Greenbook Future List Spotlight: Christopher Beer

Discover how one insights professional blends data journalism, creativity, and empathy to explore culture, trends, and the future of market research.

by Karen Lynch

Head of Content at Greenbook

Editor’s Note: The following interview features a 2025 Greenbook Future List honoree, Christopher Beer. 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.

From turning cultural quirks into viral data visualizations to unearthing unexpected truths through market research, Christopher Beer, Senior Data Journalist at GWI, blends analytical rigor with artistic flair. Whether dissecting calorie counts in Bridget Jones’ Data, identifying song title trends, or analyzing shifting public sentiment, he brings the same curiosity and empathy to every project. With a background in data journalism, a love for storytelling, and a passion for bringing clarity to complexity, his journey reflects the evolving, human-centered future of insights.

Outside of insights, what are your passions and interests?

It seems like working on insights in my day job isn’t enough, as I spend a fair bit of my spare time working on data journalism projects for areas I care about, which I upload to Instagram and Reddit. Many of them have got significant reach, and it’s always satisfying to see a chart you thought was a good idea resonate with so many people. I’ve done almost 100 now, and I love choosing data that’s a bit leftfield. Some personal favorites include identifying the most common song titles of all time, the most Christmassy non-Christmas films, and a project called “Bridget Jones’ Data”, which tracked all the calories, alcohol, and cigarettes consumed by the namesake character in her famous diary.

This all came about because I saved up a bit of money during the pandemic, which I used to do a coding course and I remember having an epiphany when I realized just how much data there was in the world, and how many stories you could tell.

To be clear – I do have a life outside of data as well! I’m really into sport, and I’ve been a recreational footballer and runner for many years, as well as racket sports. I also like to indulge my cultural side, and you’ll often see me at an art exhibition, the theatre, or a standup show. My father lives in the Middle East (Doha), and from my trips there I’ve acquired a real taste for painting from Arab and Persian countries. Their artistic heritage is so different to mine, with much more emphasis on calligraphy than portraiture, that I always come back fizzing with new ideas.

Who is your career role model or source of inspiration?

Honestly, one of the reasons I like working in insights is that it’s such a relatively new field, you can take inspiration from anyone and anywhere. I’ve been very lucky to work with some brilliant people, and I have to mention my current manager Vic Miller, who manages to blend a very empathetic manner with fearless advocacy. She also has years of experience working in digital content, and she’s good at making sure we convert data into great storytelling.

As a data journalist, I take a lot of inspiration from brilliant writers like John Burn-Murdoch, Ed Conway, and Andrew Van Dam. They’re true masters of their craft at every stage, from sourcing the data, to visualizing it and communicating the key findings. I’d also have to mention Max Roser, the founder of Our World in Data, for his work in making vital information easily accessible to so many people. I also admire the work Andrew Tenzer and Ian Murray have done highlighting biases and blind spots possessed by marketers.

As a final curveball, I’ve always been massively inspired by Hazel from Watership Down (the book about rabbits that was also made into a film that traumatized generations of British kids). For anyone who doesn’t know, the book describes how he and a group of rabbits flee their warren after Hazel’s brother has a vision predicting its destruction, eventually founding their own warren at the titular location. Hazel assumes a position of leadership, and demonstrates all the key traits that it demands. He listens. He puts others first. He’s inclusive, bringing new animals – not just rabbits – into the group. He’s compassionate, he protects the weak. He delegates to people with more skill than him. He has a vision, can articulate it, and motivate people towards that goal.

What is the most valuable lesson you have learned from market research?

This is a great question as I’ve learned a lot from market research, certainly a lot more than I would have ever expected.

I’ve learned that “the average person” is often more clued-up than I am. Before working in market research I was probably guilty of a college-educated bias, a feeling that I had all the answers because of my education. Now, I know that if a high proportion of people are giving a clear signal or trend of something in your research, chances are they know something you don’t. It sounds like a horrible cliche, but market research has genuinely made me more empathetic.

That feeling of empathy has developed even further by spending lots of time studying particular countries, communities, and audiences. I’ve come to respect cultural context a lot more in how it dictates human behavior, and had to abandon a lot of my old assumptions about what “normal” behavior is. I’m very glad to have had this lesson, as I feel less likely to make instinctive moral judgements about groups of people, focusing instead on understanding how their environment shapes behavior.

