How To Maximize The Value Of Your Market Research

The goal of market research is to better understand your customer. But at global corporations, there’s often so much research available that it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

I recently spoke with Thor Olof Philogene, CEO and Founder of Stravito, a leading enterprise platform democratizing access to market research, about what his company is doing to help brands navigate large amounts of consumer insights to make more informed business decisions.

Gary Drenik: Tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and what led you to Stravito?

Thor Olof Philogene: I've always been interested in solving complex problems, which has led me down an entrepreneurial path.

In 2008 I founded a social media company for virtual worlds, or what is also known as the Metaverse. The business was acquired by Second Life in 2010 and from there I went on to work with Second Life’s creators Linden Lab in San Francisco to scale out the monetization of the platform.

Later, I became VP of Growth and Chief Revenue Officer at fintech company Zettle, which was later acquired by PayPal for $2.2B. During my tenure, I scaled the growth division from scratch to a 200-strong team covering 12 markets globally. Through this process, I built out the data and analytics division, and it was here that I saw first-hand how hard it was to bring consumer knowledge to everyone on the team. Zettle had an infinite amount of data and insights but struggled to distribute and leverage it effectively.

Together with my co-founders, who are also established market research entrepreneurs, we realized that many multinational organizations had the same problem.

So, we set about to solve it and Stravito was born.

Drenik: What is Stravito? How does your platform help “democratize access to market research?” What are the key benefits of this democratization?

Philogene: Stravito is a Swedish based SaaS Scale-up. Our product is an AI-powered enterprise SaaS platform that allows Fortune 2000 companies to easily store, discover, and integrate market and consumer insights.

Using Stravito, global organizations such as McDonald’s, Comcast, and Danone put more knowledge into the hands of employees worldwide, so they can maximize the value of their market research and insights and make more informed business decisions.

For example, according to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, nearly 30% of US consumers 18 and older plan to dine out less frequently, in response to shifts in the US economy. Additionally, almost 24% say they plan to spend less on apparel.

These could be vital insights that food & beverage or apparel brands can then act on as the US economy remains uncertain.

Drenik: Stravito works with several large brands. Prior to adopting your platform, what were some of the core challenges brands faced in optimizing their market research data?

Philogene: Stravito primarily covers three core problems: siloed knowledge, restricted access to knowledge and duplicated research

When knowledge is siloed, it leads to inefficiencies in finding and reusing insights across the organization - making insights under-utilized resources. And when business decision makers are not able to easily access insights, they make less informed and less efficient decisions. Finally, when it’s hard to assess what knowledge already exists or to find information, teams tend to duplicate efforts and spend extra time and money, leading to even further waste.

This problem is costing Fortune 2000 companies millions of dollars each year. Ultimately, the inability to access data and insights results in uninformed decision-making, poor product innovation, lost opportunities, and even decreased revenue and profitability.

Drenik: Optimizing the use of consumer insights can definitely have profound effects on a brand’s efficiency and decision-making. But how does Stravito communicate the “real-world” benefits of its platform?

Philogene: There is a lot of research that showcases how integrating insights can positively impact a business's performance. For example, Gallup estimates that businesses that integrate customer insights can outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin.

Stravito also recently commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study that demonstrates the significant productivity gains, cost reductions and ROI possible through enhanced insights management. Notably, the study concluded that an interviewed customer saw a three-year 254% return on investment and a 70% reduction in time spent looking for information while using the Stravito platform.

Drenik: Once a brand adopts an enterprise insights platform, what can it do to ensure workers actually use it?

Philogene: Stravito is purpose-built to focus on market research and consumer insights. We offer smart and powerful AI-driven searches tailored to each customer, with automatic tagging and transcription. Stravito also provides advanced tools to curate, share, and promote insights, ensuring they are activated, and remain alive and in use.

But what truly sets us apart is our platform’s ability to provide employees with a consumer-like experience with a level of simplicity and usability similar to apps such as Spotify and Netflix. Traditionally, this doesn’t exist in enterprise software. But we believe there is no point in being feature-rich if your user experience is poor, especially as investing in software for your company is only worth it if employees log in and use it frequently.

Whilst legacy systems often struggle to drive adoption, usage on the Stravito platform remains high through our commitment to providing software our customers want to and will continue to use.

Drenik: Your company helps brands streamline their access to insights. What’s your advice for brands looking to put those insights into action?

Philogene: Opening up access to insights is only one part of the equation, the next is ensuring those insights remain activated, alive and in-use.

It’s crucial to ensure the software you choose makes it easy for users to integrate insights, providing a highly personalized and collaborative experience. At Stravito, we have spent the past 12 months introducing a string of new features to significantly increase insights engagement. Notably, we have launched:

1. Atlas: A first-of-its-kind exploratory search tool that uses orbs to navigate and narrow down available company research, so users can find the insights they truly need even if they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.
2. Insight Radar: An AI-powered feature that automatically keeps users up to date through personalized notifications whenever content related to their chosen keywords appears on the platform.
3. Scrapbook: A tool that allows users to pick-and-mix slides from various reports and presentations into a single story, making it easy to recycle relevant research and create effective insights narratives for specific projects or campaigns.

All of these features not only help employees to find insights, but also encourage them to share and integrate them so they are put into action.

Drenik: Thank you, Thor, for your insights on how Stravito optimizes the use of research data and the profound effects it can have on efficiency and decision making.