Q&A with a client-side researcher
Editor's note: If you're an end-client researcher and interested in participating in a Q&A with Quirk's, please e-mail me at emilyk@quirks.com.
What makes consumer insights a compelling career choice for young professionals today?
I didn’t want to be a consumer insights strategist when I was a kid. I didn’t even know what consumer insights was until I got a job in the marketing department of a large media company. However, I believe that consumer insights is a fantastic career choice for young professionals today. For starters, the discipline is a perfect blend of art and science. It’s a highly creative field, but also grounded in hard science. Successful companies tend to be very customer-driven so that squarely puts voice-of-the-customer teams in the driver’s seat. There is ample opportunity to heavily influence, up, down and sideways across an organization. When you own the voice of the customer, you take on a larger-than-life persona within any corporation. On top of that, having any valuable data analysis or synthesis skills is incredibly useful regardless of whether you want to remain in consumer insights, go into marketing strategy or data science/analytics or really anywhere else in the business world. The consumer insight professional’s ability to tell stories with data is a fundamental skill set that can catapult their career.
As a consumer insight professional, you get to be on the bleeding edge of your organization’s R&D and new product development cycles. Chances are high that any new products, services or concepts will need to be tested with customers. You get a front-row seat to how customers react to brand extensions, line extensions and other innovations coming from your organization. Sometimes the ideas die on the vine, but other innovations are fueled by early positive customer reception.
I like to do an exercise where I walk new associates through the aisles of our stores and show them all the aspects of our environment, products and in-store communications that we impacted through our research with customers. As a researcher, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing a package design or product re-branding that you worked on, on the physical shelf in the store. You didn’t design it, but you gathered the necessary inputs from customers to refine the work. There are few things in the business world more rewarding than that. If you’re analytical and also creative, love numbers and people and love having an impact on strategy, products and services, then look into consumer insights as a career choice!
How does qualitative research maintain its value in a world increasingly dominated by big data and AI?
I’m a huge qualie. Before I had the job I do now, I moderated focus groups. I learned about qualitative research before I immersed myself in quantitative to become a better researcher. I encourage anyone grappling with this question to read the book “Small Data,” by Martin Lindstrom. It’s a great read. In the book, Lindstrom reinforces the notion that researchers are like detectives, solving business problems and issues, one mystery at a time. Qualitative research is fantastic at teasing out latent and often hidden motivations. Quantitative surveys, AI and big data are all fantastic tools. However, most of our custom studies have both a qualitative and quantitative component. There is no substitute for practicing deep listening with customers. AI, as great as a development it is, will only strengthen the need for genuine human connection and understanding.
My favorite example of this is the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. Domino’s learned from its customers that there is a black hole of anxiety between when the pizza is ordered and when it presumably arrives at your door. I don’t know for a fact that they used qual, but this is very likely the type of feedback you would get via qualitative research. A structured, closed-ended questionnaire would likely have missed this. But a dozen in-home ethnographies watching people order and eat pizza? Absolutely!
I believe very passionately and firmly that the more impersonal and transactional our data gets, the more important it will become to actually talk with and listen to customers. I see a very, very bright future for qualitative research.