Becoming a Business Intelligence Expert

In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Nick Rich, Group VP Insights & Analytics, ex-InterContinental Hotels Group/Carlsberg.

“Insights aren’t just for marketing. They’re for the whole business”. 

And that’s precisely why it’s essential to be a business intelligence expert.
In this episode, Nick Rich, Group VP Insights & Analytics, ex-InterContinental Hotels Group/Carlsberg, shares the importance of building capabilities and competencies around problem-solving, developing business talent, and achieving growth. 

We also discuss: 

• Why it’s essential to tailor innovation to brands and portfolios
• The importance of leveraging existing knowledge to drive commission better research
• Why business performance analytics should be priority #1 for insights teams

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 an incredible insights leader joining me for what I know will be a fantastic conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Nick Rich, a global consumer insights and analytics leader with over 25 years of experience. In his most recent roles, Nick led the global insights and analytics organizations at Intercontinental Hotels Group and Carlsberg Group. Nick is an active member of the Market Research Society's Senior Client Council, and he's also currently co-writing his first book on insights-led business growth. Thank you so much for joining me, Nick.

Nick:

Absolute pleasure, Thor. Thank you for having me.

Introducing Nick

Thor:

I am so excited to get to spend this hour with you, and I would like us to get started by learning a bit about you. Could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself and how you got to where you are today? How did it all start?

Nick:

Yes, certainly. Well, how did it all start? I actually, I've been in this industry, as you say, for 25 years, and thank you for reminding me just how long it's been. But I actually did start on the front line. So I started doing, actually administering questionnaires in people's homes and on telephones.

And what I thought was going to be a summer job, doing exactly that, has turned out to be a 25-year so far career.

So I managed to discover what kind of insights was around by doing these interviews. And I managed to get on a graduate program and join one of London's biggest agencies. And I've never looked back. That was many years ago, but, you know, I made the switch having spent some time on the agency side. I then moved to Nokia on the client side, and it was, frankly, the best move I ever made. I realized I just loved the depth of knowledge that you would get. And also, maybe somewhat naively at the time always felt you could actually change the world in some small way. And I like to think I've been going on doing that, whether it's introducing better mobile phones, a comfier stay in a hotel at night, or a better tasting beer. And that's really what's driven my passion for insights and making the world a somewhat better place than it was before I joined that company. And I think insights is really powerful in helping businesses do that.

Defining insight

Thor:

Well, we share your view on the power of insights. But if we pause for a second and we talk about that very word, how would you define an insight? And tell us, because of all your experiences, has that definition changed over the course of your career?

Nick:

Yeah, very good. Well, look, I mean, we've all batted this question around as part of our jobs because we are trying to understand what impact we can have on our positioning in businesses.

We all know insight is a kind of a penetrating discovery or a new piece of knowledge. But, quite frankly, the years of experience have shown me that good insights help a business to keep moving forward.

And that needn't necessarily be some brand-new piece of knowledge. It could be something old rediscovered. I mean, for all the insights we generated, a majority of them, a lot of them are left on the cutting room floor. But I found the most profound ones, the most impactful insights, the most impactful learnings are things that help keep your business moving forward, help with understanding how it can continue to grow, and generally insights that help your business keep your customers and consumers and your peers happier.

Thor:

100%. I couldn’t agree more with you on that definition. In preparation for this episode, you mentioned feeling strongly about the inappropriate use of what some call "marketing religions." To make sure we’re all on the same page, could you tell us what you mean by "a marketing religion"?

Nick:

Yes, obviously this is a contentious subject in some areas, so I’m going to tread carefully. For me, a marketing religion is essentially a central idea or ethos of any given moment. I think we’ll all be familiar with examples of this, whether it’s growth through marketing, expansion, and share development that came up in the 1950s. I wasn’t around then, but I’ve done plenty of reading because we’re still using some of those principles today. We’ve also had ideas like diversification and portfolio planning from the 1970s. More recently, we’ve focused on growth through physical and mental availability. A marketing religion is essentially a fundamentally important idea that rises to prominence in any particular decade, offering pathways to growth. In the short time I’ve spent in the insights industry, we’ve seen these ideas cycle as companies try to discover new ways to realize growth. They often take over how we operate and think, becoming somewhat evangelical in their nature.

Thor:

Now, what I'd like to know more about is there are obviously challenges tied to these marketing religions. And what are some of the challenges you think these marketing religions can create for insights work? And tell us also if you have any stories or examples you can share.

