BANG & OLUFSON - Stefanie Zammit, Director, Analytics and Insight. Re-examining the role of analytics and insight; navigating Middle East market research; learnings from Marks & Spencer and Starbucks; key traits of successful agencies.

So delighted to have on Stefanie Zammit of Bang & Olufsen, formerly of  Marks and Spencer, and Starbucks. There’s so much fantastic perspective and insight from Stefanie in this episode….not least do’s and don’ts of work in the Middle East, learning how to socialize research at M&S, and researching at Starbucks during the pandemic. You’ll also learn about Stefanie’s unintended moment of stardom in Sri Lanka…

Some of the key areas in this episode:

• How client side is fundamentally different from agency: “the final report is only the beginning”.
• Research and analytics departments are flip sides of the same coin: distinctions are often artificial and not helpful.
• How insights infrastructure and sequential knowledge building enables you to optimize resources.
• Budget restrictions can sometimes be a benefit (really?...yes!).
• Lessons from mentors
• Hygiene factors and what really makes a good agency stand out
• Key considerations in structuring a research department

Listen in to find out more....

All episodes available at  https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/

Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com

Transcript

Guest intro

Stephanie Zammit 0:09

I know so many people, so many incredible analysts that have such consultative minds, and I think it's unfair to assume that only the research side can think strategically. I mean, what's different is the core skills. I think that's the one where you're either trained in one or the other and, yes, those core skills are different. Everything else is a bias and an assumption that I really think needs to be challenged.

Henry Piney 0:35

Well, what a pleasure to talk to Stephanie Zammett of BBang & Olufsen the podcast. This episode is sponsored by MX8Labs. com, the first research platform built from the ground up for the AI world. Now Stephanie and I have a really wide-ranging conversation here. She has an unusual role and background and, as well as being a lovely person, is a fond and interesting perspective. Stephanie is responsible for both insight and analytics at Bannon Olofsson so, as you've just heard, we discuss similarities and the often falsely perceived differences between the departments. We talk about how you should really do research in the Middle East. We draw on Stephanie's experiences and learnings from other major brands like Marks Spencer and Starbucks, and there's lots of great perspective from in-depth experience on both the agency and client side.

Henry Piney 1:22

So much to get into here. Now just a touch more detail on MX Labs. I definitely check out this platform if you want to supercharge the back office research functions that can often be so frustrating. Mxa's platform is built for AI from the ground up, so the researchers at agencies and in-house departments can use tech to take care of all the time-consuming tasks like programming, link checking, running data, additional data queries. You know the type of thing and they can apply their brains to what really matters. If you want to turn tasks that used to take days into minutes, then check out mx8labscom. Now on to the interview. So, stephanie, firstly, thanks so much for joining today. I know you've got a really busy schedule at the moment and really delighted to have you on the podcast thanks.

Henry Piney 2:10

It's super fun to be here, especially after having been a listener of yours for a while, very recently well, well, thank you, I hope you, I hope you enjoyed it and you've had a bit of a laugh and you've learned a couple of things along the way yes, absolutely, which is exactly what made me reach out, so thank you.

Henry Piney 2:26

Okay, no worries at all. Well, given you've listened to a couple, you probably know what the first question is going to be, which is just something about you that most people don't know or that they might find surprising. You know that isn't easily found in the public domain.

Stephanie's lesser known US political connections.& stardom in Sri Lanka

Stephanie Zammit 2:41

You know you would think I would have prepared an answer to that one. Something you know you would think I would have prepared an answer to that one, Um, something about me that people don't know. I usually my fun fact is about all the places that I've lived in, Um, but that is highlighted pretty predominantly on my LinkedIn profile, Um, so I, I, uh, I won't use that one here as an extremely random one. I I will actually give you two, because now they're, they've both popped into my head. The first is that I am cousins with Pete Buttigieg, who is oh, wow, yeah, yeah, is he a governor?

Henry Piney 3:13

Is that? Right at the moment he was running to be president. He was a presidential candidate at one point.

Stephanie Zammit 3:18

He was a presidential candidate and I think he's a transport minister at the moment in the US.

Stephanie Zammit 3:23

Yes, he's Maltese, as am I ethnically, and yeah, we're pretty closely related.

Stephanie Zammit 3:30

His dad was my dad's godfather, and I think the other fact I was going to give you which couldn't be more different from that one is that when I was a teenager, I was living in Sri Lanka for a couple of years and I agreed to take part in a music video without knowing too much about what I was getting myself into. The music video turned out to be in Sinhalese, which, although I have some, I knew some basic words. I don't I'm not, I don't speak it fluently or anything, so I didn't really know what we were singing about until after the video was released. It turned out to be the song that was used for the election, like one of the party's election song, and the lyrics were essentially about how terrible the West was and how all the Western countries were terrible, and they wanted sort of token you know white folk to play those roles. So it was very unpatriotic of me and it did go viral and I was famous for all the wrong reasons for a couple of years.

