Marketing Career Focus: Consumer & Shopper Insights
Each of these Career Focus posts will cover a specific track or specialty track within the MS in Marketing degree program that can lead to the acquisition of many, if not all, the skills needed to successfully enter the career under discussion.
MS in Marketing Consumer & Shopper Insights
In addition to completing the MS in Marketing’s fifteen (15) credit hours of core courses, students pursuing this track must do six (6) hours of core track courses: Customer Analytics & Insights and Spreadsheet Modeling & Analytics. The remaining fifteen (15) credit hours are from this track and tend to be courses on topics such as developing customer insights, data visualization, business intelligence tools, and consultative skills. Details of the courses in the degree and this track are available at the UT Dallas Graduate Catalog page. Our program prepares students to enter this dynamic and high-growth field by providing the necessary quantitative skills but also management and consumer behavior expertise. Our courses offer a wide range of learning opportunities with software and programming skills such as Cognos, SQL, SAS, SPSS, Tableau, Watson Analytics, and web analytics platforms.
Indeed.com is a good job search site because at a glance it shows you average salaries, years of experience for many mid-level positions and a job count, as well as locations. I looked at 10 to 15 customer insights job descriptions from major companies and frequently mentioned skills at such employers as McDonald’s, PepsiCo, American Airlines, Match.com and others. However, there is NO substitute for doing your own searches and analyses.
What does a consumer & shopper insights employee do?
Customer insights is an emerging area for marketing professionals who are not modelers, statisticians or data scientists. They often work more on the analysis and recommendation side of the profession. One who can connect the dots and tell stories — unlike most data scientists, who have never taken a consumer behavior course so they often lack the connect-the-dots abilities needed for this job.
Shopper insights is a sub-category of this field that is heavily used by consumer-packaged-goods companies, such as Conagra, Kimberly Clark and Procter & Gamble. A profusion of jobs now included under the heading of customer insights includes “customer experience” openings. However, customer experience is NOT to be confused with user experience, a different field that will be covered in a digital career discussion.
Forrester Research describes consumer & shopper insights employees as
Professionals who “capture, manage, analyze, and apply customer knowledge to help your business win, serve and retain customers. To succeed, you must capture customer data from all sources and manage it across customer-facing systems and functions as well as analyze it to obtain actionable insights and apply it to the business.
Average years of experience and salary average
Three to five years for a manager-level position with a salary range of $70,000 to $115,000. Note that compared with many other jobs, the lower end of the pay scale is in the $70,000 range, so someone working for a large company or agency with three to four years of experience can be in the $90,000 range. If you have no work experience, the skills listed below are the ones you need to get as a junior analyst in order to become a manager within three to four years.
Typical consumer & shopper insights job description
(from a McDonald’s posting for a “Customer Insights Analyst”)
Key responsibilities include generating and analyzing reports for key stakeholders. The ideal candidate will go beyond reporting ‘the numbers’ and deliver analyses that also report ‘the insights.’ The Analyst will query databases to retrieve quantitative and qualitative customer feedback information for short- and long-term trend reporting, as well as new-product launch analysis. Feedback is analyzed primarily using Excel and presented in PowerPoint. This person will help manage requests for insights reporting that derive from various departments, regional/divisional offices and suppliers, and work closely with the manager to prioritize the requests.
| Skills Mentioned by at least 10 major companies with this job title posting |
Courses See the syllabus for each course for relevant skills, as not all skills are taught in every course. |
|---|---|
| Critical thinking and business analysis: Connecting the dots to actionable consumer initiatives. Storytelling (see recommended book) |
MKT 6310 Consumer Behavior Science & Practice MKT 6339 Capstone Marketing Decision Making or MKT 6350 Competitive Marketing Strategy & Game Theory Framework |
| Knowledge of scanner, demographics, market research and shopper data and tracking (Nielsen), data vendors |
MKT 6310 Consumer Behavior Science & Practice MKT 6353 Customer Analytics & Insights |
|
Market research and proficiency with data analysis software: SPSS, SAS or R and Surveys (Qualtrics) Knowledge of retention and loyalty analysis Business Intelligence tools (Cognos, SAS) |
MKT 6309 Marketing Data Analysis & Research MIS 6356 Business Analytics with R |
| Excellent oral and written presentation, including data visualization (Tableau, Cognos) |
BPS 6360 Management and Organizational Consulting: Theory and Practice MIS 6380 Data Visualization |
| Advanced proficiency with Excel (pivot, what if, solver) and SQL | OPRE 6332 Spreadsheet Modeling and Analytics |
| Web and social media analysis |
MKT 6352 Marketing Web Analytics and Insights – This class is not MIS 6344 Web Analytics, which covers other areas, such as pay-per-click (PPC). MKT 6384 Advanced Marketing Web Analytics & Insights MKT 6343 Social Media Marketing and Insights |
Note: There is not a course for every skill; for example, Cognos Analytics is not taught at JSOM.
Popular Books on Customer Insights
(Consumer insights, critical thinking, storytelling)
Critical thinking can mean many things to many people, but often those who think they don’t need it are the ones who need it most. This can include otherwise smart people who have a blind spot in this area. Every single member of the Jindal School’s Marketing Advisory Board tells me that finding recruits who are software proficient and can generate routine tasks, such as regressions, is relatively easy. However, finding someone who can think critically and “tell a story” is extremely difficult, they say. The table below came from an article that summarizes “critical thinking” skills.
Certifications
There are no major certifications specific to customer or shopper insights listed in the job postings analyzed or that are in demand by industry.
Professional Associations
National Groups
Mostly for Consumer-Packaged-Goods Shopper insights:
LinkedIn: Shopper Insights and Brand Experience
For Shopper Insights: Shopper Insights and Retail Activation
