Conversations with corporate researchers
Tiffany Ng
Senior Manager, Consumer Insights, Experian
Prior to working in marketing research you were a marketing analyst in the automotive and TV industries. What motivated you to pursue a career in MR?
I started out as an analyst because I didn’t know there was another way to understand people’s behaviors. So moving into market research seemed like a natural pathway to go from creating stories from data to creating the data from scratch. Understanding what drives people has always been so interesting to me, which is why I studied psychology. I soon discovered that people are very much motivated by their environments so I studied sociology as well. However, when I graduated college, I just needed to make money. So I landed myself in marketing as an analyst. It was destiny.
Being a marketing analyst allowed me to play around with data, learn to value it and understand its importance to any business. But I wanted to learn the other side of it. Over time it became clear to me that behavioral data was only one piece of the pie. And I wanted the whole pie. One commonality, or consistency, throughout my career is that I love to tell stories with information. Data, words, images all can be used to tell a good story. So it was more than just data for me. It was being able to tell a complete story. Market research opened the door to more information.
Do you have any tips for researchers looking to conduct qualitative research in a quant-focused company?
Truly understanding the value of each methodology will help tremendously and set you up for success. I work for a data company. In fact, it’s one of the top reasons I wanted to join Experian. They’re known for their data assets and I love data. But what market research has taught me is that there are many different ways to answer a question. And knowing the right way to get the right answer is the value that a corporate researcher brings to the table. I often get asked to run a specific type of study – “I want to run a focus group” – but understanding the stakeholder’s objectives is what’s really important. If we don’t know what we’re looking for then we can’t propose a way to try and find it. And thus, we can get lost in the methodology. As we enter the experience economy, listening to people is more important than ever. Recognizing that data/quantitative studies only tell part of the story will force us to consider different ways of getting answers. Knowing when and where qual fits in will produce better insights and more trust from your stakeholders.
When I first started in MR, I learned that starting with qual studies, like focus groups, is what you do and then you follow up with a quant study to validate what you heard. That’s mostly a function of the data culture I was in. I quickly learned that it really does depend on what you’re trying to learn. We definitely do a lot of focus groups and then follow that up with a survey to validate themes or size a particular market. However, there are times when we want to give a voice to the data we’re capturing. So, we conduct IDIs or usability tests to home in on themes the data show us. This is particularly useful when we’re conducting product research.
My team is also responsible for our VOC program. This is a program that constantly forces me to put a face or emotion to each data point. It’s where I get the biggest opportunity to tell the stories of our customers. Although we have hundreds of thousands of data points, it’s when you bring it to life with an emotion or a comment conveyed in a video that really makes it real. And my company eats it up. They love being able to connect to a customer, to hear how they’re using our products, if they’re validating our work or stretching us to think about things differently. It really is what drives Experian.
Talk about a recent win for your team and what you learned from it.
Experian has recently launched some pretty cool products in a short amount of time – CreditLock, Financial Profile and Experian Boost. From exploratory research to usability testing to ad concept testing and then to VOC, my team has aligned to support the business across each of these phases. The difference being that we’ve been able to be more proactive and less reactive. It sounds small but there’s so much freedom packed into this feeling of being able to show impact this way. We participated in some design thinking workshops where conversations and planning were heavily influenced by the research my team had conducted. Our segmentation was being used and we had a say in the process. This put us in a position to be integrated into the product-development process from the beginning. We’ve really started to put the customer as the center of our business. Our products are built with empathy for people who want control over their data. We’ve created products for people who can start to affect their credit by giving them access to their information, giving them the opportunity to boost their scores and the ability to lock their credit files to protect against identity theft.
My team has grown more since this evolution took place. Not in size but in maturity and scope. We’re positioned now as thought provokers who have information about the problems we’re all trying to solve for. We learned that our insights weren’t being shared out quickly enough. That studies we did for one team were actually coveted by another. And while this was a great problem to have, it was really challenging to solve. We had to think about ways to get our insights out to the rest of the business so that other teams could leverage this as part of their process. It’s something we’re constantly thinking about now.
What new methodology do you see yourself leveraging in the next year?
We’ve been using self-service tools for years now. And we’ve been using more and more to create an agile MR team that can keep up with the rest of our business. But it’s so vital that you have the right team to conduct good research. Because companies make it so easy to create surveys, anyone thinks they can write a questionnaire. Or conduct IDIs. With regards to these self-service tools, although we’ve been using them more and more, it’s become evident to me that maintaining a MR skill set is just as important as moving fast. If my team doesn’t know how to write questionnaires or know what methodologies are best then we may be agile but, over time, our value decreases as researchers and we become project managers to studies we might not be as confident in. With all that said, we will continue to leverage these self-service tools, like Qualtrics, Zappi and Alpha, but we will also work just as hard to maintain our skill set as researchers to enhance our output and continue to be seen as thought leaders and strategic drivers throughout our organization.
Oh, you asked about new methodologies …
JTBD [jobs to be done framework] is something we’ve been playing around with for a number of reasons. Our product teams are adapting this approach, there’s value in trying to solve for pain points that people have, it’s efficient and innovative and supports an agile product development cycle. There are a number of reasons why this is important to my team. But because my team does a lot of research – not just market research but product, customer experience, brand, marketing/communications – it almost feels like we need to slow down in order to adapt to this methodology. And although we recognize we’re so reactive to what our stakeholders want, we know that slowing down for one thing slows us down for everything else. So, what we’re doing is talking to our research partners about their technologies to try and make JTBD more efficient for us. How can we standardize JTBD so that it’s not always an ad hoc and timely research project? I know there’s a way to do it with the partners I work with today. They just have to build it. Yes, you guys know who you are.