Heineken’s Mary Beth Jowers on Driving Insights-Led Change

Mary Beth Jowers, VP of Americas Consumer and Market Insights at Heineken, joins Karen Lynch to explore how insights professionals can become more effective drivers of organizational change. Drawing on her leadership experience across global, regional, and developing markets, Mary Beth explains why insights teams should operate like internal businesses—prioritizing work that delivers measurable value and supports better decisions. She shares how empathy, stakeholder understanding, and behavioral insight can help teams overcome resistance and influence how organizations operate.

The conversation also examines practical ways to increase research ROI, from repurposing existing studies to creating snackable content, interactive training, and action-oriented deliverables. For insights leaders seeking greater influence, Mary Beth offers a compelling framework built around partnership, persistence, persuasion, and meeting colleagues where they are.

Key Discussion Points

• How Mary Beth’s unconventional career path shaped her approach to insights leadership
• Why insights and analytics teams should operate like internal businesses
• Applying consumer empathy and behavioral understanding to coworkers and stakeholders
• Turning research into action through training, snackable insights, and engaging content
• Increasing ROI by repurposing existing research and embracing “good enough” information

Resources and Links

• ⁠The Heineken Company
• IIEX Conferences

You can reach out to Mary Beth Jowers on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Mary Beth Jowers for being our guest. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.

Transcript

Karen: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Greenbook Podcast. I am excited. I’m here with Mary Beth Jowers. She is working for the Heineken Company as a VP, America’s Consumer and Market Insights.

Mary Beth: Hello, nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Karen: Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. And for those of you listening, Mary Beth heads up insights and analytics. She works with brands like Heineken, Heineken 0.0, Red Stripe, Dos Equis, not just for the U.S. But across LATAM and Canadian markets. She also serves as Heineken headquarters’ America’s liaison, aligning U.S. And long-tail country priorities across, kind of, the global mandates and strategies. So, I think that it’s an incredible job, Mary Beth, and I can’t wait to hear a little bit more about it.

And also spoiler alert. Mary Beth was one of our speakers at IIEX North America, and I invited her here to, kind of, dig into her topic. So, I’m excited to do that, but first, I wanted to, kind of, take a pause. Mary Beth, tell everybody more about your role because it is really large and comprehensive, and critical for the organization.

Mary Beth: Sure. Yeah, so I’ve been at Heineken for about nine months now—or seven months, so somewhere there—and so I have a couple different hats, like your description just said. So, the first is, I run, sort of, the U.S-based team, shopper insights, consumer insights, syndicated data, market intelligence, as well as, you know, one of the really great strengths of Heineken globally is that we are very successful in all sorts of developing markets around the world. And so, you need a pretty different footprint for insights communities for that. You can’t go into a small market and just say, “Hey, I’m going to run a whole bunch of pricing models for you or a whole bunch of deep insights.” It doesn’t work.

So, what we have is a very agile team that knows and are experts in how to do research across essentially 35 different countries across the Americas, from, you know, very developed markets like Canada to the nation of Saint Lucia with a population of 180,000. And so—which are very important because they do drink a lot of beer and we have a lot of strength in a lot of these markets. So, it’s working with those markets on a more agile basis to make sure that they are giving the value that we need from a corporate perspective, but also respecting local nuances.

Karen: Yeah, I think that’s—I think I first discovered Red Stripe in Jamaica, and I think it was at the resort that I stayed at in Jamaica. I think they loaded our mini fridge with Red Stripe, and it became—

Mary Beth: Fantastic brand. Yeah.

Karen: —the beverage of choice [laugh].

Mary Beth: Yes [laugh] great.

Karen: Very cool. Yeah, and actually, we just got back from—speaking of IIEX—we just got back from IIEX Europe—our team—where Heineken is, you know, always on stage there. So, it was a pleasure to meet you in North America because Heineken has just always been a very good partner of ours for our events. So, anyway, again, I’m anxious to get to your talk, obviously, but going back to your career a little bit because I think whenever people make it to, like, the VP level at a corporation, it’s always very admirable, and I’m always very curious. Like, what are some of the career milestones that you achieved on your way to that level? I know a lot of people aspire to even landing that first corporate job or brand-side job. What are some of the steps along the way that you took?