Henry Piney 4:28

Well, please tell me you can still find it online and that we can look it up afterwards.

Stephanie Zammit 4:32

You can it's it's quite mortifying.

Henry Piney 4:36

I mean, yeah, mortifying but kind of funny as well. That's a good, that's a good random fact. I like it.

Stephanie Zammit 4:40

You won't find those on LinkedIn.

Henry Piney 4:42

And I've also discovered how you say butachig. Is that how you say it?

Stephanie Zammit 4:46

Butachig yes.

Pathway into the insights sector

Henry Piney 4:48

Butachig, that's it. Okay, something I've learned already and, as you know, I want to pick your brain on lots and lots of different things from when we were chatting. You know, the first chatting a couple of weeks ago. But just to begin with, why don't we just start at the beginning? And how did you get into the insights industry and what pulled you in or attracted you to it?

Stephanie Zammit 5:05

Ah, yes, this is a much more a question I've been asked many times and I love hearing other people's stories as well, because it's always so interesting. I think maybe it's different these days, but back when I joined me and my peers tended to be in the accidental fall into the category sort of group, that was very much me. I was a student at Leeds University doing my undergrad and I picked up a part-time job working for the Times. A friend recommended it for me. It was doing the National Student Survey and Graduate Student Survey, which the Times would then use for their top 100 graduate employers or they did lots of top 100 ranking systems and it was basically that study. So I was an interviewer for my campus. I then graduated in 2008, which was at the height of the recession I don't recommend doing that and there were no jobs. So I literally contacted my old supervisor in that job and just sort of said I'm desperate, Do you have anything? And it turned out that they did.

Stephanie Zammit 6:08

The research was managed by a company called High Flyers I don't even know if they exist anymore. They're like an education research group and I started working in their head office, very fieldwork focused. I ended up looking after a couple of campuses for the same study, but on a more regional scale, and thought you know what? This is actually quite fun. Is this like a thing? Is this an industry, you know? Could I make a career out of this? So I started Googling market research agencies and the MRS had I think it was called the research buyer's guide, where they had a list of all of the research agencies in the UK. I literally went through the list A to Z and emailed out my resume to every single kind of info at you know whatever email address that I could find. So it was a mix of that. And then I will say that a friend of a friend got in touch and put me in touch with a recruiter. That streamlined my efforts significantly.

Henry Piney 7:08

Yeah, and that's how I ended up with my first kind of official gig well, I mean lots of credit to you as well for being so persistent, and so what was the first bit of it that you liked in the field? Was it basically just asking people questions?

Stephanie Zammit 7:21

well, yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I'm such a talker, which is why I bothered you to be on this podcast. I just want to talk to people, and that's what research is for the most part. Of course, it's a lot more than just that, but in the interviewer and moderator side of things, that's the biggest part of the job. I just thought it was fun talking to people and then I started thinking about the information we were collecting and spotting the patterns. As an interviewer myself, the response patterns and being interested in oh, so many people have been saying that or oh, that's interesting. Not many people have mentioned that I was just sort of naturally interested in what we were learning in addition to the actual doing of the research. And then, especially when I was at the head office and there was more opportunity to dabble in the data and sort it and thematically look at it, it just got more and more interesting.

Henry Piney 8:19

What did you do at university in terms of a degree? Just out of interest.

Stephanie Zammit 8:22

Oh, I was going to be a diplomat, so I grew up as an expat kid and all of my friends, their families, were either diplomats, do at university in terms of a degree, just out of interest. Oh, I was going to be a diplomat, so I grew up as an expat kid and all of my friends, their families, were either diplomats or they worked for ng you know, international ngos, um, and that's, that was what I was going to do. I did actually do an internship at the embassy in london. I'm a maltese by citizenship and that was where I learned I definitely do not want to be a diplomat.

Henry Piney 8:45

It's much too political ironically Well, but actually diplomatic skills are probably very, very useful not specifically in your current job, I wouldn't comment on that but in the research sector as a whole. There's probably a lot of diplomacy required in terms of how you present results and how you assuage egos and how you try to sort of take the findings to actually make something happen.

Stephanie Zammit 9:10

I suppose the stakeholder engagement part of it absolutely. But yes, I did international relations as my bachelor and I guess there are you know, I never thought about it that way but potentially some transferable soft skills.

Do's and don'ts of research in the Middle East

Henry Piney 9:22

Yeah, definitely. And now, picking up on the international theme, then. So one of the things that jumped out to me and thank you, by the way, already, because you've already given me some recommendations about agencies in the Middle East that you were working at Ipsos and then you set up your own business in Qatar. So what happened there? I mean, why did you set it up, and what should people be thinking about when they're conducting research in the Middle East?

Stephanie Zammit 9:45

Yes, we moved to Qatar. I was Ipsos London and then transferred to their Doha office and it was a reality check on the stark difference, logistically, of conducting research in the Middle East versus Western Europe or North America. It's a very different situation in terms of the legality of what's possible. I mean, at a very fundamental base, market research is illegal in Qatar. It's considered a form of political canvassing.