I’ve also learned so much about human biases and how inescapable they often are. As so much of my work is about trying to understand future trends, I’ve also learned the special biases that afflict us when trying to predict the future. I’ve learned you must respect the inherent uncertainty of the world, while also acknowledging the importance of historical context and statistical base rates. I cringe now when I think about some of my old opinions and predictions.

What do you think the key characteristics or qualities of a leader are? How does this play into MRX?

I’ve spent almost all my life playing and watching football, so when I think about great leadership, those are the examples I tend to look up to. The best captains I’ve played with, or watched, tend to share the following traits:

Leading by example – the best leaders demonstrate the behaviors that others should follow.

Bravery – the best leaders don’t go missing. Even when times are tough, they front up, and find ways to get out of it.

Patience – good leaders understand that new arrivals take time to settle in and regularly check in on their emotional wellbeing.

Talent-spotting – the best leaders can identify the strengths of people they work with, and put them in positions where their strengths shine.

Strategic – good captains figure out a plan, communicate it clearly and consistently, and motivate people to buy into it.

Sensitivity – the ability to identify if someone isn’t performing, but more crucially, recognize it may be due to things beyond their control. If a star player experiences a drop in form, do you have a go at them, or do you investigate further? A good leader does the latter.

Direct, clear feedback – on a football pitch you soon know if you’ve done something wrong, but the best captains and leaders don’t just point out mistakes – they get to the root of the problem. A goal might look like your mistake, but the real problems could have happened elsewhere on the pitch.

Possibly the worst type of leader in my experience is what we’d call in football “passion merchants” (in a corporate context we might call it “performative leadership”). These are people who seem to make the right signals – they might talk in a motivational way, and play up the importance of working hard, but there’s no substance to what they say, and no strategy. Everything is just “one big push” that eventually burns people out, or gets found out by strategic opponents and competitors.

Where do you see the future of insights heading in the next 10 years?

I think AI is going to be a massive game-changer for our industry and while it’s hard to pin down specifics, there are some broad predictions I’d make.

Until now I think insights professionals have almost been treated like a priestly caste in the workforce – you’re the guys who know data, you know the numbers, we trust you to get on with it. I think that AI will strip away that kind of aura we’ve been able to enjoy until now – the research and insight process will be much more democratized. From my own experiments, AI is already better at analyzing data than I am, faster, cheaper, better at writing, and it will soon outperform me in secondary research.

To be clear, I think this is a net good – I’m really excited by the idea that, let’s say, young people who want to start a business now can get access to high-quality market research for a much cheaper price. I think that will benefit everyone. And I don’t think our profession will disappear, but it will have to adapt.

I have some experience of this as my very first job was actually in sound recording, specifically audiobooks and podcasts. Audiobooks used to be entirely recorded in studios, with three people in the control room – a producer, an engineer, and a tape operator.

Now, people can record themselves solo in their bedroom, and production costs have plummeted. But there is still a place for producers and engineers at the top-end of the market, for the premium recordings, those with big casts, and those with sound effects (like children’s books).

I think similar things will happen with knowledge work across the board, and it’s a good incentive for us to raise our game. And while AI is immensely powerful, it will have blind spots that humans can exploit. Large language models are heavily biased toward content published on the internet, so there’s a real incentive to explore more of the wisdom found in books that are obscure or out of print. They will also likely have certain cultural biases that will need humans to overcome.

More to the point, when everyone is using AI, taste will become a big differentiator in output. My ideal scenario is AI takes more of the grunt work involved in research and we can spend our time crafting the best stories that can really inspire people to take action. And while AI’s creative qualities are impressive, I do think its outputs will tend towards a safe working average, and we can take advantage by taking more daring approaches.

If you could change one thing about insights, what would it be?

I worry sometimes that we bias our findings – put our thumb on the scale, so to speak – too much, and especially in recent years have become more concerned with reporting the world as we’d like it to be, rather than what it actually is.

One of the biggest trends at the moment is a broad collapse in trust of institutions, which we’ve seen in our own research at GWI. I fear the market research industry may be caught up in that. To maintain trust, we have to be as scrupulously objective as possible. In the last few years especially, I feel like we’ve overlooked too many polarizing trends – like shifts in public sentiment around immigration and transgender issues – that significantly impact society. Regardless of your views, we have a duty to report what’s going on, and if we avoid doing so, it might diminish our credibility.

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Karen Lynch

Head of Content at Greenbook

283 articles

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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.