Datamatics Global Services Ltd. (DGSL), a global Consulting, IT, and BPM company, in association with the Market Research Society of India (MRSI), announced the 9th Dr. Lalit Kanodia Laureate Award for Technology Excellence in Market Research 2021 on 30th March 2022, in a ceremony held at The MCA Club, Mumbai.
The Market Research Society of India (MRSI) is a unique, dynamic and a not-for-profit autonomous market research body formed in 1988 by a large fraternity of research suppliers and users spread across India. MRSI aims to guide, encourage and uphold the highest quality standards of professionalism for all those who use, need, generate or interpret insights/data in the Consumer Research & Insights industry.
MRSI instituted the Golden Key Awards in 2019 to recognize the contribution of insights for the growth of the business; to let the limelight shine on the research professionals; to share the sense of pride amongst research and insight professionals through industry recognition and to acknowledge the prestige of the great work being done in Marketing Research and Insights.
Dr. Lalit Kanodia Laureate Award for Technology Excellence was instituted with the objective of acknowledging and rewarding innovators who have made significant technology-led efforts within the consumer research & insights industry processes. The winning entry for this year by Hindustan Unilever was ‘Athena’ an integrated, automated end-to-end scouting, screening and sizing solution that moves from early trend detection to consumer validated ideas. This in-house capability scans through social, secondary reports, and e-commerce data to arrive at all possible permutations of benefit, ingredient & format to generate ideas which are then shortlisted through a series of ML algorithms trained on past learnings, post which it screens with consumers and sizes the winning ideas.
The nominations were reviewed by an independent jury comprising industry experts, based on multiple pre-defined criteria such as uniqueness, relevance, quality of solution, potential applicability to other areas, and overall cost of implementation. However, the most important criteria was for the solution to be functional and operational.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Sandeep Arora, President MRSI, said, “The vision of this award has been to promote technology-led innovations in the field of Market Research. This year saw great nominations of some incredible work done in the research fraternity. The nominations under this award category are a testimony, that proves that ‘consumer research’ is critical to business success, to support the brand, marketing, and business strategy.
Mr. Chandan Agarwal, CMI PDC Director, Unilever, South Asia said, “At Hindustan Unilever, the consumer insights team is the growth partner to business with a vision to drive incremental growth by not just getting cutting edge insights, but also predicting the trends using AI and ML techniques. We try to innovate and drive growth for our brands by being more agile & nimble. We encourage experimenting and pilot projects, making Hindustan Unilever a consumer tech company! It is very humbling to be recognized for our efforts and getting the prestigious Dr. Lalit Kanodia for Best Use of Technology at the Annual MRSI Golden Key Awards 2021. This is the second time Hindustan Unilever has been recognized with this award. We look forward to using new technology to grow our business through data-driven insights.”
Sandeep further stated, “The eminent jury had a tougher job this year to shortlist from a stellar list of entries. Given the challenges that arose with the pandemic, this year we saw nominations being more focused on technology adoption to enable digital transformation. Heartiest congratulations to HUL on winning the award for showcasing their innovative & technology-based approach to drive business growth.”
Dr. Lalit Kanodia, Chairman, Datamatics, said, “The technological excellence award recognizes innovations in the Consumer Research & Insights Industry. Research is essential to equip an enterprise with valuable insights to help with business decision making & growth. For an enterprise to thrive and stay relevant today, they need to ensure continuous innovations & research. It has been heartening to see the entries and their efforts. I would like to congratulate Hindustan Unilever on winning this award and for their innovative entry”
Datamatics is a Digital Technologies, Operations, and Experiences company that enables enterprises to go Deep in Digital to boost their productivity, customer experience and competitive advantage.
