Greenbook Future List Spotlight: Asha Parmar

Editor’s Note: The following interview features a 2024 Greenbook Future List honoree, Asha Parmar. The Greenbook Future List recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, passion, and excellence in the next generation of consumer insights and marketing professionals within the first 10 years of their careers.

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Asha Parmar, Associate Director at C Space, fearlessly leads in exploring generative AI developments, providing valuable insights amid change. Despite facing unique challenges as a woman of color, she actively promotes embracing risks and venturing into new territories.

Asha's global impact includes hosting discussions on AI's influence in the insights field, participating in industry-leading events, and spearheading thought leadership at C Space's Tech & Financial Services team. She established the Behavior Lab to drive discussions on the evolving insights landscape.

Her dedication to enhancing experiences and creating opportunities is evident through her leadership role, organizing client roundtables, writing on AI for Insights, and delivering speeches at prestigious conferences. Asha's influential work includes leading client accounts, strategizing key business initiatives, and founding the Behavior Lab to drive educational initiatives and seize commercial opportunities. Recognized by Women In Innovation, she is celebrated as a top innovator.

Asha Parmar stands as a beacon of excellence, driving innovation and shaping the insights industry's future with her pioneering efforts and impactful leadership.

Outside of insights, what are your passions and interests?

The pursuit of good food has become part of my DNA; whether sourcing high quality ingredients to cook and experiment with, or seeking out new or little known restaurants. Food is a vehicle for sharing stories and spreading love, to spend time with people I care about and as the gateway to cultural experiences, at home and when abroad. 

Since I was young, I have been obsessed with the challenge, intricacies and reward of learning languages. I distinctly remember being ten years old in line at a cafe in Paris, hearing two women natter away in French behind me. There and then I made it my mission to one day become fluent enough that I’d have understood them, or been able to speak with the same fluency. I feel grateful to have mastered French, a strong command over Spanish, and to have taught myself enough Italian to have enriching conversations with elderly restaurant owners deep in the countryside of Udine.  

Ironically, the skills developed in language learning are conducive to insights; seeking out patterns, extrapolating theories for what something might mean based on the knowledge I have in that moment, acknowledging anomalies. I believe these have been central to the love I have for this craft.

Who is your career role model or source of inspiration?

There is no single individual that I would consider my career role model or source of inspiration; along the way there have been so many individuals that have shaped the way I think about the world of work, the industry and the difference I can make personally.

However, the non-profit organization WIN: Women In Innovation has been central to me finding the path I am now on. I credit the members of WIN and the wonderful WIN: London committee with the gift of a constant learning exchange in which we all partake, as contributors and recipients. 

WIN has helped me build the philosophies that underpin my approach to my career, knowing my value, the gift of coaching and supporting others, as well as practical, tangible resources that continue to guide me day to day. 

What advice do you have for folks hoping to start a career in insights?

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it certainly didn’t kill the researcher. Insights is a magical career if you stay curious and hungry to learn; it’s all about people and why they do what they do. And if you’re interested in people, that’s a fantastic place to start. 

No days are ever the same; you must be willing to learn, try, fail and adapt - and comfortable with this sequence. Finding a community of people that will support your growth in this way, whether at your workplace or a network outside of it, is the key ingredient here, and can help you keep your thinking fresh if things start to feel too samey. 

What do you think the key characteristics or qualities of a leader are? How does this play into MRX?

I fundamentally believe in teaching others to fish; I advocate for ‘builder’ leadership styles, guiding with tools and resources to help others realise their potential by themselves. This requires a delicate balance of patience, openness and above all, empathy. 

Seeing others on this journey, learning, failing and rising while confident to give feedback to their leaders in a constant learning cycle is crucial for everyone’s growth, and incredibly rewarding.

These same qualities are, I believe, fundamental to the way we approach insights too; to allow people to feel comfortable in opening up and sharing their experiences with us, to examine data without assumptions and an underlying motivation to do right by the people the product or service will ultimately serve. 

What challenges do you see facing newer MRX professionals as technology advances?

There is a mountain of dialogue about the imminent death of the researcher in the face of new AI-driven technologies. In my view, this narrative is much more of a threat than the advancement of this technology itself.

I see our roles evolving to become more strategic than executional, demanding vision and the orchestration of tools. Emphasis shifts from ‘getting it done’ to ‘how to get it done’: setting up strategically rigorous sandboxes, defining prompts with precision, and coordinating powerful tools. 

Yet as businesses focus on the commercial benefits of AI, they can lose sight of what people value; machines cannot replicate lived experience. Analysis divorced from nuanced cultural, social and political context does a disservice to the customers we represent and the complexities of human truths. It cannot identify the negative space and read between the lines, triangulating what is there with what is not; what customers won’t say, can’t say, or don’t know. 

Remaining curious and critical is key. The nuanced interplay of imitation (what was) and lived experience (what I know to be) drives inspiration (what could be) and our capacity to innovate. If AI is fundamentally backward-looking and predictive, without lived experience to integrate, its potential to fuel true innovation remains stunted.