Building a Brighter, More Insightful Future

In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, we speak with Kerry-Ellen Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights - Predictive Intelligence & Platform Innovation at PepsiCo Foods North America. 

Who will your consumers be 10 years from now? How will they change? How will they stay the same?

Answering these questions isn’t easy, but combining insight, foresight, and empathy can take you a long way – no crystal ball needed.

In this episode of The Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Kerry-Ellen Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights - Predictive Intelligence & Platform Innovation at PepsiCo Foods North America.

They cover: 

• The difference between foresight and insight
• Why human centricity and empathy are core to the best insights work
• The importance of meeting consumers face-to-face
• Why it’s essential to factor in the impact of time on innovation
• The benefits to spending time on both the agency and end-client sides
• Why it’s important to both challenge and be challenged
• The impact of mentoring junior researchers
• Why happiness should be paramount no matter where you are in your career

If you want to learn how you can build a brighter, more insightful future, tune in to this episode of The Consumer Insights Podcast.

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or use the RSS feed with your favorite player. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor Olof Philogène: 

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Consumer Insights Podcast!

Today, I'm excited to have an impressive insights leader joining me for what I know will be a fantastic conversation.

 I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest Kerry-Ellen Schwartz, director of Consumer Insights for Predictive Intelligence and Platform Innovation at PepsiCo Foods North America, where she leads the foresights agenda, as well as shaping up the executive breakthrough and platform innovation on Frito-Lay's brand. 

Prior to joining the food side of PepsiCo business, Kerry led foundational consumer insights and communication strategy for PepsiCo beverages on the Mountain Dew brand. She's a strategic insights professional with 15 years of experience with a diverse industry background from B2C, Pharma, Technology, FMCG,  Food and Beverage. Thank you so much for joining me, Kerry.

Kerry-Ellen Schwartz - 00:01:25:

Thank you so much for having me.

Thor - 00:01:27:

So what I would love to do is to dive right in, so maybe you could take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your company and how you got to where you are today. How did it start?

Kerry - 00:01:39:

How did it start? It's a really great question. I would say so when I first got out of school. So I studied psychology and sociology, and I had plans to become a psychologist, and then I quickly decided that wasn't right for me. So then I kind of poured through all my different networking, my family and friends to figure out what can I do with my background in stats, in particular, because I had a Bachelor of Science degree, and I had a lot of experimental psychology under my belt. And so I kind of just talked to everyone I knew. 

And one of my aunts who lives in London had been working at Ogilvy, and she mentioned, “Oh, well, you can do market research”. And I didn't know what market research was at that time. And so she kind of led me down this path and introduced me to a lot of different folks. And I kind of got my foot in the door at GfK many, many years ago, where I worked on financial services. And that's kind of where I got my feet wet, as it were, kind of learning the ins and outs of the industry at the time.

I will say foresights as a different type of insights is really dynamic and interesting and something that I know within the industry has grown a lot and will continue to grow, and I'm so excited to kind of have this role in which I'm learning a ton but also spreading that learning out to all my different coworkers on the marketing side.

Now things have changed a ton since I've started. Like, I remember working on phone surveys and things like that we don't typically do as much anymore, but that foundation gave me the ability to kind of launch myself to different parts of Insights as a profession has grown over the years. Within the last decade or so, I kind of shifted from working on a vendor side. I worked in consulting for a little bit, which was really interesting. I worked in pharma consulting on a lot of cool different brands, a lot of women's health focused brands. And that actually kind of gave me kind of an “in” understanding how companies use end research. 

And once I saw that I was like, “Oh my goodness, I need to kind of be on the end user side”. And that's where I kind of was able to find a role within Nestle working on Gerber baby food for a few years before joining PepsiCo almost five years ago. So I started at PepsiCo as you mentioned earlier.  I was working on Mountain Dew brand for North American Beverages, which was so much fun. Talk about a fun legacy brand – like Mountain Dew kind of tops the list. It was so fantastic. And from there because PepsiCo is such a dynamic company, I’ve seen all different parts of the business and have used that to move around the company. 

Now I'm working on foresights and platform innovation on the snack side of the business, so leveraging all different parts of my background to kind of fulfill this next interesting new role. I will say foresights as a different type of insights is really dynamic and interesting and something that I know within the industry has grown a lot and will continue to grow, and I'm so excited to kind of have this role in which I'm learning a ton but also spreading that learning out to all my different coworkers on the marketing side.

