Meet Rebecca Bello, VP of Product at PureSpectrum. Today Rebecca shares her goals for our Insights Platform as well as thoughts around the future of Insights and sample collection.
Q. What’s your background? What was your journey to PureSpectrum?
A. I’ve spent the last 12 years in market research in a variety of roles ranging from product, sales, strategy, to marketing. My journey to PureSpectrum was a bit of an unusual experience that can only be described as fate. I wanted a position that would allow me to apply all of my experience and do something big. A friend of mine was working for PureSpectrum and had posted something about the company on LinkedIn. She made it sound like a great place, so I reached out to ask her about the company and culture. She spoke so positively about how great the company is; how amazing the team is, how inspiring company leadership is, and how everyone genuinely cares about and takes care of one another.
My friend put me in touch with leadership, and while they had open roles, none of them would have been a fit for me. I had an introductory meeting with Mark Menig, and he knew that the company was in the process of acquiring a survey scripting platform. He would need someone to lead a team to rebuild this platform from the ground up, and he saw that I’d be a fit for the role, as it’s in line with my skill set and professional passions. He couldn’t tell me much during the interview process, so taking the job was just a blind-faith leap on my part. The whole thing was a little like a rom-com if you will, where I fell for a company, and its people, and that led to a decision to accept the unknown position based almost solely on instinct and trust. I’ve never been happier.
Q: What is your role at PureSpectrum?
A: I am a Vice President of Product leading the PureSpectrum Insights solution. My role is very strategy-focused. It’s about understanding the power that PureSpectrum can deliver to our clients through the Insights Platform. I’m very lucky to work alongside an incredible team of engineers, product managers, and key internal stakeholders. We’re enhancing the Insights scripting platform to provide users with the ability to design, program, launch, and analyze studies in unison with our Marketplace sample.
My main mission is to make sure that everyone across the company has what they need to help the Insights Platform reach its full potential. I try to be an ambassador of the platform and advocate the value proposition, details on features being released, and why we’ve chosen to build them. Most importantly, I work with the Insights development team to plan the trajectory of their work and create new features so we continue to provide value to our users. We’re moving fast, but we’re doing it as a cohesive team.
Q: One of the PureSpectrum cornerstones is simplicity, how do you see that echoed in the Insights Platform?
A: Simplicity is at the forefront of everything we do. So many solutions end up being over-engineered, and people can mistake complexity for competency. We have an exceedingly competent and experienced engineering team, and they’ve learned from what’s already out there. We’re building an elegant insights solution that makes researchers’ jobs easier by not overcomplicating the process.
It might sound counterintuitive, but we want researchers to spend very little time on our platform. We know our clients’ jobs are much bigger than building a survey, so they should be able to come in, create what they need, launch their project and get the insights. We want to allow them instead to spend their time focused on actioning against the results. So that’s my overarching goal – to figure out how we can help expedite the insights for our clients.
Q: What are your other goals for the Insights Platform?
A: The goals I have for the Insights Platform are expansive, but it all boils down to the simple objective that guides everything I do: I want everyone to love the Insights Platform as much as I do. Some of our goals include driving enhancements to functionality and reporting features, both of which will improve the user experience. Realistically we will never be done building, enhancing, and streamlining. My biggest objective currently is automating our Insights scripting platform with our Marketplace Platform to create an end-to-end user experience to deliver exponential value and convenience to our clients.
When I look at 2022 and think of where it started versus where we’ll end with the Insights Platform, I’m humbled by the investment and support from the PureSpectrum Executive team and the dedication of the developers working tirelessly to create an exceptional product. I’m incredibly excited not only about the impact we’ll be able to make on market research as a whole, but I’m excited about the opportunity to be on this journey with the most incredible people.
Q: What excites you most about the future of the insights industry?
A: When I first started in market research, big data was everywhere. It was the buzzword that everyone was talking about. And they still are, the idea has been built upon year over year. We now know that there’s never a shortage of information. There’s never a shortage of how we can find information from people. Now it’s about how we can talk to people? What’s the best way? With the advances in technology, having access to people is so much easier, and yet our industry still has struggles.
People no longer have an attention span for a 20-minute survey because they’re doing 30,000 different things at once. I’m curious how we as an industry are going to get some of those deeper thoughts from people that we might have been able to get in the past. In the past, a survey was something to do on a slow Sunday night, now there are a thousand other things to capture their attention in the palm of their hand. It seems to me that we are going to see a shift in incentive structures to combat this.
But I think an even bigger value may be for us as researchers to tie insights back to panelists and let them see the impact they’ve had. I think that’s something that’s missing, the full feedback loop. And I think that would be a very interesting shift for insights as a whole, to teach consumers how much their opinions matter. How many different industries and brands want to hear from them. I really could go down such a rabbit hole with this idea. If we were able to show this feedback loop better, would voter rates go up? Who knows what could happen if people understood how much their voices matter.
Q: What do you like to do in your free time?
A: My free time is dedicated to my two kids, Abigail (12) and Grayson (3). I love spending time with them and making their childhood as magical as possible, whether we’re going on a day trip somewhere fun or curling up on the couch and watching a movie together. They’re my biggest priority and I enjoy every minute of watching them grow up. I feel very privileged to be their mom.
Once they’re in bed it’s usually a mixture of mindless TV, something crafty, or the occasional off-the-wall adventure with friends. I try to do things that help keep me connected to who I am as a person, not just a wife, mother, and employee. The idea of a work-life balance is new to me since joining PureSpectrum and I’m slowly learning how to have it, much like many of us former workaholics are learning. Maybe I should launch a survey on that…
Interested in learning more about how the PureSpectrum Insights Platform can simplify your research? Connect with our team below:
About PureSpectrum
PureSpectrum offers a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform, helping insights professionals make decisions more efficiently, and faster than ever before. Awarded MR Supplier of the Year at the 2021 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, PureSpectrum is recognized for industry-leading data quality. PureSpectrum developed the respondent-level scoring system, PureScore™, and believes their continued success stems from their talent density and dedication to simplicity and quality.