GreenBook Future List Spotlight: Marin Mrša

What are the three skills you believe to be crucial to succeed in market research?

In my opinion, those are:

1. Precision
2. Ethics
3. Storytelling

First of all, there is no room for mistakes in our profession as we are the starting point for important decisions done by companies and brands. A person in the market research industry should definitely be aware of the weight and the impact we bring to the table. We all witnessed in recent years how data can be used in the wrong ways. From my perspective, we have a tremendous responsibility as data collectors. From one side, we should always protect the data, and on the other side, we should always be transparent in our insights. And finally, the crucial part is how to make the most of our insights – through easy to understand and implement stories. I like to be guided by the principle “SUCCESS” by Chip and Dan Heath which means that our story should be: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.

What trends do you see making headway on the horizon of insights? What trends do you think will falter in years to come?

I think that we all are focused on the wrong things. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are pretty common these days and everybody is focusing on them. We will all use them, but we need to look to them as a tool for making our products and services better. The only important thing is the insight and what kind of value it brings to our client. We should put them in the center and start with that. Besides that, I believe that a lot of companies will alter their focus on better insights and better customer experience and reduce the advertising. Customer retention will be the key trend during the COVID-19 crisis.

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

As technology advances, we are already now in the world of Big Data. Through time we will have even more data points and sources and it will be difficult to choose the relevant data for a particular case. Data integrations from multiple sources are a great way to look at the bigger picture but we should be extremely careful here and do not force the integration if it is not a data fit. Otherwise, it can mislead us in findings. To avoid this, from the start we should focus on clean and relevant data, not necessarily big data.

What’s a fun fact about yourself that would surprise people to know?

I’m a former national vice-champion in Kickboxing. While I was in college, I was an active athlete and a fighter. Training twice a day and studying was a combination that I loved. I had offers for continuing my fighting career as a professional athlete but in the end, I decided to pursue a career in business.

Outside of insights, what are your passions and interests?

As I am an entrepreneur, I have a strong passion for promoting and talking about entrepreneurship as well as for personal development. I see those two fields highly correlating and pushing each other. I see all my interests as a combination of personal development: learning (books, audiobooks, courses, meetups, conferences), body (training, healthy diet, regular health checks, grooming), and mind (meditation, therapist, think week). Also, I love to produce good content in topics of customer experience, market research, entrepreneurship, and personal development. I’m especially really active on LinkedIn where I’ve challenged myself to post every day for one year. Currently, I’m on the 210th day of the challenge. You can check my journey on hashtag #postadaymm.