Interview With Lucia Roncancio: How Consumer Insights Help Drive Alquería

Lucia Roncancio is the director of insights at Alquería, a well-known dairy company in Colombia. She has dedicated 14 years to growing the company and, during that time, has amassed a wealth of knowledge on the impact insights can have on a business. Sitting down with Ana Vanegas of Echo Market Research, Lucia talked in-house versus outsourced research, consumer-centric approaches, and working with local research agencies.

You said that you manage a hybrid system, doing some work “in-house” and some work through external agencies. Why?

Lucia: “We are the ones in charge of capitalizing on insights for our business and we are the ones in charge of fostering consumer culture within the company. We achieve all this if we have in-house mastery of information, its integration, and a holistic understanding of the consumer. This allows us to ensure that a brand director or manager has knowledge of both the consumer and the shopper as would any other person in the insights department. When this is achieved, it’s possible for insights and branding to co-create.

Additionally, having an in-house model allows us to develop our own methodologies, build standards for the company, and to be able to monitor everything we have. On the other hand, working with market research agencies allows us to constantly update the way we approach consumers and shoppers, gaining precision and speed.”

What criteria do you use to choose between in-house and an external company?

Lucia: “This changes over time. Nowadays, for example, if you were to ask me at what point we make the decision to go with an agency, we feel that external agencies bring us a lot of value when it comes to innovation. Agencies these days have elegant, agile methodologies that allow us to develop innovative ideas. I’ll give you an example where we worked with an agency to innovate. In one day, we generated about 60+ ideas that then moved to consumer feasibility in the same day. So this is a very interesting process that we are following with the agencies in terms of co-creation. It ends up being a collaborative, multi-disciplinary learning.

What role does the insights department play within your company?

Lucia: “We are enablers of innovation, we validate everything that is live out there, whether it is communication, products, or opinions. We understand trends and how they are developing in Colombia, we study consumer needs and their motivations in order to co-create valuable proposals with brands.

We are responsible for creating and fostering consumer culture throughout the company.

We are also responsible for designing internal processes to improve consumer understanding and we are constantly iterating on these processes. Our priorities are: identifying needs and building and validating value propositions delivered by brands to the consumer – everything that has to do with understanding the market and the competition.

The acquisition frequency for several product categories changed during and after the pandemic and never returned to the sales volume they had before. We are a consumer-centric company, and right now we have to put our focus on understanding the shopper, how they are migrating to other channels, and what their needs are, because all of that is changing.

Our offering is the humanization of the consumer, the empathy we create with them, getting to know them to the point of becoming their ally in solving needs. The consumer is where it all starts, the entity from whom we receive constant feedback, all the way from the identification of an opportunity, through the evaluation of a possible solution, to the monitoring of what is happening with the product once it’s on the market.

Thinking about research agency partners that you work with, what difference do you see between local agencies and international agencies?

Lucia: “The local agencies have the flexibility that our in-house department has. Their ability to adapt is what defines them; we can jointly build the way in which we are going to approach the consumer and how we are going to solve our problem question. In addition, they are perfectly aware of the culture, the consumer, the market, the variables that impact the brand’s performance.

I would like to highlight the constant innovation of international agencies with respect to integrated models of diagnosis and information analysis. The way in which they capitalize on knowledge and share it globally is impressive. For example, I found all the online insights they were able to share with us during the pandemic quite interesting. I would also like to emphasize the variety of methodologies they have pre-designed according to the need for information at each stage of innovation or renewal of a product.”

What challenges do you think the market research community is facing in Latin America right now?

Lucia: “These are time challenges. We are calling out that we need to make decisions in line with what is happening now. If you ask for market information, the market information should not come out fifteen or twenty days after the cut-off you established, because if you are receiving the information on the twenty-eighth of the month, you say: ‘That’s what happened a month ago’. And the market varies with the development of new channels, categories, based on the adjustments made by the consumer in terms of habits, needs, and motivations.

Additionally, I think we have a very major challenge in terms of how we as a company can use artificial intelligence. That has not been invented. There must be a number of opportunities for all of us who work with market variables and competitors that we are currently missing or are not succeeding in scaling because we do not have the internal know-how or because the agencies do not have the know-how either.”

Is there anything you would like to see from the market research community in Latin America in the future?

Lucia: “”Beyond a market research organization, I would love for companies to be able to form an association, and for us to meet periodically to capitalize on and share learnings, experiences, and results of our experimental processes with new methodologies. I find that highly relevant. I have colleagues who call me on the phone: ‘Hey, how are you doing this?’ I think that could be an opportunity that we are all clamoring for. What can companies learn from each other? I would also love it if we could sit down and talk about how everyone is seeing trends, emerging behaviors, and general consumer habits that are impacting the market. This would be ideal as part of a collaborative learning framework between companies and market research agencies.”

Lucia’s call for collaboration within the market research community in Latin America speaks to the importance of learning from experiences in this industry, especially when taking into consideration challenges that the region may face when it comes to successfully driving market research forward. With the right connections, the Insights community in Latin America can continue to push for innovation and fresh perspectives.