Increasing the impact of an insights team by organizational evolution- Part 1

The drivers behind the organizational evolution

The findings in this article are based on expert interviews, discussions with Insights colleagues (FMCG, Retail and Consumer Electronics) and an international, qualitative benchmark study by the information service provider mBrain, which takes a closer look at the Insights structures of 4 brands from the fashion and luxury sector. In particular, three aspects emerge:

1. Many Insights departments are still anchored in marketing organizations and are managed by a CMO.
2. Most Insights departments are divided geographically, such as EMEA, the Americas or the Pacific.
3. The typical Insights areas are customer, brand, market, social media, competition and advertising effectiveness. A small minority also covers the area of supply chain insights.

From a content perspective (WHAT is being done and WHERE it is being done), these aspects still make sense, but do they make sense when you focus on stakeholders (for WHOM it is done)?

Insights professionals, whose primary objective is to help and guide brands to move more towards consumer centricity, must also ask themselves how well they are doing in terms of stakeholder centricity because their customers are the stakeholders.

A closer look at stakeholders and their expectations is necessary given the many organizational changes in many industries. Stakeholders’ expectations of Insights Professionals are changing very fast, faster than ever. In the last 3-5 years alone, a large number of new expectations have arisen that present Insight teams with new challenges. These can be divided into two areas:

1. The way Insights departments work and interact
2. The social competencies

If one first takes a closer look at the aspects of work and interaction, the following can be said:

• Insights professionals must be able to derive the right implementation recommendations and accompany the implementation process as such. Very often, the stakeholder wants the Insights professional to make a contribution that goes beyond pure Insights expertise, such as taking their own point of view and discussing issues constructively. In many companies the cooperation often ends with the delivery of the results after the presentation. Frustration is quite high when Insights professionals realize that the results have not been implemented at all or only partially, or when stakeholders realize that, for example, there is no exchange about the implementation, or that the success of the implementation cannot be measured. To combine and link holistic thinking, the recognition of the overall picture and various sources are critical success factors.
• It is equally important that Insights professionals can work in cross-functional teams/projects, especially when it comes to implementing Insights results. For example, the request for a buyer segmentation comes from Marketing, while the cross-functional implementation team also consists of members of the Retail, CRM and MarComms teams. The successful Insights professional thinks holistically and sees himself as the bridge to bring the relevant target groups together for better implementation.
• Insights professionals need to better understand and speak the language of the stakeholder, usually a marketing language. This is associated with the demand that Insights professionals develop a business sense, and understand the stakeholder’s business to a larger degree. Today, reports are often written in one Insights language with many technical terms. A stronger adaptation of the reports to the language of the stakeholders should make the involvement of internal customers and partners more effective, and increase the probability that the results and recommendations will be implemented. Successful Insights professionals are in constant contact with their stakeholders, not just at specific times. They actively participate in important meetings and workshops to gain a deeper understanding of the business, and to be perceived as true business partners.
• Interestingly, stakeholders still expect Insights professionals to provide them with the latest and most up-to-date technologies and/or methods to generate Insights more efficiently and effectively. This does not mean that the stakeholder wants to understand these technologies/methods in every detail. The Insights professional must be the one who knows, understands, can explain, and pro-actively proposes the application of these new technologies/methods with the goal of gaining insights faster, more cost-effectively, and without compromising quality.
• An Insights organization generates many studies over time; each study is usually considered separately and answers a specific set of questions. The successful Insights professional must be able to link the different studies together in order to gain new insights without commissioning additional primary studies. This includes, for example, merging consumer segmentation with shopper tracker data and brand tracker reports to create country reports for a defined set of countries.

If one now considers the aspect of social skills that are necessary for Insights professionals to become accepted and trustworthy partners of stakeholders, the following aspects emerge:

• Insights professionals are expected to act as thought leaders or sparring partners. Actively participating in meetings with stakeholders, assuming the role of the constructive challenger and bringing new and inspiring perspectives to the fore. This also includes influencing the stakeholders, e.g. through the research briefing of the stakeholder: discussing, constructively challenging and making suggestions, always with the business objective in mind, is central to a successful Insights professional. A fully focused and informed research assignment that contains the burning questions so that the appropriate answers can be found is an important milestone for future successful results.
• Moderation, storytelling and communication skills, including the corresponding visualization, are becoming increasingly important. The aim is to convey the Insights results in the right format, and in the right language, so that the implementation can follow smoothly and accordingly. Slides with too many statistics, illustrations and metrics, which are still widely used, are boring and lead to drops in attention. The Insights professional must understand the “So-What” and pack the relevant details into good stories in the language of the stakeholder. This enables the important messages to come across effectively.
• The role of the Insights professional also includes connecting Insights specialists and developing them into synthesis specialists. The aim is to bring traditional market researchers together with data scientists, business intelligence experts, CRM specialists, etc. to discuss current findings and latest challenges. In this way, the various perspectives can be brought together and combined to form an overall picture. The Insights professional changes from a reactive to a proactive mode of collaboration and can thus grow into the role of the driver of customer-centric activities.

In summary, it can be said that the ability to build true partner relationships is clearly a new challenge. The Insights professional must increasingly become a mid- to long-term partner and is no longer anymore a simple data analyst or information provider.