Mary Beth: Yeah, and to land even on—like you said—like, to land on a brand-side job, it was a little unusual pathway than some people. You know, I don’t think I ever thought I would even work in business [laugh] when I was 22 years old. So, I actually started from a pretty different point from where I’m ending up right now, still within the market research space. I got my start at a company called Olson Zaltman Associates that we were doing deep psychological interviewing, with consumers and really working with pretty high-level marketers on what to do about it with their brands. And then I moved over to the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo. And it was a little bit of luck, in that they were one of my large clients, and so we’d gotten to know each other. And they actually wanted to bring someone in who knew something about design thinking. This was back in, like, ’08, ’09, when design thinking was going to change the world, and if you go back and you remember IDEO saying, “Design thinking will save the world,” in those very optimistic [laugh] times.

Karen: I took a few IDEO courses on design, and I remember thinking, “I’m going to change the world.”

Mary Beth: Right? And so weirdly, that was something that I was just very interested in and passionate about. It wasn’t what I was doing, and so when they approached me about a job that was inside the insights space but doing something that was a little bit left of center and a little bit off kilter, I absolutely jumped at it. And I think from on that, I think that you just have to, sort of, eat a balanced diet of insight specialties, learn as much as you can about different approaches, different methodologies, and different types of business problems so that, you know, when you’re put in different areas, you can jump to them and learn and grow very quickly. And then beyond that, I actually made a move to a much smaller company, which gave me a chance to do a whole lot of things very, very quickly, and learn on my feet, and I think that set me up for now leading more teams that are more during doing a diverse set of activities.

Karen: So, cool. Now, I have two things I want to ask you about. So, one of them, I love the phrase, kind of, eating a balanced diet of things internally. I think that’s a great, kind of, you know metaphor for what you do internally, taking it all in. I love that, so I encourage people listening right now to think about that and think about their work life that way, exploring all the different methodologies, yeah, embracing all the different challenges, jumping in on all the different projects. I think that’s really greatly inspirational, just as a concept, so thank you for that. And also the idea of stepping back and working for smaller companies as well, where you get exposure to a lot, right? When you are at a smaller firm, you certainly are exposed to more, almost by necessity, right? So. 

Mary Beth: Right. Right.

Karen: Yeah, pretty cool, pretty cool. So, one of the things, again, as I mentioned because you’ve worked your way up, right, so now you’re at a VP level, which is quite coveted, and not everybody gets there. And I would venture to say not always—females don’t always get there as well because I think a lot of [unintelligible 00:06:32] there’s a lot of, with female executives as well, so I find it very impressive, and I admire it greatly. You know, what are some of the things that has changed as you’ve, kind of, evolved, whether it’s your way of thinking, whether it’s your way of, like, thinking about what it takes to be a leader in the field, whether it’s what it [means to 00:06:52] be a leader in corporate America right now, or certainly in this world of insights?

Mary Beth: Yeah, definitely. And I think I could spend an hour just talking about that [laugh] as part of it. Interestingly, I think that the first thing is the downside of working for small companies is you don’t really have a clear pathway of what success looks like, you know? What does a VP look like in these companies? Because I’m one of one, right, there isn’t a long track record, frankly, in most of my roles, there wasn’t someone that I was taking over for that could say, “Well, this is how this works, and this is what good looks like for your role.” So, it is a bit of charting, you know, your own path.

And so, if you’re very interested, I don’t know if what I’m about to say at all reflects the VP experience [laugh] in other larger companies because of that, but I think for me, the way I’ve approached every role that I’ve taken has been in a way that’s quite similar to how a brand approaches innovation strategy, in that, I first come to the role thinking what is the problem I’m here to solve, right, and that is informal interviews and discussions with you know different stakeholders. What is the problem that we’re trying to solve here? What is the white space that exists in the organization for my team to solve, right? And I think that to me is something that’s quite different than just running a team or running a function, of thinking about it as I think about running an insights team or running an analytics team or any of these, sort of, you know knowledge creation teams as solving this white-space problem and in essence being an internal business that you have designed the business model to service the business. And what do I mean by that is, what are the problems I’m solving for my customers internally? What are the problems they can’t even articulate? If I say, “Hey, I think we need to go solve this,” it’ll surprise and delight them. Notice I’m even using the same terms as product design here, right?