Nick:

Right, right. So, I mean, first off, I will clarify upfront that it's not these strategic ideas themselves that I disagree with. I mean, that's absolutely not the case at all. They all offer pathways to growth. They all offer new ways of thinking and new ways of growing. But it's just some of the ways they may be adopted and observed that I think offer challenges to us, not only in insights but also to businesses themselves. And it's necessarily the way they are deployed as a one-size-fits-all solution to all the marketing challenges that we face. And I think, over time, I've learned and begun to understand that that's not always necessarily the right approach. So we're always reminded that we do need, you know, we live in a disrupted world, and you do need innovation and new thinking at all times. And it's very human that we are constantly finding or striving for answers.

So it's a very human trait to be, to want to progress and be competitive. But I think the big challenge I'm seeing is you're seeing some really good, solid, well-supported marketing ethos and ideas, but we're seeing them in a very binary context. It's either one or the other. And the challenge for insights, I feel, is we need to be owning our understanding of a category in a marketplace because one size fits all isn't often the answer. Actually, it's an amalgam of many of those ideas, depending on your brands, your portfolio, your market position, the category dynamics at play. And insights has an absolutely central role in owning that understanding of what is going on in the world around us to know which of those strategies and ideas are best to apply for the right brand at the right time in the right market.

And as I say, it's not always a one-size-fits-all. So, you know, to give you an example, I think one of the challenges we face in insights is as the ethos changes, the ideas change, you often see changes in terms of personnel, the ways we spend our money, the resources, the suppliers we use. And actually, for insights as well, we often find the way the business models we employ have to change to adapt to the ethos. When the solution for me, and as I've learned over experience, good and bad, is if you really understand the total market and total dynamics of your consumer, then you can cut through some of these ideas that kind of lead us off in irrelevant directions or misplaced strategies and really focus on what's important.

And so with my businesses in the past, you really begin to understand that not all brands and portfolios need to be treated the same way. And I'll give you a perfect example of my time at Nokia. When I joined, we were just overtaking Motorola to become number one in the world. Always looking forward at the time in the early 2000s, how is the business going to stay ahead and grow? The answer and the challenge was to address developing markets. How do you bring mobile telephony to markets that couldn't afford mobile devices, didn't have the infrastructure? And so one of my first roles at Nokia was to look at entry markets and understand consumers in tier four cities or even beyond that into rural areas of Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America. And out of that, we really gained an understanding that it wasn't going to be the same approach we were using in Europe and the Americas to win over those consumers.

And at the end of that, we ended up with what is still the world's biggest single-selling phone model of all time, the Nokia 1100, which I'm sure a few people still have in their side drawers because they're still working. But we really understood that a one-size-fits-all approach to what made us grow before was not necessarily going to work for us in terms of finding future growth and growing in different markets with different consumer needs. And so I really learned from that time 20 years ago that taking the best of good ideas and applying them sensibly using good old common sense really has to be the most effective way forward.

Thor:

That makes perfect sense. And for insights leaders that might recognize these challenges in their own organizations, what advice would you give to them? What steps can they take to overcome these challenges?

Nick:

It's really similar. 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. 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 prioritize your insight 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 at Carlsberg or IHG, it was really about understanding, okay, what tools do we need to protect our existing revenues? And then introducing the elements about how we're gonna discover new growth pools. So we're really 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:

Most definitely, but I couldn't agree with you more. And we might touch on some of the things you've already mentioned here, but you've already mentioned that the number one priority for you as an insights leader is to ensure that all of your business performance platforms are in optimum shape before or in parallel to investing in any foundational insights platform. Can you share a bit more about how you came to prioritize in this way?

Nick:

Yeah. An experience in both previous businesses where I've been leading the group team, one of the things we encountered as an insights team is that when you're having business performance meetings and people are debating the credibility of numbers and who has the right numbers, you have a bit of an issue because you're not spending that time talking about how our performance is actually occurring and, actually, what do we do about it?

So, one of the first things we did at Carlsberg, for example, a very decentralized business, is everyone had their own take on things like market share, volume, value, and pricing. And one of the first things we did was to build a consolidated view of those fundamental business performance metrics. And then you get people moving forward very, very quickly around who has the right numbers, who has the wrong numbers. And you remove that debate, and we had really successful discussions around, okay, everyone believes and trusts in those numbers, what can we actually do about improving them? And that's where you get to the cut to the chase about, okay, what actions can we take? And really how insights can add much more added value over and above the day-to-day performance metrics. And we really start investing in really good quality primary research that really opens up our understanding of consumers and markets.

