Driving success for Japan’s top skincare brand
SKIM helps skincare brand TAKAMI optimize its subscription model through stakeholder interviews, collaborative innovation, and conjoint analysis.
Global companies are drowning in information, and navigating this labyrinth to guide strategic plans can be daunting. How do you synthesize and interpret mountains of intelligence to reveal the insights you need for greater certainty and precision in decision-making?
Danone’s Specialized Nutrition Unit recently asked SKIM to help their stakeholders find a strategic path forward by providing a concise, actionable resource with consolidated wisdom from 80,000 words of fragmented, diverse information . . . in just 3 weeks’ time.
“I approached SKIM as a Danone long-term partner with strong expertise in our specialized nutrition categories. I could trust that they would bring this together in a compelling way for my internal stakeholders.”
– Kasia Królik | Global Head of Strategicy, Insights & Analytics for Danone’s Specialized Nutrition Unit
Kasia and Sarah Raoufian, SKIM Research Director in the UK, shared their journey to turn isolated knowledge into a powerful, cohesive narrative to drive action for sustainable growth.
Danone’s challenge: Use the right intelligence to inform business decisions
To maintain its competitive edge in the dynamic food and beverage industry, Danone consistently monitors consumer preferences, market trends and competitive strategies. Their Specialized Nutrition Unit, which provides early life and advanced medical nutrition products and services, additionally requires an understanding of healthcare professionals (a diverse group in itself), caregivers and payers (healthcare insurance and government institutions).
Danone had amassed an abundance of data and insights, along with information from internal departments, suppliers, manufacturers and more. They needed SKIM’s expertise to synthesize and interpret a mass of complex information and translate it into knowledge designed to inform their decision-making.
Danone’s Specialized Nutrition Unit had planned an in-person business wargaming workshop with category managers, marketing and insights leads from key European markets, to help their teams make faster and more holistic decisions using competitive perspectives. To prepare, they wanted a briefing book to align participants, powered by insights from 80,000 words of data.
SKIM’s knowledge synthesis approach and process
Incorporating this information would allow Danone to better anticipate market trends, understand consumer needs and innovate in a proactive way. Without it, they risked missing opportunities and inefficiently using resources.
SKIM created a briefing book that would:
- Serve as a single point of reference for different stakeholders
- Connect the dots to identify critical insights and predict developing trends
- Cohesively present critical information for easy understanding and application
- Inspire creative thinking and collaboration with an engaging format
Here’s how SKIM developed a briefing book that stakeholders would feel compelled to read, in less than 3 weeks.
Step 1: Identify the objectives
SKIM began the journey by identifying stakeholders’ needs:
- Who would read this briefing book?
- What are their knowledge gaps?
- What are the critical insights they need to make decisions?
After uncovering Danone’s strategic goals, the team identified key metrics and areas of focus.
Step 2: Organize the information
SKIM began by categorizing, grouping similar types of information together, and identifying key themes that would guide the analysis.
“This process was crucial,” said Sarah. “It allowed us to move from a state of overwhelming complexity to one of clarity and focus.”
Step 3: Partner with AI
With generative AI, anyone can create insights, ideas and content. But here the team understood the value of expert curation. SKIM commenced a deep dive with a series of comprehensive prompts, but before long, they encountered instances of hallucinations (answers that felt strange or misleading).
“I nearly wrote off this AI experiment,” shared Sarah. “But our experts were able to use the hallucination instances to fine-tune the model and it ultimately pulled out some interesting themes.”
Step 4: Interview stakeholders
Returning to the human-centric approach, interviews with key stakeholders were a vital part of SKIM’s process to infuse hard data with qualitative understanding.
“The interviews unearthed knowledge gaps, validated themes, verified our understanding of the competitive landscape and created a clear path to creating the final briefing book,” explained Sarah. “Plus, the interviews helped with buy-in and built anticipation for the wargaming workshop itself.”
Step 5: Develop the briefing book
Throughout the process, SKIM’s team focused on what the stakeholders needed to know, making the content easy to digest, and crafted it to inspire creative thinking. The output included market snapshots, regional narratives, clear and actionable recommendations, and a thoughtful structure and design for easy navigation and sharing.
With a narrative focus, clear recommendations, and an easily navigable format, the briefing book proved to be essential to the team and enhanced alignment on decisions during the wargaming workshop.
“This empathy-forward approach allowed us to develop a compelling briefing book that was not just a regurgitation of learnings, but rather a powerful fusion,” said Sarah. “By focusing on what mattered, we delivered a resource that made a significant impact.”
The outcome: From siloes to synthesis
The end goal was to prepare Danone stakeholders to put themselves in competitors’ shoes, decide on the right path forward for the company, and make clear business decisions during the workshop.
“The feedback from our cross-functional stakeholders was overwhelmingly positive,” said Kasia. “Comments like: ‘This is now my bible’ and ‘This book will be my go-to for years to come’ underscore its profound value and enduring relevance.”
Establishing a unified knowledge base has yielded several long-term benefits for Danone:
- Alignment on strategic direction
- Efficient collaboration on evidence-based decisions
- Increased longevity and reusability of insights
- Expanded learning for other teams, markets and innovation
“SKIM did much more than produce a report,” Kasia emphasized. “They delivered insights and strategic implications that had the power to open new doors for us, with the potential to transform our business.”
Key takeaways
Consolidating knowledge within your organization helps to navigate market changes with greater confidence, but it’s not always straightforward. Below are takeaways to support your next initiative:
- Pair AI with expert curation for data translation and triangulation: AI can help to efficiently summarize and identify patterns in large data sets. But remember, human expertise is needed to interpret the insights, contextualize them for the business application and weave data into compelling narratives.
- Don’t overlook usability: The power of knowledge synthesis lies in its potential to inspire creativity and facilitate collaboration. To achieve that, the output must be clear and user-friendly.
- Create a single source of truth: Involve cross-functional stakeholders throughout the process to capture what people want and need to make a variety of operational and strategic decisions.
- Assemble a dynamic team: Include experts with complementary skills for the best results. Insights teams need to become data translators, not just data collectors.
- Grow AI literacy: Infuse your organization with AI expertise to derive actionable insights from complex information. Prioritize time for training and model tuning.
How can your company transform fragmented and siloed information into unified wisdom for greater precision and certainty?
If you’d like to learn more about how this approach can meet your goals, schedule a consultation with our experts.
