Syngenta Market Research
Syngenta wanted to completely transform its digital marketing processes, but when you have 49,000 employees in over 100 countries, you need to do your homework first.
Seeds of change
BACKGROUND
Syngenta is one of the leading global agricultural companies, headquartered in Basel. Their ambition is to help safely feed the world while taking care of the planet. Syngenta is part of Syngenta Group, with over 49,000 employees in more than 100 countries working to transform how crops are grown. Their leading products include crop protection and seeds.
Transforming a giant
THE CHALLENGE
Giants like Syngenta don’t get to where they are without constantly looking at how they can improve – and they don’t stay where they are without doing the same. In 2019, Syngenta asked for our assistance in their ‘Fit for Digital’ project – a deep analysis into their global marketing operations with a view to improving and equipping them for a digital transformation.
Syngenta wanted to transition from having digital operations and marketing as separate entities, to marketing becoming digital. Making any change for a company of Syngenta’s size is not easy, but such an important shift required high-level research to be conducted throughout their company’s vast empire.
For a project this size we knew we would need a layered approach, before presenting everything back in a findings and recommendations report.
Painting bigger pictures
THE WORK
The project was split into 3 parts. The first was a quantitative survey – quantitative meaning that questions had yes/no and multiple choice answers. The survey was sent to ca. 100 Syngenta marketing staff across the globe to gain information on all aspects of the digital marketing process. This included use of the brand toolkit, other internal tools and why they were/were not used, channels that were being exploited, partnerships they had, agencies they were using and more.
Once this information was obtained we moved on to part 2 – qualitative discussion. This saw us ask more broad questions to local market representatives, building on answers from part 1 and allowing us to paint a bigger picture.
Finally, part 3 involved us bringing all of this information together. We prepared a presentation which included an executive summary, a methodology, quantitative survey findings, a summary of key points, qualitative survey findings, summary of recommendations and findings and insights compared.
Trustworthy suggestions
THE RESULTS
After 3 months of gathering and analysing input from approximately 100 marketers at various levels, surveyed across 10 markets, with over a dozen phone interviews conducted with teams on 3 different continents, we had a massive amount of data.
This enabled us to present what improvements Syngenta needed to make to maximise efficiencies and be marketing fit for the digital age. Suggestions were made in areas such as digital strategy, marketing asset creation and distribution, UX, SEO, owned channels, brand toolkits, messaging, social media advertising, influencer outreach and more.