Karen: Absolutely.

Mary Beth: And then like any business, you know, your revenue has to be higher than the cost of creating it, right? So, where my team’s time is spent is so important because I want to make sure all those man-hours are going towards something that’ll have outsized impact in the business, right? So, I don’t think about hey, we could be creating these great reports or creating these great dashboards, or doing this cool project. It has to be, how am I going to do something that we might do it once, and we can then use it in a lot of different ways across the business in different applications to make that, sort of, ROI on the activity higher than the cost of actually doing the activity. I don’t mean just research dollars; I mean, like, the man-hours of the team, and for me that’s been a real journey, right, on becoming more of a team lead and organizational lead of thinking about what my team is as more like an internal business, and what is the most efficient way and the most impactful way of running that business inside of a larger organization.

Karen: So, what I love about that, Mary Beth, is I have had a lot of conversations with people talking about the importance right now about solving business challenges at the C-level and how the job of an insights professional has evolved to really not just thinking about what’s the research question and the research challenge, but really getting quite strategic and thinking about how are we addressing these larger strategic issues and challenges. So, what you just described to me is somebody who has evolved their leadership to that place that the industry has naturally progressed to, so thank you for sharing that. And also it’s somewhat amazing to me how that all seems very natural to you. And I’m sure there were people listening saying, “Like that’s actually what I wish would happen to me.” That it all becomes just a part of my thinking, that you have evolved, you know, right alongside the industry. So anyway, kudos to you. I think it’s really neat to hear.

Mary Beth: Well, the proof is in the pudding, so I won’t say I’m always successful at it, [laugh] but it’s how I think about it. So.

Karen: No, that’s great. That’s great. So, the moment I’ve been waiting for is really to dig into your talk, as I said. And you know, backstory for our listeners, I approached Mary Beth right after her talk at IIEX North America. Now, I knew what was coming, right? I’m in charge of programming for all of our events.

So, Mary Beth’s talk was about the future of insights change management, and I was very excited about it. I wanted to hear it because, as I’ve shared with many of our listeners in other forums, my husband is a change management consultant. I’m poignantly aware of the importance of change management during this time of disruption, but also just in general, I think that you know we all struggle to navigate change. And then in the insights field, very often when there are professionals making recommendations, it involves change and it involves recommendations that insights have brought to light that really would require change at the organizational level or at the brand level or whatever. So, I was intrigued by the talk right from the get go. And then, of course, afterwards it was one of the highlights. It was a plenary session on I believe day two, and it—was it day one? Now, I’m not—now, I’m not—I think it was day two.

Mary Beth: It was day two. It was day two. Yeah.

Karen: Anyway, it was a fantastic talk. So, thank you again—

Mary Beth: Thank you.

Karen: For bringing stage. But what I want to get back to is your thought process. So, talk to me about why you felt like it was the right conversation to be having and to be bringing to the stage.

Mary Beth: So, I want to talk about this talk, just I didn’t even know if you would actually accept the topic of the talk because it’s such an unusual thing to talk about. And I thought, had you actually accepted it. I might be in the side room for, like, 15 people that wanted to nerd out about this, right [laugh]? So, it was quite a surprise to me that this actually went well and people were passionate about this. And the reason I wanted to talk about it was really because it was a very—yeah, it was a very hard learning curve for me when I suddenly found myself gone from running small traditional insights teams to being under a transformation department where I had no idea what that even was, and learning that whole new world.

And when I learned it, I was like, “This is actually so quite similar spiritually to a lot of what we do. This shouldn’t have been that hard. We should talk about this because all leaders should be prepared to do this.” And the second is, I feel like this sphere of insights, analytics, intelligence, all of that, really can do anything, and can actually be the forefront of change inside organizations. And I get personally quite annoyed to see those topics not talked about in our sphere, and being taken over by change management consultants, by outside outsourcing organizations, by other spheres that we’re not even in the table at, right? We’re not even in the room talking about these things, even though I do feel like we are best positioned to not own the whole thing, but to really drive impact, outsized impact, and that needs to be what we need to talk about, right? The future value proposition of our sphere.

Karen: How much of that—and again, we’ll get into the talk in just a minute—but how much of that is the responsibility, though, of the insights team versus the stakeholders who really are calling those shots?

