How to be a progressive insights leader

With technology continuing to advance, constant budget constraints and the need for businesses’ to gain a competitive advantage, it's clear that now is the time to ensure your team is looking ahead to prepare for what the future of insights holds.

But where to start? What areas should you hone in on to put your team in the best position to thrive in the future state of insights? 

From structuring your team for success to incorporating AI in productive ways, here are all the areas you need to stay on top of to be a progressive insights leader. 

To truly set your team up for success, it’s important to stay on top of what the role of insights looks like in the future. 

Insights teams that have been led to lean into new technology and focus on getting relevant consumer insights into the right hands at the right time are the ones who will succeed in the future. 

“Your team’s role isn’t to single-handedly run all the research in the business or to control access to consumer data. It’s to help and empower people across the organization to use meaningful consumer insights where and when they need them, so they make the best, consumer-oriented decisions. Your team can provide the competitive advantage of today: True consumer centricity.”

— Ryan Barry, President, Zappi

Zappi President Ryan Barry recently shared some of his biggest takeaways from conversations he’s had with insights leaders who are leaning into these changes. Check it out to see what you can do to set your team up for success in the future. 

2023 will likely be remembered as the year of scalable artificial intelligence. Which is why it’s important to be thinking of how you can incorporate AI into your team in productive ways.

While it can be daunting to be faced with certain change and yet so much uncertainty around what exactly that change will bring, embracing it and learning about the direction technology is headed will only benefit you and your team. 

“I think the best researchers thrive on change because they want to be on the cutting edge of their industry and of technology. So when something like generative AI rolls around, their first reaction is not how will this impact my job? Their first reaction is how can I get my hands on this thing because I have three ideas on how to use it in my job already?”

— Oksana Sobol, Insights Lead at The Clorox Company

Our founder and CEO, Steve Phillips, recently shared his predictions on how he expects AI to affect insights. Take a look for some insight into how you can help prepare your team to work with AI, rather than be replaced by it.

The changing role of insights means that successful insights teams of the future will need to be staffed and structured in a different way than the way most are structured today.

As a skilled insights leader, it’s up to you to guide your team through this change. Check out some tips from our CEO Steve Phillips on how to structure your team for success, outlined in the blog below. 

In addition to structuring your team for success, another important step you may need to take is to ensure you have the right skills on your team.

Ask yourself: What skills should you influence your team to hone in on? As you’re staffing your team of the future, what are the insights skills you should be looking for? 

“It just takes one person to drive change. Never underestimate the power of a single person within an organization.”

— Lauren Stafford Webb, CMO, SoFi

To help you get started, Julio Franco, Chief Customer Officer at Zappi, recently shared the top six skills on his radar. 

Too much of the market research conducted today reflects outdated practices. It is expensive, done too late and often fails to provide actionable findings. If this continues, research will only deliver a fraction of its potential value and risks becoming left behind in the digital age. 

“Everyone is so resource constrained. Everyone is getting squeezed. You really have to do things differently. You cannot do the same thing that you used to do 5-10 years ago.” 

— Joseph Chen, former Insights Lead at Mondelēz

So while traditional research may have served you in the past, it will not help you or your team succeed in the future of insights. As a leader, investing in the right research solutions and systems is an important step to ensure your success in the future.

Check out what Dan White, marketing expert and illustrator with 33 years’ experience in brands, advertising, and market research, had to say about where digitization can help.  

Democratization is the future of consumer insights. 

That statement may make some insights leaders and teams a little uneasy, but ultimately it’s key to enabling organizations to be customer centric and to elevating the impact of the consumer insights department.

In order to succeed in the future where insights teams have a different role, many aspects of your team’s current job need to be democratized to other teams. 

“What we needed to do was transform the perception of the role of insights from a doer that provides support, to a strategic partner to the different key stakeholders. And for that, we first needed for the local insights team to be able to focus their time on more strategic projects and not be drowning with very recurrent simple tasks.”

— Jennifer Picard, Head of Centre of Excellence for Mix Optimization at Pernod Ricard

To get started, check out the blog below where Zappi President Ryan Barry outlines his insights into why this is the future of insights and how you can set your team up for success with democratization now.

As an insights leader, your company relies on you and your team to provide a deep understanding of your consumers — so that your brand’s ads land and new products sell.

But your team can’t do it alone. You need the right partners to help you. That’s where your market research stack comes in.

To help you get a handle on the landscape, we talked to over 75 global brands across different industries about what their market research tech stack looks like and compiled those learnings in the blog below.

Last on our list is knowing how to manage your stakeholders to drive change. 

Managing all these changes will certainly be a long journey, but it’s an important one to take to avoid leaving your insights team stuck in the past. 

“The biggest barrier of all is fear.”

— Tony Costella, Global Consumer and Market Insights Director at Heineken

To help get you started, Zappi President Ryan Barry recently compiled his learnings from insights leaders who are at different stages of their insights transformation and placed a few key learnings — from building a vision to establishing champions and more — in the blog below.

Change is constant. So while this isn’t the end-all-be-all list of how to set your team up for success in the future world of insights, it will certainly help you and your team be better prepared for what that future holds.