I was very passionate about my internship throughout and very excited to talk about it. Then, a question of course follows: “ What do you do?”. When I say, “CMI” to my friends, they have no clue. So in this blog, I am finally explaining what CMI does… Starting with what CMI actually stands for Consumer and Market Insights…
To my understanding and what I took from my internship: being at the CMI has two sides. These two sides can be named pre-research and post-research. Different teams come to you on what they want to research in what markets, and the research objectives they have. Accordingly, you have to think of the right method to do this research and which research agency or which tools of this agency will fit better for the purpose of the research. The second part is post-research. This is the part where you have to present results to the internal team who have asked to do the research in the first place. I believe this is the easiest way to put down CMI functions.
But there are some challenges along the way. First, the department that wants to do this research does not always have crystal clear research plans for which market, which objectives, and, for which target. The market list is likely to depend on the costs of the research too. Pre-research as CMI you really have to communicate both ways; internally and externally. You have to communicate with the research agency and the internal team. The second part is data analysis. If you are not working with a self-service tool the research agency will take some weight out of you and do this part. Still, it is possible that the internal team might want to focus on some specific parts or connect it with some other research. That way it will require CMI to work on the results and put them in the right form for the team. If you are working with a self-service tool, then CMI would be doing the analysis. These contain making charts, looking at what actually is important and including it in the presentation, scanning many verbatims and looking for possible risks, writing executive summaries, future recommendations, etc…
Personally, even though it is not my favorite part I am very happy to work on data analysis. I did not have much experience with it beforehand and I am super happy that I got to practice and improve this skill. I believe it is an important skill when reading the results even if you were not part of the research process. I learned many quick shorts and get to practice Excel during my internship. Overall, it is pretty cool to see what each department is working on and be able to see the final outcome improving through different phases.
I think being part of the Global CMI team is extra fun because you test the same ad on different markets (countries) and see how they react. I believe culture plays an important role here since it changes the level of understanding of the respondents. It is very cool to see how different cultures perceive the same content differently. This is a very big challenge for communication teams if they want to make a single ad that will air throughout different parts of the world. To make sure this global ad actually works they need CMI of course!