How Danone Gained 6 Years of Consumer Understanding in 6 Months with Discuss

“With Discuss, we’ve gained more in-depth understanding of our consumers in the past 6 months than the past 6 years. This isn’t just about insights teams. It’s about the marketing teams, sales teams, and every team speaking directly, one-on-one with consumers.”

– Elizabeth Ackerly, Sr. Director Strategic Insights & Analytics at Danone

From the Quirk’s London event presentation, How Danone Transformed its Approach to People Centricity in 6 Months

Watch the full session here.

About Danone

For over a century, Danone has been bringing health through food to as many people as possible through their unique range of products. They’re recognized as the global leader in dairy and plant-based products, and rank second in packaged waters and infant nutrition. Their portfolio includes beloved brands like Activia, Alpro, Danonino, Evian, Aptamil, and Fortimel, which can be found in more than 120 markets worldwide.

“Listening to consumers and talking to them as people always reinforces my conviction that consumer connection needs to be a part of our Danone way of doing business and should be done much more systematically using the efficient and effective tools and resources at our fingertips – both online and offline.”

– Antoine de Saint-Affrique, Danone CEO

Challenge

Danone wanted to fuel insight-led growth by getting closer to the people they serve. To do that, they needed a way to connect teams directly with consumers, scale those connections globally, and make rich, in-the-moment feedback a part of everyday decisions across the organization. But the path wasn’t without its challenges:

• “Always-on” market insights are time-consuming and require a lot of effort.
  Danone had no shortage of understanding the “what” from their quantitative data, but understanding the “why” felt out of reach. As a global organization, Danone needed a powerful and scalable tool that made in-depth customer feedback not only fast, but also cost-effective and easy for any team to connect with and understand their consumers anytime, anywhere.
  

• Creating a global insights hub is difficult because data is often siloed and hard to share across teams and regions.
  When customer insights live in separate tools, slide decks, or the knowledge lies only with the insights team, they lose impact. Danone needed a centralized, scalable way to capture, store, and share insights that could serve as a single source of truth for consumer understanding for their teams and brands across dozens of countries.
  
  
• Many teams across the organization aren’t trained or confident in having direct conversations with consumers.
  For roles outside of insights, speaking directly with consumers can feel intimidating. Danone needed a partner that empowered their teams across the organization with the tools, training, and support they needed to feel confident engaging with their audiences.

Solution

“We knew we needed some sort of scalable way to make a shift in our organization to ensure that consumer connectivity became a part of our DNA and when we found Discuss with it all under one roof, that’s where the magic started to happen.”

– Elizabeth Ackerly, Sr. Director Strategic Insights & Analytics at Danone

Danone partnered with Discuss to launch their people-centricity program, “Consumer Love”, to bring real-time consumer feedback into every corner of the business with a scalable, global solution.

One global market insights platform

Discuss offers a globally accessible hub that brings all of Danone’s consumer connections under one roof—human-led interviews, self-paced research activities, and past research (which can be uploaded to the platform), to AI agents that support the entire research lifecycle to video editing and analysis tools. This centralized and searchable research repository makes it easier for Danone’s global teams to access insights on-demand, easily bringing consumer voices into their decisions.

With Discuss’ human-led feedback session, even Danone’s most senior executives, including their CEO, are directly engaged in these consumer conversations like never before. And with self-paced feedback activities, Danone can have their consumers complete tasks like in-home usage tests, unboxing, shop-alongs, and more all at their own convenience for richer, authentic insights.

Actionable insights in an instant with the power of AI Agents.

With Discuss’ AI agents, Danone is dramatically accelerating their time to insights, scaling people centricity like never before. Rather than teams spending hours sifting through hours of recordings, transcripts, and notes, Discuss’ Insights Agent does the heavy lifting to analyze research. Whether human-led interviews, self-paced feedback activities, or uploaded research, the AI surfaces themes, quotes, and links findings to research goals in minutes.

Discuss’ Agents also breaks down language barriers for Danone’s global empathy projects – summarizing interviews across multiple languages and countries.

“We’re all strapped for time, so having a way to quickly synthesize large volumes of data is critical. We use the Insights Agent as a first pass—it pulls themes, surfaces key verbatims, and gives us an initial read we can build on. Of course, human interpretation still matters, but this has been essential for speeding up our process and making insights more immediately clear and actionable.”

—Elizabeth Ackerly, Sr. Director, Strategic Insights & Analytics, Danone

Unlimited research model that incentivizes more consumer connections. 

Discuss’ unique approach gives Danone unlimited access to in-depth customer feedback — allowing teams to engage regularly with their target audiences without incurring additional costs. This unlimited model also offers Danone the essential services and support they need for all of their research projects including live tech support on every session, recruiting respondents, project management, and more.

Results

“One of the biggest benefits of the Discuss platform is how fast we can iterate with it. We can have conversations to test a hypothesis, learn from it, and immediately dig deeper with new questions—without being burdened by the usual time or budget barriers. So it allowed us to understand much more than we originally intended.”
– Elizabeth Ackerly, Sr. Director Strategic Insights & Analytics at Danone

Over the course of just six months, Danone rewired how their organization connects with consumers and drives insight-led growth. And with Discuss, they’re doing it faster, smarter, and at scale. 

• More in-depth consumer understanding in 6 months than the previous 6 years.
  Danone used Discuss to uncover rich consumer insights faster that are shaping key strategies. In one example, feedback sessions about sustainability revealed a key tension that consumers want to make responsible choices but often feel conflicted by convenience. Even more importantly, Danone learned that consumers expect corporations to guide and support them on their sustainability journey.
  
  In another case, conversations with consumers in Kazakhstan showed how Ramadan’s timing influences Danone’s product needs: warmer months boost demand for hydration, while in cooler months consumers prefer more satiating products like yogurts. These nuanced insights are helping Danone fine-tune product positioning based on real-time understanding of their audiences.
  
  
• Over 800 team members engaged in conversations with 1,000+ consumers in 25 countries.
  Danone’s teams now have direct access to real consumer voices across the world from Morocco to Japan to Kazakhstan, something that was simply not possible before. But this wasn’t just a research initiative, it was a complete cultural shift to being people-centric. Teams across the organization are now actively building empathy by hearing directly from the people they serve to make smarter decisions.
  

• Real consumer voices are being brought to the heart of every decision.
  Using Discuss, Danone’s teams are capturing powerful “aha” moments from consumer feedback sessions—over 5,000 so far. These easily shareable video clips are being brought into strategic meetings, enriching presentations, and shifting internal mindsets by giving voice to the emotional truth of their consumers’ experiences and guiding strategic decisions.
  
  “There’s a huge difference between showing a data point and playing a clip of a real person saying it. When our leadership hears directly from the consumer, it resonates in a way that data on a slide just can’t. Discuss’s save moment and highlight reel features have completely changed the way we communicate insights internally.”

• 600+ business questions answered with the power of AI agents. 
  Danone teams used Discuss’ Insights Agent to provide answers to hundreds of their most pressing business questions—instantly making sense of these large scale, global customer conversations. Insights Agent gives teams a valuable head start by handling the heavy lifting of analysis, allowing them to focus their time and energy on more strategic work. Now, Danone teams can move faster from insight to action while spotting new opportunities, validating hypotheses, and more easily bring the voice of the customer into strategic conversations with the power of AI agents.

By partnering with Discuss, Danone’s people-centricity program is leading the future of market insights with faster, deeper understanding that fuels customer-centric campaigns, products, and programs while also sparking internal excitement and love around Danone’s mission and brands.