How did you get there? Ruth Hinton

Delighted to have caught up with the brilliant Ruth Hinton who is Group Head of Customer Experience and Insights at Vue International, working with head office and cinema teams across Europe to deliver amazing big screen experiences. She is also Chair of AURA, the UK’s biggest community exclusively for clientside researchers.

So Ruth, how did you get into the industry, and take us through how you got to this point?

After my psychology degree, I got onto a graduate training programme in marketing in one of the big UK banks, as I understood that would be a good way to get started when I wasn’t sure what jobs would suit me, or even much about what jobs existed. They invested a lot in our training and I also made several life-long friends.

When the programme ended, I got a job in the bank’s market research team, managing tracking studies – and I’ve loved working clientside ever since. I’ve always been attracted to big household brands, about which customers will have opinions! Also it’s fun to work in retail, hospitality and leisure, which are enjoyable discretionary purchases for our customers, and involve looking at the environment and service as well as products.

I remember talking to my Dad about whether to do further studies after my degree, and while I enjoyed psychology, I didn’t think I’d like doing all the primary research. He said, is there not a role where you work with other people’s research? It turns out, there is!

In addition to my main job, I’m also Chair of AURA, the UK’s biggest community exclusively for clientside researchers. It’s a not-for-profit organisation, providing events, networking and support for over 190 companies and 900 individuals; run by members, for members. I had been an AURA member on and off for many years, and I was invited to join the leadership team a couple of years ago, because they saw I was actively contributing on the member forum and at meetings. It’s such a friendly, supportive community  in which people are happy to share their experience; and it’s amazing how much can be achieved by a team of volunteers. It’s a great development experience, because together as a volunteer team of Directors, we are running a small business and all that entails: setting a strategy, managing a brand, steering our financial performance, acquiring and retaining customers, building commercial partnerships, creating content and running a programme of events. It’s a great chance to experiment and build skills, as well as feeling like a satisfying contribution.

Why should anyone consider a career in market research, data and insights?

Insights is a valuable profession in which you build a lot of skills sourcing, interpreting and presenting information, plus project management, influencing and consulting – and generally staying curious and open-minded. Once you have these skills, you can work on, or in, a huge variety of sectors, brands and topics. This means it stays interesting, while keeping insight as the core of your career, enabling you to progress. So for me, a career in insights can be a great mix of variety while also being a specialism.

Clientside in particular I think is a really satisfying and fun position to be in. Embedded in the brand, you can experience the bits before and after the research, see how things develop over time, get really into your category and your brand experience, and work with lots of different parts of the business. And you are in a special position: the interface between your colleagues who need timely information to make better decisions, your agency partners who have amazing expertise for you to draw on, and the consumers or clients that you need to understand and represent.

Career paths are rarely without challenges. Can you share an honest moment from your career when things didn’t go quite according to plan, but the lessons remain with you to this day?

In one role, I was given responsibility for another department in addition to insight, but it wasn’t a good fit because I didn’t have the experience to manage that team. There were some things I could do well with them, such as organising the work flow and coordinating with other departments, but there was too much I didn’t know about their function – and it wasn’t good for any of us. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have accepted the additional role – and after a tough year, I applied for other jobs and went back to a pure insight role in another company, taking a pay cut in order to get back on the right path.

But you always learn from these things: I know I’m much better suited to using my expertise, rather than being a more generalised team leader; I got a useful view of business processes from another angle, which I draw on to make my insight work better; I’m more careful in evaluating which opportunities to accept and which are not right for me.

What two things should junior researchers focus on as they progress in their careers?

Firstly, there is a lot to learn from the behaviour of your colleagues and how they conduct themselves. You might like to identify and observe one or two people who you think are really great to work with. What is it they do so well, in how they interact with you and other people – and how can you do some of those things yourself? I don’t mean turn your back on your authentic self or try to be something you’re not, as that can be a waste of energy and rarely works. But it’s like choosing to work a particular set of muscles, which can develop into a strength over time. Or if it doesn’t feel good, if it’s a stretch too far, then try working on something else until you find what feels more like you.

Secondly, it’s great to have broader horizons and a fresh perspective, so take opportunities to meet research and insight people from other companies – such as AURA if you are on the clientside and &more or the Market Research Society more generally if you are working elsewhere in the sector. If you have the time, it’s worth actively contributing to these sort of communities too, because in my experience you meet great people and you get so much more back in return.

Do you have any advice for our sector?

There are times when we need to be more intentional and empathetic in how we collaborate, as this allows people to do their best work and leads to better outcomes. No one intends to be difficult, but when we’re under pressure or if we lack appreciation for what it’s like on the other side, there is a risk of causing unnecessary stress or inefficiency.

To help with this, AURA has developed the Working Well Together campaign. Consultation with AURA members and agency partners identified 6 principles, which form the Working Well Together Charter; and a team of cross-sector volunteers are producing resources and The Working Well Together Podcast to help make it easier and more habitual to work well together.

There are practical steps you can take, wherever you are in the insights ecosystem (research agencies have suppliers too!) and whether you are experienced or new, or in a management position or not. It can be as simple as making a little time to share more context and figure out some smart ways of working together. So my advice is to visit aura.org.uk and follow AURA Insight on LinkedIn to find out more and get involved.

And do you have anyone who has helped your career so far that you’d like to acknowledge and say thanks or give a shout out to?

I loved being part of a big, ambitious, fun, multi-disciplined team under Crispin Beale, Caroline Bates and Sinead Jefferies, and alongside Claire Rainey, at Post Office and Royal Mail. I learned so much from them, from big things like leadership style, to the little things like standardising templates for efficient integration, that I still use all the time.

Rowena Patterson was a really helpful mentor at just the time I needed a bit of perspective and confidence – and it can be worth being a member of the Market Research Society to be paired with an experienced mentor, along with all the other benefits.

I love working with my current manager, Shona Gold, who is amazing at clearing the way to get the important stuff done and enabling me to do my best work – while also making it a great balance of fun and challenging along the way.

And a huge thank you to my fellow AURA Directors who are such a committed and friendly team to produce our community with, which gives me enormous satisfaction: Steven Darby, Irene Grovenstein, Louise Sharpe, Maddie Shields, Tim Steere; supported brilliantly by Richard Drury, Julia Joskey and Tom Kerr.