Getting the job done: Jane Frost talks leadership

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This is probably the first job anyone has really wanted me to do,” Jane Frost tells me, when we sit down together in March after this year’s MRS annual conference. “I’ve been lucky that people wanted me to do the job.”

This is because, claims Frost, in reference to her marketing career before the Market Research Society: “They never want the brand director. They never want the customer director. They never want somebody to say: ‘That experience was awful, can we please redesign our product?’. But, for the first time ever, I think this is when somebody said: ‘We really need the job doing.’”

She’s almost 13 years into her tenure as MRS chief executive. In that time, the scope of the association has only increased. MRS serves not only as the industry regulator, but represents the sector to government, as well as being a standards bearer and a provider of training, resources and networking opportunities. It has also, increasingly, turned its attention to the issues plaguing market research, from survey fraud and questions about the representativeness of sample, to broader concerns, including diversity, sustainability and flexible working.

Leading it is not necessarily straightforward, then, but Frost feels proud that MRS has found a voice to represent the sector. “It might not be big enough yet, loud enough yet, but MRS is providing that space for people to be heard and to effect change.”

A few years ago, she was accused of championing inclusion in the sector simply because she is a woman. How was it to hear that? “Old is what it was,” says Frost, with the wry awareness of someone who has frequently been one of the few women in predominantly male organisations prior to her current role. “Variants on that include: ‘Well, why should we hire you? Because you’re only going to get pregnant and leave us.’ So there’s been a variety of that throughout my life,” she says.

While the gender comment may have been frustrating, for Frost it serves as a reminder of how far the industry and the Society

have come in recent years: “I don’t think, when I joined, we would have done the inclusion pledge or the climate pledge, for example. MRS found a voice and a leadership position that people wanted it to have.

“During that time, people have said to me: ‘We have this good idea – we talked to lots of people and they said it’s a great idea, but you need the MRS on side.’ We found that authority, and that has enabled us to do the other things I’m proud of, which are those pledges. We’ve moved from a place where I was personally accused of only wanting to ‘do inclusion’ because I was a woman, to a place where people realise that we need to be inclusive as a sector if we’re going to still do our jobs in any way – so I’m very proud of that.”

One moment a couple of years ago was particularly resonant for Frost. “There was a young woman who said: ‘You made me a research hero. Can I have a selfie, please?’. That’s lovely, because putting a spotlight on people who wouldn’t get spotlights otherwise is really important.”

Raising the profile

As leader of the sector’s trade body, awareness is woven into almost everything Frost has done to date, from spearheading the Fair Data accreditation in 2013 to spotlight the industry’s data prowess, to efforts to champion its people. She is committed to creating routes to bolster the visibility and value of a sector that can often be overlooked, whether because of its own humility or practical constraints.

A marketer who cut her teeth at Unilever, Frost is the first chief executive to be appointed at MRS. Before 2011, it had a director general, with David Barr holding that position for the previous 14 years. At the time, MRS said Frost’s appointment was “a signal of intent” to “highlight the bottom-line benefit research brings”.

When I ask how her journey has been, leading the organisation and representing the sector in the years since, she says: “I don’t think I ever expected it to be easy, and it hasn’t been in terms of that objective, partly because you have to value yourself before you can get other people to value you. And I don’t think the sector does very well at valuing itself. So, that is a difficulty because you have to be able to go out and make a noise and be heard.”

Unlike in advertising or marketing, Frost says, “very few people” in research are happy to talk externally. “Of course, it doesn’t help that, very frequently, the stuff we have to talk about is confidential.”

The other problem Frost faced in the beginning was the lack of an outlet for client-side leaders to express their leadership – something that has changed with the establishment of the Senior Client Council. “The people were there, but they just didn’t have a place to be heard, and I do think that is changing.

“Dreadful as Covid was, things like Covid do highlight the value of research. Some of our senior client people obviously got closer to the boardroom, while everyone was panicking about not knowing what was going on.”

Leading by example

Frost doesn’t differentiate between her role as leader of the sector’s trade body and her position as organisational head. “If you’re a leader, you need to lead externally and internally. If you are not consistent, then you’re not a very good leader, because it soon becomes clear whether you’re smoke screening: because you can do all this external stuff but you’re not actually leading by example internally. You don’t want MRS to ever put out dodgy research, do you?”

It was during her time leading corporate marketing at the BBC that Frost oversaw the 1997 ‘Perfect Day’ campaign, promoting the broadcaster’s services to the licence-fee-paying public. The single released from the promotion also later sold two million copies, raising £2.5m for Children in Need.

“When I made ‘Perfect Day’, it hit me that the best internal comms is external comms. You can tell with some advertising that they don’t look like that internally and, therefore, it just doesn’t ring true. Whereas the phone calls I got with ‘Perfect Day’ were: ‘I’m crying because I’m proud of the BBC.’ I was selling an advert to the outside world, but we seemed to be selling it inside as well. I’ve always believed that you can’t afford to have different standards.”

