In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Bonnie Chiurazzi, Director of Market Insights at Glassdoor.

How can you maximize the impact of your insights while working in an imperfect world?

Bonnie Chiurazzi, Director of Market Insights at Glassdoor, joins us to share how her transition from CPG to tech has shaped her rigorous approach to market research. She also explores the best practices for leveraging research methodologies in real-world contexts and how this yields deeper insights.

We also discuss:

• The risks of democratizing the research process
• The pros and cons of pairing Category Entry Points (CEP) analysis with journey maps and leveraging them to drive engagement.
• Why businesses should focus product development on early adopters rather than late adopters.

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 riveting conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Bonnie Chiurazzi, Director of Market Insights at Glassdoor. In her current role, Bonnie conducts both B2C and B2B research to support the marketing, product, business operations, and go-to-market teams. She is a seasoned expert in consumer insights with 15 years of experience and excels in crafting customized market research projects for stakeholders on both the vendor and brand sites. Comfortable at any stage of the product marketing cycle, Bonnie is highly skilled in qual and quant studies, turning insights into actionable strategies. Thank you so much for joining me, Bonnie.

Bonnie:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm always happy to talk shop about research with fellow insights enthusiasts.

Introducing Bonnie

Thor:

Well, haven't you come to the best place and the best podcast? So to kick things off, could you tell us a bit about yourself? So take a couple of minutes, tell us about yourself, tell us about your role, how you got to where you are today. How did it all begin?

Bonnie:

Well, you know, it's funny as I never thought that I was going to be a market research when I was in school studying, I thought I was going to be a political analyst. And my very first job was actually this interview that I didn't want to go to, but the recruiter was like, no, no, no, you must come. So I went to it and what it was, was a top secret, like government political analyst job in a company that was masquerading as a market research company.

So I got to learn all the market research skills and then apply them to these really cool political issues all around the world.

So my intro to market research was using all these wonderful market research methodologies for communications and the audience insights, research questions of the government. And then after that sort of fizzled out and that company closed down. I had to decide, do I want to pursue politics or do I want to keep going with market research? And I enjoyed market research so much, I stuck with it. So since then I've been bouncing around between the brand side and the vendor side, just soaking up as much market research experience as I can.

Defining insight

Thor:

Wow, that is probably the coolest way to get into market insights and market research. Now, as you know, on this podcast, we love to hear the different perspectives on the concepts of insights. So on that topic, how would you define an insights and tell us how that definition has changed over the course of your career?

Bonnie:

Yeah, I feel like the definition of an insight for me has changed a lot over the course of my career.

For me right now, an insight is when you can isolate the moment when the initial motivation occurs for a consumer.

Because within that moment, there's a mix of their contextual experiences, their individual experiences and demographics and characteristics, their unmet needs, their expectations a trigger, perceived value, maybe even marketing stimulus. Like so much comes together in a moment right before motivation is born. And then all those things shape a motivation and lead to an expectation. And then the brand can either meet or miss or exceed that expectation. But it really all comes down to that moment of motivation.

Thor:

I love that definition. And when we were preparing for this episode, you mentioned that you disagree with the idea that research can be democratized. Can you tell us a bit about what you mean here and why you disagree?

Bonnie:

So going back to how the definition of insights for me, working in tech kind of changed that too, because there used to be working more on CPG products, this perfect moment of purchase where everything, there was a before and an after purchase. And you could really track everything kind of to that moment. And in tech, it's a little bit more about engagement. So thinking more about the motivations and all these things that lead up to it. And then things that keep the motivation in play is a big part of all the insights that go into insights for tech. So then when you get into democratizing insights, especially in the tech world, it's a little bit trickier. It's not just, did they buy it? Yes, no. If yes, what led up to that? If no, why not? There's and I'm not trying to say that CPG research is easy. It's not. I'm just saying tech is different.

So especially in working in the tech field where consumer insights weren't initially developed in tech, they were more developed into the CPG world. You have to have a little bit more finesse with the research. So walking into tech companies, I frequently encounter product and marketing teams who are getting their hands dirty and doing their own research. And unfortunately, they're bringing their own biases into this research. They're not using best practices for research. And then they're making decisions off of the data that they collect. And there's a lot of research methodologies out there where if you complete the methodology, it will yield a result. So if you field a survey, you will get answers. If you didn't include great survey questions that don't have a lot of bias baked into them. If they're using weird scales or if you're not analyzing data in the right way, the data you collect isn't going to be as helpful. So as much as I love the enthusiasm for people doing their own research and getting their hands dirty and amplifying the voice of the consumer, I think research is best led left to the insights professionals.

