Development and Implementation of Marketing Research Database

Project: Automation of Wrigley’s Marketing Research activities in EMEA region

Technologies: Lotus Domino Designer 5.0

The Wrigley Company is the world's largest manufacturer of chewing gum and home to some of the best-known brands in the world, including Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, Big Red, and Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Wrigley gum is a part of everyday life in more than 150 countries around the world. In the U.S., Wrigley sells nearly half of all gum. In Europe, Wrigley accounts for about 50 % of all Chewing Gum profits. In 18 European markets, Wrigley is the absolute market-leader with shares of 80% or higher. *

Marketing research activities, such as consumer preferences studies, marketing trends monitoring, new products and advertisement campaign testing, are seen as tasks of high priority in the Wrigley Company. Marketing research activities are planned and coordinated by the company’s Market Research Department, with EMEA regional branches located in Germany, UK, the Czech Republic, and Russia. The increase in research volume and its diversity in EMEA region required to built a single corporate marketing research database.

Therefore, in the middle of 2002 the Russian Marketing Research branch initiated the development of a marketing research workflow automation system. The system implementation was scheduled to be started from the Moscow office with further rollout to entire EMEA region. The following goals were to be achieved through the system implementation:

• Common Marketing Research Department’s database for storage of undergoing and completed marketing research projects with advanced search tools
• Automation of new marketing research projects initialization and launch
• Notification of Wrigley’s employees on the events related to current projects and accumulation of employee’s feedback

Based on Wrigley’s tender results, Aplana Software was selected as the implementation partner that has proven project methodology and broad workflow automation systems development experience based on IBM platform.

Solution

The first stage of marketing database development project consisted of the following functionality implementation:

• Automation of market research request filing and approval process, initiated by one of Wrigley’s division;
• Research preparation process unification (opening a project, building project team, sending requests to research agencies)
• Project success monitoring, storing all project related materials in the single database On-line help and documentation

After almost a year of successful operation of the system in the Moscow office, a decision was made to transfer the technology to all EMEA branches of Wrigley’s Market Research Department.

During next stage of project implementation coordinated from Munich office, the system was enhanced by new view and search capabilities, improved consumer research forms, flexible data access control rules, user forum created, and some other improvements.

From technological standpoint, the database architecture was changed to a distributed one: the synchronized replications of a single database are now used by all Wrigley market analysts in EMEA region.

Implementation Results

Currently Market Research Database is used by all employees of Wrigley’s Market Research Department in EMEA region located in Germany, UK, the Czech Republic, and Russia In the nearest future the system is going to be proposed for automation of marketing research activities globally. Plans for the nearest future are to use Marketing Research Database in Wrigley’s marketing divisions worldwide.

The results of the system implementation are higher effectiveness of Wrigley’s market research activities due to a faster launch of new research projects and more flexible access to market research results for company employees.

According to Donald Scholz, who coordinated the second stage of the project from Munich office, the HQ of Market Research Department in EMEA region:

“The implementation of the Market Research Database spared us from routine activities and let us focus on research goals. Besides, the use of Lotus technology advantages such as collaborative tools and knowledge management capabilities let us make research results more accessible to Wrigley’s staff.”