In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Darren Sharps, Researcher at Pinterest.

Quantitative data alone is not sufficient for informing successful business decisions. Dr. Daron Sharps, Researcher at Pinterest, says the best research she’s seen involves the rigorous integration of multiple methodologies and that great qualitative research can be the catalyst that takes quantitative data to its highest, most useful form.

Pulling from her expertise in psychology and human behavior, Daron shares how embracing multi-methodology can be what separates a short-lived insight from an enduring one.

Join us as we discuss:

• How understanding psychology empowers better decision-making
• Three vital research principles to optimize your insights strategy
• Critical components for making up the DNA of a successful insights team

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 wonderful conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Darren Sharps, PhD, a multi-method multidisciplinary researcher of human behavior who currently leads Pinterest inquiries into inspiration. She's passionate about pinning down the hard to measure and the difficult to explain. And she's obsessed with understanding human behavior—what motivates us, what biases us, and how to change behavior for the greater good. Prior to her current role, Darren earned a PhD in organizational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Thank you so much for joining me, Darren.

Daron:
My pleasure. I'm very excited to have this conversation.

Introducing Daron

Thor:
So to kick things off, could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your role, your company, and how you got to where you are today? How did the journey begin?

Daron:
Yeah, great question. So I am a brand researcher at Pinterest and I lead our global thought leadership research, helping to research and, very importantly, tell stories about Pinterest's mission, audience, and impact. So for the first couple of years, a great deal of that was research on inspiration—what it is, how it happens, and why it's important for individuals and for brands. What makes that exciting is that inspiration is tied to our mission, which is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. My work has also touched on topics like shopping, user segmentation, positivity, and celebrations. And today, a lot of my work focuses on well-being as we are committed to making the internet a better place. I'm currently working on an annual measurement program for well-being that will fulfill Pinterest's commitment to the Inspired Internet Pledge, and our findings will be publicly released next year. You asked a little bit about how it started, how all this started. You know, it started in a very nerdy place, which was as an undergraduate. I took a class in organizational psychology. I went to the University of North Carolina, and that just happened to intersect with the first job of Adam Grant, who's an incredible psychology researcher. And one day after class, I was sort of like, "How can I do what you do?" And that led me in this direction.

The power of connecting the dots for true insights

Thor:
That's a fascinating journey, and I absolutely love what you guys have set out to do. And if we talk a bit more about insights, how would you define an insight?

Daron:
So I would define an insight as the intersection between data and comprehension or the meeting point of data and comprehension. Many professionals stop at gathering data, which is a very important place to begin. That's where the research craft excels. But the result itself, I believe, is never enough to constitute an insight.

When a thoughtful researcher also puts time and energy into connecting the data dots, understanding their audience and where they're coming from, and pushing the story to a place where it's easily understood by just about anyone—that is insight.

You often hear that business decisions should be data-driven, but I strongly believe that they should be data-informed, inflected with the insight that only a good researcher can bring to the table. And I think I would be bold enough to say—and we may return to this later in the conversation—that quantitative data alone is insufficient. Just to make that concrete or give an example, one insight that has been really powerful for us at Pinterest is that people use the platform to plan for their future and where they want to go, be it an upcoming date night outfit or their dream bathroom renovation. Pinterest is actually a bit of a crystal ball for where consumer behavior is headed. So that insight has led to our annual Insights Report called Pinterest Predicts, where we highlight not-yet-trending ideas that we think will explode in the coming year. Some of my favorite past trends that also came true when we went back and looked at the data later are things like Japandi interior design—sort of where zen meets modern—Gemini hair, which is like two-tone hair color, and dopamine dressing, which was a return to bold, vibrant color as people dressed to uplift their moods post-pandemic. So that report will be coming out this December.

The crucial role of marketing consumer insights in navigating complexity

Thor:
Wow, absolutely fascinating story. And if we build on that, from your perspective, why are marketing consumer insights so important?

