Q&A with Ferrara Insights and Analytics Team, 2024 finalist of Best Client-Side Team award
Editor’s note: Ferrara Insights and Analytics Team is a finalist of the 2024 Best Client-Side Team award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 19 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
Ferrara Insights and Analytics Team is a finalist in the 2024 Best Client-Side Team category which is part of the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. This award category was created to recognize client-side teams making outstanding contributions to the success of their company by consistently executing high-quality research.
In the last few years, Ferrara’s Insights and Analytics Team has gone through changes to ensure that well-informed decisions contribute to the success of the company. Anthony Jackel, senior director of business intelligence and analytics and Shannon Weiner, senior director of consumer insights explained these changes and why the team at Ferrara is up for this award.
“Over the past couple years, the insights and analytics team at Ferrara has undergone a significant transformation. The team has nearly doubled in size and has seen a 55% budget increase after proving its value to senior leadership, including the CEO, by enabling stronger brand strategies and actionable insights,” Jackel and Weiner said.
Read more about the great qualities this team has and why they are one of the 2024 finalists of the Best Client-Side Team category.
How do you balance teamwork with your individual tasks?
Our insights and analytics team is made up of a dozen stellar individuals. While each person’s contribution is important for tackling the work and completing projects, staying connected and coming together as a team is critical to maximizing our impact.
One way we do this is through our monthly insights and analytics team meetings. In these sessions, we rotate leadership among team members, empowering one specific individual to take the lead in building out the agenda. This typically includes items like business updates from our leadership team, key project sharing and discussion and opportunities to highlight work that team members are most proud of or would like feedback on.
We always proactively book a room in our office large enough to bring us all together in person for these sessions. While candy and sweets certainly help spark conversation, the topics themselves usually bring out natural dialog from team members to ask questions and weigh in on ongoing projects they may not be closely involved in.
Beyond that, our team leaders have recurring “connects” with their direct teams and reports to ensure we stay connected beyond day-to-day project work. By holding these sessions, disparate dots can be connected across workstreams to drive the greatest amount of synergy and value from each person’s individual efforts!
What would you say is your biggest hurdle as a team?
The biggest hurdle we face as a team is the balance of providing a constant flow of consumer knowledge to the organization to drive consumer centricity at Ferrara with the delivery of specific learn plan projects which may be more brand or product focused and not always largely applicable to a broader audience. We believe that the more we feed the “consumer gut” of the organization, the more equipped many of our cross-functional partners will be to make business decisions, which can reduce the need for small or one-off research projects and measurements that may answer only a few questions and are not holistic in nature.
To combat this hurdle, we have been very intentional about the balance of larger foundational research projects and measurement, ensuring we update them every few years and rallying large audiences around sharing out the findings – whether to functions beyond our key stakeholders or at large company events.
We are also leaning into tools and behaviors that will help overcome this hurdle. This includes initiatives like large-scale consumer trends programs that are accessible to many functions and levels of the organization, automated impact focused consumption dashboards that are consistently built across brands, robust marketing effectiveness measurement with learnings that can be applied across the company and consumer focus groups in our office for teams to come in and out to listen.
We are also leaning more heavily into automated tools/methodologies and coaching our vendors up to our expectations so we are spending less time on the basics and more time on sharing our knowledge of the consumer with broader Ferrara teams.
Do you have any tips for researchers looking to influence decision-making and connect with key stakeholders?
One of the best ways researchers can transition from being thought of as “the people who run the research” to those who actually “influence strategy and decisions” is by becoming better-connected business partners.
A first step in this process is to actively go beyond your day-to-day work and build business acumen by learning from cross-functional partners. We recommend leaning in and approaching this with a curious mind-set – it's important to learn about the business from not only marketing and brand counterparts but also from people in sales, finance and operations! The more insights and analytics teams can learn about the broader business and have the right conversations, the more equipped they will be to understand the impact that decisions made from research or analysis will eventually have. As practitioners build that muscle, their influence will grow stronger based on insights and recommendations being rooted not just in the research findings, but in the real implications for the broader business.
Over time, and as we have seen with our Ferrara team, key stakeholders will begin to turn to you for strategic guidance, thought leadership and partnership, rather than solely for help executing research. You can expect that a “seat at the table” will always be reserved for the insights and analytics partners as you develop this mindset and approach!