Thor:

That's so interesting, Nick. And I think that even me, when I come across insights leaders, I still talk to people that are in very large organizations that describe these very same problems. And, you know, it's still very much the case. It's not a solved problem in many organizations. And for someone who's trying to follow your advice, what are the things they could easily get wrong? And what are some possible warning signs?

Nick:

So relevance, I always very conscious about how do we make ourselves as relevant as possible. For years and years we've talked about, are we at the right tables? You know, are we invited to the right meetings? You obviously notice that in terms of from a strategic element is insights at the table? Are you not only helping derive the major strategies and objectives of the business, but you're actually writing them.

And I think one of the things that an insight team should do. I've talked about really understanding where the business is today and then for the next 12 months, because frankly, those are all the targets we are judged by for right or wrong. But then understand, do you have a view on the future as well?

So one of the warning signs is, do you have a good view of foresight? We often talked in simple terms to help our peers really understand the value we brought about the difference between insight and foresight, understanding keeping the business protected and growing today, but then also understanding where you could take the business in future. And so, you know, one of the top discussions now is, are we really investing in the level of foresight that we had?

Another good warning sign, a really good tool to use is really understanding fully how you spend your marketing insight budget. So something I did at Carlsberg, which was really helpful in helping not only myself and my team understand are we investing in the right places, but also our senior leadership is, looking at how you divide your budget up in three pillars. One is what you spend on business performance measurement. Second is what you spend in supporting brands in year. So you're advertising, you're product testing. And then the third is really what is around future growth.

And it was really insightful to understand the split across those three pillars. And then you began to understand the business is all asking me to uncover growth, but we're not really spending anywhere near the amount we need to really uncover that, those answers. And so we had a much more fruitful discussion around evening up the balance of spend across those three pillars and enables to invest in what we call the Carlsberg Trends framework that really underpinned everything around the next five year strategy. The way consumers were behaving, the changes in markets, the impact of COVID, for example, health and wellness, these were all really instrumental in helping us devise, okay, is our portfolio fit for purpose? And then what do we need? What are we going to innovate? And what are the solutions to these questions that we don't yet have answers for?

Why talent development matters

Thor:

Absolutely love that Nick. And let's talk talent development. Now I know you're also a strong believer in the importance of talent development. Why do you think it's so important for insights leader to keep that in mind?

Nick:

Well today more than ever before, right? We're always being disrupted and in insights we're no different to any other function in our world. So building capabilities and competencies for successful Insights teams for me is as important as ever and an insight leader, we've got to be thinking really actively about that.

So, you know, there was a time when we had to be really good market research managers and I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with that you need to know how to extract new good primary knowledge from consumers and members of the public.

Of course you do. But I think more than ever, the capabilities around business acumen, relationship building, change management, I've already touched on financial awareness, even problem solving, these are all skills we need to have an impact today.

And so, I see these as all complementary to what we might consider the traditional tools of the trade, whether that's research approaches, analytical methods and so forth. But even on the latter, I think even analytics is changing now. What we're seeing called in a lot of cases machine learning is actually often analytical methods that we used in the past, but we didn't really talk about them. Now they're right out in the spotlight and we need to be thinking about regression analysis. People are actually hungry to understand how that works. And we do a lot of work in the business that I've been in, in helping to educate people about how we got to answers. And before we might've avoided those as market research management. Now people are much more interested in, you know, looking to help us understand, you know, invest in analytics and be much more open with that.

So I think we're all cognizant of what it means to be an insight and intelligence expert is going to involve a much wider repertoire of skills than perhaps we've had in the past. Obviously identifying the capabilities is really key. And in my past businesses, we've really been clear on what are the skill sets we've got in the team currently, and then writing the plan for what we think we might need in the future. I'm also conscious that when I talk about being business intelligence experts, you don't always need to be an expert at everything. So can we be an expert change manager as well as a market research practitioner? Can we be a financial expert as well as brand strategy? I don't think we necessarily need to be really top of the game on all those, but you do need a good repertoire of skills and tools around you to be truly successful.

Thor:

And if we, if we double down on these skillsets, are there any ones that you see as particularly crucial for insights professionals with a view on staying ahead in the months and the years to come?

Nick:

Yes. Yeah, I think for me, particularly, I keep going back to the commercial side, but I think I've made my point there.

The other one for me is problem solving. In an age where you're seeing new technologies come in that help us do our jobs much quicker and fill in some of the gaps. And I will mention AI because I'm seeing some fundamentally powerful new developments in that perhaps you weren't even seeing six months ago in terms of how developers are working with the entire knowledge base that's open and available to us and producing outputs that move us much quicker and with much more certainty around any given topic or business problem.

