Meet Our Moderator: Bonnie Janzen

Bonnie is a self-professed math nerd and student of human behavior.

Combining a statistical background along with over 30 years of consumer insights experience, she works with her teams to create unique solutions to improve strategy for global brands. Most often they are improving strategies in areas of marketing, branding, communication, advertising, packaging, innovation, new product development, and customer experience. She also utilizes her understanding of each client and their industry to match the client with the right Client Service team. The hiring, training, and mentoring of researchers and executives is a key part of her role, as she manages a significant portion of the Client Service staff.

Bonnie’s informal style is the result of her upbringing. She’s from a small town where everyone knows and talks to each other, and that’s where she learned the old-fashioned art of conversation—a useful skill for a moderator. She enjoys meeting people, getting to know them, and learning what makes them tick. She especially likes methodologies that ask respondents to include video and images from their lives, homes, or shopping experiences; they provide a great starting point for a discussion.

She believes that a quantitative background and qualitative experience are opposite sides of the same coin. Her experience with analyzing quantitative data helps her find deeper meaning in the emotions respondents share in qualitative settings. She brings her understanding of those emotions into the questionnaires she develops for the quantitative phase of a project.

Bonnie has conducted in-person and webcam depth interviews, as well as in-store ethnography and in-home ethnography. She has also conducted various types and sizes of in-person focus groups, dyads and triads. These included interviewing young children who were seated on the floor. She also moderated some focus groups among married couples about purchasing and using outdoor grills—which devolved into sessions much like marriage counseling.

Bonnie focuses primarily research in North America, although she has also conducted interviews with English speakers in other parts of the world. She has also worked with local moderators and translators on qualitative research and ethnography in the Caribbean, the European Union, and Asia.

Bonnie’s moderating experience has been in consumer packaged goods and fast-moving consumer goods, retail, cosmetics/health & beauty, durable goods, health care, hospitality, and automotive.

Bonnie feels that innovation and new product development can be incredibly exciting. However, global expansion, product line extensions, and improved customer experience can improve return on investment significantly. She believes that’s the most exciting time to work with a client—when they come to you and say this is really difficult and we have tried to fix this problem for a while. If we can explore the customer journey and emotional engagement, then suggest the correct modifications to the business plan, we can help our clients transform their business. That is so exciting!

Bonnie and her better half have four children: a new public-relations associate in NYC, one in college studying economics, another in college studying business, and the youngest who is engineering-/physics-minded and finishing high school. They support their local symphony, go hiking, love their Maltese-Yorkie dog, and are avid travelers.

Qualitative Research Services

If you would like more information on Qualitative Research, please contact Bonnie Janzen by emailing bjanzen@decisionanalyst.com or calling 1-817-640-6166.

Meet Our Moderators