Daron:
So if an insight is the meeting point of data and comprehension, market and consumer insights are the meeting point of psychology and commerce. So I believe that we live in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Sometimes you'll see that written as an acronym VUCA in Harvard Business Review or something.

Market and consumer insights give us tools to navigate that complexity and ambiguity, to pierce the fog of the future by better understanding psychological motivations. When we understand more about why people act the way they do, we empower better decisions and better outcomes.

And market and consumer insights really help us pull back and see the bigger picture beyond just a single goal or KPI or business or decision. So I believe that to take that one step further, researchers should really lead their organizations in predicting and pushing for the growth frontiers of the business. To give a specific example of that, I was part of a working group at Pinterest that developed something that we called the Inclusive Research Principles. Sounds a little abstract, but we were really trying to develop guidelines for researchers to prioritize inclusion in the way that we conduct our research. That gave us much richer data to leverage our intuitions and insights far upstream before the business is implementing those decisions. Sort of acknowledging and designing for that complexity helps us to future-proof the platform and even the business itself. So that work was in process a couple of years ago, and it was an early iteration of our Inclusive Product Research function, which now has full-time staff dedicated to our inclusive product offerings. These are things like skin tone filters and our brand-new body type technology, ways for pinners to navigate the platform in a way that feels really inclusive of many different skin tone ranges and different body types. So now, if a user searches for date night outfit inspiration, they will see results inclusive of various body types and skin tone ranges, and we're aiming to show people more diverse feeds by default.

Exploring the relationship between inspiration and well-being

Thor:
I love that. And you've mentioned that you think the insights profession should stop focusing on rapidly shifting behavior and focus more on enduring psychological insights. Could you tell us more about that?

Daron:
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I see a lot of research that seems like it's got an expiration date. Even at Pinterest, we start questioning whether things are fresh enough around the 18-month mark. And this is especially true in survey research. Now, I think we all know consumer attitudes are constantly shifting because we live in that volatile world I discussed. But I think, coming from the academic background, I believe that human psychology is actually pretty stable.

So in the insights profession as a whole, I’d love to see less sort of high churn, like year-over-year data, and more grounded explorations of the motivations behind human decision-making.

One way that we've done this at Pinterest is an academic partnership that conducted an experiment, actually. So we wanted to look at the relationship between inspiration and well-being. And we partnered with UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center to do so. We found that just 10 minutes a day on Pinterest helps to buffer against stress, social disconnectedness, and burnout among Gen Z college students. The reason that that's important is in designing an experiment in which we had a control group for comparison, we were able to isolate that independent variable we were most interested in—engaging in inspiration-seeking behavior—and look at the impact on dependent variables like stress, social disconnectedness, burnout, social anxiety. This experimental rigor makes me believe that this is an enduring human truth and one that we can cite for many years to come, not one that's likely to change year over year. So I definitely recognize that this is a privileged position, and I'm very lucky to be able to do research like this. But I'd love to see more insights professionals take maybe one big swing every year, designing something super rigorous that might stand the test of time.

The power of mixed methodologies in creating enduring insights

Thor:
And you know, ideally, this should get at underlying human motivations or sort of the why behind what we do. And earlier in our conversation, you told us that business decisions need to be data-informed. And you've also mentioned that you passionately disagree with the idea that quant is everything. What's led you to that belief?

Daron:
Yeah. So now that I've had my moment of soapbox about rigor—and that was, in fact, quantitative research—I'm passionate about mixed methodologies. And I believe strongly that great qualitative research will take quant into the stratosphere.

I would say that quantitative research is necessary but maybe not sufficient for enduring insights. The best research that I've seen takes multiple lenses to understand the same concept.

