How Colgate-Palmolive Improves Data Literacy Through Business Storytelling

The push to invest in data is stronger than ever.

Data provides crucial evidence to support your ideas and recommendations. When presented well, it illuminates your points and inspires action. But when presented poorly, data can create confusion and mistrust, leading people to misinterpret your message, raise questions and stall decision-making.

As important as having accurate data is having people who can demonstrate data literacy – the ability to understand, interpret and humanize data for any audience and communicate data-driven recommendations clearly.

We’re not just talking about your analytics and insights teams! A recent Forrester study shows that 70% of employees are expected to heavily use data by 2025, making data literacy a must-have skill at every level and in every role of an organization.

Here’s the problem: The same study revealed a gap between the need for data literacy initiatives and implementation, with less than half of workers responding that they’ve been offered comprehensive data training. In other words, not all organizations equip their teams with the skills needed to read and interpret all the data flooding in, let alone how to make it meaningful and strategic.

Odds are you have already experienced the fallout of this gap — long, overworked slide decks full of hollow numbers and graphs that overwhelm everyone in the room, especially key stakeholders and decision-makers. Or worse yet, your data dump puts everyone into a daze, completely checked out of the presentation. With no true data literacy skills, most teams resort to sharing data for data’s sake, which means no one actually benefits from it — especially not your audience.

So, how do you develop the data literacy chops to drive business success?

Companies like Colgate-Palmolive, which sells essential health & hygiene products in more than 200 countries and territories and whose Colgate brand is in more homes than any other, are finding that the secret to data literacy is going beyond analytics. Instead of just investing in data collection and hiring specialists, they are upskilling people across their organization with the ability to interpret data, gather insights and effectively communicate these insights to the business and to their customers.

And one way they’ve done it is by teaching their teams this essential skill — storytelling.

As part of its Data Literacy & Analytics Academy, Colgate-Palmolive’s Global Learning team partnered with The Presentation Company (TPC) to upskill (and in some cases, reskill) the Company’s commercial functions on how to influence and drive business forward with any form of communication, from emails and one-pagers to presentations. They sought to do this while successfully transforming facts and figures into clear and actionable data insights.

Data and story — a winning combination

Taking note of an increasingly competitive and data-driven retail market, Colgate-Palmolive realized it needed to rethink the way it used data to drive growth, profitability and efficiency in the business — while advancing its purpose to reimagine a healthier future for all people, their pets, and our planet. The changing business landscape placed new realities on everyone, specifically less time with customers.

The data-heavy product pitches of yesteryear were no longer cutting it, and Colgate-Palmolive heard the feedback loud and clear: customers want presentations that focus on their needs and care-abouts.

Partnering with TPC, Colgate-Palmolive’s teams embarked on a storytelling learning journey to:

Build narratives that grounded every conversation in a “BIG Idea” with the right balance of storytelling, data, and visuals.
Understand their audience to ensure they served up data that is relevant and actionable to them.
Create compelling data visualizations to influence decision-making and gain buy-in.

Through this partnership, TPC has helped equip more than 1,000 Colgate-Palmolive employees with advanced storytelling and data visualization skills through its Crafting Strategic Visual Stories and Presenting Data Visually workshops. In fact, TPC and Colgate-Palmolive were awarded two Brandon Hall Group Gold Medals for their successful work in this area.

Storytelling can drive meaningful business outcomes at Colgate-Palmolive

Here are just a few of the business outcomes storytelling has helped drive:

A more unified story is being told. Through storytelling, the company has shifted to an audience-centric mindset, one that places the customer and the category at the center of the data conversation. Category managers are now telling a unified story. They continue to build upon the narrative and iterate but maintain a unified message – communicated through a “BIG Idea” – each time. This provides clarity, consistency and direction for their audiences and moves business forward efficiently.
Decisions are made faster due to the clarity of conversations. Storytelling has helped teams bring their ideas together in a clear, compelling way that centers around a narrative-based data strategy that answers a key question: “What do you want me to know and do with this information?” The data tells a story with a clear point-of-view, allowing them to talk not just about Colgate-Palmolive essential health & hygiene products, but the category as a whole, with non-biased insights.
Employees feel empowered and add more value. Individuals are now showing up more confident and demonstrating the capability to fill senior leaders' shoes. Enhanced data literacy and storytelling skills have allowed employees to be seen and heard in new ways, which has helped to improve company-wide productivity.
The culture is starting to shift. Storytelling principles are helping teams have objective, non-emotional conversations around the elements that need to be highlighted in any given communication medium. Selling ideas internally or having challenging conversations over funding/budgets is easier using established storytelling and data visualization techniques. The end result of having this common language and framework has been driving efficiency at Colgate-Palmolive.

Turn your team into a data literate powerhouse

As with every strategic initiative, investments in data and analytics must deliver measurable business value. Slides full of numbers but lacking insights won’t be enough to create a competitive advantage, and relegating analytics to a few specialists will only limit the potential a data strategy can offer.

Leading companies like Colgate-Palmolive are quickly discovering that in today’s demanding market, data literacy is a critical skill at every level of the organization. By equipping employees with the right mix of data strategy and storytelling skills, companies can turn their data into outcomes and their teams into a united strategic powerhouse.

The Presentation Company (TPC) is a corporate training company that helps talented businesspeople bring clarity and meaning to their ideas and data and influence decisions through storytelling. For over 20 years, TPC has partnered with companies that support the Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail industries – including leading brands Kraft Heinz, Colgate-Palmolive, and Nestlé – to transform teams into strategic, influential visual communicators and drive business forward. We believe that with our storytelling framework, some simple guidance, and the right tools, everyone can be a great business storyteller! 