Though we here at Quirk’s are anxious for the return of in-person events (fingers crossed for later this summer in London!), we enjoyed assembling three Quirk’s virtual events during the pandemic. While there’s no substitute for being on-site, one benefit of the virtual format is that it lessens the feelings of FOMO that live gatherings can bring about. Instead of listening with regret as your fellow conference goer raves about the great session they just came out of, if you’ve attended any of the Quirk’s virtual events you’ve had 60 days afterwards to watch any sessions you might have missed.
Two cases in point from our February virtual event are sessions featuring conversations that James Wycherley, chief executive, Insight Management Academy, had with Maria Petersen, VP customer intelligence, Dow Jones, and Nick Rich, VP insights and analytics, Carlsberg Group. I had missed them while moderating our live track and was excited to be able to watch them last week. (Attendees of the February event have until April 25 to circle back to https://quirksvirtualglobal.pathable.co to watch the sessions.)
Both Petersen and Rich were articulate, thoughtful and passionate about their roles as insights professionals and demonstrated the mix of macro and micro viewpoints that today’s researchers need in order to remain relevant to their organizations and forge new trails for their departments.
Though they touched on many topics during their conversations with Wycherley, a few key themes emerged.
Mentoring
One of the great things about insights is that it accepts and encompasses so many different skill sets. You don’t have to be a statistics whiz or have deep data analysis experience. You can have, as Petersen does, an art history background or other seemingly unrelated educational or work experiences but if you have that inherent curiosity, you can thrive.
Like so many researchers, Petersen said an innate curiosity has driven her, even before she became a researcher. “I think that’s as good as any place to start a career in insights: the pursuit of wanting to understand why people say what they say or do what they do. Diving further into the underlying things that inform us as humans was just always something that I found interesting,” she told Wycherley.
Petersen cited the impact of a manager who recognized her passion and aptitude for understanding and investigation and that she was perhaps better suited for a different role that took advantage of those aspects. This manager then helped coach and mentor her into that new role – something she has tried to do for others during her career.
Researchers, especially managers or function leaders, need to take time to identify co-workers who aren’t on their team but who may have the skills and interest to be effective researchers and urge them on while fostering opportunities for them.
And, as a manager, it’s also important to take stock of your own skill set, acknowledge the areas that aren’t your strong points and add team members who can fill in those gaps. “As I’ve gotten more senior I have hired my way out of some of my problems,” Petersen told Wycherley. “I work with people who are far smarter than me and that's in the recognition that as you become more senior you can't also be the expert on everything, particularly not when you're in a slightly generalist role, which is what I would say you are as an insights leader. Because there are so many other facets to the role; it's not just about technical proficiency. You are, however, accountable for the fact that that proficiency has to live within your team. So how do you solve for it? I hire people who are far better at [certain things] than I am and that helps me sleep very soundly at night.”
Break down the silos
Wycherley noted that, especially during a crisis situation like the pandemic, it’s better for customer insights to join together with other internal functions to produce the data the company needs. It’s likely no one will care where the data came from as long as the insights function has vetted it. “That’s something I'm really passionate about for us as a team,” Petersen said. “Yes, we take pride in the research we do and we stand by it but it's not a given that every question asked is best either solved by us or by work that we've done. And if that's the case, we shouldn't at that point try and sell in more work. We should be honest and open with the stakeholders and say, ‘Actually I'm not the right person but I can help you find who is. Let me connect you with them.’ I think that [being open and honest] is one of the tenets of being a good advisor and business partner. There's no reason to do work twice and there's also a benefit to working collaboratively. Sometimes you get a different perspective on a problem that you, by virtue of what you do and where you sit, are just blind to and otherwise wouldn’t have picked up on.”
Part of being able to connect those bits of information to the people who need them is having a firm grasp of what the organization knows and where the information is housed and both Petersen and Rich talked about the need to effectively manage information. “Because we are a matrix organization we have so much knowledge that sits everywhere and it's just impossible to find,” Petersen said. “So the very unsexy phrase of knowledge management is now cropping up again as something that we're going to have to prioritize to enable business decision-making and make sure it is founded in customer data and customer insight.”
Rich echoed that idea and acknowledged that the insights function doesn’t always do a great job of selling its value and impact to internal clients. “What I’ve found through my career is most people who we would consider our stakeholders or customers for insights don't understand the value or don't see the value that [insights] could have … And that's because mostly insights hasn't been great at communicating or selling ourselves. I think we're getting better at that but you have to convince people and get them on board.”