So by rigorously applying multiple methodologies to the same question, you'll start to get a converging perspective. Or if you don't get a converging perspective, that's data in and of itself. Quant data alone is one bite at the apple, but I think that real magic happens when you start applying two, three, or four methodologies. So I'll give an example of research that will be released, I think, shortly before this podcast airs—this will be in mid-October. At Pinterest, people not only plan the future, but they also plan celebrations for life's big and small moments. So I called my friends at Pepper Strategies, a brilliant duo of women named Kelly and Christina, and together we did a lot of rich qualitative work, including oral interviews, descriptive trendspotting, lots of desk research to build a framework to understand different celebration types. We sort of uncovered five altogether, things like merriment making and personal applause. And we looked at different trends using Pinterest's first-party data in search to find out what people search on the platform and how it fits into this different framework. We then partnered with GWI, a global survey and insights platform, for scaled quantitative research on celebrations. Their incredible reach helped to validate and test our framework and gave us really rich audience cuts to play with as well. So we could look at things like what are luxury consumers interested in? Our joint report will be released shortly. Just as a teaser, we found that people on Pinterest planned celebrations every three seconds, with over 14.6 million celebration-related boards created in the last year alone. Some of the cool findings of this report are that solo celebrations are on the rise. Many consumers are looking for intimacy and connection in more bond-building celebrations. And for those folks still celebrating traditional occasions, there's a huge appetite for fresh, creative twists on the traditional. So this report will be available on business.pinterest.com. But I think it shows the magic of, like, it would have been very difficult to develop a smart survey instrument without all of this background. And then by combining those methodologies, we have just like a very, very rich report to share.

Breathing life into research insights

Thor:
That's such a fascinating answer. I really want to take a look at that report when it comes out. Now, a few months ago, you presented on measuring the immeasurable at Quirks New York. And I'd love to hear more about this. Could you share a bit about how you identify and break down hard-to-measure and difficult-to-explain concepts?

Daron:
Sure. There's a long talk behind this—not super long, like 20 minutes—so I won't share the whole thing, but I have eight principles in total for getting at the hard-to-measure. Today I will share just three as kind of a teaser. Generally speaking, I believe that the best research touches on squishy topics all the time, and we should be very comfortable poking at these big questions. But they can be scary to approach. So how do we do that?

First, I actually encourage everyone, especially early-career researchers, to cultivate their curiosity.

You know, I try to read very widely. I always take advantage of my learning budget at work to grab books in psychology, leadership, social change. Got a lot of books back here. And, you know, I also listen to podcasts on many different topics. And I'm convinced that podcasts and social media are actually getting great academic work into the real world. So this is like a golden age of accessibility—take advantage. Most importantly, I actually love talking to my friends about my work. Not necessarily people that work at Pinterest, but they always have reflections and even further hypotheses to explore. So through cultivating your curiosity, new dots to connect and opportunities to grow will naturally reveal themselves. A second principle that I have for getting at the difficult to measure is, you know, I often find that I have more questions than I have budget. And I doubt that I'm alone in that. One thing that I found very valuable is a research agenda—sort of laying out a staged approach to the biggest topics, and always keeping a document going where I store my hypotheses, questions, hypotheses, like a little bit of a parking lot. When you want to explore your company's mission or impact, a research agenda gives you permission to scope projects more appropriately, save some things for later, generate excitement for what's to come—to be like sort of like "ooh, if you like this, there's even more coming"—and make impact in different parts of the company. Some parts of the agenda resonate more among different teams, and this sets you up to stage the approach and make it accessible to teams at different times. Maybe one last principle to share:

As you dig into the work and start to generate those insights, I really encourage you to get cross-functional with it. Research without oxygen will keep its impact limited.

I like to think of sharing interim and final insights more broadly as breathing life into the work. The truth is, everyone loves good research, so by making sure that you share your findings in marketing, product design, engineering, or whatever's relevant for you, people will see their work in your research and give you new puzzle pieces or proof points. It's rare for me to find that sharing work doesn't improve it. I have one little bonus tactical tip here—make an internal research resume to highlight your work. So my Slack status on my Pinterest account is a short link to a one-page Google slide where I share sort of at a high level what I do, because it's sort of opaque if you're not familiar with this realm, and then links to the research that I've done in sort of a staged way. And as your agenda builds and gets more and more behind it, this page gets more and more interesting to share out with folks.

