Insight & strategy Holland & Barrett relaunched its food range in September 2023, which includes Plant Points on the labelling, aimed at encouraging customers to eat more plants Prioritising partnerships Profile Georgina White is director of customer experience and insight at Holland & Barrett, chair of the MRS Senior Client Council and a member of the MRS Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Council. 2018-2022: Group insight director, BT 2017-2018: Director-marketing, customer and insights, Centrica 2014-2017: Head of insight, British Gas 2012-2014: Head of consumer insight, British Gas 2010-2012: Head of consumer insight, Capital One Another challenge for White is the teams relationship with agencies. Ive always passionately believed, and still do believe, that agencies are strategic partners. They should feel like an extension of the team. The reality is, in the past 18 months, weve not treated them like that. So, its something that hurts me personally, knowing that. There are good reasons as to what we needed to do, but ensuring we improve those relationships is really important. White is also focused on tackling the age-old challenge of ensuring sta have enough time to work on diering projects, whether its a short-term tactical piece of insight or more strategic work. One of the things I love about what we do, but is also a real challenge, is that on a given day, you can be going into meetings that are talking about trading right now, to the next quarter, to the next six months, to the next year, and going from current trading through to strategy of what we are delivering in market in 18 months time or what we need to be doing in three to ve years time. As an insight team, you need to be able to adjust to that. White continues: This is an insight team thats driving everything, from our strategy to supporting how we optimise campaigns or activity, and everything in between thats a lot for people to be juggling with. It brings brilliant opportunity, but you dont do your best thinking when youre going from right now to longer term and weve got to make sure we give people the time that they need on the correct things. White has hired a mixture of ex-agency sta and former client-side insights managers but has also placed a heavy focus on developing colleagues internally. For example, some of the team are former 30 Impact ISSUE 44 2023_pp28-31 I&S Holland and Barrett.indd 30 05/12/2023 12:08