Aparnaa Rajasekaran on how insights professionals can shape business strategy

In this episode of "Now That's Significant," host Michael Howard interviews Aparnaa Rajasekaran, Segment Insights and Strategy Manager at Georgia Pacific.

Aparnaa shares perspectives on how insights professionals can shape business strategy, emphasizing the importance of serendipity, a passion for excellence, and an entrepreneurial spirit. She highlights her inquisitive nature and how her background in sales, brand marketing, and insights, coupled with her education in technology, has shaped her approach to market research.

Aparnaa discusses the critical role of customer and consumer insights in today's fast-paced business environment. With data abundance, understanding consumer needs, fostering loyalty, driving innovation, and mitigating risks are crucial for success.

She emphasizes the power of insights professionals to influence business strategy by transforming data into meaningful and actionable insights for leadership teams.

Aparnaa provides valuable strategies for effectively communicating complex insights to senior leadership. She emphasizes understanding the audience, their decision-making process, and presenting information clearly and concisely. Aparnaa also highlights the importance of aligning with stakeholders, preparing pre-reads, and adapting communication styles for different departments like sales and innovation.

Some key takeaways from the discussion include:

- Understand your audience and tailor your message to their needs.

- Develop a strong understanding of your company's business goals and how your insights can help achieve them.

- Be able to clearly and concisely communicate your findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.

- Build relationships with key stakeholders across your organization.

- Stay up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies in market research.

The resources mentioned in this podcast are: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Coleman, Start with Why, Simon Sinek, Win Every Argument- Mehdi Hasan, How to win friends and Influence people – Dale Carnegie, Mel Robbins Podcast, and The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.

For more insightful conversations with market research experts, subscribe to "Now That's Significant" on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. 

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Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

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Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, we make it easy for to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool.