Dig Perspectives: Samantha Muscia on Building Confidence As a Researcher And Mother

Over the course of getting to work on so many different things and getting to work on different types of methodologies and verticals, I realized that market research at its core has a lot of similarities, whether it's a concept test or a package test or an ad test. They're all rooted in a very similar thing.

And so once I sort of realized that it was really kind of easy to have confidence. I once got roped into doing an online qual group. I am not a qual moderator. I am a quant researcher. So this is kind of like, "Okay, well, I could do this". And I remember the client asking me what were the pros and cons of qual online fall versus in-person qual. I've never moderated in-person qual. I've watched a lot of in-person qual. So I was able to say in my mind, "You know what, I can answer this question". I know what the pros and cons are, even though I had never moderated either of them. But I had enough experience in it that I could be like, I know what we're talking about. Once you realize that you can draw on all those experiences, it does help you just be more inherently confident and able to apply that.

And I also think you do have to have that inside yourself. I've had metrics that I've had a lot of experiences where there are people who research managers just said, "I've never done that", and there was almost a fear of doing something new. And I would always just be like, "I've never done that, but I guess I'm going to do it". I would just be like, "Yeah, I'll do it. Just give it to me and give it to me. My team will take care of it". And I became sort of known for the person that did that because I refused to say, "I can't do that."