GOAL

• Build and maintain a community that serves as one-stop shop for professionals in the area of cataracts.
• Continuously optimize the community with respect to content integration and customer experience optimization.
• Integrate tools and services to deliver on key benefit: a“one-stop solution” to support users in their daily workflow overall, saving their time, improving outcome through shared expertise and enhanced knowledge, increasing efficiency and practice throughput.

CHALLENGE

• Continuously integrating services previously launched as silos into the cataract community delivering on the promise of a “one-stop solution”

• Creating editorial plans together with the product teams to continuously provide new and interesting content based on customer behavior and interests

• Transforming internal thinking from a product driven company to a service driven company

SOLUTION

TD Reply implemented a modular open innovation platform based on LifeRay. The intention was to provide a wealth of content together with the possibility to ask questions, exchange with colleagues and provide access to experts. Content and page structure are continuously monitored to provide insight on how to improve customer experience and deliver content that meets customers’ interests and needs. Community management connected to specialists within Carl Zeiss Meditec guarantees fast reactions to user questions.

GOAL

Our client Sanofi faces three key objectives:

• Developing an initial KPI concept based on two pilot cases that serves as a global blueprint for Sanofi across markets and business units
• Identifying data blind spots
• Making sure the KPI concept serves the following criteria:

1. Practicability: use only data that is available to Sanofi
2. Usefulness: support the decision-making of marketing stakeholders
3. Scalability: ensure roll-out beyond the two defined pilots

CHALLENGE

• Each channel needed to be evaluated independently – a multi-channel approach was not feasible.
• Highly diverse products, target groups, and marketing channels made the development of “one KPI concept for all” difficult.
• There had been no unified reporting so far. This means that stakeholders are making and using decisions based on various data sources.

SOLUTION

• Development of the KPI concept along a generic funnel from awareness via interest and activation to sales, and, eventually, loyalty.
• Development of a scores-per-funnel step that makes campaigns comparable – regardless of product category or business unit.
• Implementation of a “traffic light system” that serves as an early indicator for the success or failure of a campaign or activation.

RESULTS

• Common understanding of marketing success and multi-channel steering.
• Development of a means to steer and orchestrate multi-channel activities.
• Roll-out of the concept within the global Multi-Channel Engagement Program.

GOAL

To stay at the forefront of its segment, SEAT decided to address the needs of a more urban and progressive target group with a new positioning and clear product USPs based on solid research and in-depth consumer insights.

CHALLENGE

One challenge the client had when deciding how to define the USP features for the next Leon was to identify the right methodology. On the one hand, SEAT wanted to base the future product USPs on solid consumer research, especially as it needed to gain in-depth understanding of a new target group. On the other hand, SEAT was skeptical as to whether consumers could come up with new feature ideas and evaluate their importance and uniqueness.

A further challenge was to involve stakeholders from multiple departments – ranging from market intelligence, innovation management, and research and development to product management – to not only combine their expertise, but also find consensus throughout the process.

SOLUTION

TD Reply’s Data-Driven Innovation Team came up with a multi-method project approach that combined state-of-the-art digital research methods, such as online buzz analysis (scraping and analyzing conversations of consumers in social media) and research communities (asynchronous online focus groups) with design thinking principles and real-life co-creation workshops across Germany, UK, France, Spain, and Italy.

Status quo analysis: Identification of best cases within the mass market and premium segment matching the targeted positioning of the new Leon.

Buzz analysis: In-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of online conversations in social media around car models and features across EU5 countries to derive the strengths, weaknesses, and potential USP features based on unbiased consumer discussions.

Co-creation workshop: Identification and recruiting of automotive/non-automotive experts and lead users coupled with a co-creation workshop to develop positioning concepts and feature ideas by applying design thinking principles and methods.

Research communities: Validation and enrichment of prioritized USP features and positioning concepts with consumers over the course of one week in asynchronous online focus groups across EU5 markets.

Transition workshop: Synthesis of overall research results and selection of USP features for the launch as well as definition of a USP feature roadmap that will inform the product lifecycle strategy.

GOAL

• Evaluate the feeding habits, expectations and perceptions of modern dog owners
• Identify requirements for future pet food and new business opportunities
• Analyze the public perception of Mars Petcare and their key competitors
• Gain actionable insights for marketing and product development

CHALLENGE

• Finding the best tool for qualitative and quantitative social media analysis and defining relevant pet food related search queries for all markets
• Researching relevant online communities, blogs, review sites and social news sites for cat and dog owners in UK, US and China
• Update and identifying consumer needs, feeding relevant trends and best cases
• Collecting valuable insights relevant for all three key markets; finding similarities and main differences between the markets
• Derivation of opportunities for customer-centric innovations
• Engaging the multinational project team, with team members from TD Reply’s Berlin and Beijing office
• Transferring the outcome to the relevant stakeholders the study belongs to (from different departments and country markets of Mars Petcare)

SOLUTION

The 3-step process of the netnography enables us to gain emphatic insights from pet owners, to identify new product developments and derive inspiration for the marketing and innovation pipeline of Mars Petcare.