An aspect of making a case for the value of research is that doing so costs money but often there isn’t budget available for socializing the data after a project is done. “I think one of the things that I actually learned in my last couple of roles is, when we think about budgets and insight leadership, you’re thinking about [funding] the programs of research that insights is delivering and the reason why some teams have more impact is because they have also budgeted for impact. What that means is, you need resources and some money to message more effectively, to get [the data] looking the right way and that comes with a cost. But successful teams budget for impact and we were budgeting for projects. Now we've got to do both,” Rich said.
For him, another part of that process of making an impact is understanding how different people absorb information – which in turn effects how that information is communicated to them. “This has become more important and more of a major thought for me, that one of the reasons why insights hasn't got things right over history is because we haven't necessarily understood how groups of people absorb and act on intelligence,” he said.
Everyone has a different learning style and everyone has a different role in the organization – some need big-picture, macro-level research insights and others need more granular data. “Do we understand that well enough, that we're taking advantage of that learning and understanding to make sure the insight is getting to the right people, at the right time, giving the information they need to make a decision? That's the bit I still don't think we've got right so the enterprise intelligence [topic] and looking at groups and how they absorb information, that's my next kind of philosophical area to get my head around,” Rich said.
On that front, Rich said that the COVID-19 pandemic actually brought to light some effective strategies for disseminating information internally. “COVID accelerated a couple of things. For example, we got a COVID insight portal set up in an afternoon using Teams. You just need someone who knows how to use Teams to show you but it's unbelievably simple and within the space of an afternoon we had a full COVID response website on the intranet that basically everybody in commercial functions used as their access point. And it just kind of opened our eyes to saying that this is not difficult; you can really merchandise the key stuff very simply. But accessibility is so key. Make sure you're everywhere you can possibly be [within the organization].
“COVID's got us all wanting to work faster because we feel if we don't, we're going to lose out and that's definitely accelerated things but underlying it I still have the same vision that I had when I first started, which is to understand what the business needs, understand the outside world and make sure you’ve got the [insights] team structured and organized to be able to understand what's going on, synthesize, summarize, make sense of what you learn and then, most importantly, work with the business and communicate and embed and handhold – all those things that we've said insight should be doing if you really want to have impact, right down to the front line – help these people understand what they should do the very next day [with the insights you’ve given them].”
Empathy for internal clients
Petersen said she used to be dismayed by internal stakeholders who didn’t see the value in being customer-centric but she changed her mind once she viewed things from their perspective. “I try to be empathetic to the fact that most of my business stakeholders have got 100,000 other things to worry about in addition to their customers and my advice is: don't be blind to that. I have the luxury of worrying about their customers every day – that is the sole purpose of the insights organization, right? They don't have that luxury, so be kind to your stakeholders and help them by doing the worrying and then obviously come to the table with some good solutions, ideas and options to help them make those business decisions. When I finally managed to flip it and turn my frustration around from ‘Why do you not care about this?’ to ‘I know you don't care because you’ve got other stuff to think about; let me help you,’ I found myself in a much better place for my stakeholders and also with the job I'm here to do.”
And that big-picture perspective is an aspect of the insights function that confers upon researchers the ability – and really, the responsibility – of keeping track of and communicating the overall value for the organization of meeting customers’ needs. “That's one of the beauties of the roles we find ourselves in,” Petersen said, “where you have the very rare vantage point of seeing all of this stuff that not everybody else has visibility into. And with that comes the responsibility to make sure that you are providing good counsel to your stakeholders.
“It's a real privilege to be able to see across [the organization] and not have to always go deep into a vertical. That wide span is something people in our role find fascinating because part of being a good insights professional, I think, is also being a relatively strategic person. Understanding that fuller picture is a huge motivator for me and certainly for many other [researchers] as well.”
Keep it simple
In closing with Rich, Wycherley asked him for any single piece of advice he wished to pass along, based on his years of experience as a corporate researcher. For Rich, it boiled down to not trying to tackle every burning organizational question at once. “If you’ve got a whole new story to tell about a consumer, just put some shape around it, give it definition and concentrate on doing that thing right. So whether it's market share this year, brand equity next year, demand-space segmentation the following year, focus on that and get it right. I've made mistakes where we've tried to do all of those in year one and you never do any of them right. And that's the key thing for me is to focus on where you know you can have a win and just do it really, really well for the next six months because people will come on side, they will like you, they will trust you and then they will listen to the next one. And the next one could be bigger.”