For many years, retailers and consumer packaged goods companies have lamented the fact that they possess a wealth of data but are not always able to harness it in ways that deliver maximum benefit. As president of NielsenIQ’s North American business, Liz Buchanan aims to use the company’s formidable array of data collection and analysis capabilities to help alleviate that problem.
“Data is becoming more democratized, which is a great thing,” she says. “But that proliferation, together with competing systems and frameworks, can lead to a lot of confusion. We need to simplify access and create the types of activation that are going to be efficient. This is where NielsenIQ can play such a big role — creating the signals that are going to be the most meaningful for each use case.”
| Click for the list of People Who Made a Difference |
“Whether you’re a brand marketer at a CPG company, a retail merchant, someone in shopper marketing or a CFO, you want to be confident that the intelligence you rely on is comprehensive, tailored to your needs, and that you can trust it. Improving the way intelligence is served to each persona in a world of AI is the direction we’re going to move, in addition to just making things simpler.”
For her work in driving efforts to take the consumer intelligence generated by NielsenIQ to the next level, Buchanan has been selected as one of MMR’s People Who Made a Difference for 2025.
Buchanan is well suited for her current role. Having discovered her interest in data and storytelling during an internship at General Mills while attending Indiana University, she joined Nielsen and rose through the ranks to become president of NIQ’s operations in North America two years ago.
A pivotal moment in her career came in October 2022, when Buchanan was named global head of customer success and platform transformation. In that role, she was responsible for unifying the technology platforms of the entire enterprise, which does business in more than 90 countries around the world, collecting data on 177 million items from 21 million retail locations.
“Over the years, Nielsen had grown both organically and through a lot of acquisition,” notes Buchanan. “When you do that and don’t invest in a single unified initiative to consolidate technology and move everything to a common architecture, it results in a lot of inefficiency. Fixing that situation takes a lot of capital and the whole organization pivoting its focus. NIQ’s leadership had the vision and discipline to take that on and to do it all at once.”
Buchanan’s skill in guiding the massive project to a successful conclusion led to her appointment as head of the North American business unit, NIQ’s largest. In the new role, Buchanan is taking full advantage of the unified technology platform as her team pursues an ambitious agenda.
“We are really focused on making sure that we can help effectively lead the industry through what we think about as four concurrent transformations — AI and technology, the ongoing cultural evolution, and the regulatory and the economic environments,” she notes. “How are we developing products to help our customers cope with these different forces of change? How are we leading the conversation and framework around these four areas, and understanding and diagnosing them? How are we keeping an eye on other emerging forces that will impact the industry?”
Historically, Nielsen and its competitors have focused on providing point-of-sale data to customers. That’s not enough in today’s world, according to Buchanan. Retail and CPG companies expect help in turning data into AI-enabled intelligence.
“The evolution of our customers and their responses to marketplace dynamics directly informs the types of products that we create,” Buchanan explains. “In addition, we are maniacally focused on a world where we curate unique content, because I believe that unique content and currencies are — just as they have been historically in the media world — a very important part of our future as an industry participant.
“What that looks like to me is making sure that we are not just focused on point-of-sale data but that we’re expanding beyond that to also include other types of content to drive signals, to train industry models and, most importantly, to provide value back across the ecosystem of brands, retailers and ultimately the consumer. So, you’ll see us taking a different position than some of the other players around the types of data that we believe are going to be critical going into this next chapter of our industry and placing outsized investments in acquiring or curating them.”
With innovative offerings in areas ranging from tools to speed the development of CPG products to item-level analysis of the sales performance of individual chains to the impact of retail media, Buchanan expresses confidence that NielsenIQ is poised to increase its already considerable impact on the industry.