• Set-up: First, we started with the project set-up, at which we defined relevant social media sources and pet food related search queries, initiated the automated data collection and a manual quality control of the data set.
• Buzz Analysis: Secondly, we did a quantitative analysis of relevant buzzwords and brands, followed by a qualitative content analysis, the interpretation of consumers’ postings (related to pet owner’s needs, lifestyles and the related purchasing behavior) and the clustering of all insights.
• Opportunity Mapping: In a third step we developed an opportunity map for Mars Petcare, with 3 main feeding trends, 9 opportunity fields and 20 rising product categories, which we enhanced with detailed descriptions, trend related personas, best cases, country deep dives and brand insights. 

GOAL

Siemens wanted to develop a vision of the future of the mining industry, derived from relevant trends and their future impacts on strategic business roadmaps for 2030.

CHALLENGE

Siemens uses Pictures of the Future (PoF) projects on a regular basis as the key methodology to inform roadmap planning. But from an organizational perspective, the key challenge for the Corporate Technology department was to ensure that the results would be valued and integrated into business and technology roadmaps by internal customers – the business groups.

On an operational level, recurring challenges throughout Pictures of the Future (PoF) projects include alignment, timely input gathering, and the synthesis of results and opinions across multiple stakeholders on the client side.

SOLUTION

Creating Pictures of the Future for the Mining Industry in 2030. It highlights future business impacts and informs business and technology roadmaps by combining proven traditional methods with new state-of-the art digital research approaches.

• Trend analysis: In-depth, structured market and trend analysis combining TD Reply’s data-driven trend research solution SONAR and expert interviews to identify and quantify key trends
• Hypotheses development: Extrapolation of trend developments, including time horizon and regional aspects, based on expert hypotheses
• Business impacts: Derivation and evaluation of future impacts for the mining industry and for Siemens
• Scenario development: Description and visualization of future scenarios as a basis for business and technology roadmaps

GOAL

• Create a holistic understanding of the German ICT market as basis for strategic planning & operational decision-making at Deutsche Telekom.
• Leverage data and insights to differentiate Deutsche Telekom in a more and more fragmented market through consumer-centred product development and marketing.

CHALLENGE

• Collecting valuable insights within complex customers’ lifestyles and fast changing ICT markets, products & services.
• Combining traditional, representative but rather slow and static consumer surveys with new methodologies of gathering more granular, dynamic and timely insights through digital data.
• Transferring study outcomes to relevant internal stakeholders and trigger decision making as well as the development of new Ideas and concepts.

SOLUTION

TD Reply has been successful in supporting Deutsche Telekom’s changing data needs by continuously adapting one of the key innovation tracking studies for more than 10 years.

This continuous evolution involved on the one side the adaption of the study design, which required a smart balance between maintaining key tracking topics and the steady integration of new trends & ICT topics.

Additionally, TD Reply managed the methodological transition of the BENEFIT studies from a classic face to face survey to an online survey with more than 3,000 respondents aged 14 + in Germany and the integration of google search data to gather more granular, dynamic and timely insights.

The granularity of the data allows us to prepare specific insights by linking various perspectives facing different stakeholder requirements: segment analysis, provider view, ITC product forecast, innovator groups, brand image attributes, needs & attitudes and the analysis of strategic growth of innovation fields within ITC market.

TD Reply supports Deutsche Telekom in the implantation & communication process of the results in the various departments to ensure that they are optimally used for further product and process development.

GOAL

As input for the vertical technology planning, Huawei wanted to identify and evaluate technologies and important trends with a significant impact on the global transportation industry (air transport, railway, shipping, cars & truck, as well as last mile mobility) over the coming 5 years.

Based on an in-depth understanding of trend & technology impacts on the global transportation industry implications for the ICT business and business opportunities for Huawei have been defined.

CHALLENGE

• Identifying vertical technologies within transportation, an industry on the verge of disruption with many new players entering and changing ecosystems
• Identifying key verticals and anticipating relevant trends early
• Linking Huawei’s status quo and long-term goals in terms of R&D, market orientation, and technology investment with technology trends within transportation
• Finding a common ground across all important internal Huawei Research stakeholders

SOLUTION

Trend Discovery & Analysis: Using TD Reply’s proprietary data-driven trend research solution SONAR (www.trend-sonar.com) for trend discovery and analysis, TD Reply identified a list of 70 transportation-related trends. The SONAR platform enabled TD Reply to map all trends according to their maturity level (niche vs. established trend) which helped validating and prioritizing trends. This led to a zooming in on 50 trends. Within those 50 trends, 6 trend clusters with a high future impact on the transportation industry where identified.

Trend Prioritization: To select the priority trends for a further deep dive analysis, a workshop was held together with Huawei stakeholders, re-evaluating the list of 50 trends according to trend impact and certainty of trend. At the end, 9 final trends were prioritized for a further deep dive analysis.

