In this episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Lynn Adelmund, Senior VP of Market Research at Trifecta Research, a leading research and advisory firm serving Fortune 1000 companies and agencies. They discuss some of Lynn’s Aha! moments; how technology has impacted the world of consumer insights; how insight professionals can get too caught up in semantics; and why insights are all about building a connection with customers. They also chat about the overabundance of data, making it more difficult to read and sort through it all!

Lynn is the Senior VP of Market Research at Trifecta Research, but she was previously a Business Insights Manager at Kreg Tool Company, and was also the VP and Chief Insights Officer at GlynnDevins. In fact, for nineteen years she was an Analyst, Manager, and Director of Research over at Informa, proving that she’s more than experienced in all things insights. 

What Lynn doesn’t know about insights simply isn’t worth knowing!

👉Lynn recalls early on in her career when she was asked to create an analysis for the first time. She pulled out what she thought was a great analytics technique and wrote a great report. However, once it reached the president's desk, he saw that there was a typo and stopped reading immediately. From this, she learned that insights are only as good as the way you communicate them!

👉Any insight professional loves when you figure out what’s driving a consumer. Lynn says that consumers love technology as long as it’s supporting something they love in their life; if someone loves their iPhone, it’ll be because there is something they love on it; someone might love Facebook, not just because it’s Facebook, but because it allows them to connect with their grandchildren. Everything consumers do, they do for the sake of a connection.

👉Insights and research pros can sometimes get a little caught up in the semantics, but Lynn believes that true insight is new knowledge that allows us to better connect with customers and stakeholders. They help us serve customers and allow us to understand them more clearly. 

👉The world of insights has evolved and grown a significant amount in the last few years, and a lot of that growth is due to new technologies and tools. There used to be a time when, in order to get some of the best insights, you had to go door-to-door, but now we have tools that can analyze data and examine customer behaviors and habits, making for more detailed insights. 

👉Despite the fact that new technologies and tools have allowed us to access more data, it is equally just as hard to keep up with that data due to its sheer volume of it. In fact, Lynn mentions that, in certain niche audiences, they’ve gone back to doing telephone interviews rather than gathering data in the new, modern way - it’s almost as if they’ve time-traveled!

👉In order to retrieve good qualitative data, you need to make sure you have decent stakeholder involvement and that you know what you’re doing! Not only that, but you need to ensure you leave your biases behind. Make sure you go into it with an open mind and be ready to listen; don’t go in thinking you already know a topic and that they’re going to confirm what you already know!

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