Mary Beth: Yeah. I’d say it’s a great question, and you know, a person I worked at my last company, Pernod Ricard, who ran you know consumer insights and brand insights, when I went too far into this change management thing, she’d go, “Mary Beth, let insights be insights.” So, I do think there is attention, you know, on this. I don’t think it’s everyone’s job or everyone’s role, and I don’t see even in my most trying to influence change in the organization, I am not the decision maker and the principal decision maker, but I do feel like a government policy maker. It’s our jobs to make sure the people that are empowered to make decisions have the best available information and the best available understanding of the risk and the dynamics and the trade-offs that they’re making, right?

And sometimes you work with leaders that can naturally connect all those dots, and they’re good, right? Sometimes I do think it’s on leaders, not everyone in the team, but on leaders to step up and help them navigate the complex set of changes and/or choices that they’re making.

Karen: Yeah, it’s like a fine line because the insights professional definitely has a job to do, right? To, kind of, get to buy-in, get to stakeholder buy-in, like, best represent the voice of the consumer and represent the results of any work that you do, and, kind of, you know, I don’t want to use the word ‘sell,’ but you know, represents the work. There is a responsibility there, and yet at the same time, that’s where the tension lies, right? At the same time, at the end of the day, you do the best you can, and somebody else is ultimately in charge of it. So, and even when insights is at the table—because I’ve heard from people like insights is at the table these day—insights isn’t necessarily, you know, the one that walks out of the room and says yes or no.

Mary Beth: Right. Right. And here I think we’re talking—here I think there's two different things that, sort of, all are in this mix. The first is the type of insights work that is maybe pressed against or influencing an individual stakeholder choice—doesn’t matter if it’s brand marketing or revenue growth or what have you, right—and there, they are the end decision makers, right, and they have to balance what the consumer or the shopper or the market’s telling them with other constraints that they’re dealing with, you know, supply chain constraints or financial constraints or what have you. I think the other place where our skills actually knowing how people think, knowing how people can change their minds and influence them, is how you actually change the internal operating model of a company, and how you change how decisions are made inside a company.

And it’s that space where it’s much more of a gray zone who decides those things, right? Some companies might have someone that’s like the process owner. It might be a chief of staff, might be someone else that creates the [unintelligible 00:17:10] in the company. Other times, it’s by mutual agreement [laugh], right, of different stakeholders how a decision gets made. And that’s where I’m saying that because we actually know how people think, we have deep insights about how our consumers think, how behavioral economics works, how all that comes to pass, we can apply those same skills to leverage that to help design better ways for companies to make decisions, right?

And that is where it’s not about the individual decision, but it’s about us bringing our skills to bear to how does a company operate better based off of two things: one is a deeper understanding of shoppers and consumers and market movements, and the second is understanding our coworkers as people and how to get them to act better, act differently, shift their mindsets, see different perspectives, all of that?

Karen: Yeah. So, very early on in your presentation, you shared a slide, and it was simply, you know, lovely shaded slide in the background, and the words, “Co-workers are people too.” And I think there was, like, universal laughter from the audience because it just seems funny when you see it on the big screen—and at IIEX, we have very big screens—“Coworkers are people too.” So everybody, kind of, laughs because it sounds funny to say, but there’s so much subtext around that, right? So just, kind of, talk to that, and kind of, what you mean when you think about everything that was behind it, what you shared with us then, the meaning behind that.

Mary Beth: So, with this, I’ll say there’s two contextual things about my career. The first is, you know, I started out my career, you know, I don’t have any degrees in business or anything, right? I have an undergrad degree in sociology, so it’s not like I went through an MBA training school or anything like that. But I got my start at that company, Olson Zaltman Associates where we were doing deep psychological interviewing, two hours with one person, right? You often got to know how they thought about their mother or the nature of life or all of that.

And so, the first thing is, like, I’m very comfortable seeing people and the deeper, deeper context that people are operating in, right, usually in consumers. The second is, when I joined my last company, Pernod Ricard that’s makers of things like Jameson and Absolute Vodka, I actually didn’t report into marketing. The team that I was building reported into the transformation officer, and he was formerly the CFO. And those two things together was suddenly I was in this world, like, okay they’re asking me to actually rethink how we make decisions around marketing dollars, or what have you, based on analytical work products and consumer insights work products, and I have no idea what these people in transformation are talking about half the time. But I could notice that the things that we were talking around about change adoption, around, you know, getting people to rethink what their incentive systems were inside the company and how to incentivize them to change, started to sound a lot like the topics we talked about in those deep indirective psychological interviews.

