Meet Your ESOMAR Reps: Taylor Anderson from Colgate-Palmolive Company

In this blog series, we're profiling ESOMAR Representatives and gaining insight into their views on market research industry trends, what they're passionate about and more.
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Date 5 August 2023
Author ESOMAR North America

In our latest interview for our “Meet the Reps” blog post series, we spoke with Taylor Anderson, Senior Director, Global Insights Capabilities at Colgate-Palmolive Company. Read on to get to know him and his unique views and experiences in the insights space. We're happy to have him on board as one of our North America Representatives!

Give a little background on yourself, your company and experience in the market research space.
After starting my career at Nielsen (then ACNielsenBASES), I joined Colgate-Palmolive in 2006 and have spent the time since growing into an equal parts analytical, creative and empathetic Insighter and change agent.  With experience gained across product categories, geographic divisions, analytics, and even consumer affairs, I currently lead the enhancement of Insights' capabilities, skills, and impact to drive growth at Colgate-Palmolive.

What do you love about market research? What are you passionate about?
At its core, I love journeying along the virtuous loop between curiosity and learning, and the electrifying light-bulb moments created along the way that produce appreciation for different perspectives or new ideas altogether.  Early in my career, I found this love was fed most by connecting the dots across various data points and timeframes.  In time, I've realized the value of connecting the dots across as many different data types, methods, disciplines, contexts, and diverse lenses as possible.  I carry this into my current role, especially in driving people-centricity, infusing DE&I into the DNA of insights work, creating learning & development experiences to better our craft, and building external partnerships for our teams.

What trends are you seeing in the industry right now that you are tracking? Anything you are particularly excited about?

While technology is the obvious elephant in the room, I want to open the aperture a bit to refocus the trend of technology around the real ways "insights" and "analytics" -- which have traditionally been treated related but separate -- are increasingly being woven together and empowering each other.  Integration is more than a goal, it will be vitally necessary as all forms of information & data can be connected through a common denominator (with the right model & training).  From the client/manufacturer side, this means that the skill sets and capabilities of these domains need to be truly integrated in our teams (if not, individuals) and that outputs of any form of market research or analytic capability be as directly ingestible (i.e., APIs instead of having to work in suppliers' walled-garden platforms) or insertable (i.e., analytics tools and engines that can easily layer on top of our data lakes).  Achieving this in itself is a means to the end where the most, and most diverse, set of dots can be connected and the greatest light-bulb moments created.

Why did you decide to become an ESOMAR Rep? 

Selfishly, I have to say that the major reason for becoming a Rep was to get the opportunity to grow my sphere of influence for my ambitions of being a change agent.  I first became exposed to ESOMAR when Colgate-Palmolive became a Corporate member, and immediately was struck by the global reach of the organization, in addition to the wealth of practitioner resources it provided.  As we're certain to be both challenged and inspired by the ways in which things like technology are likely to change our industry, it's extremely important to have a "town square" where we can share and collaborate to ensure our collective potential is only enhanced in the coming months and years.