Q&A with Best Client-Side Team finalist, Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. – Consumer Insights Team
Editor’s Note: Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. – Consumer Insights Team is a finalist of the 2025 Best Client-Side Team award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 19 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. – Consumer Insights Team has made a big impact across the company, Earning them a spot as a finalist in the 2025 Best Client-Side Team award.
In the last year alone, the team of 10 ran over 100 DIY projects, saving Fortune Brands more than $1 million. The team has expanded its reach across more than 20 brands and three business units, building more than 30 self-service dashboards. The team also introduced an AI-powered insights platform enabling faster, more informed decision-making.
The Consumer Insights Team at Fortune Brands Innovation also lead the organization's first ever Innovation Week, ultimately winning the 2024 Elevate Award.
Elizabeth Riddle, director of consumer insights and analytics at Fortune Brands Innovation, shared more about the Consumer Insights Team’s success in this Q&A.
How has your team been able to influence decision-making and connect with key stakeholders?
We see ourselves as an extension of our business teams, not just a service function. With each initiative, we help frame the right questions, choose the best approaches and support our internal clients as they activate the insights.
We stay connected through regular touchpoints and working sessions, immersing our internal client teams not only in the work at hand but also in what we’re learning from other relevant projects and teams across the organization. This helps them see patterns, build on existing knowledge and make more informed choices.
We also act like consultants rather than order-takers – shaping the work with the business and guiding them on what the findings mean. We focus on being good storytellers: making data easy to digest, memorable and tied back to business impact and strategy.
That combination of ongoing connection, active collaboration and clear storytelling makes it much easier for our colleagues to act quickly and confidently on what we learn together.
What does it mean to your team to be named a finalist in the 2025 Quirk’s Awards?
Being named a finalist is both an honor and a reflection of the approach we’ve been building. It recognizes our commitment to balancing rigor with agility – using DIY to empower ourselves while knowing when to partner with experts – and to making insights truly actionable for our stakeholders.
The recognition is also bittersweet.
With our company’s recent announcement of a headquarters relocation that will impact our team, this nomination serves as an important reminder of the resilience, empathy and excellence we’ve brought to every challenge. For us, it’s not just an award; it’s validation that a small, collaborative team can drive big impact, strengthen decision-making and deepen partnerships across an entire enterprise.
What would you say to a fellow researcher looking to incorporate more DIY research methods into their processes?
DIY research can be a powerful way for corporate research teams to expand the value and speed of insights they deliver to internal clients. It delivers faster answers and builds internal capability, but not everything should be brought in-house.
The key is to be thoughtful and strike the right balance. Use DIY where it fits your resources and skill sets, and partner with experts for complex or high-stakes work.
We’ve learned that DIY isn’t about cutting corners – it’s about empowering our team to handle rapid learning in-house while knowing when to involve outside expertise. Because not everyone has the skills right away, we invest in training, templates and standards so results stay consistent and credible.
We pilot new tools on low-risk, quick-turn projects to understand our real needs, refine processes and build confidence without risking big decisions. You don’t need every tool out there – the real value comes from finding what works for your business and integrating it thoughtfully.
We also choose intuitive, flexible platforms – often with templates, client support or AI-assisted analysis – and think holistically about how they work together.
Another key to our success is that we stay scrappy. Not all DIY requires licenses or panels recruiting friends, family or associates for exploratory work lets us iterate quickly while keeping costs low and protecting team capacity.
Finally, we’ve recognized that, given our size, we can’t take on every project ourselves. That’s why we’re piloting a “we-search” approach: guiding internal teams on how to tackle smaller, lower-stakes initiatives on their own. By sharing best-practice tips and advising from the sidelines, we help them apply the right approach and rigor so insight quality stays high while our collective impact grows.
Through this approach, our team has successfully scaled DIY research across the organization. We’ve built a nimble capability that delivers fast, actionable insights while protecting quality and team capacity – demonstrating that DIY, when done thoughtfully, can become a true strategic asset.