Stephanie Zammit 10:18

The idea that you would stand on the street or go door to door and talk to people about things is very much not okay. You need a whole set of government permissions and even with the permissions, it is more often than not that you will be reprimanded for doing so, even with the permissions. And so because of that, a lot of the agencies out there were taking shortcuts, you know, to enable fieldwork to happen in a way that just got it done and didn't necessarily get it done in the way you would robustly in a European or Western market. So I was really unhappy with all of the options out in the Middle East and I met a fellow researcher, an Australian, and she sort of had the idea of saying, well, we could just do our own thing, seeing as no one else is doing it. I mean, it's an obvious gap in the market, but it wasn't as simple as doing our own thing. We had to find a way to conduct research in a way that genuinely prioritized quality, because nobody else was doing that, but there was a reason they weren't doing it.

Stephanie Zammit 11:20

It was a very difficult thing to do so. The other thing is in Qatar to this day. It was a very difficult thing to do so. The other thing is in Qatar to this day. You cannot rely on panels. It's not just Qatar, it's the entire GCC. So UAE, saudi Arabia panels won't work because the local national citizens do not exist on panels. It's a very face-to-face market. It's either door-to-door or in-street intercepts.

Henry Piney 11:43

So who is on the panels? If you don't mind me buzzing in, it's expatriates.

Stephanie Zammit 11:47

So these populations are predominantly expatriate, either Western Asian or African foreign workers. They make up the bulk of society, but, of course, most brands and government projects. They want to speak to the locals. The locals is also where the pockets of cash really lies, which is another reason that they're not on panels. They don't need to be paid $5 a survey or whatever. Even $100 a survey would be meaningless to this group. So you needed to go face-to-face and canvassing is not allowed. It was very difficult. I ended up just through sheer desk research, sort of questioned.

Stephanie Zammit 12:26

There's got to be a way that we can do this, that we can evidence the quality of our research, we can be sure that the interview took place with the right respondent, et cetera. There's also an assumption that if you do a survey in Arabic, you'll get the right respondent, but there's lots of different languages of Arabic and the Arabic that is spoken by the citizens of these countries Khaliji Arabic is a different dialect and so, again, you know, if you're doing interviews in Arabic, you need to listen. Which Arabic are they speaking to as your clue of their true nationality? And not all, of course. Not all Arabs are equal. It's like saying, you know, not all white people are equal, or whatever it might be.

Stephanie Zammit 13:07

So yeah, so there is a software called Doobloo I don't know if it exists anymore and it lets you order, record a snippet of every interview, just so you could listen in to a few seconds in a way that protects PPI and at the same time, lets you vet that the questionnaire was being asked properly. You know. The same time lets you vet that the questionnaire was being asked properly. You know the response, speaking the right language etc.

Henry Piney 13:32

And we were able to say no one else is doing this and it was true and business was very good. What sort of projects were you doing? Was it just was it a really wide range of the whole gamut of market research and insight type projects, or did you find that you were generally being commissioned in specific areas?

Stephanie Zammit 13:44

It was quite a range. I would say government was the biggest sector and then foreign companies, especially foreign universities. There's a hub of campuses, like universities that had campuses in Qatar. Banking was huge Again, mostly local banks. Quite an interesting mix of social slash academic research, which needed a totally different approach, and I learned a whole lot about huge, again, mostly local banks. Quite an interesting mix of social slash academic research, which needed a totally different approach, and I learned a whole lot about the academic way of doing research, in addition to corporate commercial research.

Henry Piney 14:15

What are some of the differences, then, between the academic ways of doing research and the commercial ways of doing research?

Stephanie Zammit 14:20

Oh gosh, that's such a good question. I think the academic way of doing research is a very it's a much more textbook. You know there is a right and a wrong way. The room for flexibility is significantly reduced, especially when it comes to sample plans using specific methodologies to answer specific questions. Other academic research which is done by other organizations, and so attention to methodology design, is much, much more detailed than commercial research where you can bend the rules a little and there's a lot of art mixed in with science to the methodologies etc.

Sticker shock moving client side

Henry Piney 14:59

I see, yeah, that does make sense. Yes, now, then you moved on and so you went to Marks and Spencer's and I've been doing my LinkedIn stalking and this looks like a little bit of a shift in terms of because that was more customer experience and brand marketing. So what do those roles entail?

Stephanie Zammit 15:16

It was certainly a shift to client side. So that was my first client side gig and, you know, radical game changer, going agency to client and it's fascinating, it's the same work. But I remember when I started thinking, god, I don't know anything. You know, I've been in research for years and I know nothing. That was probably the biggest shift, more so than the methodologies.

Stephanie Zammit 15:36

I had had CX projects as well as brand equity, you know advertising effectiveness projects when I was with agencies, especially at Ipsos, that was a lot of the heartland of the work that they did.

