How Suntory is Crafting Consumer-Centric Experiences with Discuss

“Since adopting Discuss, we’ve seen a dramatic uptick in our teams getting connected to consumers. In just a few months, over two hundred of our team members have engaged in virtual IDIs, really learning how to connect with consumers and understanding them and what’s going on in their lives.”

Sarah Tomasaitis, Director of Consumer & Shopper Insights

From the virtual webinar, Apathy to Empathy: The 3 Steps to Design for Human Centricity at Scale

Watch the full webinar here.

About Suntory Global Spirits

Inspiring the brilliance of life, by creating rich experiences, in harmony with nature

For over 200 years, Suntory Global Spirits has been renowned for crafting iconic bourbons, Japanese whiskies, and tequilas of exceptional quality. As the number one portfolio in bourbon and Japanese whiskey worldwide, Suntory is beloved by consumers globally. 

Consumer centricity is deeply ingrained in Suntory’s DNA. As a Japanese-owned company, the concept of “Gemba”—meaning the scene or the actual place—anchors their consumer empathy and is a practice expected across all levels of the organization. Employees are encouraged to visit bars, restaurants, hotels, and retailers to observe firsthand how consumers interact with their brands, enabling Suntory to truly understand their customers’ experiences by walking in their shoes.

To create these rich experiences, Suntory understands that they must deeply and more broadly understand their consumers as nuanced individuals, acknowledging that today’s consumers have a lot on their minds – juggling careers, families, and personal interests.

Challenge

Suntory’s recent consumer empathy program brought to light the historical roadblocks of achieving true human centricity on a global scale:

• It’s too hard.
  If you’re on your own for each step of the process – sourcing respondents, scheduling sessions, getting stakeholders to engage, executing the research, pinpointing and sharing insights – it can be overwhelmingly cumbersome.  

• It’s too complex.
  Given the sheer number of moving parts involved—multiple entities, technologies, tools, and third-parties—the process is far from simple and the complexity often makes the insights inaccessible across teams.
  
• It’s too expensive.
  If you’re paying for each interview, focus group, project or for additional support or services—along with the costs of managing multiple third parties and tools—it can get really expensive, really quickly.
  
• It takes too long to synthesize insights.
  Manually sifting through unstructured data like interview transcripts to distill insights can take weeks, or even months.

Faced with the limitations of traditional empathy methods, Suntory sought a scalable solution that enabled their teams to talk with a wide range of consumers easily, efficiently, and cost-effectively.

Solution

“Discuss allows our marketers to have one-on-one consumer experiences – connecting with a number of different consumers to build their empathy muscles, without having to transform into consumer insights professionals.”

Sarah Tomasaitis, Director of Consumer & Shopper Insights

Partnering with Discuss, the all-in-one platform for driving human centricity, Suntory Global Spirits is bringing their consumers to the heart of their strategic vision.

The easy button to connect directly with consumers.

Discuss offers asynchronous, live research, and previously recorded research all in one qual platform. Discuss’ unique approach gives customers unlimited access to qualitative research — allowing teams to engage regularly with their target audiences. This unlimited model also offers Suntory 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.

With Discuss, Suntory’s brand and marketing teams can essentially “shop” for consumer insights each month. After submitting an order form and indicating when they’re available, the Discuss team identifies and connects them with the consumer(s) who perfectly match their needs and scheduling availability – allowing them to easily talk to the right target audience for their specific business objectives.

“I realized how different his answers were from what the quant research said, so I would spend more time in interviews like this! I get the feeling that people may answer differently to an anonymous survey than in live interviews.”

Suntory North American Associate Brand Manager
(real takeaway following a consumer interview on Discuss)

Insights in an instant with the power of GenAI.

With Discuss’ suite of GenAI tools, Suntory’s teams are enabled to dramatically accelerate their time to insights, scaling consumer centricity like never before. In the past, Suntory’s researchers had to spend hours sifting through hours of recordings and data. Discuss transforms this process, summarizing research, highlighting project-level themes and quotes, in mere minutes.

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

One global human centricity hub.

Discuss offers a centralized and searchable research repository, making it easier for Suntory’s global teams to have in-depth conversations and capture insights, on-demand. This globally accessible hub consolidates all of their qualitative research efforts under one roof, from live interviews and asynchronous activities to past research (which can be uploaded to the platform), and GenAI-powered analysis and video editing tools.

Benefits of the Strategic Partnership with Discuss

This collaboration is helping Suntory Global Spirits unlock consumer centricity at scale.

• In 3 months, consumer closeness increased by 10x.
  Before Discuss, the idea of sending people to bars, hotels, and restaurants to get insights was great, but overly time-consuming. One person would have to travel around, spending hours in conversations at various places, and only that individual was hearing the insights. With Discuss, Suntory’s teams can connect with their consumers or retailers right from their desks and all of the insights gleaned are easily accessible to anyone in the organization.
  
  
• Brand & marketing leaders are using consumer insights to drive business strategy.
  What was simply not possible before, now, with Discuss, over 200 people at Suntory actively engaged in live virtual in-depth interviews with their consumers almost immediately upon roll out, whether speaking to them directly or observing the conversations. Brand and marketing leaders and now  incorporating real quotes and video clips directly from their consumers to guide their strategic business decisions.
  
  
• Research repository where all have 24/7 access.
  With Discuss, Suntory teams can capture their insights, ideas, and takeaways from consumer interviews—whether they’re leading the session or observing from the backroom. Previously, insights would often be confined to a single team member’s knowledge from the conversation with, say, the restaurant manager or bartender. Now, Suntory teams across the globe can understand the thoughts, opinions, and behaviors of their consumers and influencers, wherever, whenever. With a robust repository of insights and the ability to review recaps at both the project and individual session levels, anyone can tap into these consumer insights to identify key themes, address business questions, and inform their strategies.
  
  
• Anyone, anywhere, can have summaries created in an instant with relevant quotes automatically pulled related to key themes.
  With a click, Suntory teams can leverage a best-in-class suite of GenAI tools to mine insights from conversations with their consumers, uncovering themes that might be overlooked in manual analysis and revealing new opportunities for their categories and brands. With this next gen tech, anyone is able to extract key insights and Suntory is enabled to stay agile, making data-driven decisions that are grounded in real consumer insights.

“As we’re building this insights repository of videos in Discuss we can use their AI for meta learnings and look for things that maybe we’re not seeing on an individual basis but the AI can really help us to understand and detect those themes that can impact our categories and brands.” 

Sarah Tomasaitis, Director of Consumer & Shopper Insights

By partnering with Discuss, Suntory Global Spirits has not only overcome the challenges of traditional consumer empathy but has transformed its approach to human centricity. As Suntory continues to inspire the brilliance of life, Discuss remains a vital partner in their journey to crafting rich experiences.