How Diageo is meeting the growing demand for insights

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With Diageo’s Senior Consumer Planner, DACH, Jamie Fulham and Bounce’s Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Rónán Dowling-Cullen.

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Insights teams are under mounting pressure to prove their worth. Research must move the needle for the business, or it risks being seen as a cost, not a competitive advantage.

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For Jamie Fulham, Senior Consumer Planner, DACH at Diageo, this pressure comes down to focus. Research only earns its ROI when it genuinely serves your audience — in his case, the consumers drinking Diageo products or the customers selling them — not just the researcher or the internal stakeholder. That’s why he encourages insights leaders to spend more time defining the business question - specifically why you’re asking it and who it’s for.

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Jamie took to the stage at IIEX Europe, alongside our Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Rónán Dowling-Cullen, to share his experience embedding this approach at Diageo. Here’s a recap.

‘Leadership is piling on the pressure’

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“I don't envy insights professionals at the moment. I think it's quite a tough time to be working in the industry, both on the vendor side and the client side” shared Rónán. 

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“There’s a huge pressure to do more with less, "better, faster, cheaper", but there aren’t any solutions available to facilitate this.”

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“On one hand, you’ve got traditional research agencies. Some really smart people I know do excellent work in these agencies, but they’re often slow and expensive. When you're trying to do more with less, slow and expensive is the opposite: doing less with more.”

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“Next, you’ve got DIY tools - the behemoths of the 2010s. They were great at automating processes that didn't require heavy research expertise, but they're struggling to build agentic solutions that can support decision making throughout the research process.”

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“Lastly, you’ve got AI assistants - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. While they have best-in-class AI technology, they don't understand anything about research. There's incredibly deep work done by humans throughout the research process - a thousand different decisions where we might nudge the process slightly, make sure it's on the right track, make sure the quality is good enough, and make sure we're actually answering the question at hand.”

‘We need to focus on asking the right questions’

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“I'm sure everyone in the room has been told to answer questions quicker and get results faster,” said Jamie. 

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“There’s a lot of noise out there in the market right now and with that comes a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty drives opinions. A lot of my time day-to-day is keeping the business on the straight and narrow on what is actually an insight and what is just an opinion dressed up as an insight.”

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“There’s a lot of talk about research having an ROI problem. Ultimately, you need to be really keen on why you're asking the questions. One of the things Bounce is really good at is coming back to us and saying, “You’re asking the wrong questions”. That helps us get much sharper on what we need.”

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“Beyond that, we work with brilliant vendors on longitudinal studies, with great brand tracking platforms, and we will continue to do that. But we need answers quicker for business cases that are consistently changing. For the on-trade space specifically, consumers are going out less, they're spending less, they don't want to be with each other as much, so there’s a lot of pressure. Bounce has been really good at giving us scale and depth for audiences that have been hard to track historically and bringing that together in a way that’s right for our business.”

‘Research should be an iterative process’

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“The goal of technology in market research has always been to do more with less,” said Rónán. “The problem is, in reality, market research is nuanced, bespoke, custom. Every single question that your business might have is slightly different and needs to be tweaked and adjusted.” 

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“A lot of these tech tools, while aiming to do more with less, have actually ended up standardizing the process. You scale it up, you take the researchers out, and you bang insights out as quickly as you can. That might work for particular niches, but it actually builds more of that pressure we were talking about, without solving the overarching problem of doing more with less.”

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“The way we think about the future is based on how people actually make decisions: using multiple forms of research and iteratively taking steps along that process. Let's say I want to launch a ready-to-drink cocktail in Amsterdam, and I want to know how to position it. The first step would probably be some secondary data analysis. To understand what I already know, what's available in the market, and then based on that secondary analysis, I might make a decision: do I want to do qual or do I want to do quant? If I've got a clear idea of the topics we're discussing and we're just trying to validate our ideas, we might do some quant. If we aren't so sure yet and our secondary data analysis is a bit fuzzy, we might do some qual to explore those topics further. And then off the back of that research, we might do another piece of secondary research into the new topics we discover. You end up with this iterative process—those decisions I was talking about that researchers have to make every step of the way.”

