Use case: AI drives use of marketing research

The Challenge

Elaine leads the five person marketing research and insights team at a global apparel brand. The brand’s commitment to research had inadvertently created a volume of information that the brand managers found difficult to mine and use. The company’s crucial insights were often unknown or inaccessible to the very teams that needed them most.

An internal audit starkly illuminated the issue, revealing that regional marketing teams collectively spent an amount equivalent to 20% of the central research team’s budget procuring data and insights that the company already possessed. This substantial financial leakage stemmed from several core problems:

• Information Silos: Vital data and analyses were frequently embedded within extensive PDF documents that regional teams lacked the time to thoroughly review.
• Ineffective Discovery: The enterprise search tools were keyword based and proved inadequate for cases where users didn’t know exactly what they were searching for which was frequent.
• Synthesis required: The answers to many teams questions were spread across multiple sources requiring intimate familiarity with the entire research corpus. The research team had this familiarity and spent a lot of their time simply mining the research for the marketers.
• Bandwidth Constraints: The research team’s significant backlog which often led to regional marketers bypassing the team altogether and going to the web or to paid external sources.

This scenario highlighted a clear need for a solution that could not only centralize and organize their vast data repository but also democratize access to it, ensuring that every insight could be readily discovered and applied.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Elaine implemented 99Ravens first as an intelligent intake form for research and data requests. The deployment included an AI-enabled research workflow that guided teams through the process of formulating their requests and enabled:

1. Intelligent Data Suggestion: The platform would automatically analyze the marketing team’s requirements and, where relevant, suggest existing data and insights from the brand’s vast internal and third-party research archives. This capability directly countered the problem of unknown or inaccessible information, ensuring that existing investments were maximized.
2. Structured Research Request Generation: For information gaps that could not be filled by existing data, 99Ravens assisted marketing team members in crafting precise, structured research requests. This streamlined process ensured that any new research undertaken by the central team was clearly defined, targeted, and aligned with specific business questions, eliminating ambiguity and reducing back-and-forth communication.

Results

The implementation of 99Ravens brought about a measurable transformation in the brand’s research and insights ecosystem:

• Reduced Redundant Spend: By intelligently surfacing existing data, the platform significantly reduced instances of regional marketing teams purchasing already-available research. Initial projections indicate savings of 50-75% on previously duplicated research.
• Increased Data Utilization: While the number of citations in marketing briefs has remained roughly the same, the number of different files cited more than doubled as a broader set of insights are now being used in the brand’s marketing instead. This keeps things fresh instead of regurgitating the same stats repeatedly.
• Improved Research Alignment: The structured research request feature ensures that new research requests are substantially faster and that overlapping requests are easier to combine into a single study.
• Enhanced Team Efficiency:
  • Marketing Teams: The time that marketing teams spent searching for data was cut by an estimated 60% and the number of requests for project-specific research went down by roughly a third.
  • Research & Insights Team: Because so much of the research team’s time was previously taken up with poorly defined inquiries, the one-third reduction in campaign-specific requests led to a massive 60% increase in the amount of higher value market and consumer trend insights that Elaine’s team is able to proactively uncover.

The deployment of 99Ravens allowed Elaine’s team to drastically reduce the amount the firm spends on research while simultaneously increasing the diversity and quality of research underpinning their marketing campaigns. Her team was also able to spend more time on the work they loved increasing morale.

Work with us

If you’ve got a corpus of internal or third party research that is under-used by your marketing team then book at demo today to find out how we can turn cloistered knowledge into immediate value.