An Optimistic Outlook for Insights

In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Stephanie Hutchison, Principal Divisional Strategy Consultant at Health Care Service Corporation

Uncertainty or opportunity? It’s only a matter of perspective.

Drawing upon a wealth of experience in leveraging secondary research foresights, Stephanie Hutchison, Principal Divisional Strategy Consultant at Health Care Service Corporation, joins us to explore the opportunities in the future of the insights industry and share how insights professionals can prepare today to exploit these opportunities and reach their full potential within their businesses.

We also discuss:

• Stephanie’s step-by-step approach for businesses to build a Future Trends Program 
• How AI can help  insights professionals become thought leaders in their organizations
• The importance of continuous education in the insights industry, whether formal or informal, to upskill and scale. 

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 the Consumer Insights Podcast. Today, I'm excited to have a brilliant insights leader joining me for what I know will be a marvelous conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Stephanie Hutchison, Principal Divisional Strategy Consultant at Health Care Service Corporation. With over 14 years of client-side market research experience, Stephanie currently specializes in managing secondary and syndicated research. In addition to her current role, she's on the board of directors for Market Research Institute International, a nonprofit institute that works to advance continuing educational programs for market researchers across the globe. She has an MBA from the University of Phoenix. Thank you so much for joining me, Stephanie.

Stephanie Hutchison:

Yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Introducing Stephanie

Thor:

We are so eager to get to know you, Stephanie. And in order to kick things off, could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself? Tell us about your role. Tell us about how you got to where you are today. How did it all begin?

Stephanie Hutchison:

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that question. I have been, as you mentioned, managing market research or various aspects of market research for Health Care Service Corp for the past 14 years. And I have actually gotten an opportunity to manage a number of quantitative, qualitative projects, large market landscape projects, market share, market sizing, and future trends programs. And I actually, when I started my undergraduate degree in psychology, that's what really spurred my interest in market research. And I really love the idea of research and then really putting that together with the consumer. I really enjoy understanding the perspective of the consumer psychology, marketing being the way that we understand why consumers do the things that they do and how they make their decisions. And that was just really interesting to me. I actually, when I came into Health Care Service Corp, didn't start in the market research area. I had an opportunity to get in and learn a lot of different areas of the company.

Before I got the opportunity to move into research, I was able to work closely with some of the local marketing areas as well. And I think that's really benefited me in my career in market research.But after I'd been with the company about five years, I did get an opportunity to move into the market research area, managing competitive and market intelligence, and the rest is history.

Insight vs foresight

Thor:

And as you know, we have our questions here on the podcast and, but I'm going to do it with a twist this time. So I wanted to ask you, how would you define a foresight?

Stephanie Hutchison:

That's a great question. I think that we talk a lot about what's insights and I've heard you ask that question a lot. And I think initially in my career, I did have to learn what that was. I did think these wonderful disparate pieces of information that I learned from a new study or learned from a new piece of even syndicated research was exciting and an insight.

But I really learned that you really have to put that together with other things that provides the context for your company. And I think foresights are the same way.

You really have to connect it to the bigger pieces, connect it to your company. The more you know about your company and your industry, the better abilities you have to see those patterns and connect those and really come up with something that is a foresight that can be used and that is actionable for the business leaders that are looking at the content that you've put together for them.

Thor:

Thank you so much for that, Stephanie. And you mentioned, I mean, you started off with the definition of the insight and you continued on with the definition of a foresight. How do you believe that definition or those definitions have changed over the course of your career?

Stephanie Hutchison:

I fortunately had an opportunity to work with some really great mentors when I first came into my role and people that had been doing research for a long amount of time, people that had the opportunity to tie that in with strategic planning for the company and being able to learn from them that we really have to take it a step further. It's not just the disparate pieces of information, but we can connect the pieces that we're learning from external inputs, expert interviews, our primary research that we've done for another project within the company that's then secondary to that project. How you just tie all of those things together to really look for how you define something as an insight and add that context so it can really be actionable to the business leaders.