So I'm seeing the problem solving is reflective of an insight professional today who is aware of the full horizon of tools and knowledge that's available to them and being able to call on any one of those at any one time. One of the tools I've used actually is called the Dreyfus model, which helps you really understand how expert you need to be at any given capability. So I urge people to look at that. It was developed in 1980, but it's so prescient even for today, 40, even 50, getting on 50 years later, it really helps you understand the kind of core skills that you need and to what level you need to be an expert on or at least just competent.

And so problem solving is a great one. Using the tools, what does that mean for an insight practitioner? So I'm really excited by kind of where that could go. But it's also made me start to think about things like recruitment. What kind of questions are we gonna be asking? It's not necessarily about methodologies only. I want to know how you would deal with business challenges and problems that we would be facing every day. So it's given me a different idea about how we go about developing our existing teams, but also exploring new talents to bring in.

Thor:

There's so many interesting things you just said there. During this conversation, you've mentioned the word foresights, and we've talked about foresights. You also mentioned AI, you know, which is obviously a topic nobody escapes today. And we're talking about talent development. So there are really two questions. And one of them is how do you believe foresights will be impacted by AI? How's that trade or how's that work going to be impacted? And are there any things you would advise people to think about when looking out for talent to staffing any teams that would go into that realm?

Nick:

Interesting. So let's take the form. I think we've got to an era where we were describing media as paid, earned and owned in the recent paradigm has been around that focus and it helps you understand the different channels and routes to market to get your message across. I don't think it's any different for knowledge, insights and data.

We have paid, earned and owned data sources coming at us from all angles. And in fact Stravito, one of the things you specialize on is helping us harness and tame that huge landscape of insight inputs and to help us make sense of it. And so from a foresight point of view, I would always expect my insight teams to ask the first question they would ask themselves when they have a business challenge posed for them is what do we already know or what can I already know based on the information landscape that we have in front of us?

And so when you can use tools that we're starting to see that help you disseminate that information landscape, you suddenly become a much more knowledgeable business partner. So from a foresight perspective, AI appears to be moving in a direction where it can start to make judgments around knowledge, yes, but interpretations of that. And that's what foresight is leading us, really leading us to be experts in that paradigm because we're then able to take the full knowledge base to distill it down, but have opinions that go with it. And that's really getting into good foresight because you're starting to think about consequences and possibilities. And for that reason, I'm hugely excited about the future that is coming our way. Your second question in terms of the talent, does that mean we're gonna need different skill sets?

Thor:

Exactly.

Nick:

Probably and possibly, possibly and probably. I think we absolutely are. I think I've already made changes and you'll be evidenced from my peers and colleagues and teams that I've worked with. We have a much wider range of skill sets and backgrounds that can come into insights. And in fact, most encouragingly all, Thor, is I've seen the people who want to come into insights coming from all different backgrounds proactively. I mean, they're actively asking is it because our industry is suddenly becoming the sexy thing? Data is now a very attractive discipline to be in. It's certainly an exciting one.

So I am seeing people actively wanting to come into the insights because it does look exciting. It's about discovery. It's about personal growth as well as professional growth and business growth. And I think we're definitely gonna need more people who are able to tap in and be open to tap into a much more ambiguous world, but using all the tools that are potentially available to them. So yeah, I want people who are open to work with ambiguity, open and comfortable with uncertainty, but also logical and have a great deal of common sense and street savvy that they can work out a way to get them to get answers and get out of business challenges. So definitely the profile I think will continue to change.

And that's even before we talk about, you know, technical skills, analytical skills, data science skills that I think, again, we need to be upskilling for if we're traditionalists. But we also need to be bringing those people in and then teaching them about marrying, you know, data science experience, analytical experience, but also commerciality and merging those two. And I think that's where insights, you know, has a really strong position because we've always been doing that.

Rethinking research-first solutions

Thor:

Now we talk a lot on this podcast about how research is foundational to business decisions. But you actually shared with us that you think insights professionals should stop thinking that the answer to every business issue is a new research study. Can you tell us more and what do you think they should do instead?

Nick:

Well, yeah, maybe a little controversial, but I don't mean necessarily stopping completely primary research. But let me clarify that. You know, I mentioned before that in my last role, we absolutely had this mantra, which is what do we already know? Before we spend any money on a new study, what do we already know about? Let's go back to the assets we have. And the Stravito was, you know, instrumental in helping us manage those assets, catalog them make them available and merchandisable. But what do we already know?

