Keeping Consumers Central to Making Business Decisions

In this episode of Inside Insights, host Steve Phillips speaks with Carla Mahfuz, Senior Manager of Consumer Insights at Ferrara, the confectionery company behind brands like Nerds and Brach's. The conversation explores what happens when consumer understanding outpaces physical product innovation, examining how insights teams can effectively bridge global long-term innovation strategy with short-term local market realities across regions such as Europe, Asia, and Latin America.A major takeaway centers on navigating the inherent tensions between global and local teams, where insights leaders must act as translators to maintain core brand consistency while supporting necessary regional adaptations. Mahfuz highlights how artificial intelligence and modern technology enable teams to run multi-market studies concurrently, rapidly synthesize large datasets, and execute accelerated turnarounds—such as a three-day creative test—without compromising decision quality. However, she emphasizes caution regarding synthetic personas for disruptive concepts, advocating for AI as an analytical partner while keeping real human needs at the center of research.Key action items for business leaders focus on turning insights into tangible results, starting with bringing cross-functional teams—including marketing, R&D, commercial, and manufacturing—together early in the process to act on consumer truths. Rather than viewing an insight as the final destination, teams must treat it as a launchpad for business action. Finally, Mahfuz advises marketing and insights professionals over the next 12 months to remain obsessively focused on uncovering underlying consumer needs rather than solely tracking brand performance, positioning companies to anticipate market shifts and innovate ahead of competitors.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marketing plans around what consumers say; insights knows it's not enough.Mariline Alsuar-Dean, Global Consumer Insights Director for Sexual Wellbeing and Female Hair Removal at Reckitt, turns cultural shifts into products, packaging and messaging, and has identified £450M in growth opportunities along the way. She shares how to segment by values and mindset, not just demographics, so product teams and comms teams build for the same person. She also shows how a simple highlighter test exposed one word, "desensitizing," that quietly sank a product pitch, and why humans must teach AI the emotional side of consumers before it guides your strategy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dashboards update in real time, but most brand insights still never change a single decision. Alexander Shmelkov, Digital Product Leader for Brand Pulse at Inter IKEA Systems, rebuilt a 20-year-old brand tracker from the ground up and knows exactly where that gap lives inside a real organization. He walks through aligning 64 markets around one shared definition of what the brand is for, replacing bloated legacy metrics with category entry points tied to actual growth drivers, and building change management muscle so country teams trust a new number instead of defending the old one. The result is a model for turning tracking data into something marketing and insights teams can act on together, not just report on separately.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marketing and insights teams still read the same data and reach opposite conclusions about when consumers actually enter the room. Nataly Kelly, CMO of Zappi, and Steve Phillips, Zappi's co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, sit on opposite sides of that gap—one building brand strategy, the other building the systems that feed it—which is exactly why they unpacked Zappi's third annual Connected Insights Imperative report together. They dig into why rising "connectedness" hasn't translated into satisfaction, how to separate real AI acceleration from AI that just speeds up old workflows, and where synthetic data earns trust versus where it quietly misleads. The throughline for both audiences: insight has to stop living in reports and start living inside the tools where decisions actually get made.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The traditional shopper funnel is dead, yet most brands still chase it. Nico Laruina, General Manager of Nestlé's Food Business Unit, bridges both worlds daily, running a global food portfolio while proving that consumer truth beats commercial pressure every time. He breaks down why the funnel became circular instead of linear, how elasticity testing reveals what shoppers will actually pay for, and why the right AI prompt only works if you already know your consumer's real need. A must-listen for anyone building strategy and anyone building the research behind it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marketing and Insights teams still speak past each other, burying consumer truth in translation gaps. James Mackenzie, Head of Growth at PZ Cussons, and Paul Yocum, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer, dismantle that gap firsthand by treating Insights as neutral ground, or what Paul calls "Switzerland", inside a company spanning Indonesia to Nigeria to the UK. They unpack Qualiquant, the fusion of qualitative depth with quantitative scale, AI-led interviews that capture consumers in real moments instead of stiff focus groups, and a path-to-purchase framework that finally separates the shopper from the consumer. The through-line is that getting to the human faster doesn't replace judgment, it sharpens it for marketers and researchers alike.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI can generate creative fast, but soul gets lost. Matt Harris (Research & Insight Lead) and Oli Bussell (Creative Lead) at Canva sit on opposite sides of the table—data and instinct—and prove the two only work together. They break down how to test storyboards early instead of waiting for the final cut, why bringing a single consumer's voice into the room beats any statistic when defending or reshaping an idea, and how to use insight as a creative challenge to solve rather than a verdict that kills bold ideas. You'll hear why the best partnerships treat research as a steer, not an answer—and where the human touch still beats the algorithm every time.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Performance marketing gets you noticed, but it can't scale you forever. Marcelo Kertész, CMO of MANSCAPED, turned a brand built on awkward jokes into the number three electric grooming brand in the US. All this while outmaneuvering competitors decades older by knowing exactly when to shift gears. He breaks down "The Great Rebalance" from D2C conversion campaigns to full-funnel brand building, why zooming out from seven-day attribution windows to six-month brand performance changes everything, and the difference between consumer insights and human insights. These are the emotional truths data alone can't capture. You'll also learn why listening to consumers with intention beats letting the "popular vote" make your decisions for you.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The biggest brands have the most data and act on it slowest. Patrick O'Toole, CMO of Unleashed Brands, has led billion-dollar brands at PepsiCo and Burger King. Now, he's rebuilding an entire marketing function from scratch with AI at the center, giving him a rare view from both worlds. Pat breaks down the 70-20-10 model for balancing proven tactics with true experimentation, shows how feeding NPS and Google reviews through a behavioral-economics-trained LLM uncovered hidden consumer motivators competitors miss, and explains why every AI insight still gets validated through traditional methods before it ships. You'll hear how to move fast without losing the human expertise (and consumer truth) that makes the work actually land. Pat also hints at Unleashed Brands' newly-launched KidHub, a new family app designed to help parents manage their children's activities while giving them greater visibility into the confidence, resilience and life skills being built along the way.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Most legacy brands fail when they're too scared to be brave. Boris Dolkhani, CMO at Robert Bosch GmbH, transformed a 139-year-old engineering company into a modern storytelling powerhouse with campaigns like "Like a Bosch" and their first-ever Super Bowl appearance. He reveals the "gut feeling" framework that guides creative decisions beyond data, the cultural conversation strategy that generated 10 billion media impressions on a limited budget, and why shifting too much spend toward performance marketing kills the brand storytelling that drives long-term growth.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.