The Key to Predicting Growth to Drive Innovation

In supporting women in research, GreenBook is talking with female leaders from across the insights industry to celebrate their achievements and inspire the next wave of professionals. We sit down with female leaders for a conversation on their areas of expertise and achievements.

Marsha is a lover of data-driven insights. She is a senior insight professional with 25 years of experience in the FMCG industry including food, retail, and dairy. Her peers have known her for providing strong thought leadership, innovative solutions, and strategic thinking, with commercial acumen underpinned by powerful data-driven solutions. Marsha’s focus is on finding the intersection where data becomes insight and insight becomes a tangible commercial opportunity. She enjoys challenges, never shies away from tough conversations, and always strives to exceed targets and deliver results.

Today, I have the opportunity to speak with her who is an insights expert in discussing the key to predicting growth to drive innovation. Here it is and I know you’ll enjoy it.

 

The interview has been edited for clarity.

 

Colin Wong: Hi, Marsha. It is great to have you on board with us today. And I am overly excited today to actually have a chat with you in understanding the growth driving innovation. So well, before we get stuck into it, I thought that I should give our audience a little bit of an introduction because this is so new for GreenBook itself. GreenBook is launching the site that we are currently on called expert channel a Disruptive Insights Asia-Pacific.

Now, the reason why we wanted to do that is to bring everybody to one place that they can look for innovations, methodologies, business opportunities, as well as housing information for researchers, even businesses that will require our help for everything to basically sit in one place. And all you must do is just a few clicks away to use the system for that. And for our session today, I really wanted to focus on talking to you about innovation that we will be going through today, and how it will help to drive the growth. It would help our audience to understand who you are and a little bit about your background, I thought of instead of introducing you to our audience, I might get you to introduce yourself for the next couple of minutes.

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah, absolutely. Super excited about being involved in the expert channel. I am the former head of insights and long-term growth at Bulla Dairy Foods. They are a wholly Australian-owned dairy company, and they manufacture predominately ice cream and cream. I have worked in Insights for about 25 years in FMCG and food/fashion retailing. I am mainly on the client-side. So, unlike traditional research, I have worked on the client-side, and I’ve spent a lot of my time using and developing processes that allow companies to find a nice intersection where data becomes insight and then insight becomes a tangible commercial opportunity.

So, the developments in human-centered design thinking have been fantastic in offering the opportunity to bring that broad thinking and that detail thinking together, integrating research on how we understand the consumer better to then drive better conversations, unlock goals, and deliver products that meet consumer needs. So that is what I have really focused on for the last 20, 25 years. And I love the insight space. It is such a great platform to drive good strategy, really good innovation, and really get the opportunity to understand how consumer behaviour drives purchase behaviour, essentially.

 

Colin Wong: Great. This is a great introduction. Thank you for that. I am glad to hear that you have 25 years of experience.

 

Marsha Montebello: I must have started in my teens.

 

Colin Wong: You must be, I don’t know, a dinosaur in our industry, 25 years of experience.

 

Marsha Montebello: Well, I was reflecting on it in our conversation. I don’t know if there were any insights roles when I first took my insight role. I was working for the dairy company, Australian Dairy Corporation, which is now called Dairy Australia. And I started, my background is marketing economics. And I worked there probably for about three or four years. But I love to use research to drive strategy and really understand what we were trying to achieve by going out to consumers and saying, how are you using dairy?

What are your pinch points? What are your pain points? What would encourage you to do or use more? And then we fashioned the role around market and consumer insights. And that was the very beginning of me moving into this space.

Because it really wasn’t, and still probably really isn’t a lot of training behind becoming an insights professional. So, it’s either people who come from strategy or using insights in their marketing plans and brand plan, et cetera. So, when I was reflecting on either talking to the audience about what is my background in insights, that’s how it started.

And it is such an exciting space. And it can be used in the right organization by people who know how to use research to drive strategy. It can be a really powerful center and hub for any business. And that is what I’ve loved on the climate side, I’m working with some great agencies and then seeing how that information actually translates into tangible business decisions or products or services. So, it’s been really a nice time to reflect on how things have evolved over time.

