Q&A with Felicia Varga, Director, Brand, Consumer and Market Insights, at T-Mobile
Written by Rebecca Szew, Executive Vice President, Research & Insights, GBK Collective
One of the most challenging aspects of research and insights is striking the right balance – defining strategy based both on outside-in customer driven insights as well as internal priorities. This month I had the honor of speaking with Felicia Varga, Director, Brand, Consumer and Market Insights, at T-Mobile about how she approaches research and insights for the fastest growing mobile provider in the country.
Felicia discusses the opportunity to better understand consumer behavior and solve problems through research, how she manages the process of seeding customer insights within the organization to make it actionable, as well as the important role research plays in shaping T-Mobile’s uncarrier brand strategy - focused on solving consumer pain points. Here's what she had to say:
Q: Felicia, please tell us more about your role and background. How did you first get started in research and insights?
A: I’ve been with T-Mobile for four years and in my current role as a Director on the Brand, Consumer and Market Insights team, I lead research across different areas to help inform our brand and marketing strategy.
My background includes consumer research and insights, brand strategy as well as social media listening. Prior to T-Mobile, I worked with American Express as a contractor where I managed brand research initiatives, including their international social listening and 360 campaign measurement. Prior to that, I worked on the agency side working with brands such as AAA, Disney and Home Depot.
It's been a really interesting career path because I didn't actually even think about market research to begin with. It was a required course for my business major, which gave me the expectation it wouldn’t be interesting but it surprised me. I found that it was quite fascinating to study people within a business context. That's what started this whole path into research and insights.
Q: In your current T-Mobile, what parts of your role do you find most rewarding or enjoy the most?
A: What I find most rewarding is the opportunity to dig deeper to understand consumer behavior and solve problems through research. In many ways, our team is the voice of the customer within the organization, so it’s the chance to do meaningful work that truly makes an impact.
Where research sits within an organization is an indication on what they view the role of insights plays and before joining T-Mobile, I noticed it was part of a strategy and decision analytics groups, which applies insights broadly and at different altitudes across the organization.
“The rollout of T-Mobile’s uncarrier moves is a great example of how we’ve worked to make sure our brand strategy is truly customer led or defined from the outside-in.”
Q: That's awesome and connects well with my next question, which is.. what is your philosophy when it comes to defining success in your role or consumer insights overall at T-Mobile? How do you balance the internal priorities of the business, while also ensuring your brand and marketing strategy is customer centric, or defined from the outside in?
A: Everyone needs to find their own intrinsic motivators. For me, it’s doing work that is challenging and makes a difference with truly connecting the brand with consumers. My philosophy for determining whether I’m successful is asking: do I help others learn and make better decisions, or even change their minds? Do I help them understand customers to be able to inform that decision making? If the answer is yes, then I’m likely on the right track toward doing work that makes an impact.
More broadly, there are a variety of things companies need to do to make sure they are not only listening to customers, but also applying those insights to inform decisions across areas – from the products and services they bring to market to their brand and marketing approach.
The rollout of T-Mobile’s uncarrier moves is a great example of how we’ve worked to make sure our brand strategy is truly customer led or defined from the outside-in. By understanding the biggest consumer pain points in the mobile industry – those things that people complain about the most – and then systematically solving for those gaps in the marketplace, we’ve not only grown, but truly differentiated our brand.
So to answer your question, you have to make it work both from a business perspective and values perspective, for the customer too. There has to be a way you can do both.
Q: In working with you, one of the things that stands out is your focus on clearly defining the business problem you need to solve for, while also applying emotional intelligence to listen to each key stakeholder that’s involved in the project. How do you create alignment with cross-functional groups when scoping research to ultimately make it more impactful?
A: That's a great question. Without a doubt, one of the biggest success factors when scoping research is applying emotional intelligence. You need to develop a very clear sense of what key decisions need to be informed by the research and for whom. It means understanding who you're working with and what each stakeholder needs to be successful. What are the end goals and key decisions the research needs to inform? What questions do you need to ask to capture those insights?
From there, it’s looking at how you translate those goals into your overall research approach to uncover new insights with customers. At T-Mobile, there are many cases where our product, service strategy or uncarrier moves were directly shaped based on research we uncovered around consumer pain points.
There are other times where the strategy was largely baked, and our focus was on finding new insights we could apply to maximize our success. So, it's definitely strategizing throughout the entirety of the project and thinking about the end state.
“One of the biggest success factors when scoping research is applying emotional intelligence. You need to develop a very clear sense of what key decisions need to be informed by the research and for whom.”
Q: How do you turn up the heat with research and insights without boiling the ocean? In other words, how do you parse which data and insights to focus on and apply?
A: The first thing you have to do is understand who you’re doing the research for and where they sit within the organization. The ideal is it would be a two-way conversation and a partnership where you’re identifying what insights and data you need to capture and what’s going to be most actionable for that team given the overall dynamics of the business.
As we’ve discussed, you have to be adaptable to understand your audience. If you are leading research for someone with a data science background where they’re used to thinking about massively large data sets, you need to look at how you can narrow your target data and research approach, while staying analytics driven.
If it's an executive, or a CMO with a strong creative background, then you need to lead with the consumer insights that are most relevant or impactful. So, to me the key to not boiling the ocean is really understanding the ask up front, who's asking, as well as who's not asking, but should be.
Q: How do you strike the right balance between quantitative and qualitative research - applying both data and the analytics with the voice of the customer insights?
A: Maintaining the right balance with the insights you focus on requires constant calibration, or recalibration, but it also depends on who the research is for, where they sit within the company, and what they need.
In some companies, you see a fairly strong philosophy or understanding of the role of qualitative versus quantitative research plays, whereas within other organizations you have to develop that rigor.
Qualitative research can help to put data in strategic context. It can also help you uncover new areas to explore when it comes to consumer behavior or opportunities in the market.
One of the things with data is it can only tell you what you ask. There are times when you don't know what to ask, so exploring those unknown areas to uncover new insights is one of the areas where qualitative research plays an important role. You can take an open approach to probe, or from a more ethnographical or anthropological sense, just literally observe and learn from consumers.
That’s one area where qual and quant complement each other. Another key to effective market research is the sampling methodology. You can't talk to or reach every single person in a population. You can only talk to a subset of your customers or segments, so you want to make sure that that subset is representative.
If it is an opt-in, you need to ask who would opt in for this? There are times where the sample population you’re drawing data is biased such as when it’s incentive based. So that’s another example where other data sources are needed to complement quantitative research, and reality check your findings to make sure they’re accurate.
“Maintaining the right balance with the insights you focus on requires constant calibration, or recalibration, but it also depends on who the research is for, where they sit within the company, and what they need.”
Q: Do you ever find the different methodologies with qualitative or quantitative analytics inspire people in different ways at T-Mobile? Does one do something a little bit different than the other, especially for folks who maybe are not as research oriented or familiar with the nuts and bolts like we are?
A: Absolutely. It all goes back to understanding the end user and the audience for the research. I've seen many, many different ways that you can socialize and communicate insights whether it's by video, death by PowerPoint or newsletter formats.
At T-Mobile, we’ve come up with your own organic content and channel strategy, with a variety of different ways that we share research, or as my SVP calls it, democratizing insights. We upload research to our Slack channels. We’ve hosted Lunch and Learns. My VP also writes a weekly newsletter that goes to our CMO. We've also done video clips because some people have shorter attention spans or respond better when something is presented visually, rather than a long PowerPoint deck.
At T-Mobile, we have a “Yes, And” culture. So when it comes to sharing insights across the company, we figure out a way to try and get this translated to you because again, we want it to make a difference.