Singapore 2018: Abbott Laboratories’ business-transforming insights journey

The 5th Market Logic Executive Roundtable in Singapore was hosted in December 2017 by Carlos Hernandez Jr, Asia Region Head of Market Insights at the fabulous new Abbott Laboratories headquarters in the new DUO Tower. Attendees included representatives from Johnson & Johnson, Lumenlab (MetLife), Mastercard, Reckitt Benckiser, and Visa. The Singapore roundtable was a follow-up on the roundtable hosted by Abbott in Chicago. Read all about that event, plus a case study on the Abbott Insights Hub here.

Brand building across diverse regions

As the regional insights leader for Asia, Carlos championed the deployment of the Abbott ‘Insights Hub’ to support brand building in India and across Asia. This work took place in the context of “the transformation of Abbott from pharmaceuticals to healthcare, where the ‘Insights Hub’ was essential to unify the business across silos and regions”. In this context, Carlos cited the journey of a consumer lifestyle insight, which was instrumental in guiding the next-generation continuous glucose monitoring applications.

Fast access to insights: The Abbott ‘Insights Hub’ by the numbers

Today, Carlos explained that the Abbott ‘Insights Hub’ facilitates fast access to insights within and across corporate marketing, the nutrition, diabetes care and established pharmaceuticals. The ‘Insights Hub’ includes;

2,000 projects,
18,000 documents,
4,000 findings,
1,000 verbatims and over
500 innovation and communication concepts.

Abbott marketers use the ‘Insights Hub’ to understand their brand’s opportunities and challenges as the starting point for planning; trawl past copy tests as a source of inspiration for new creatives and onboard new employees with all the insights they need in their field.

Bridging linguistic divides in multilingual regions

In multilingual regions like Asia, insights are typically exchanged in the corporate language (English or Chinese), but local agencies and team members may lack strong competencies in that language. What’s more, local market research is executed in the local language, adding to inefficiencies and communication challenges across the entire process. To address these challenges, Market Logic’s SVP Product Management, Mario Lenz outlined planned support for a range of multilingual scenarios in 2018, including:

In-document search to make global content accessible in 40 languages, so users can search and get high-quality translated results in their preferred language, with special characters, tokenized terms and irregularities, as well as a fully localized user experience.
Cross-language search so a multilingual marketer who speaks English and Chinese could conduct a search in either language and get English language results in English, and Chinese language results in Chinese.
Content translation for “fast data” to leverage auto-translated content from multiple global news sources in the corporate language as it’s imported to a dashboard to quickly identify articles of interest that merit high-quality translation.
Content translation for “high value” data, for example, using machine technology on demand to translate a final report, while preserving the design and layout of a powerpoint deck.

Attendees discussed specific use cases and their priorities. Most urgently, they argued that a marketer who feels more comfortable working in their own language has the obvious need to search in their local language and retrieve results in the corporate language that are then translated into their local language. Another use case focused on synergies between local markets (i.e. some Asian and Latin American economies) that prompt demand for translations of underlying local language reports. It was also noted that agencies producing final reports are often challenged to deliver high-quality versions of the same materials in the corporate language. All of these circumstances have to be evaluated from a cost perspective, where rapid advances in machine technologies offer welcome support. In this context, attendees agreed that the “fast data” content translation scenario would support 80% of the jobs to be done.