For us it was an obvious choice to source the expertise and capability externally. Working with an agency dedicated to the broader publishing space brings benefits – their familiarity with the process and the possible pitfalls and the lessons they’ve learned from other clients. We knew we would benefit from that experience of ‘been there, done that’ – Julie Harris, IWSR CEO
Immediate wins
- 30% increase in new user log-ins
- New platform designed, built and launched within one year
- Platform allows IWSR to embed themselves in user workflows, building stickiness and ultimately growing value and diversifying revenue opportunity
- Scalable content and data architecture has enabled IWSR to accelerate new product developments to address specific markets, further diversifying, growing and protecting their revenue
- IWSR moving through roadmap to shift from static data to predictive intelligence which is visual, interactive and customisable
The problem
IWSR is the market-leading data and insight business for the global alcohol beverage industry, with proprietary volume and value sales data across 160 countries as well as consumer insight. As a mid-market, private equity-backed business, building value and launching new products at pace is critical to success. However, its outdated technology infrastructure limited its ability to innovate and capture maximum value from its data. Their data assets – all of which relate to the global drinks industry – were split across three different sites, each with their own login and user interface.
Having data siloed in this way made it difficult for users – internal and external – to get a clear view on the entirety of the drinks data they held. The technology was aging and inflexible. The user interface and experience looked dated and the way the database was structured made the process of developing and launching new products laborious.
Internal decision-making was hindered by the difficulty of accessing company-wide information about the depth and breadth of the data they held.
Analytics were rudimentary and, like everything else, siloed, which meant that sales teams didn’t have access to the kind of engagement and usage information that supports subscription renewal negotiations and cross and upselling pitches.
These legacy systems meant that IWSR was not serving the needs of their customers as well as they could and, consequently, were not realising their full revenue potential.
The solution
We began with a discovery phase where we outlined the critical issues and highest-value developments. From there we designed, built and released the new data platform that integrated all their existing outputs into one smooth user interface.
As part of the re-platforming, we have built predictability and additional robustness into the data publishing infrastructure and developed new delivery channels to support an unbundled distribution strategy, integrating directly with customer workflows through an Excel Add-in and embedded IWSR’s data in its customers’ day-to-day operations.
Key features
- Enhanced search experience: The Insights dashboard improved search functionality by indexing and tagging all content and data assets, allowing for precise access management based on user subscriptions.
- Customisable data interaction: The new Data Query database offers an interactive experience with extensive filtering options, giving users complete control over their views. Users can create and save custom searches, streamlining their analysis process for future logins, reducing their time to value and increasing site stickiness.
- Advanced calculations: Users can perform in-database calculations like CAGR, market share, and percentage change, including current and predictive data.
- Data storytelling: The consumer insight Bevtrac product turns data into engaging visualisations, supporting IWSR’s ‘why behind the what’ mission by allowing users to see trends in consumer behaviour
- Tiered access and pricing based on entitlement: New product packaging has created opportunities for upselling through tiered pricing options, diversifying revenue opportunities and enabling deeper relationships with subscribing businesses.
End-to-end the process from discovery, build and launch took less than a year. Throughout, we used an IWSR user group to get feedback on early features and mock-ups, which meant we kept the users central in all development plans.
The platform looks amazing and the feedback we’re getting so far from customers is all super positive. It’s been an absolute joy working with such a talented team – I couldn’t be happier with where we are! – David Green, CTO, IWSR
Outcomes
The new platform has been rolled out to IWSR’s customer base and garnered significant positive feedback during the first weeks of its launch. The platform offers significant additional value to its customers and supports a more sophisticated corporate subscription model with retention and revenue expected to grow.
With a clean and scalable data architecture, IWSR is now able to release more value to its customers and subsequently increase the value of the company. We are now working to deliver further value through the new platform, launching new products to address new, high-value markets and using large language models to structure, interpret and extract data from the research corpus to monetise through new products in the future. IWSR has a bold roadmap, including enhanced forecasting capabilities, integrating scenario planning tools into the platform, expanding data sets and, over time, looking at potential new verticals and acquisitions, all of which will be significantly easier to achieve using the new platform developed by 67 Bricks.
Customer feedback
‘You can tell a story in response to a question’, IWSR researcher
‘It is a drastic improvement for me from a daily usage standpoint’, IWSR team member
‘Dashboards immediately help you set the scene to see what is happening. It is great to be able to visually break down category and geography’, IWSR user
‘It is a breath of fresh air to have the data here in a nutshell’, IWSR user
