Listening Between Worlds: How A Third Culture Kid Mindset Redefines Insights

Brian Fowler with Jonathan Erickson

Jonathan grew up between cultures, spending his adolescence in Bolivia and adulthood in the United States. That experience taught him to listen closely to how identity, environment, and pressure shape the choices people make. His early work was grounded in real-world financial tradeoffs - from subprime lending and microfinance, to financial inclusion product investment, fintech, and retail banking.

After obtaining his Master’s in Market Research & Consumer Behavior at Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, he trained at Ipsos UU Iberia, continuing on to C Space, Comscore, Ducker Carlisle, and Kantar. In each, he’s enabled organizations to align their decisions with the lived realities of the people they serve. He widens access and belonging by making overlooked human truths visible in business contexts, striving to enter new spaces where culture, markets, and identity meet.

Jonathan is an adult Third Culture Kid (TCK) in that, thanks to his parents’ career choices, he grew up in between worlds. Bolivia shaped him through adolescence. The United States shaped him beyond that. Thanks to an upbringing with widely ranging situational and environmental differences, TCKs have a unique ability to listen to how people describe their place in the world. They notice how some people are welcomed easily into systems, while others are held outside, no matter how hard they try.

That early awareness shaped how Jonathan came to research, markets, and strategy. He learned to pay attention to identity, environment, and the pressures that form choice. He also learned how to sit inside someone else’s way of thinking without overwriting it with his own.

The summer before graduating from college put that into focus. Jonathan lived in Denver in a neighborhood where families stretched every dollar. He sold coupon books during the day and, with his college alum housemates, mentored a group of Latino junior high boys in the neighborhood. They played soccer, helped tackle homework, and traded hoops and hopes for the future.

One particular afternoon, Jonathan took them to Young Americans Bank (the world’s only kid-only bank) because they were so excited to have bank accounts. While two boys ran up to start, Jonathan asked one hanging back near the waiting area why he wasn’t interested anymore.

“I can’t do it, man,” he said. “I don’t have papers.”

That moment taught Jonathan that belonging is not just a feeling. It is also a gate. Some kids get welcomed into the simplest parts of society. Others are kept on the margin no matter how hard they try. Jonathan did not have the language yet, but he felt a responsibility to widen the gate.

After graduating second-highest in his Psychology cohort in college, Jonathan started in subprime consumer debt collection in Northwest Arkansas. Real life showed up with hard choices. Instead of simulated conjoints and MaxDiffs, Jonathan started with the ethnographic experience of asking people to make impossible life decisions.

Instead of hypothetical rankings, he saw how people chose to keep their cars, or provide their family another Thanksgiving meal, continue cancer treatment payments, or take their kids (in rural areas) to school. Those mental modalities were people’s lives - there was no comfortable “return to the office to debrief.”

Those stark, painful decisions showed Jonathan how beliefs about money are inherited from family values, cultural norms, financial tools at one’s disposal, and how the glass ceiling hinders progress. He wanted to help people move from reacting to those patterns to understanding them well enough to make life-altering shifts.

That led Jonathan to a year with AmeriCorps VISTA, where he built the infrastructure for Capital Good Fund (CGF), a 3-year-old Rhode Island microfinance organization led by Brown University alumni to create pathways out of poverty through equitable financial services. He trained volunteer financial coaches and wrote the modules they ran through with community clients to achieve their financial goals and increase their credit scores. The program created a pathway for individuals and microenterprise owners to receive subsidized loans, provided they acted on the recommendations of their financial stability coaches. 

Frustrated by the difficulty nonprofit business models faced in scaling their services and offerings, Jonathan sought alternative solutions. He moved to Chicago to intern at the Financial Health Network (FHN), the nation’s leading authority on consumer financial health. Leveraging his previous experience, he humanized the narrative surrounding the $2.5M Financial Capability Innovation Fund II (FCIF II) pilots.

His work took him to Washington D.C., to collaborate with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on promoting how these unique public-private partnerships utilize education and cutting-edge technology, including social networks and behavioral incentives, to achieve higher financial stability outcomes. The FCIF II fund also introduced Jonathan to Ted Gonder, a future Financial Capability White House Advisor, and influencers and authors like behavioral scientist Dan Ariely. 

Shortly after, he worked at a retail bank and volunteered as a UX Researcher for another FHN venture recipient, conducting beta usability tests on a geo-location-based deal-scraping app aimed at helping users get out of debt.

Inspired to gain a stronger understanding of international markets and mindsets, Jonathan chose to study Market Research and Consumer Behavior at IE Business School in Madrid. He had developed one take of the world, influenced by the environment he grew up in, but he wanted to learn how culture shapes identity, trust, and agency from within a culture that was not natively his own. Seeking immersion, not just exposure, he moved to Spain.

After graduate school, Jonathan developed his craft across insights, analytics, and strategy. At Ipsos UU Iberia, he conducted ethnographies, ideation workshops, and in-home interviews. Being in people’s day-to-day environments taught him to understand and respect the choices and the way they do things, and how not to let pre-existing personal or cultural biases influence your personal perspective or the research participants’ experience.

Jonathan further developed his research chops in Boston, informing multi-national decisions with agencies like C Space, Comscore, Ducker Carlisle, and Kantar. He enjoys being at the intersection of human research and enterprise transformation, translating lived realities and clickstream behavior into product priorities, competitive opportunity spaces, segmentation, and go-to-market strategy.

And his work at those companies has driven significant results, including helping an insurance client regain the #2 app position by identifying competitor design advantages, advising a $1.3B fitness brand on its first study of APAC market usage and attitudes, and reshaping a $6B HVAC/Plumbing brand's market re-entry strategy by providing vivid, leadership-changing customer segment insights.

Along with an Insights Career Network co-founder, he recently cofounded the Marketing AI Peer Circle, a 30+ member group of marketers using their curiosity of AI to practically discern how to use tools and workflows for professional development.

Most recently, Jonathan thrived as an Innovation Director, directing $2.5M sales strategies, leading pilot-to-$2M program expansions, and commercially engineering Kantar’s new Brand Sustainability practice launch. Across commercial and social impact spaces, he leads research to shape markets by guiding leaders towards the overlooked or forgotten human truths, whenever he can in cross-cultural settings, leveraging his Spanish.

Growing up between cultures taught Jonathan how to belong by helping others belong. It taught him how to listen across differences and translate perspectives without flattening them. That continues to guide his work with global and multicultural markets. He wants the strategies we chose to reflect the realities people live with, not just the behaviors they perform.

That is still the work. And it is ongoing.