 

Colin Wong: You are very, very right in saying that, in the old days, you couldn’t go to a university and actually study a market research course. I remember, during my time, the only way that you could do that was to actually study a psychology course, which is a research component in that. And most of the people there who actually do that turned out to either become a psychologist or down the track become a market researcher or insights professional. And I have to say that I am actually one of them coming through that way, of course.

We see that a lot of universities actually started to provide graduate courses, specializing in market research. To some degree, some universities even provide those courses three-fourths focusing on marketing and marketing research. So, it’s good…

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah…

 

Colin Wong: To see that our industry has come a long way. Yeah. With looking at one growth opportunity, where do you actually first look at it? Where do you actually start? Are you looking for changes, like gender, or age, or demographics with the population moving? Where do you start when you look for growth opportunities?

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah, great question, and yes to all of those questions. The interesting thing about the growth space is that you’ve got to use a number of data sources to really start getting a feel for what the themes and the patterns are and what’s happening. But as you know, information and data are just that, unless you have purpose and direction in terms of what you’re looking for.

So you use a combination of data, but you go very broad and have a look at what’s happening. And then you use what I call strategic guardrails. So before jumping straight into this particular metric, you’ve really got to understand, what’s your growth horizon? Are you looking for short to medium term, or are you looking really further afield for the longer-term growth? Because that will help you understand how to interpret what you’re looking at or force you to go and look for additional data sources.

Then you’ve got to look at what universe? Are you looking for growth in your existing category and markets and segments, or are you looking for growth in that adjacent or new categories? And is it local, or do you want it to be global? And does whatever growth or trend that you’re looking at, does it apply to different markets? And what’s the nuance that you might have to take into consideration if it doesn’t?

Then they’re looking for things like, what’s the business appetite for growth? Is the business willing to look at mergers and acquisitions? Or do they want you just to be contained to your existing assets and products that you’ve got available to you?

Are they willing to make a big investment? Or is it only a small Capex investment? Is the brief to go look for a really big opportunity, or do you want to have a niche opportunity that you can nurture into a big opportunity? And that comes back to what your horizon is.

So if you want something in the short to medium term, you’re going to need to look for something that is moving into the mainstream, widely used by different categories and adjacencies. And then you want to come in and go, right, how can I shuffle out some existing competitors? And you can probably do that within a two to three horizon.

Whereas, if you’re looking for niche opportunities to nurture into big opportunities, it’s going to take longer. And the business is going to need patience because it’s going to take a while to actually see the fruits of your labour. So that helps the growth brief become less overwhelming if you use those strategies to guide you as to where you want to go, where to look, and what data sources to use.

 

Colin Wong: With Bulla being such a significant local brand I think everybody knows about, I don’t think there is anyone not knowing who Bulla is. I grew up eating Bulla ice cream ever since my family migrated to Australia back in ’87. So I’ve been here 30 plus years. It is such an iconic brand.

So if we look at the economic changes from your experience, how big is the difference of the growth stage during the time that you started with Bulla and to well, let’s just say concurrent stages that you have seen, the growth in other Bulla products, or specifically the products that you worked on?

Marsha Montebello: So it’s really interesting because sometimes, it depends on the size of the business and the level of investment, not only from a dollar point of view but also people and processes. So when I first started at Bulla, it was very much around growing within our existing categories. Have we spent enough time ensuring that we’re growing in the right spaces? Let’s go and have a look at demographic changes, what’s happening with our economy, where is our brand anchored, and how that relates to the markets that we’re playing in.

Are we every day, and the growth is at a premium? Asking those questions, and really using things like your brand tracking, your segmentation studies, then what’s happening in the marketplace, what are your competitors doing, and really going, right, now let’s solidify and make sure that we know that our marketing team is set up strategically to grow within our existing categories, and how our eating behaviours obviously play into that and ensuring we’ve got innovation, really good insight-led innovation pipelines, to meet those needs.

Once you’ve got that happening– and it wasn’t that I just did that job, and like, right, that job is done now. We’re just handing over to the marketing team and saying, right, you guys are now responsible for growing your categories, using data-driven outcomes, and setting up the processes to support those. So I’ve spent a lot of the time, especially being on the client-side, setting up processes, and setting up insights team, and using the right data sources to inform marketers on how to make really good business decisions.

