Unlocking new Sales Growth with an Insight Driven culture

900 words, a 5-6 minute read

​Why Insight?
Thriving as a business means growing your brand … and doing this faster & better than the competition requires Insight. 
 
Not just data or facts, Insight explains the ‘Why?’ behind the trends we see.  
 
By understanding the ‘Why?’, brands can better know the Consumer, and as a result create better products, or develop more targeted activation plans.  However, to do this Insight first needs to be demanded & embraced by the organisation.
 
Panasonic knew this.  As a very successful electronics company, Panasonic prides itself on high quality products and therefore culturally has a very strong technical focus.  However, as a global player, the company recognised that to grow even faster it is critical to understand how categories & customers differ in each market in which it plays, and to place these insights at the centre of what they do.

​Developing the Panasonic Insight Driven Value Training Programme

​In 2021 Panasonic asked Optima Retail to build on the work we were already doing together to help them build a more consumer & data led culture in the business, and further develop team capabilities to execute a new growth strategy.  

Doing this across the business required an ambitious training programme, so Panasonic orchestrated a unique partnership, leveraging the combined strengths of their own business & 3 external agencies – Untapped Innovation, Mindtap & ourselves.  
 
Mindtap brought their expertise in applying principles of neuroscience to training organisations.  Untapped Innovation their skill in applying insights to develop customer led innovations, and Optima rounded this off with our deep understanding of how Shoppers shop & experience in developing category growth visions and go to market strategies.

The ambition for the programme was to drive a cultural shift, where future innovation and go to market plans would be led by Insights (not assumptions), driving new value for the Panasonic brand.  

​What resulted was an 11 module “Insight Driven Value” training programme, released online in English and Japanese over a period of 12 months.  Each of the 11 modules was focused on a different topic, from building a base understanding of what an Insight is and where it comes from, to introducing the different stages of the Customer journey and then exploring more advanced topics like Insight led Product/Packaging and how to develop a Category growth story.
 
Key principles were explained in bite-sized chunks, and each module was brought to life with case studies, quizzes and hands-on exercises so participants could learn by doing, as well as a community forum where questions could be asked and best practice shared.

Our focus was to shift the culture in 3 key ways:-

1. Bringing the outside in

• Use a foundation of core category management principles to help Panasonic look at things from a consumer and a retailer perspective, rather than just the brand’s.
• Execute go to market strategy through a structured range review process, unpicking macro & category trends to see how consumers can be better served, thereby identifying new growth opportunities.
• Apply these Insights to build a vision for how Panasonic can help to grow the total category and strengthen the brand’s partnership with leading retailers.

2. Data Driven

• Start basing plans on real Insights, rather than assumptions or ‘how we’ve always done it’
• Use the assumptions that are held to form hypotheses – which are then validated or disproved by the data.  For example,  use research to understand which touchpoints different types of Shopper use to decide which products they want to buy, and then activate these with targeted marketing using claims & messages which are proven to drive up conversion.
• Learn from the data we have - to ask new questions & create a positive learning loop.

3. Keeping it simple

• Analyse data to understand what is going on & why, but also be able to take a step back to see the fundamental trends.
• Distil the data to make it easy to understand, using visualisations & real examples
• Always focus on action – how can we use this new understanding to prove to retailers how Panasonic products will add incremental value and grow the total category?

​The Results...!
Sponsored by senior stakeholders across Panasonic the results exceeded all of our expectations.  What started as 20 Panasonic colleagues being trained has grown to over 400 Panasonic colleagues across 20 countries, completing over 2,000 modules so far. 
 
Through this unique collaboration not only have we developed new capabilities for the Panasonic business, we have started a new conversation which now has its own momentum across the business.  We look forward to seeing the fruits of this new approach in the months and years to come!

---

Optima Retail work with a range of brands to help them better understand their customers and the market opportunity for their brand.  We then work with them to develop growth strategies which deliver these opportunities often including building brand & category stories which are presented to their retail customers.  To find out more about how we may be able to help you, please get in touch via our contact page.
​

Photo credits : Pexels.com / (1) This is Engineering, (2) Pixabay, (3) Fauxels