CASE4Quality

Mary Beth Weber, founder of CASE - a coalition to elevate data quality - has been in the research industry for more than 3 decades, investing 20+ years assisting brands such as Kraft, Mondelez, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, and Hershey to ensure supplier compliance to research standards.

During her first decade in the industry, Mary Beth worked on the supplier-side of data intelligence and noticed that potentially data-corrupting issues were rarely being disclosed to the consumer. She also recognized that users of research and intelligence seldom asked questions about the accuracy or quality of the underlying information. For example, Mary Beth worked for a company providing forecasts to support major investment decisions in commercial mortgage-back securities and REITS and, in her 4-1/2 years at that firm, only once did anyone ask about the underlying data. Users of all types of information tend to trust the veracity and integrity of findings and rarely conduct sufficient due diligence. 

The key to ensuring quality is for client-side researchers and consumers of data intelligence to ask questions and require transparency and accountability. In addition, we, as an industry, need to develop objective and auditable measures of data quality to help buyers differentiate between vendor offerings and understand the trade-offs being made between price, timing and quality.

Based on a request by Allen Whitehouse while he was at Kraft Heinz and frustrated with his ability to receive valid and reliable findings (Allen is now head of insights at Tyson Foods), Mary Beth created the "Coalition for Advancing Sampling Excellence" (CASE).  As the coalition grew, Mary Beth left the research industry to be independent and unbiased as she advocates for transparency and accountability across the research supply chain.  During her years in working with client-side researchers at Fortune 1000 companies, she understood their desire to optimize the use of their already-owned and licensed marketing data; and eliminate the wasteful cost of redundancy. When she learned about Lucy.ai, Mary Beth asked if she could introduce the knowledge management tool to her network while continuing to focus and advocate for research excellence. CASE helps ensure a quality foundation for the insights and answers found by Lucy.