Stephanie Zammit 15:50

So they were different in the sense that the way that you're using the results, you know the final report is the beginning, like that's where the project really starts, and a project lifecycle extends so much longer than it does when you're client-side, extends so much longer than it does when you're, when your client side and the sheer volume of stakeholders that you have is, you know, more than quadrupled, it's like 20 times over. You sort of go from having what three, four, five if you're really busy clients to I mean today I couldn't, I couldn't count them. You know 150, 200 people that you serve. It's uh. And then you suddenly hit into the uh, the challenge of time management in a way that never existed before, because you still need to do lots of work and, of course, you've got your vendors supporting you uh, but how do you find desk time balance with the 1000 meetings that you need to have?

Henry Piney 16:45

I see, I see. So when you're in an agency you say, for sake of argument, you've got five projects on the go, whatever it might be, and you know what the deadlines are on those, and there's a certain sequence of events.

Stephanie Zammit 16:55

One point of contact.

Henry Piney 16:57

Yeah, there's a certain sequence of events you need to follow in terms of the project and the timelines, whereas, imagine you move to M&S or, frankly, any client, and then, all of a sudden, people are calling up the whole time and going have you got any information about this? What does this mean? I disagree, et cetera, et cetera.

Stephanie Zammit 17:12

Constantly and you can't charge by the hour, so you can't go. Oh, that's out of scope. You know, it's an always on job. Yes, it's completely different. And then the embedding and the consultation that is to be had on the results. You know what does this mean? What do we actually need to do about this? How do we plan for the next five years off the back of these results? That's a brand new system as well. And to be able to answer those questions, the level of knowledge that you need to increase on business nuance and context and strategic plans it's basically a completely different job. I learned so much the upward sort of curve of learning from agency side to client side those first few months at M&S. It shot just vertically upwards in terms of what I was learning.

Henry Piney 18:01

Yeah, I can really see that. Sharon Linore, who is at the Estee Lauder company. She did an interview last month or so and she's been on agency side. She said good agencies give you the so what, but on the client side you need to get to the now what?

Learning how to socialize research at M&S

Stephanie Zammit 18:19

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm definitely going to use that. Thanks, Sharon.

Henry Piney 18:24

Well, we'll call out her, We'll give give her credit on it, and so any particular lessons you learned in your time at starbucks sorry, starbucks, that's the next one I mean there are so many it's it's hard to pick.

Stephanie Zammit 18:38

When I was at mls, we were in the middle of an insights revolution, so there was a huge transformational change, cultural shift around how we become an insights led or data led organization, and it was really fun to be part of that. I think that is a big thing that I learned is undergoing that transformation and I've really taken that into all of my roles since mns so many initiatives which I do, my own, linked stalking and I can see that M&S continues to run things today that we put in place. You know back how many years ago was it? Now it's. You know it's coming up on 10s very soon and the same events that they are holding for stakeholders. You know the insight days and the roadshows of bringing in external speakers to create insights, understanding, education and cultures. It's still happening today, but we were the team that originally put those into place. Again, it's almost like two different jobs, so it taught me a lot about where the sweet spot is to running those kinds of outreach programs within an organization in addition to the day job.

Henry Piney 19:45

So playing it back a little bit or kind of guessing what you were doing. You were probably one of the first businesses that was really looking at kind of starting to do roadshows and thinking about how you present insights, whether full presentations or snippets, in really impactful ways In turn. Was it that type of thing?

Stephanie Zammit 20:02

It was, it was and it was so new at the time that we were nominated for an award by the MRS. Again, I want to say this would have been about 2017, something like that for these roadshows, for this work stream of just culture building with insights internally.

Henry Piney 20:18

So then, jumping onto Starbucks as well.

Starbucks and research during the pandemic

Stephanie Zammit 20:20

You seem to go more my first gig at Starbucks was looking after loyalty research. Loyalty was referring to the Starbucks Rewards program, so the app it was essentially the program was on the app it was app-based research and the program itself. So the design of the program, the features of it, the messaging and communications around it, anything to do with the sub-brand. That was the Starbucks Rewards program within the Starbucks business. That was sort of the main focus of my role.

Stephanie Zammit 20:54

I also, as part of that same role, looked after partnerships, insights, mainly because partnerships was often done in collaboration with our loyalty program, so there was sort of a mix there, and by partnerships I mean external brand partnerships with other companies. And then I had special projects as well, which is the sort of miscellaneous catch-all, for there isn't anyone else to do the work and it's really really important we need someone. So I ended up doing all of the COVID routine disruption norms of you know, normality has changed the tracker on when are things going to get back to what they were? All of that accidentally and sustainability as well. All of that fell into my sort of miscellaneous title of loyalty.

Henry Piney 21:39

Well, those are some big buckets, frankly.

