GM views car dealers as a primary source of customer insight, not just a sales channel. Dealers effectively run continuous A/B tests on messaging and can provide real-time feedback on what resonates with customers—what "makes their eye sparkle"—which is often more potent than formal research.

PepsiCo intentionally hired a leader with a marketing and consulting background to head consumer insights. They rejected the 'promote the best surgeon' model, believing an outside perspective was essential to galvanize the team and connect its work directly to business needs.

Gap Inc. integrates MMM insights but doesn't let them dictate strategy monolithically. They combine model outputs with real-time sales data and consumer trends to disrupt themselves, acknowledging that MMMs are based on historical data and can stifle innovation if followed too rigidly.

During its insights transformation, PepsiCo learned that implementing new technology was a minor hurdle compared to changing employee behavior. The real challenge was shifting the team's mindset from simply 'doing research' to strategically 'maximizing the benefit' of the data.

Instead of brainstorming subjectively and then seeking data to support a favorite idea, start with audience insights. Analyzing what content people already engage with defines the creative sandbox, leading to more effective campaigns from the outset and avoiding resource-draining failures.

Don't just show creatives a summary report from the marketing team. Giving designers, copywriters, and video editors raw access to performance data allows them to spot non-obvious patterns and make intuitive leaps that analytical minds might miss, leading to better creative.

In AI, low prototyping costs and customer uncertainty make the traditional research-first PM model obsolete. The new approach is to build a prototype quickly, show it to customers to discover possibilities, and then iterate based on their reactions, effectively building the solution before the problem is fully defined.

While a performance dashboard is important, a data-driven culture bakes analytics into every step of the marketing system. Data should inform foundational decisions like defining the ideal client profile and core messaging, not just measure the results of campaigns.

PepsiCo's R&D head created global "flavor banks" to catalog both successful and failed experiments from around the world. This system allowed disparate teams to build on shared institutional knowledge instead of starting from scratch. It fostered productive internal competition and dramatically increased the speed and success rate of new product development.