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Recently, we were joined by Frank Santiago, Global Knowledge Manager at Colgate-Palmolive, and Jenny Michelman, Global Consumer Insights Manager at VISA, who compared their award-winning market insights platforms. The two consecutive winners of the BIG Innovation Award (read about Colgate’s 2021 win here, and Visa’s 2020 win here) shared how their market insights platforms deliver measurable impact in CPG and Finance.
At Colgate, the DIG (“Driving Insights Globally”) platform is a shining example of the innovative ways technology can be used to improve business outcomes by driving decisions with consumer insights. Frank Santiago shared how the DIG platform is democratizing a $300 million knowledge asset for the global organization. He highlighted new, expert-curated storytelling zones as instrumental in sharing information while also encouraging collaboration across insights, commercial, brand and R&D teams.
Frank is continually building Colgate’s knowledge asset on DIG while reducing duplicative research. To achieve this, the entire research process at Colgate is automated on the platform, which has been “streamlined it to make it not only consistent, but user friendly too.” These workflows are expanding to support agile projects with Toluna, Zappy and other DIY providers, to enable general business users to execute research.
At Visa, the Global Insights Exchange brings together all of the key elements for successful innovation, technology, a robust change management program and good governance to achieve business objectives. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars saved through research automation, Jenny explained that their new business reporting capability allows Visa’s teams to get ahead of unwieldy distribution chains. “People can go into the platform and subscribe to business reports, to get alerts whenever there are new updates. The reporting runs alongside ad hoc research and analytics, meaning the Global Insights Exchange delivers one place for everyone to find out what they need to know.”
Frank and Jenny reflected on the ways their market insights platforms supported ways of working through the pandemic. Frank said that despite the extreme difficulties of the circumstances, Covid-19 presented, his global knowledge team were able to pause and re-group, “taking the time to re-visit and re-use past research while facilitating remote work”. This also enabled insights experts to take more of a leadership role, he added: “We’re always asked to showcase something on DIG – it’s very much top of mind.”
As soon as COVID struck, said Jenny, the team at Visa was inundated with research. Luckily, the Global Insights Exchange was already set up to enable remote work and universal access to information. “I’m so thankful that the platform made everything available, at our fingertips.”
In January they went one step further, launching their next-generation platform at a CMO Townhall. For Jenny, this was “super exciting, creating additional buzz beyond insights and marketing to ensure insights reach across our global organization”.
