Editor’s Note: Pernod Ricard USA is a finalist of the 2023 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 14 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com. 

The Pernod Ricard Insights team members are change agents, driving a shift to a consumer-centric model and elevating their role in decision-making. In their nomination for the 2023 Best Client-Side Team award, they demonstrated three key strengths: value, effectiveness and diversity. 

Anna Estlund, senior director of strategic insights at Pernod Richard USA answered some questions on behalf of the Pernod Ricard Insights Team. 

Teamwork is critical to get broader perspectives that make our ideas better, and to work together to get to the heart of a strategic challenge. Teamwork is most important at the beginning phases of scoping a project, and at key milestones where decisions are made on next steps. We’re fans of using a divide and conquer approach so team members are empowered to own work streams and individual actions that propel us forward on a project. 

Beyond business projects like brand campaigns, we are also balancing teamwork and individual actions on insights team improvement. For example, we’ll brainstorm how we want to improve our team impact, and then divide and conquer so some team members own training and some own new partner exploration.

Prioritization! We intentionally created demand for our insights and strategic partnership across brand, innovation and shopper marketing teams. However there is more work than we can handle as a team of 10 – so we take many steps to prioritize such as:

Identify the decisions your stakeholders are making that have the biggest opportunity or risk to the business. Offer a perspective on how you can add value in that decision-making thr...