From Cost Centre to Profit Centre: TUV Marketing Team use Data Storytelling to Prove Their Strategic Value.

TUV Rheinland is a worldwide organisation that provides product testing and inspection services for all industries. Their broad range of services ensures that consumer goods are safe for use before they reach the market. The TUV organisation has been around for about 150 years and has approximately 20,000 employees worldwide.

We spoke to Jane Lim, Regional Communications Director and Winnie Soh, Head of Digital Marketing for TUV Rheinland APAC and EMEA to understand the problems the marketing team are facing...

The Problems

Jane's team are responsible for all TUV's marketing and communications activities across 28 countries. That’s about 35 regional campaigns encompassing about 5000 activities in a year. “You can imagine the amount of effort and time it takes to track the performance of all the campaigns and tactics that we’re using.”

Jane continues “We’ve always been very traditional in the way we present our efforts, using PowerPoint, Excel and Word files. Processing data, analysing and reporting on so many activities takes a ridiculous amount of time and leaves us with less resource available for working on strategy."

"It's also very hard to show our management the importance & value that we provide. The perception is that marketing & communications is a very fluffy thing. I often get confronted with ‘We can’t see the end results’ ‘Why are we spending so much money’ ‘Where do I see the ROI’. The kind of KPIs that marketers can use (impressions, clicks, reach etc) are not the kind of concrete sales figures that business people feel comfortable with.

Winnie explains the manual effort involved in reporting “Historically, to create our reports on a month to month basis we’d have to pull data via excel spreadsheets from all the different software and tools that we have and then merge them together manually using Excel. We’d then create graphs using excel before copy and pasting them into Powerpoint slides basically. This could take us up to a week, depending on the complexity of the data or what we’re trying to analyse for that month.”

Jane concludes "We’ve looked around the market for a very long time to find an all in one solution that would transform this and we are very happy that we found Nugit.”

Jane Lim, Regional Communications Director & Winnie Soh, Head of Digital Marketing from the TUV Rheinland APAC & EMEA Marketing Team.

Nugit Easily Integrates Everything

Like most B2B marketers, TUV uses a mix of online and offline tactics across numerous channels. From social media marketing (Website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Ads etc), newsletters, website, email campaigns through to offline exhibition seminars, training etc. Altogether they have around 20 different channels where all their marketing and communications data is stored. Each channel has different metrics and its own way of showcasing results, making it hard for the team to keep track of the big picture. Jane explains how Nugit has helped. “Nugit is able to automatically pull our efforts from all channels onto one platform. The Data Stories give us a clear overview of performance across all channels at once or an in-depth look at each channel - whatever we need. Everything is just a click away, it’s very convenient.”

“Nugit gives my team visibility of all the up to date, refreshed data we need at the click of a button. As a result, my team are very effective. We’re able to monitor a particular tactic to see whether it’s working or not and make immediate decisions to get the best ROI from our budget.” - Jane Lim

Take the Nugit Platform Tour to understand the Data Storytelling Platform's features and benefits.


Nugit Storybuilder has an easy-to-use Drag & Drop feature to add visualisations.

Onboarding to Empower the TUV Teams

Nugit Customer Success Manager Charlotte has been working closely with Jane, Winnie and the TUV team to help them get the most from the Data Storytelling Platform. “My role is to understand TUVs business needs and empower the whole team to tell the best data stories possible. To get started we sat down together and I asked a lot of questions to help me understand what TUV are trying to achieve. What do they need to include in their reports and why do they need that? It’s really key for us to understand the business so we can help create stories that make sense to the clients and help them to have real business impact.”

“We don’t want to just replicate the reports they were building before, we want to build stories with a clear narrative tailored to the people who are going to consume the data, making it as easy to digest as possible. We want to create impact for the client as fast as possible.”

TUV is a complex organisation and agreeing the best reporting formats took a few weeks to decide, Jane explains “Once we’d decided on the format of the reports we were able to produce the first data stories almost right away within the first couple of days. It was exciting for me when I looked at the first reports to see what I’m able to create. We can now dissect data in many ways and draw some quick insights within a couple of clicks… that has created a lot of excitement.”

Winnie has also been impressed with how quick the process has been, “Nugit CS team has been instrumental in getting us onboard the platform in a very short time. The team has conducted training to our marketers, been on hand to answer any queries and gone the extra mile suggesting how we can better process and present our data.”


Charlotte, TUV's Account Manager for the Nugit Customer Success Team.

Data Storytelling Presents Data in a Way Everyone Can Understand

TUV Marketing & Communications team send Nugit Data Story reports out to over 100 stakeholders every month. Jane explains

“90% of the senior management are Engineers or Scientists. They don’t have marketing expertise and don’t always understand the content of our traditional reports. Nugit Data Stories takes our complex information and showcases the relevant parts in a very visual way. It makes it very consumable for people, no marketing background needed.”

Jane continues, “One of the highlights of my career was showing a Nugit report to one of my regional executive Vice Presidents. For many years he’d been an engineer and he couldn’t really understand what Marketing Communications was about. When we showed him the Nugit report he was like ‘Ohhhhh so this is what the big fuss is! This is what you guys are doing!’ Now we’re having really impactful conversations based on the Nugit stories. He’s so impressed.”

Winnie adds “Our management and stakeholders especially like the fact that they’re able to interact with the Data Stories. It makes our reporting process a lot more dynamic compared to the conventional presentation slides we had in the past."

Nugit's unique visualisations help to make sure insights are instantly understood.

The Output... Data Stories Tailored to TUV's Audience

Jane describes the purpose of the reports that TUV produce using Nugit. “We use Nugit to produce 3 main Data Story reports. The first is a regional report which showcases the efforts of all our marketing and communication tactics online and offline as a region (across all 28 countries). That report gives all my Country Marketeers an idea of how we’re performing on the whole.”

“The second report is an in-country overview, customised to each country. This is something our Country Marketers have never had before so they were excited to get a clearer understanding of their comparative performance as a country. They use this report to drive strategic conversations during monthly meetings with local country managers.”

“Nugit is definitely helping improve communication across the wider teams.”

“The 3rd report tracks individual campaign performance. We have a Data Story tailored to each of our 35 campaigns. That one’s really useful to see which tactics work best for each circumstance. With campaigns in such a diverse range of industries, the performance of tactics varies a lot so it’s important for us to see clearly on a case by case basis to make the best decisions.”

“We Are Not a Cost Centre!” Increasing Visibility of the Value Marcoms Gives

Jane has spent a large part of her career trying to increase the transparency of what marketing and communications can do. “Often, people not trained in this field think that marketing & communications is a very fluffy thing. With the help of Nugit and a powerful CMS we are now able to showcase the end to end of a customer lifecycle and every customer touchpoint.”

“Nugit was able to fully justify for every single euro that I spend, how much is translated into demand generation, sales and revenue. That’s the reason we’re able to move away from the bias of being a cost centre and are now considered to be a more strategic business partner. Now they will think twice about cutting my budget.”

“Our internal stakeholders are really impressed. They’re finally able to see where my money is going. By integrating our CMS data into Nugit we’re able to see our entire customer lifecycle from start to end... The promotion, to demand generation, finally through to revenue. Nugit is able to showcase that funnel very, very clearly so I’m very happy about that.”

Productivity & Efficiency - More Time to Spend on Strategy

As well as improving data communication Nugit is also taking the pressure off manually building reports. Being able to automate so much reduces the risk of human error, ensures reports are always on time and frees up more resource for strategy “Our Country Marketers actually don’t have to prepare reports any more!” Jane explains “They like the fact that they can see the reports on the first week of every month without having to do any data crunching and processing with excel sheets or powerpoint. With Nugit it’s all automated so they can now spend the time more strategically... looking at what worked, what didn’t work and building their local marketing plans.”

Winnie elaborates “Nugit’s ability to connect to multiple digital Marcoms channels as well as the marketing software stack has freed up a lot of our marketers time so they can use it to add greater value, analysing the data to develop marketing plans.”

The TUV Marketing team keeping on top of campaign ROI using a Nugit Data Story on-screen in their meeting.

Sharing Data for Better Conversations

With multiple sharing options to suit every situation, TUV has found what works well for them. The team schedule their regular email reports and include a live-link so that the reader is able to explore further if they want to deep-dive any interesting insights. The team also download Data Stories to Powerpoint to run through as a large-screen presentation during their weekly meetings.

“A picture speaks a thousand words." Jane exclaims, "I’m DONE with all the excel files and Word files trying so hard to prove to colleagues & management the value marketing communications can give."

"Everyone tunes out when they receive another powerpoint, pdf or word report that takes such effort to both produce and read. Now I can just send stakeholders the link to a Data Story and they can see the full story in a very visual way. It follows a clear narrative so readers are presented  with the key insights in a logical order, starting from the website, scrolling down through social media in a way makes sense to them.”

Looking Ahead... No Sleep for Charlotte

Jane has big plans for rolling out Data Storytelling at TUV. "Right now we’ve implemented Nugit over 28 countries and if it continues to be a success, globally we will be looking to launch it across 80."

Want to learn more about the impact of Data Storytelling within different organisations? Check out other Nugit case studies or reach out to the team to understand what it can do for your business.