the bookshelf of people here, this is the shelf of people.” Cool. But assuming that all the books on that shelf are identical to each other, that’s a big flaw. And that’s what we’ve been doing wrong.

We’ve been saying, “Oh great, we know what shelf it’s on. So those books, they’re all exactly the same. They’ll respond to things in the same way.”

Thor:
I really loved his comparison to the Dewey Decimal system here, and I think it underscores the importance of continuously re-evaluating the tools that we use and ensuring that we move with the times. Which I think is a major theme of this year. The rise of generative AI has really shifted the insights tech landscape, and it’s meant that we’ve all had to re-examine the tools that we use. We really started to explore the implications of new tools and technologies for insights in our episode with Joanna Dumont, VP of Strategy, Insights, and Innovation at Danone. She shared how the tools available to insights professionals now are vastly superior to the ones available when she started—but she underscored that tools are just that—tools:

I see tools for us as insight professionals, as tools. And so I actually say to my team, our goal is to make the tools invisible. And it's not that tools aren't important, because they are really important, but they’re our tools. If I hire a builder to build a house, I don't need to know which hammer he used and which saw he used. What I need to know is that he delivered a house that's stable, sturdy, and will stand the test of time. And it's the same for us. The tools that we have at our disposal now are vastly superior to anything that I could have ever imagined when I started in this industry. And that's wonderful for me because that helps make my life and my team's life that much better.

But it's not about the tools for the audience that I'm communicating with, for my marketing teams, and for the business. The business shouldn't care about the tools. And sometimes that's been a danger in our industry—that we get fixated on tools when what we really ought to be fixated on is the questions that we ask and leave it to us to answer those questions. So, when we think about this at Danone, we think a lot about the questions.

We actually spend time training our teams on finding power questions and really emphasizing the notion that spending time upfront to define the right question is as valuable as any time you're going to spend at the end to try and answer that question with the right tool. So, we sort of flip it on its end—the tools are for us, the questions are for the business, and in the end, we are the interface between the tools and those questions. But in answer to your question about the tools that are most relevant to us, I personally have found that a tool is only as good as the question that it's able to answer for us.

Thor:
“A tool is only as good as the question that it’s able to answer for us.” I love that. And I think that she raised some excellent points about how important it is to really think about how we work with tools and technology, whether that’s generative AI or otherwise. This is something I explored further with Bhaskar Roy, Client Partner for APAC at Fractal, one of the most prominent providers of artificial intelligence to Fortune 500 companies. He shared some excellent advice about how using technology the right way can help you advance in your career:

As I think about it, the best advice was from my first or second manager in the organization, and it links back to the whole learning aspect that I mentioned earlier as well. He basically said, “For you to continue growing and learning in your career, it's important that you make yourself redundant to your current role.”

And as I broke that down in my mind, that essentially meant a couple of things. One, first and foremost, you should not need to be actively doing your current job. That's when you'll have time to learn. Now, to be able to get to that stage, you need to automate what you can in your current job and get it out of the way.

And from that comes the opportunity to realize where there are synergies across different kinds of work that you might be doing, and then explore that to create a sort of product or accelerator that can do more than just that small piece of work you were doing. I think that, to me, was the single biggest piece of advice that helped me as I was starting off my career. And it has, in different shapes and forms, remained true as I've gone along.

Thor:
I thought Bhaskar’s perspective here offered razor-sharp insight into how insight professionals, as individuals, should be using the power of automation to make themselves redundant to their current roles. And with my next guest, Hemant Mehta, we spoke about the role of insights professionals from another perspective, instead zooming out a bit to look at the role the industry plays between businesses and consumers.

I firmly believe—and I say this not just because I've made a living for 30 years from it—but I do believe the role of the industry is really the bridge between the brand or the business and the consumer. We very often tend to believe what we believe. Sitting there saying, “I've got a product, it's solving a problem, it's going to add value to a consumer's life.” We often miss out on whether a consumer actually has a need for it. Does she really see that it's going to help alleviate her life? I might come up with the most interesting bit, which I believe is interesting from my perspective, but does it engage or excite the consumer?

I think that's really the key question, and I think that’s where we come in. The second part is that a lot of times you need an external mirror—somebody to put a mirror in front of you and say, “Hey, this is the reality of your business or your brand. This is what your end users are talking about,” and that's where we come in. We play an extremely critical role in two ways: one is for the consumers, to bring to them better products, better lifestyles, better services—whichever way we define it.

And for the business, it’s really to make or provide things that their end consumers want and that can make an impact on their lives. So I think our role is very, very critical, even today, in an age where we are swimming in data. I personally believe that the algorithms and machines are going to throw up insights, but nobody's validating them. You can’t just act upon it without saying, “Hey, does this really help you?” Or how do you verbalize that insight in consumer language? And that’s where the industry is always going to be relevant.

