The best conversations at a research conference don’t happen on stage. They happen in the hallways, right after a session, when someone’s still thinking out loud. Waves of Thinking is our attempt to capture that—short, unfiltered interviews with the researchers and strategists shaping the future of consumer insights, recorded live from the floor at Quirk’s New York 2026. Here’s everything from our time there.
Kicking off Waves of Thinking — Molly Strawn-Carreño, aytm
aytm’s Molly Strawn-Carreño introduces Waves of Thinking live from the floor at Quirk’s New York 2026, opening the series despite flash flood warnings and storm delays across the city. This short-form series captures unfiltered conversations with the researchers, strategists, and insights leaders shaping the future of consumer intelligence. No slides, no polish—just sharp perspectives from the people doing the work.
Kicking off Waves of Thinking — Elana Marmorstein, aytm
aytm’s Elana Marmorstein opens two days of Waves of Thinking conversations at Quirk’s New York 2026, previewing a shift she sees playing out across the industry: less focus on what AI can do, more on how researchers actually apply it—scaling qualitative research, generating synthetic data, and keeping humans at the center of every decision.
Pam Everett — Grupo Bimbo
Pam Everett, who leads consumer insights and strategy for Grupo Bimbo’s health and wellness division, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 for a return visit to Waves of Thinking. She walks through a shift playing out in households nationwide: Gen Z consumers are teaching their Gen X and Boomer parents what to look for on nutrition labels, driven by apps like Yuka and a generation raised on TikTok’s food and wellness content. The result is a family grocery list shaped less by the person holding the wallet and more by the kids scrutinizing the ingredients.
Barbara Pacheco — Bayer Consumer Health
Barbara Pacheco, Director of Strategy and Insights at Bayer Consumer Health, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about reimagining the in-home use test. Working with Veylinx, she redesigned a traditional IHUT around an auction-based pricing method—participants spent their own money to buy the product before testing it, generating a full demand curve and revealing that nearly 80% of testers were willing to pay more after using it. The result: research grounded in real purchase behavior instead of claimed intent.
Genevieve Colman — Veterans United Home Loans
Genevieve Colman, Senior Director, Consumer Research at Veterans United Home Loans, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about translating Broadway storytelling into insights work. She breaks down how finding the true throughline in a set of findings, the same way Fiddler on the Roof isn’t really about a milkman but about tradition, changes how researchers deliver a story to stakeholders. She also shares how designing for the audience in the room shapes a more intentional research experience.
Jonathan Goodbread — aytm
Jonathan Goodbread, Head of Data Quality Strategy at aytm, joined Waves of Thinking at Quirk’s New York 2026 to walk through his four-part framework for data quality: prevent, protect, purify, prove. He also made the case for industry-wide transparency, sharing that aytm will publish a quarterly report benchmarking its data quality against the Insights Association’s GDQ standard, starting with data from the beginning of 2026.
Matt Annecharico — Unilever
Matt Annecharico, who works in Consumer and Market Research at Unilever, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about de-risking product reformulation under a tight three-week turnaround. He breaks down the fundamentals: the right consumer sample, a study design sensitive enough to catch any change, and a research partner who can recruit people actually using the exact product variant in question. He also makes a case for a single research platform with live data, which let him manage stakeholders and spot trends before a study even wrapped.
Lumeng Jin — Mars Snacking
Lumeng Jin, Senior Manager of Human Intelligence at Mars Snacking, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about using AI responsibly in early-stage innovation research. She shares which tasks LLMs handle well, and why human judgment still matters most when nuance and emotion are on the line. Her take: know your tools, test them constantly, and don’t reach for an LLM when the moment calls for a real conversation instead.
Molly & Elana — Mid-event check-in
Halfway through Quirk’s New York 2026, aytm’s Molly Strawn-Carreño and Elana Marmorstein paused to recap what stood out so far. AI is everywhere in the sessions, but the bigger trend is using technology to scale qualitative research to quant-level speed. They also point to a growing push to democratize consumer insights across entire organizations, and a renewed focus on getting closer to the customer, including HubSpot’s “Growth Gabby” persona as a case study in staying customer-obsessed.
Liz Riley Raukohl — OLLY
Liz Riley Raukohl, Director of Insights at OLLY, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about how her role evolved as the brand matured from a small, fast-moving team into a company with more stakeholders and higher expectations. She also shares her honest take on AI: most “AI slop” comes down to weak prompting, and her fix was building guardrails directly into her workflow instead of re-explaining them every time.
Valeria Esparza — Zenni Optical
Valeria Esparza, UX and Consumer Insights Researcher at Zenni Optical, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about reframing brand loyalty as more than a feeling. She breaks down how her team measures long-term conversion and rethinks channel switching, with quality serving as the proof point that has to show up everywhere in the customer experience, not just in messaging.
Shourav Sen — Colgate-Palmolive
Shourav Sen, VP of Strategic Insights & Analytics at Colgate-Palmolive, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about what researchers should do with the time AI gives back. His answer: use it to build deeper business context and move up the value chain, not just to work faster. He also makes the case for measuring success by influence on business decisions, not by reports delivered.
Jasmine Silvernagel-Reid — Zenni Optical
Jasmine Silvernagel-Reid, Mixed-Methods UX and Consumer Insights Researcher at Zenni Optical, joined us at Quirk’s New York 2026 to talk about treating loyalty as a behavior, not a feeling. She breaks down how a two-hour ethnographic session with 24 parent-child pairs gave her team the signal they needed to reinvigorate Zenni’s kids category, before layering in unmoderated testing and surveys to round out the picture.
Until next time
Ten conversations. One conference. A lot to think about. aytm’s Waves of Thinking series wrapped up at Quirk’s New York 2026 with nearly 1,900 attendees on hand despite storm delays and flash flood warnings across the city—one of Quirk’s biggest shows to date. We’re leaving inspired—and already looking ahead to TMRE. Catch up on every episode and stay tuned for what’s next.
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