What is your deep human motivation, right? You know, are you afraid when you choose your brand of toothpaste? Making this up, right? You know, are you trying to seek some sense of balance or control or power? And suddenly, those topics, it’s not the way change management talks about them, but getting people to feel empowered, safe, motivated, curious, that starts to sound very similar to that deep, deep insights work that a lot of insights professionals do.

And that’s why I said you know you got to understand that your coworkers have the same motivations your consumers do, the same fears, the same hopes, the same dreams, and if we can understand how our coworkers are approaching a business problem, we can make what we do, you know, sort of, sing and resonate with them, right, by understanding how to actually message to them our outputs.

Karen: Yeah. It’s interesting to me. A thought I just had was at one point somebody had said to me at one point that when you think about your staff, keep in mind that the number one fear of every employee on your team is going to be, am I going to lose my job?

Mary Beth: Oh wow.

Karen: And if you approach every interaction with people as, just remember, their number one fear on the job is if they’re going to lose their job, you will see them in a very different light with every interaction. And I’ve not forgotten that. But it’s dormant, right? So, when you say—

Mary Beth: That’s quite stunning.

Karen: Right? When you think about it, that probably goes all the way to the top on some level, right? There’s always people who have an innate fear of what are my personal consequences to what’s happening right now? Anyway. Sidebar that [laugh] because I bet that plays out with some of this resistance to change—

Mary Beth: Right. Absolutely.

Karen: And how it plays out. Yeah, yeah. So, let’s talk about what this looks like in practice, then, some of this knowledge that you have. What are you doing when you’re doing this sort of work internally? Because you made the point that the answer to some of this work is not just, you know, another report, not just another presentation. What are some of the tools that you’re using in your work to help facilitate this process for people?

Mary Beth: Sure. So, the first thing, and again, this doesn’t apply to, like, all insights-types programs, right? It really is more anchored on when you want—what I’m about to say is really more when you want to have, like, the marketing department or, you know, some other larger part of the business really rethink how it’s making decisions to make them more responsive to the market itself. So, the first is you need to understand how the business makes decisions, and that to me has been a critical part of my career path is really stepping outside of you know whatever sphere I can control to really understand how finance works, how supply chain works, how marketing works. Not in deep detail. I can’t run those departments or anything, but to understand where they’re coming from and what are the series of decisions they need to make.

Because if I can’t understand how a decision is being made, how am I going to influence it? And I see that’s the first thing that a lot of the people I work with don’t really take the time to understand that, right, and it makes it so it’s very hard to then make insights more relevant for those stakeholders is a key component of this. I think the second thing, so that’s—you got to essentially have a process map in your head of how decisions get made and what the stages are. And then within that, you know, I think that you know my teams tend to then think about okay, when do people need to make those decisions and what type of information they need, and let’s craft, like, a relevant deliverable. It might be a report, but it might be a different type of report.

So, a very talented member of my team, he created these things he called snackable insights, that he knew people weren’t going to actually sit down and sit through large presentations, but occasionally, he and his team would do, you know, a quick five-slide, five-minute review of some really penetrating, interesting thing that went out to a broad audience, right? Or it might be, look, we know we have a research report, but actually we’re going to deliver it as a training session, and you know the team would create very inventive, creative ways of training people, right, more through the lens of we’re going to give you a playbook of how to act versus like a training on how consumers behave.

And as a quick example of this, like, the team did very successful trainings on how on-premise—so bars and restaurants—how consumers react in them. We had deep insights on the role of the consumer in bars and restaurants. We didn’t really present people the deep insights. We had these very fun interactive trainings via the Simpsons bar of, you know, how to interact and how to market your brand inside a bar and restaurant, based on Homer Simpson going to his bar. And so, you know, you want to make it interactive, you want to make it fun, you want to make it more training-based, right, so it becomes more about action than just learning.

