Insight & strategy Weve now set up what we call our insights distillery, which is like a repository for all of our research insight documents with the brand and marketing teams, and sometimes the commercial and finance teams too, when it comes to decision-making. A lot of the information that we provide feeds into how our senior management is rolling out the brand-building philosophy within the business to discover how to develop great positioning and drivers of growth, as well as how you step over [any] barriers. Drilling down into how the research function works at Beam Suntory, Thomas enthusiastically describes another recent innovation. Weve now set up what we call our insights distillery, which is like a repository for all of our research insight documents. What it means is if Im sitting in France, not only can I find out if theres ever been any specific research for that country, but I can use this tool to discover that we might have done something similar in Spain, so I can take some learnings from it. As an organisation we are trying to reduce spend on new research and increase spend on having people with the brains to leverage what already exists. Its all about the democratisation of knowledge, agrees Baxter. It effectively puts paid to the can you just requests, as in Can you just pull that report for me? With our new system, you have the ability to find it yourself. In an example of using local market knowledge and funnelling that into overall insights, the company has conducted research into moderation and the potential for beverages with low or no-alcohol aligned with consumption patterns. This is something that is entirely 100% insight-based, working with insights from four quite different countries, a mixture of ad hoc and desk research, all of those things are needed to start to build a global strategy. The fact that insights is driving that kind of strategy just shows how important it is and how taken up its been, Thomas says. Driven by competitor analysis that shows a number of manufacturers are claiming that as much as 20% of 38 Impact ISSUE 39 2022_pp36-39 I&S Beam Suntory.indd 38 23/09/2022 15:17