Driving stories with insights 

Thor - 00:04:31:

I absolutely love your background and the fact that you've had all these different experiences makes me really want to ask you and be curious in asking how you would define an insight but also adding to that, how would that be different from a foresight?

Kerry - 00:04:44:

It's a great question. So an insight to me is something that isn't a fact, and it isn't something that you already know, and it's something that really pops off the page. It's something you can draw a conclusion. So not looking at any insights right now, so I can't think of one off the top of my head. 

But for instance, 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. 

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.

And that's kind of the challenge of insights and market research in general is feeding 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 kind of fully ingrained into society, is fully ingrained into their careers or what wound up being their careers? They're kind of 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 says. It's taking those insights that we know today and trying to kind of extrapolate it out a little bit and try to predict, like, “We know this happened, so do we think this thing will happen again?”

The challenge, of course, is there's a lot of disruptions, there's a lot of different dynamics. The pandemic for certain, for Gen Z shifted a lot for them. Their views on things have shifted dynamically that don't have kind of a millennial or a Gen Xer to kind of look back to. So we have to kind of make a little bit more of a prediction of where we think they're going to go as a cohort. But that's the fun part and that's the challenging part. But essentially that's kind of what my day to day is when I'm working on the foresight side of the business.

On humanity in insights

Thor - 00:07:12:

And I know that humanness and empathy are two things you're very passionate about. Could you tell us a bit more about that, and how do they inform your approach to insights work?

Kerry - 00:07:23:

Yeah, so human centricity and empathy are definitely things that I think you can't be a really good marketer without understanding who you're talking to. And you have to be able to build empathy or empathize with your consumer so you understand where they're coming from. And if you can't do that, then you're not going to succeed in terms of making a really strong campaign or creating a product that actually solves a need for them.

We talk about consumers, we talk about customers, we talk about all these kind of intangible things, but really we're talking about other people. So let's not try to make them just a number on a page. Let's actually put a face to the number and kind of put a story behind it and a narrative. 

Pretty much all of my work that I've done for the past 15 years, as much as I can control, I've tried to ensure that there's an element of learning about a consumer as a person. We talk about consumers, we talk about customers, we talk about all these kind of intangible things, but really we're talking about other people. So let's not try to make them just a number on a page. Let's actually put a face to the number and kind of put a story behind it and a narrative. Especially now, given how crazy things have been with the economy coming out of the pandemic, people losing their jobs. It's even more important now to really understand what is going on with our consumers lives. What do they need from us?

I know we're just soda and chip brands at the end of the day, but we bring a lot of joy to people's lives and to people's families, and we give them something. And so we need to always ensure that we have a good sense of what that need is, and it's ever evolving. And our mission is to bring joy and bring smiles to our consumers. And the only way you can do that is by understanding what their needs are. It's as simple as just talking to them directly. And I try to ensure that in all of my different hats that I've worn over the years, that my marketing teams, my brand teams, have a chance to meet the consumer face to face. When I was at Mountain Dew, I led a really big work stream in which each one of the marketers was paired with a consumer and just had a conversation. There was no questionnaire. There was no guide apart from, “talk about what they like, try to understand them as people”. And it wasn't to drive any comms. It wasn't to drive any product innovation, concept building or anything like that. It was purely to understand what motivates and makes our consumers happy and how does Mountain Dew as a brand or whatever, as a brand, fulfill that need for them? And that's all it was. 

Being able to tag those emotional connections to the product, that's really powerful. And if you can start to understand how those things kind of add up across all of our different consumers, you've got a really great understanding of who they are as people.

It was so eye opening for myself as well as my marketing counterparts just to hear like, “Hey, this consumer really loves Mountain Dew because they had their first Mountain Dew when they were 13, with their grandfather when they were fishing. And that's a really strong emotional connection”. Being able to tag those emotional connections to the product, that's really powerful. And if you can start to understand how those things kind of add up across all of our different consumers, you've got a really great understanding of who they are as people.

Understanding motivational factors 

Thor - 00:10:07:

And if we connect that to your current role, how do you incorporate humanness or human centricity, if you will, into predictive intelligence, innovation, and foresight?

