Yoshi Yonekawa

Yoshi Onikawa is a senior manager of consumer research and Mariko Chiba is a consumer research manager at Glico.


When you think about consumer insights, that can mean a lot of different things. What types of insights and what types of sources are you turning to to get those insights?  

Yoshi: That's a very big question. We're trying to cover a lot in what we do from a foundational understanding of consumers, the category, how we feel, how our brand fits, our positioning … and from there, what kind of innovation we could roll out, and how that translates to the messaging that we give out in advertising as well. So there's a lot that we're trying to cover right now. 


Makes sense. Anything to add? 

Mariko: I'd like to explore the opportunity for the Pocky brand. What kind of consumer, what kind of research method, could bring more to our brand. 


That's a lot of different topics that you're trying to cover. There are obviously lots of sources out there. How do you think about combining and staying on top of it all? And I'm sure you have big projects you're trying to address at the same time as staying smart and generally in the thick of things. How do you approach that? 

Yoshi: Yeah, it's very tough. One thing that we’d like to do a lot more of is just prioritization because we are a small team trying to tackle many, many key initiatives. And doing that, we have to be really smart with where we put our time and resources in terms of prioritization, what kind of tools that we use. Do more with less.

There’s a lot of talk of AI right now – there's a lot more we can adopt into the day to day that we do. There's a lot of challenges that we're trying to solve, but we're trying to find more streamlined, simple ways and quicker ways of doing that.


When you think about the balance between desk research (so anything that's publicly available and out there) and then primary research (where you're talking to your audience, or to customers who do or don't use the brand), how do you think about the balance and where you would use one versus the other?

Mariko: For now, we really need both. I would say 50/50. 

Yoshi: We could probably do more initial desk research. We tend to jump into research. For example, if there is a specific need, we just jump into that. It's been more reactionary, but I would like to see how we could transform things so that it's more proactive – but in order to do that, we need to understand the landscape more, the category more. So I think it would make sense to put more weight on desk research to be able to be smarter about how we do things.  


Interesting you mentioned that. There's the thought that research has a few different vectors or cadences:

• Big projects: you know what you need to tackle, might have multiple stakeholders and/or multiple sources, there’s a clear outcome in how you're going to use it. 

• Short, quick stuff: somebody has a question, you need a quick answer, you need to get smart fast. 

• Recurring: staying in tune with your customers, or on top of different trends and dynamics. 

Do those three buckets generally resonate? Do you spend your time on one versus another or wish you could spend more time on one or the other?  

Yoshi: The big elephant in the room kind of projects are necessary from a strategic perspective. We'll probably want to be able to cover that initially first. That will help feed into a lot of the other smaller ideas, smaller projects. But we do often get various questions from various teams: “Hey, do we know this about the consumers?” and so forth, but if you don't have that foundational piece, it's hard to kind of connect the dots. So there is definitely a use case for the larger projects that you mentioned earlier. 

From there, how do we speed up being able to answer the quicker questions that come up on a day to day basis? Because those can easily suck up a lot of our time.  

Mariko: I'd like to spend my time more in a more strategic planning way. But the smaller, quicker projects, sometimes can connect the team a lot more than a strategy study.


Makes sense. A couple of last quick questions here.

When you think about the future of research and AI, what’s one word that comes to mind around how you feel about it or your general sentiment?

Yoshi: A lot of what we're seeing right now is speed, simplicity, lower cost, which are all important factors of research. I would love to see more of how it is impacting the business – business decision making. Because from our perspective, we're not doing research for the sake of doing research. We're doing research to make a business impact. And it would be really interesting to see how AI is ultimately translating to the executive business decision making that we're making as an organization. 


If you could wave your wand and fix one thing about Google or LLMs or all these different desk research providers, what one thing might you fix?

Yoshi: That's a very interesting question. I would say: how could search engines, Google or LLMs, really get to understand us, our business, and me? Because I think that's where a lot of the human element comes into play – being able to have more of a conversation. 

When you're searching on Google, yes, the results are kind of catered to your previous searches. But a lot of times you feel like “does it really understand what I'm trying to get at?” So I think AI with this capability of LLMs and Natural Language Learning Processes, how can it  really be customized and personalized to you as an individual as well as your business? 


Thank you so much for your time. Super helpful.