Consumer Insights Associate

Qualifications

• Fresh graduate or 0 to 2 years of experience. Moldable and hungry over heavily credentialed.
• Strong academic record: honors, a strong thesis or research project, or an equivalent track record. We look closely at this.
• Some research exposure (required). A thesis, a school research project, a survey you designed, interviews you ran, or customer feedback you organized at work. Academic research counts.
• Strong data literacy and spreadsheet fluency (required). Can turn a messy export into a clean, structured sheet someone else can pick up and use.
• Can present (required). Turns what they found into a short, clear deck with a recommendation, for people who did not do the analysis.
• Curious about people (required). Genuinely interested in why people buy what they buy, switch, or stop. Follows the interesting thing in an answer instead of moving to the next question.
• AI-fluent (required). Uses AI tools fluently for research, tagging and drafting, and keeps their own judgment on top of it. This is a real differentiator we screen for.
• Follow-through (required). Finishes what they start and keeps records current without being chased.
• Rigorous with numbers. Notices when something does not add up, and says so before drawing a conclusion from it.
• Comfortable talking to strangers. Will run consumer interviews by phone, video and occasionally in person.
• Based in Metro Cebu (required). Hybrid, Wednesday to Friday on-site in Mandaue City.
• Open degree, no degree bias. Psychology, sociology, statistics, economics, marketing, communications, business and engineering are all welcome.
• Conversational in Tagalog and English (a plus). Bisaya is a bonus for on-site sessions.

Duties and Responsibilities

The Consumer Insights Associate builds what the company knows about consumers: our customers, and also the people who buy similar products from other brands or have not bought yet. They gather it, organize it, and present it so other teams act on it. The centre of gravity is organized consumer data and clear presentation. The output is a finding delivered to a named team

The order matters: market first, then the alternatives, then our product. Who these consumers are and what they want, fear and wish existed. What else they use to solve the same problem, in and out of our category, and why they stay or leave. Then how our products actually get used.

Consumer research (core)

• Run consumer interviews with our customers, competitors' customers and people who have not bought yet. Mostly remote and nationwide, with occasional on-site sessions in Cebu. Log every session.
• Build interview guides with the founder, and co-design questions with Marketing so sessions also produce language and quotes Marketing can use.
• Run surveys where interviews are the wrong instrument, such as post-purchase and non-buyer surveys.
• Study the category beyond our own store: competitor listings and reviews, marketplace Q&A, social comments and communities.

Reviews and feedback (core)

• Collect, tag and organize customer reviews across Shopify, Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop every week.
• Maintain the tagging scheme so review data stays queryable over time.

Organization and presentation (core, and the main accountability of this role)

• Own the insights repository: every interview, review theme and finding organized so anyone in the company can find it.
• Publish a regular consumer brief: what we learned, what it means, and which team should do what. Insight, not reports.
• Work with Customer Success, Operations and Marketing to capture consumer information inside their existing workflows, such as confirmation calls, Messenger conversations and refund reasons.

Explicitly not this role

Product sourcing, marketplace operations, product safety, data engineering and people management are all out of scope.

Probationary KPIs

Three KPIs for the probationary period. Input KPIs first. An outcome KPI is intentionally not named until there is a baseline.

KPI 1. Insight System: Organization and Presentation (Initiative) [MAIN]

• Day 30: insights repository live with the tagging scheme, and the first consumer brief presented.
• Day 60: consumer brief published every month, on time, with each finding naming the team it is for. At least one brief covers non-customers, such as competitor reviews, category research or non-buyer interviews.
• Day 90: a capture standard agreed and running with at least one customer-facing team (Customer Success or Operations).

This is the main KPI because organizing and presenting what we learn is what this role is accountable for.

KPI 2. Consumer Interview Cadence (Quota)

• Days 1 to 14, onboarding: no volume target. Shadow, help build the first guide, and run the first sessions supervised.
• Day 15 onward: minimum 5 consumer interviews per week, a mix of customers and non-customers, remote and on-site.
• Every interview logged in the repository within 2 business days.

KPI 3. Review Ownership (Quota)

• 100% of new reviews across Shopify, Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop tagged weekly. No backlog carried into the following week.
• Shopify review volume baseline established in month 1. The growth target is set in month 2 against that real number.

General Operating Standards (the floor, not a KPI)

• Acknowledge messages within 4 working hours. Deliver or give an ETA within 1 business day. Same-day acknowledgment on urgent items.
• Daily end-of-day report to the Head of Strategy: what was done, what is blocked, what is flagged.
• Proactively surface findings, risks and gaps without being asked.