Kerry - 00:10:18:

I think that's a big part of it, actually. As I was mentioning, you have to understand the pure motivation, the emotional motivations of a consumer, and you also have to think about how their lives are going to change. We know in general, if such and such thing happens, if you have a baby or if you get married or if you move states, it causes a cascade of different emotions and different needs and different things that a person is going to need. 

How do you start to kind of build that into your plans? How do you start to understand your consumer from that point of view? And so if you're talking to your consumers today and asking them kind of these foundational, values-driven type questions to kind of understand them as people.

How do you start to kind of build that into your plans? How do you start to understand your consumer from that point of view? And so if you're talking to your consumers today and asking them kind of these foundational, values-driven type questions to kind of understand them as people. You got a good sense of where they may be going in the future, may not know exactly where they're going, they don't either. But it gives you a sense of like, “This is a core value that isn't going to change” versus “This is probably something that's very dependent on their situation right now and that may move and that may change and that may cause them to kind of go down a different path”. I think it's a matter of kind of understanding all those different triggers and then connecting them to what we've seen in the past and kind of using millennials right for a Gen Z proxy and understanding, “Okay, in general, this is where we think something's going to happen.” And then I use other types of data, other kind of hard data to kind of build out a full story.

I think as long as you've got a really good base of data, you've got really great consumer understanding and learning, you can definitely kind of plot out where you think things are going to go.

For instance, if we know lifestyle and life stage kind of determine where a person is going to go and we know that a lot of Gen Z’ers right now say kids are not in the picture for them for whatever reason. It may kind of shift how I think that life stage may or may not come to pass for that group of people and what that means for us. And so from a foresights perspective, you have to kind of scenario plan. You come up with three or four different cases like “If this such and such happens, this is kind of the path we think will kind of happen for consumers and where we need to kind of meet them”. And you just plot that out. It's literally just predicting the future, so there's no good formula for it.  I think as long as you've got a really good base of data, you've got really great consumer understanding and learning, you can definitely kind of plot out where you think things are going to go. And then you track it. You track your hard data, you track your consumer. You can kind of see like, “Oh, I think we're headed to this scenario”. And that again leads you down what path you need to do from an innovation perspective, from a foresight perspective.

The importance of foresights 

Thor - 00:12:49:

And do you have any stories that you can share about times during your career when you have integrated insights to fuel innovation just as you just talked about –and that could be for a campaign you've worked on or an improved process, a new product?

Kerry - 00:13:05:

Yeah, actually I can talk about something that happened before I was working on foresights, where I think foresights would have been kind of perfect for the scenario. 

This goes back many years before I was at PepsiCo. I was working on a brand I won't mention, but there was a lot of research done on parents and where parents were at the time and what they were doing for their children at the time. 

And there was some kind of internal movement kind of going on on like where do we need to shift and where do we need to go in order to kind of satisfy the needs of parents? And it had to do with packaging. And all this work was done, and it was determined we were going to change the packaging from one form to another. To do that change was kind of very long because it involved switching things at a factory level, it involved a lot of capital expenditure, etc. And it took a long time because anytime you're dealing with factories, right, it takes a long time to switch things out, especially like a big packaging change that they were going to do.

I had found that the prior research was about a decade old, and by the time the new parents were starting to come in, they were Millennials. And Millennials had vastly, vastly different needs and values than the prior generation of parents from Gen X. The wave of organic had come through, new packaging technologies had come through, new parents were looking for more sustainable things.

Everything had changed.

So the packaging change happened. Then all of a sudden the complete dynamic of the market had changed significantly, and then we were kind of already down this path where we couldn't really go back. And when I was looking back at all the prior research, and I tried to kind of decomp like: Why? What is going on? What do we do to kind of to shift here? 

I had found that the prior research was about a decade old, and by the time the new parents were starting to come in, they were Millennials. And Millennials had vastly, vastly different needs and values than the prior generation of parents from Gen X. The wave of organic had come through, new packaging technologies had come through, new parents were looking for more sustainable things. 

Everything had changed. And had we at the time really paid close attention to Millennials, even before they had kids coming in, we would have been able to say, like, “Hey, if we do this and it takes ten years, by the time this thing is on market we're going to have a whole group of parents who are going to reject this because it's not meeting X, Y and Z needs. It's not meeting organic, it's not meeting sustainable, it's not meeting affordable, it's not meeting anything.” 