Importance of future trends

Thor:

And I know you're really passionate about future trends work and that you presented on this topic earlier this year at Quirk's Dallas. And from your perspective, why is future trends work so valuable?

Stephanie Hutchison:

Thank you. I appreciate that question. I am passionate about looking at future trends and doing trends research. I've done that. That's actually been one of the projects that I've had for nearly the entire 14 years that I've worked in market research with Health Care Service Corp.

And I think the thing that really makes it important to me is that you're able to see the risk and opportunities to your business and present those to the leaders and decision makers within the company and be able to help them make a better decision.

You can never downplay insight. Insight of business leaders that have been in the company for a long time is very important. But when you're looking at how the industry is changing, and healthcare has had rapid expansion and change over the past decade, for sure. I think that you take into account that intuition, what somebody knows about the business, and then you can look at that along with the patterns that you're seeing for what's coming, understanding what kinds of things you need to think about and build for the future. When you combine those, you can really be able to help decision makers make the right decisions and feel like they have data to lean on and not just rely on that intuition, even though that is very valuable.

Thor:

And what do you think is easy to get wrong about future trends work?

Stephanie Hutchison:

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 absolutely, absolutely love that. And what advice would you give to insights professionals looking to create the appetite for a future trends program in their organizations? What's step one? What's step two?

Stephanie Hutchison:

So I think that you have to really understand what the need is within your organization. Get out and talk to business leaders. Find out what they're looking for so that when you build a program, it's going to be something that hits them at the right time that they need it. It's going to be the level of content that they need and also be able to be something that they have time to consume. And so you really have to get out there and talk to the leaders what needs they have, what gaps in information they have that you're able to step in and fill.

And I think at that point, you kind of understand or try to kind of get to know for step two, who those individuals are that are really passionate about this type of work within the organization, that really have some of those things that they're looking at in the future, some of the risk and opportunities that they're balancing and really passionate about themselves. And you can use them to help you self promote within the organization, the need for the program, the reason why the company should fund this or allow people resources to go into it. They can really be your cheerleaders and advocates for the program and really then when it gets rolling, help you socialize it to the individuals in the organization as to why they need this work and why it can be valuable and considered in the lens of what they're looking at when they're making business decisions.

Thor:

And when we were preparing for this episode, you mentioned that you don't think secondary research gets the credit it deserves. Could you tell us more about how you came to this belief?

Stephanie Hutchison:

Yes, 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 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, not be asking what somebody else has already asked. And then it really makes it personal to your company and really allows you to expand into the things you need to know and again, get the value for the research dollar. That's so important as practitioners for us in our fields that we're really showing and fully utilizing all the value of the research dollars so that the corporation understands how much value it can have.

Thor:

I think I'm very happy that you're actually highlighting this. And if we rewind a moment, do you see secondary research playing a role in the future trends work you described earlier?

Stephanie Hutchison:

Yes, definitely. It's a huge part of future trends work in our organization. And I think at a lot of organizations, the secondary research that you look at can really help you understand what the trends are coming in your industry and within other industries that are going to impact your consumers. Our consumers build expectations, for example, around technology. When the Amazons of the world started doing all the amazing things that they do and are able to set those customer expectations so high, I would say unfortunately, but I think it's good for the consumer market overall, but that hits you.

And you have to know how to respond to that and do the best that you can to meet those consumer expectations, understand how those consumer expectations have been reset. And I do think that looking at the secondary research, expert interviews, understanding even from a qualitative perspective and at times even a quantitative perspective when you're looking at a number of people and understanding how many people are seeing this trend, seeing this pattern, what are the experts in the industry saying if there's a little bit of a maybe controversy on whether something's moving fast or slow. You can kind of take that to a quantitative level. But really digging in and getting that rich secondary data can help you set the stage and really understand the context between, what the industry is doing, what the risks are, what the opportunities are going to be that you really need to focus on and possibly invest in for your organization.