So I've always wanted my team to ask that question because what it means is actually any primary research you do get to do is gonna be that much more focused on the real open questions that you still have available to you and that you've uncovered. So yes, for a period I did see the level of primary research spend go down for a while. But actually what you begin to see is it start to pick up and it tends to be a slightly different, very, very focused approach to new consumer discovery. And for me, that's fantastic because again, one of the issues we might have seen in our insight teams as insight is you come into a business and you see a lot of repetition, particularly between group and local and you see different dynamics within businesses and there can be a lot of repetition.

I think we're gonna start to see less and less of that. One, as we're better managing our knowledge, but also sharing it. But two, getting much better at really focusing on new questions.

And I think the AI tools, some of the other tools that we're bringing in, technologies, will help us really get to the heart of what's the core question I actually need to know and not just something repeating that someone did a few years before.

I don't want any agency partners to think that we're gonna be spending less with them in future. I just think it's gonna be better.

Thor:

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

Nick:

Yeah, I think it's really the world around us is obviously changing, but I think it's us as individuals just being very cognizant and 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 technological 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 gonna 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, I think we really need to be aware, and very self aware of the skill sets we have. And so I talk 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 need to be a much broader understanding of your business environment, your peers, your colleagues, your ways of working than just 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.

An insightful lunch 

Thor:

Fantastic. And as we come to the end of this episode, there's this one last question that I love to ask, which is who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

Nick:

Wow. Well, I take a little, just a little tangent off from insights, but I'll explain why. So there's certainly a couple of people that would absolutely be around my dinner table.

The first one is a journalist who's now sadly no longer with us, Christopher Hitchens.

He's known for a couple of things, which isn't what I love him for, but he had a unique ability to understand human behavior. And his insights into particularly the history of human behavior and the consequences is something that I've really taken kind of as a profound learning, but also taken it back to business. Because if you can understand consumer behaviors, we often think in business about the immediate consequences. I've learned to understand the secondary consequences, the thing you didn't always understand.

And, you know, a recent example, COVID. In hindsight, it's absolutely no surprise that consumer behaviors changed when people were spending more time at home. But the immediate thing we obviously thought about in those first few weeks and months was keeping same behaviors going. How do we keep people getting into supermarkets? How do we keep pubs and clubs and restaurants open even in the face of major challenges? And of course, then very quickly, we think we understand the secondary consequences, the things we weren't immediately thinking about. And Christopher Hitchens was very good at understanding history, consumer behavior, but also the resulting implications of that. So he's someone absolutely you would have around your table to better understand the world around you.

And the second person is a guy called Tony Bloom, who is the owner of my favorite football club, Brighton and Hove Albion. But the thing is, the thing he's kind of known for and the club is well known for is his use of data. So he owns a company called Star Lizard, which is a betting consultancy. But what he's brought to the sport of football, and particularly with my club, thankfully, is a huge, huge, unique data set that they then are able to interrogate and understand, okay, where is there talent around the world that fits the profile we need to fill a gap in our team? And so here's someone who's brought a very data and analytics approach to sport, which I think is, you know, we've all heard of Moneyball, of course, in the US. He's taking the Moneyball approach here. But for me, it's really a unique, absolutely new way of using data and understanding and knowledge, applying it in a different way for success. And the business results show that. By and large, the results on the pitch also show that. And for me, that's a great example of how you take insights and you improve something.

Thor:

Wow. So much good advice and so many conversations I would love to eavesdrop on. This has been such an amazing conversation, Nick. Your perspective on insights is truly unique, and I think we can all learn from it.

Before we end today's episode, I'd like to return to some of the moments of our conversation that have really stuck with me. Good insights help a business to keep moving forward. It doesn't have to be brand new, it can be old knowledge rediscovered. The most impactful is the insights that can help you continue to grow while supporting continued satisfaction of your customers.

When we talked about marketing religions, you told us that they offer fundamentally important ideas that offer thinking on pathways to grow that are very important. But beware when they are deployed as one-size-fits-all solutions. Now, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You do need innovation, but all brands and portfolios don't have to be treated the same way.

You also reminded us that insights has a central role in the understanding of what goes in the world around them to help inform the application and deployment of any such views on how to support growth. As an insights leader, you need to understand the business from top to bottom. Never forget that insights priorities always need to be the same as the business priorities. And lastly, when looking at this fast paced world we live in, never forget the human element. We will still need the human element to understand context, apply insights and make growth happen. I know that I've learned a lot from talking to you today and I'm sure our audience has as well. So thank you for joining me.

Nick:

Thank you very much, Thor.