How a global toy brand builds with confidence by putting customer intelligence where decisions are made
One of the world's most recognized consumer brands discovered that its most valuable customer knowledge was invisible to the people making the biggest decisions. Here is how Dovetail changed that.
4+
teams across research, design, product, and senior retail leadership now self-serving customer intelligence directly in Dovetail
120+
countries of loyalty program research, once siloed across local teams, now unified and searchable in a single Dovetail workspace
1
global toy brand whose most senior retail executive uses Dovetail personally—the team cannot upload studies fast enough to satisfy the demand
Ch.01
A brand built for everyone, and research that had to catch up
Founded in 1932 in a small town in Denmark, this family-owned company has grown into one of the world's most instantly recognizable consumer brands, with products sold in more than 120 countries and a fanbase spanning every age group and every kind of imagination.
Its customer base is unusually complex. It includes first-time buyers, young families, adult enthusiasts who build for the love of it, members of a global loyalty program, and internal designers who study their own users as rigorously as any research team. Understanding all of them, without letting one community's findings contaminate another's, requires more than a research tool. It requires a Customer Intelligence Platform.
Today, the most senior leaders in the company's retail division don't wait for research summaries to land in their inboxes. They log into Dovetail themselves. That shift, from findings filtered through layers of sign-off to leadership accessing customer knowledge directly, is exactly what the best organizations are built for.
Ch.02
The challenge: research locked in silos across a 50,000-person organization
Before Dovetail, research knowledge was fragmented and largely invisible across the business. Teams ran studies independently, stored findings in different tools, and had no visibility into what anyone else was learning. Insights that could have informed a product decision on one side of the business never reached the team on the other side who needed them.
The organization's audience complexity made this worse. Research into the global loyalty program, spanning dozens of countries, sat separately from studies of casual shoppers, insights about the adult fan community, and research from internal product designers. These audiences were deliberately kept distinct: what a lifelong collector thinks shouldn't be conflated with what a new customer expects.
"Keeping things separated is better than cross-pollinating—knowing you're dealing with grown-up enthusiasts or with internal designers who build sets and they don't interfere with each other. But if we do have user groups that are similar, we want to be able to search across and aggregate those."
— Head of Research, Retail Division
Researchers couldn't search across projects. Designers didn't have access to findings that would have changed their decisions. Leadership had no direct line to the customer at all. Starting with a team of 10 researchers, the organization went looking for a platform that could hold all of it, without collapsing the distinctions that made the research useful.
Ch.03
The solution: one platform for audiences that span the globe
The team implemented Dovetail to centralize its research operations, not by flattening the differences between customer communities, but by giving them a shared home where each could be understood on its own terms.
The most complex work involved the global loyalty program. Research spanned multiple countries, with studies running in parallel across markets as the team sought to understand what members valued and where the experience fell short. All of that work, previously scattered across local teams and shared drives, came into Dovetail, where it could be searched, tagged, and synthesized across geographies for the first time.
"We've run a lot of global research in different countries on our membership program. Other designers have come on and started to digest their data. Stakeholders are using it to get summaries, and we're using the AI tool to prompt all the rich data put in about users in that area."
— Research Lead, Retail Division
Designers who had previously relied on summarized reports began accessing research directly. Chat let any researcher, designer, or stakeholder ask a question and get a cited answer grounded in real data, instantly.
Ch.04
When leadership starts asking for more, you know something has changed
The real measure of any customer intelligence program isn't whether researchers use it well. It's whether the people making the biggest decisions start using it at all.
At this organization, that shift happened faster than the research team expected. Leadership within the retail division, including the most senior person in the business, began spending time in Dovetail directly—not to audit the research team's work, but because they genuinely wanted to understand what customers were saying.
"The most senior person in the organization loves it and is spending time in there—we can't actually upload the studies fast enough for how excited they are."
— Head of Research, Retail Division
When leaders stop waiting for briefings and start seeking out customer knowledge themselves, the research function has done something more than streamline a workflow. It has changed how decisions get made. For a company whose identity is built on creativity and play, the most powerful thing the research team could build turned out to be a single, searchable, always-on record of what its customers actually think.
That is what a Customer Intelligence Platform looks like when it's working.