The Challenges & Triumphs of Change with Rosa Halford

 Each month, in “The Challenges & Triumphs of Change” I speak with a client-side Insights professional on the realities of using Insight to drive change in their business.

This month, I spoke to Rosa Halford, Group Insights Manager (Brand & Consumer) at Asahi Europe & International.

Hi Rosa. It’d be great to start by understanding about Asahi and your Insight team.

The Hub Strategy, Planning & Insight team at Asahi Europe & International sits within the Commercial Growth function. Within our team we cover trade & shopper insight, market & category insight, business intelligence & data science, and then my team, brand & consumer insight.

Since 2023, the Hub team and the local market insight teams have also been brought together into one community – so we can operate as one voice and start driving more consistent learnings and processes.

It’s a far cry from when I joined in 2018, when we were a small team, in a geographically siloed part of the business – we did a lot of things DIY and had a limited remit. Now we’re supporting eight domestic markets as well as a long tail of export markets, a range of brands (global and local) and building company-wide tools and frameworks. It’s exciting.

And does this position translate into a wide variety of work?

Yes. We work across creative development, early-stage innovation and general consumer understanding, supporting both global and local teams. Moving from silos to a single Insight community has created real opportunities – more knowledge sharing, more cross-pollination of ideas and more career development for people on the team. 

Thinking about how your team drives change, how do you approach implementing Insights?

The first thing is having the right partners in the right places, quickly followed by understanding the appetite for change so you can adjust your approach accordingly. 

For example, we work closely with local Insight teams. We co-create together right from the design stage, so when we get to sharing the results, audiences are hopefully more likely to buy into the recommendations because they’re built with local expertise. Because if you propose bold change at the end of a project, you’ll need some allies who’ve been involved in the project from the start to support your case.

Are there any examples you can give of when you’ve excelled at implementing Insights?

When we launched a new brand tracker, we treated it like a product launch – and it needed a full communication plan, because it would impact over 400 stakeholders. That meant a microsite, branded newsletters, physical keyrings featuring key metric explainers, townhall take-overs… a tailored touchpoint strategy, always asking ourselves – in this moment, does this audience need to be educated or inspired? What’s the key, single-minded message?

We also did some work with Asahi Super Dry on their sponsorship of the Women’s Rugby World Cup. There was very little data or insight available in this area, despite obviously lots of knowledge regarding the men’s game.

Knowing this, we designed the study in a way that would let us create engaging deliverables that people would pay attention to and would truly bring this little-known audience to life. Of course, you need a study that will collect the best insight to meet your aims – but you also need the right insight to create impactful content with.

That meant sending professional videographers to watch games at home with fans and getting fans to capture footage at matches. We didn’t want to reach the edit and find we only had grainy Zoom calls!

What kind of changes did this approach enable you to drive?

Big sponsorships are a data-led world – people in that space can be less used to engaging with classic insight, especially qual. But sharing findings through polished video alongside authentic UGC helped us bring the consumer voice into the core of the campaign planning.

One of the key insights was that women’s rugby fans actually struggle to even watch matches – access is a real barrier. That had a direct commercial application: our trade team got over 1200 UK pubs to sign a pledge to show women’s games during the tournament. We also took over a pub in Shoreditch – rebranding it the ‘Open Arms’ – to screen matches from the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup.

(If you’re attending IIEX EU, Rosa will be presenting the study there!)

That’s a good example of when you’ve made Insight-based change possible. Are there things that make driving change challenging for you?

One challenge we don’t have is a lack of appetite for insight — Asahi’s SAB Miller heritage gives us a classic FMCG foundation, and the consumer voice is genuinely valued. That’s not something to take for granted.

Geographical scope is the bigger hurdle. We’re still a relatively young global business and we have strong legacy operations in several markets. As a result, making well-scaled multi-market changes that are relevant for all parties can be challenging.

Has there been any challenges that are specific to the changing nature of the beer category and the emergence of ‘No & Low’?

No & Low has been a constant theme of my tenure here! Our previous CMO had a big battle to convince people that ‘No & Low’ was going to be important. So, he had done lots of the legwork convincing people that change on this front was imminent.

What the Insight team added was a sharper understanding of the consumer need at an occasion level. One key reframe from our research was that even with a brand as distinctive as Peroni Nastro Azzurro, people don’t want to stand out in moderation moments — they want to fit in. So Peroni Nastro Azzurro 0% was totally redesigned to be as close as possible to the master brand in taste, look and feel, rather than something conspicuously ‘different’.

While this could have been a hard idea to sell-in to marketers (accustomed to prioritising distinctiveness and stand-out), because such a senior sponsor was championing the idea of taste superiority & simplicity of naming within non-alcoholic beer, we had a receptive audience.  This is a great example of why having a senior sponsor in the business is critical when you’re trying to make changes to how people internally view a topic.

Outside of a senior sponsor, what else do you think is important to do when trying to change how a business views a topic on the scale of ‘No & Low’?

Patience with your messaging – and I think this applies to change at any scale. There’s an irony that we routinely tell marketers their campaign hasn’t worn out and that they’re the only ones getting bored of it. But we rarely apply that thinking to our own Insight work. Do we repeat our recommendations enough? Do we put the same energy into the 10th presentation as the first?

Too often, we rely on a single debrief and putting a file on SharePoint to be the catalyst for change. And that’s especially risky when people move teams. If a brand manager who attended a key debrief is replaced by someone who wasn’t there, briefing their replacement on your key ‘change’ topics is essential due diligence. Again, think like a marketer – new cohort recruitment!

So, patience and repetition?

Absolutely. Change takes time. It’s sometimes more about chipping away over years rather than making a big splash. That’s not to say a launch event or a standout piece of work can’t create momentum – but they tend to work best as a starting point, not a conclusion. Getting comfortable and confident with repeating the same message, in different rooms and different contexts, is an underrated skill. Not delivering it once and hoping it magically triggers people to act or think differently to how they have done for years. 

You’ve given away some great tools and tips. Where have you learned these from?

The value of having senior sponsors is something I’ve learned by observing what’s possible with one and what isn’t, without one – and finally, what happens when a senior sponsor leaves midway through a project! 

Treating insight like a product to be marketed, and thinking like a marketer as a result, has been a recurring theme at a few key industry events (particularly by AURA) , and I’ve found a lot of inspiration in the work I’ve seen presented there by, for example Dr Matilda Andersson at Truth Consulting and Rupesh Patel at Samsung.

There’s also a bit of luck involved. The ability to ‘market’ your work, doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I’ve been fortunate to have some bosses and team members who are brilliant at it – outward-facing, great networkers. If you find someone like that, hold onto them and learn from them!

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.