Stephanie Zammit 21:42

They were some big buckets but it was a super fun job. And the other thing with a program design, so anything to do with you know, we've got a program and we're optimizing it and we're adding to it and evolving it. It's so conjoint focused. At one point I think there was one year where all I did was conjoints and you get a conjoint, and you get a conjoint and everyone's getting a conjoint and I'd never been in such a. I'd say I'd never been in such a. I'd never really done that type of work before in my previous role. So it was fun for me because I was still learning a lot, but just again a very different way of doing research.

Henry Piney 22:15

And so now you're at Bang Olufsen and you're fairly new to the job. What's the brief? And so what's on your agenda? What are you working on?

Stephanie Zammit 22:24

Well, I'm new in role, so the very first thing is to learn and just understand the business. It always takes a few months before you sort of confidently know right. This is where we are today, where we're going customer intimacy, product intimacy, stakeholder mapping all of the upfront, foundational stuff that needs to be done, and then thinking about our foundational insights as well. So what are the big things that every organization should have as kind of foundational data and insights, knowledge, Auditing what we have, thinking about our gaps and then business casing like hell to try to fill those gaps.

Stefanie's role at Bang & Olufsen

Henry Piney 23:03

Got it. And so what type of research then have you inherited in terms of I mean, obviously I'm not talking about anything proprietary, in terms of exactly the issues you're necessarily looking into, but, conceptually, what type of research does Bang Olufsen focus on at the moment most other organizations.

Stephanie Zammit 23:24

it's all consumer or customer intimacy programs between your very typical brand equities, cx, and then some kind of profiling, or call it segmentation if you will. I would say those are still the biggies that most companies would have, and Bang Olufsen certainly knew enough before I got here that that was needed. So it's really again just auditing okay from these programs. What are they actually telling us? And then what is the opportunity to build, evolve and add to this knowledge?

Stephanie Zammit 23:58

I'm a big believer in sequential knowledge and knowledge building, as opposed to running ad hoc studies to answer specific questions.

Stephanie Zammit 24:08

I actually got that from M&S, the idea of insights infrastructure that you sort of need your foundational things to be always present and available and then your ad hoc work sits on top of it to plug the gaps wherever they may be, but in a way that is additive as opposed to replicates.

Stephanie Zammit 24:25

So I'm really lucky that in this role I have both the analytics and the insights team together. This just is so exciting for me because I can think about data as well and analytics and what we know from our internal data point of view, which means less research is needed, because if we run our research in a way that is smart with known customers. Then, by the time the customer enters the survey to answer a questionnaire, we already know all of this back data about what they bought and how often they bought it and when they bought it, et cetera, et cetera. So, yes, I think I've just been auditing what's logistically possible in terms of those data connections, what we already know and then how to plug gaps in a very smart way. Budgets are tight everywhere. There's been a global economic downturn that's affected absolutely everyone, and so we just need to be smarter about using the little money we have to gain brand new knowledge that adds and builds on what we might have known before.

Henry Piney 25:21

How do you knit together, then, the data that you already have, the insight that you already have from the analytics department, into the consumer insight side of things, in terms of you know, you've got a, as you mentioned, you've got a known customer base, they've got certain characteristics, they've got certain behaviors, and then you are, for the sake of argument, surveying them or bringing them for interviews in other forums. How did you actually go about tying that together?

Stephanie Zammit 25:48

yeah, I think research and analytics I would call those. The two separate groups have more in common with each other than they differ, and I think especially analytics has been dealt an unfair hand in recognizing that. That is also deeply meaningful insights. They've been associated with data, but everything's data Research is data as well. It's just a different source of data that you're then storytelling off. So, the way I see it, they are the same. There are some differences in skill sets and capabilities.

Stephanie Zammit 26:23

Obviously, analytics folks are incredibly smart in terms of the prowess that they have navigating large data sets and running models and statistics on the data, but research does that as well. You know we have research analytics teams that exist and they do a similar job using a different data set. So I like to think of them as the same job using a different data set. So I like to think of them as the same, and I really encourage both researchers and analysts to learn from each other, because at the end of the day, you're doing two. You've got two sides of the same coin, and the more you understand the other side of the coin, the easier it will be for you to then have the big picture and think very smartly about each of your projects.

Stephanie Zammit 27:04

You know, maybe I don't need to do this work because the research team has already done it and it's just a connection point. Maybe I don't need to ask you know half my survey questions because we actually already know this. I just need a connection point to the analytics team. I really encourage cross-functional collaboration which is, on every single project, a researcher and an analyst should be looking at that project together, look at the objectives together and say, well, what do we already know, what can we get internally? And then the research is additive. So if you have a 10-minute questionnaire, those 10 minutes are squeezing brand new information and we're getting the best bang for our buck on those 10 minutes.

Henry Piney 27:42

Yeah, it makes an enormous amount of sense, and I may well borrow your wisdom to impart that onto others.