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“If you want to make good decisions at pace, you need tools and systems that help you do that. Show you what you already know and then help recommend: "Oh, you've got a gap here that you need to validate, maybe you should run some quant," or "You don't know enough about this space, maybe you should do some secondary data analysis," or "We want to explore topics in more detail, maybe we should run some qual."

‘How can we address the ROI problem?’

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“Linked to this theme of making better decisions, one of the problems that's often talked about is tying research back to ROI. What are your thoughts on this, Jamie?”, Rónán asked. 

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“We talk about research having an ROI problem, but I think it only has an ROI problem if it doesn't answer the key stakeholders in the business,” said Jamie. “Every single piece of research I do answers a question for the consumers who drink our products or the customers who sell them. If we don't answer a question for them, our research is going to have an ROI problem, because we’d be asking vague questions about the business.”

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“I think we need to step away from that. I see people simply repeating the data back to stakeholders. We need to get super smart in understanding why we’re asking the question, who it’s for, and how we can bring it all together in a way that drives action.”

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“I work across marketing, commercial, and finance. All the research I do needs to answer those three stakeholders. But it’s not just about building a case like, "Oh, this is going to solve a business solution for a marketing case, growth drivers, and so forth". We need to make sure that whatever research we're doing goes much further in the business, because if it's only for that researcher and the stakeholder receiving it, then the ROI is going to be poor.”

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‘Tech and talent must work together’

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“What would the ideal solution look like to help you make insights go further in the business?”, Rónán asked. 

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“There’s a few pieces to this,” Jamie said. “The first is about working together. Here’s some context.. One of the big problems we’ve been trying to solve with Guinness is, you think of Guinness and you think of the winter months. A nice cozy pub, a fire in the corner, chatting to the barman. But that didn’t suit us as a business, because we sell throughout the year. So we needed to pull Guinness out of that place. We reached out to you guys to say ‘Look, we need your help to do this’. For us, being able to do that was the ideal solution. Being able to come to you with a business problem, not just a research brief, and working together to solve that problem.”

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“We can also flex the tool up and down depending on what’s happening in the room. At Bounce, you have the technical competency and then you also have people who understand how to make the most of it.”

“Yeah, that’s spot on,”  Rónán added. “Tech and people have to work together to solve these problems. When you want to do more with less, you need to have pace and move fast, but you also need to be able to customise your research. Without tech, you’ve got no pace. Without people, you can’t smooth out the bumps that will inevitably exist in tech.”

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“The problem with this combination in the past has been cost. It was expensive to have both of these things simultaneously. Thankfully, AI has been deflationary here, so we’ve been able to build proprietary technology that allows us to deliver white-glove service and best-in-class tech at the cost of a DIY tool.”

What is Bounce's Insights Operating System?

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The Insights Operating System exists for insights leaders like Jamie, who value partnership and need a solution they can scale up or down based on what's happening at the time.

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It’s for insights leaders who use full-service agencies for large, in-depth studies, but also need a flexible solution to help them stay agile throughout the rest of the year.

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In short, the Insights Operating System has two parts. First is the Retrieval Engine. Studies show that over a third of all the research done at an enterprise level is duplicative - a huge waste of budget and effort. The Retrieval Engine unifies all of your past research and enables you to ask questions of it in plain text to see if the answer you need already exists. No need to dig through slides, scan datasheets or rely on your memory.

“Knowledge management, like many DIY tools, failed, because it was like a Google Search for your information. It would simply tell you which of your reports mentioned ‘drinkers in Mexico’. But it didn’t give you the actual answer.”

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“Only recently has it been possible to ingest structured and unstructured data and auto-tag it. We can integrate into your central data infrastructure and understand the context [behind your question], so instead of telling you where the answer might be, we can give you the answer.” 

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For the questions your past research can’t answer, the Insights Operating System runs a gap analysis and builds a custom study using the Research Engine, which is run and delivered at speed by your dedicated Bounce consultants.

“One of the critical components for an operating system is that it can be independent. For a lot of our clients, we’ll tell them the gaps in their knowledge and they’ll go off and run the research with a different partner.”

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“We’re not saying we can do absolutely everything. When speed is important and the need is quant, we will design a survey ready to go live for you in a matter of hours. But if you need deep qual, you can take the brief and take it straight to your qual partner. You may not need to run any research at all, you may need to buy Nielsen data. The point here is independence. The clarity of what you know and what you don’t know.”