How Haleon Got Legal, Regulatory, and Finance Talking Directly to Consumers

“Once they did their first consumer connect and talked to a real consumer, they all walked out amazed and inspired, and it’s really stuck with them.”

— Petra Jelic Masterton, Consumer and Business Insights OTC Global Category, Haleon

From the Discuss session at IIEX Amsterdam, Closing the Distance: How Haleon Wired Consumer Closeness Into the Way They Work, 2026.

Watch the full session here. 

Haleon is the world’s largest consumer healthcare company, and its mission is to deliver better everyday health with humanity. But when Petra Jelic Masterton and her insights colleagues looked at how the business actually worked, they found a gap between the mission and the reality: 98% of people in the business had never spoken to a consumer. Teams sat in office hubs in Switzerland and the UK while their consumers lived everywhere else. Two years into an always-on consumer centricity program built with Discuss, people in legal, regulatory, medical communications, and finance are talking directly to consumers around the world, in the consumers’ own languages, and demand for sessions now exceeds available slots. This case study explains how Haleon got there.

TL;DR

• 98% of Haleon’s business had never heard directly from a consumer. A monthly always-on program with Discuss now lets anyone in the company watch and hear real consumer conversations, recorded in-market and in the consumer’s mother tongue, giving teams across the business direct exposure to consumer voice for the first time.
• Cross-functional participation extends far beyond marketing: legal, regulatory, medical communications, and finance teams have completed consumer connects, and first-wave participants recruited their colleagues to join
• Behavior changed where it counts: regulatory and legal partners shifted from “we can’t do that” to finding compliant ways to get things done, because they understood the consumer behind the request
• Haleon applies a deliberate method mix, using AI-led interviews for speed, agility, and breadth while reserving human moderation for deep insights, uncharted territory, and emotion
• Platform engagement grew year over year across sessions run, observers, first-time moderators, saved moments, and AI summary queries.

About Haleon

Haleon is the world’s largest consumer healthcare company, formerly part of GSK, home to global brands including Panadol, Advil, and Voltaren. Its products support everyday health for consumers in markets around the world, from childhood through later life. The company’s mission, delivering better everyday health with humanity, makes consumer understanding a strategic requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

Petra Jelic Masterton is a leader in the Consumer & Business InsightsOTC Global Category at Haleon, working across the company’s pain relief portfolio including Panadol, Advil, and Voltaren. A scientist by training, she entered market research conducting telephone interviews at the end of her PhD and never looked back. Her focus at Haleon includes closing the distance between the company’s global teams and the consumers they serve.

What was keeping Haleon’s teams away from their consumers?

There were three structural barriers, none of them unique to Haleon, and all of them familiar to global insights teams.

The first was geography. Haleon’s teams work from major office hubs that don’t overlap with where their consumers live. “I work in Switzerland. None of our consumers are in Switzerland, or very few,” Petra said. The company serves consumers across life stages and markets, but the people building products for them sat in what Petra called an ivory tower.

The second was budget. Petra is candid that visiting consumers at home remains the gold standard for building empathy, and equally candid that it isn’t scalable. “Travel budgets are very small, so we can’t do that,” she said.

The third was the limits of the traditional project model. Research projects came and went on long healthcare timelines, and consumer exposure was incidental. “People dip in and out. Maybe they come and watch a few interviews. Mostly they don’t. And even if they do, they tend to be marketing,” Petra said. Project-based research would remain essential, but it wasn’t bringing the consumer into the room for the rest of the business. 

Underneath all three sat the conviction that drove the program. “We need to really build empathy with our consumers,” Petra said. “We want to make sure that we can think how they think, feel how they feel, and only then can we produce products and services that better meet their needs.”

How did Haleon structure an always-on consumer closeness program?

Haleon’s answer was to stop treating consumer contact as a byproduct of research projects and start treating it as a program in its own right. Working with Discuss, and initially through agency partner Human8, the insights team built a consumer centricity program that is now in its second year.

The mechanics are deliberately simple. The program runs monthly sessions: some are inspirational talks, but most are consumer connects, live conversations where anyone in the business can speak directly with consumers anywhere in the world. Discuss recruits the consumers at times that suit them. Haleon provides a discussion guide and training that covers research ethics and MRS compliance, so participants from any function can moderate with confidence.

Language was built in from the start. Haleon’s teams speak roughly 26 mother tongues among themselves, and participants can run their connects in English or in their own language, speaking with consumers in the consumers’ mother tongue.

