Brian Seel
Sargento
Brian Seel is a Senior Manager of Consumer Insights at Sargento Foods. He works on the core marketing side of the business, supporting brand teams with all of their insights and analytic needs.
That's a lot on your plate! How do you think about the different types of insights you're gathering and where you're gathering them from? Do you have a process or best practice workflow for that?
We're still pretty traditional in that we'll tap secondary sources.
We subscribe to trend reports and trend services, and then we'll supplement those things with custom projects and ad hoc research based on the needs of the business.
When you think about tapping a combination of primary research and secondary research, when do you tend to lean on one versus the other?
Secondary research is great for painting the landscape and giving you the 50,000 foot view of what consumers are doing. But to get to the “why,” you have to go out and talk to people, survey people to get specific answers to why they're doing behaviors you may have seen in the secondary data.
And when it comes to the different cadences and types of research that you're doing on the job, I'm curious if this resonates. We've heard generally three types of buckets:
Big projects, where you know what you have to tackle, all the sources you might mine, and what the outcome is going to be.
Short, quick stuff – somebody asked you a question or you're prepping for a meeting.
The in between, the always-on, staying up to speed type of research or question.
Do those tend to align, or how do you think about?
That tracks. There's always the day to day questions that are kind of one-off things. How do you deal with those?
There's bigger projects.
And then, yeah, we're constantly looking at trends throughout the year. We'll share out annually once a year with the company, but we keep a pulse on those constantly.
Last two questions for you – speed round!
When you think about AI and research, what's one word that comes to mind in terms of how you're feeling about it?
Chaotic.
It's still clearly early days and some of the solutions are maybe a piece of the puzzle or some of them feel like maybe ChatGPT-4 versus really transforming or moving things forward.
But that's probably where we are and things are changing every day – two weeks from now somebody could launch a brilliant new AI product. That's just kind of where we are.
And when you think about desk research (whether that's Google or LLMs or whatever you're using), one word that comes to mind in terms of how well those solutions are doing the job for you?
I think they're okay. They're a good starting point that can get you faster, further, and help you narrow in on where to then go from a custom research standpoint.
Thank you, appreciate your time! This was super helpful.