The panel included moderator Nandita Sen, Senior Director of Research, Analytics & Insights at InfoVision; Kerry Sette, Vice President, Head of Consumer Insights & Research at Voya Financial; Tamar Rimmon, Vice President, Research and Analytics at Fandom; and Prab Sundaram, Director, Global Consumer Insights at Energizer Holdings, Inc.
Insights as Currency
Nandita Sen: The fireside chat topic is delivering your insights impact. We live in a world where insights are currency. We can lean this through data, through experience, through intuition. All of that makes for a very transformative experience for brands, for industries, for communities. One thing I do feel, though, that when delivering these insights, you must make them actionable, meaningful. That’s both an art and a science but in my experience, it’s both sort of the right brain and the left brain that needs to fuse well. In your current journey, what does impact mean to you when it comes to delivering insights?
Kerry Sette: I’ll just start by saying that awareness of the work that’s being done, utilization of the insights, that’s definitely necessary but insufficient conditions for impact. But for us at Voya, it’s all about that we enable growth. We are growth enablers as an insights function, and also what’s really important to us is that we ensure that we’re retaining our clients. We also constantly talk about land, expand, and deepen. First, we must win new business. We must expand the relationships with our current customers, making those relationships much stickier. Then we have to deepen those relationships over time. That means getting our clients and their end customers to use our products and services, to use our technology platforms, and really just ensure that we have very strong engagement. From an impact perspective, we have lots of different types of ways that we measure.
Tamar Rimmon: Building on that, I think that the impact is measured in the action that is taken on the insights. Interesting and informative is not enough. It must be something that people actually take an action on. To me, our impact is really measured in the real-life applications of the insights that we shared, of how people either internally or external clients take what we found out and do something with it. It must resonate, be meaningful and it must be actionable. And it must mean something that can change, your team thinking, your stakeholders. You take them through an internal journey as well as to a broader audience.
Prab Sundaram: I look at impact a few different ways. First, it’s when you get asked the questions. You’re in a meeting, the brand folks are presenting, and the CMO or the category leader looks at you and asks, what is your opinion on it? That to me is impact. That means you have influenced insights at the C level for them to lean on you and say what do consumers think about it? That is a big deal for me. That is impact. Another option is when I get emails from international marketing folks saying, thanks for that research, it helped us gain additional shelf spacing. That’s a big deal. It’s tough to showcase ROI on insights. But when you start adding the dollar figure to the additional two or three SKUs that ends up on the shelf, that is enormous. The final thing is the tangible evidence, at least in the CPG side, when you walk around the store and you see a packaging or a new product or a communication element, that you know you influenced through insights and that is sitting in the store when you walk around it, that is fulfilling. That to me is another way I feel the impact of the work that we do.
Measuring Impact
Sen: How do you measure the impact of your insights? And the metrics, have they differed from the last few years?
Sette: Obviously, over time, I think we’ve gotten a lot better about just real time continuous measurement. But how do we measure impact? I would say it depends. Our approach is probably a lot more academic in nature. We absolutely subscribe to goal setting theory and smart objectives. But it really depends on the audience. It depends on the business outcome expectations. But the approach is always the same. We define the goals at the outset. They’re not done later. If the goal is to drive awareness of a campaign, we’re not changing it to something else like a sales tactic at the end. Sometimes you have to remind even your CMOs of this, what the main objectives were. Is it to optimize this campaign, before we go to market? Is it what we call a disaster check, which is we’re not optimizing, we’re sticking to our messaging, but we want to understand the impact if we have to mitigate any negative reactions to it. So, our approach, again, in goal setting theory, we define it at the outset, specific, realistic, actionable. It’s defined by the business objectives, the marketing objectives.
We typically will have short, mid, and interim objectives along the way, and then we also want to optimize at the end. That’s sort of our overall goal and approach. Today, I think we’re getting a lot better at measurement. I think there’s a lot of different types of methods that we have today that we didn’t have before.
We’re also getting more efficient in terms of speed, and integrating not just perception metrics, but also integrating that with behavioral metrics. Working hand in hand with our heads of analytics who are day in and day out looking at our book of business. We put those together, and what it often does is paint a very good picture of are we actually having impact in the market in relation to our specific goals?
Rimmon: There are kind of two layers to this. There’s work that we do where we can point to tangible, measurable impact. For example, if we do UX research and we can say the product was changed in these ways as a result of our findings, and this was how it impacted the KPIs that we care about. That’s very tangible. If we do work for clients and we can say we were able to sell more campaigns through this insight work, that’s again something that’s very easy to say. We drove this immediate result. But a lot of times, I think for research, because we’re supporting the decision making of other people, there isn’t this direct relationship.
One of the things I’m really interested in measuring with the team is just how many people invite us into the room, how many different stakeholders do we work with. Because the reality is that if you’re impactful, then people want your insights. They ask for them. And so one of the things we’ve been really focused on this year is measuring how big our circle of influence is, because I think it’s a very good indirect metric that shows that people actually find value in the work that you provide for them.
Sundaram: My response might be the most unattractive one. I measure impact by the volume of what we do. We’re creating demand. The more demand is there, the more recognition we are getting and more people are asking for us. That is the volume I’m talking about.There’s one portion of it, and volume is not just a black and white thing as well. Kind of what Tamar mentioned, it is about the influence you’re having. How much have you influenced your R&D team to ship out products and have consumers test it? How many are you doing compared to what you’re doing two years back?Have you showcased a more cost-effective way and in a quicker manner?
That all creates more demand, and we are doing a lot more today. Same thing if you look at the media team.How much have you influenced them in the early stages of media targeting, the audience buy, going all the way through measuring the media buy? It is about the influence and all influence across the organization in different teams that circles back to higher demand. That volume has helped me grow my team and helped me ask for more resources so people see the value of what we are doing.These guys are doing some good work. People are doing a lot more than what we were doing two years back. These guys deserve a little bit more budget and more manpower.It doesn’t happen that quickly but at least keep asking.
Watch the video for more of the session on delivering insights impact, as the panelists discuss the influence artificial intelligence has made on the insights community.
