Todd’s Story
Across his twenty odd years in market research, it’s hard to name a technique that Todd Eldridge hasn’t mastered. From clustering and grouping to experimental design based trade off methodologies and visualization techniques, Todd has market research pretty well covered! Throughout it all he has never lost sight of the goal – the people that his analysis is about and delivering strategic business insights and outcomes as speedily as possible for his clients.
“I’m fascinated by the intersection of the data and people – to a lot of people, data is just a bunch of numbers but I never try to lose sight of the fact that at the end of it all are human beings and the decisions they make.”
TODD ELDRIDGE
The backbone of the team
Todd’s decades of experience in market research meant that he was perfectly placed to lead the advanced analytics team of Fiftyfive5. He relishes jumping in to support the team with more advanced analytics, taking the lead when he can. His analysis software of choice is Q.
How Todd uses Q
Before Q, doing a large market research project could be enormously challenging due to the number of different applications involved. From transferring data to formatting data to the analysis itself, it’s easy to see how things can get lost or go wrong. Now, Todd uses Q for all his analyses. His favorite part of using Q? He can now pull all his data prep work and analyses under the single roof – speeding up the entire process enormously. Using Q means that the team at Fiftyfive5 can deliver more, quicker. Todd says “having it all in that one single app really helps with efficiency – it certainly helped me”. In a changing industry which demands “cheaper and faster” all the time, that is no mean feat!
“I’ve essentially been a team of one for most of my career and the only reason I’ve been able to do that is to have Q at my fingertips that can bring everything together and help with efficiency.”
TODD ELDRIDGE
Going global with segmentation
Todd recently completed a large project in the beverage sector, involving multiple segmentation lenses for different purposes including brand positioning and new product development. The client ended up using the segmentation globally – deepening the bond between the client and Fiftyfive5 and helping them grow their business. A win, win!
Looking to the future
While, the role of market research may shift further towards assisting clients tease out the answers they need within huge amounts of on-tap data, Todd doesn’t see this replacing the primary research professionals do. Todd believes that while the “vast lakes” of data may be a valuable record of past human behavior, it is impossible to answer the most important question of ‘why’ people do what they do without taking the structured, human-centric approach of market researchers.
