“Consumer insights can no longer afford to be the order taker. That’s just not good enough.”
versus somebody who works in a bank or an automotive company or B2B company for that matter. It’s the same with seeing “lack of control over activation of insights” as a weakness . I think if you are influencing the business, you’ve managed to not necessarily control, but to actually impact the way the business is done, the way the business is run or the way the brand strategies are articulated. I think for people in a function like insights to say it’s a weakness, I’m sorry, but then you just don’t get it. You also have no control over product production, because that’s not what the Insights role does. Other people do that. So the question is, to what extent are you able to inspire, enable, and optimize the business with human-centricity? “Not a revenue generating function” is also not a weakness . I always compare insights to an old- fashioned radio where you have a big knob
knob, the volume– i.e., by adding more advertising budget. But if you’re not spot on the station, you’re just creating noise, whereas if you’re spot on with your tuning, i.e. a really insightful insight or data set, then you know it can work at lower and higher volumes. It just depends on the budget that you have available. The role of insights is to get your organization tuned to the right station. I think that’s as revenue generating as making advertising. There is an opportunity with data overload– as opposed to perceiving it as a threat . But the role of the insights function is to drive simplicity and to turn what can feel like data overload into meaningful information for the business. For an Insights person to say I’m overloaded with data is strange to me. It’s about finding the right data and finding the synthesis that makes the learning accessible for the organization.
Stephan Gans SVP, Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer PepsiCo
that you have to tune- - you can be close to a station and then you can turn up the other
INSIGHTS SPEND & TRENDS REPORT 2023
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