Achieving Success in Insights – Ford Motor Company

As we all know, some insight organizations have more impact on their clients and companies than others.  This podcast focuses on those organizations that are doing a good job making an impact – and in different ways. We’ll be talking with leaders from brands and from suppliers that have made a lot of these steps and missteps.  We’ll cover the definition of success, how you know if you’re being successful, how to organize around that idea, and other related topics.

Our guest today is Nick McCracken.  Nick is the Global Strategic Research Manager for Ford. In his role with Global Consumer Insights, Nick takes both a near-term (by auto industry standards) and long-term view of consumer needs and consumer trends.

Nick outlines three definitions of insights success:

• efficiency: The blocking and tackling of running a research organization
• impact: The short-term and long-term insight that drives changes
• relationships: the ability to participate and influence the team

All of this is happening while being truly integrated with the human-centered design team to make decisions and trade-offs that benefit all.

 

Please read the transcript or listen to the interview for more about his perspective on the goals of the organization, how to align the structure to the goals, and adapting to change within your own organization.

 

 

Gregg Archibald

Hello, everybody.  I appreciate you joining us today for Getting It Right: Achieving Success in Insights.  I’m Greg Archibald of Gen2 Advisors, and this is a podcast series focusing on how various organizations are achieving success in the insights structure.

And through the series, we’ll be talking about brands and suppliers that are achieving success in different ways.  We’ll discuss how success is defined, how to do it, trials and tribulations, the relationships with internal clients and suppliers, and really kind of what the future holds for that.

And today, I’m very pleased to announce my guest, Nick McCracken.  Nick conducts research to gain insights into the customer wants and needs for the future Ford and Lincoln products.  I’ve known Nick now for several years. Pleased to call him a friend, before joining ford, oh, and he is the Global Strategic Research Manager, who has been with Ford for coming up on 20 years, even.  When I say that, it sounds like a long time.  Prior to joining that, he was with Young & Rubicam and as a professor.

So, Nick, welcome, and thank you for being here.

 

Nick McCracken
Gregg, thanks; it’s great to be here, too.  Great to spend some time with you, Always informative, always entertaining.

 

Rethinking the Insights Organization

Gregg Archibald
Let’s hope that remains true today.  When I think about Ford, you guys, particularly over the past year, have had a very wild ride.    You kind of went from being a car manufacturer to ventilator manufacture there for a little while.  You’ve had some tremendous success with the electric mustang and had some real success with hybrid truck sales, but you’ve also had some difficulties in this in terms of overall sales.

And some of that’s pandemics, some of his other things, you’ve had supply chain issues with computer chips.  Just like a lot of other companies have, has this impacted the insights organization?

Nick McCracken
Yeah, that’s a big and a great question, Gregg.   As you say, everybody in the insights business around the world has had to rethink what they’ve been doing for the past year or so, not just here in North America and Europe, but around the world.

We’re a global organization.  We have operations in China, Europe, South America, and we have to think about global footprints.

At Ford, we’re very proud of the work that we did with Project Apollo and ventilators, but the business kept rolling on.  We introduced the Mach-E.  We introduced the new F 150.  We introduced the Bronco.  And the business didn’t stop.  The challenge for the insights group was: How do you keep supporting this business at a time when it’s much more difficult to do face-to-face research?  So much of the auto industry research is based on qualitative research where you’re showing things to people.  How do you deal with that in a safe way?  During the area era of the pandemic, can we use more digital tools? Digital tools have always been part of market research, but how can we make a shift to really leverage those which allow people to give us valuable information without leaving their homes and remain in safe environments?

There are several overall industry inflection points, and we’re asking ourselves questions like:  What does this pandemic mean?  How could it affect services? How could it affect the shift over to electric vehicles like with the Mach-E that we introduced?  All these things are happening at once.

The short answer is, we had to go inside ourselves as an insights organization and rethink a lot of things.  So, we developed protocols that allowed us to conduct research in a more remote way.  To do face-to-face research, but in a safe manner, so no respondents would be exposed to any risks.  We shifted to digital tools that allowed us to gain the insights we previously would have captured in a face-to-face manner.  It’s not exactly the same thing as traditional qualitative, but the method of collection is a more appropriate approach for this situation.

The short answer is we had to rethink a lot of stuff, and that rethinking continues to go on.  I don’t think it’s going to stop. I think the situation in 2020, and in 2021  just that lit the fuse.    It’s the catalyst for a kind of rethinking and re-examining of everything.

