Marketing Insights Researcher

About our family of companies:

We are on a mission to bring learning to life! At our family of companies, Learning Resources®, Educational Insights, and hand2mind, we create a unique range of toys, educational products, and supplemental curriculum trusted by teachers and loved by families alike. Voted among the Chicago Tribune’s Top Workplaces for six consecutive years, we are a 500+ person strong, family-owned global organization dedicated to helping kids succeed in school and develop a love of learning. In addition to high-quality, hands-on products like VersaTiles® and Cuisenaire® Rods, we make award-winning toys, including top sellers such as the Pretend & Play® Cash Register, the Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set and Toy of the Year winner Botley® the Coding Robot as well as Educational Insights top sellers Kanoodle®, GeoSafari® Jr. series, and Playfoam™. We pride ourselves on being committed to our employees’ personal and professional development, a thriving culture, and a diverse, creative atmosphere. Along with our culture and competitive benefits package, we offer a variety of opportunities for training and development. We are looking for professionals who are truly just kids at heart! We hope you will join our award-winning team today!

Team & Position Description:

We are currently seeking a Marketing Insights Researcher to join our Shared Services Analytics Team! This role is a critical partner to our internal teams and provides a great opportunity to join a high performing team in a hands-on role helping drive business and shape strategies. If telling compelling stories with data is your jam, join us!

What you’ll do day to day: 

• Deliver Insight-Led Solutions: Transform complex data into simple, visually engaging charts, graphs, and infographics across all business functions.
• Own Market Research Function: Internal owner of all qualitative and quantitative market research, including surveys, focus groups, and third-party software. Draft surveys, own focus group scripts, serve as the main point of contact with external partners, complete all analysis of research, and present results to internal stakeholders.
• Support Retail Insights: Build scalable retail insights function by leveraging AI software to pull internal and external data to develop strategy and report results.
• Support Product Innovation: Collaborate with product development teams to translate data and research into actionable insights to inform new product ideas and innovation. Participate in product brainstorm sessions and testing
• Own Competitive Research Function: Internal analytics owner for monthly competitive landscape reporting, including ownership and reporting for monthly Circana updates.
• Support Business Updates and Planning: Provide analytics and insights support for annual planning and quarterly business updates, assisting with data insights and visualization.
• Support Strategic Creative Projects: Create product concepts, mockups, sell sheets, packaging explorations, and other special projects that transform consumer insights and business opportunities into compelling visual stories.

What we’re looking for (Key Performance Objectives):

In the first 3 months:

• Create Insights Vault consisting of all prior company research (focus groups, surveys, etc.), where any employee can easily find and review prior research.
• Develop a 12-month, prioritized research roadmap that balances the needs across all departments (product, marketing, school, sales) and stay within budget.

In the first 6 months:

• Audit our internal tech stack for market research and suggest alternative software to improve our effectiveness.
• Become a power-user for Circana and Scintilla reporting systems.
• Audit our current catalog of PowerBI reports and dashboards within the sales and marketing departments and recommend any optimization or consolidation opportunities.

In the first 12 months:

• Attend at least 1 internal and 1 external (retailer) line review presentation.
• Become fluent in PowerBI and audit existing dashboards and reports for data visualization opportunities.

Requirements & Ideal Attributes:

• Education: Bachelor's degree in a marketing or digital analytics related field
• Experience: 4+ years of marketing or digital analytics experience
• Mindset: Curious, results oriented, and proactive in identifying insights and opportunities
• Execution Excellence: Highly organized, able to manage multiple projects in parallel, and deliver reliably against timelines 
• Market Research: Knowledge of quantitative research methods (survey design, analysis and statistics)
• Technical Skills: Familiarity with data visualization tools and modern analytics tools; ability to learn and adopt new platforms quickly;
• Analysis Skills: Experience analyzing and evaluating consumer data and developing actionable insights
• Visualization & Reporting: Proficiency in Power BI (or other visualization tools) to build scalable, automated dashboards 

We are a drug-free workplace and an EEO employer.

Please note: This role will be filled by our internal recruitment team, so no assistance is needed from any outside staffing agency at this time.

Compensation Range: $95,000 – $105,000 annual salary – Actual compensation may vary due to other factors such as: years of experience, skill set and location. Total compensation includes profit sharing bonus potential, 401k matching, and a variety of other benefits (details can be found here). 

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