Senior Research & Insights Associate

Job description

Location:  Lusaka

About the Role:

This role sits within the marketing function and directly reports to Market Research & Insights Manager. The Senior Associate, Research & Insights will ensure the bringing of customer perspective to marketing and overall business by gathering and interpreting market and customer insights to informed strategies. The role will be pivotal in development and execution of market research strategy across the Southern Africa markets (Zambia, South Africa, Mozambique). The role involves deep team work with cross-functional teams (Marketing, Product, Sales, Customer Care and Operations).Zambia Job Market

What you would be expected to do:
Research planning, execution, and coordination:
Plan, design, execute, and manage quantitative and qualitative research projects from brief to presentation to know customer needs, perceptions, and usage behaviors.
Design research instruments, sampling, and devise data collection methodologies.
Work with agencies and internal teams to ensure high-quality data collection.
Voice of the Customer:
Gather and check customer feedback to ensure the customer voice is heard.
Conduct in-depth research to uncover customer needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviors to ensure that all products, services, and communications are customer-centered.
Market Intelligence:
Track landscape by gathering, checking, and interpreting intelligence to help strategies across our solar energy and PAYGO phones.
Check other companies’ products, pricing, distribution, and promotional strategies to identify opportunities and threats.
Data Synthesis
Correlate sales and survey data and prepare reports and presentations with clear and actionable insights.
Synthesize data from multiple sources and provide recommendations and implications for the business.
Check and synthesize data from multiple sources and provide actionable insights, recommendations, and implications for the business.
Prepare and present reports, dashboards, and briefs tailored to diverse internal audiences
Strategic Partnerships & Teamwork
Provide insights to help cross-functional work with creative, marketing, new product development, and sales teams.
Help pilots, experiments, and pre/post-launch evaluations.
ROI Tracking:
Work with marketing and finance teams to track ROI of marketing and strategic initiatives, ensuring insights go to tangible outcomes.
Contribute periodically to marketing ROI and performance reports.
Knowledge Management:
Create a centralised hub for storing and giving research data and reports.
Develop processes and onboarding plans for stakeholders accessing research outputs.
Summarise and update key findings to relevant stakeholders during voice of customer sessions
Market Research Uptake:
Ensure data and insights are integrated into workflows across teams
Drive internal adoption of research findings by ensuring insights are easily accessible and well-communicated.
Follow up with teams to ensure research learnings are integrated into ongoing projects.
You might be a strong candidate if you:
Bachelor’s degree in marketing, Economics, Statistics, Social Sciences, or related field.
4–6 years of experience in market research and consumer insights, or related roles.
Knowledgeable with key tools and data check software (SPSS, Excel, Python, Stata).
Strong data check skills with experience in data synthesis and reporting.
Experience in conducting research projects, including designing qualitative and quantitative studies and checking data, and with a strong interest in keeping up with market trends and research best practices.
Possess strong project management skills, with the ability to work on multiple projects at the same time, and manage multiple stakeholders.
Excellent communication and presentation skills.
Knowledgeable of business visualisation tools.
Have a strong knowledge of Southern African market research trends and a good grasp of the African sales and commerce landscape.
Financial software
What we offer (in addition to compensation and statutory benefits):
A platform for professional growth in a rapidly expanding, high-impact sector.
Immerse in a collaborative culture, energized by employees of Sun King who are collectively motivated by fostering a transformative, sustainable venture.
A genuinely global environment: Engage and learn alongside a diverse group from varied geographies and backgrounds.
Tailored learning pathways through the Sun King Center for Leadership to elevate your leadership and managerial capabilities.
About Sun King
Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection.

Sun King has built a new kind of energy utility: distributed, green, customer-centric, and affordable. We bring clean, reliable, decentralized energy directly into people’s lives — from solar kits that provide first-time energy access to multi-kilowatt systems that serve both off-grid users and grid-connected customers powering larger homes, schools, hospitals, farms, offices, and light manufacturing.

Already, 25 million homes and businesses rely on Sun King for electricity supply and the appliances and services it enables: lighting, televisions, fans, refrigeration, and smartphones.

Sun King combines energy generation, energy-efficient appliances, installation, and financing into one seamless offering. Think of it as a distributed utility, designed for wherever energy is needed and designed to scale with its users as incomes and energy needs grow.

Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.14 a day via mobile money or cash.

Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright.

Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 35,000 field agents — over 1 million payments each day. To date, Sun King has extended more than $1.4 billion in PAYG loans to customers.

Sun King began by powering homes and businesses with solar systems delivered through PAYG financing. Now, we’re using the same model to make smartphones and clean cooking equipment affordable: helping households connect to the digital economy and transition from wood-based fuels to modern, sustainable alternatives.

Sun King employs 3,500 full-time staff in 14 countries, with specialties spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 42% of Sun King’s workforce.