How Heineken ditched DIY for an AI-native insights operating system

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With Heineken’s Head of Insight, Media & Innovation, Mary McMahon and Bounce’s Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler.

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Insights leaders are using increased efficiency to spend more time diagnosing, thinking, absorbing, persuading and driving tangible business change. 

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The pressure to do more with less is compounding in the era of AI. Teams are dealing with tighter budgets, timeline reductions and external uncertainty. This is why Heineken’s Head of Insight, Media & Innovation, Mary McMahon ditched DIY tools in favour of an insights operating system. A system that allowed her to be agile and to scale her projects up or down based on her needs. 

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Mary took to the stage at Quirk’s Dallas, alongside our Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Charlie Butler, to share her experience. Here’s a recap.

The big squeeze

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Insights leaders are feeling the squeeze on budgets, on time and on the ability to plan ahead. Mary described her biggest frustrations right now: “On the 1st of January, I have a pretty decent research budget. By the 2nd of January, by the time the PO’s have been raised [for our full-service agency partners], the budget is a lot smaller [for unexpected requests].”

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“This makes the budget a real pain point for me, along with the level of uncertainty at the moment. If I use a full-service agency and go into fieldwork for a couple of months, so much can change between briefing the project and getting the debrief.”

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“Lastly, from a personal perspective and I’m sure everyone’s the same here, how scheduled we are. Our times. Our calendars. Trying to find time to think, to absorb the research and to come out with clear insight.”

A fork in the road

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This squeeze in time and budget has been exacerbated by the fact insights leaders only have two paths to choose from. Full-service or service-free. Full-service agencies have incredible researchers in-house and are well-suited to handle large, in-depth studies, because of their context and expertise. But their business model is not designed to deliver speed and cost efficiency. 

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“We have strong relationships with our full-service agencies. As a global organisation, we’re mandated to use them for certain things, like innovation and market rollouts. The times I choose not to use them are when agility is key. If I want to test a hypothesis or check the sentiment of a brand, I’ll use a company like Bounce.” said Mary. 

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“DIY tools, on the other hand - the service-free option - “entered the space to try and pursue speed and cost efficiency, so the term ‘quick and dirty’ came along. This bred the idea that expertise was a thing you couldn’t get fast. The perspective that ‘this project turned around too quickly, so I don’t trust it’. But research is an emotions business, a trust business, a credibility business” said Charlie. 

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“I’ve met with insights leaders across the UK and Ireland and they said ‘we’re being forced to use DIY because of budgets, but if we could have the expertise, we would always take it’. There’s a very small number of research teams who have the resources, the autonomy and the control to want full DIY.”

A line you should cross

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These two paths force a trade-off. Speed and cost efficiency without expertise through DIY tools or expertise without speed and cost efficiency through full-service agencies. Mary’s ideal solution removes this trade-off, so she can scale her projects up or down based on her needs. This is exactly why she ditched DIY tools in favour of an insights operating system to complement her agency partnerships.

“It always feels like there has to be a compromise. Choose two of these, but you can’t choose three (speed, cost efficiency and expertise). We use a lot of full-service agencies and local agencies and we’re really happy with them. But what stood out with Bounce is that we can still get access to research consultants. They poached a lot of experienced researchers from some of the big agencies, so I get access to them but with speed and affordability.”

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“For example, one of my colleagues was testing some RTD’s and a new pack design. We created a questionnaire, but we were very busy. You know, you’re writing the questionnaire and your Microsoft Teams is popping up and your emails are coming in and it’s hard to focus. We wrote it, we put it in and we thought we were happy with it. But one of the research consultants at Bounce proactively gave us his perspective. “With what you’re trying to find out here, if you ask those three questions in a slightly different way, you’ll get better results”. We trusted him, we changed it and got the results we actually needed.”

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“Another problem brand-side is the pain of not being able to decide on something. But because of his guidance, we had a clear winner. So we were able to make the decision and move on and now we’re rolling it out.”

“Ultimately, I work in a very competitive industry where lots can change in the space of 12 months and I have a small team of 5. Sometimes I just need something really quickly. We were naming an event, for example. We’re all millennials trying to name a really cool event for Gen Z, so we needed something fast.”

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“On the other hand, if anyone from my team is on annual leave for a few weeks, I need to lean on a vendor more and have a solution that can scale up. So, instead of just getting the dashboard, I’d also ask one of Bounce’s research consultants to pull out insights for me, put it in a deck or scale it all the way up to a debrief.”