So after a couple of years there, I then moved into what we call the growth and long-term growth space. And I’ve been fortunate that the business has invested in having this kind of team that runs alongside the existing business, that looks at everything outside of our existing categories. So we’ve had the opportunity, in my team and I, to go, right, what’s trending internationally? What rating regimes are trending? What patents, big companies with deep pockets, what are they registering from an R&D perspective?

So you start drawing on a whole different set of data to drive the different areas that you’re playing in. And so to your original question, you need to be on top of all those dynamic changes within your existing categories. But then if you’re fortunate enough, you can start playing alongside the existing business to grow outside of that, if you find opportunities where you feel your brand can play in that space.

 

Colin Wong: Yep, yep. Given the massive information out there at the moment, and especially currently with the COVID situation ever since, I would say, probably the end of the first quarter, the beginning of second quarter until now, and we are still in it, and there’s no way of telling when we will be actually out of the woods. And we could only guess, maybe the next few years before anybody can safely say that this thing is now over, or it is under control or can manage, as we all know that we still are not getting that free bell ring to say, hey, we can all now go flying to Mars tomorrow.

So that’s quite a bit of worrying. So how does the current economic situation, how would you sort out what information to develop growth estimation in your own brand for Bulla, in particular? Is that something that you guys check internally to say, okay, the economy has actually slowed down a little bit, and are we still planning to estimate the same growth that we have done, I don’t know, last year or the year before, to project that estimation?

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah. I think there are two parts to that question, Colin. One is you need to make sure that you’re processing what, that you’re really reviewing things on an ongoing basis. COVID was a really good example of the need to do that.

So if you were designing something that you were planning on launching in a couple of years, and very much tied to what the demographic of Australia’s population looked like, and you were relying on growth from a migration point of view, COVID told us that that could stop, that could slow considerably and that, unless you’re on top of that, and you’re seeing that, that you might make the wrong decision.

So I think they estimated we will have the slowest population growth in Australia since World War I. And that’s because we closed our international borders. So, net migration was, I think the world population runs at about 1% growth. We were running at about 1.4%, and a lot of that had to do with net overseas migration. Because we were averaging about 200,000 people a year.

Now, this year, we’re actually estimating negative 70,000. So if you rely on a product that’s relied on demographic and population growth, you’d have to go, right, what are our plans of how are we being nimble to change that? And so that’s one thing. And the important thing is to keep revisiting what your assumptions are and ensure that it’s an iterative process. The other one is about…

 

Colin Wong: Yeah, I was going to say, the easiest way, sorry to interrupt. I say the easiest way is to say, hey, let’s shelve that product for now.

 

Marsha Montebello: Absolutely. But I think then you can’t predict when it’s going to return. So unless you want no growth, you’re going to have to be nimble and go, how do we, and I dare,  I hate to use it. How do you pivot and ensure that you’re continuing to drive growth within the business, but you’re not just making a knee-jerk reaction? You’re actually understanding what the change is, and then reviewing what your product solution was.

Do consumers still have the need that you were making, the assumption based on the fact that it was population growth? And it might have been a product that was driven by cultural changes or cultural needs and demands. So I think that’s really important, to really be nimble and understand what’s happening in your marketplace.

So again, when you’re using research to try and identify those growth opportunities, you always come to intersections where you go, is there enough weight behind the information that we’ve looked at, to continue to make these recommendations where we feel like we’re moving towards? Or do we need to stop and go, right, has the need changed?

Do we still see that as that opportunity? Has the market moved on, even in the time we’ve done the research? And that knowing, which is sometimes really tough, because you’ve invested a lot of time and energy and blood and guts and sweat into the projects.

 

Colin Wong: That said…

 

Marsha Montebello: You’ve been working on. But it does take a lot of courage to say, no, actually, the best option for us is to stop and actually move on to something else growth. Because you can invest a lot of time and money in launching a product that doesn’t work. And that would be a shame. Because it’s quite an investment for any business to move into that space. And you never get success in the first year. So you’ve got to be willing to make an investment in getting behind your product or service.

