Conversations with corporate researchers

La Sridhar

Global Director, Global Insights and Consumer Excellence, Molson Coors

Do you have any tips for client-side insight professionals looking to develop a strategic partnership with internal stakeholders? 

Focus on the tangible outputs and the value created vs. the inputs or data insights into the marketing/business process. It’s a fine balance of doing both. We tend to execute the research and provide insights to answer the direct brand/category question. While that is important, pay attention to how it has enhanced the broader business question and enabled thought leadership in changing behaviors. This will demonstrate active engagement and build partnerships to jointly drive value in your  organization. 

Build empathy for your internal stakeholders as you may not see their pressures beyond your interactions. Understand their remit, and what their leadership is asking of them. This will open up your ability to deliver value-add insights, thinking and impact. 

Finally, on a personal level, always be curious and be a continuous learner, scanning your external environment for ways to bring new thinking on your consumer and customer to the table. Think beyond your role and what you are working on to enable connectivity with your immediate team as well as senior leaders in the organization. 

What is the biggest challenge for the marketing research and insights industry? 

Overall – but especially in the CPG industry – shifting consumer needs and behaviors. The pressure of businesses to deliver cost-efficient, fast and smart solutions to capture consumer interest and engagement is high. That has led to tremendous pressure on marketing and insights teams to be #smarterfasterdeeper – and cheaper – in delivering value to the organization. 

As Wayne Gretzky said, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” It’s critical for insights teams to be ahead in their thinking and predicting where the consumer is going. Being the stewards of these shifts will add value to the organization. Additionally, the challenge is to be smart and innovative in spending your limited insights dollars to help lead the conversations to future-proof the organization vs. executing reactive and tactical research. 

This also has an impact on the industry professionals helping their clients deliver on the smarter, deeper, faster expectations. My push to my vendor partners is to understand the broader picture and bring solutions to help clients deliver on their specific internal needs. 

What new methodology do you see yourself leveraging in the next year? 

Tools on my radar run the gamut from techniques leveraging mobile technology for agile and contextual insights to behavioral-science driven tools; social listening for anticipating signals of potential behavioral shifts; and leveraging observational and ethnographic insights vs. System 2 responses. 

With the online consumer digital footprint, I see a trove of unfiltered, honest consumer interactions that I want to continue to mine via AI/machine learning techniques. This will help teams with immediate brand insights but also provide signals to create hypotheses and new sparks that we can unpack and understand for the business.