The second meeting of our NYC Insights Executive Chapter took place this time online hosted by Keurig. Attendees included executives from the first roundtable at American Express headquarters (Aetna, Cardinal Health, Colgate, Comcast, MetLife, Prudential, PepsiCo, etc.) together with new faces from J&J, Staples and Verizon.
The keynote speaker was Brenda Armstead, VP of Consumer Insights, Keurig, with an encore presentation about her learnings rolling out Market Logic insights platforms at J&J and Keurig Green Mountain.
Deploy for success from day one: Insight platform change management
Tizian Bonus, our Chief Customer Success Officer at Market Logic (and the face behind many of our successful insights platform deployments) together with Brenda Armstead compared experiences at J&J, where the platform replaced a legacy SharePoint system to support 30 categories with a backlog of 10,000 projects.
She also shared the Keurig experience, where a greenfield deployment supports beverage and brewer categories with a backlog of 200 projects. In each instance, the change management process covered three phases:
Implementation – the setup process, where the platform is configured to suit your way of working (processes, filters, languages, security settings, etc.). Here, Brenda confirmed that implementations by Market Logic Software at J&J and Keurig were both accomplished in less than 90 days.
Launch – the release of the new platform to the user community with communications and onboarding.
This is where Brenda comes to the fore as the architect of two outstanding marketing campaigns for The HIVE at J&J and Spark at Keurig. Both campaigns encompassed great names and visual identities, videos with executive endorsements, tickler newsletters, training, and onsite branding and events.
Success – measuring usage to continuously improve over time.
In addition to fundamentals like careful usage monitoring, investigations to uncover barriers, and senior executive involvement in quarterly steering committees meetings, Brenda and Tizian traded notes on carrots and sticks.
For example, at J&J, carrots included sharing success stories, introducing ‘wow’ features and promoting the knowledge asset in regular newsletters. In parallel, sticks included usage measurement as an objective for annual performance reviews, along with the “thrill” of knowing the CEO is reading your work on his mobile.
Anticipate and proactively address internal hesitation
In response to questions about the headwinds she faced at Keurig, Brenda emphasized the need to pitch the business case for the initial investment to all stakeholders including procurement and IT.
Brenda highlights the importance of “getting people beyond the initial outlay to see the benefits because the system really does sell itself over time.”
Three-dimensional business benefits
A lively conversation also ensued about metrics to understand adoption and utilization against targets. Here, Brenda spoke to three dimensions of business benefit: time to insight, activating the knowledge asset, and optimizing processes and spend.
For example, the time to insight metric measures number of hours spent searching for insights in 10 hours where J&J benchmarked five hours per question.
It is an impressive opportunity cost saving when tens of thousands of marketers self-serve answers to their business questions.
