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.

Teams needed a shared understanding of what a strong consumer insight is and how it drives better decisions in innovation. Without that common foundation, even good ideas risked losing relevance along the way.

How we inspired change

We developed and rolled out an online insights training programme, designed to create a shared language around consumer understanding across Henkel’s global teams.

Accessible worldwide, the programme welcomed new participants each week and built capability step by step. It covered what makes a strong insight, why insights matter and how to identify, shape and activate them in practice.

Within two years time, 800 employees completed the training, strengthening a common baseline for insight thinking across the organisation. In parallel, Henkel teams worked with us on insight validation projects. Here, longlists of insights were tested across multiple dimensions and benchmarked against our broader insights database of 3,000+ validated insights. This helped identify which insights had real potential to move forward into ideation.

How it lives on

Employees became more confident in recognising and shaping stronger insights from the start, which improved the quality of inputs entering validation. As a result, validation work became more focused and directional. It helped teams prioritise the most powerful opportunities earlier in the innovation process.

The outcome was a more consistent, more confident way of working with insights across the organisation, and a clearer path from understanding consumers to building ideas that matter.