GreenBook Future List Spotlight: Olivier Tilleuil

What trends do you see making headway on the horizon of insights?

I expect that in the next decade, we will witness the needle move from 20:80 to 80:20 in favor of implicit vs. explicit insights. We see a more widespread awareness and use of the unconscious measurements – and the clients that try it and stay with it.

Further, in-context testing is something that will become commonplace, with the testing environments as accurate as possible. Given the need for speed, but still keeping a high methodology rigorousness, I expect that we will be choosing virtual shopping over central location VR testing. This is owing to a much bigger sample enabled by remote testing, and a better experimental design than you can do with CLT.

Insights and understanding of how people make decisions will always be important. But I expect that the industry will not exist anymore as it is now, but it will instead become a merger of insights, strategy, and data science.

 

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

Like my first boss always told me: “No matter if you are right or wrong, if you don’t get what your ‘right’ is about, it’s irrelevant.“ Aside from focusing on having the correct insight, we need to learn how to convince all stakeholders (not only insights people but marketing as well), in order to have an impact.

Don’t make things too complex. If you can’t explain it to your mom in simple terms, then you made it too complicated and probably didn’t understand it well enough.

Insights are all about understanding people – we need to put respondents first, and reason from their perspective. How do you replicate the environment in which people make decisions and measure their decision-making process as close as possible? (instead of discussing 5 vs 7 point likerts.)

 

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

In Belgium and France, you have students selling a type of donut on the beach; I have the record of selling the most donuts on the beach in Belgium! How? By leveraging insights!

You walk around, observe, and speak with the prospects (kind of like interviews). The first info you obtain is about client segmentation: the main target group is children, but it varies over time. If you approach children before 2 pm – they are not allowed to eat sweets because they just had lunch but their dads might still be hungry, so you target the dads which might still be hungry (and if they buy, they need to buy as well for their kids). Between 2-5 pm, your main target is the kids, but you need to have the buy-in of the other stakeholder (the parents). After 5, kids are not allowed to eat as they need to have dinner, but you have groups of younger people gathering for a drink and are getting hungry. So after 5 pm, you target those groups of friends.

Secondly, it is about experimentation; you try out different messaging and see how people react (buy or not buy), but it is also about channels of communication. You can shout so that people are aware of the offering or you can sit down and eat a donut. Sitting down and eating donut results in high return (especially where you have many children – as they don’t know the concept) as you can display the product but as well show that the food is safe (I, the seller trust in what I am selling). Again, you learn this by experimentation or, sometimes, accidental insights.

Thirdly, you can nudge people to a certain extent, too. For example, you can increase the number of tips by a factor of 3, depending on how you give back change money. A donut was 2.3 euros, and customers usually give you 5 euros. You can first give back the highest change money (so first 2 euro, then 1 euro, 50 cents, and 20 cents), or the reverse – give people back the lowest change first (20 cents, then 50 cents, 1 euro, and then 2 euro). The first option results in a much higher chance of people saying, “you can keep the change” at the end – just before you give them 20 cents.”