Thor:
I think that the bridging function Hemant describes really feels more critical now than ever, especially that ability to translate insight into consumer language. In our next episode with Kerry-Ellen Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights - Predictive Intelligence & Platform Innovation at PepsiCo Foods North America, we also spoke about translation in a way—except this time, we discussed translating insight into foresight.

If you're reading something, and it’s like “X amount of people prefer blah blah blah,” that's not that interesting. It’s a tidbit. It’s a fact. But if something else kind of grabs your attention, like “X percent of people are doing this” and you want to know why—so that insight prompts “the why” for you—that, to me, is like a really strong insight.

And that’s kind of the challenge of insights and market research in general: sifting through all the different data points and trying to figure out what is actually going to drive a story or drive a narrative or answer a question that someone has, versus stating something obvious or stating something we already know.

The difference with foresights is you’ve got to take that extra step further and try to predict where these things are actually going to go. So, if we know right now Gen Z is really into social media, and they’re into changing the world and all these things we kind of “know” about Gen Z, what about ten years from now, when Gen Z is fully ingrained into society, fully ingrained in their careers or what wound up being their careers? They’re pretty much out of school. Maybe they're starting second careers, et cetera. They’re starting families.

How is that lifestyle shift going to change their values, if at all? And that's what I’ve been kind of tasked with on a foresights agenda that Frito-Lay is trying to understand—in ten years, where do we need to be in order to still meet the needs of our consumers? And that’s what foresight is. It’s taking those insights that we know today and trying to extrapolate it out a little bit, to try and predict, like, “We know this happened, so do we think this thing will happen again?”

Thor:
I think the way that Kerry-Ellen describes how she approaches predicting the future needs of consumers is truly fascinating. And we continued talking about predicting the future in our next episode with Andi Govindia, CEO and Co-founder of Riviter. Except this time, we looked through a slightly different lens. Her company uses predictive social intelligence to help build iconic brands, and as someone who has worked with AI for several years now, she offered a really wise perspective on how brands and technology suppliers alike should be approaching this new world we all find ourselves in.

We've been doing this for eight years, and for the first seven of it, I kind of felt like I was a little bit crazy—like a mad scientist talking about these terms. And now suddenly, even in the last six months, it's household terminology. Everybody knows what we're talking about when we say things like generative AI.

So, I think it's going to become a lot like the internet, right? We're going to have to weave it into our day-to-day. We're going to have to build a lot of discernment around how we use it, how we build capabilities around it, and how to differentiate between providers of it. And so there are two bits of advice that I would share when thinking about AI.

One is to think of it almost like a brain—everything that goes into it is going to be important, and everything that comes out of it needs to be discerned. So the main question to ask when thinking about any AI is: How has this AI been trained? Has it been trained with legal documents and scholarly papers? Has it been trained with people's blogs from the internet? What information has been given to it?

That's something that's really important to us at Riviter as well. We take input from subject matter experts within every product domain, understanding what the machine needs to recognize and building that in. Then, on the other side, it’s about checking—how do I make sure that what this AI is telling me is true? How do I know it’s been AI-produced, and how can I provide feedback and input back? And again, that's something we've implemented to be able to take that feedback in.

But I also think it's on the responsibility of technology providers to be open and to say, “This is something we've done with AI. This is not human-generated. Be discerning, and be just as careful, if not more, as you would be with something human-produced.” But with all that said, it’s something to be really embraced. I think it’s going to accelerate the pace of our innovation. I like to say it's our third team member or third intern. It's really useful and really protective, and let’s just honor and recognize that the things that go into it are what come out of it.

Thor:
I think Andi’s take on how to think about AI is really insightful—suggesting that we should think about it similarly to the internet, and that it’s going to become a part of our day-to-day. And that brings me to the last episode we’ll cover in this first part of our podcast year in review—my conversation with Tzachi Ben-Sasson, Head of Global Voice of the Customer at Amdocs. This last clip that I’m going to share today, I think, really showcases the enduring importance of insights work in helping the business understand where it’s going in the long run.

If you don’t have a customer listening program of any kind—and it doesn’t really matter how large of a company you are or what you sell—if you’re a monopoly, you don’t need it. If you’re not, and you don’t have a customer listening program, then basically you’re flying blind. If you say, “Look, you know what, yeah, we have our financial projections and we do pipeline analysis,” all that’s great. But that’s basically living from quarter to quarter. The only thing that’s going to tell you where your business is going for the long run—and again, B2B, B2C, what have you—is whether you’re listening to your customers and really understanding what you’re getting from them.

Thor:
I think Tzachi’s point here really underscores the universal value of customer and consumer insights, no matter what type of business you’re in. B2C, B2B, or otherwise—really listening to your customers is the only way forward. And that’s where we’ll pause for this first part of the Year in Review. There are still plenty of incredible conversations to cover, and we’ll be diving into those in our next episode—so stay tuned for Part 2. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your favorite parts of the episodes we’ve reviewed today. The link to my LinkedIn profile is in the show notes, so please feel free to connect with me there and share your favorite moments from this year. And as always, thank you so much for joining me today.