Consumer Insights Senior Analyst

Toyota North America • Plano, TX

2d

About The Position

Toyota's Consumer Insights Department is looking for an enthusiastic and highly motivated Consumer Insights Senior Analyst for the New Mobility & Future Business Team. The Consumer Insights Senior Analyst will play a vital role in helping Toyota identify, evaluate, and develop new business opportunities. Working closely with market insights, business development, product planning, strategy, and other cross-functional teams, this role will provide the customer, market, and competitive insights needed to build and strengthen business cases for emerging products, services, and future mobility solutions. This role requires strong qualitative and quantitative market research expertise, combined with the ability to translate research into business decisions. Research may support the full development journey—from identifying unmet customer needs to defining target customers, evaluating use cases, testing concepts, assessing willingness to pay and pricing, and supporting whether a new solution has sufficient customer and market potential to move forward. The successful candidate will bring strong foundational market research skills and be comfortable working in areas where the business model, customer, competitive landscape, and even the product or service itself may still be evolving. Rather than simply reporting research findings, this individual will be expected to synthesize customer, market, competitive, and pricing insights into clear recommendations that help stakeholders make informed investment, product-development, and go-to-market decisions. Reporting to the Consumer Insights Future of Mobility Manager, the person in this role supports the department's objective of championing the desires of our consumers to ensure they are at the center of the decisions made by our strategic planners, engineers, product planners, designers, marketers, and executives. The ideal research candidate can operate upstream with Business Development and help Toyota reduce uncertainty around new businesses, rather than primarily someone who only executes automotive research studies.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Market Research, Business, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology or a closely related discipline, equivalent professional work experience
• Understanding of and ability to critique quantitative surveys and qualitative discussion guides based on agreed set of business questions and research objectives
• Ability to synthesize both quantitative and qualitative research to develop concise, creative, and insightful reports, and to effectively communicate research findings to a diverse business audience
• Strong relationship building and influencing skills to effectively work with cross-functional project teams.
• Display expertise with a variety of research methods such as segmentation, online surveys, ethnographies, one-on-one interviews, focus groups, marketing and/or product clinics and various analytic techniques (e.g. chi square, t-tests, correlations, regression, factor analysis, cluster analysis, Max-Diff, and conjoint analysis) and the ability to explain these techniques to internal clients

Nice To Haves

• An MBA or other advanced degree in Market Research, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, or a closely related field
• Deep understanding of the automotive industry
• Analytical Platform experience such as R, SPSS, Tableau SAS, or mTAB
• Understanding of functions such as advanced product development, product management, brand management, brand marketing and media and experience conducting research for those functions
• Experience researching consumer attitudes towards new technology, vehicle preferences, and lifestyles, with a specific focus on BEVs, PHEVs and FCEVs.

Responsibilities

• Industry Analysis: Secondary and Primary research to understand customer needs and determine opportunities for innovation. This includes customer research related to target customer sizing, competitive assessments, and initial segmentation activities to partition the target buyer groups.
• Consumer Analysis: Understand consumer needs and opportunities for innovation across the experiential journey. Importantly, this includes understanding customer problems to guide development of products, insights to understand use cases, unmet needs, creating and documenting a clear problem statement, and journey mapping.
• Concept Development & Testing: Producing solutions to address customer problems that are developed into tangible and relatable concepts. This includes approaches to down selecting the best ideas for testing, developing different fidelity levels of stimuli, supporting effective brainstorming of unique ideas, and ensuring new perspectives and diversity of ideas are generated.
• Prototype Development & Testing: Creating, testing, and getting feedback on prototypes to optimize product/service communication. Research support may include assisting in prototype testing with consumers, usability feedback, understanding optimal pricing, developing KPIs, and understanding the correct messaging / positioning of new product or service.
• Launch Activities: Understanding buyer behavior and quickly addressing concerns. Once launched research is needed to understand source of sales, cross-shopping of alternatives, and creating customer profiles. Additionally, customer product evaluation provides feedback on in-market products or services.
• General Research Competencies -The Consumer Insights team is committed to a framework we believe ensures the customer voice is placed at the center of all decisions we make at Toyota North America. Here is an overview of key competencies our team members strive to achieve:
• Business Problem Solving: Working with their manager, the Senior Analyst is expected to have a strong understanding of how to translate and scope business questions from internal clients into a research study design. This includes the ability to understand and clarify their client’s business context and questions.
• Project Execution / Management: An ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously for various stakeholders and business partners to ensure projects are executed on time and on budget is critical. The candidate will also need to recommend to clients’ different research methodologies and analytic techniques and their application to provide efficient and actionable insights.
• Insight Generation: Consumer Insights’ function is to provide insight, not merely information and data. Senior Analysts develop compelling insights by collecting and exploring data sources that go beyond the obvious. Leveraging their understanding of the marketplace and TMNA’s strategies they develop recommendations to help stakeholders make market-based, consumer-driven decisions.
• Data Synthesis / Analysis: They use their knowledge of research processes, the marketplace, and diverse data sources to help their team deliver a cohesive story. They should be able to leverage their experience and intuition to provide effective answers to quick-turnaround questions, without necessarily relying on initiating a new research project.
• Communication / Influencing: To translate the insights into data driven stories that inform strategy, our Team Members must be able to effectively communicate to stakeholders at all levels of the organization. They must be comfortable presenting to working level teams as well as senior executives in a way that meets the needs and styles of different audiences.
• Consult client groups to provide advice on all aspects of the research process, translating business objectives into research questions
• Working with our business partners, they will manage a variety of quantitative and qualitative research projects
• Select, design and implement a variety of research methodologies to address relevant research questions
• Work with TMNA agency partners and their strategy & insights teams
• Analyze data to generate relevant and actionable consumer insights
• Effectively communicate insights to a variety of audiences, from working-level teams to senior executives
• Pro-actively monitor and recommend new and innovative research ideas/approaches to address changing research needs and priorities
• Manage assigned project financial and operational resources, including managing the purchasing and internal finance processes for assigned projects
• Working with their manager, the Senior Analyst is expected to have a strong understanding of how to translate and scope business questions from internal clients into research study design. This includes the ability to understand and clarify their client’s business context and questions. They must be able to work effectively with internal stakeholders as well as business partners to design research that will inform and influence business decisions.

Benefits

• A work environment built on teamwork, flexibility, and respect
• Professional growth and development programs to help advance your career, as well as tuition reimbursement
• Team Member Vehicle Purchase Discount
• Toyota Team Member Lease Vehicle Program (if applicable)
• Comprehensive health care and wellness plans for your entire family
• Toyota 401(k) Savings Plan featuring a company match, as well as an annual retirement contribution from Toyota regardless of whether you contribute (if applicable)
• Paid holidays and paid time off
• Referral services related to prenatal services, adoption, childcare, schools and more
• Tax Advantaged Accounts (Health Savings Account, Health Care FSA, Dependent Care FSA)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior