Elaine re-joined RB as Chief Insights & Analytics Officer in November 2019, tolead both the consumer insights and data analytics teams. Passionate about people and consumers, she is leading RB’s efforts to always Put Consumers First, via expansive consumer-centric thinking and ‘humanizing data’ through the digitalization of insights. She is a firm believer in the power of connecting all sources of data and insights about consumers and categories, with analytics playing a key role in building data-driven decisions in-market close to consumers. A key part of her role is to accelerate the digital and data transformation of the group, building insights &analytics as key enablers of digital marketing & eCommerce. This is Elaine’s second stint at RB, the first being in 2001 when she spent 6+years in a variety of roles spanning the Global Category in UK, and Geographies.Prior to re-joining RB, Elaine was Chief Strategy & Insights Officer at Danone for3 years, where she led a company-wide charge towards a more agile & digital approach to insights. Elaine also spent 9 years at Kraft/Mondelez, as RegionalConsumer Insights & Strategy Director for Asia Pacific, and Global CIS Director for the Biscuits category. Elaine started her career at market research agencies including Kantar and Ipsos, and has a PhD in Marketing from Monash University in Australia. She is originally from Singapore, and has lived in Paris and London.

Episode transcription:

F: Thank you for being with us today. Elaine.

E: I've been looking forward to this happy new year.

F: Awesome. Just to get us started, tell us a bit about yourself and the role that you play at RB.

E: Sure. Yeah. Мery happy to be here today. So my name is Elaine Rodrigo and I'm chief insights and analytics officer at RB Reckitt Benckiser. Which means I'm responsible for the entire function across the group, first of all, the business units. So everybody who works in the consumer insight area.

F: In most mature organizations understand how to leverage analytics for knowledge discovery, whereas fewer are able to consistently aim this discovery in the right direction, which is also an impressive analytics that may be functionally useless. What strategic steps would you recommend when designing analytics processes that would help avoid the use of analytics for analytics sake?

E: Okay. Now I think it's a great question. And maybe I'll tell you a little bit about my background, which also kind of almost defines, I guess, where I start. And I'd say that my starting point is never the analytics, so I always start from a business question. What's the insight that you need to drive and answer that business question, and then the analytics that, that is required in order to inform it, but maybe if I look at the, I guess the way that I've developed my career and learning over the years, as well as I started off in a very analytical space. So I started off as a PhD student and constructing structural equation models. So really deep into building. Building an analytical model. And then after that, I actually started my career when I left university and I went into a market research agency. So this is like in the 1990s now. And that's when it's about consumer, it was about consumer insights. It's all the insects and the consumer and needs and what's going on there. So I shifted gears to thinking about that. And then actually I joined RB the first time around 20 years ago in a client role. And that's when you realize when you come into an organization that the whole point of the insight is to drive business decisions. So therefore I kind of came around into that. And then finally, over time as analysts and analytics, I guess, became more important even in large organizations around what we call driving. Fact-based thinking, data-driven thinking it's come around. So I feel like I've kind of gone round circle and that's why now I take everything from a lens. So believing that.