I joined the high school wrestling team because I thought I was too small to play football, I got bored with all the running in soccer, and I hated swimming for water-polo.  However, I knew that I liked sweating and resistance training, and I wanted to learn how to defend myself, and I sure as heck was not about to waste away with the non-athletes of PE.  So, I granby rolled straight into wrestling and never looked back.  

Throughout my years in competitive wrestling and later as a high school wrestling coach, I have seen this same pattern play out time and again – kids with no other options other than a vague notion of the sport provided historically by WWF, or WWE, and now MMA, join the team in hopes of finding an alternative they can call home.  As such, in states where wrestling is not celebrated and encouraged, the sport lurks in the dank high-school cafeterias as a catch all for athletic refugees.

Consumer Research is very similar to wrestling in this respect.  When I studied in college, very few majors existed in this field.  Business, Economics, Statistics, Marketing, Math, or Psychology represented the closest paths to this specific expertise.  However, these paths only crossed minimally, and as far as I knew, never converged on the targeted study and understanding of consumer behavior.

After graduation, I eventually stumbled upon Consumer Insights and Analytics as it strongly appealed to my interested in puzzles and people.  A job focused on asking questions and interrogating data in order to understand why people behave as they do was not work, but rather a fun complex puzzle to help simplify.  However, discovering and mastering the myriad of nuanced details of how to properly ask these questions, how to collect and compile the data, how to connect data streams, and how to communicate the findings, required constant work and endless trial and error over the years.

Much like wrestling, where so many successful movements contradict instinct, the path to success in Consumer Insights and Analytics requires relearning how to ask questions, and more importantly, how to interpret the answers.  Without specific detailed education in this field, most consumer researchers have to painstakingly learn from trial and error over the course of their careers. This can be extremely frustrating for the researcher as well as crippling inefficient for the organization.  While those who enter the practice from the agency side may receive specific qualitative or quantitative training, many corporate researchers act more as project managers who rely heavily on the agencies for direction and education.  In order create a more expert and efficient staff who can help push forward the speed, quality, and actionability of insights and analytics, I strive in my role as Head of Research to empower researchers with the technical skills, business acumen, corporate philosophy, and customer empathy that I have learned throughout my 25 year career.

Here, now, I aim to codify these learnings so that anyone who stops by can learn what I have discovered to be successful approaches to driving growth and mitigating risk through deriving actionable consumer insights.

Enjoy Wrestling with Research,

Researchador