When I joined the business, we did barely any market research. The job then was just to try to bring in the customer by setting up some basic brand tracking, doing some basic quantitative (quant) research on the addressable market and trying to get to know who the end consumers could be.

We prioritised and segmented them to make a case for marketing investment, in my case. The start of that at Little Moons was the way we would evaluate recipe development – we would do sensory panels externally. Then we graduated to doing concept tests on new pieces of product development, which we do quantitatively.

When you’re trying to launch a significant piece of new product development (NPD) or a new ad campaign that involves some capital, people want you to do some quant or qual (quantitative) work to make sure it’s the right thing to do.

Fast forward to now and it’s a slightly different chapter. We’ve got lots of tracking set up and data feeds coming in: EPOS (electronic point of sale) feeds and panel feeds from the likes of Kantar. We’re doing quite a lot of evaluative research on NPD, as well as when we create big campaigns.

The next chapter will be more about the upstream use of research. When I was at Cadbury, we invested a lot of money just understanding the market and being able to segment the market by occasion or need or audience. We’re in that stage now because we’ve gone through such rapid growth.

Market research sits within my team in a category management function. I don’t have anyone in my team who specifically looks after quant and qual insights; that is reliant on me. That is quite common in businesses of our size, where very often the marketer will be tasked with being the person who does the colouring in and who looks after all the upfront consumer insight that feeds into the business strategy.

That means I rely heavily on third-party agencies or consultants that I trust. I have a trusted qual researcher and a tracking partner that offers a cost-effective way of making sure that I’m doing my brand tracking well. Plus, I have a quant partner who can go, “Here’s a brief” and they will make that happen in the correct way, rather than all the mistakes that I would inevitably make if I was to do it myself.

The key thing is knowing what the right solution is to the needs you have, so you’re not just thinking, “Oh, I should probably do some tracking” or “I should probably do some focus groups” – that’s just too focused on what the solution might be.

For example, in the case of tracking, the need in my business is to demonstrate the consumer franchise that we are building in certain markets and the effectiveness of our marketing activity in growing that funnel. Decide on the right tool according to the need you have and then link that to the degree to which it needs a specialist set of experiences to do it accurately. Because, honestly, bad insight is worse than no insight.

When we were starting out the insight budget was zero; I had to persuade my founders it was worthwhile. It is hard to show a direct return on investment, but if you can show why the pieces of insight are going to impact the decisions we make elsewhere in the business in a positive way, it is easy to sell that.

Equally, I think you get to a stage quite quickly where you can find yourself investing in stuff without clarity on the problem you are looking to solve or illuminate. That’s when you get the output that just sits gathering dust on the PowerPoint shelf, which was interesting in the moment of the debrief, but then never really goes on to impact. Those are the things you need to be alive to when you are a medium-sized business because that’s wasted money.

My main bit of advice is to get your head into the market rather than into your customer base. That’s specific to medium-sized businesses like us because they are often using insight to chase growth. The point of insight is for you to get a much better understanding and feel for what’s going on in the market, and then to bring that in through action that the business can use to target the growth you are after. That’s the leap any business needs to make.

As told to Sarah Vizard