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March 26, 2021

Read time: 5min

Decision quality and reach

Market Logic Team

What happens when business managers work with insights remotely? How do you ensure your stakeholders use insights to make decisions that keep the customer’s voice top of mind?

In most companies, the ratio of insights experts to business managers is scarce. Across Market Logic clients, we see expert-to-stakeholder ratios ranging from 1:10 in a house of brands to 1:100 (or more) in a branded house. Differences in time zones between experts and teams, along with the distance created by the work-from-home revolution, further complicates the space between business managers and their insights intelligence.

Top executives from REWE, Coca-Cola, and Kellogg’s joined our Insights Roundtable recently to share the strategies and tactics they use to support quality decision-making and overcome common insights and decision-making obstacles.

REWE’s “Knowledge Hub” newsletter delivers curated insights

While efforts to bring knowledge together across REWE date back to the 2008 financial crisis, their insights team now uses its next-generation Market Logic platform “Knowledge Hub” (“the Hub”) to deliver personalized information to the business by digitizing existing corporate behavior.

The team uses the Hub to deliver a longstanding insights product historically distributed on Fridays, called “The Notes.” This used to be an old-fashioned email with a PDF document, said Marc Röhder, Leader of Customer Analytics Business Insights at REWE. Now it’s an expert-curated newsletter distributed from the platform.

“The digital newsletter is saving 10 hours per week for every insights expert, which is nice for us, but it’s also saving time for our stakeholders by delivering all the relevant information they need in an easy way. It keeps us close to our users and makes insights an important part of their daily work,” Marc said.

Despite the complexities of sharing knowledge across competitive business divisions, Marc and his team have shown impressive progress with the Hub—there’s been a 200% increase in business users over the last two years.

And it gets better. Recently, an Instagram post led Marc and his team to highlight an analysis of disruptive delivery service—it was a hit with stakeholders, and it also caught the attention of the CEO.

Coca-Cola’s “Insights Connect” brings self-service access to “the one-and-only number”

Well… which number is it?

It’s a familiar story Martin Egger from Coca-Cola knows all too well. Martin is the Senior Director of Global Platform Services in Marketing Analytics, leading the “Insights Connect” platform at the company.

“We’ve all been in meetings where there’s a lot of talk about which number is correct because people have different numbers in their decks,” Martin said. “To avoid that, it’s critical to make sure everybody’s aware of what the correct number is, the one source of truth.”

Coca-Cola’s Insights Connect platform provides that solution. The platform delivers end-to-end data management analytics, next-generation analytics, and knowledge organization and sharing, all in one place.

“It’s our one-stop-shop for insights and knowledge, while also providing access to one source of truth,” Martin said. “We provide unlimited enterprise access to encourage the possibility to share, with security controls to make sure sensitive data doesn’t get into the wrong hands.”

The result? Martin said the old ways of waiting in line for support from a central team processing a queue of requests is over.

“If you have a large audience that requires access to information, the sheer volume of incoming requests is overwhelming. Self-service is essential, and it’s all about speed and reach,” he explained.

“Ask Kiri” simplifies desk research for Kellogg’s insights pros

Kellogg’s recently transitioned to a matrix organization, bringing more integration between business units and category teams and less silos in how the business operates. As the Director of Next Generation Insights, Terah Putman said insights are foundational growth drivers for the company, and the restructure led to a fresh hunger for insights.

“There’s a hunger for insights across the breadth of partners that has really expanded the number of people coming to the insights and analytics team with questions,” explained Terah. “So our challenge is, how do we reach the business with insights when 36 experts are serving 47 brands, and each expert is serving 9 or 10 stakeholders?”

The answer? “Ask Kiri.”

“Ask Kiri” is the next-generation Market-Logic powered insights platform Terah and her team transformed to democratize data at Kellogg’s. The platform used to be a digital research library primarily accessed by the insights team.

Now it’s a democratized data hub.

“Rather than coming to an insights person and asking them for a truckload of data; if someone in sales, or customer strategy, or on a retailer team has a specific question—Ask Kiri. Let the search engine, the AI, the filtering and tagging, the curation with knowledge zones, help them answer those questions for themselves, empowering them to connect to all the rich insights that are available within the tool,” Terah explained.

Ask Kiri has seen a huge jump in average monthly users. This is in part because of a mechanism Terah and her team use to eliminate one of the key behavioral barriers Terah sees in her role—the busy work that comes along with asking people to put content on the platform.