Taking stock of insight

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As group insight director at the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, it’s perhaps unsurprising that one of Naomi Kasolowsky’s priorities is to keep things simple, both in terms of purpose and output. 

“Insight teams have a huge responsibility to convey meaning with as much accuracy as possible – especially when you work in a business like Tesco, where you work with a lot of stakeholders and the impact of what you’re saying or recommending is far-reaching,” she says.

Never has simplicity and clarity been more necessary than during the complexity of the past few months. For a company at the forefront of responding to the pandemic, from keeping stock levels stable to introducing a range of new social distancing measures, insight has been in high demand.

Kasolowsky is responsible for all the insight teams across Tesco, including more than 100 people in the UK and teams overseas. The responsibility of the function is to identify opportunities for growth and inform how the business develops new propositions, as well as being accountable for customer understanding and the impact of propositions on brand health and customer experience.

The team uses a partnership model to work with colleagues across the business, including the customer function, strategy and finance, product function, category buying teams, and product development.

The team has recently invested in thinking differently about how it partners with these stakeholders, forming a closer relationship and embedding themselves within the processes and functions they support. “We walk more in their shoes and we take ourselves out of the vantage point of being in the insight team,” says Kasolowsky.

“That’s a new way of doing things and it is enabling folks in the team to feel they’ve had the right opportunity to develop consultative skills. You need sales skills to be able to have impact and influence, so we want to focus on that.”

Understanding colleagues 

As well as understanding customers, the insight team is responsible for carrying out research with Tesco’s large employee base. The retailer recently launched continuous colleague listening for the first time – providing the team with a continual flow of data from employees.

“It gives us a stream of really trustworthy data and insight about how colleagues are feeling, and how that relates to how the business is doing – whether that’s the corporate brand or the employer brand,” says Kasolowsky.

As well as obtaining data on whether its colleague propositions are driving advocacy, and the key metrics around its workplace programme, bringing that data together to analyse it alongside the company’s customer insight will be a key focus for the team going forward, says Kasolowsky. “It’s going to bring us a whole new level of understanding we have not had before.”

The pandemic offers a clear case study for the ways in which Tesco’s staff and customers intersect. Like all supermarkets, Tesco introduced multiple new measures in-store as a result of Covid-19, including protective screens, one-way systems, and reserved times for vulnerable shoppers. These changes, of course, did not only impact customers, but also the firm’s employees, who had their own thoughts and anxieties.

Kasolowsky explains: “We needed to understand how confident our colleagues and customers were feeling, how fearful they were, and the extent to which Tesco’s response was allaying those fears and building confidence, so we asked the exact same questions of colleagues and customers.”

Looking at customer research alongside employee insight gave the team a “robust understanding” of what to focus on, according to Kasolowsky, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, when Tesco needed to decide on the most important measures to take to support employees and customers in store.

“We’ve got a lot of colleagues and a lot of shops up and down the country, and they can be a very good barometer for the mood of the nation but, equally, we knew that in those early days, we had to make some choices about the most important things we needed to do.

“Because we looked at the two things together, I think we came up with quite a sensitive, human response. This was an example of a time when you needed smaller data to be able to really know that’s the right thing to do. Let’s say you roll out the wrong thing to 2,000 shops – that’s quite a big deal, so we had to get it right.”

The insight team also analysed shopping behaviour to understand differences in shopping patterns across different types of store –for example, looking at whether there were different issues faced by Tesco Express than Tesco Metro – to help the company’s leadership team make decisions on issues such as closing times.

Early on, Tesco formed a cross-functional team that was focused singularly on understanding what was happening with Covid-19, formed of a mixture of analysts and research skills to assess the situation from various perspectives.

“We almost became like a news desk,” says Kasolowsky. “We moved to daily insights sharing because we were making decisions every hour about what needed to happen.”

Are there any ways of working implemented during this period that Kasolowsky would like to take forward? Simplicity – both in terms of the team’s purpose and in terms of output – and communication are high on the list, she says.

“We had a very strong purpose – we anchored ourselves on our job and it was very clear what we were there to do. Going forward, that clarity and simplicity of the role of the team and keeping things simple was incredibly helpful.

“Because people didn’t have time to read everything – there was an unbelievable amount of communication – it meant we had to sharpen the communication of our deliverables, key insights and recommendations, and make them digestible for stakeholders. I think we’ll hold on to that.

“The communication between us was also very strong. My teams are in a lot of different countries and locations, but when you are all virtual, it makes everything very equal.”

Panel perceptions

During the first few months of the pandemic, the insight team needed to press pause on the own-brand product testing conducted within its continuous panel, and so it took the opportunity to review the panel, as well as assessing its membership from the perspective of diversity and inclusion.

As product testing was not possible, the team then used the panel differently, to conduct research on people’s perceptions of what was important to them during the first months of the pandemic.

While Tesco has a wide roster of agencies, this panel is managed in-house by the team, meaning they have quite a close relationship. “We continued all of that because we want them to have a voice”, says Kasolowsky. For example, the panel provided insight on what role value, price and promotions played in the mindset of customers during lockdown.

Data – both big and small – is, of course, central to the work of the insight function. Kasolowsky’s team analyses data from the Clubcard scheme, for example, and works closely with data science and enterprise analytics teams within the business. Inclusion and representation is also a priority, she says. “We are trying to really get on top of the techniques and ways in which we understand the people of this country in a much better way than maybe we ever have done before, because it’s the right thing to do, and as a brand like Tesco, that serves everyone, it is incumbent upon us to do that.”

For Kasolowsky, with multiple data sources available within organisations, insight teams should think carefully about how they are viewed internally, their positioning within the business, and where they can uniquely add value.

“You need to be able to partner effectively and form those bonds across the organisation, otherwise you’re kind of in a vacuum. You can come up with brilliant things but they’re never going to go anywhere, because they’re not going to solve someone’s specific problem, because you probably don’t know what the problem or question is.

“That’s what I always instil in the team – ‘the answers are not found at your desk. You have to engage with the business and understand how it works, and then use the things that are uniquely yours to do to help get a better answer than if stakeholders try to do it themselves.’ That’s fundamentally what we need to be doing – day in, day out.”

Zoom cooking

This Easter, with the country under stay-at-home restrictions, Tesco had to adapt its long-standing ‘Food Love Stories’ campaign.
First launched in 2017, the campaign features ads focusing on cooking different meals throughout the year, with accompanying recipe cards available in stores.

Many of the ‘stories’ focus on families congregating at mealtimes. However, with many people unable to celebrate events like Easter in person this year, Tesco tweaked the campaign.

Research from Tesco conducted during the lockdown period found that one in five people reported cooking from scratch more frequently, while video calls with family were considered one of the highlights.

The insights led to the development of two new ‘stories’, one of which showed members of a family learning how to make a meal via video call with relatives.

As more people were watching TV at home, and Google and YouTube saw an uptick in usage on a range of channels including baking and indoor exercise, Tesco’s media mix for the campaign focused on these channels.

Kasolowsky says: “Our business had to adapt and respond to Covid-19 in many ways, and it was essential that we were quickly able to grasp how our customers were feeling and how we could remain relevant to them.

“Our ‘Food Love Stories’ campaign is focused on bringing people together through food. With everyone in lockdown, our insights highlighted that this was even more relevant to our customers – the idea of bringing people together, even if it had to be virtually. As we approached Easter, we also knew that many more of our customers were cooking from scratch, and the team was able to bring this to life with Zoom-based Nan’s ‘long-distance’ roast lamb and John’s ‘isolation’ aromatic lamb.”

This article was first published in the October 2020 issue of Impact.