Karen: Yeah, yeah. Very cool, very cool. One of the things you talked about was upgrading existing processes versus asking a business to, like, adopt something brand new or change something completely, which I think is, you know, psychologically, that makes some sense to me once you say it out loud [laugh]. Like, yes, of course, it’s easier to, kind of, position it as let’s just improve upon what we have rather than change something new altogether, so that feels like some common sense. Are there other, kind of, principles of navigating change internally that you, kind of, keep in mind as you do this work, or other things that you think insights teams can, kind of, learn from as they may set forth to, kind of, [fix 00:26:13] their own mindset?

Mary Beth: Yeah. So, I’ll give you a couple all around the theme of ROI [laugh], so ROI metaphors. So, I guess the first is, like, you know, insights teams do such great work, right, but often it’s like we get—we say this about marketing, you know? We get bored with our own advertising before consumers do. I think the same is true for insights, right? We get bored with our own market research and our own insights work before the organization does.

So, the first is, like, you know what I call, like, let’s earn more ROI on our product or product. And so, it’s like go back and revisit some piece of research, some insights work that you did or analytical work you did, and remarket it, you know? Who’s a new audience that hasn’t heard this in a while? You know, is there a new business problem we think it might be relevant for? This is where we got to some of those great trainings about bars and restaurants and consumers because we had done all this research on this sphere.

It was very costly, and we needed to figure out new ways of applying it inside the business so to get the ROI up on it, right? So, that’s one thing. It’s just, like, go back to what you already know. Do people know enough about it? Have people listened to you enough about it, right, to create change? And that helps again build that stability and that learning culture.

I think the second thing is, you know, and this is—I’m going to quote a person at a different company who will remain anonymous—but we’ve done some stakeholder interviews about how different companies were actually measuring in-store activity, and to do that well, you have to get a lot of data and a lot of analytics. And one of these other companies said, “What is the ROI of calculating the ROI?” That yes, you can collect perfect data. Yes, you can do perfect analytics, but eventually the cost of doing that will be so high versus the output, right? Is there a simpler way of doing this?

And so, don’t shoot for the stars on perfect data, perfect analytics, perfect insights. What is good enough to move the business? And I think we as insights professionals, we feel very uncomfortable with the gray area. We feel very uncomfortable with directional findings, but sometimes that’s better than nothing, and it’s better than perfection if perfection is going to be too high cost and too long. And you can get there, you can eventually get to perfection, but don’t throw away the thing that’s good enough for now.

Karen: Yeah. Very cool. I like that, and I think that’s a very valuable partner, so hats off to them, put you in that place, or allowed you to be in that place, so I respect that. I want to go back to the first point you made for a minute because there’s a great analogy to the work of—you know, we’re a media company right and so we share a lot of content and there’s great value in, kind of, repurposing content. So, we do a podcast and then maybe we quote our podcast in an article and then maybe we take something from an article and we put it in our newsletter.

Like, we’re always trying to share something that we—a conversation that we have, different way for a different audience. Somebody might be listening, somebody might be reading, somebody might be subscribing to a newsletter. So, as you’re talking about that, I’m like, of course, that’s a great thing to do internally. Like, it is a—anyway, just a great thing to do. And I love when we can think about what works in other fields and apply it to our work. So, thank you for sharing that.

Mary Beth: I do think that, you know, we are in some sense content creators, right [laugh]? Like, that is the role of insights is we create content [laugh]. We don’t like to think about, it seems very strange, [laugh] but you know—and if people don’t want to engage with your content, you got a problem, right?

Karen: That’s so right.

Mary Beth: That’s about again understanding where your coworkers are coming from, how they’re going to engage with your content. And if you have the wrong format, you got to retool it or rethink about how to approach them because we want to persuade, right? We aren’t just passive books on a shelf; we want to persuade people to take an action that we know is right for the consumer.

Karen: And if you’ve been in this industry long enough, as I have been, you remember a day when the reports did line the shelf, so thank goodness we evolved beyond that because I remember all that GBC-binded reports, all on a shelf. Like thank goodness we’re past that, so I’m so grateful because that just feels like—speaking of ROI—that just seems like oh my goodness. And I love what you said earlier too about, like, just taking the stuff back off the shelf again, and you know, sharing it with a different audience. But also, I just love the idea of looking at it again and seeing what you might learn, what you might learn after you’ve looked at it. That’s always been, kind of… as a researcher, always been something that I’ve enjoyed, is like, what can we look at now? We might have done this work a year ago, but if I look at it again, do I learn something new?

