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Dana Stanley
Greenbook’s Chief Revenue Officer
Categories
May 9, 2023
Esi Akaltun, Senior Manager, Customer & Product Insights, 2023 Future List Spotlight
Editor’s Note: The following interview features a Greenbook Future List honoree, Esi Akaltun. The Greenbook Future List recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, passion, and excellence in the next generation of…
Editor’s Note: The following interview features a Greenbook Future List honoree, Esi Akaltun. The Greenbook Future List recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, passion, and excellence in the next generation of consumer insights and marketing professionals within the first 10 years of their careers.
Introducing Esi Akaltun of Hims & Hers
Esi Akaltun is an exceptional mixed method researcher who has been successfully delivering strategic insights for the past 7 years on the research agency side, at C Space, and on the brand side, at Hims & Hers. Esi is passionate about trying new research methodologies, embarking into new research topics no one has tackled before, and helping companies make impact in industries that haven’t been touched.
She has been building an intent-based customer segmentation for the organization’s categories to bring to life who their customers are and create actionable plans for each category. They explore the website flows through this lens, and build an audience strategy based on this lens. The organization very often uses her frameworks.
Here’s a quote from her manager that describes Esi’s passion for research methodologies: “Esi has mastered how to do consumer insights and translate it to a digital product company – insights work is not always actionable and product teams at tech startups aren’t usually used to taking action based on insights work. Esi has placed herself strategically with teams to translate complex, emotional insights to their tactical needs in order to create actionable plans.”
Outside of insights, what are your passions and interests?
I love new experiences and diving deep into a hobby for months at a time: most recently this has been hot yoga and surfing, though I also have life-long practices such as playing the piano, ceramics and free diving. My friends sometimes call me an old soul – I have a dog, a bike, and I love to cook multi-course meals for hours, only to serve the food on plates that I’ve made. This one is more related to insights: I am also deeply passionate about social impact and partner with local non-profits whenever possible to help with customer-centric research strategies, such as building customer journey maps or helping run workshops.
When did you know you wanted to enter a career in insights, and what inspired you?
Being from Turkey, a land of complex history and socio-political structures, I’ve always been curious about the human condition and what drives us. When I moved to the US for university, I landed in a Sociology major and fell in love with the field – the idea of looking at complex systems of humans and building theories out of it clicked with me. I decided to stay in research, but did not want to commit to a single line of study for the rest of my life.
After conducting research for a think tank in Italy, a non-profit in Turkey, and many other studies for my field – producing knowledge did not feel enough, I wanted to be able to have conversations around it and make change that I played a role in. That’s when I found out about insights — I love that I can keep doing research on different topics, keep learning and digging, and translating insights to a new language (corporate, marketing, engineering, you name it) to make impact in an organization. Seeing the tangible impact in customers’ experiences is invaluable.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your career, what advice would you give to your younger self?
For every ‘cool’ project, there is another project or role that simply doesn’t click with you or your interests. Learning to see the balance of the two, and staying open minded (or even enjoying!) the projects/roles that don’t mesh well with you is a big gift. These are the moments you’ll grow the most. For every ‘cool’ project in market research, there is another project or role that simply doesn’t click with you or your interests. Learning to see the balance of the two, and staying open minded (or even enjoying) the projects/roles that don’t mesh well with you is a big gift. These are the moments you’ll grow the most.
Tell us about any advocacy/volunteer/association work you’re doing within the industry. What issues are you trying to solve? Why is this work critical for the industry?
I am passionate about social impact and I partner with non-profits who may have insights challenges, but not necessarily the budget or personnel. For these organizations, I help bring in new ways of thinking and research processes such as ethnographies, journey mapping, workshops and activation strategies. Sometimes my work is in the form of consulting and conversations, other times I play the role of a pro-bono teammate. Previous to Hims I worked at an agency, and there I started our office’s non-profit consulting arm. We partnered with a local organization in NY to run co-creation workshops and re-create their customer service strategy.
Where do you see the future of insights heading in the next 10 years?
It’s interesting – as much as insights is such a human industry, that requires human skills, human conversations… technology is completely changing the industry. Now, many new insights companies are software companies: offering faster analysis, faster access to consumer responses, better data visualization, better transcription. There’s a bit of a tension between insights professionals and emerging tools — perhaps because tools are not there yet or that many professionals don’t feel comfortable relying on the tools. I definitely think technology is here to stay, but we’ll either watch it evolve and redefine insights, or find ways to complement & collaborate.
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Disclaimer
The views, opinions, data, and methodologies expressed above are those of the contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect or represent the official policies, positions, or beliefs of Greenbook.
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