Jennifer Yellin

Jennifer Yellin is an SVP at HarrisX, a primary market research consultancy supporting B2B & B2C clients.


When you think about the research that you're doing for clients, can you talk about the different types of research and how you think about what in your portfolio to pull from to answer any given question a client is coming to you for help with? 

We are very much focused on primary research. We have a very tailored, bespoke approach based on the client need itself. So they'll come to us with a problem and then, because we are methodologically agnostic, we try to determine what is the best approach to answer our client's specific questions and objectives. 

We do everything: U&As, segmentations, pricing, conjoint. We help with advertising, honing, and refinement. Basically kind of any question that you’d ask, we help our support our clients with. 


To what extent do you think about desk research (sampling what already exists, whether it's internal data or external publicly available information) in your projects?

It’s excellent. I wish we could do it more. It would really benefit both our own internal knowledge as well as our clients, but frankly, we just don't have the time and capacity to do it ourselves. 


So what's the alternative? You do a quick dip and move past it? You don't do it at all?

A lot of the industries that we work in, we've been doing it for 10-15 years. So, for example, beverage, alcohol, I read about every day – I keep tabs. I've got newsletters I'm keeping up to date with. For new clients and new sectors that we're working in, a lot of times we'll do a workshop with the clients, and we try and beef up as much as we can, but usually it's some googling, some looking at websites. We do as much as we can in an hour or the few hours of time that we have. 


I'm curious for your philosophy on the balance of research that companies should be doing. There's usually three buckets. I'm curious if these resonate:

• The first is big projects. We've got this big thing we need answered. We know what the outcome is. We know how we're going to use it.

• There's small projects. Someone asked me something. I need a quick answer. Even some of what you just described. I need to get smart fast for a meeting. 

• And then there's the always-on in between. Staying up to date on developments or whatever it might be. 

I'm curious if those resonate, if there's anything else you'd add, anything you'd emphasize within those three more than the others?

I think it's a combination of all of those. You can't just rely on your clients because they have a very focused view of the world. A lot of times (and they even know it), it's a bit of navel gazing, right? They just know what they know and what they're hearing. Sometimes it's a bit of an echo chamber. Even when you work with a lot of clients, it's still so focused internally on what they think. 

What we try to incorporate is that consumer perspective. That helps with “Yeah, that's what you think. But here's what consumers really think.” But having that third external view of what's happening at a more meta level – what are those trends that are happening? It’s really, really useful, and would be really beneficial to provide a contextual framework.

Do we always have it? Probably not to the extent that we need to. That would allow us to provide the most meaningful and insightful recommendations to our clients. 


Last question – speed round!

One word that comes to mind when you think about the future of research and AI in it?

That is not actually an easy question. 

Exciting. 


Excited! So optimism in general? 

Can I have a couple words?! Cautious optimism. 

There are a lot of really great trends there. When you look around, everybody is talking about the same thing. In the next 2 or 3 years, it's going to shake out: we're going to see who really knows their stuff, how this is actually useful. But there are a lot of use cases, and I think it's “how can we find AI to really help us deliver better insights to our clients and not just focus on efficiencies and speed?”

That's a lot of the selling points right now. And yes, it's helpful, but at the end of the day I don't think that’s actually going to move the world forward, which is what we should be doing with market research: giving consumers what they want and helping make the world a better place. 

And I think we need to have more human involvement in that. 


Well, I'm here for that future. Thank you.