Defining success for the insights organization.

Gregg Archibald
Let’s talk about that a little bit in terms of this idea of being successful, the phrase that you use, that you needed to look inside yourself, and this is the fuse.  So, those big moments always give us a chance to be introspective and start to make some changes. Has that affected in any way, kind of how you define success for the insights organization?

Nick McCracken
Yes.  I first started working in market research at Ford in the early 2000s, and I’ve done some stints in business incubators and in media along the way, but I keep coming back to insights – it seems to be my home.

A lot of the measurement of success is still there.  It’s about doing the right project and doing it on time, doing it on budget.  But that’s table stakes now, right?  We have to think in terms of that, kind of the starting point for the insights process.  We need to follow those insights through to see if we are acting on them. Are they influencing change?  Are they flowing through to decisions?

What are we learning about customers in the near term, and then to what extent can we get a lens on the future?  It’s important to think about these insights in different timeframes.  There’s a picture of the way the world looks today, at this moment.  We get a clear picture of that, so we can take appropriate actions.  That’s sort of the near future, which might be a product cycle.

But there are things that are beyond happening now.  We’re increasingly having to ask ourselves, “What does the future look like?”  With the future for the auto industry opening up, we think of autonomy, we think of electrification, we think of connectivity, and digitalization.  There’s a lot of open questions.  The more that we can gain insights that help us get a clearer picture of that longer-term view, that’s helpful.

The last component when we talk about measuring success comes down to what the client relationship is like.  I mean the internal client relationship.  Do they think we’re giving them the information that they need? Are we helping them to drive their business forward?  Are we helping them to make better products, services, ecosystems?

 

The structure of the insights organization.

Gregg Archibald
Oh, we’ll come back to that. But before we get there, I want to learn just a little bit about how you guys are organized in terms of delivering value to Ford.  How is the insights organization structured?  Is it centralized, decentralized?

Just give us a sense of what you guys look like today.

Nick McCracken
I work for an organization called GCI -Global Consumer Insights.  I report to the Global Director at GCI. We are part of what’s called D-Ford, which is Ford’s human-centered design organization.  We are technically part of the product development effort and human-centered design.  We’re organized as a community of research SMEs.

As a service organization, we providing insights to our internal clients, whether its product design or marketing or planning or customer experience or whichever group we’re being asked to do that research for at the moment.  So, when I say clients, I’m talking about my internal clients.

And we’re pretty flat.  I report, as I said, to the director of the global organization, and I have a layer of people reporting to me, and that’s about it.  It’s organized a lot around the process of doing steps of product and service development through time. It’s less organized around product or brand.  It’s organized about how we have to do the work, and we end up with specialists in various areas of doing each step of the work.  We also have teams which are part of what we call the D -Ford labs.  These are human-centered design laboratories embedded with team members in these laboratories.  A team member may work on a project for three months, five months, and that’s all they do, and they’re part of that team 24/7.  They’re embedded with that team on a daily basis as design researchers.  I hope that’s given you a picture of how we look.

Gregg Archibald
Actually, it really makes a lot of sense given the three things that you said that were definitions of success, and that’s following the insights, making sure that there’s impact along the way and things are dealing with different timeframes.

And we’ll come back to the client relationship in just a second. If you’re structured around the timing of the needs of that knowledge, what you just described fits with those goals.

Nick McCracken
Great.  I’m glad it makes sense, Gregg.

 

Defining timeframes; short and long term.

 Gregg Archibald
In terms of the different timeframes, you’re dealing with near term and long term.  And a lot of insights people are dealing with near term and long term, as well, except their definitions are of near term, and long term are very different than an auto manufacturer because your production cycle is a long time.  So, what is near term to you, less than a year? Or how do you kind of start to push those into two different buckets?

Nick McCracken

You asked about timeframes, Greg.  One of the corporate goals is to be disruptive of ourselves.  If Ford doesn’t disrupt itself, then our competitors are going to disrupt things for us.  This premise goes all the way down to the insights organization.

We’re trying to go faster and speed things up.  Typical automotive product cycles aren’t measured in months but in years.  When I say “near-term,” we’re talking about years in advance, exactly how many years that is for what we call a program or product.  That’s going to vary, but you can think of our near term as a few years.

The “far” might be 5 or 10 or more years into the future.  We want to think about this because some of the big bets we’re trying to inform in the company are not just nearer-term topics.  They’re also the bigger technological bets or even partnership bets the company may want to make going forward to give it the capabilities it’s going to need in 10 years because you’re kind of shooting at a target in the future.  And if you’re not ready, when the future gets here, then you kind of miss the boat, right?

