The Insight250 spotlights and celebrates 250 of the world’s premier leaders and innovators in market research, consumer insights and data-driven marketing. The inaugural list was revealed this April and created renewed excitement across the industry whilst strengthening the connectivity of the market research community.
With so many exceptional professionals named to the Insight250 it seems fitting to tap into their expertise and unique perspectives across an array of topics. This weekly series will focus on doing just that; inquiring about the expert perspectives of many of these individuals in a series of short topical features.
This article features two exceptional academic experts who are educating the next generation of data-driven professionals – Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and Paul Baines, Professor of Political Marketing & Associate Dean at University of Leicester.
As markets become increasingly complex and consumers become savvier, preparing professionals to analyse and understand the landscape of business and politics relies more and more on data-driven approaches and innovation. Peter and Paul share their perspectives on a variety of topics surrounding the education and preparation of the next generation of data-driven professionals.
Crispin: Why do you feel it is important for the next generation to embrace innovation and what do you see as the drivers of research innovation over the next few years?
Paul: “Innovation is the lifeblood of any business, and the market insight profession is no different from that perspective. All firms need to stay ahead of the competition and the research profession plays a role in ensuring that, and this is partly by innovating their own techniques. Drivers of innovation in market insight are usually linked to technological advancements. Quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and other such developments are likely to profoundly change the discipline.”
Peter: “Forty years ago I was convinced to get a PhD in marketing by a professor at MIT since a new science was being developed that was essentially the electronic microscope of the customer. I look at so much of marketing today and really on the surface it is no different than it was 60 years ago. We’re still doing the same sort of ‘Here is the product. Who should we sell it to? How do we get them to buy more and tell their friends?’ Now that we have the electron microscope of the customer let’s do things differently. It’s not so much throwing out the old rules, but let’s use innovation with a fresh look and get better results. It’s been pretty darn disappointing so far based on what we have seen. Data innovation is important because the system is broken and it needs to be fixed and that’s what I have been pushing for really hard.”
Crispin: Do you feel the next generation of leaders you are teaching are open to innovation and if so how can this be encouraged?
Peter: “They are clamoring for it. I am teaching the same stuff I did 10 or 15 years ago. Bit by bit the world is shifting in the right direction. For me it is kind of right place, right time. Also, some folks are seeing the success I have had both commercially with startups I have developed and the uptake of the content I put out there.”
Paul: “Yes, most students I teach are interested in innovation in some way and are often more predisposed to it than more experienced individuals. Perhaps this is because of their inexperience and the fact that they don’t have entrenched perspectives on how things ought to be done. They know the future will be shaped by artificial intelligence, robotics, financial technologies, cryptocurrencies, the blockchain, quantum computing and much more. There is another angle though: the next generation of leaders have to be open to innovation or they won’t become the next generation of leaders! Innovation is central to leadership.”
Crispin: How can universities, students and enterprises work together to most effectively drive innovation?
Paul: “Most universities run some modules in partnership with business, but these tend to focus around consultancy challenges and perhaps via working with businesses to source guest speakers on a range of different topics. It would be great to see market research agencies partnering more with universities to co-deliver market insight modules and to recruit directly to their graduate programmes from universities. It would be great also to design more internships, placements, and apprenticeship programmes with them too to build the skills necessary for the workforce for tomorrow for the sector.”
Peter: “Oh sure, and we do it terribly and everyone is to blame. On the university side we insist on teaching basically the same old stuff, we just try to do it with a cooler case, like Airbnb instead of IBM, but it’s the same stuff. I think a lot of the issues may be a generational thing. I believe tomorrow’s CEOs will get this, but I believe today’s CEOs are still kind of old school and clinging to the past. At many companies their creativity, their resourcefulness, their analytics skills are just squashed. So, there is still a lot of resistance from both parties, but we are getting there. I give a lot of credit to the digitally native firms since they are rewriting the rule book in a lot of ways.”
Crispin: Peter, you literally wrote the book on customer centricity, entitled Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage. How has customer centricity evolved since your book first came out nine years ago and where do you see innovation taking it in the future?
Peter: “First all, it’s true that maybe I was the first to write a book on customer centricity, but I am standing on the shoulders of giants. My forefathers, especially from direct marketing, came up with a lot of these practices and never got the credit they deserved, never got the full visibility for these ideas. I didn’t really invent this stuff, I just helped to popularize and broaden it. Since then there is a lot more voluntary uptake, instead of companies that were just desperate to try anything. It’s great to see companies doing it in a position of power. The best example being Nike. Here’s a company doing super well already, but they said they can do better. All the things Nike has done to be a direct marketing company, including buying my previous company, have been an amazing wake up call for others. All the more startups building this thinking into their DNA has been great. We are also seeing increased adoption of these concepts with executives like the CFO. So that breadth of buy-in is effective as well.”