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The first 10 metres and the last 10 metres

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There’s a lot of talk about what AI can do for efficiency, but less talk about what insights leaders are able to do with the time they’re saving. 

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Instead of being bogged down in project set-up and inputs, insights leaders are carving out more time to better know their business and diagnose the problem at hand, to craft stronger stories and strategic recommendations for stakeholders, to tie consumer understanding back to real business change.  

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Mary shared an example of this: “That’s one of the reasons we really value Bounce. The agility and speed. I put a research request into the team a couple of weeks ago on a Thursday and by Monday, I had the full report, accessible on the dashboard. So I knew, on Monday, I was getting it, and I was able to carve out time in my diary on Monday and Tuesday to absorb it and look at the insights from my brand’s perspective.”

“All of our clients operate on the assumption that they should put their time and effort into the first 10 metres and the last 10 metres of a study,” added Charlie. 

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“Focusing upfront on business question diagnosis and prioritisation. What are you actually trying to do? What decision are you trying to make? That’s the first 10 metres and that requires a huge amount of intellect, curiosity and context. We’ll never be able to do this with technology. On the backend, even though we have amazing consultants on hand, your role is to socialise these insights, story-tell them and get people to listen.”

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Mary’s top takeaway: Control the controllables

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“We’re standing here in March and I have no idea what I won’t know in August, September, October. I can’t plan for that at all. What I can do is plan a bit of budget and be aware that the world will be a different place by then, so I can be agile and shoot something at speed.”

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“The research question we put in with Bounce on Thursday, our Managing Director got in touch on Friday and asked if we’d have a topline or even a sense of the answer before the meeting she had the following Wednesday. We were able to go back and say we’d have the full report on the dashboard by Monday. We can also share the dashboard with anyone, even with our other research agencies.”

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Charlie’s top takeaway: Put your foot down

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“Demand more from your partners. I’m not going to say you should work with Bounce. There are some incredible vendors out there, and I’d recommend a lot of those companies. But what I will say is demand more of them. AI is the most deflationary technology out there, so the 90% margins and the seat-based pricing models shouldn’t exist anymore.” said Charlie. 

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“Why do we allow the team at Heineken to share access to their insights with the entire organisation [at no extra cost]? Because we’ve built so much automation and efficiency into the system that whether they need us for 5 minutes or 5 hours, it doesn’t impact our margins. Demand this level of transparency from your partners.”

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“If it’s an agency and you know their core competency isn’t technology, ask them who the technology partners they’re assessing are. If it’s a data collection agency, ask them about their sources and the data quality systems they’re using. There are so many good solutions in the space now and they’re here to serve you, so ask more of them.”

What is the insights operating system?

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The insights operating system exists for insights leaders like Mary, who need speed and cost efficiency to stay agile throughout the year, but also value access to experienced researchers to provide support on inputs and outputs.

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It’s for insights leaders who may use full-service agencies for large, in-depth studies, but need a solution to help them meet unexpected research requests without sacrificing time or budget. 

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In short, the insights operating system has two parts. First is the Retrieval Engine. Studies show over a third of all the research done at an enterprise level is duplicative - a huge waste of budget and effort. The Retrieval Engine unifies all of your past research and enables you to ask questions of it in plain text to see if the answer you need already exists. No need to dig through slides, scan datasheets or rely on your memory.

“Knowledge management, like many DIY tools, failed, because it was like a Google Search for your information. It would simply tell you which of your reports mentioned ‘drinkers in Mexico’. But it didn’t give you the actual answer.” said Charlie. 

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“Only recently has it been possible to ingest structured and unstructured data and auto-tag it. We can integrate into your central data infrastructure and understand the context [behind your question], so instead of telling you where the answer might be, we can give you the answer.” 

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For the questions your past research can’t answer, the insights operating system runs a gap analysis and builds a custom study using the Research Engine, which is run and delivered at speed by your dedicated Bounce consultants.

“One of the critical components for an operating system is that it can be independent. For a lot of our clients, we’ll tell them the gaps in their knowledge and they’ll go off and run the research with a different partner.”

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“We’re not saying we can do absolutely everything. When speed is important and the need is quant, we will design a survey ready to go live for you in a matter of hours. But if you need deep qual, you can take the brief and take it straight to your qual partner. You may not need to run any research at all, you may need to buy Nielsen data. The point here is independence. The clarity of what you know and what you don’t know.”