 

Gregg Archibald
Right.

Nick McCracken
The “now-term,” I would say, is within a year, six months, or even immediate.  And there are other insights, organizations, beyond my own that do research. One of them is our data analytics organization, which does a lot of the tracking studies, they do the communications research, and things like that.  They’re more focused on the immediate term than my group.

The success factor for client relationships.

Gregg Archibald
Gotcha,  so within your group, you guys are embedded with a lot of other SMEs under this human-centered design function. Can you talk a little bit about the success factor of the client relationships? Do you look at an environment where you are embedded as another SME among several?  How do you think about those client relationships and whether they’re successful or not?

 

Nick McCracken
Part of that’s always reputational.  A manager will talk to the people we’ve done projects for and understand the quality of the services that we deliver, the quality of the jobs that Joe or Jane did for that client.

Part of it is also when you’re embedded as part of a team; you rise or sink with the output of that team and the assessment of that end product by the clients for that product.  Whether that be senior management, whether that be another organization, you get feedback from them – Was this a good project or a project that could have gone better?

On the one hand, you’re going to get feedback from your peers and from the people who are leading that effort, and then also you’re going to get a reputation from what that effort produced and the people who consumed that work as well.  It becomes kind of a pattern because you’re seeing multiple projects of a certain kind. And they’re either rising or falling in terms of their reputation.

You could say that it’s very relational, and it’s very much, you might say, a somewhat subjective measure, but that is the reality, right?  We’re all assessing ‘did this go well or not?’  But you’re also looking at time.  Did it come in on time?  Did we meet the scope or objectives of the project?

I got a note yesterday from a client.  We’re doing a project at the moment in another state, and I hear from our design client that my team member is doing a great job.  That’s what tells you whether you’re building reputational equity or not. Those partners will spread the word as well amongst their own peers.

 

Other measures that define success.

Gregg Archibald
So based on this integrated team approach, do you have some measures, some end-of-the-year measures that say, and most of us that have run research organizations, have projects that were on time, within scope, on budget, those kinds of pardon, fast measures.  But do you have some softer measures that you look at for GCI that says we’re successful beyond this kind of reputational?

 

Nick McCracken
Absolutely.  As you said, it starts with, did we meet all the milestones because we have a very complex new product development process.  Are we hitting the key points that we need to deliver the information? Are we hitting it on time?  Are we’re on a budget?  As I said, those are the table stakes.

 

Gregg Archibald
Right?

 

Nick McCracken
We also have measures of what I’ll call disruption within ourselves.  We set stretch goals for ourselves to say, OK, this is a part of the business that we want to work on, that we have control over, and we want to improve its speed or improve its efficiency by X percent this year.  Or we want to remove this amount of time from a process.

We also look at tracking the way the information is used.  So, when you’re doing this type of research, that’s sequential.  Because we’re measuring steps in a process towards building service, building a product, building an integrated set of experiences, we know at point A, in the process that we learned something, we gained an insight.  At Point B, we chose to take some kind of action around that insight.

And then, at point C, we’re probably measuring it again to see if we achieved the goal that we had from what we learned. We can also look through time and say, “Hey, this is the value.”  I don’t mean “value” in terms of dollars and cents, but it eventually translates to that.  This is the value we provided to the organization because we were able to help improve or focus or consolidate our thinking around this product or service through the process.

 

Planning your own disruption.

Gregg Archibald
Nick, I don’t know that I’ve talked to anyone that has said that we plan our own disruption, that’s a part of the process, and I absolutely love the concept, particularly that phrase.  So, you mentioned this in terms of being able to provide more, being able to provide cheaper, or faster, or whatever that that may be.  Can you tell me a little bit about how you guys look at this?  Is this from an innovation perspective?  Is driven by client needs?  I just love the idea.

 

Nick McCracken
The short answer is yes to all of those things.  As I said, if you look at our corporate goals, ‘disrupt ourselves’ is a corporate goal.  We’ve been looking at it all along.  I started this Product Innovation Research team back in around 2008.
Since 2015 or so, when Ford decided to embark on a more user experience, human-centered design path, we’ve had to rethink many aspects of our business.

I’ve talked about this in presentations at IIEX too, which is the idea that, for many decades, the auto industry focused on what could be thought of as the atoms of the physical product:  the power train, the styling, the roominess.  And these are all important.  Absolutely important – it’s still true today.