Crispin: Do you have any top tips from academia that can help lead to better innovation?
Paul: “I think it’s very important for firms to co-create with their key customers right from the off to develop new propositions, processes, and business models. Roughly 19 out of 20 new consumer products fail, and the principal reason is usually because they do not take customers’ needs into the design of the product. If this is realised too far down the development cycle it then becomes too costly to repair the damage done.”
Paul: You have worked with ESOMAR at both Cranfield and Leicester – why do you feel being involved with associations helps students innovate?
Paul: “I think it’s very important that students become members of a professional body like ESOMAR. Being part of an association helps them see a wider picture of the industry and from the content made available to them through membership they can pick up tips and tricks, both in terms of their career and in terms of how they develop their practice. All practitioners in the market insight industry should become members of a professional body to learn best practice, industry news, and to gain and improve their qualifications. Students are no different and once they’ve gained their academic qualification, they need to gain on the job experience, acquire new skills and gain industry knowledge. Professional bodies help them do that.”
Crispin: Are there examples of innovation from your students – past or present – that you’ve been particularly impressed by?
Peter: “Students will come up with these cool ways of applying these models. One of them is Big Loans which is revolutionizing payday lending, which is a horrible industry that gouges people. They are lowering the interest rates to make it appealing and make it a lifetime value play. Then they develop a credit record so they can eventually get a bank account and they can do some social good. Another one is pediatric asthma at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia using my repeat purchasing models to estimate how likely is this child is going to need inhalers to predict if they are going to be a chronic asthmatic. This is extraordinary. So students have been stepping up to find applications that are good for the world. This is a big reason I love teaching my course.”
Paul: “You tend to see methodological research innovation mainly in doctoral students, who develop new techniques or apply existing techniques to new areas. One of my former doctoral students, a former market research agency owner, used distraction questions in a conjoint analysis survey to identify new segments in a particular industry for a major supermarket research sponsor. That was highly innovative. Another one of my doctoral students has just used a similar approach, discrete choice experimentation, to identify whether or not there is a market for dynamically priced products in the telecommunications industry. That said bachelors and masters students often question the use of ‘tried and tested’ techniques and their questioning does sometimes reveal that there are new and better options available to the researcher.”
Crispin: What is the “secret sauce” that your University uses to help foster a mindset of innovation?
Paul:“We tend to imbue the students with the sheer pace of change, whether that be technological, social, political or economic. We explain that large firms, with the strongest reputations, can fail and that small firms with limited market experience can win out with the right approach. The secret to innovation is always to challenge the existing order no matter how long it’s been in use. The mindset we seek to generate is therefore to be curiosity-driven and to always challenge accepted norms.”
Peter: “It’s always been in our DNA at Wharton. We’ve always cared about genuine, practical value. Not just motivation to solve it, but also in how we solve it. Is there simplicity, scalability, ability to apply them to giant datasets in real time? it is going after practical problems in practical ways that can spill into other applications. The school tends to think this way on many levels.”
Crispin: HOT TOPIC – In your experience, what are current students’ attitudes to sustainability, mental wellbeing and diversity and inclusion?
Peter: “It’s really tough out there. I am extremely sensitive to my students having a hard time with school, with life. Wharton is a pressure cooker, and a lot of it is what the students do themselves, feeling they must get that job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and they will do anything they can do get there. There is a lot of difficulty coping. This is not something that is new, but this pandemic hasn’t helped. We’re seeing more of it. I will make that the highest priority when I see a student having a hard time. Sometimes they are too afraid to seek help, but I feel blessed that I can help them in some way.”
Paul: “Our students have a strong belief in sustainability and by and large do what they say they will do. They are much more likely to be vegan, flexitarian, meat-reducing, or vegetarian, for example, in their eating habits to take one example. They are likely to be the first generation to swap vehicles with combustion engines for battery-powered cars. They are much more acutely aware of their own mental wellbeing and are quicker to seek support to maintain it. They are also much more aware of the need for inclusion, and much readier to act in that manner and to call out bad behaviour in this area when they see it.”
TOP TIPS:
Paul: “My top tip in learning about research innovation is to read this book: “Outside Insight: Navigating a World Drowning in Data” by Jorn Lyseggen.”
Peter: “I am going to give you two polar opposite answers. One is to trust me – these models that I have popularized are so incredibly applicable to hundreds of applications. They just work. When I go into a new situation I often know what I am going to see. Beyond that, embrace more natural curiosity. There is very little science in data science. It is mostly about pushing data around and visualisation and querying. It is done in a more mechanical way. I want to get below the data and see what the underlying story or pattern is that is driving the data in the first place. Think about the mechanisms that are driving the data.”