 

Colin Wong: Absolutely. Absolutely. And having developed growth estimation, who do you guys, or people in this area, would develop innovative product concepts to? Who do you talk to? How do you test the product concept with ideas, whether it is with potential consumers? Or do they actually produce the product first and then test them– Two ways of looking at it?

 

Marsha Montebello: I think there’s a bit of a– there’s a big stick between that identifying where the growth is and using those strategic guardrails and then developing products. And that’s where the human-centered design thinking comes into it quite well. Whereas, you’re going through the first stages, called empathize, which is really understanding your market and your opportunity. Then you go into defining what the problem is, or what the issue is, or what the opportunity is. You’re actually defining that exactly.

And so there’s another research process that you go through that helps you keep funneling that information down. So by the time you get to the end, you’re feeling really confident that you know where the growth that’s happening, know how big the growth is, and what the size of the opportunity for the business will be, know where you’re at in the innovation curve. So is it a product or an opportunity that is only targeted at the innovators or the early adopters, and it hasn’t become mainstream yet?

And that gives you an idea about the type of demand you’re going to have, the type of consumer that you’re going to go after, the type of information that you need to communicate to your consumer. Because if it’s, say– and I always use the example with my team. So we look at there’s a lot of products at the moment launching overseas with collagen in it. If I said to you 10 years ago that you would have a yogurt with collagen in that, you’d go, are you crazy? Like, really?

 

Colin Wong: Yeah. Who are you trying to kill?

 

Marsha Montebello: Overtime– Yes, totally. Over time, because big companies have been investing in it, and they’ve had the willingness to just test the market. You’ve had people going, whoa. Those innovators and early adopters are like, oh, wow, I had this great yogurt with collagen in it. That might have been eight years ago.

And then two years after that, you had another brand launch with it. And then two years after that, you saw categories. And then two years after that– so that’s the way they evolve. And so you’ve got to start looking at where you think consumers are in terms of understanding what the trend and opportunity is, who’s playing in that market, how are they using the category, where is the white space.

So there are all the things you need to answer before you go anywhere near a product or service solution. And I like to be really particular about making sure that you have an opportunity platform, that you test with consumers to say, am I really understanding what your need is that I need to be satisfying, or that’s currently unmet, or brands are doing, but not really well? So there’s an opportunity for me to come in.

Because what that allows us to do is create products against that opportunity platform, test those products, and if they’re not successful, you can then go, right, did I not interpret what the need was? The need is still there, but my product solution is not right. If you don’t have that opportunity platform, your concept might bomb, and you’d go, Oh, I don’t know why my concept bombed. And then you have to go back to the start. And that’s quite labour-intensive, and not very efficient, and not very good use of time and resources.

So having the discipline up front– and I know everyone loves to get into the innovation solutions and come up with a product concept. And that’s their most sort of exciting view. But if it doesn’t perform really well, then you can’t answer why. And so it’s a real discipline that I constantly coach my teams through and businesses through, going, I know we want to jump forward, but let’s just take a little bit of time. Because we’ll then end up being in a better place with greater success for our products and services than we would if we just launched a product.

 

Colin Wong: Absolutely. I mean, in the old days, we see that some companies tend to actually develop a product first before they actually even go out and do concept testing.

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah.

 

Colin Wong: And some of them are successful. Some of them are unsuccessful. Because I think the ones that are successful are probably lucky in the way that the product that they have created is what the society needs at that point in time. And therefore, there was a growth opportunity. But for those who don’t need a product and could potentially actually grow the product, that didn’t do so well.

So I suppose in comparing or creating the product first and having that concept first before you actually go and create the actual product itself, I know we see a lot of differences in that. I mean, obviously, you just spoke about testing those concepts before we actually go out and develop the actual product. And do you think there will be cases that you would take that road differently, to say, I see this product confidently, knowing, based on the past experience, that we could go out and create this product, and you will go and not worry about testing until you create a product? Would you ever tag along that way to take a bit of a risk?

 

Marsha Montebello: Well, I think some companies do it. And it very much is dependent on the risk level the business is willing to take, the amount of money that they’re willing to walk away from if it doesn’t work. Because if you’ve got a higher appetite for risk, sure.

