Lauren DeRaleau and Irene VoisinMarket Research Director and Senior Market Research Manager., respectively, Groupon
You both have undergraduate degrees in psychology. What special skills or viewpoints do you feel you bring to the field?Lauren DeRaleau: For me, psychology really lays the underpinnings of successful marketing research. Certainly, the field is moving in that direction in terms of integration of neuroscience, response latency, emotion and sentiment recognition, etc. But beyond those, for any given project, we navigate and design research that has to consider the way people think, take in stimuli, make decisions and even how they react to research design itself. A foundation in psychology has been an incredible asset.  Irene Voisin: I spent most of my psychology studies doing research and my psych degree has influenced my marketing research career in two key ways. First, it has driven me to be a stickler for rigor and quality in methodologies and data. Second, it has fomented my passion to understand the whys – psychology – behind the data.What methodology/techniques do you find most useful when researching consumer behavior?Voisin: Being able to tie survey data to behavioral data from our customer databases on both the front- and back-end of our research process has been critical to creating truly actionable insights. Triggering questions off of known behaviors and tying the whys back to these behaviors has offered a much richer picture of what drives our customers’ needs and wants.DeRaleau: Completely agree with Irene. I love anything that marries passive/database data with active data from primary research. There’s such a wealth of information about consumers available through so many formats today and I feel strongly that layering those formats is the best way to see the full picture.How do you see technology changing the role of the marketing researcher?DeRaleau: Technology is going in s...