Stephanie Zammit 27:50

In terms of how and data connections. I mean most companies have mailing lists and customer lists. As long as your data is set up in a way that you know who your customers are, you can use email address or whatever contact detail to send research surveys to known customers and just import their back data with your survey. So when you get your survey data, you've got one huge data set which includes the internal data as columns and then the new columns of the research data.

Henry Piney 28:20

Yeah, got it Now. You talked about the commonalities, but what are some of the differences then between the and I know this is a I'm sort of driving against the spirit of your answer in some ways but I recognize there are some commonalities, but there must also be some differences between the way the research department thinks or operates and the analytics department thinks and operates.

Stephanie Zammit 28:46

There are. There are, but I do believe that these differences have come top down. I think there has been differences in expectations from leadership of the two teams, which has created a cultural norm that isn't necessarily the most helpful or you know, useful norm to have. It's just always been assumed that people working in the analytics side of things tend to be more introverted. I mean it's just wild stereotyping that they wouldn't be confident running strategic presentations and all the rest of it. But I know so many people, so many incredible analysts, that have such consultative minds and I think it's unfair to assume that only the research side can think strategically. I mean, what's different is the core skills. I think that's the one where you're either trained in one or the other and, yes, those core skills are different. Everything else is a bias and an assumption that I really think needs to be challenged.

Henry Piney 29:48

Yeah, that's interesting because I was going to ask what you thought those assumptions were, those top-down assumptions, obviously and this I imagine, goes across organizations, and so, from your view, is it kind of the analytics departments historically have been seen as more like the data geeks or the big data people, and then the research side of things is more the project-based and more the why qualitatively oriented people. Is that another one of the distinctions?

Stephanie Zammit 30:17

Well, that's exactly it. See, I think we're all data people. I think the researchers are data people as well. We're just using different data, and that's just my personal view, but you're absolutely right. The stereotype is that, oh, the analysts are the data people. Well, research is data. Qual is data. You know, open text, verbatim is data. It's just a different kind of data. And so I think we're all data people to the extent that and this is me being in presentation mode now but data is just a hygiene factor. You know it's not the thing it mode now but data is just a hygiene factor. You know it's not the thing. It's like we're all human, we're all data people, and then it's the skills that we have to use that data.

Thinking about the ideal insights department

Henry Piney 30:55

And so I totally get that and I think it's a really good analysis in terms of some of the distinctions between departments that may be being imposed but that aren't necessarily true. And then, looking on a related note, what's the ideal structure of an insights department? Now, I mean, in fact, you're in the process of shaping it, so what are the considerations you would have in mind, for instance, if you were doing an audit of an insights to Cardinal?

Stephanie Zammit 31:22

Yes, I think the infrastructure. Now this is where it does differ, depending if you're on the analytics side of things or the research side of things, because the tools that those two teams need are very different. So if we start with research, it's your basic building blocks. Um, and depending on audience, right now in bno we have a very niche audience, a luxury customer is not as easily found and they're much more discerning in their decision making and and all the things. So a community really benefits an organization that has niche audiences.

Stephanie Zammit 31:58

Um, maybe you want the ability to interview your own customers, like, do research with your own customers more so than non-customers, depending on the level of growth that your business is trying to achieve and if it's growth from new audiences versus existing ones, you might need then a panel. You might need to partner with something that is much more external so you can conduct quick, high volume, low cost. Partner with something that is much more external so you can conduct quick, high-volume, low-cost research with something external. It also depends on the teams or the departments that the organization have. If they are an organization that are developing their own products, then you need some kind of product insights roadmap. So concept testing, from paper concepts through to prototypes, through to. You know, if you're a CPG and a high volume, you probably want to do some kind of basis type thing that gives you APIs that predict the sales of your product. So, yeah, so that's product.

Stephanie Zammit 32:51

And then marketing insights means different infrastructure. You've obviously got your brand equity and, depending on how much advertising the organization does, you might want pre-post ad testing. It really does depend on what type of business there is. Cpg brands as well then have a totally different type of insights infrastructure that's required versus a retail brand or a brand. You know an automotive brand, retail brand or a brand, you know an automotive brand. Packaging matters so much in some industries and not at all in others. Customer journeys matters for store experiences or physical space experiences in a different way from digital, which is then UX. So the answer really is in the organization. You know some organizations will need a CX program, others not so much.

Stephanie Zammit 33:44

I think yeah, it's an interesting question. I think I haven't given you a very straight answer because it depends on the organization, but whichever organization you're in, depending on what the business does, there will be basic tools that will be required, and then for analytics, it's a whole different ball game. It's more about the state of your data, the quality of it, it being organized in a way that is usable, it being connected to other data sources, dashboard reporting in Power BI or whatever else. It might be for stakeholders and the wider business to self-serve the data so that you don't become like give me this number and give me that number and you can move away from doing lots of that. And then the volume of intake on analytics requests is so much higher than it is on the research side. You know researchers might get a couple of projects a year.

