The “Unsexy” Truth about the Market Research Industry
Understanding its lack of appeal to minority prospects and how to fix it.
When you were a kid, what did you say you wanted to be when you grew up? A teacher? An astronaut? A basketball player?
When I was a child, I never once heard anyone say “I want to be a market researcher or study human behavior when I grow up”.
In fact, until recently the term “market research” was one that implied the use of boring surveys and the implementation of focus groups. Today, thanks to the internet and advances in technology, the industry has ballooned into a billion-dollar hub of complicated data, algorithms, insights, and strategy.
Today, I’m a seasoned brand strategist who has worked with a number of brands and clients across multiple industries, but my journey here was a rocky one with no clear direct path to what would ultimately end up being my dream job. I thought I’d be a fancy advertising executive that came up with catchy songs and campaign ideas like the ones you see on TV. Strategy & insights was a field that I never even knew about or considered.
In fact, many people have never even heard of my industry especially people of color- there is a real need to change this.
Addressing The Awareness Gap
When you’re a person of color, or when you come from an immigrant family, quite often the logic is quite simple: find a stable job, and make sure it’s lucrative and stable. This push from our parents and our communities means that we are expected to follow paths that are attached to well-known titles and roles that guarantee lots of money and so we strive to become football players, doctors, lawyers, etc.
These are also the roles we grow up seeing in media most often, and they are portrayed as sexy, powerful, and lucrative. They become the highly coveted, rigid career paths we align ourselves with, especially in communities where imaginations for what we can do or be is as limited as the resources we have access to. We grow up unexposed, and therefore somewhat narrow-minded, rarely allowing ourselves to consider something else that may actually be more fulfilling. This is even truer in Black and Brown communities where adults having non-traditional occupations are seen and experienced less often.
Understanding what makes us “unsexy”.
Today, the tech industry is sexy. Not only is it sexy, but it pays big bucks. As a result, we’ve seen an explosive interest in STEM occupations, especially within the highest paying field of engineering. The halo effect of the gain of interest in STEM fields for the market research industry is a slightly increased appeal for data analytics roles, but the industry as a whole is still hardly ever mentioned or glorified, despite the integral role it plays in developing new innovations and brand messaging campaigns. There are a couple of reasons why:
1. Our General Inability to share.
In this highly viral, highly shareable world where people can take pictures and share what their days look like, the research industry has little to no room for such social media games. A majority of the research initiatives we work on are highly confidential- so much so that we can’t even mention the names of our clients at times. Quite often if I speak to friends about what I‘m working on I have to be so vague about it that once I’ve finished explaining it, they still have no idea the kind of work I do or what clients I’m doing it for.
2. Creative agencies get all the credit.
Creative agencies are not only applauded for their great work and storytelling, but they are also rewarded for it on a national and global scale. The general public rarely knows or experiences the process of distilling key points of data and insights into bite-sized pieces to ultimately inform the main idea of what lands across their screens or their favorite magazines. Quite often, our job is simply to engage with a brand for a certain amount of time, hand over our insights and recommendations and hope for the best.
3. Clients forget about us.
The process of turning insights into actions or campaigns can be a long one. As a result, even our most cherished clients will forget to let us know what’s happened with the work we’ve done for them. Honestly, it’s not until I see an ad or campaign in real-time for a brand that I’ve worked with that I’m able to see how and if my team’s insights or recommendations were implemented- often 6 months to a year later.
4. We are fixers.
90% of the project I’ve worked on have been reactive responses to a crisis in the marketplace. When a data point or significant number has decreased for unknown reasons, we are contacted to save the day, and to get our clients a better understanding of their problem in order to propose the right solutions. Once the problem is fixed, we are of no use until the next crisis begins.
5. We tend to shine in the background.
I know it feels such a bleak picture of an industry that brings me such joy. The truth is, for those of us who love what we do, being a background-player is actually kind of nice. Before I discovered my love for being on stage and facilitating client interactions, I was more than content sitting behind a desk and developing strategic solutions — sight unseen. For some data and insight folks, witnessing the brands we work on succeed while secretly knowing we played a major role in that success is enough.
Using insights to craft beautiful human narratives and strategic solutions is rewarding work. More importantly, an agency’s solutions & recommendations are only as good as their diversity of thought. The problem with our industry exists in our inability to be on the radars of the next generation (even though the irony is that most of the work that we do is built on targeting them).
So how do we change this?
1. Build Awareness- Gain Popularity.
When I became the North American Lead for Kantar’s Multicultural Practice in 2016, the first thing I knew I had to do was get the industry on people’s radars and I had to do it in a way that was appealing.
One of the first things I did was tap into the momentum created by the tech industry’s attempt to appear to be more diversity-friendly. At that time, the trend was very much about creating networking events that were also not-so-discrete employer branding techniques. This was the same approach we took for the role out of the Insights in Color initiative developed to 1) create a welcoming community and safe space for the very few people of color who were currently within the industry and 2) educate and then attract other potential candidates of color by demonstrating the kind of work we did and how they could add value.
I also built a plan to become further integrated into incoming generations because finding out about market research after graduation is often too late. This plan went beyond the expected college fair recruitment strategy by outlining a way for prospects to experience a day in the life of a brand strategist over the course of a week. By getting them fully immersed into the lifestyle and the work of a brand strategist, qualitative moderator, or quantitative analyst, the hope was to create intrigue and a pipeline for future prospects.
