Lauren Bergner

Lauren Bergner is a VP of Client Development for Rakuten Insight. 


How do you spend your time? What kind of responsibilities do you have?

I've been here for about 11 years. Our US / North American headquarters are based out of New York, which is where I am (in New York City). We've definitely morphed over the years: now we do both quant and qual, more on the data collection side of things. 

We have proprietary panels throughout Asia as we're a Japan-based company, but we've developed a pretty burgeoning panel in the US as well. Sort of a one stop shop. We really try to market ourselves operating across all global markets. 

We're very consultative in our approach in terms of how we work with clients. We offer the field work, data collection, programming, and hosting, and then we can do full service with the design and analysis if there's a need.


There's a lot of conversation lately about different types and altitudes of research. 

I'm going to overview three and I'm curious to hear if it resonates with your experience. 

• Big projects: We know where the start and the finish are. We know what has to go into it in terms of steps and types of insights, and how we're going to use it on the back end. 

• At the other end of the spectrum, there’s ad hoc: We got a question from someone; we're hopping into a meeting and we need to get smart fast on a topic. 

• And then in between, there’s the always-on drumbeat of competitive insights or category or trend dynamics. 

I'm curious if those three buckets generally resonate? 

We do ad hoc projects. Something may come up that's just a one time sort of thing. And we can help out whether it's B2B or consumer-based or healthcare-based – whatever the nature of the work might be. We also do tracker work – long term, syndicated work, just to look at trends over time. 

And then in terms of strategic dynamic, we're consultative in our approach. So guiding the client from a methodological approach. Do we want to do a mix of quantitative and qualitative if we're doing a project where maybe online isn't the right approach? We want to do an offline to online or CATI-based face to face approach depending upon what the target is and what the initiative is.

So these buckets make a lot of sense. 


When you think about fast versus longer term, what time horizons are you typically operating under? 

We're doing data collection, right? Fast can be a three to five day turnaround type of thing. Long-term, it depends. If it's a more niche market and it's a more detailed project (like right now, we're doing a project with quantitative and qualitative combined), that might be a couple months. So it just depends on the nature of the project.


How do you think about the intersection of primary research and secondary (or desk) – public sources of information? 

We do primary research, so we don't really do secondary research so much. But I do think secondary research is important from just the perspective of understanding what the trends are. So both play an important role. And we definitely utilize secondary research in terms of understanding different subject areas. But what we do is all primary research focused. 


Got it. So in your team's work, would you at all reference secondary or you would trust that whoever's coming to you has…?

We reference secondary. 

Someone might come to us and say, “We want to do a certain study on these specific types of gamers.” So we have to access secondary research for the ad hoc, e.g. determining what penetration is like in this universe. So we do read secondary research reports to gain insight into how we're going to project the ad hoc bid or project.


When you think about Google, LLMs and tools that your team might use for any desk research, even if it's just really quick or to get up to speed fast, how have you generally found the different resources you use in terms of helpfulness or getting you what you need? 

It's been okay. With secondary research, it's important to have some subscriptions because you can do research on the web, but sometimes you need more detailed subscription-based resources to really gain true insight and get all of the information you need.

We use Statista, and it's okay. But I do sometimes wish we had more of those paid subscriptions to access. 


Do you find that their depth of information is better? Their relevance? What makes paid different or superior?

The depth is better. Sometimes when you do research on the web, it directs you to something which is paid and you just can't get access to it. 


Last couple of questions – speed round!

When you think about the future of research and the potential role of AI, what's the word that comes to mind in terms of how you feel about that?  

It can be innovative, but also sort of dangerous. Innovative in the sense of it can help change things, but dangerous in terms of knowing how to use it. You don't want to abuse it so you don't get bad data, right? You want to know what you need to check and how to use it appropriately. 


And when you think about tools like Google, LLMs, and any of these catch-all desk research types of solutions, a word that describes how you feel or satisfaction with their ability to get you the answers you need? 

Pretty good. There could be some improvement in terms of the answers needed and I don't always feel like we as a company have access to that. 


So interesting. Thank you very much!