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Charitie Dantis-Gayo

Charitie Dantis-Gayo

Corporate Vice President, Center for Consumer Insights, New York Life Insurance · Brand-side

Topics Charitie shaped

AI & technology, Researcher craft & identity, Insights function & business, Industry, profession & meta, Methods, methodology & rigor, Consumer behavior & culture

Episodes

What Charitie said — indexed claims

  • The industry's enthrallment with AI has crowded out qualitative co-presence — focus groups, interviews, ethnographies, shop-alongs; the start move is to bring those methods back, because in-person observation reveals decision behavior (price-checking on phone in store, Netflix as background noise) that no synthetic dataset captures. — Ep. 42 · 42:40 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-023
  • Early-career professionals lost foundational years of in-person relationship-building during COVID; AI emerged in that window as a substitute for asking another human, which compounds the deficit — managers must deliberately re-teach interpersonal skills, including knowing when not to ask the chatbot. — Ep. 42 · 33:15 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-017
  • Researchers from journalism, political science, and economics backgrounds make insights work more meaningful precisely because of the difference they bring; background variety is a structural strength of the field, not a recruiting awkwardness. — Ep. 42 · 12:08 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-004
  • What retains people in research is not the appeal of the industry but a manager who recognizes that their skills transfer — the AmEx hiring manager's translation \"subscribers become card members, newsstand buyers become prospects\" is the prototype move; without that translator, the field loses talent. — Ep. 42 · 23:50 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-010
  • The most effective form of stakeholder influence is storytelling that lets the listener arrive at the conclusion themselves; trying to prove you're right is structurally weaker than telling the story of someone experiencing what you want them to understand. — Ep. 42 · 37:15 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-019
  • The best advice for anyone considering market research is to talk to people in it: peers, leaders, second-degree connections; do the exploration, recognize that nobody is stuck in a single career anymore, but expect to keep returning to research because it lets you bring your full self to work in a way most other careers do not. — Ep. 42 · 45:55 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-025
  • For most non-researchers entering insights, the only real adaptation cost is lingo — picking up new vocabulary for what they already know how to do; that becomes a bigger skill stretch only as researchers move into more strategic roles where business fluency itself becomes foundational. — Ep. 42 · 25:25 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-011
  • Mass-market quizzes (love language, political typology) are the most accessible on-ramp to explain market research to non-practitioners — they show that traditional research methods produce the personally meaningful tools people already use. — Ep. 42 · 30:50 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-015
  • The industry should treat its talent pipeline like a brand campaign — show up where younger people are, on job boards and through professional organizations, with the same intentionality used for any new product launch. — Ep. 42 · 12:25 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-003
  • For non-researchers entering insights, lingo is the dominant adaptation cost in the first five years; deeper business fluency becomes the binding constraint only as researchers move into more strategic roles. — Ep. 42 · 24:55 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-026
  • Market research is an invisible career: the industry's structural failure to make itself discoverable to younger generations begins with insiders not advocating for it in their own networks. — Ep. 42 · 08:46 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-002
  • The path into market research is typically nonlinear; the field is discovered, not chosen, even by those who become career-long practitioners. — Ep. 42 · 02:55 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-001
  • The insights and analytics functions become more powerful when integrated rather than separated; analytics professionals' reluctance to engage survey-based data as legitimate (treating it dismissively as \"qualitative\") is a structural blind spot that the next generation of insights organizations should design out. — Ep. 42 · 41:15 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-022
  • The corporate-side default of requiring market research experience for entry-level insights roles should stop; analytical skills from adjacent disciplines are a legitimate foundation for being a good insights professional, and that gate is keeping good talent out. — Ep. 42 · 40:02 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-021
  • When hiring for an insurance-industry insights role, the right move is to avoid candidates with insurance backgrounds; same-industry hires arrive with the same vendors, the same approaches, and no fresh frame for the problem. — Ep. 42 · 18:15 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-007

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