IIEX APAC 2024 Speaker Interview with Mai Marcelo

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

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Mai Marcelo emphasizes understanding consumer behavior beyond surface-level data, highlighting the importance of emotions and values in developing consumer strategies. By creating emotional connections, brands can build stronger relationships with customers. Marcelo encourages research practitioners to consider values in their analysis and explore mobile-friendly and engaging research approaches.

She believes in research innovation, proposing new perspectives, methodologies, and solutions to address industry pain points. Marcelo suggests incorporating futures thinking into research and cultivating holistic researchers. She hopes to see discussions on the industry's contribution to sustainability at the IIEX conference series.

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

In the age of big data and AI, we get to know a lot about consumers – their behavior, what they like to consumer, where, when what and how. We may also be able to get some reasons why they consume certain things, but we often fall short on the deeper motivations and the root of why they consume that things that they buy. I want to share the importance of emotions and values for developing consumer strategies. How brands can leverage on emotions and values to develop a stronger relationship with their customers.   

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

Since I was young, I have always been fascinated by people, observing them, and as I got into research, my work has given me the opportunity to dig deeper. And the more I get to explore the human being, the more I see the central role of values in determining how people would behave in certain situations I hope to be able to encourage MR practitioners to look at values as they do their analysis and as marketing practitioners develop their strategies if they want to build a stronger relationship with their customers..  

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

I am looking forward to learning more about how we can do research that would be mobile friendly, engaging yet simple and easy even for the least educated segments of society. 

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

This is a very good question. For me, research innovation is when you are able to propose a new way of thinking/looking at things/analyzing, or new way of doing things. It answers very real pain points related to research like how do you make surveying more inclusive? Or problems like how can we shorten a survey without sacrificing depth of responses, etc.

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

I think more and more we should be incorporating futures thinking in the way we do our research and as we provide recommendations to clients. This way, clients would be able to incorporate our research with their strategies and we get to journey with them as they execute the strategies based on scenarios that we provided through our research with futures thinking. 

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?

One of my desires for the industry especially for the research agencies, is to veer away from being research factories -- for them to be less siloed and to hone holistic researchers who know research end to end.  

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?

I hope as insights practitioners, let us discuss our contribution to sustainability.