Young researcher Q&A: Sabrina Salvador

Name? Sabrina Salvador

Job title and company? Insight Manager for Hachette UK

Where do you live? London

How long have you worked in market research? It’s been four years already!

Was becoming a market researcher accident or design? Somewhere halfway

Please elaborate…  After a first unsuccessful internship in category management, I figured I needed to find something where I would feel more valuable and use data to come up with business decisions. I found another internship in a marketing consultancy firm in Paris which was doing market research among other things. I worked on a lot of global projects mainly for FMCG companies and I loved it. This is how I fell into it.

What the best thing about my job is… The variety of topics, analyses, methods I am working on, from quant to qual, through to social media listening, sales analysis etc.

What is the worst thing about my job is… the repetitive tasks: checking survey links or tables for example.

My dream job would be... Travel blogger. I love travelling and I wouldn't mind writing articles about my trips to help others discover the world

What’s your favourite methodology? I'm a quant researcher, I like robust sample sizes and being able to feel confident about the data I am using to make decisions. That being said, qual is very useful when you want to deep down into a subject, a good preliminary step.

What are your work ambitions for the next five years? Grow my skills on the strategic side, manage a bigger team with people from various backgrounds (quant/ qual/ other), and manage large scale projects worldwide.

Favourite brand? I am not a brand addict to be honest, I would say Lindt because of my passion for chocolate!

What bit of your job will be extinct/automated in ten years’ time? I guess all repetitive tasks could be automated by machines or algorithms, like link checking and table checking (I can't believe we are not there yet!) Big data will also dramatically change the way we do research. As behavioural data is more and more available, I think research data will be used for very specific projects that can't be answered by other methods. I think market research as such will just be one of the various ways to gather insight along with big data analysis, social media analysis etc.

If you weren’t working in market research what would you be doing? I would still be doing a business job involving data, such as analyst or statistician for example.

What would be your advice to anyone contemplating joining the industry? I would say do it, it is really interesting, but make sure you can use various methods of research and analysis, and get some strong statistical and story telling training. The researcher of tomorrow should be able to juggle with different skills.

What’s the most useful mentoring/career advice you’ve been given? Think ahead about where you want to grow, don't just let it flow. It sounds simple but it actually helps a lot to be strategic, decide what projects to focus on and what your priorities are.

What would be the research project you’d most like to work on? Build a segmentation of travellers around the world for a travel guide brand to understand their motivations, objectives and all practical aspects of their travels.

What is the most stressful thing about your job? Delivering projects on time. We are a team of only three and we manage the research for our seven publishing houses in the UK as well as our overseas companies, which means multiple projects and priorities at the same time. The publishing schedule is quite long, but when the teams are pitching to acquire an author for example, research has to be carried within a day sometimes! This has led me to be quite creative in the methods we are using.