Stephanie Zammit 34:35

Yes, we have lots of stakeholders that ask us lots of questions, but very rarely are those questions going to create new work streams, unless there's budget. I think the researchers have the luxury of budget restrictions to control the volume of work that they do, whereas the analytics team don't. So you need an intake monitoring system to stay on top of things. You need prioritization of the 100 people that are asking for things. How do you prioritize what you do first? It's a. It's a very different way of doing an audit or kind of a hygiene view of your department I think they're great answers because I I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective.

Henry Piney 35:17

for the research departments, as they, as you say, you know they're asked to answer a particular question or they have a consistent program running to provide a particular type of insight. But you know that it costs, whatever it is €50,000 to do this project or €200,000 to run this annual program or wherever it might be Whereas, because you don't have the hard costs on the analytic side, there is a risk they just get totally overwhelmed with people going. Can you run this? Can you answer this? Can you do more of this?

Stephanie Zammit 35:46

It's complex things. Can we have a customer lifetime value analysis and let's create some clusters for a segmentation on this particular thing? Let's forecast behavioral change based on these initiatives, all the various ab testing things that you can possibly do for marketing or store design or product launches? I mean, there is so much and the analytics team can't hide behind the all. Right, yeah, sure, have you got budget for it? You know we'll just outsource and bring in consultants. Obviously, resource is a challenge, but it's a lot more difficult to communicate a resource challenge to a business than a budget challenge.

Henry Piney 36:26

Yeah, very much so. I also like the point you made right at the beginning around trying to really focus on the business outcomes and the business goals. So one of the simple ones being is the priority for whatever it is like in the next few years, retention and increasing the value of our existing customers, from which one starts to draw various kind of conclusions in terms of the types of research and analytics you need, as opposed to we're trying to attract these new customers or crack open these new markets, or whatever it may be.

Stephanie Zammit 36:58

Yeah, yes, exactly. It just all depends on the business objectives, and that's why you can't come in day one and kind of day one, be like right, here we go, we're shaking things up. There has to be a period of learning the business, getting to know the game, the roadmaps, the game plans and building the relationships as well. You know, I think I was at Bang Olufsen almost three months, if not more than three months, and I didn't do any work. It was just getting to know the business, getting to know the stakeholders, understanding their needs. The more intimacy you get in those first few months, without having the burden of work distracting you from that learning process, the better an insights consultant you will be when you do then start doing the work.

What makes a good agency

Henry Piney 37:42

So you've talked there about internally, but how about externally, from your view, what makes a good agency? And then there's also the flip side of that a bad one. But what makes a good agency from your perspective?

Stephanie Zammit 37:55

So this is a difficult question. I used to be agency side and I like to think that I do have some empathy remaining for agencies. Well, you know it's been a while now, but I certainly remember the difficult clients and you know the eye rolling moments of, you know, getting an email that's asking for yet more things that are out of scope. Things that are out of scope. I understand it. I understand that agencies struggle to maintain a good service to their clients within the hours that they allocated to the project before they're then out of pocket. It's really difficult, and the reason it's difficult my answer as a client to this question is exactly that what makes a good agency Flexibility is exactly that. What makes a good agency Flexibility? Because it's very difficult when your client side, when you are briefing, even if you really visualize the end product or the end report as much as you possibly can, you've done all of your internal research, you have a pretty good idea of what it is that you want to put into the scope and the briefing stage. When you actually then take that, you're fine. You know when you see it, because you don't. That's the whole point of running a research project. Right. There is a gap in our knowledge that we are trying to fill, and so I can't predict exactly what I need to know, because I don't know what I'm going to learn as we go through this process. So there will always be something you haven't thought of. That requires going back to the agency and saying there was something it was really important. It suddenly needs to be in scope and doing that in a way that isn't unfair to the agency. But those are the best agencies, the ones that you feel like you know what they're going to understand that this actually really is important. I'm not trying to swindle them. It's not just trying to get cheeky freebies. It's because you could only predict so much and you just don't know what your CEO or whoever is going to suddenly ask for that you hadn't thought of because you're not the CEO. That's the biggest thing I mean.

Stephanie Zammit 39:58

Obviously there's again hygiene factors. The quality is a big one. Right, like you don't have data quality, you don't have anything. But I think I'm at the place now where I've sort of a pretty good idea on what you know, what quality controls need to be in place on our projects. I do actually like to ask for our own quality controls in surveys and in qual that you need to put. You need to implement this rather than just lean on the agency to worry about it. So, obviously, quality and good storytelling I would say all of these are hygiene factors, but the one, the one shining point of difference is flexibility, like, yes, I see that's important. Or even the ability for the agency to have that premonition themselves and say, hey, we're going through the report. You didn't put this in your scope, but now we're seeing it and God, it's really interesting and you should probably know about it, so we're going to include it. It's invaluable to have that kind of partnership.

