The Value Frontier Is Moving: What Two Years of Listening Has Taught Me

When we launched MRII’s Insights & Innovators podcast two years ago, I knew we were creating a podcast. I didn’t think about the fact that we were also building a running record of a profession going through a remarkable period of change.

Nearly 90 episodes later, we’ve had the opportunity to hear from an extraordinary range of people across the insights business, from brand-side executives, to agency leaders, entrepreneurs, academics and rising stars.

At our two year anniversary mark, it’s a great time to step back and look across all these conversations. Individual episodes may be about very different things. Taken together, though, certain themes keep resurfacing.

One in particular has been on my mind lately: how rapidly the value frontier for insights is moving.

Pam Forbus and I have been exploring this idea in presentations and discussion we lead at conferences this year. We’ve been asking audiences to think about the difference between good insights teams and great ones.  Pam leads the global insights and analytics function at Mondelez and is an MRII Board member.

Good teams answer questions; great teams help shape decisions. Good teams deliver insights; great teams help drive growth. Good teams execute projects; great teams build capabilities. And good teams support stakeholders; great teams influence strategy and action.

Of course, none of this means that answering questions, doing excellent research or delivering meaningful insights has suddenly become unimportant. But increasingly, it’s not enough.

That message comes through again and again in our podcast conversations.

Oksana Sobol, Vice President of Insights and Decision Intelligence at Clorox put it particularly well. She described an insight as a “half product.” The real product is what comes next, be that an idea or a business decision. She challenges insights professionals to stop thinking about shipping decks and instead ask whether they are “shipping the right business decisions.”

Stan Sthanunathan, who headed global insights for Unilever and now is co-founder and Executive Chairman of i-Genie, puts an even sharper edge on it. He argues that insights professionals need the bravery and boldness to deliver a message that makes people sit up and take notice; it’s what he colorfully calls creating an “Oh shit” experience. AI can produce a beautifully written report. The human contribution is asking why and why not, challenging what the data appears to say, and being willing to deliver a point of view people remember after the meeting.

I think that gets to something important. Our profession has always taken great pride, appropriately, in the quality and rigor of our work. But increasingly, the measure of success isn’t simply the quality of what we produce. It’s what happens because we produced it.

Elaine Rodrigo, Chief Insights & Analytics Officer at Reckitt, pushes that thinking all the way back to the beginning of an assignment. Her advice is to start with the business question, not the research project, the research objective or the methodology. And sometimes that may mean deciding that new research isn’t needed at all.

Pam herself was talking about this when she appeared on the podcast early in our run. She said she never saw her job as creating research reports. She saw it as impacting and influencing senior leaders. She told the story of foresight work at Frito-Lay that ultimately helped make the business case for new manufacturing capacity supporting what became a multibillion-dollar business.

That’s business impact in a very tangible form.

So, what’s different now?

People in our industry have been talking about becoming more strategic and earning a “seat at the table” for a while now. I certainly don’t want to suggest that we discovered that idea by doing a podcast.

What does feel different today is the urgency and the primacy of that goal.

Pam and I make a deliberately provocative prediction in our IIEX and TMRE sessions this year: AI will commoditize a meaningful portion of what insights professionals do today. Answers are becoming cheaper and nearly instantaneous. Parts of research execution, analysis and synthesis are increasingly AI-assisted. And insights capabilities that once resided primarily within research departments can increasingly be put directly into the hands of decision-makers.

That changes the equation.

Oksana makes the point quite directly. If our output is “research,” AI can already do some of it and will probably do more. But if the desired outcome is growth ideas and better business decisions, AI can free people to spend more time shaping problems, engaging stakeholders and influencing what the organization actually does.

That’s why the value frontier is moving. If more of the mechanics can be automated, and I think it’s increasingly clear that they can, being exceptionally good at those mechanics won’t differentiate an insights professional or an insights team the way it once did.

So where do we create value?

The answer I hear across our podcast conversations is not in one place. It starts earlier, with understanding the business and making sure we are solving the right problem. It extends into connecting research with other data, analytics and business knowledge. And it continues well beyond the research itself, through judgment, recommendations, communication, influence and action.

And this isn’t only an issue for corporate insights teams.

Nick Graham, who led insights at Mondelez and now has an advisory business working with agency and client side teams, argues that we should think of ourselves as “insight driven growth owners.” Research and analytics may be our particular expertise, but they aren’t the ultimate deliverable. The job is helping the business find and unlock growth opportunities.

That has implications for agencies as well. Understanding how to execute a client’s brief is important. Understanding the client’s business, how it makes money, what problems its leaders are trying to solve and where insight can create commercial value is something more.

Rethinking What “Finished” Means

I’m wary of predictions about exactly what AI will and won’t be able to do three or five years from now. If the last couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that those predictions will have a very short shelf life.

But I do feel more confident about something else after listening to all these conversations.

We need to think differently about what constitutes finished work.

Sometimes a report will be the appropriate deliverable. Sometimes it will be a deck. But increasingly, neither will be enough by itself, and might not be needed at all. And even an insight may only get us part of the way there.

The real measure is whether we helped frame the right problem, identify a growth opportunity, clarify a choice, give a stakeholder greater confidence to make a decision, or help an organization act.  Of even higher value will be bringing a bold recommendation to the table. 

As Stan Sthanunathan put it, “It’s not about how smart you are; it’s about what decisions you can actually influence.”

Getting there requires more than excellent research skills. It requires understanding the business, exercising judgment and being able to influence what happens next.

Two years ago, we launched Insights & Innovators to share innovative and enduring best practices from some of the best minds in our profession.

Nearly 90 conversations later, I’m struck by how much innovation we’ve heard about, and how much more is surely coming.

But I’m also struck by the challenge our guests keep putting in front of us. As more of the work of producing research and insights becomes easier, faster and more widely available, we have to keep raising the bar on what we do with it.

That may be the biggest lesson I’ve taken from our first two years.

And it raises another question I’ve been thinking about: if the value of insights work is changing, how do we make sure our own skills keep changing with it?   I’ll take that up in my next piece.