IIEX APAC 2024 Speaker Interview with Katherine Mendoza

Disclaimer: Opinions represented here are personal and do not represent those of Haleon. Join us March 5-6, 2024 for the event. Find more information on IIEX APAC 2024 here!

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Katherine Mendoza is poised to speak at this year's IIEX APAC event, offering insights into the digital transformation shaping consumer research in the realm of AI. Her expertise lies in harnessing digital tools to glean deeper consumer insights, underlining the critical need to align strategies with digital advancements. The core lessons from her presentation revolve around the role of digital transformation in enhancing business outcomes, strategies tailored for effective transformation, and the acceleration of insights generation for superior innovations.

Mendoza is focused on advancing consumer healthcare products by enhancing research methods to meet consumer needs. She is eager to learn from industry peers at an upcoming event to improve consumer research practices collectively. Emphasizing the ongoing innovation in research, she advocates for combining digital tools and AI with human creativity for maximum consumer impact. Mendoza envisions a future where AI and digital advancements lead to personalized product creation. She looks forward to discussions on technology's transformative role in research, aiming to enhance product offerings strategically for consumers.

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Question #1: Give us a brief peek into your talk. What are the key insights and take aways?

Digital transformation is happening around us particularly in the space of AI. How do we leverage these digital tools and technologies to enable us to do faster, easier, and richer consumer researches to enable unlocking of deeper consumer insights? From my presentation I would like to share some recent developments and best practices on consumer and sensory research in consumer healthcare categories applying digital tools and platforms to enable the development of better/superior products and product experiences. 

Key takeaways:

1. It is critical to understand how digital transformation can enable your business

2. Aligning your strategy & priorities to determine the digital transformation roadmap

3. Digital transformation enabling faster, easier & deeper understanding to develop better innovations

Question #2: You have a great topic. What led you to choose it?

As research practitioners and professionals, it is critical that we keep ourselves updated on the latest developments in tools, technologies and methodologies to constantly improve the ways we do things – whether it is to be able to do things faster, easier, more cost-effective and definitely if it will enable us to connect more deeply with our consumers and get a better understanding of their unmet needs to enable us to develop the right products for them that will be relevant and they will prefer to use again and again. Especially in consumer healthcare, I am very passionate about how we are able to develop better products that will meet the everyday healthcare needs of our consumers.  

Question #3: We are glad to have you with us. What would you like to learn from other speakers and attendees? 

Am looking forward to meeting other speakers and research professionals in different industries and learn about their use cases - their challenges and successes in utilizing new methodologies, or how they are able to embed new digital tools and AI in their processes and what were their wins. I would love to hear about perspectives about how the industry is moving and developing and what we can all do to further enhance our knowledge and capabilities in consumer research. 

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Question #4: Our industry is buzzing with the word innovation. What is research innovation to you?

Research innovation is about constantly improving the way we do things – in connecting with consumers, in gathering and analyzing data/information, in presenting and engaging with our stakeholders to understand the key business questions/needs and generate actionable insights to enable business decisions.  

Question #5: Research technology and automation are helping to streamline our cost and time. What else is at work to help insights professionals?

There is still a lot to discover and explore in the world of digital and particularly in AI. It is still developing as we speak and the applications and implications to various industries are enormous. The challenge is how we can leverage these and how we can maximize the power of digital/AI and marry these with human creativity and insights to generate new innovation spaces that will ultimately benefit the consumers we serve. 

Question #6: Greenbook works to move the insights industry and profession forward into the future. What is the biggest thing you would like to see change to improve for our industry?

I am looking forward to seeing more robust methodologies and techniques in implicit and behavioural research so we can better truly understand the consumer behaviour, triggers and motivations to design and develop the right products for our consumers. 

Question #7: Speaking of the future, the IIEX conference series is a leader in leading discussion of insights future prediction. What do you see on the horizon that (hopefully) attendees can discuss at this event?

As AI/Digital has been the hot topic in the past few years, I hope to see more robust applications and use cases delivering impact and value to the business. It would be great to see how the research industry is leveraging these new technologies to develop better, more personalized, more targeted  products for consumers.