Demystifying democratized insights

Thor:

Love that. And, and if we talk about democratizing insights instead, what do you see as being the common misconceptions? From your perspective, what should they do instead?

Bonnie:

Yeah. So one thing I hear is like, well, can we democratize the data? And the data still isn't the insight. So when we're democratizing data, there's even a risk that, you know, people are seeking validation for their ideas. So they'll find that one data point that supports the thing that they want to do or the strategy that they want to have. And they won't look further once they validate their own opinions.

That's why it's really important to have an insights professional working alongside those stakeholders to help them see the full picture. So when you're democratizing insights, that includes the strategic elements, that includes the recommendations. that includes the next steps so that you're not democratizing just data points, which can lead to a lot of miscommunications and misunderstandings. You're democratizing the insights with a plan and what they mean for the company and what they mean for the stakeholders.

Thor:

I love the fact that we're getting into the application of insights here. And I understand that you're also quite an expert on best practices for research in the real world. And I'd love to dig into this a bit more. So could you tell us a bit more about why you've grown to be so passionate about this topic?

Bonnie:

Yes, lately I've listened to a plethora of incredible insights, presentations from conferences and webinars and podcasts. And it's always this well-resourced insights team and they share how they leveraged a new technology in just the right research methodology that allowed them to deliver just the right insights to their stakeholders at just the right moment to make a huge impact to their consumers. And the grand result was this better product or better experience or better sales or all the above. And it's like a perfect insights fairy tale. And I truly, I love that journey for them. And I love to hear those stories.

But that's not how I'm living my life in consumer insights at all. And if there are any people like me out there, I just want them to know that they're not alone, that they shouldn't feel ashamed, that there's other kinds of insights work that's happening in the world. So I wanted to tell you about some of the work. I do and the impact that I make, and it's not this perfect fairy tale, but the real world contributions I'm able to make do have some real world implications, and they do help my stakeholders. They do help the business, just not in that perfect way that we all aspire to sometimes.

So one thing that I do quite often is research that I like to call forensic research. And that's research where I either A, figure out what went wrong or B, how we're going to launch a product when we don't know who the audience is and why they would want it. And for those kinds of projects, I really call on my design thinking background. So obviously, I have pleaded with my stakeholders to include me in discovery research. And I've had some mixed results. I have some that are all about it. And we do what we can with the limited resources we have. And I have some who just kind of skip over it. And we do the forensic research on the back-end.

So the reality of the situation is, sometimes I can only make the impact in this like awkward middle stage, and then we have to go back. So we'll take, you know, an MVP canvas and we'll fill it out and we'll figure out, okay, do you know who you built this product for? Do you know what the competitive advantage is? Do you know what your value props are? Like what's the value story there? Do you know what the engagement loop is gonna be for this particular kind of product or experience?

And we just go all the way through it and figure out what we need to know to be able to set this product up for success as much as possible, regardless of where we're at in the product development lifecycle. And my best tool for this kind of project is my market research online community that we have with FuelCycle. They've been a terrific partner and vendor. And what I love about it is we have a panel of our B2C consumers who are job seekers and employees, then we have our B2B customers on a separate panel. So we can run really quick concept screens and ad tests and awareness and usage studies and anything else, usually within a 48-hour turnaround to at least get some initial results to figure out like, okay, who is interested in this thing that we're launching or we already launched. How does that compare to other things that we have on our site? Like, where does it kind of stack up? How can we expect this to go? And what are the key value props that are most appealing and why? And are there any areas where we want to beef up the product or beef up the experience or beef up the messaging that are going to increase the resonance and engagement in this product?

Thor:

I think there are so many things you share that a lot of people, a lot of listeners and the audience will relate to. And if we dig a bit deeper into what you just said, what are some of the strategies you've come to leverage for insights work under less than perfect circumstances? Because I think that's, that's the real world, right?

Bonnie:

Yes. Well, number one is definitely building relationships. It was immediately obvious to me that I need to seek out the people in the organization who are believers in insights and actively sought to amplify the voice of our consumers and our customers and all the work they're doing. And luckily for me, I found them in every business unit and I do everything I can to answer their burning research questions so that they can help me promote the value of insights throughout Glassdoor. So that's sort of the long game strategy.

And then the second strategy was a really hard lesson for me to learn, but it changed my life at work. So I'm a design thinking junkie. One of the main premises of design thinking is that you test your product with the audience you believe is going to be your early adopter, like your super fans. So I applied that to my work.

So my strategy is to build for my fans. And I used to always want to win over the research curmudgeons, the people who kind of ask a dog whistle question in a research kickoff meeting to just kind of signal, they don't really believe in this, and they're not sold that these results are gonna help them. And so I would bend over backwards to make the research work for them as much as possible, even sometimes at the expense of the stakeholders who I knew were most likely to apply the research. Now, when someone appears disinterested or makes dismissive comments in the kickoff meeting, I label them as a late adopter and I don't build for them anymore. I will answer their questions. I will hear their insights. I'll take their feedback. And if I can, I'll implement it, but I won't put them above the people that I know are my super fans. And I know want to amplify the voice of our customers.

Thor:

That's great. I think they resonate a lot. And I like the fact that you tied it to design thinking. You gave an excellent presentation on leveraging category entry points analysis in your work at Glassdoor earlier this year at Quirk's Chicago. And I think a lot of our audience would find it interesting. Now for those that are less familiar, could you give a quick refresher on category entry point analysis? What is it and why is it beneficial?

Bonnie:

Absolutely. So category entry points or CEPs, those are the building blocks of mental availability. And they capture the thoughts that category buyers have as they transition into making a category purchase. So as I read that definition, you might think like, that's weird. You know, if you're in tech, especially a site like Glassdoor where the consumers don't buy anything, how the heck does that apply? So we realized at Glassdoor that we're launching this new community offering. So you can go to Glassdoor now in addition to salary insights and reviews, there is this community full of rich discussion with professionals in specific industries, at specific companies, with specific lifestyles and specific geos.

So you can really find your group there, and you can talk about what's going on in your career and you can talk about it anonymously so that you can ask questions you wouldn't ask anywhere else. And that's a whole new offering for us. So we need to figure out what are the moments when people might have a need that would bring them into a professional platform like that. So we needed the category entry point, but historically category entry points don't really work like that. So we had to tweak it a little bit. So when there isn't a moment of purchase, we had to think more about how to adapt the CEPs to fit more of a tech engagement standpoint. And the way that we did that really comes back to what were, where are the points in a consumer's life and specifically their career journey where a motivation was born. Like something happened to them. They saw something. They had a conversation with someone. They had a weird day at work. They got an email, like something happened. And suddenly they thought, I need to do something. I need to search for a job. I need to make more friends in the industry. I need to network. I need to, you know, learn more about my salary. I want to switch industries. And how do we capture them in those moments and bring them into community so that they can have those rich conversations that they need and ask the questions that they can't ask anywhere else to get that information to propel them to the next step in their career?

Thor:

I actually participated and saw the presentation at Quirk's Chicago live, and I very much enjoyed it. And as part of that presentation, you also discussed the pros and cons of pairing category entry point analysis or CP analysis with a journey map. Can you outline some of these pros and cons that you learned from this project?

Bonnie:

Yeah, absolutely. So for me, a journey map tells a really compelling story and it's especially valuable because it's a compelling story, whether your stakeholders are on the product team or the marketing team and a journey map in tech is a really valuable asset. So being able to map anything to a journey map, I feel like automatically gives it this kind of weight and this credibility that other insights might not have. So that's always something that I want to do.

And another reason we want to link it to the journey map is because historically Glassdoor's journey map was a job seeking cycle. So you were either a job seeker or, and then you like, if you, when you get hired, like you're an active job seeker, you get hired. So then you're not a job seeker. And then after a while, maybe you're browsing just to see what's out there. And then you kind of go ramp back up into active job seeking.

And job seeking really doesn't take up most of your career. It's just you know, this little spiral that happens periodically. So for this new journey map, what we want to do is map out an entire career journey, because now that it's not just about job seeking, which is usually when Glassdoor was relevant to consumers, now we want to know how do we be relevant to consumers throughout their entire career journey?

So we needed a new journey map, and being able to use the CEPs to develop this journey map made it something that was going to highlight our opportunities in a way that we've never done before. So those are the pros for sure. And then the cons would be that not everything happens in a beautiful linear fashion, especially in careers. Like there's all kinds of pivots, there's life events. So there are some entry points and there are some opportunities that are just really, really hard to map. So for example, one of the ones we were looking at is improving your work life. That could happen at any point in your career journey that has a lot of different kinds of triggers that could happen in different kinds of moments. So that one's a little harder to predict and map. But we found ways to map the things we can map and then show where different cycles might appear, even if they can appear in multiple places. But the nonlinear fashion of careers made that part a little tougher.