Thor:
Thank you so much for that. And you've transitioned from the world of academic research to the world of industry research. What are some of the learnings you've picked up along the way, and what advice would you give to someone considering making that journey themselves?

Daron:
You know, I was a bit lucky in that I worked for several years before going back to graduate school, so I've had a foot in both worlds for the course of my career. I deeply loved academic research, but I found that the grind of publishing was just super tedious for me. Academic research can be a very solitary endeavor, and I needed more of a team to really thrive at work. And that's been very, very true as I've grown at Pinterest. So, you know, for anyone who is considering this transition, first, I just think it's important to acknowledge that this is really hard. Like, that's to be expected. Don't be hard on yourself. Your skill set is extraordinary, but it will take time and practice to translate it for those who are unfamiliar with academic research. I think the biggest mistake that I see on resumes—and this also translates into conversations and interviews—is academic researchers describing the findings of their projects or papers. Now, this is certainly what you do at an academic conference, but for transitioning into industry, think about academic research as a job with bullet points, like a job description. What did you excel at in that job description? Was it managing complicated research projects with multiple moving pieces? Was it presenting complex findings for a big variety of audiences? Highlight those things, and don't forget to quantify your impact. Numbers are always great on a resume. So as an example, my resume estimated the number of lines of code that I had written over the course of grad school. I would also recommend coming up with a very short elevator pitch of what sets you apart as a researcher. Even before joining Pinterest, I pitched myself as an organizational psychologist who uses experiments and surveys to pin down the hard to measure and the difficult to explain. And to my great surprise and delight, I manifested that exact role. That's what I do now, and I feel very lucky for that.

The importance of diversity and versatility in insights teams

Thor:
And if we double-click a bit on the topic of skills, what would you say is the DNA of a successful insights team?

Daron:
A successful insights team needs diverse perspectives. And I think just about every insights team in the world could stand to improve at this one. I've said before that the best research I've seen takes multiple lenses to understand the same concept. Methodologies are one lens to explore, but so too are lived experiences and different ways of seeing the world.

A truly great team brings a big variety of strengths to the table, creating a shared toolbox so that any question the organization may have can be approached by something in the toolbox.

As I was preparing for this podcast, I was trying to think of a way to make that more concrete. This is a bit of a silly metaphor, but I think of the problem-solving scene from the movie Apollo 13—if you haven't seen it, definitely worth a watch—where they dump all the items they've got in the rocket onto the table, and they say, "The people upstairs handed us this one, and we've got to come through. We've got to make this square peg fit into this round hole using only the stuff on the table in front of you." And when you're on an insights team, you're always getting stuff from the people upstairs, and you have to be sure that the tools you're pre-equipped with are sufficient for just about any pressing question. So that can only come from hiring well and hiring for a diversity of backgrounds and lived experiences.

Thor:
When you think about the people who have inspired you during the course of your career, what's the best career advice you've ever received?

Daron:
This might venture a little bit more into the realm of life advice, but when I was a senior in college, I took a capstone course that encouraged me to write down my life values. And I will be forever grateful for that challenge. I went to discuss my draft of this manifesto with my instructor, who was also a long-term mentor of mine. You know, I had several other words on the paper, but he really zeroed in on the word courage. And he knew me well enough to challenge me on this, saying that if I wanted this to be a guiding life value, it had to be an explicit focus, because courage wasn't necessarily in my DNA to start with. You know, that was definitely a little hard to hear, but he was right. And I've tried to make the courageous decision every day since that time. I think he would be proud of the brave life that I lead now, and I really attribute so much of where I am now to choosing the authentic, aligned, and courageous way forward—whatever that is, especially for me and what's right for my beliefs and the life that I want—as often as I possibly can.

Thor:
And I absolutely love that. And if you would give— I mean, there are a lot of listeners that are in senior roles that lead insights functions across different companies—if you would give them any advice in terms of how they should think about elevating the role of insights within their organizations, what advice would you give?

