DS Smith, a leading European packaging company

Firstly could you explain your market intelligence role within DS Smith ?

I have been working for DS Smith for the last two and a half years. DS Smith is a British company and one of the European leaders in packaging. I work on medium term innovation which includes a wide range of activities: project building, partner identification, project management and market intelligence. As part of my role I have structured market intelligence in the company in order to meet internal needs and requests. Firstly this meant competitive intelligence to follow key competitors and other companies in the sector, but also to follow key topics in the packaging sector such as the fight against single-use plastic and blockchain which will have a strong impact on our business. This intelligence initially helped us to pick up on emerging new competitors and identify partners, and was extended to sales intelligence and innovation. Thanks to the monitoring carried out we edit a newsletter with a content which is adapted to the expectations and needs of colleagues and helps us to give them very relevant content. To ensure that the information monitored and shared is even more relevant, we specifically picked out the colleagues who were interested by this type of service.

How exactly is market intelligence organised at DS Smith ?

From a hierarchical point of view market intelligence is in the marketing and innovation department. This is due to the fact that market intelligence is expected and evaluated through direct business. Form an operational point of view I carry out most market intelligence tasks myself and a colleague in the marketing department has a role as a curator and shares the information internally. He implemented an employee advocacy platform with Hootsuite Amplify which is connected to Sindup. Therefore the content whcih he thinks is relevant is pushed directly to the DS Smith sales team, which can also be published on social networks, internal articles or indeed articles which confirm messages which we are trying to advocate. There is also an internal use of market intelligence. Currently we have two monthly newsletter: one competitive and one sales which share articles detected in Sindup and we also intend to create a topic based newsletter every two months with a real editorial line and analysis. The goal is not only to share articles but to understand and contextualise the potential impacts on the fields which are of interest to us. Take for example the explosion of e-commerce, which has resulted in a 30% growth of our e-commerce volumes. If this growth continues it is important to ask the question of tomorrows challenges for e-commerce packaging: cold packaging, mailers. We have all received a parcel in a bad condition. So the key question, what is the business interest of our market intelligence ? It helps the sales person have a real role in advising the client.

Internally we talk a lot about the end of BtoB and BtoC as people are looking more and more for HtoH (human to human). Carrying out market intelligence for sales teams helps bring monthly information about clients to our sales teams and our product managers. It helps to create personal links with clients. There has been a very positive impact on client relations when the client realises that we truly understand their situation. Therefore we can say that our market intelligence has a real impact on improving the client relationship. Naturally sales managers and project managers really appreciate having this type of resource.