Deep Dive Analysis: For the deep dive part, a mix of quantitative (using SONAR) and qualitative analysis was used to further analysis all 9 trends in terms of trend dynamics, historic developments, market overview and outlook, ecosystem and player analysis. An additional analysis of European research institutions related to the identified and analyzed trends was conducted, to better inform further Huawei R&D invests and potential partnerships.

Implications & Business Opportunities: The deep dives were presented and discussed at a one-day workshop with top Huawei technology planning researchers and executives. Based on the final research results, implications and business opportunities for Huawei have been refined, enhanced and prioritized and innovation projects were defined.

GOAL

In detail, the task was to:

• Identify drivers and triggers within the overall funnel logic for the purchase of an Audi vehicle
• Take internal and external data points into account to explain the connection between KPIs and each role within the overall framework
• Show the effect of KPIs within a customer journey from a time perspective

CHALLENGE

The challenges from a data-sourcing perspective were:

• Collecting all relevant internal data (based on briefings for the Audi data science team) and providing relevant external data, including online search behavior and pre-processed buzz data
• Bringing structured and unstructured data into a standardized format for further analysis
• Identifying a format to investigate online and offline KPIs, with a concentration on time-series analyses
• Covering spurious correlations based on non-stationary time series, attribution problems due to highly correlated factors (multicollinearity), and time differences between the company’s actions and effects on touchpoints and sales
• Using statistical methods, machine learning, and probability theory methodologies
• Enabling an in-depth investigation of customer actions across the entire customer journey

SOLUTION

Based on time-series analysis, an exemplary customer journey was created that included:

• Four major customer touchpoint KPI groups
• A clustering into the phases: awareness, information/consideration, and purchase, which reflect the different stages of customer involvement
• Detailed insights into the KPI impact over time
• A framework which evaluates the impact of performance indicators that clearly affect the company’s business, and mirrors the (marketing) value chain from input to output to outcome

GOAL

Deutsche Bahn planned to take a broader brand measurement approach into account to strengthen and adjust its brand position & message in the market, along with its products and – last but not least – amongst its customers. By making digital brand perception of media and customers visible, tangible, comparable and accessible company-wide, Deutsche Bahn wanted to be able to keep track of newly launched products, apps, media efforts and the impact to their brand values, always with one eye on the competition, plus fostering one internal understanding of how the brand is perceived.

SOLUTION

With the set goal of measuring the Deutsche Bahn brand holistically with new data, TD Reply proposed the Digital Brand Perception Approach: From the gathering of digital data to assessing & analyzing the pool to visualizing synthesized results and handy KPIs. Our data intelligence team at TD Reply operationalized the brand values, competitors and topics into digital customer language, pulled the data from a social media monitoring tool and applied text mining analytics to crunch qualitative data into quantitative numbers and scales. The results are visualized on an ongoing basis through a comparative dashboard that is accessible company-wide, presenting live data of unbiased consumer and media voice to keep track of brand values as well as brand topics.

GOAL

• Drive data-driven decision making across the business
• Learn, adapt and improve marketing based on data-driven insights
• Grow marketing efficiency and performance across all markets while ensuring one consistent way to measure performance over the 47 markets
• Create synergies among markets and learn from each other

CHALLENGE

• Be relevant. How to deal with such huge amount of data and select the ones that will help to answer real business questions?
• Trust in Data. How to cultivate a new habit of trusting and using data as a basis for decisions?
• Embrace change. How to engage the 47 markets of Miele to use the dashboard as a regular routine to support them in their daily work?
• Be actionable. How to turn the data-driven insights into real actions to create impact?

SOLUTION

In order to understand the challenges and business questions faced by the diverse stakeholders, numerous expert interviews were conducted. Having the most relevant business questions for Miele and for the industry in mind, TD Reply was able to connect the dots by developing a holistic KPIs set common to all 47 markets. In doing so, TD Reply could fill in the blanks between the data sources and drill down the amount of necessary data to the most important ones, facilitating the whole data collection.

Using Miele´s internal data and leveraging the powerful alliance of social listening, web analytics, search engines and data science via direct source connections, TD Reply could give context to the smart data to derive BIG insights. The Miele Dashboard Rollout was released in several waves. It went first live with 12 pilot markets, followed by 15 additional ones and finally 20 more markets joined the data-driven journey. Along the way, many new dashboard views tailored to answer specific business questions were developed, running advanced analytics within the Miele Dashboard.

Workshops all over the world were conducted in order to introduce the data-driven marketing culture and the Miele Dashboard in each market. In doing so, we were able to understand better the local specifics and tailor the Dashboard to their specific needs while understanding the global relevance.

RESULTS

• 12 pilot markets were already integrated in the Dashboard within the first 6 months
• A data-driven marketing dashboard available in 47 subsidiaries from Miele
• 7 views available answering various business questions and creating synergies among markets
• 234 users driving decisions based on data and allowing data democracy throughout the company
• Providing actionable insights to local management while allowing global transparency for global decision makers