Editor’s note: Elizabeth Saulsbury won the 2019 Outstanding Young Researcher, end-client, award and was recognized for her achievements at the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards Gala. To learn more about the awards, visit quirksawards.com.
Conversations with corporate researchers
Elizabeth Saulsbury, Senior Research Analyst, Cox Automotive
What led you to a career in marketing research?
My background is in digital marketing, with an emphasis on content strategy and copywriting. Research was new territory for me before I joined Cox Automotive!
I got connected here via Morgan Richards, a senior research manager on the team. His wife, Melanie Richards, is also a researcher and was one of my professors in college. Morgan and Melanie thought I would be a good fit for a client-facing role on this team. To this day, they remain fantastic mentors.
After being here for almost two years, I can see a definite connection between my background in content creation and my current role in research client services. So much of what I do on a day-to-day basis is about storytelling – interpreting and presenting research in a meaningful way, and finding ways to make our insights inspiring. I love that this position allows me to do that.
You are currently a co-chair on the board of Ignite, the Cox Automotive early career employee resource group. Could you share a little bit about your role and how it connects back to MR and insights?
Ignite is an organization for Cox Automotive employees, focused specifically on helping early-career team members succeed. Our mission is to cultivate the next generation of talent through development, networking and increased opportunities for exposure in the company. As a co-chair, I help lead a team of board members to strategize events and resources that will achieve this goal.
Research plays an important role in Ignite’s success, especially as it relates to member engagement. It’s important for us to continually gauge satisfaction with events and content so that we’re equipped to create cool programs that will really resonate with people. We also want to be able to provide information about the early-career experience to the greater Cox organization.
Is there a research methodology that you use that you feel is overlooked by others in the industry?
I’m always impressed with how our Research Center of Excellence team members proactively track down new ways of doing business. One area we’re exploring that I’m personally really excited about is artificial intelligence, which holds immense potential for research and analytics. Right now, we’re working on leveraging AI models for consumer research purposes. Recently, we also started investing in crowdsourcing as a means of generating insights and product optimization ideas.
What is your greatest concern for the future of research and analytics?
I don’t know if concern is the right word … I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, so I’ll say it’s more of an opportunity. And I think the greatest opportunity lies in cross-functional teamwork.
I focus on primary research for Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book – Cox Automotive’s consumer-facing brands – and it’s been a helpful exercise to join forces with teams in analytics, UX, strategy and more to find areas for synchronization and think tanking. It’s great to get a bunch of different stakeholders in a room to identify opportunities where we can work together and to toss around the big “what if” research questions. I believe that ideating with a diverse group of team members is especially powerful in automotive, where disruption is frequent and requires us to constantly innovate. We need holistic, whole-brain thinking in our research projects so that we can do just that.
This kind of diversification is not only important across a company, but within a research team. I’m really fortunate to work in a group where this is the case; our department encompasses many backgrounds and realms of expertise. What’s more, the people here are willing to collaborate across their focus areas with flexibility and passion. I believe that everyone in Cox Automotive’s Research and Market Intelligence group would agree that this a contributing factor to the health of our culture and the quality of our work: having a team of researchers who bring very distinct perspectives and voices to the table.