I think it also has to do with the level of experience with the team, the mindset of whether you’re a growth mindset. Are you willing to listen to and observe what’s going on? And as much as organizations might say they don’t research, I think it’s a less traditional research that they do.

So, I do feel like that they’ll be looking at scouting markets and seeing what’s going on, talking to other people. So I think it’s less formal research that they might do, but I very much am not saying where it’s just like, Oh, let’s just create a product, and let’s just launch, and see what happens. It’s like they’ve collected information on the way, which is all– as we know, which is all research. They might not validate it quantitatively, but it’s qualitative research that they’ve bought into the business to talk about.

And then, again, it’s about those horizons. So if it’s in the shorter term, and there are lots of companies doing it, and you feel you can do something slightly different, then yeah. If you’ve got a high risk for– appetite for risk, then go for it. But if you want something that’s in the longer term, where you go, right, well, it might actually involve R&D time. You might want to create some R&D–

 

Colin Wong: That’s right.

 

Marsha Montebello: Around a particular strain or a new treatment or a vitamin that you want to deliver that’s different to the marketplace. That’s a lot different. That’s where your risk is really high, and then you’re spending a lot of dollars without really understanding if there’s an opportunity for it. So again, I wouldn’t discourage it, but I think that there’s a time and a place for that really high risk, let’s go for it. And then there’s a time and a place for really solid evidence-based research processes.

 

Colin Wong: Yeah, I think a model of this side of approach is mainly– I think startups will tend to take that process a little bit more than the established company. Because they’ve obviously been there a while. They’ve done it in the past, so they know what research will actually bring and how to actually utilize the data to actually help them. Where a lot of data, first of all, they don’t have the funding to actually do the research thoroughly probably, unless they are able to get the funding, in the first place.

And if they just start up and supporting themselves, they tend to, like what you say, do very minimal qual research to then get a better understanding of the target audience, the targeted markets, and tend to just go out and create the product. I mean, I see that a lot, especially within technology space startups. They think, well, this is a great product, great software that I’m going to do, and I’m just going to go and create it and hire a couple of software developers and start building it.

And then, once you’re building it, and we’re trying to scale, and you’re trying to sell it, It just doesn’t work. And people are not accepting that. And you’re thinking about, why is it not working? Because I’ve got such a great company. I’m trying to solve a challenge that society is having. But people are not responding to that need of a challenge.

 

Marsha Montebello:  Yeah, I think about your really good point, Colin. I love looking at what all startups are doing because they’re actually quite entrepreneurial people. So I’m always looking at–

 

Colin Wong: I agree to that, yes.

 

Marsha Montebello: And some of the websites that post what startups are investing into. And I think the really important thing to acknowledge is that the tech type of person, to become a startup, you have to– they’re for a long time, doing–

 

Colin Wong: That’s right.

 

Marsha Montebello: Everything went wrong– the smell of an oily rag. But they also can identify an opportunity or a gap in the market. And that’s what made them start their business, giving them the fire to start what they did. So they’ve already started doing that informal research process.

I suppose the difference between the ones that are successful and the ones that aren’t is those that really draw on their mentors and stop listening and broadening their view around what could this mean, and what are the tweaks and nuances and changes I can make to ensure that my product is a success? Because they don’t have the big budgets that the big companies do. So they need to do it a little bit more informally. But I do think that startups are always good to look at because their focus is to find the gap in the market and try and fill it with the product or service. And that’s essentially what you want to do with a growth strategy.

 

Colin Wong: That’s exactly right. And we still see that. Having said that, we still see some startups fail miserably. And unless the actual founders or co-founders have nothing to look forward to, thinking about, OK, I tried that. I’ve done that.

 

Marsha Montebello: Now what do I do? What do I do next? Where do I go now? Do I go back to square one and reveal everything that we have done in the past, and see where we actually fell? And was it because we don’t understand our market well enough, and we are not, as you just mentioned, that we are not actually closing the gap that we were meant, or we were trying to do, and therefore, our product did not work? I mean, have we done our homework in the sense that, have we done enough research to understand our audience, to understand our market?

And that’s something that I think is quite critical. Going back to looking at the concept testing and building products, what has been the success with this sort of approach, from your experience? I mean, you don’t have to necessarily use Bulla as an example. But I’m sure that you will probably know a lot of people within the industry locally in Australia. So even understanding some of the other brands whose colleagues might have shared some information with you, that would be great to learn.