AI's impact

Thor:

And switching gears for a second and tying it to another mega trend, you also share that you don't think that AI will be running the market research world anytime soon. Can you tell us more about the impact you do expect?

Stephanie Hutchison:

You can't throw a stone in market research without hitting GenAI, right? I think that it's good though. It's good that we're keeping this topic of conversation at the forefront of our minds because it really is an emerging trend and something that we can't just leave behind. We have to be able to react to everything. And again, it's setting expectations. It's setting in our case, if you're a client-side researcher, is setting your business leaders' expectations.

And so we definitely want to keep an eye on it. I do not think, though, that it will be running market research. And I think the reason why is because you can get a lot of rich data from AI.

You can get them to do maybe the more routine parts of research, and especially from the secondary perspective. And then having that part of the time constraint removed to where you're not focusing so much on gathering all of the information from maybe 20, 30 different sources. Then you have time to take that and apply it to your organization and industry. You can apply it to where you're really taking that and building the context and telling what it means to the organization. That allows you to become a thought leader within the organization and really start to become that advisor to your internal clients within your organization where you are helping them understand this is what it means. And you really have that extra time to think more strategically about it if somebody else is doing the base work.

Thor:

I love that. And that's definitely a future. I think a lot of us are, uh, are optimistic about, and actually speaking of optimism, are there any use cases of GenAI that you are particularly optimistic about?

Stephanie Hutchison:

Yes, and I think part of that is really having that additional time to be the strategic thinker. So I know at times for future trends, we could spend as much as 8 to 16 hours developing a new trend, looking at all of the different research and all of the ways that all the industries are going to be impacted, the technology is going to be impacted, how it impacts consumers. But thing bringing that in specifically to, okay, what does that mean for our industry?

And all of that research and all of that time, when you have that reduced and you're able to get in and have that base nearly immediately and you're consuming the information, then I think there's a really good opportunity to have the time to be strategic. There's a lot of times that we deal with urgency in research rather than what's important. And it really allows us to focus on what's important and really be able to focus the key business leaders in on what's important rather than focusing so much on producing just the background research.

Thor:

Yes. And conversely, do you see any areas where you think AI won't be useful or could even be detrimental?

Stephanie Hutchison:

Yes, definitely. I am concerned as I think a lot of researchers and leaders in research are concerned about, especially things like GenAI hallucinating. I think we've heard those stories about if it doesn't know the information that's going to make it up. I do think that we will solve for that in the future. In the short term, I do think it's a really big concern because if you're constantly needing to validate the information that's been pulled in and make sure that it was real research, real work that you're gathering, that there are really sources to back it up. You could spend almost as much time doing that and validating the information that you get back as if you had done the original research yourself. So I think in the short term, that's something that we're really going to have to be cognizant of and really watch on any feedback that we get from AI or research that we get back from AI. But in the longer term, I do think we'll solve for that.

Thor:

And if we try to stitch together what we've been talking about until now, I know that you see continuing education as being particularly important for people in the research and insight space. Where do you think insights professionals should prioritize upskilling to stay ahead?

Stephanie Hutchison:

That is a really big passion of mine. And of course, that's why I was very excited to be offered the opportunity to work with MRII that focuses on educating market research professionals. And I am a big believer in graduate programs and market research, or even graduate certificates in market research to get that formal education. There's a lot that's built into those programs that really allows you to kind of learn how to think differently, you spend a lot of time with people that you're working with on various projects and are able to kind of get that, you know, understand what they're thinking about.

I had the opportunity in my master's program to work with someone that was a dentist, and he was learning how to run his business and open more rural dental offices. And it was really fascinating to understand his perspective and the different way that he needed to look at the world versus the way that I had looked at the world being in larger corporations.

So I think there's a really, a lot of things you can learn even from your peers when you're going through a program like that and it makes you think differently and makes you incorporate those real world examples into everything that you do.