Getting the program adopted took as much strategy as building it. The mandate for consumer centricity came from Haleon’s CEO, and the insights team made sure nobody forgot it. “We just kept quoting it,” Petra said. “We put that on everything we did. It was kind of hard to argue with.” Early sign-ups were slow, then the first wave did the selling. “The people who did the first round from the business, they loved it so much they actually advocated and brought the others on. Influencer marketing at its best.”

What happens when legal and finance teams talk to consumers?

The program’s objective was never data collection. It was exposure. And the effect on functions that had never had consumer contact surprised even the insights team.

The initial reaction from departments like legal, regulatory, and medical communications was skepticism: what’s that got to do with me? Then they did their first consumer connect. “Once they did their first consumer connect and talked to a real consumer, they all walked out amazed and inspired, and it’s really stuck with them,” Petra said.  

The business impact shows up in how those functions now work. “A regulatory person or a legal person, whose job is normally to be a policeman, has shifted from ‘Right, we can’t do that’ to ‘Let me think of a way to get this done slightly differently.’ And it’s because they’ve talked to a few consumers over the year.”  When the people who manage risk understand the consumer behind a request, they stop being barriers and start being problem-solvers.

Demand now outstrips supply. Participants send enthusiastic feedback and ask to come back, and the program doesn’t have enough slots to accommodate everyone who wants in.

Consumer voices also travel upward. When Haleon teams present to the board, they bring consumers into the room through video clips saved from sessions on the platform. “The easiest way is to tell a story based on a personal experience or to bring a video. We do that a lot,” Petra said.

How does Haleon decide when to use AI-moderated interviews and when to use human moderation?

Haleon’s approach to AI in research is a working example of the principle Discuss is built on: AI and human expertise are complementary methods, not competing ones.

Haleon uses AI-led interviews on Discuss, and uses them deliberately. “There’s a time and a place for AI-moderated interviews,” Petra said. “We are using AI quite a lot for speed, for agility, for breadth.”  

For other questions, the method changes. “For uncovering real deep insights, uncharted territories, big ‘ah-has’, and emotion, we at Haleon still believe that human moderation is the best,” Petra said.  

AI also extends what human-led sessions produce. Observers across Haleon save key moments from recordings and query the AI summaries to understand what came out of conversations they couldn’t attend, pulling insights back to their own teams without waiting for a formal report.

Veronica Jelic Masterton, Senior Customer Success Manager at Discuss, sees the pattern across Haleon’s usage: what stands out is not just adoption but discernment. “All the Haleon teams have always been very smart about what they use and for what,” she said. 

What results has the Haleon and Discuss partnership produced?

Discuss and Haleon have partnered for more than seven years, and the consumer centricity program has changed the shape of that engagement. Platform activity has grown year over year across every measure of engagement: sessions run with consumers, people observing sessions, first-time moderators, moments saved from recordings, and questions asked of AI summaries. “There’s a genuine momentum to do more,” Petra said, noting that the current year’s numbers are tracking higher still.  

The harder-to-measure result is the one Petra keeps returning to: a business where consumer empathy is no longer confined to the insights and marketing functions, and where the program has a waiting list instead of a recruitment problem.

Where is the partnership heading next?

Haleon’s program generates a growing body of qualitative consumer knowledge, and the next challenge is making all of it work harder. Discuss built Discuss Intelligence, the intelligence layer around your customer insights: a living, breathing memory that teams can access and interrogate to understand what previously collected insights already say, where the gaps are, and where the next project should focus, so each project starts smarter than the one before.  

Petra is clear about where Haleon stands. “We’re not there yet as Haleon, but definitely Discuss is enabling us to do it, at least with the qualitative data, currently.”   The foundation, years of consumer conversations captured in one platform, is already in place.

Why does Discuss work for global consumer closeness programs?

Discuss is an always-on market insights solution that combines live human interviews, AI-moderated research, asynchronous video studies, Virtual Personas, and quantitative surveys in one platform. It operates across 150+ countries and supports 50+ languages, which is what makes a program like Haleon’s possible: consumers recruited in any market, sessions run in any language, and every conversation captured in one place.

Discuss is a Forrester™ Wave Leader for Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026. Forrester gave Discuss the highest possible score in live interviews, AI-powered research methods, participant quality, participant recruitment, data analysis, multiple languages, and platform usability, among other criteria.

For a consumer closeness program, participant quality and recruitment matter more than almost anything else. When the person running a session is a first-time moderator from legal or finance, the consumer on the other side has to be exactly who they say they are, and articulate enough to paint a picture of their life. That vetting is what Discuss recruitment is built to deliver.

Haleon isn’t alone in this approach. See how Mondelēz built always-on consumer intelligence across 29 markets, how Danone built a global consumer closeness program, and how agencies like buzzback and Walnut Unlimited deliver customer voices quickly, or browse all Discuss customer stories.

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