Marketing Procurement

Pitch Plus: The role of marketing procurement in driving insights

The Perfect Partner

“The insights are transparently shared across all competitors to enhance any insight capability they possess, revealing dramatically which agency partners are insight fluent and better suited to partner with.”

Freemavens is a market research and digital insights company looking at “delivering revelations, not observations”.

As part of MSQ family, they work with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, and L’Oréal.

Part of their offering is to help their clients understand consumer behaviour and find actionable insights, which develop revenue-generating strategies. 

Andrzej Moyseowicz, Founder and Innovation Director, defines these insights as “a revelation relating to human behaviour, perception or emotion that drives action and unlocks growth”. 

He takes a broad definition of growth, which can be from the perspective of the person and/or businesses the brand engages with or beyond. In practice, this means ensuring the brand is on the right track, making sure the next strategic move is clear and also innovating to try new things.

As a result, the role of procurement is crucial, as it touches all elements of the business.

How is marketing procurement involved? 

For Moyseowicz, the role of procurement is key to delivering insights. Marketing procurement in particular can justify spend in a variety of ways.

Framing it as “return on insights” rather than the traditional return on investment (ROI), Moyseowicz says that the most immediate return to be shown by marketing procurement is empathy. Despite calling this “a bit lame to some”, he says their solutions provide clients with the data that gives them empathy, allowing them to connect with their clients on a deeper level.

He continues, “actors within a business will ensure that before they act and spend budgets, they know there is a connection between what brands hope for and what consumers actually want and need”.

This is underpinned by the fact that the cost of using the Freemavens solution is far less than the marketing investment for most clients, thereby making it the most pragmatic use of time and money. 

Moyseowicz goes on to explain how a longer term return comes from leveraging insights across many stakeholders and “brutally assessing effectiveness”. He says, “Not all insights are acted upon. Not all strategies are well executed. But the crusade for insight accountability is paramount for all of us to learn and get better”.

By investing in the Freemavens insights, procurement teams can take a more active role in understanding the brand and having an impact.

Pitch plus

Whilst Freemavens claims to provide valuable insight to their clients, how does this actually work in reality? 

Firstly, they shed light on the gaps between business strategy and the priorities of consumers. This means that brands can make more calculated and clear decisions with data to back it up. Whilst there is always an element of the ‘unknown’, Moyseowicz believes that teams can give themselves the best chance of success by following an evidence driven strategy.

Crucially, he believes that Freemavens don’t need to. They have no commercial interest in the eventual agency partner, they just want to ensure clients get the best one for their campaign. He explains that “objectivity in the right hands is a super power”, and what their data does is inform decision makers rather than telling them how to make them.

This is where Freemavens can be framed as a form of “pitch plus”.

Moyseowicz explains, “Freemavens can be a pitch plus. Procurement invests in a 4 week insights sprint for all agencies participating in the RFP”. 

These insights are to fuel the particular activation area, for example media or creative. A recent piece of work was to generate audience insights for a behaviour change campaign. “Our task was to create as many audience and language insights from a range of datasets to fuel a future programme of creative development that would be carried out by another team”. Essentially, enriching the pitch brief with deep dive insights that then activation partners leverage in their submissions.

He continues, “The insights are transparently shared across all competitors to enhance any insight capability they possess while also revealing dramatically which agency partners are insight fluent and better suited to partner with internal insight capability.”

As touched upon, with the budgetary and spend risk of activation partners many multiples greater than the investment in Freemaven, Moyseowicz sees that procurement knows that insight fluency and capability is variable at best in these activation partners.

Continuing, Moyseowicz states, “It is too easy to pitch with no insights, fluency or capability. Why not maximise the value of potential pitches by empowering them with insights generated by an independent partner? That investment not only makes ideas and strategies in the pitch more valuable and grounded, it pre-primes the winner for faster integration and effectiveness”. 

The insight landscape 

Moyseowicz sees that the market has changed and evolved since he formed the company in 2013. “The market has matured from single source data expertise to strategic insight delivery with hybrid agency teams. I am hoping that the same excitement around agility will define the next era of insights partnership, where agile insight discovery is more closely aligned to creative and strategy development”, he says.

He also believes that the level of insight that brands need is a lot higher than ever before; this coincides with the explosion of digital content. 

However, he believes that trapping an insight in one department not only limits potential strategic action but often leads to duplicate spending as many research requirements are shared beyond individual departments. 

At his company, he sees “generous insights projected across disciplines expands the potential benefactors and also maximises the shelf life of insights”. 

In his view, the only parties that benefit in doing the opposite are companies that sell research like a “perishable commodity”. The key to success for brands is to utilise their teams and the ability to gain insights. 

Acknowledging the sometimes complex relationship with procurement, he says “we need to treat procurement as the humans they are. We’re an insights agency professing to listen and understand human needs, behaviours and attitudes – we do the same with the professionals we work with. We listen and understand their needs in order to deliver value to them. It’s not a game to win – that’s not how we operate.”

Andrzej Moyseowicz is the Founder and Innovation Director of Freemavens.