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July 7, 2020

Read time: 5min

Talking GRIT: business acumen, automating research and more

Market Logic Team

This year, Market Logic was asked to preview and offer commentary on the key findings from the 2020 Greenbook Industry Trends Report (GRIT report). It was great to be able to offer our feedback on what Greenbook respondents see as the most important organizational success factors: business knowledge, innovation focus, analytical expertise, and people skills. Unsurprisingly (at least for us at Market Logic!), respondents found that technical expertise should not be a major factor – it should just run smoothly in the background.

I was motivated by the GRIT report to hold a discussion with others in the industry on those organizational success factors. In my role at Market Logic, I design and engineer our software solutions across our global client base. It was interesting to compare what I hear in my conversations with insights leaders to the opinions of the industry at large.

Whenever we bring our clients together, they all share a passion for building insights capabilities across the four areas highlighted by GRIT. They attribute a lot of their success to “knowing what they know.”

In these hyper-turbulent times, that is no small feat! It’s worth taking a look at these case studies to see how client insights leaders at Prudential and Mondelez leverage their multi-million dollar knowledge asset to hone in on knowledge gaps. You will note that once they had a grasp of their business acumen, they could really start focusing on innovation to find major growth opportunities.

What does that look like in practice? Our clients like to organize their insights frameworks in knowledge zones – they are a visual representation of category drivers, segmentations, the four P’s… you name it.

Their corporate DNA is stored in these living, breathing micro-sites that can be curated by insights experts, no coding skills required (they can let Market Logic’s technical groundwork do the heavy lifting in the background, pulling insights from the entire knowledge asset).

These zones connect the dots to give a holistic picture, delivering on analytical expertise and empathetic people skills all at the same time. Check out how Philips uses their knowledge zones and Human Intelligence to tell engaging, data-driven stories.

We were also invited to comment on another aspect of the GRIT report: research automation. In our end-to-end platform deployments at over 40 client organizations, we have been seeing a real hunger for research automation to expand to more and more key tasks. It can help teams achieve twice the impact at half the cost and double the speed.

At Johnson & Johnson, for example, 94% of the insights community now executes compliant research to reduce approval delays by 6 weeks. And at Newell Brands, insights are embedded in 30+ innovation, marketing, and trade processes to drive brand growth daily.

At Colgate-Palmolive, their end-to-end platform delivers 15% budget savings with vendor efficiencies and the prevention of duplicate projects. Research automation supports collaboration through seamless, accelerated approvals, and brief templates are automatically loaded as a knowledge check pulls relevant content to prevent duplicate spending. Budget oversight enables leadership to review for efficiencies, or in the case of a pandemic, reallocate funds in a snap.

In the discussion that followed the presentation, industry leaders asked us about the role of suppliers in building knowledge. We have seen that suppliers tend to act as good citizens with our clients’ knowledge assets and have the crucial role of contributing and curating it with content.

We were also asked about best practices for identifying knowledge gaps. That is really where research automation comes in. Once you have all your content in one place for the machine to auto-classify, you then have a bird’s eye view of what you know and do not know.

And on an ongoing basis, as your stakeholders ask questions and self-serve knowledge, you can quickly identify the gaps. You will be able to see the questions they’re asking that don’t get answers, and you’ll be able to understand the new and emerging business needs to close those gaps.

We encourage all industry leaders to take a closer look at the state of their knowledge assets and explore how the current state of technology can help them bring their business insights to the next level.