A penny for your thoughts

Do you have a pension plan without knowing how much you've already saved? You're no exception. People are what you could call ‘sleepwalking towards retirement'. This is one of the side-effects of workplace auto-enrollment pension schemes, where people enroll automatically in a workplace pension. So, what does this mean for brands active in this sector? How do they effectively boost consumer engagement and drive positive savings behavior? In this podcast episode, we connect with Eve Read, Acting Director of Customer Engagement, and Dominika Wintersgill, Research Manager at Nest, the National Employment Savings Trust in the UK. Eve talks about the engagement challenges Nest is facing and how they try to solve those, while Dominika zooms in on what this means from a research perspective.

Few industries have been impacted more by COVID-19 than the healthcare sector. When it comes to consumer healthcare, we've witnessed a major shift towards prevention and wellness products, more openness to alternative treatments, and an increased use of digital tools to navigate our health. But are these changes here to stay? Is this ‘the new normal'? In this podcast episode, we connect with Deb Monahan, Director, Shopper Insights & Capabilities at GSK Consumer Healthcare, a brand at the frontline of consumer healthcare. We talk about how the pandemic has changed customer behavior, which changes she expects will stick and, in general, what the pandemic has thought us about consumer health care.

While for many of us finance is part of the background noise of everyday life, large portions of society are living in precarious financial situations. COVID-19 exacerbated these social disparities and underlined the need for better support for such underserved communities. This is where Auden steps in, a socially responsible financial services company with a strong consumer-centric mindset. In this podcast episode, we connect with Victoria Gosling OBE, current Chief Strategy Officer (Auden) and Sophie Jenkins-Anderson, Research and Experiments Lead (Auden), to hear how consumer insights help Auden in creating and developing their offering.

When we think about brands, we generally think about whatever it is they sell. Brands are no longer valued for their product or services alone; a key differentiator is the customer experience that comes with what they sell. In this episode, we connect with Frank Goedertier, marketing professor at Vlerick Business School, and with Mauro Oretti, Vice President Marketing and Commercial at the SkyTeam airline alliance, to learn more about the growing role of experiences for brand success.

In this new episode, we're talking about a question many marketers or brand owners have never asked themselves: “What does my brand sound like?”. This episode zooms-in on sonic branding and role of sound in marketing and features Dirk Soetens, sonic branding expert at Var, the media agency behind the major public broadcaster in Belgium.

In this episode we connect with brewer Duvel Moortgat to talk about the role of distinctive assets as part of their global marketing strategy.

In this episode we explore how companies are using crowd sourcing to bridge the creativity gap. It goes beyond just crowd sourcing as a service, and looks at how business and artists have also used the crowd to cope with the ongoing pandemic.

In this episode, we explore why large incumbents envy their smaller startup counterparts when in comes to innovation. We also learn how these big incumbents can be more like their smaller, more nimble competition.

In this episode of A Penny for Your Thoughts, we introduce a new segment, "Rumor Has it" where we explore rumors, myths, and legends around marketing and market research. In this first edition, we examine a persistent rumor about the use of subliminal messaging in movie theaters. Show notes: http://www.insites-consulting.com/rumor-has-it-the-use-subliminal-messaging-in-movie-theaters/

In the first episode of the show we hear about a looming problem facing the market research industry and how we got here. Along the way you'll hear from current practitioners, some of the great minds of the past, and explore some of the technological leaps research has taken along the way.

Market research is about people and people all have stories to tell. We want to tell those stories. This summer we're launching a new podcast exploring the industry built around understanding people's motivations. We're talking to clients, researchers, academics – anyone with a story to tell about market research. Because the best research is all about storytelling. Check out our trailer and stay tuned for our first episode!