Customer Stories

How Qualitative Research Software improves Brand Culture

How Belgium’s Leading Provider of Converged Connected Entertainment and Business Solutions Changed Their Culture Through Conversation

The Challenges

Telenet is the leading provider of converged connected entertainment and business solutions in Belgium. However, they face a common challenge: they have a small market research team (3 people), despite having a rather large marketing team (150+ people). As a result, the market research team was left doing a lot of project management, leading to less time for strategic, insights-driven guidance and actual activation of insights.

Telenet’s market research team is deeply familiar with their consumers, but they aren’t the team actually responsible for producing products, go-to-market and ad campaigns. Their challenge is to continuously update marketing teams on the changing trends and thinking of consumers. With a small team, this is often hard to scale.

The Solution

The market research team spearheaded an initiative that would enable marketers to speak directly with consumers. The conversations served multiple purposes: from validating assumptions, to pain and gain analysis, and pure exploration.

Wanting to change the cultural fabric of the organization to be more consumer-centric, it was critical for the initiative to be scalable in a way that would encourage marketers to ask questions as soon as they had them. They leveraged their pre-existing network of subscribers around Belgium and used Discuss.io to have conversations around the country. In having the conversations online, the marketing team could ask questions quickly and casually, from their desks or homes, without losing time to travel.

The Results

When marketers were empowered to connect with consumers directly, they quickly developed a deeper understanding of consumers’ opinions, needs, and preferences. The initiative had a powerful multiplier effect. The conversations made the marketing team enthusiastic about the impact of their work, encouraging many to share their learnings with others on their team.

Ultimately, these conversations allowed the team to sharpen their creative assets and product positioning, test marketing communications, better understand the category, and become inspired by consumers.

“Using Discuss.io, I am able to empower my stakeholders, about 150 marketers within the Telenet residential marketing team, to own the voice of the consumer. As a market researcher, it’s my job to activate insights in the business, and with the right guidance, now I can. Discuss.io is an easy to tool to get inspired by real consumer feedback. When a marketer has a question, they can validate it with a consumer in a couple of days. This approach has reduced the gap between the marketer and the consumer.

If we make products that fit consumers’ needs, people will become more relevant to people and our brands will grow.”

– Caroline Verkest, Senior Market researcher at Telenet

About Discuss.io

Discuss.io is the leading live video solution for enabling brands to discover actionable insights and build consumer connections at scale. Brands use Discuss.io to have frequent and direct conversations with consumers around the world, leading to deepened empathy and understanding, better products, and more effective marketing.

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