Editor's note: Kathryn Korostoff is founder and lead instructor at Research Rockstar LLC, a Southborough, Mass., marketing research training and staffing services firm.
There's a lot of discussion these days about what is driving change for the market research and insights profession. Many people have focused on trends such as artificial intelligence, automation and mobile apps. Sure, those are all great topics and they are all related to change but they look at what we do, not why we do it.
The fundamental changes to the profession are being driven by new corporate initiatives. These strategic initiatives are what ultimately drive changes for market research career paths, job titles and skill requirements.
Strategic initiatives in 2018
The various C-suite and CEO surveys done by management consulting companies like KPMG, Deloitte, Price Waterhouse and others exhibit strong recurring themes. Comparing the results across these studies, the three most common initiatives widely cited by C-suite executives in 2018 are:
- being data-driven;
- being customer-centric; and
- developing next-generation leaders.
In pursuit of these strategies, companies are making changes. And some of these changes have a direct impact on where the market research and insights function reports (yes, that is important), what the future job requirements will be and what other groups and subject matter experts will be regular collaborators.
Strategy, meet structure
With the current initiatives come new organizational structures. There are some clear trends. Two are changes organizations are commonly making in terms of reporting and structure in support of new initiatives:
- First is the fluidity of the structure itself. The adoption of agile and networked-based work (often including cross-functional teams) is widespread. And these days, “agile” is applied far beyond just the software teams in which it originated.1
- Second is the structure – or hierarchy – of reporting. According to a Deloitte study, companies are focused on redesigning the organization itself with nearly half actively studying and developing new models to be able to support these new initiatives.
Organizational structures are changing
Business leaders know the success of an important new strategy usually requires organizational change to support it. The structural change is made to remove frictions that may otherwise impede success.2 In this case, having siloed data functions clearly creates friction when the battle cry is about being data-driven and customer-centric.
Thus, current organizational changes often specifically include changes for data-related functions. Some organizations are creating new reporting structures to better integrate various data specialties. Indeed, many organizations have five or more specialties that they are trying to foster better collaboration between, including Web analytics, customer data, transactional data, secondary data and market research and insights (among others, some of which are highly vertical and industry-based).
The exciting thing is that companies want their customer-centric work to be based on data that is less siloed. As a result, a lot of great work is being done when multiple data methods and sources are synthesized or integrated.
Leading-edge research and insight teams have already started to make changes that reflect such data-integrated work. A great example of this comes from the September 2016 Harvard Business Review, where Stan Sthanunathan, VP of consumer and market insight at Unilever, said, “For any insights group that serves as a data aggregator, interpreter and disseminator, the first challenge is to integrate massive and disparate sets of both structured and unstructured data from such sources as product sales figures, spending on media, call-center records and social media monitoring. This may amount to tens of millions of pieces of data. The data sets are customarily owned by different teams – sales data by sales, media spending by marketing, customer interactions by customer service and so on.”
Skills
There is a catch: working in teams or departments that use multiple data types and sources is a new way of working for many market research and insights professionals. There are new skill requirements. Some of these are soft skills and some are hard.
This point about new skills isn’t just conjecture. Based on studying thousands of Indeed job postings related to market research and insights, some of the most commonly required skills are about being able to work with multiple data sources. Here are three recent job postings that are representative of the many similar postings currently on job boards:
- Senior manager, integrated analytics and market research: “Serve as a leader in integrating primary research and analytics insights with cross functional findings … and translating into strategies and organizational actions that drive tangible growth in revenue or profit.”
- Senior manager global market research: “Design and implement market research to answer business questions based on comprehensive integration of primary, secondary and competitive intelligence sources … Position requires the ability to synthesize multi-sourced, complex information …”
- Client insights senior director: “The ideal candidate has demonstrated insights and analytics experience, is passionate about customer centricity and loves data and research … integrate solicited and unsolicited/transactional client data, including (but not limited to) periodic and continuous customer feedback; operational data; insights from customer advisory boards; digital and care/service data; client feedback; and more.”
“I have to be an expert in what?!”
Being qualified to work in a data-integrated role does not mean having to be hands-on in every data type, source or method. Not everyone needs to know Python. Not everyone needs to know Tableau. This is just like not everyone needs to know hands-on how to conduct professional survey research or employ social listening tools. But for most people to be effective working in new organizational structures, they will need to know a few things:
- What are the various data types and sources available to the organization? This includes those from the categories of customer data, transactional data, Web analytics, secondary data and market research data.
- What are the relative strengths and weaknesses?
- When and why might we be able to use the data to support customer insight needs?
This type of knowledge reflects a level of data fluency that will allow a professional to be successful in a customer-centric, data-driven organization.
Vertical career path
For market researchers looking to achieve a vertical career path of director level or higher, being data-fluent will be especially critical. This means being a data-agnostic advisor (and not being biased in favor of surveys, focus groups and other conventional research methods).
Senior-level leaders need to know when to use various data sources and types and when and how to combine them. Remember, the C-suite wants next-generation leaders – and data fluency is part of that equation. The researcher who sees every customer insight need as being addressable by using surveys or focus groups is not on the vertical path. That’s fine – being a specialist is a choice. But it will have limited vertical path options.
New skills
As market research and insights professionals think about their career plans, be sure to consider the corporate initiatives that are driving new job skill requirements. This will help you avoid getting caught up in hyped up trends and tool-level thinking. Employers will value people who can help lead the customer-centric, data-driven organization. Sure, many research professionals will have to increase their knowledge in some areas – in particular, their knowledge of non-MR data sources and new methods. But becoming data-fluent at that level is doable.
And there is more good news.
First, market research and insights professionals have much to bring into integrated organizations. Many research professionals have skills in understanding business goals, creating and communicating actionable recommendations, conducting various analyses and in using techniques such as storytelling to ignite insights. These skills are of great value to a customer-centric, data-driven organization.
There are very few people who have years of experience working with data from multiple types, sources and methods. This is all still new and evolving rapidly! Market research and insights professionals who do need to add some new skills are not behind. Yet.
1Numerous articles in leading business magazines have covered the spread of agile management and processes. This December 2016 Forbes article on agile managementincludes some great examples.
2This is a classic MBA topic: the impact of organizational structure on business success. The original research on this topic is published in the business school classic, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, by Alfred Chandler (the Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian and former Harvard professor).