Carla Borsoi ’92 ’95MBA is the Vice President of Consumer Insights and the interim head of marketing for media-giant AOL. Although she handles the market research “classics” such as focus groups and surveys, she also incorporates today’s technologies with web analytics and social media analysis. She recommends the typical social science classes to students (psychology, sociology, etc) as well as analytical classes such as statistics.
Transcript
>> My name is Carla Bursoi. I currently head up consumer insights and marketing for AOL. I work in one particular division, which is AOL Services, which encompasses a lot of the things that you're familiar with for AOL, including the homepage, email, AIM. Sometimes I touch the client, and then we have emerging businesses, as well. So it used to be that like -- someone like me would be called a market researcher, but I actually span more than traditional market research. So I don't just do focus groups. I don't just do surveys. We actually just spend a lot of time dealing with web analytics, social media analysis, lifetime value. So there's like a financial analysis, as well. But it's all about how you understand what your consumers are doing, and what are your potential consumers doing? What are the trends that are happening in the marketplace? What are things that we can do to make our products better? And that could be a deep dive on a particular product, or it could be going out into the marketplace and just trying to understand what consumer needs there are. So I've done everything from a lot of ethnography, where we're just literally going in-home and spending time with people, and you're watching them do whatever it is that they do. Or maybe people in coffee shops or even sitting down and like talking to people in a mall and interrupting them and talking to them there. There is no typical day. Because my work spans both marketing and consumer insights, what -- like today was a day that was full of meetings. And one meeting was literally going through copy for one of the new products that we're working on, and we're launching a mobile version, and it has a tour. I had another meeting later, looking at copy for some marketing campaigns. And then yet, I had another meeting, trying to figure out what the usability should be like for a particular product and should we tweak the design or change it, based on what we know. So there's those -- there's days like that, that are just like getting stuff done. There might be a day where I have my head down all day, and I'm like re-watching videos, or I might be crunching some data in Excel. I might be running correlations. There could be that. There might be a day where I spend the whole day on Twitter or Facebook and dig into that. Or be writing and talking to -- talking to people and engaging them that way. Today I also talked to somebody about running some tests in some digital marketing campaigns. So it sort of runs -- that might be one day. And then there might be a day we're again in somebody's home or, you know, this weekend, I was at a conference. So just every day is very different.
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