Yeah. OK, so I think, historically– so when I worked in fashion retailing, we had the ability to spot trends early on, because we were using, obviously, international examples. And the process allowed us to outpace the growth in the category that we were seeing. So we had 25% uplift in– when active became trendy, and women were using– wearing activewear as more of their day, their day leisurewear.

We jumped on that trend. We tested it with our consumers. We found that there was a need for that kind of more casual daywear that they could wear in to exercise and then throughout their day. And so we jumped on that opportunity and they were able to outpace the category growth by 25%, which was fantastic.

We also have seen, in the Bulla business, we’ve had an improvement in our concept test results. So now we see that 80% of our concepts are testing well above benchmarks on the key metrics, like unique purchase intents. So the success of our concepts is testing better, which means we have a longer pipeline that we can launch into the market with concepts that consumers are saying, Yeah, I’d love that concept. That definitely meets a need that I have. I would buy that if it was on the market. So it gives us more efficiency in the way we work.

And then the intangible results are a greater understanding of our consumer, better conversations with our retailer, data-driven insights. So you’re taking away people’s opinions, and you’re actually saying, no, the consumer tells us this is exactly what they want. So the process allows that constant checking back in with consumers, to ensure that we’ve understood what they’ve told us, and we’ve created something to meet that need. It gives you a really great platform to talk to retailers about and then improves your success on getting products arranged in supermarkets.

 

Colin Wong: So how resource-intensive going the exercise will be? Because obviously, when you are testing a new concept and trying to launch a new product, and time is money. Time is of the essence.

 

Marsha Montebello: Yes… So you will never just do one for that. Usually, my understanding is most of the company will work on several different new products. It might not necessarily launch at the same time, but in the pipeline, there are always two to three ahead. So beginning of the year or towards the end of the year, when you guys, when you pull your team together and say, OK, 2021, here’s what we’re going to do– here are three products that we wanted to launch– how do you actually plan that out and look at the resources to say, OK, have I got enough resources to where I have the budget to do whatever that we need to do this year? Is there something that is going through your mind all the time?

 

We have a process that we follow. But the beauty of the process– and that’s that human-centered design thinking I was talking about earlier– and depending on what horizon you’re in. So if you’re in the short-term horizon, where you know more of the data, the competitors– you’ve already experienced some of the new product launches in adjacent categories, and you’ve done a lot more reading just as part of your job– you can come into the process at stage two or three. But right, we know where the growth is. We know what the opportunity is.

We can see that it’s played out in the marketplace. We now need to just create a product. So we then go straight into product concept development and then do a little bit of testing from there. When you’re looking at the longer horizon, where you’re actually trying to uncover what the new opportunity is, that’s obviously a lot more intensive from a budget and a people’s point of view. So it depends on what your strategic guardrails and depends on your horizon. That very much determines what your cost is going to be.

 

Colin Wong: And what’s the payoff for going through that exercise? What has been the payoff for you guys?

 

Marsha Montebello: The greatest success in product launch. So at the end of the day, that is your objective, is to launch a product that’s successful. And so you can’t guarantee success ever. But if you have a consistent, repeatable process that you implement, and you keep learning and iterating along the way, then you’re building skills within your team. You’re increasing your level of success with launching a product that meets a consumer’s need.

And obviously, you then have a brand that’s relevant to consumers. With Bulla, a brand that’s been around for 110 years, I think we’ve been doing something right.

 

Colin Wong: Oh, absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. Otherwise, we won’t be talking to you today, would we?

 

Marsha Montebello: No, not that I’ve been there for 110 years, but–

 

Colin Wong: No, no. No. What I’m saying is you’ve gained a–

 

Marsha Montebello: For another 100.

 

Colin Wong: That’s exactly right. That’s what I meant.

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah…

 

Colin Wong: Marsha, as we know that our industry at the moment is really in a critical stage that, in the sense, there’s not a lot of people wanting to actually jump into our industry and become an insights professional, especially the younger generations, which is one of the. But I’m not necessarily talking about in Australia alone. But I think it’s a global trend, as well, that in other countries, that we’re also seeing the same trend happening in other countries as well.