2. Create A Sense of Community and Maintain it.
To ensure that I not only attracted prospective employees but also retained them, I began building an internal community inside the network to ensure we had a team of individuals who were eager to be a part of a community of like-minded individuals with similar experiences and interests. This was as easy as putting a date on the calendar once a month for us to have an “Insights in Color” lunch to simply talk and get to know one another better.
It’s no secret that the best types of communities are organically formed, but there’s not always time for this to happen naturally in the workplace. By at least designating a time and space for like-minded groups to come together, companies can show that they care for the groups they are catering to. The people will do the rest. For instance, our Insights in Color group randomly decided to spend an entire Saturday on a food tour, organized by another member of the group who introduced us to the delicious culinary adventures of Jackson Heights.
2. Show Them the Impact of their Voice.
I know for a fact, that without people like Stephen Palacios who ran the Multicultural practice before me, or the President of Kantar Consulting, Jonathan Hall or even my boss, Helen Firth, SVP of Brand & Culture, making sure to bring me along to client meetings where I was often the youngest and/or only Black person in the room, that I would never have been able to find my voice.
Not only did they make sure I had a seat at the table (even in my most junior analyst days-whew, talk about intimidating) but they actively turned conversations over to me, in rooms filled with seasoned executives, ensuring I was seen as an intellectual equal, and fully capable contributor.
Since then, I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve consulted on, or lead, that I was able to change, enhance or positively impact based on my experiences and background. From asking better, more open-minded survey questions to ensuring that the environments in which we were asking consumers of color to divulge their deepest truths were set up to ensure that they would feel immediately seen and heard in a way that felt familiar and safe.
In my career, my voice, my input, my experiences have all been used to tell and craft better, more nuanced consumer stories for my clients, while educating and informing the colleagues and teams I’ve worked on in the process. I know what I do is not rocket science, but knowing that I can elevate the stories of real people who look and experience life like me and do so with credibility is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. All I needed was someone to let me see the true value of my worth & potential.
3. Be Real About the Pay.
Let’s be honest. Unless you’re going the data science route, the insights industry doesn’t start off paying a lot of money. This, and the fact that we don’t often get the cushy budgets or the fancy merchandise and perks that advertising agencies get is a guaranteed way to lose the interests of prospective candidates. This is especially true for those who, like me, are the first or only to enter the corporate work space with no alternative means of income as they struggle to build their careers over time. Ultimately it pushes us or others we know towards the fields that will make us wealthier faster.
For many brands, the answer to this dilemma would be to lean into superficial aesthetic “millennial workplace trends” like playing ping-pong or bringing pets to work. However, most of those “perks” are oriented towards the needs and desires of a specific audience- one that is not minority oriented. There is a need to tap into the things that are important to minority applicants to see what may be missing or what could be nuanced in ways that are more relevant in the landscape of “perks” that are typically provided.
4. Be Flexible on Requirements and Expectations.
No one in this industry that I know of took a straight path to get here. Some of the greatest strategists I’ve worked with majored in architecture or even horticulture and found themselves in the insights field feeding a passion they never knew they had.
Coming from Virginia, while my background in communications and marketing was a bit more applicable to the field, my resume was lacking any substantial internships from big brands or agencies which effectively kept me out of the door of many places. After months of struggling, I eventually found a way to intern at a notable firm and start my journey towards a career that I thought would be in advertising.
Life clearly had other plans for me, but even the journey to get to where I am today was hard-fought. Coming from a military background, I had no blueprint for the right way to do things or how to navigate this space. All I had was a vision and a dream and I figured it out based on pure will and determination. Over the years I’ve been doubted and overlooked because my background lacked the connections that other applicants and colleagues were able to amass. This has undoubtedly made me who I am today- a relentlessly passionate strategist who has over-worked to prove that I belong in every step of my career journey. But it shouldn’t have to be this way.
I’ve often used my status as “the one and only” person of color in the companies I’ve worked in as my superpower as I quickly realized that it was what made me unique, different and therefore, valuable. However, it is unreasonable for anyone to expect for other people of color to want to stand out in the same way. All we really want is connection and community with others who experience life the same way we do.
Be Ready to Play the Long Game.
The thing that stands out to me most often when the topic of diversity and inclusion is brought up is the amount of enthusiasm executives have around the idea, and the lack of motivation or know-how to figure out how to make it work.
Listen, I get it. Everything I did for Insights in Color was on my own time and outside of work hours. It was my idea, and my initiative and no one else was going to get it done, so I had to step up to make it happen. By doing so, I was able to benefit both myself and a company that very happily and enthusiastically backed my efforts, (and for that I was tremendously grateful) but who also dedicated very little time and resources into making it happen.
The unfortunate reality across all industries is that most employers think that just because they create the jobs and say they believe in a diverse and inclusive working environment that Black and Brown people will suddenly start falling from the sky, eager to devour new opportunities. But we all know this is just not how it works.
It is an ongoing process to not only create awareness for prospective candidates but also to create an internal environment of acceptance, inclusivity, and empathy. It requires work, consistency, and commitment beyond Black History or Hispanic History or Women’s History Month Initiatives.
