2023 Year in Review, Part 2

In Part 2 of our 2023 Year in Review, host Thor Olof Philogène delves into more captivating moments and insights from this year's guests.

In Part 2 of our 2023 Year in Review, host Thor Olof Philogène delves into more captivating moments and insights from this year's guests.

Join us for our last 2023 episode as we wrap up an incredible year on The Consumer Insights Podcast.

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 part two of our 2023 Year in Review.

I hope you’ve had some time to recharge these last couple of weeks and that you’re feeling as excited for the new year as I am.

In our last episode, we revisited several of the fantastic conversations we've had this year, and in today’s episode, we’ll continue doing just that.

So let’s dive right in.

We ended the last episode with our conversation with Tzachi Ben-Sasson from Amdocs, where he emphasized the importance of having a customer listening program, regardless of whether your business is B2B or B2C.

In that episode, we also spoke about the differences between B2B and B2C insights, highlighting the variety of decision-makers involved in a purchase decision and how the B2B ecosystem tends to be more complex.

My next conversation with Emilia Simonin, former Head of Global Market Intelligence at Moët Hennessy and now Global Market & Business Intelligence Director for the Consumer Product Division at L’Oréal, explored some of the complexity in the B2C environment. She emphasized the value of a “3-way win” philosophy:

I'll start by defining what I mean, I guess by a three-way win. And by no means was it my own original idea. It was something that I picked up in one of my organizations that I've worked in, and it really resonated with me. And it's something I've taken throughout. The three-way win is very much about the consumer, the brand, and usually, you know, I've worked on client side. I'm usually on the brand custodian side or the customers. So all of us have customers who sell to our consumers, and it really needs to be a win for everybody for something to work or a strategy or an execution plan to get through. And by having this mantra in an organization, I find that only the right things get through.

Thor:
I love her thinking here, and I think it can be a powerful tool to help consumer insights teams prioritize for impact.

The importance of driving impact is something that comes up in nearly all of my conversations, and it’s something that I love because each insights leader I speak with has their own unique perspectives.

In our first-ever live episode of the podcast at IIeX North America this year, I sat down with Miranda Patton, Director of Insights and Analytics at AT&T. And one of the perspectives on this that she shared was about the importance of having the right tools:

Market researchers having the right tools, I think, can be game-changing. This AI that's coming out – I'm still learning a lot about it. We're using it in some instances, but I think making sure to be open to that and staying up to date, making sure you know how to use it so that you're not left behind, and you're able to leverage the efficiencies that they bring to your job. And then 2, I would add onto that to say research to me, it's a creative art. And the more tools you can use, the more processes you can put in, just to get some of the non-creative work out of the way, so you can spend more time on the brain power and the really good gold that comes out of sitting down and developing insights. I think that's very critical for researchers to have the right tools.

Thor:
The way that Miranda links efficiency and creativity was really inspiring to me. I think it highlights how multi-dimensional insights work is—that it’s a career path that requires a wide variety of skills, both left- and right-brain thinking. And one of those skills I learned in my conversation with Simone Ballarini, Head of Consumer Insight & Business Development at Lavazza, is the art of the coffee break:

I often push my team and myself to invest time with colleagues using coffee breaks as an opportunity to build what I call business empathy. In this moment, you can easily learn new things, sharing valuable information with colleagues and train yourself in doing elevator speeches in a comfort zone. Because finally, being influential is the ultimate goal for a consumer insight professional. And this requires strong communication skills and personal credibility.

You know, companies are complex entities, and that alone, presenting a PowerPoint presentation cannot fully drive decision-making. It's crucial to create the proper context and background that make the company hear and digest the consumer insights that are landing through tons of data.