But these physical aspects are increasingly surrounded by digital connectivity and services.  And what we have to shift our thinking on, and this started with the Pivot to human-centered design and user experience, is to see the ownership of that product, the ownership of your F 150, in the ownership of your Mach-E as not just a point in time, but a series of experiences that you’re going to have with that product and with Ford.

And when you shift from thinking of the product as being the endpoint and you start thinking about the experiences, the user experience, as the endpoint, you have to totally reconfigure how you think about research and how you think about product design. Big D design.  User interface.

All of these things are important because the insights now have to feed not just the attributes that they used to, but they have to feed the experience development, the service ecosystem, the digital ecosystem, all that kind of stuff.

And so, one of the ways I started to disrupt my own team was I started to hire what I’ll call “hybrid researchers.”  A more traditional type of researcher is super valuable today, don’t get me wrong, we have lots of them in our organization.  But they might have come from a Market Research Supplier; they might have been trained in the traditional market research approaches.  When you dial up something like experience design, they don’t have a certain component of knowledge that’s going to be useful there.  I started to bring anthropologists into the team.  Because ethnography became very important, it’s the fundamental tenet of human-centered design.  I started to bring designers into the team who had research backgrounds.

There’s somebody on my team who is a designer with an MFA degree in design, but she has a passion for market research and spent years at a market research supplier.  My team looks very different than a Ford research team would have looked 10 or 20 years ago, and the team members in the labs look different.

Those researchers are part of the disruption.   Along with the talent pool, part of the disruption is the methods and the tools.  We’re always experimenting with different technologies to see ‘is there a better way to do something?  It’s no secret that the market research world is experimenting with VR and AR.  What are the applications in automotive content for something like this? And is it possible potentially that down the road to have a car clinic and you never, ever have to leave your home to experience it?  Where you don’t have to go to see a vehicle, but it comes to you.

There’s a technological component, and then, I think, there’s also the data piece of it as well.  There’s qualitative data and quantitative data through surveys, but then there’s all the data that’s collected and processed by our data analytics team.  How do we increasingly bring together primary research using more well-known methods with a lot of cool things that the data analytics people might be doing?

 

Creating organizational connections.

 Gregg Archibald
So are you guys looking at the more organizational connection between some of the research that you’re doing, some of the research that other research organizations within Ford and data analytics being more integrated to address these user experience kinds of issues?

 

Nick McCracken
Yeah.  We’re trying to do that.  I’d say we’re embarking on that process.  It’s just the whole question of staying connected as an organization, even within GCI, can be a challenge sometimes because we have groups in vastly different time zones.
We have a group in China which is absolutely mirrored or reversed in time zones to Dearborn. We have groups in Palo Alto.  And then there are the labs. And we’re all working on things that can inform each other.  Trying to stay connected within the organization is as much of a challenge, sometimes, as trying to stay connected with some of these other groups as well.

 

Integrating external suppliers.

Gregg Archibald
So, I’m going to shift gears just a little bit.  I want to make sure that I’m recognizing the time as well.

We’ve talked a lot about the kind of integrated approach that you guys have with your internal teams and then internal clients, some of those ways to think about measuring effectiveness through the relationship with your internal clients.

Let’s talk a little bit about suppliers and how you look at the relationship, and how you integrate external suppliers into your overall insight’s process.  Can you give me just a little perspective?

 

Nick McCracken
Yeah, Sure. Obviously, you want to treat your suppliers as partners.  I was a supplier, right? I worked for an ad agency for many years.  But you want the suppliers to feel invested in the process and the research objectives as much as we are on the Ford side, right?  It’s got to be a partnership at a base level.

We look at different suppliers for different purposes.  There are some suppliers who are good for very broad-based, strategic types of projects.  And there are others that are good for quick, “go out, do some qual, give us the read, let’s come back and think about it.” It’s about also having a strategy of the right supplier for the right problem or the right tool for the right task, if you will.

When I started down this road of shifting the team to more of a user experience mode, I started to look at what I would call “hybrid suppliers,” with hybrid skills, just like when I said hybrid employees, but hybrid suppliers. And again, it was in an IIEX talk where I focused on this, how the market research is now blurring domains with these experience design firms, these service design firms.

Within some of these companies, with a lot of services, or digital design experience, they can do a research project. It doesn’t have to be a design project. And what they bring in the context of their unique experience, of their background and knowledge to that project.  As a result, you’re getting a level of research that’s different than if you would have gone to a more full-service research supplier because those firms just don’t have the depth for that kind of context.  They have to be the right supplier for the right job.