Daron:
Admittedly, I don't lead a team myself, but I certainly have been very involved in elevating my team's impact within the organization. And what I've witnessed is that elevating the role of insights is all about trust and demonstrated value. So you build trust with solid data and working closely with stakeholders to help them understand and apply that knowledge. If you've got trust and you've got good data and processes, that applied knowledge will hopefully lead to successful outcomes, and that yields demonstrated value. So it's sort of a virtuous cycle. You can also build trust by asking stakeholders what they actually need and aligning your agenda with plans that will make them more successful. I think we can also think about ways to track and measure trust and impact, even on a qualitative basis. For example, I sit in marketing. Is my team invited to 2024 planning sessions? Are the members of the CMO direct leadership team using our insights or our research? That's a measure of trust. You know, look at the org chart and tally it up. These creative proof points will give you something to point to, because ironically, research impact can be very tough to quantify. I actually have a book to recommend on this. Jim Collins wrote the book Good to Great, which is a good read, but there's a very short monograph to accompany it called Good to Great in the Social Sectors, designed for nonprofit leaders. However, it contains some of the best thinking I've ever read on creative metrics. Just to give an example, it talks about a symphony orchestra in Cleveland that was trying to quantify its impact in the community. And one of the things that they measured was whether taxi drivers at the airport recommended the symphony as something for people to be sure to do or see while they were in town. So I really like this idea of finding a handful of qualitative metrics when things feel a little too squishy to nail down.

Thor:
That's such a good example. And looking ahead to the future, what opportunities do you think there are for insights professionals to make true business impact and challenge the status quo? How do you think the insights functions need to evolve?

Daron:
Yeah, our business is always changing, and I would love to see the insights function reposition itself as the go-to for imagining the future of the business. At their best, insights are strategic in nature, and insights teams should be consulted at every step of the way in strategic planning and forecasting. This is definitely easier said than done. You know, before you get to be a strategic partner to the business, you need to build trust and demonstrate value, as I discussed before. And little by little, you'll earn a seat at those bigger tables. One way that I love to do this is to literally ask consumers in surveys where they want the business to go and paint a really vivid picture of three or four possible future scenarios. I've seen this work beautifully as a concept labeled postcards from the future, and I've used it in external surveys, internal surveys. I once offered Pinterest executives a vision for what the platform would look like five years from now if we decided to go completely all in on different audience segments. This was a really big hit and helped us be seen not just as data professionals but also as strategic partners.

Thor:
I really liked that answer. Now, Darren, unfortunately, we've gotten to the end of this recording. And as much as I would have loved to continue, I've got one final question. And that question is a question I love to ask, which is: Who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

Daron:
I would really love to have lunch with Dr. Lori Santos. She's the teacher of the Yale course on happiness. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to interview her for our foundational work on inspiration, and her incredibly deep knowledge of research combined with a real passion for communicating solid social science really made an impression. I would love to ask her follow-up questions, actually, about some of the newer work on well-being and who's doing great work in the space. Also, on a selfish note, I would love to have lunch with any vendors who have unusual shopping data that leverages technology. If you've got receipts, in-store tracking, or some new way of understanding how social media converts shoppers, I would love to hear from you. This is a challenge in my current research, and I’d just love to hear the different kinds of data that are emerging.

Thor:
I'm very excited to hear there are multiple lunches ahead there. This has been such an incredible conversation, Darren. Your perspective on the world of insights is truly unique, and I think we can all learn from it.

I'd love to return to some of the moments of our conversation that have really resonated with me. I'd start off with the way you define an insight—you called it the intersection between data and comprehension. Business decisions need to be data-informed. Quantitative data is insufficient. Now, when we talked about marketing consumer insights, you reminded us that they are the meeting of psychology and commerce. They are tools to help us navigate the complexity and ambiguity of the world. They help us pull back and see the bigger picture. And lastly, you reminded us of something I think we all agree with—great qualitative research will take quant into the stratosphere. I know 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.

Daron:
My pleasure. Thank you so much, Thor.