Best insight practices in Australia

Market Logic Team

For the last couple of years, our clients, including AMEX, Unilever, Abbott, Colgate-Palmolive and Coca-Cola have hosted roundtables to bring together like minds and Market Logic platform owners to share best practices to run an insights-driven business. In Australia, our breakfast networking seminar hosts, Lion Nathan and Telstra, flipped the script by exchanging best practices at the start of their insights capabilities journey.

It’s obviously an idea that appeals to many – the events brought together insights executives from a who’s who of Australia and New Zealand brands, including AMP, ANZ, Cochlear, Goodman Fielder, Nine Network, QBE, Treasury Wine Estates, Woolworths and Westpac plus representatives from global clients and brands including Dyson, Pernod Ricard, Asahi, Caltex, Suntory and LVMH.

Fittingly, the keynote case study at both events was presented by one of the world’s leading dairy corporations, Fonterra, in the countdown to their platform launch. Tim Opie, GM Global Insights & Strategic Planning, shared his learnings from a journey that’s wholly focused on the importance of insights for the business – not the deployment of a technology platform. Fonterra is a multinational dairy co-operative owned by over 10,000 New Zealand farmers.

The company is responsible for approximately 30% of the world’s dairy exports and, with revenue exceeding NZ$17.2 billion, is New Zealand’s largest company. Tim shared exciting learnings as Fonterra heads to launch their new insights platform, the Insights Farm.

The need for an insights platform was spurred by a commercial conversation about the value of insights to transform the mindset from demand fulfilment to demand generation. The insights organization across Fonterra had consistently voiced their need for better access to insights, and better answers, to champion the consumer and customer voice, to collaborate via a common language and connected thinking, and to be able to promote, share and curate insights. The business case Tim and his team presented to management centred around four R’s:

Re-use – Double insights asset value +$15 million
Remove – Remove human time to answer key business questions (from 10 hours to 10 minutes): +$11 million
Reduce – Reduce research duplication and lower spend via agency roster: +$1 million
Re-allocate – Double the time spent proactively leveraging the insights, rather than searching for them (from 35% to 70% of time spent)

By connecting all of Fonterra’s insight content and leveraging cognitive computing to think like an insights professional and marketer, the insights platform builds knowledge, synthesizes insights and gives answers tailored to the marketing or sales user in question.