Thor:
Navigating the complexity of organizations to ensure that insights drive decision-making is certainly no easy task. But it’s incredibly worthwhile. Because as my next guest, Märta Eriksson, Senior Manager of Consumer Insights and Analytics at Marshall Group, explained, insights-driven decision-making not only helps organizations move toward their North Star—it can help unite organizations in the process:

I believe to best utilize the competence of a CI function, it needs to be closely related to the strategy of a company. And the strategy of a company typically spans across various departments, so it becomes important for the team to work cross-functionally and to connect the insights to the overall strategy of the company. And with a more holistic approach to the consumer insight function, I believe that it can become so much more than just a data provider. If we connect consumer insights to strategy, we can become a strategic sounding board that can actually unite the organization and help it towards its strategic objectives. So if we have the strategy, the North Star, then insights are what can be as the vehicle to get the organization to get to that North Star.

Thor:
I think that’s so true. And in my conversation with Humayun Rashid, Consumer Insights Director at Microsoft, we built on this, discussing the variety of insights that can drive growth:

I think we are surrounded by insight, whether that's kind of predictions or whether that's something you find out about your wife or your children. You know, I think the most important thing around insights in a commercial context at work is: did the insight or whatever you found out, let's call it that information, help grow your business? And growth can be anything. You know, it could be bringing a new product to market. It could be adding more users, selling more subscriptions, as in our case. And so, it also can be making improvements, making changes, or letting the company know that they're doing a good job. So I think defining an insight is what you do with the information and is it commercially successful? Rather than "Great! We know what happened. Thank you for this information. This is great." And you ponder about it on your drive home, and never give it another thought again. So for us, it's about business change, business improvement, and getting to that, you know, real kind of tangible benefit to the company.

Thor:
“We are surrounded by insight.” I love that. The variety of valuable insights is something that I also discussed with Steve Mushkin, Founder of Latitude, a leading insights provider for digital content and technology. He explained that insights can drive decision-making on a variety of levels, but one of the most powerful is when it helps to create vision:

You have the opportunity to create vision for a business. And that vision is more powerful than a tactical decision. And I'll get to an example or two in a moment, but there's vision that's at a higher level sometimes than individual decisions, and obviously the decisions flow from that kind of vision. And it can lead to innovation that can be really important for any company that's working in the arena that we're in, because it's changing all the time. And of course, at this point, any company needs to be innovating pretty consistently.

Thor:
I love the picture he paints here—and I think the aspect of utility, where you’re guiding multiple decisions at once, is incredibly valuable. Because as my next guest, Jennie Lewis, Senior Manager of Customer Insights at Airship, points out, it’s crucial for insights work to be practical as well. She explained this while discussing how to effectively personalize user experiences:

There has been a lot of conversation around personalization as far as an individualization perspective, an actual one-to-one. I love the concept of it. I think that, yes, there are times where we can create these truly one-to-one experiences. But I also spent a lot of my career in ops and working with brands whose marketing ops teams were really pretty jammed up from a time management perspective. And I know that creating that type of experience and the curation that it takes to do something that individual is really not something that is logistically possible on an every message perspective.

So my position on it is, yes, there are moments where 100% we want to create that individual experience. Yes, for some of the messaging, we want to do that. But it's not all the time. It's not every place. And so if you look at the different building blocks, you can kind of, by the use case, help weave together an experience. And by use case, I mean what your actual message is and also where the customer is in their lifecycle with you. So maybe somebody is very early on with the brand and you don't have a lot of information, you can use some of the learned information to drive the next best action.

Thor:
I think it was incredibly valuable to learn from Jennie’s personalization expertise—and I think it connects really well with what I spoke about with Rachel Pruitt, Director of Enterprise Insights at Target. She offered a very important reminder about knowing the bandwidth of your internal audience and tailoring how you communicate insights accordingly:

If you think about the fact that you have limited attention from your audience, while everything that we've learned might be important, not all of it is important to everyone and not all of it is important all at once. And so, you know, what I recommend that we do instead is, you know, once we've got this robust body of learning, to take a step back and take a step away from all of the content and just think about, okay, who is my audience that I'm sharing this with? What is my goal with that audience? Is it to get them to start thinking differently? Is it to get them to make an action based on that?

And then thinking about those two things, take a step back, just take a piece of paper and write down what are the three things that they need to know based on what I'm trying, the ultimate goal that I want to come out of this. And I think in doing that, you're really able to simplify and tell them only what they need to know when they need to know it. The rest of the information can come later, but you've got to grab their attention from the get-go, and if you do that by trying to share everything, they remember nothing.

