Down & Dirty with Dr. T is back with a new episode featuring John Richard, former Consumer Insights Manager at Practo (now at United Breweries Ltd).
With nearly a decade of experience in brand research, John has worked across FMCG, healthcare, and now beverages, helping brands make smarter decisions by understanding what consumers really think and feel. Known for his strength in brand advocacy and voice-of-consumer work, John brings a researcher's eye to business performance and cultural nuance.
In this episode, he sits down with Taapsi to talk about how researchers can make their work more actionable, how to align teams around the consumer journey, why not every research output needs to prove ROI and how he’s been using ChatGPT to bring more structure and scalability to the research function.
Highlights from the episode:
A day in John’s life: John starts his day at 5:30am with a 10k run, followed by planning and clearing out his inbox. As someone who manages multiple stakeholders across the org, his mornings are about getting grounded before jumping into meetings and insight-sharing.
Making insights usable across teams: John walks us through how Practo built a central tracker to log and reference previous studies, so teams don’t redo the same work twice. It’s a small shift that’s helped drive bigger impact across functions.
Using ChatGPT to cut research time and make insights usable: John explains how he takes thousands of open-ended survey responses and with ChatGPT, quickly organizes them into themes, creates word clouds and generates process maps. This helps him save hours of manual work and makes it easier for product, marketing and service teams to use the research.
Challenging the ROI mindset in research: He reflects on the pressure researchers face to prove ROI, and why expecting a measurable outcome from every single insight is unrealistic, especially when no one asks finance or SaaS teams for the same.
Learn more about our research shenanigans:
Website: https://www.poocho.co/
Blog: https://www.poocho.co/resources/blog/
LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/justpoocho
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@justpoocho
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poochonetwork
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction to John Richard
00:01:39 A day in the life of a consumer insights manager
00:04:35 Stakeholder and agency management
00:07:30 Lean six sigma and research
00:09:38 Applying lean in research
00:12:33 Data challenges, ChatGPT, and the 5S methodology
00:16:49 Introduction to 5S methodology
00:20:04 Standardization and sustaining improvements
00:21:40 Real-world application of methodologies
00:23:42 Lean six sigma and data analysis
00:25:44 Introduction to ChatGPT for research
00:29:06 Enhancing desk research with ChatGPT
00:31:49 Strategic thinking and ChatGPT
00:33:47 Using ChatGPT for consumer data analysis
00:37:30 Generating process images with ChatGPT
00:39:55 Data validation and pictorial representation
00:44:36 Analyzing course data and visualizing processes
00:47:48 Integration with lean tools and personal efficiency
00:51:17 Closing remarks