Transforming Insight Podcast James Wycherley

Welcome to Season 7 of the Transforming Insight podcast!

Episode 48 is going to begin where we left off with our focus on the positioning of Insight teams – the relentless focus that successful teams have on their position in the hearts, minds and decision-making processes of their organisations.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve explored the first three pathways that successful Insight teams have taken to improve their position in the hearts, minds and decision-making processes of their companies.

We’ve called these brand, awareness and reputation, and each involves looking at our Insight team and the messages that it communicates to the rest of the organisation, either intentionally or unintentionally. Do these messages align to consistently improve its position?

Episode 50 of the IMA's Transforming Insight podcast is now available. In this extended episode, James talks to Carolina Otero, Head of the Insight Function at Nestle UK.

Carolina is one of our few podcast guests whose journey into Insight was not an accident, but a conscious choice. Bringing us on a journey through her career, from Argentina to the UK, Carolina has seen both agency and client-side roles working with a list of enviable brands and companies.

Understanding the value in her learnings from previous roles, Carolina shares her experience of a total reset and redefinition of Insight at Nestle UK. Carolina was a driving for transformation, building a new foundation for the Insight team.

Carolina shares her playbook on empowering teams, highlighting the importance of helping each team member contribute to and feel part of the collective growth, ultimately achieving a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. We examine the shift from technical expertise to skills like influencing, storytelling, and data synthesis to drive actionable Insights.

We end the episode with Carolina sharing an important lesson for other Insight leaders – “to develop the team, to empower the team and use the talent that you have within”.

Please listen to find out more!

What does it mean to be commercial?

Is it about having passed your accountancy exams? Or perhaps having the ability to sell used cars? Or being experienced in leading Sales teams?

Perhaps it’s about having the unshakeable inner confidence that if you were in the boardroom on The Apprentice TV show, you would be hired, not fired?

Today’s podcast is the first in Season 6, and our first on the critical topic of Insight team positioning.

It’s a concept the IMA introduced 9 years ago, and ever since we’ve been slightly obsessed by Insight teams’ need to optimise their position in the hearts, minds and decision-making processes of their organisations.

There’s an analogy we often use when we talk about positioning, describing Insight as a lighthouse…

There is no point in producing any research or analysis unless it drives change.

So, forward-looking Insight teams think carefully about how they are going to disseminate their insights and ideas. As we’ve heard in earlier seasons of our podcast, the IMA’s most effective corporate members have developed:

• Influencing skills and plans to help them to persuade specific decision-makers to follow their recommendations, and
• Communication skills and plans to enable them to share customer and market knowledge throughout the organisation

To borrow a marketing analogy, this is rather like a company focusing on selling to key clients, and also developing advertising to communicate the benefits of its products across a broad market. Both are established tactics, but they are both much easier if the company has first developed a well-respected brand.