Manager, Marketing Research - Customer & Competitive Insights

AutoZone is hiring a Marketing Research Manager, Customer and Competitive Insights, to understand why customers choose us, why they choose someone else, and what we should do differently, across both B2C and B2B verticals. You’ll lead research with DIY consumers and professional repair shops: brand-health tracking, competitive intelligence, custom studies, customer-journey and loyalty research, and social listening. This is a senior individual-contributor role in Marketing Analytics & Insights, reporting to the Sr. Manager of Marketing Analytics & Insights. You’ll design studies, analyze the data, manage research partners, and present your conclusions to senior leaders.
You’ll have responsibility for established research programs and room to shape what we study next. Working within an analytics team means you can investigate both what customers say and what they buy. The work can inform how we respond to competitors, which services and loyalty benefits we emphasize, how we communicate value, and where we improve the shopping experience. Custom studies and competitive reviews will be prioritized with your manager around specific business decisions.

• Brand Health Tracking: Lead our ongoing DIY and Commercial tracking programs, from questionnaire and sample design through analysis and reporting. Track awareness, consideration, preference, satisfaction, and perceptions of value, quality, and service. Investigate changes by customer or shop segment, check whether they reflect meaningful shifts, and explain what they mean for AutoZone.
• Competitive Intelligence and Social Listening: Combine customer research, syndicated competitive advertising data, and social listening to assess competitors’ positioning, creative, messaging, promotions, and digital experiences. Review relevant sponsorships, partnerships, and local marketing as part of focused competitive studies. Investigate emerging competitors and changes in customer needs, shopping and search behavior, and sentiment. Identify which customer groups are affected and where AutoZone should respond or investigate further. Distinguish observed competitive activity from evidence of customer response.
• Research Design and Recommendations: Work with business partners to define the question and the decision it needs to inform. Design surveys, interviews, and mixed-method studies on customer journeys, shopping experiences, brand positioning, creative and messages, price and value perceptions, and services. Write questionnaires and discussion guides, choose the sample and method, oversee fieldwork, and carry the analysis through to a recommendation.
• Loyalty and Customer Communications Research: Compare loyalty programs, rewards structures, member benefits, and offers across key competitors and selected retailers. Study what customers understand and value, barriers to joining or redeeming rewards, and reasons for staying engaged or leaving. Review selected email, SMS, and push communications across onboarding, promotional, retention, and win-back journeys. Test benefits, offers, and messages with customers and recommend improvements to Loyalty and CRM teams.
• Advance Research Analytics: Work directly with respondent-level data, using statistical testing, regression, driver analysis, segmentation, and open-text analysis as appropriate. Work with our analytics team to compare research findings with customer, transaction, and syndicated market data. Use code and AI-assisted development tools to build repeatable processes for cleaning data, checking quality, analyzing responses, and producing charts.
• Insight Synthesis for Stakeholders: Synthesize syndicated competitive advertising data on media spend, channel activity, and creative with findings from brand-health tracking, advertising recall, social listening, and loyalty research. Assess how competitors’ creative, messaging, promotions, sponsorships, partnerships, and local marketing relate to customer perceptions, consideration, and preference. Present clear findings to leaders in Marketing, Digital Experience, Merchandising, Store Operations, and Commercial, with recommendations for Brand, Creative, Media, and Loyalty teams. Explain what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and where further research or testing is needed. Estimate the size of an opportunity where the data allows, and help teams decide what to test and how to evaluate the result.
• Vendor Management and Methodology Standards: Manage agency briefs, methods, budgets, timelines, and deliverables. Review the underlying work and pursue questions that need more analysis. Improve our questionnaires and recurring reports, document methods so others can reproduce the work, and help analysts develop their research skills.
   

• Education: A master’s degree or PhD in a relevant field.
• Research Experience: Five or more years in market research, customer insights, or research consulting, with ownership of studies from design through final recommendations. Client-side or agency experience is relevant, with B2B and B2C experience preferred. Experience with brand tracking, customer-journey research, social listening, or syndicated market data is especially valuable
• Research and Quantitative Methods: Strong questionnaire design, sampling, weighting, and quantitative analysis skills, along with experience using qualitative research. You should be able to identify a weak sample, a leading question, or a conclusion that goes beyond the evidence.
• Communicate for Impact: You can turn a substantial body of research into a focused report, make useful charts, and explain your conclusions to people who do not share your technical background. You can challenge an assumption constructively and recommend a course of action when the evidence is incomplete.