Liberating a $175 million knowledge asset to boost guidance at Mondelēz

At IIeX 2020 in Amsterdam, Market Logic client partner Mondelēz shared their exciting journey to true consumer centricity. With 37 brands and operations in over 80 countries, the snack giant needs to find ways to stay ahead in a competitive landscape where many companies go after the same cake. Because the Strategy, Insights, Analytics (SIA) team serves hundreds of different business stakeholders, cutting through the noise to deliver the most personalized and relevant insights is key.

Access to insights – anytime, anywhere

In Amsterdam, we heard from Paola Vacchini, Director Consumer Insights & Analytics – Europe and Gaby Gaut – I&A Director – MEU Chocolate and iQuest MEU Project Lead, who described how Mondelēz’s end-to-end market insights platform, iQuest, puts insights right into the hands of business stakeholders – when they need them, where they need them. Using AI, iQuest democratizes all things insights and leverages the $175 million knowledge asset from all past research. On iQuest, over 500 users can access Mondelēz’s vast knowledge asset of primary research, including 6,000 projects, 25,000 documents, 285 past innovation concepts, 40,000 integrated RSS feeds, over 28,000 Euromonitor International reports and a 291-agency strong vendor roster.

A growing knowledge asset

Mondelēz’s knowledge asset is growing, daily, which is one of the reasons why Paola finds iQuest so valuable. Users can use the platform to find existing insights, like “what do we know about healthy millennials?” or “what is the market share of Cadbury in India?” The platform delivers all available knowledge on the topic, including documents, reports, and videos, in an easy-to-read auto-summarized report.

“I hope you can appreciate what valuable support this provides to our teams. While our stakeholders can understand very quickly what we already know, the I&A team can save a huge amount of time every day and focus on delivering business impact – the ultimate measure of success.” – Paola Vacchini

Once they scan the auto-summarized report, users can either deep dive into a specific insight of interest, or simply collate insights into a story. All the while, the machine (or the “beast,” according to Paola!) gets smarter – making connections and learning more deeply the needs of Mondelēz’s users.

“This is fantastic from a user perspective point of view” – Paola Vacchini

Users can also leverage the platform to discover new connections between insights, like Toblerone where the European Chocolate team discovered a hidden treasure trove of information on a brand that had never been directly researched.

Democratizing curiosity, globally

In a global organization like Mondelēz, with so many people working around the globe on loads of documents archived in different places, iQuest brings to life the knowledge and insights that stakeholders really need. When marketers ask questions and find out what the organization already knows, iQuest empowers the SIA team to quickly join the dots across different sources, build stories that address specific business questions using available knowledge, and actively engage teams in constructive conversations on business implications. That means teams are freed up to focus on actual knowledge gaps, providing huge benefits for collaboration and budget management.

“This is where we start to really drive business impact, and start to be famous internally – we democratize curiosity.” – Paola Vacchini

Behind the scenes with Market Logic technology

Inside the iQuest platform, Market Logic technology joins the dots with a knowledge graph for CPG, that understands the business fundamentals at Mondelēz, with entities like market shares, flavours, channels, packs, brands, and countries. We train the machine to understand what those entities mean, so AI can find and connect relevant facts across all the research projects, business reports, videos, and sources like Euromonitor and Nielsen. For example, the machine could reveal a certain finding about trending salty flavors, or a certain fact about a new player with a salty product. That’s where human sense-making comes in: using that new information, I&A experts connect the findings to formulate an actionable insight. As Mondelēz adds new sources, the knowledge graph grows seamlessly. At Market Logic, analysts keep telling us that business stakeholders don’t use insights when they should, which means that user experience on iQuest is just as important as the technology powering it. Market Logic uses design thinking methods with continual UX research to make sure stakeholders actually want to engage with insights. There are three key success factors to usability: personalization, so every user gets the content they need for their job to be done, engagement with social interactions for every item, and mobile-friendless.

Speed to deployment and adoption

The world of data and insights doesn’t slow down. Luckily, it was a matter of weeks to launch iQuest at Mondelēz, despite a backlog of at least ten years of research. It was mostly thanks to the AI learning models, which are trained to understand the FMCG industry. Adding secondary sources like Euromonitor also took less than one month. Security and technical standards, including Single Sign-On, are regularly monitored with the internal IT teams to ensure secure and easy access around the world. Members of the SIA team at Mondelēz act as “ambassadors” to ensure internal adoption is high and insights are always delivered in the best possible light.

What end-to-end really means

For Mondelēz, an end-to-end insights platform offers so much more than the standard tools, which just help users search for documents. iQuest connects all their data sources in one place, with deep AI to retrieve answers to questions. On top of that, users can generate new insights in research processes, in collaboration with all agency partners. That saves real time and effort to deliver results the business can use.

“With iQuest we have a state-of-the-art one-stop-shop for Insights at MDLZ with thousands of pieces of ad-hoc research going back to 2013… Powered by Artificial Intelligence, its search engine is more powerful than ever and the results you get are personalized to your profile and preferences. You can share, like and add insights to your favourites – it works like a social media platform!” – Gaby Gaut – I&A Director – MEU Chocolate and iQuest MEU Project Lead

True consumer-centric decision making

With the current state of data saturation, getting stakeholders to actually use insights is challenging. Many are intimidated by the volume of information, and others are cherry-picking the insights that simply confirm their assumptions. That’s not the case at Mondelēz, thanks to the amazing work of the Strategy, Insights, Analytics teams. In a short time, they’ve turned a $175 million knowledge asset into an agile and democratized technology powerhouse, driving decision-making and cost savings across the business.