How it started

Henkel  is a leading manufacturer of laundry/home care and personal care products as well as adhesives. With over 50,000 employees worldwide and with the large number of categories and markets Henkel operates in, being insights-led is a challenge. Employees need to be aligned on a common definition of what consumer insights are, and strong insights are required to ensure that product innovations stay relevant for consumers, today and in the future.

How we inspired change

We support Henkel with an online insights training, accessible to all employees across the globe. Each week, new members are invited to complete the training. This covers what an insight is, why consumer insights are important, how to find and formulate insights, and how to activate insights in the organisation. 800 employees have been enrolled in this training in the past two years.

In addition, the Henkel team frequently runs insight-validation surveys with Human8. In these projects, a long list of insights is validated on several dimensions and benchmarked against our insights database which contains over 3,000 insights tested across several markets. This way, the insights with the strongest potential can be identified and prioritised in the ideation phase, leading to better chances of developing a successful concept.

How it lives on

The training delivers a common understanding among employees of how consumer insights should be identified and formulated, meaning that many of the insights that go into a validation survey are rather strong. The validation phase then identifies the most powerful insights, allowing the team to ideate solutions with greater focus and confidence.