Cementos Argos Partners With Premise for More Agile Market Insights

The Medellin-based concrete manufacturer is using Premise insights to conduct competitive analyses and grow brand penetration in key markets.

By Matt Lindner, Senior Content Marketing Manager

Concrete giant Cementos Argos had a market research problem.

The firms that they were using were not agile enough to tell them what was happening in the market in real time. The Medellin-based concrete manufacturer, which operates in 15 countries throughout the Americas, needed a data partner that offered more cost effective and up-to-date market insights.

“We have usually used traditional market research companies and one of the key elements here is when you hire a company like that, the surveys are conducted once a year or a couple of times a year,” says Felipe Gonzalez, corporate brand manager at Cementos Argos.

Fresh data that comes in once a year wasn’t cutting it for Cementos Argos, Gonzalez said. For one of the world’s largest concrete manufacturers to continue growing, it needed a solution that provided more dynamic and up-to-date data using agile data collection methods.

A couple of years ago Gonzalez read about Premise in Seth Stephens’ book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, and filed away his interest in Premise until he decided on a project he knew Premise could help with.

After taking a closer look at what Premise had to offer, he found himself intrigued. Premise offered Cementos Argos the opportunity to tap into a global contributor network that could provide them with geotargeted, on-the-ground insights into market conditions in a matter of days.

Cementos Argos could also get research projects up and running in specific markets quickly, providing them with more in-depth insights to real-time problems. That agility, Gonzalez says, is crucial to helping his team uncover more opportunities in more markets.

“Premise provides us with a solution that offers us the flexibility and the opportunity that traditional market research companies cannot deliver,” Gonzalez says.

Cementos Argos launched a pilot program with Premise earlier this year. The initial focus is on using on-the-ground insights from Premise’s contributor network to increase its brand penetration and conduct regular competitive analyses in markets throughout Central America.

“Premise provides us with a more flexible, more timely reading of the market compared to other solutions that were not as comprehensive or as timely. We are aiming to replace the third parties that conduct irregular research with this [solution].”

Premise’s contributors serve essentially as an extension of Cementos Argos’ workforce by providing them on-the-ground updates from specific markets. This has the added benefits of freeing up internal resources for the company and saving Gonzalez’ team valuable time when it comes to growing sales in emerging markets.

“This is exciting because it’s basically being open to new technologies and new business models such as crowdsourcing in this case and data analytics for having a more effective market process.” Gonzalez says.

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