Thor:

One of the key points of that presentation was also about how to help cross-functional stakeholders activate the insights from this analysis. What were some of the strategies that you found successful here?

Bonnie:

Yeah, so this is something that I experiment with a lot. And going back to one of your original questions about democratizing research, this is one place where I like to kind of take the enthusiasm for getting their hands dirty and direct it towards something that's a little bit more productive. So I love to have workshops or even mini workshops where I pull out specific insights for a smaller team and help them address their unique opportunities, their unique problems, their unique questions. So it could be a smaller marketing team working on a campaign. It could be a smaller product team working to create a new product or just improve an existing experience and really digging really deep into the insights to figure out.

So if looking at the holistic CEP opportunities specifically for one thing, so specifically for community, for example where do we have the most opportunities? And having them go through the insights, I'll share an overview of the insights, and then we'll work through workshop activities together so that they can leverage their creativity and all their amazing product and marketing expertise to actively solve some of those questions and brainstorm in the room with the insights there so that they're deeply immersed in the insights while they're going into that solution space. And when they are actively creating with the insights, it helps them internalize it and really take ownership of them. And then it improves their belief of them because they've created something that they now love and are attached to based on those insights. And it just helps really embed the insights more deeply in the organization when we can do that.

Thor:

I think that's such good advice. And what I'm really intrigued by is the journey you've done going from more traditional businesses to tech. And if you could advise people that are maybe in CPG and maybe kind of based on your experience, having done that transition, what would you tell them? What are the learnings that came from having come from say a CPG type environment into moving into tech that you would have told yourself going back in time?

Bonnie:

That's a great question. I think it would have helped to have somebody remind me that a lot of market research was born more in the CPG world. So something tangible, something you can touch, something you can purchase, something you can see on the shelf, that's where a lot of the research methodologies come from. So it's okay to tweak them a little bit when you need to tweak them. And just knowing that, you know, you're not selling something that somebody can buy on the shelf. Like, what does that mean? What else do you need to know? Like, what would you gain about learning about an item on a shelf? And then what of that translates and doesn't translate to, you know, creating a user experience or marketing and experience over a tangible thing. Like when you're, when you're trying to promote the use of information and you're trying to promote content engagement. It's just a lot different than selling like, you know, a can of Coke and being able to be creative with it and really looking to your, your colleagues in the tech industry for best practices. Cause it's not a totally different research methodology. It's just like slight little tweaks to how you think about things and getting in your customers brain about how they make this decision versus other decisions.

Thor:

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

Bonnie:

I think the one takeaway I'd love listeners to get from this episode would be if you don't see your experience reflected in some of these expertly crafted presentations and webinars from your fellow insights professionals, that doesn't make your experience or your insights any less valuable. If you're doing different kinds of work, you're making the best impact you can with the resources that you have.

The insightful lunch

Thor:

I think that's brilliant. Now we've come to the end of this recording. We've come to the end of this episode. And as you know, there's a question I love to ask, which is who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

Bonnie:

So I thought about this a lot. This was probably the hardest question. But, and I'm not sure if this is cheating,

I get a lot of my human insights content from Brene Brown. So I picked Brene Brown because I'd love to have lunch with her.

And I just find the way that she talks about emotions and motivation and relationships and goal setting so helpful because it's sort of like when you read self-help and psychology books. They help us kind of hack our own mindset and better understand our own decision making. And that's a lot of what market research and consumer insights is, is just really getting deep into the psychology of decision making and understanding the motivations that go into that.

Thor:

I love it. And I would love to eavesdrop on that conversation. Wow. This has been such an incredible conversation, Bonnie, 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 like to return some of the moments of our conversation that has really stuck with me.

When we talked about the definition of an insight, you told us that for you working in tech changed how you would define an insight. In CPG, there's a perfect moment of purchase, whereas in tech, it is a lot more about engagement, understanding how you keep motivation in play.

Now for people who need advice doing research in the real world, you advise them to focus on two core pillars. One, building strong relationships with the people that matter, the long game strategy, and two, applying design thinking. Test your product with your early adopter audience. Build for your fans. Make the research work for them.

And because of that, don't forget and don't despair. If you don't see your experience reflected in the many presentations you will come across in the world of market research. It doesn't make your experience less relevant. Most of us operate in that real world. Now I know that I've learned a lot from talking to you today. And I'm sure our audience has as well. Thank you so much for joining me.

Bonnie:

Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.