London 2017: Unilever hosts 1st executive roundtable

Hosted by industry leader Chet Henderson, the London Market Logic Executive Roundtable welcomed a panel of executives running Market Logic platforms at Ferrero, FrieslandCampina, and Imperial Brands. Attendees included owners of Market Logic deployments at JTI, Kimberly Clark, Shell and Tesco as well as executives from leading consumer brands in FMCG/CPG, media, retail, financial services and telecoms.

The Unilever PeopleWorld success story: Insights in the driver’s seat

Spurred by the mission to double the impact of the consumer and market insight function at twice the speed, with half the resources, Unilever turned to Market Logic to co-create “PeopleWorld” – Unilever’s branded Market Logic platform. The marketing insights platform, which has evolved through co-creation since its first deployment in 2013, was cited as one of the world’s best insight engines in Harvard Business Review. Chet stated that Market Logic has played a pivotal part in that journey. Chet shared learnings on a broad range of topics from the need to shift thinking and functionality from “library” to “workflow” to the significance of design, and tips to protect confidentiality. One of the key takeaways from Chet’s presentation was that once an insights platform is deployed, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the software when a behavioural change should be centre stage. Read more about the Unilever case study here

The impact of AI on the marketing profession

Market Logic’s CEO, Kay Iversen took the stage to share latest developments in how cognitive computing (the human interface of AI) can: Help insights teams find, re-use and promote knowledge to marketers by aggregating all customer and market-facing data from any source (primary, secondary, panel, social, CRM, IoT, etc.), and consolidating answers to users’ questions in dossiers Deliver market intelligence to the organization on personalized dashboards users can create to follow their own topics of interest and explore early warning signals and trends that emerge from the buzz Boost marketing excellence with a cognitive assistant that understands what the marketer wants to achieve, guides them through the company’s best practice method and suggests relevant insights along the way.

The AI paradigm shift

Kay asked the roundtable to consider three key success factors to leverage AI.

Stop thinking tool, start thinking insights platform.
Change positioning from “insights promotion” to “insights injection.”
Voice is the new keyboard

The challenges and opportunities of a digital insights platform

Panellists shared their feedback from the Unilever case study and AI presentation, with a deep dive on challenges and opportunities of communicating insights on a digital platform. Everyone agreed that digital platforms are essential, as “we have so few insights managers dealing with huge demand across our global workforce.” They emphasized the need to equip insights managers with new skills to “inspire with insight and to embed insight in processes.” The consensus was that AI will play a key role extending current platforms from “research sharing to organization sharing with a far broader data set” encompassing research, business performance metrics, social listening and tacit expertise.