Event recap: supercharging insights management at Mars

How did Mars Wrigley end up with the perfect FMCG insights management platform to unlock the power of insights across the enterprise? Insights pros from Mars Wrigley and Market Logic recently shared key takeaways from their innovative and successful partnership during a recent ESOMAR event “Supercharging Insights Management at Mars.” Here are some of the key points.

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Challenges in FMCG insights management

Blaire Stevenson, Insights Transformation Lead at Mars Wrigley kicked off the session by outlining the main challenges FMCG insights professionals face. She said some of those obstacles include data gatekeeping and data silos, slow “data hunting and gathering,” lost institutional knowledge, and duplicative research.

But the team at Mars had a better vision for insights management.

Brendan Emmerson, Consumer Technical Insight Scientist, said “We needed to challenge our current process and ask ourselves, is there a way to do this better? We wanted to make insights and research open access and democratize across our organization’s insights instead of limiting it to insights associates.”

Beyond the status quo of knowledge management in the FMCG industry

In 2020, Mars started their zero-waste research journey, fearlessly re-thinking and experimenting with knowledge management, so they could supercharge their insights and realize their vision.

“We treated it almost as if it was a big consumer facing project, or even like a product launch. We solidified KPIs and measured ourselves against those. We evaluated driver barriers, we segmented groups, we micro targeted those groups, and we had a post launch program. So, all of that together, I think, made it so successful,” Jennifer said.

After applying a deep listening tour of peer and key stakeholder interviews, two rounds of agile testing; user feedback surveys throughout; deep-dive design thinking workshops; and KPI scoring for the final decisions, Market Logic’s technology ended up scoring the highest across all KPI’s. It was a no-brainer to continue the partnership.

“We got into a really nice groove where constructive criticism was welcomed on both sides. This was a series of push and pull, and it really tested how well we could work together. The process confirmed to both sides that are still a great fit as partners,” Brendan said.

Game-changing improvements to FMCG consumer insights management

During the session, Jennifer Greene, Account Director, Global Customer Success, at Market Logic outlined the game-changing improvements to Mars’ new insights platform “Synapse 3.0”. She shared details on how Natural Language Processing (NLP), a Top 10 Answers feature, a fresh new UX with personalized homepages, a quick-upload feature with auto-metadata, and multiple partner integrations brought Synapse 3.0 to a completely new level for Mars.

“Being a collaborative partner means that Market Logic needs to continue to adjust as ways of working at Mars change over time. One way we do this is by integrating and connecting to their third-party vendors and tools,” Jennifer said, “We want to seamlessly connect with the partners and tools that Mars deems valuable to save time and increase speed to insight.”

The result was Market Logic developers created something new and perfectly curated to Mars’ needs. Now, Market Logic proudly offers the new platform to all clients.

Best practices: why the Mars & Market Logic partnership works so well

Blaire shared some vital best practices behind the successful partnership between Mars and Market Logic, including both teams embracing a process of agile, iterative experimentation and testing, deep listening to understand stakeholders’ pain points, and fast decision-making to adapt the tool quickly.

“We have really seen this platform transform into something that’s compatible with the new environment and new ways of working with the reinvention that Mars has gone through,” Jennifer said. “We were really able to co-design our ideal tool.”

More on FMCG Insights strategies and tools

The session finished off with tips, tricks, and methods Mars used to proactively drive change management and tool adoption, including an iron-clad communications strategy using the ADKAR framework, an on-going continuous feedback strategy, and an action plan for long-term FMCG insights engagement success.

Are you looking for FMCG or CPG insights management strategies at your organization? Mars’ successful insights journey gives you everything you need to know about best practices and strategies in insights management.

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