Sometimes, just like we train our own team members in GCI, you have to help train or coach the suppliers.  Especially since they’re not aware of all the internal issues that you might be dealing with.  There’s a way that you need to communicate or a way they need to collect the information or the way they need to present it so that it can be digested from different groups.  One of the challenges with having these more cross-functional situations that we are describing as part of human-centered designs is not everyone wants to, or needs to, hear the information in the same way.

You can do a workshop where everybody is together, and three teams are happy, and they leave, but the fourth team goes, “We didn’t quite understand what was going on….”  Because as a research team, we may not have used exactly the right way of communicating to that group of people.

It’s about training suppliers as well as having trusted ones.  And we look for new, creative suppliers too.  We’re always looking to see if “Hey, is there somebody out there who could bring something new to the party?”

 

Gregg Archibald
Do you have a formal or kind of semi-formal process for training those suppliers?

 

Nick McCracken
No, it’s mostly done ad hoc.  It’s a great question, and maybe we should think about something like that.  But it’s mostly done on a project-by-project basis as specific to the needs of that individual project.

You gave me a good idea.

 

Changes to the insights organization structure.

Gregg Archibald
Good, I’m glad you’re getting something out of it.

One last question, if you could make any changes that you wanted over the course of the next year or so, in terms of how the insights organization is structured or can provide support for, utilize those tools or focuses more on data democratization or whatever this thing is,  what would be the 1 or 2 things that you would like to see happen in your organization to make you guys more successful around this idea of providing the right insights, working in those timeframes, and influencing the client relationship?

 

Nick McCracken
We already touched on some of them.  We talked about being faster. The clock speed of the world has increased, so we’re going to have to match that clock speed.
Ford is making big investments in technology and partners to really leverage the power of technology across the board.  And I think insights will be no exception to that.

We talked about the need to have as much of a future view as we can.  We can’t go out and ask consumers what the future is going to be like, right? I mean, it’s the old anecdote attributed to Henry Ford “If I ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”  We want to think of the research as a part of that process of thinking about the future.  If you understand people’s fundamental needs and what they’re trying to do, then you can interweave what you know about technology, what you know about your brand, about your strategy,  about the future of services to say, “this is a potential way to serve those needs in the future.”  We also touched on the interconnections between qual and quant.

But to talk about democratization for a moment, we could have left the labs and the regions as different research teams as standalone entities.  We chose to knit them together as a global network of subject matter experts because GCI believes, and our leadership believes, that there is great value to creating a culture in which the information is quickly and freely shared.  And that these subject matter experts inform each other, and train each other, and collaborate on things.  When you’re part of one large organization and are recognized as the go-to organization for that kind of service, it makes that a lot more likely to happen.

The democratization of information is a tricky thing.  In reality, there’s information that’s not supposed to be democratized.  It’s secret.  But I need to democratize it enough so that the people who need that information can use it.  So that’s always tension, especially in human-centered design.  If you’re doing ethnography, you need to very much protect and be cautious of people’s personal information.  The more you democratize that kind of content, the more the risk is that you know someone, not through malice, but just through not knowing any better, could misuse it.  We’re constantly balancing all of that. Some information is highly democratized.  And then some information is kept closer on more on a need-to-know basis.  And I think that’s appropriate.

This is my opinion. I struggle with fully democratizing those tools to anyone.  We are research professionals.  I’ve spent 20 years doing this job and then another 10 years at an agency before that.  There’s education that needs to happen to do the job well, and there’s experience that comes with it.  And there needs to be objectivity.  I think this is why you want to have a standalone research organization like GCI and really keep the research activity under a professional umbrella than just sort of letting it go totally freely. And I know different organizations, very smart ones, have chosen different approaches, but that’s kind of my philosophy.

 

Gregg Archibald

Nick, first of all, thank you for your time. This has been fantastic, and I’ve picked up so many things out of this.  Just the thoughtfulness of how you guys are approaching it.  How you’re truly kind of organizationally design around these key objectives.
And the other piece of it is the true intention, the stated objective of disrupting yourself.  That’s a phenomenal goal.

So, thank you for your time, for your insight, and just your general demeanor and healthfulness.  I appreciate it.

 

Nick McCracken
Thank you, Greg.  Always a pleasure.  Great to talk to you.

 

Gregg Archibald
Have a good day, everybody.

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