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September 28, 2017

Read time: 3min

Insights for connected living in Singapore

Market Logic Team

Earlier this month we joined forces with our good friends at Ipsos Singapore for a seminar on Insights for Connected Living. The idea was to spotlight this important local topic as a springboard to show: how marketers are using cognitive insights platforms to pull together all their research and data; and professional curation services to transform knowledge from these platforms into engaging insights. The result was a lively discussion with senior insights and innovation executives from 20 or so brands including DBS, John Deere, Nestle, Abbott, Align Tech, Singapore Airlines and more.

Singapore’s Smart Nation program

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Singapore is a fabulous high-tech city, with smart people, smart buildings, smart businesses and an expansive Smart Nation program – the most extensive effort to collect and connect data on daily living ever attempted in a city. The Wall Street Journal recently described Smart Nation as “an unprecedented look into how the country is functioning in real time, allowing (the government) to predict, for example, how infectious diseases might spread or crowds could react to an explosion in a shopping mall.” At the same time, Singaporeans will reap the benefits of connected living, by seamlessly leveraging phone, finance, physical and household data to proactively manage their daily lives. But what does all this mean for marketers and innovators? Joseph Chua, Managing Director at Ipsos Singapore kicked off the discussion with the observation that “organizations are grappling with an unimaginable volume of information – a data dragon, in effect – but the irony is that more information has not delivered more insights, maybe even less.” Joseph argued that cognitive platforms and curation services could empower marketers to stop reacting to data, and start using it to proactively inspire the front end of innovation.

Marketing insights platforms and professional curation services

Guest speaker Damien Cummings then shared key learnings from the digital transformations he led at Phillips, Samsung and Standard Chartered Bank. Memorable takeaways included the importance of branding your digital platform and shooting for fast, short sprints instead of perfection. Next up, Andrea Villani, our new Vice President APAC explained exactly how a marketing insights platform works. His live software demo included cognitive search technologies to synthesize all the answers to questions like “what do we know about millennials in Singapore?” from primary and secondary research results, and social listening feeds. Finally, Radhecka Roy from Ipsos showed how professional curation services can bring cognitive evidence to life, in compelling stories about millennials, their aspirations, their goals and how they engage with the world around them for resources, media, content, and brands. Radhecka made the point that “with curation, we see how the different pieces of the complex mosaic of consumers lives come together as human insights, in a simple intuitive way”. The discussion then focused on key issues for effective insights management and curation, including the need for tight data security, and key success factors for implementation. All in all, a great way to meet key players in the Singaporean insights community and frame thinking on major plays to leverage big data for insight impact.