So my question is, while we talk about growth opportunity, growth-driving innovation, so a lot of brands, a lot of services, basically do that, right? So what would you tell, I suppose, the younger generations or people who might think about joining our ranks within the research industry, to say, hey, look, it doesn’t matter if you wanted to become a program developer or if you wanted to become a CEO of a company. Every company that, which is driving innovation through growth.

But particularly, in our industry, it’s a really exciting part of that process. Because we basically are the people who give that guidance to all the marketers, to all the C-suite staff, or even to call them the management staff, to say, here’s a product, this is the data, and this is what it’s actually telling us about our market and our audience. And we should then follow this through in order to gain success. So what would you tell these young people, to say, hey, come and join us? Well, this is something that you can actually drive that growth opportunity through innovation via market research industry?

 

Marsha Montebello: I mean, Colin, if I had my way, I would make strategy, research, innovation, the first year of any university course. Because I think those skills are extraordinarily transferable. They understand how, what makes consumers do what they do, whether it makes a purchase, whether it avoids a behavior, whether it encourages a behavior. At the end of the day, the majority of businesses are there to make money. I mean, you’ve got some–

 

Colin Wong: That’s right.

 

Marsha Montebello: Your volunteers and your foundations and things, which are there to either help people take up a behavior, to help their health, or avoid a behavior to help their health. But it’s all driven around consumer behavior. And the insights and research space is really a foundation of understanding, how do consumers behave? And which are the data sources that I need to use to understand what is going to drive behavior, whether it’s purchase behavior or health outcomes?

And it’s less about just using data to run research. It’s about saying, these are ways to identify problems. We teach you skills on how to take lots of information and go, what is the problem or opportunity? That’s a transferable skill. Then it’s like, how do I solve that problem or opportunity? And then, here are a whole set of tools that are going to help you understand how to respond to that problem or opportunity.

And that’s, again, driven by people in the insights space, all the research space, from an agency point of view. So I think the mindset and the attitude towards, Oh, it’s just insights. It’s like, no, actually, we’re like behavioral scientists. And we are problem solvers. And we are extraordinarily strategic. And those skills you can use anywhere. So I think we should just all rally for it being the first year of university at any or all. But it’s an exciting space that gives you so many different skills.

 

Colin Wong: Oh, I completely agree with what you say. I thank you very much for that distinctive, clear answer to encourage the younger generation to say, hey, here, you can make a career out of it. Because like you said, it is so exciting. Because I suppose the mentors of the industry, to say, hey, here’s what we do, and here’s how we can help to grow their businesses. Work with us and cherish our work and understand how it could potentially help you to grow. It’s as simple as that. Yeah. That’s my job.

 

Marsha Montebello: Yeah…

 

Colin Wong: Yeah, yeah. Well, Marsha, it’s been such a pleasure having you on boardbull today, and have a great chance to learn so much. I learned a lot myself today.

I wish I could have a few more people like you on board, having a chat, and share that knowledge and experience with our audience. Because I think it’s critical, critical importance, that that knowledge is actually being shared. And that’s what we really wanted to help the APAC region, is actually to share that knowledge from experts like yourself so that everybody can learn what other people are actually doing and how it could potentially help other industries as well.

Because hopefully, we’re not living in the silos and say, hey, oh, this is only applicable to the marketing research industry. And hopefully, no one thinks like that.

 

Marsha Montebello: No, absolutely.

 

Colin Wong: Yeah, this is really all about knowledge sharing and to learn together, basically, to help to improve our industry and to help improve overall business opportunities for everybody.

 

Marsha Montebello: Well, thank you so much for having me. It was fabulous to talk about it. And as you can see, I’m so passionate about the insights and innovation, and research space. So yeah, I’ve loved being part of the panel today. Thank you.

 

Colin Wong: Thank you very much. For everybody else out there, it’s a great session today, Marsha Montebello, formally from Bulla. So we thank her for spending the time with us. And hopefully, we will see everybody in our next exciting session for Expert Channel Asia-Pacific. Thank you again, Marsha. And enjoy the rest of your day.

 

Marsha Montebello: Thank you.