elina halonen

Our guest on this episode is Elina Halonen, a behavioural insights strategist. Elina joins us on the Room 101 podcast to share what things in the industry she’d like to see banished to Room 101 forever. The main pet peeves Elina describes are: the shiny, shiny syndrome, proprietary methods, and a lack of knowledge of the history of market research. Elina provides meaningful criticism during our conversation, and we hope you enjoy it.

Key Quotes:

• “After having worked in market research for 15 years, and I’ve been to dozens of industry conferences, presented at them, I’ve probably seen maybe 100 talks on the topics. I’m aware of the breadth of innovation in the industry. Yet, a couple of years ago I was listening to a podcast about data science and data science practitioners…They talked about surveys with a perception that it was 20 years ago.” (4:35)
• “Having been through a couple of downturns through working in the industry, I know that the first thing that goes every time is research. Every single time, it will be research that gets cut first. Advertising doesn’t. Research does. And that tells you that that’s really the lowest appreciation - that information feels like it’s not as necessary. It’s not as sexy as advertising.” (9:33)
• “Behavioral science and behavioral economics was a trending thing for a few years in conferences. And for a while, it seemed every conference had talks on that. Around that time…but the problem is every time you do a talk, you start from scratch. You’re doing the basics talk. The audience is always slightly different. And you can never get beyond groundhog day or actually talking about something more sophisticated.” (14:48)
• “The focus on proprietary and secrecy stops true innovation in our industry. I think that’s a cumulative problem. It is very difficult to, for example, to train yourself and develop your professional skills as a market researcher without spending a lot of money.” (23:21)
• “Imagine you’re a small agency, and a big agency copy what you do – a big agency with tens of millions in revenue – they have very different resources to put behind it and to market it and take it to a lot more clients faster than you can. So it’s not a fair game in that sense.” (26:07)
• “Some years ago, I did a talk at the Austrian Market Research Society Conference, and the theme was ‘Dangerous’ like dangerous ideas. I did a talk about WEIRD. It refers to 95% of the psychology research is based on WEIRD sciences samples – people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries.” (30:15)

Key Topics: 

• Elina tells her story of entering the insights industry (1:44)
• She discusses how market research has a bad reputation (4:17)
• Then talks about the vicious cycle as a result of not being properly compensated (8:52)
• Elina’s first pick for Room 101 is the shiny, shiny syndrome, especially at conferences (13:52)
• She expands on her first pick and talks about why the industry does this (16:52)
• Continues on whether clients really know the new innovations or they’ve only heard about it (20:19)
• Proprietary methods are her second pick for Room 101 (24:46)
• Elina acknowledges that some will copy ideas (25:48)
• Her last pick for Room 101 is a lack of understanding of insights history (29:54)
• Elina discusses what can be done to address the old methods and the outdated samples (33:08)
• She points out that because most people fall into market research accidentally, they are not aware of this history (36:38)
• Elina explains NFTs (39:32)
• Elina agrees with Hannah to banish the shiny, shiny syndrome to Room 101 (42:00)

About - Elina Halonen:

A Behavioural Insights Strategist, Elina helps companies use insights about human behaviour to design their strategy. She’s worked in consumer insights for 15 years, and 10 years of that as a behavioural science specialist. Her academic expertise is in consumer behaviour, linguistics and cultural psychology. Before becoming an independent consultant, she spent eight years as the co-founder of a London-based insights consultancy working with global brands on branding, communications, and product/service development projects. 

Relevant Links:

• Elina’s  LinkedIn.
• Square Peg Insight - Website
• Day One - https://www.dayonestrategy.com/
• Hannah Mann - LinkedIn

The Day One podcast is published by the Day One Strategy and produced by Zorbiant.

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