Thor: 

“If you do that by trying to share everything, they remember nothing.” That’s pretty powerful. I want to rewind for a moment to something that Rachel mentioned earlier in that clip – “a robust body of learning.” Because I think our next guest Dr. Daron Sharps, Brand Researcher at Pinterest, offered a unique perspective on what that can look like. She drew from her academic experience in psychology to illustrate the benefits of rigorous, enduring insights and how she’s gone about sourcing them:

I think we all know consumer attitudes are constantly shifting because we live in that volatile world I discussed. ButI think coming from the academic background, I believe that human psychology is actually pretty stable. So in the insights profession as a whole, I love to see less sort of high churn, like year over year data, and more grounded explorations of the motivations behind human decision making. One way that we've done this at Pinterest is an academic partnership that conducted an experiment actually. So we wanted to look at the relationship between inspiration and wellbeing. And we partnered with UC Berkeley's Greater Goods Science Center to do so.

We found that just 10 minutes a day on Pinterest helps to buffer against stress, social disconnectedness, and burnout among Gen Z college students. The reason that that's important is in designing an experiment, in which we had a control group for comparison. We were able to isolate that independent variable we were most interested in engaging in inspiration seeking behavior and look at the impact on dependent variables like stress, social disconnectedness, burnout, social anxiety.

This experimental rigor makes me believe that this is an enduring human truth. And one that we can cite for many years to come, not one that's likely to change year over year. So I definitely recognize that this is a privileged position. And I'm very lucky to be able to do research like this. But I'd love to see more insights professionals take, maybe one big swing every year, designing something super rigorous that might stand the test of time.

Thor:

In our next episode with Uzma Rauf, Founder and CEO at Khatana-lytics , we also spoke about the importance of endurance and standing the test of time. Except in this conversation, we looked at it through the lens of engineering brand loyalty, which is one of Uzma’s areas of expertise: 

It's not just about the customer service team. And that's another thing that I want to emphasize is we sometimes think that, you know, building brand loyalty is marketing's job. No, it's everybody's job. Everybody's job, right? The salesperson, the person who's doing the merchant merchandising, the E-commerce, the person who's designing the e-commerce site, of course, customer service, and so many more, everyone is ultimately responsible. Cause I, as a customer, if I come and buy your brand, I don't care who you are. I may go on your website, I may go to your store, I may go pick up the phone and have someone help me. For me, it's the same company, right? And so making sure that it is consistent and well done across is really, really key. So through research, we're really trying to elevate visibility to that, what matters, and then what to do about it, so that we can help build that loyalty longer term.

Thor: 

Something that I really appreciate about what Uzma said there is that building brand loyalty requires a breadth of impact – that stakeholders across the business are responsible for building this. And in my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Stringfield, VP of Global Business Research and Marketing at Activision Blizzard, we took a different perspective, discussing how to think about the depth of impact:

What I think attention measurement represents and whether or not it is attention measurement or otherwise, it's a move towards a world where we're not just looking at the breadth of media, but potentially the depth to the things that actually have meaning that I've been both personally interested in, I think we've made the most advancements in the measurement world is not just, again, did you or someone else see a message, but did it have some impact? Did it draw you to action? Did it have some cognitive impact? Because ultimately, I would love to think that, if an advertiser or brand or what have you is going through the trouble of putting together an ad campaign, they want to effect change, right? They want to maybe convince you to buy a product or think a little bit better of their company or what have you. So I think attention is a step in that direction because we're not just looking at how many people saw it, but again, did they really internalize it? 

Thor:  

A lot of food for thought there, and I think a perspective we can all learn from. And with that we’ve come to the end of our 2023 Year in Review. What a year it has been, right? 22 incredible conversations with some of the brightest minds in the insights space from across the globe. I’ve had a lot of fun this year, and I’m truly grateful to you, our listeners, for joining us on this journey. We’ll be back in January with a fresh season of the podcast, and I can’t wait to kick off another amazing year with all of you. Until then, I wish you a happy, healthy, new year. And as always, thank you so much for joining me today.