Thoroughly understanding consumers purchasing behaviors and decision-making lays the foundation for effective marketing, sales, product and category management - in particular for slow moving consumer goods, where purchase cycles are long and consumers investments high. Ad hoc research is a tried and tested approach to inform businesses in this respect. However, it is often not able to meet the requirements of todays’ fast-paced and increasingly digital business environment which is calling for on-demand access to actionable insights. GfK tackles this challenge with the Consumer Insights Engine, a new generation of platform-based analytics solutions: Connecting syndicated ad hoc research with sales data, behavioral data and artificial intelligence in a single integrated platform. This talk will show how to combine data from mobile-first surveys, retail panels, online product reviews and online metering in order to understand consumers purchasing behaviors. It will additionally demonstrate how this data system helps brands and retailers to increase return on investment. Be it by understanding who their customers are, stimulating demand with their messaging, optimizing visibility with their marketing channel mix or providing the optimal customer product experience.

Brands and agencies are currently using different data sets to inform insight, planning and activation, and to evaluate campaign success. Using multiple data sources makes it challenging to compare and combine insights and effectively measure campaign outcomes. The need to prove marketing ROI/ effectiveness and tie it to business outcomes is rising, for both marketers and agencies. So how can brands and agencies plan campaigns, execute (digital) media buying and track campaign performance using a single source of data?

YouGov’s core offering of opinion & passive data is derived from our highly participative panel of 6 million people worldwide who provide us with live, continuous streams of data. With YouGov Profiles, our audience segmentation and media planning tool, users can identify target audiences and describe them in-depth to create personas or dynamic segmentations. Profiles collects and connects data on brand usage, brand perception and brand satisfaction, media consumption, mobile behaviour and social media engagement – all profiled across attitudes, opinions, demographics and elements of lifestyle. Once identified, these target audiences can be bought programmatically in the digital space via our partners (DMP platforms). Through pixel-based retargeting and cookie matching, we can identify which of our panellists has had contact with the ad and follow up via online surveys. Finally, we connect and analyse all of this data in our data analytics tool, Crunch. Since all of the data comes from our panel, it allows stakeholders to speak in a common language around a single source of connected data.

Many internationally active companies are decentralized and have established complex reporting processes. Typically, data from different locations is forwarded to a central unit for consolidation purposes. This has an impact on the quality of the data and implies a high level of effort for the data centers in terms of consolidation. Furthermore, it creates isolated data sources which cannot be analyzed coherently. This presents a major difficulty for the marketing department: The effectiveness of marketing spendings cannot be analyzed in a reasonable way, since performance data and marketing spendings are not merged in many cases.

DataLion and MSR provide an system to replace and simplify these processes. First, relevant data sources are merged into one database to create a coherent database. Furthermore, manual processes are largely automated to increase data quality and to release resources for content-related work. Afterwards, DataLion offers the opportunity to analyze this data with all instruments of market research by using their their dashboard software. The analysis of centralized KPIs, using methods of market research, creates more transparency and completely new insights into the effectiveness of marketing spendings. The continuous update of data helps to track and evaluate the effectiveness of individual campaigns.