But I do think that there's also a place for the less formal education as well. So up-skilling using one of the technology-enabled learning platforms that have maybe a particular skill that you're learning to, you're going to pay attention to that you want to upgrade, or doing something new that your team hasn't done. There's a lot of room for on-the-job learning. I think on-the-job learning is really important. And I myself had the opportunity to benefit from that, from some very experienced, my boss who was very experienced at market research and the peers that I had that I was working with managing various aspects of research and really getting the opportunity to get exposure to the different things that I had done.

I myself actually 20 years post MBA went back and did the formal education, a certificate in market research through the principles of market research learning certificate. One thing that did, our entire team did it. And so we got a common set of language that we could talk about to use. So there's value on both sides. I think there's value in taking and learning a particular skill that you need to learn very quickly. And I just think you can't undermine the value that you get from a formal, either graduate program or certificate as well.

Thor:

Stephanie, I think you've shared some really insightful learnings with us today. And if you had to summarize, what's the one big takeaway you want listeners to get from this episode?

Stephanie Hutchison:

I think that there's a lot to be optimistic about. I think there's a lot of people that are worried about the future of market research because of things like GenAI and different ways that the industry is changing. But I think there's a lot to be optimistic about. I kind of am known for being very optimistic.

If you know the older stories of Pollyanna, I've been called Pollyanna a time or two. But I do think that we just have a lot to look forward to in the industry of really making a big impact on our organizations, being able to step into the more strategic advisor role and really playing that role with gaining not just information about how to be the best market researchers, but also engaging and being knowledgeable about our industry and the company that we work for.

A lot of us are lifetime learners and that just engages us and makes us very excited to learn more. But I don't think we should be afraid of AI or the future. I think that there is a lot of positive and that we really need to look at it as what opportunities it opens for us. How can we be more strategic in light of some of the more routine things that we're being able to rely on to get the research done, or even helping us tie insights together?

An insightful lunch

Thor:

I love that. Now, Stephanie, as you know, there's one more question I have to ask you, which is who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

Stephanie Hutchison:

This is always one of those difficult questions. It is almost lunchtime, so I can understand how people are thinking about lunch.

Unfortunately, he's no longer with us, but I have a lot of respect for Dr. Neil Salkind.

He taught at the University of Kansas for 30 years and was the author of Statistics for People Who Think They Hate Statistics. I just really loved his passion for teaching individuals statistics that maybe had a block about it, maybe had some math anxiety, maybe weren't people that would necessarily think that they could do well in the world of statistics or maybe afraid of research a little bit.

And I really respected the way that he approached that and wanted and had just a passion for wanting to help those students feel more comfortable and be able to learn and know that they could learn it. I couldn't have lunch with him now, but he is someone that I've always really respected and would like to have had an opportunity to spend more time conversing with.

Thor:

I love that. Wow. This has been such a wonderful conversation, Stephanie. Your perspective on insights is truly unique and I think we can all learn from it. Now, before we end today's episode, I'd love to return some of the moments of our conversation that have really stuck with me.

At first, you reminded us that whether it's about insights or foresights, they only matter as long as they are actionable for the business. And if we put that in context, people sometimes believe they need to know everything about the future. Now it's important not to get hung up on that. And at the end of the day, it's about looking at patterns of what's going on in the market that all set the context for good business decisions.

When we talked about GenAI, you told us that it will help us do a lot of the more routine parts of research, which can then free up from a lot of the gathering work, to instead become a thought leader of the organization and take the role of the advisor to your organization.

Lastly, you encouraged us not to be afraid about AI and its role in the future, as there is a lot to be optimistic about instead. A lot we could look forward to, as we have the opportunity to step into an advisor role to support the company that we work for, which is very exciting. I know that I have learned a lot from talking to you today, and I'm sure our audience has as well. Thank you so much for joining me.

Stephanie Hutchison:

Thank you. I enjoyed being here. Have a good day.