Mary Beth: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I’ll give a tangible example for the audience, but you know, I joined my company a few months ago, so it’s not like I’ve had time to have the team do tons and tons of big foundational research, so what we did was we had you know we had done a couple years ago, the team had done some very good path-to-purchase research, you know robust, but what we’re lacking is really like a touchpoint analysis to influence, you know, brand planning. And so, we used that data and we recut it for the new purpose. We just went back to the raw data, had the team, you know, rethink about how to pivot that data in a new way for a new business problem. And it’s pretty simple, pretty straightforward example of just we’re sitting—most organizations, if they have a good filing system, are sitting on a giant repository of knowledge that we ourselves can go back to and [unintelligible 00:32:02] in different ways.

Karen: Yeah. No, it’s true. It’s true. So, we digress just a little bit, and that is all my fault. And I’m looking at the clock, and I promised you that we’d be off at the bottom of the hour, and here we are. I mean, there is a lake house to get to at some point in the next 24 hours, so I really want to be mindful of your vacation time as well.

But let me ask you this because I want to wrap with the high-level thinking about change management within the organization, and what an insights professional who has, you know, some influence for, kind of, not just navigating change within an organization, but influencing change within an organization, what words of wisdom might you offer to somebody who would like to influence change? And maybe they can’t replace a change management consultant, but maybe they can be the step before it. Maybe they can head it off at the pass if it’s coming.

Mary Beth: Or support them. Or be a great partner. Like, that’s one thing is partnership, right? I think change management—and I would say to the audience, I know nothing about change management. What I’ve learned has been just by osmosis sitting next to change management specialists, but I do think partnership is key, right? Partnership in knowing the end vision of the company or the stakeholder and where we’re going, and realizing we all have a part to play, you know, to drive success.

I think partnership in terms of also understanding the partners, and I think that’s again where insights can come in because we’re very good at understanding people, right? And if you can understand people, you can understand what they need, right? And if you understand what they need, you can help design those solutions, right, as part of that, and that their images for this. I think, also just persistence. I mean, persistence is a big—an absolute stubbornness is a big aspect, I think, of successful change management, of when you hit roadblocks, just find a different way, you know? Just take a step back; realize you have to go in a different way as part of that.

And then I think it’s also just realizing that, like, this is going to be an uncomfortable space for us as a field, right, but ultimately, whether it was you know us trying to persuade an individual brand manager that their advertising really didn’t hit the brief, right, or persuading a CEO that they need to be responsive to their marketing mix modeling tool and their advanced analytics programs in order to drive total P&L success, that’s still the same change management. It’s still about persuasion, it’s still about meeting people where they are, and crafting a strong story that they’re going to understand, right? It’s still the same underlying skill set.

Karen: Yeah. Yeah. And if we start—if we as insights professionals always have this foundation of, like, empathy for our consumers and the people we’re talking to, we should apply that same level of empathy to our stakeholders, our coworkers [unintelligible 00:34:54], but also our stakeholders. And I love the idea of a deep understanding of where they are at and what’s at stake for them and their jobs. You know, I always think about, you know, the decisions just get bigger the higher up you get in an organization, and the responsibility gets weightier, and if we have empathy for that type of—you know, the weight of those—the significant the weight of the and the significance of the decisions that are being made, and approach that with some empathy, I think that mindset alone can maybe make a difference in how things are presented.

So, much fodder, Mary Beth. I can’t thank you enough for this conversation, and I wish it could go on because, again, I wanted to talk more about your talk, and there’s so much more we could have dug into.

Mary Beth: I mean, yep, yeah. So, I look forward to talking again. So, thank you very much.

Karen: You’re so welcome. You’re so welcome. Thank you for your time and your attention. And to all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate you being here with us time after time. Thank you so much. And to Jamie, our audio editor. You might have had your work cut out for you with this episode. Thank you to my dog for interfering and the squeaky toys that always pop up, but thanks Jamie for doing what you do. For Emma for producing. I just want to say hats out to all of y’all. It’s a pleasure, and we’ll see you next time on the Greenbook Podcast. Bye-bye everyone.