Respect for people was the most important asset she took from her marketing career. She learned her trade in the graduate scheme at Unilever (then Lever Brothers), during which time she was the first female brand manager for Persil. After seven years with the FMCG giant, she went on to marketing roles at Shell, the BBC, the Department for Constitutional Affairs and HMRC – a route that might be known as a ‘squiggly career’ in modern parlance, but one that has always revolved around the customer.

“You have to respect your consumer if you’re going to do a good job delivering value,” says Frost.

One of her first priorities at MRS was to ask whether the organisation was respecting its membership enough, and delivering the right value for them. “You should never do things to people. You should do things with people,” she says. Though Frost acknowledges that some in the industry felt they had to “shout” at her in the beginning, she hasn’t received a “shouty email” in a while. She aims to see anyone who asks her for a meeting – something that has been made easier in recent years by Zoom. For someone in her position, there will always be questions and concerns to address, but she also understands the importance of learning from others. “You should talk to everyone whenever you can. Serendipity is the most underrated thing in this world,” she says. “There is a ‘why’ question in everything.”

Looking outwards

Frost thinks her background as a brand marketer – and user of research – enables her to be “externally focused rather than internally focused”. She is “slightly tired” by old debates about the validity of one methodology over another. “Is qualitative still important? Yes, it bloody well is. But we talk about it all the time and that really doesn’t interest people with budgets much – people with budgets want the right method to get the insights they need.”

Often, research is delivered to a client and then the communication ends. Frost feels the sector tends to move on from a narrative too quickly and assume that, because something has been said, it has been heard. “We’ve got to keep going back and saying things time and time and time again, and then we get heard. Most of the agencies I know still forget that people have much better things to do with their time, so don’t always hear what’s said.”

Despite the best efforts of insight leaders, we still see brands making blunders with their advertising that could have been avoided had they only done a bit of research, and a gulf between company strategy and the needs and wants of customers. Why the continued disconnect? There isn’t a simple answer, but Frost thinks there is a “paucity of experience” at chief marketing officer level, with research not regarded as a core skill within the marketing function, alongside a lack of extroverted ‘EN types’ (according to Myers-Briggs) at the top of the research unit, and marketing budgets not being what they were.

She would like to see more research leaders working with other stakeholders parallel to marketing leaders. “It’s like, if you’re making bread, only having one supplier every week. Take the report you’ve done for the chief marketing officer and extract a different message.

“You need to find the other person, whether it’s the CCO, the CSO, or the CFO – we forget the CFO at our peril. We have lots of stuff we can tell the CFO.”

While the first couple of years at MRS were “long and slow”, Frost counts herself lucky with the people she inherited. “Building a partnership with Debrah [Harding, managing director] has been great. We’ve got one of the best events teams in the business, and I’m really proud of Research Live and Impact. They have helped us have a voice.”

Frost feels fortunate. In addition to her delight at being “wanted” in the role, she “loves” the people. “I’ve been in sectors where the backstabbing has been prodigious, but I’ve not felt that in the cultures I’ve encountered in this sector.”

Outside of the day job, when she’s not walking her dogs or spending time in her garden, Frost holds several trustee positions, including with Cats Protection and The Lowry theatre in Salford.

“I like to exercise my brain, but I’m not good at Sudoku or anything like that, so I do it with trusteeships and other things,” she says. “It keeps me learning and keeps my brain fresh. Sometimes I don’t particularly want to learn what I’m learning, but it’s still always useful.”

She is also a mentor – “a huge privilege” because “it freshens you every time you’re talking to somebody and they’ve done you the honour of listening to you or being open with you. You learn something more about yourself when you do it.”

Skills and lessons in the day job can be reapplied elsewhere, Frost says. “There are two things I’ve learned over time: you need to have done some finance and audit skill work; and network, network, network – there’s never a time when that is not useful. Even if it’s not useful to you, it’s always useful to somebody else.

“If you don’t go out and do totally useless things, or what look like totally useless things, you don’t enlarge yourself. I think it’s really important for MRS that I’m on these boards, because I’m keeping going outwards.”
Frost thinks she’d be a “lousy” retiree – “I don’t know what I’d do with myself” – and would like to see more researchers doing trusteeships and non-executive roles. She also feels it’s incumbent on those in the industry to keep fostering their curiosity, as well as challenging the status quo.

“We need to have, and develop in ourselves, a sense of joy at challenge and a sense of joy at what curiosity brings. I think your brain lights up with that sort of emotion and I think it can do it more if you let it,” says Frost. “Just because it’s the same problem you’ve seen before doesn’t mean there isn’t another way at it.

“I don’t think the world is closing down, but I do think we have to be vigilant, particularly if you’re a woman, because progress is being made, but it ain’t permanent yet. I make no apologies that some of my charity work is just for women and children. They have the worst hand played to them in the world.”

Researchers can and should rise to the challenge, thinks Frost. “It is necessary that we are vigilant about our liberties and help other people protect theirs, and that’s all of our jobs. But I think researchers, because they see what they see and know what they know, are particularly well placed to be part of that defence – and I think they should be.”

This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of Impact