GreenBook Future List Spotlight: Muriel Silva

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

1. Organization skills: you’ll have to lead many projects at the same time, while working with many different internal teams and business partners. It’s important to be organized to ensure the studies are on time and on budget.
2. Strategic thinking: you’ll be at an advantageous position when exposed to the knowledge gaps from different teams in the organization in order to effectively prioritize the budget and resources based on those needs
3. Teamwork: a successful project needs the expertise of many different areas, both inside and out of your organization

 

If you could change one thing about insights, what would it be?

The insights function needs to be in the core of strategy and to be separated in terms of organizational structure from the marketing department. It enables the insights function to grow and not only serve marketing objectives but more broadly serve all the departments in the business. Being close to the consumer is not only a core marketing responsibility, the entire business should be involved.

 

Who is your career role model or source of inspiration?

My mother is definitely my career (and life!) role model. Even when she is incredibly successful in her career, I take most of my learnings from her example as a mother and a friend. She taught me responsibility, empathy, to be calm think clearly during stressful situations and that true leadership is based on leading by example

 

What is the most valuable lesson you have learned from market research?

Business empathy: the key to a successful market research outcome is the brief. You need to understand the business need and really grasp the implications to be able to recommend the course of action and ensure at all stages of the project that you have that end goal in mind

 

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

Privacy and data ethics will continue to be important challenges for our industry. As we collect more and more consumer and shopper data, the challenge will be to ensure we are mindful about privacy and fair to all stakeholders when using data to advance business objectives