That's why it's so important to not only keep trends in mind, keep your consumer in mind currently, but also those foresights.

We would have got that from understanding just their habits even before kids because it was a core value for them. And now I'm not at that company anymore. But I've noticed on shelf they've kind of slowly switched things back, but again was definitely too late at the time. 

That's why it's so important to not only keep trends in mind, keep your consumer in mind currently, but also those foresights. And that's so important because, again, if you're looking at a consumer group that's not in your market yet, but is going to be because of a life stage, if you just talk to them, find out what they're doing now, before they come into your market, before they are parents or whatever. Talk to them about what's important, because then you'll understand what you need to do in the future and not change things. Had that company not changed anything, they would have been fine. It was such a clear lesson in not only human centricity, but the importance of foresights and then building foresight in your scenario planning. Especially foresights with that human centricity combined – that is so eye opening that I always think back to that when I'm working on something now. When someone asks me like, “Oh, what is Gen Z going to do? Or what are they going to do now so we can kind of put this new thing out there?” And I'm like, “Well, that's good for today, but what about tomorrow? What about Gen Alpha? We don't know yet exactly what their habits are. We need to find that out so that we're not putting something out there that's going to be not appealing to them, for instance.” And I always think back to that example and kind of wish foresights as a discipline was more ingrained at the time.

From agency to brand 

Thor - 00:16:47:

That's such a good example, and it also highlights exactly what you had said before, which was how you incorporated that humanness to understand and to allow yourself to extrapolate. 

Now, you started out on the agency side with GfK and The Connell Group before moving to Gerber and now PepsiCo. What motivated you to make a switch to the brand side and what advice would you give someone considering making a similar career transition?

Kerry - 00:17:17:

Yeah, so it's a great question. So when I was at GfK, which I said was really great and foundational to my career today, delivering reports and I was going to do presentations and et cetera, but there always came a time when the project was over and I was just done. And then maybe six months down the line, a client would reach out to me and say, “Hey, can you also run X, Y and Z?” without giving me additional context or giving me the core business question, and so that kind of started my brain spinning on like, “What is going on over there? What do they actually need? If I had a better understanding of their question or the context or where this thing is coming from, I could probably just pull exactly what they need.”

That just kind of forced me to say, like, “Look, I could probably do a much better job in delivering insights if I was on the other side”. That's really what drove me to look for positions that were on end user side. 

And so that line of questioning kind of was always in the back of my head as I kind of transitioned on the agency side. When I was at The Connell Group, I was actually very unique in that I was more of a consultant for a bunch of pharmaceutical companies who didn't have insights. So they relied heavily on me and my team to provide those insights for them. And that gave me the opportunity to sit directly with marketers and hear those questions and hear the context. And I got a very great understanding of, like, “They're not looking for this other thing, they're actually looking for this other question that's kind of unsaid, but said”, which happens a lot in the marketing world. 

I'd say for anyone thinking about going over to the client side, think about what prompts you, what kind of questions you're looking to understand.

That just kind of forced me to say, like, “Look, I could probably do a much better job in delivering insights if I was on the other side”. And that's really what drove me to look for positions that were on end user side. I'd say for anyone thinking about going over to the client side, think about what prompts you, what kind of questions you're looking to understand. For me, it was a curiosity of like, what are they actually doing with all this work? I'm delivering tons of slides and I'm presenting in a couple of meetings, but I'm not in the trenches day to day, so I don't actually know what's really going on. I just hear from my client like, “Hey, I need a study on what women's health issues are most important to women right now”, which is fine. But for me, I'm such a learner and I'm such a curious person that it just prompted me to be like, what's really driving this question? Or what's the full context of this question? So for anyone who's like that, who's currently on agency side, take that curiosity over to the client side, for sure, if that's something you're interested in, it's definitely a different dynamic versus what I was used to on the agency side, but there's pros and cons to both, for sure.  But I definitely really appreciate being able to push back to my marketers and say, like, “I don't think you actually need that specific study, I think you need this other thing”. Or I can also say, “I don't think you need a study at all. Let's just run some analytics and see what the data says”.