Henry Piney 40:55

And then, from the agency perspective, as they're looking at this and they're exploring things they've discovered or they know the project's going out of scope and I guess they're investing in the relationship. Do you have the flexibility on the other side where sometimes you might be able to go guys, I know this is taking a lot longer than you thought it might do, I can pay you a bit more or is it more that they're investing in the fact that you'll recognize that they've done a great job and that hence, they're likely to get more work in the future?

Stephanie Zammit 41:26

So that's the thing Everywhere I've worked. I've never and there might be places that can do this, but I have never known a place of work where the budget that I sign off on day one of the project has room to grow. On day 30 or 60 of the project, whatever was signed off becomes fixed. It goes, you know, because to go to get to a PO, to get through the invoicing process, it goes to finance. They write the number down and once they've written that number down, it cannot magically change. So there is just never an instance where there's more budget, unless you run an insights team where you are the 100% holder of the budget, which, again, I haven't known that to be the case. Usually our business partners will fund work, you know, in different departments. Um, if you are the holder of 100% of the budget, you can say you know what, I'm going to cancel this project and take the amount and put more here, because I, but I I've never known that to be the case. It's. It's always been very project by project paid for by a different team.

Stephanie Zammit 42:23

So the only flex that a client can provide is time. I could probably move the deadline. You know the deadline isn't written down, it quite as an ink that is quite as red as that, um, that price, uh price text. It's probably time, it's probably removing scope, so we need this. We're going to take that away and I try to do that wherever I can, especially on questionnaire design, because we've committed to a certain length of interview and I'm trying to think what else I think. The only other thing I think of is the promise of more work at some point eventually, but even that one is very difficult again, because we're not the budget holders. We're not 100% sure what new budget might exist beyond this.

Henry Piney 43:09

Stephanie, I know you're running out of time. Thank you, You've been fantastic, so let's do genuinely a quick far round, if we can do so. Who have your mentors been?

Stephanie Zammit 43:19

and what did they teach you? Every boss I've had has been my mentor, whether in a good way or a bad way. They teach you how to be and how not to be. Luckily, I've had more good ones than bad ones. What did they teach me? Oh, so many things. All sorts of little life lessons. I had one boss that told me when I was agency side the report is never finished, it's never done. You can work on it forever and you will never be done, so it's finding the sweet spot of good enough. I had one boss that taught me about don't ask in a questionnaire where you already know. You know the whole data connections piece. And I had the most incredible boss when I was at Starbucks. That just the stakeholder management and engagement. She had the power to turn around the most insane and kind of high emotion of stakeholders into being aligned and back on track with our original plans or conversations. It was a wonderful thing to witness All sorts of things.

Henry Piney 44:21

Okay, fantastic. I'm going to skip the AI question because that's not going to be a quick fire question. Um, how about what's the best mistake you've ever made? So something that, oh god, was turned out to be a mistake?

Stephanie Zammit 44:31

you're kind of glad you made it oh god right, the first thing that came to my mind. I was absolutely not glad I made it, because I once forgot to put gender in a study and it was a bit that really was a mistake. Um, a mistake I'm glad that I made. I might have to think on that one a little bit as an excellent question. Probably work something recruitment related, where you know you sort of learn, you learn through that how to build a successful, strong, functional team. Recruitment is really tough because you're sort of I think there's a natural inclination to, if you're the person hiring, you hire someone more junior than you, and it took me a while to learn that actually that shouldn't be the case. I should hire people better than me, even though I'm their leader. That will strengthen our team overall and I will then continue to learn as a leader. That's the first one that comes to mind.

Henry Piney 45:23

I think that's a very good one. Final question Favorite book or recent book? It could be a piece of media, it doesn't have to be a book, and why?

Stephanie Zammit 45:32

I'm currently reading a very trashy fantasy book called A Court of Thorns and Roses, which I'm sure lots of people have heard of. It's super fun. I highly recommend it. I do try to read to balance the fiction with the nonfiction and I try to read, you know, managerial style and team development and all those kinds of books and they do teach me a lot, but at the end of the day they're not very fun and I like to read for fun. So I think I would just recommend people to have a mix. It's uh, don't take the joy out of reading by, uh, learning too much. Sometimes trashy fantasy is a good idea yeah, I think that's.

Henry Piney 46:08

I think that's sage advice. Definitely, I know you've got to go. Thank you so much. It's been really great and a pleasure talking to you thank you, it's amazing how quickly time passes.

Stephanie Zammit 46:18

Thanks for the opportunity. I love to talk um, so thank you. Thank you, it's amazing how quickly time passes. Thanks for the opportunity.

Henry Piney 46:23

I love to talk, so thank you for what you do. I can genuinely say that was one of the interviews I've enjoyed doing the most and learned the most from across the whole series. As well as obviously being very articulate, stephanie is also incredibly perceptive and there was so much good advice in there. Thanks, as always, to Insight Platforms for their support, to MX8 Labs for sponsoring. Do check them out if you want to cut the research grind and spend more time on real insights mx8labscom. And, of course, thank you to you for listening. See you next time.