I am an Artist. Like almost everything in my life, my journey to making art has been unconventional. I first picked up a paintbrush at the age of 36 with a goal of quieting my mind. I found that painting was far less about the ability to create an image, and more about training my brain to stay extremely present to what was in front of me. It was about honing the skills of seeing what was there, shifting my perspective to a new lens, and applying that to a blank canvas.
The challenge to conducting quality research is reliance on communication. In order to uncover insight, a researcher must be able to apply an artistic lens.
An artist knows the value in squinting at what a respondent says, in order to probe the feelings that drive their word choices.
In addition to being a ‘maker’, I am also a Xennial mom of two, with a background in education and anthropology. Similar to my journey in art, my work in consumer insight has followed a non-traditional path. I entered the world of marketing at age 16, a fresh intern working at a youth-focused marketing agency in NYC. (The Geppetto Group, Inc.) They immediately placed me in their insights department and handed me the task of building a panel of tweens and teens to launch surveys and field questions for feedback. This was in the early days of the internet when AOL was booming and being online was brand new. It was then, empowered to build a community that could offer insight in real time, that I realized I liked the feeling of being present to the truths that community offered, in order to shift and change perspectives in the world around me.
Over the years I used the same skills that allowed me to become an artist, to do many things. I traveled to India under an anthropology grant to observe street children in order to understand how their tacit relationships were structured. I worked in the inner cities in classrooms with elementary aged students, using my ability to listen closely to them as a way over leveraging new and interesting ways to reach them. Eventually I returned to my roots in the world of consumer insights, as the Director of Strategic Planning and Qualitative Research at Liminal Research, LLC. About 6 years ago my partner retired and placed the company in my hands to steer. After working for almost 10 years under that umbrella, it became clear that it was time for me to re-define what I can do and how I do it.
It is in context of today’s market research culture which is so often effectively driven by numbers and statistics, that I am creating a space for the artistry of research. To see what I believe about good market research click link below.