Market research in an age of skepticism with Lauren Cheatham

Thanks for listening to this episode of 'Now that's Significant,' a market research podcast hosted by Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools. Joining him is Lauren Cheatham, a behavioral scientist and principal quantitative researcher at Roblox.

Lauren shares her journey from being a professional equestrian to a leading figure in market research, discussing the challenges and significance of getting stakeholder buy-in for research endeavors.

Key points of discussion

1. The Journey to Market Research: Lauren narrates her unconventional path from equestrian pursuits to discovering a passion for research during her master's degree at Northwestern University, which eventually led to a PhD at Stanford.

2. Stakeholder Buy-In: A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the importance of getting buy-in from cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Lauren emphasizes relationship building and understanding the organizational dynamics to effectively integrate research insights into business strategies.

3. Skepticism in Research: The conversation delves into the skepticism surrounding market research, especially in tech companies where data science dominates. Lauren highlights the need to demonstrate the rigor and unique value of qualitative and quantitative research to overcome this skepticism.

4. Framework for Gaining Support: Lauren outlines her framework for gaining stakeholder support, which includes building personal relationships, making difficult stakeholders allies, and educating teams about the importance and nuances of research.

5. Future of Research: The episode concludes with Lauren expressing optimism for the future of research, emphasizing the importance of understanding consumer behavior and leveraging technological advancements to enhance research productivity.

Reflecting on Lauren's insights, how can organizations better integrate market research into their strategic decision-making processes to ensure that consumer insights are at the forefront?

If you find value in this discussion, be sure to listen to our other episodes for more expert insights on market research.

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Infotools Harmoni is a specialist 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.

www.infotools.com

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, provide sample, or collect data, we make it easy for market researchers 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.