The vital role of a gatekeeper

Thor - 00:19:57:

And I think that's so good for people that are making that consideration to hear. Right. And if we should focus on skills and you've alluded to it, you talked about curiosity. What would you say is the DNA of a successful insights team? How do you think about that?

Kerry - 00:20:14:

Of a full team? Yeah, I definitely think there's got to be someone who is the gatekeeper in a way. Like someone who's like, “Hey, these are great questions, but what are you really looking for?” Someone who can push back. 

I think that's an important skill to have, especially if you're going to be on the client side. But I'd say on the agency side too. Increasingly, I need a lot of agency partners to set me straight. Honestly, if I feel like sometimes I just blurt out a bunch of questions to them, and I need direction as well. Just to be completely honest, like, I've got a million things going on. I really appreciate agency partners who are like, “Hey, let's have a quick call”, or kind of “Tell me what's going on so I get a better understanding of what you need” versus just saying, “Okay, yes, we'll deliver that data point for you”.

You have to be thinking four or five steps ahead of your marketing team. You know what they're doing, you know that they've got these plans, what do you think they're going to need next?

And then like I mentioned, curiosity. You have to be thinking four or five steps ahead of your marketing team. You know what they're doing, you know that they've got these plans, what do you think they're going to need next? Because I find especially PepsiCo marketing is so fast and so dynamic that one day you're working on one thing and you've asked a question like, “Hey, are you going to do a comms launch for this new thing?” No. I hear no and then all of a sudden it's yes. And I've kind of gotten used to that dynamic of like, it's no until it's a yes, but it's always going to be a yes. I've always kind of planned out like, eventually they're going to need this thing, they just don't know it yet. But I know it's coming. So I always just kind of keep that in my back pocket because I know it's coming and I just try to again, empathy is not just for us understanding consumers, but also our coworkers too. I know what my marketing team is going through. I know what they're dealing with day to day. I can totally empathize with them. And I just know enough about our senior leadership as well. At some point, things are going to shift and change and so you yourself have to be on your toes and kind of ready and anticipate when things change at the drop of the hat.

On her passion for mentoring 

Thor - 00:22:18:

And I know you've been mentoring junior researchers, and some of them might be interested in joining the industry. How did you get involved with that and what inspired you?

Kerry - 00:22:27:

Yeah, so that's another really big passion area of mine. So when I started in Insights, my first job many years ago, I was one of many women – I saw there was tons of women at my level, and then all senior leadership were men. But I also noticed there weren't very many people of color.

I've just put myself out there as a mentor to talk to other people, especially people coming right out of school to kind of help them understand Insight.

I always kind of just felt like, why? What's going on? Like are they just not being recruited in? Or is it just not like a cool industry for other people of color to want to join? And so over the last few years, probably starting when I was at Nestle, I've just put myself out there as a mentor to talk to other people, especially people coming right out of school to kind of help them understand Insights. I think there's a lack of understanding right now of what insights is, what market research is. There's still kind of some prehistoric notions of like, it's just a person with the clipboard and going to ask you questions in the mall or something, which is not true and hasn't been true for over three decades. 

To me, there's kind of a little bit of a lack of diversity in our industry, which I'm hoping to change in the little ways that I can. But I think it's important, again, if we're trying to understand our consumers, it's so much easier.

So I just try to put myself out there and be open. And what's really great at PepsiCo is that we always have new classes of interns who are looking for mentors. And I always put my name down on a list and some of them I've led into Insights and they really love it. I've kind of seen their careers progress over the years, which is awesome. I just find it so refreshing to start to see more and more people of color, honestly. To me, there's kind of a little bit of a lack of diversity in our industry, which I'm hoping to change in the little ways that I can. But I think it's important, again, if we're trying to understand our consumers, it's so much easier. If you're trying to talk to black consumers that you have a black researcher leading the questions. It's empathy building and you kind of help break down some barriers, even on the consumer side when you see someone who looks like you asking you the questions versus someone who doesn't. And so I've been really cognizant of that over my career, and I hope to continue to do more of that. 

I've also branched out into doing not only mentoring for people of color, but also moms. So I'm a mother of three young kids and being a working parent is like the most chaotic thing ever, to be honest. And so I've started – we have these things called “mom pods”. I've put myself out there to be a mentor for people who are thinking about becoming parents or our parents or new parents and just want to vent. Honestly, it's just about talking about the challenges of being a parent and working full time in crazy capacities. If you travel, if you're on the phone or conference calls all the time, like, how do you manage illness and daycare and all that kind of stuff, sometimes you just need someone to vent to, and I'm happy to be that person.

Kerry's best career advice

Thor - 00:25:08:

Such good help for the industry. Also, if we spend a bit more time on the inspiration part, which I guess is a big part of what you do when you do mentor people, and those who have inspired you, what's the best career advice you've ever received?

Kerry - 00:25:24:

Best career advice? The best career advice I've ever received, honestly, is just from one of my prior managers here at PepsiCo has just been, “Focus on yourself. What makes you happy? What do you want to do? And just make it happen.” I think a lot of times when we hear about careers and career advice, it's always in the context of a level change or salary or whatever it is. But she really broke it down to like, “What will make you happy? Do you want to continue working on this thing which – you're great at it, but is it making you happy?” And she really inspired me to think kind of internally about like, “Yeah, what would make me happy? Am I learning still? Am I pushing myself? Am I still being challenged?” if I can answer those questions, like, yes, I'm still being challenged, then great, then I'm probably where I need to be. But if I'm not, then I need to think about what the right next thing would be for me.

You're dedicating a lot of your time to this job. You’ve got to be happy. You've got to be getting something out of it besides just a salary.

I think it's always important, especially as a working parent, to not forget yourself and what makes you happy. You're at this job for however many hours a week, 40 hours, 50 hours, whatever it is. You're traveling for this job. You're dedicating a lot of your time to this job. You’ve got to be happy. You've got to be getting something out of it besides just a salary. Now, obviously, a salary is super important because it supports your family and supports yourself. But you have to be happy. You have to be getting something out of it. You have to be fulfilling yourself. You have to be learning. It has to kind of give you a step to your next adventure as well. So that's my advice to a lot of my younger colleagues who I mentor with, is “What's going to make you happy? What's going to challenge you? What's going to cause you to learn something new that you didn't realize you needed to know?” And that's always my advice to them: focus on yourself. Where do you see yourself going? Where do you need some more abilities? Where do you need new skills? And is this going to give it to you, or is this other position going to give it to you?

On who she'd like to lunch with 

Thor - 00:27:22:

That is such great advice. Kerry-Ellen, it really hurts me because we've got into the last part of this podcast, which is the last question, which is a question I'd love to ask, which is, who in the world of insights would you love to have.

Kerry - 00:27:38:

Lunch with in the world of insights? Oh, my goodness. So he's not here anymore – Steve Jobs. I know he's not in the world of insights, but he did have a lot of quotes related to insights at Apple. Famously, he said he didn't like to interview consumers because they didn't know what they needed or didn't know what they wanted. And I know I don't work at Apple. I've never worked at Apple, obviously, but I know hearing from people who have worked there or do work there, they do still a ton of consumer insights. 

So I want to know, what was he really saying in that? Was he just saying it's not about innovation and finding out what consumers want from an innovative perspective? To me, that makes sense from a tech perspective because, yeah, who would have predicted the iPhone, right? The consumer wouldn't have come up with that. Maybe some type of consumer, but not a focus group. I just want to understand a little bit more, like, what did he really mean in terms of that quote? So, yeah, that's who I would have lunch with.

Summary 

Thor - 00:28:43:

I'm very sure that most of our listeners would love to eavesdrop on that conversation if that happened. Wow, this has been such an enlightening conversation, Kerry-Ellen. 

You've shared so much wisdom that I think we can all learn from. And if I play back some of the pieces that have really struck a chord with me, I'll say that an insight is defined as something that will grab your attention. The insights prompts the why. A foresight, however, has been taken an extra step further, telling you something about the future. 

When we talked about incorporating humanness into foresight, you raised the importance of understanding the pure motivations, emotional motivations of the consumer, how those will change. How can you then take those and build them into different scenario plans? Do it well, and it will help you serve your future customers before they get into the market. 

And lastly, what I think is great advice for people early in their careers, but potentially even for everybody else: focus on yourself, focus on what makes you happy, and focus on what you need to do to make that happen. 

Kerry - 00:29:58:

Yeah, it's a great summary.

Thor - 00:30:01: 

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 so much for joining me.

Kerry - 00:30:10:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate your time.