Australia – Consulting company Kantar Australia has announced that it is combining the ‘insights and consulting’ divisions in Australia through formal structural integration.
Turbocharging its ability to drive insight into growth context, and bridge the languages of research, marketing and growth, this announcement marks a realisation of opportunity through structural evolution and propels the company’s combined offer to be unrivalled in the Australian market.
Managing Director Jon Foged of Kantar Australia says, “While we have long collaborated on projects and clients, we have been in steadfast planning towards the invaluable opportunity of fully aligning Kantar Insights and Kantar Consulting as one unified team in Australia. This is an incredibly exciting transformation. The combined pool of world class consulting talent who deeply understand marketing’s evolving role in driving growth is meeting world class researchers with the expertise, tools, global scale and unrivalled benchmarking. We think it’s a game changing and unique proposition in this market.”
Foged added that through this integration, Kantar can turbocharge the innovation and brand strategy domains, as well as adding a cultural insight and futures capability, and world class growth strategy thinking across everything they do. “Ultimately, it is all about giving our clients the right balance of responsiveness with capacity and scaled capability,” said Foged.
Kantar Australia’s Managing Partner of Consulting Dennis Wong adds that the union will amplify and deliver growth in uncomfortable places for Australian clients,
“The market is filled with buoyant opportunities, but in highly competitive markets such as Australia, growth is harder to find than ever before with a totally different backdrop of consumer and market dynamics.”
According to Wong, brands are increasingly trying to do more with less, but at scale. That this requires reframing opportunity, yet retaining ability to deploy at scale. Wong also added that the complexity of the client problems requires genuinely actionable solutions solved and embedded by teams that can cut across silos by linking the languages of insight with those of marketing and growth. “By coming together, our combined expertise will ensure our clients can see it, shape it and do it. By this I mean see the growth beyond categories, but well into the future through the lens of culture. They can shape a compelling offer through portfolio, brand, customer experience and innovation, and not only drive strategy into action but measure against the growth opportunities in ways empathetic to the capability of the business,” added Wong.
Tracey Forbes head of marketing transformation at Diageo Australia says the combined offer has already had immediate impact on clients, “the coming together of Kantar’s Consulting and Insights team has brought greater value to the Diageo Australia business than ever before. It means we can join the dots up, down and across our teams to link the future facing, big picture strategies we build together through to what we see in measurement and everything in between.”
