Rachit Agarwal

Let’s start simple. Who are you, and what do you do with social data that others might not expect?

Hello. My name is Rachit, and I currently lead social intelligence for Nestlé India. And that means that I turn social data into smells, flavours and textures that my brand marketing teams can funnel into their NPD cycles.

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What’s something in our industry we pretend to understand, but don’t?

Why Meta APIs are the way they are ;)

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What’s a moment this year where social data helped your team do something bolder, faster, or better?

There were quite a few such instances. Without getting into specifics, most of them were about increasing resonance with an aspirational cohort. We were able to identify exact avenues & tactics to accomplish the same.

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What’s one belief about your audience that social data completely upended for your teams?

It's always such a learning experience whenever we do a social listening exercise around consumer preferences. The breadth and variety of preferences we encounter on social media, versus the opinions espoused during traditional research, really makes me love the confidence (and lack of conformity) accorded to consumers due to the anonymity afforded by social media!

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If you could build your dream social intelligence team from scratch, with no legacy and no limits, what roles would you include?

Definitely the usual suspects - your BOOLEAN query experts, data scientists, analysts, and visualisation experts. But then I’d also augment them with designers from the amazing team over at InformationIsBeautiful.net, a few qualitative research experts from Kantar/Ipsos, and some PowerPoint gurus from one of the Big 3 consulting firms. 

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When do you feel like you’re doing your best work?

When I’m trying to crack a new use case or technique. I love how the initial frustration slowly gives way to applications I would never even have envisaged for social intelligence. The way that this field continues to surprise me with its depth and malleability still amazes me, nearly 15 years into my career!

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What’s your browser history giving away about you this week?

1. The Ashes are the pinnacle of Test cricket, and Bazball is the pinnacle of a circus clown car (b) If you need to idolize one particular data analyst, it has to be Jarrod Kimber, and (c) Greece looks like a lovely place for a holiday.

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