Energizing the Insights Function in the World of Tech with Marie Van Blaricum, Google

On a past episode of MRII’s Insights and Innovators podcast, our host Stan Stunathan spoke with Marie Van Blaricum, senior director of global insights at Google, about what it takes to energize the insights function inside fast-moving tech environments. Van Blaricum drew on her experience across CPG and technology, including leading research innovation at Unilever, heading insights at AB InBev and now driving transformation at Google. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A drawn from that conversation.

You have worked in CPG and now in tech. What are the biggest differences in the insights function across those worlds?

There are actually a lot of similarities. At the foundation, the role of insights to understand people holistically, understand their needs and merge that with best practices in marketing and business opportunities are very similar.

Some of the differences are the speed and the rapid cycles of change. In technology, you’re launching lots of products, but they’re not always something consumers can touch and feel. The cycles are really quick.

The role of marketing and the role of insights is also a little bit different. In CPG, you oftentimes own the whole entire funnel and you’re very early on designing innovations and thoughtfully setting full funnels and strategies and segments. In tech, you’re running and going quite quickly with the pace of change and working closely with your marketing partners and your product partners to translate technology, features and upgrades to what really matters for humans and for people around the world.

How has your career path shaped the way you lead insights today?

I specialize in large-scale transformations in insights, analytics and digital marketing. I spent my first decade in more traditional insights, learning every aspect of marketing. You learn how to make great ads because you test hundreds of ads. You learn about all elements of mixes and business models.

In my second chapter, when Stan Stanunathan came into Unilever, I switched more over into how can we really advance the function, how can we drive innovation and insights, merging my lifelong love of technology. I led research innovation at Unilever and also helped set up the digital hubs and digital marketing at pace with data capability.

After that, I transitioned to head the insights function at AB InBev, so I traded in bar soaps for beer in bars, and then joined Google to lead the transformation across marketing and to ensure that we are championing people and users into the future.

Companies talk about consumer centricity all the time. What do insights teams need to do to earn the status they deserve?

The truth is, it starts with us. We’re not going to suddenly get a phone call to run into the boardroom to give the views.

One of the big angles is how can we be strategic leaders who have a specialty and that specialty is our superpower versus specialists trying to be strategic? We need to help the CMO and executives not only know the user better than anyone else in the company, but also know the opportunities, know the strategic moves we should make, all the way down to how we should optimize to serve the user now.

No one’s going to call us up on our own. We can’t just wait to be invited into the room. We have to think about how we add value and lead with our superpower of insights and data versus focusing only on the tactician part of the role.

Everyone is talking about AI. How do you see AI impacting the world of insights?

With AI, it’s really important for insights to step back. It’s easy to get worried about tools claiming insights. I actually think AI can be the best thing that ever happened to the insights industry.

We’ve been talking for years about switching from the activity of doing the research into being much more business, impact and strategic focus. AI can finally help us pull out of the grunt work and use AI to enable that shift so we can focus on being the dot connectors and strategic leaders and use AI as our superpower.

I use AI almost every single day. Whether it’s using NotebookLM to bring different sources together and provoke my thinking, using AI to connect the dots and clean data across large sets that teams used to spend a ton of time on. If we change our perspective to how we use AI to further enable our superpowers, that is the unlock we need to finally play the role in business that we’ve wanted to play for years.

In a world where skills change quickly, what should insights professionals do to future-proof their careers?

You cannot lose the core kernel of insights, which is curiosity. Curiosity for your own learning, constantly playing around with new tools, reading new sources, doing things that aren’t even in the insights or marketing industry.

The most important thing is adopting and living in that curious, lifelong learner mindset. There are also practical free resources out there. Google has resources on how to upskill in AI, and MRII has fantastic resources around insights and what’s the latest there.

It’s carving the time to make that investment into you, which then pays off into investment in your roles, to be constantly learning and keeping up with what’s the latest tech, what’s the latest in the industry and what’s the latest that we can now step up to do thanks to technology.

What leadership skills matter most right now as the pace of change accelerates?

In times of rapid change, setting a bigger, steady vision is really important. That includes clarity on where we’re trying to go as a function and the impact we’re trying to have, then making sure you have the right processes and teams in place to keep up at pace.

It’s not about switching everything to chase tools. It’s knowing what the goal is with the tools, then piloting, iterating and evolving capabilities fast.

I’m also seeing even more importance placed on leadership competencies. Just knowing methods is not enough because those are changing and being disrupted. Business partnering, storytelling, advocating for a view, doing that faster than ever, expanding a brief, helping teams who are thinking small to think bigger.

Storytelling, effective communication and confidence are increasingly important for being in the center of business discussions. Insights can be a steady force that helps guide the business through change and helps people recenter on why we’re doing this, which is to improve lives and help people around the world.

What decisions helped propel your career that others could learn from?

A leader at Unilever gave me one of the best pieces of advice and it changed how I made decisions. He said, as you’re thinking about your next step, you should always feel both nervous and excited.

If you’re just excited, that’s going to fade once you’re in it. If you’re just nervous, that’s a different issue. Nervous plus excited helped me judge whether the next step would help me grow and learn a lot and also bring my best self. That helped me decide to take roles like AB InBev and then Google.

Another thing is going for unique opportunities that set you apart. Early on, I was fortunate to do a mix of strategic and launch roles, small business and large business roles. Later, going into data-driven marketing, holding a media budget, seeing the business from that side helped expand my perspective and allowed me to give better recommendations and have more impact.

What are the biggest opportunities and threats for the insights industry right now?

A big opportunity is playing the midterm game versus the short, shiny tool. Strategically, what should be our role and what should be AI’s role as enhancement to us. It’s time to do the relaunch we’ve talked about for a long time: how we move from just doing research or delivering insights to being impact organizations.

We also can’t lose sight of the soft skills. Conferences can’t be just on AI enablement. They need to be on who is showing up for their business in a new and strategic way, how we build those skills consistently and how we stay impactful from the specialist human side too.

On threats, I see risk around the definition and quality standards of insights. There are a lot of companies coming in saying they deliver insights. For me, an insight is something that unveils a new business opportunity that has business impact and can spark a great idea. There’s a big difference between an AI-generated single bullet point and something that matches the brand opportunity and the business opportunity.

Insights are going to become a commodity if they’re not already, so the question becomes how you ensure it’s insights into impact. If you stay in insights and let commoditization happen without showing the higher-level impact, that becomes a threat.

Listen to the full episode of MRII’s Insights & Innovators podcast with Marie Van Blaricum here.