Building a Market Intelligence DaaS Platform to Help CPG Brands Optimize Marketing Campaigns

CPG brands often have access to retail and transactional data, but turning it into decision-grade market intelligence is the hard part—especially when insights need to work across brands, categories, stores, baskets, customers, and geographies. We built a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) market intelligence platform that delivers multi-level performance insights and enables self-serve exploration using Microsoft Fabric Copilot—so marketing teams can act faster and optimize campaigns with confidence.

At a glance:

• Industry: Retail / CPG / D2C / E-commerce
• Core problem: Market performance visibility was fragmented, slow, and not self-serve
• What we delivered: A DaaS market intelligence layer + reporting + Fabric Copilot for self-serve insight discovery
• Primary impact: Segment-level performance analysis, faster KPI discovery, and marketing optimization using consumer + purchase insights
• Core stack: OneLake, Fabric Warehouse, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric (Copilot)

The challenge: insights existed, but they weren’t usable at speed

The business needed comprehensive reporting and analysis on market performance across SKUs, brands, categories, stores, shopping baskets, and consumers—at multiple geographic levels (national down to postal code) and across diverse time periods. The key constraint wasn’t “lack of data”—it was the lack of a coherent, scalable, self-serve system that teams could use daily to answer questions and optimize marketing actions.

What we set out to solve:

• Provide performance and transactional analysis across segments and customer cohorts
• Enable drilldowns across geo layers and time windows without rebuilding reports
• Create a repeatable metric layer so KPIs don’t change across teams
• Add Copilot-assisted exploration so users can discover insights faster (without analyst dependency for every question)
• Turn consumer + purchase behavior into campaign optimization inputs

“When marketers can ask a question and get a trusted answer in minutes—not days—campaign quality changes overnight.”

What “good” looked like (success criteria)

We aligned success around three outcomes: (1) multi-dimensional performance views across the full market hierarchy, (2) a self-serve experience that reduces reliance on ad-hoc analysis, and (3) an insight loop that directly informs marketing actions and targeting decisions—now accelerated by Copilot.

Success criteria:

• Coverage: SKU → Brand → Category → Store → Basket → Consumer views, with geo drilldowns
• Trust: One metric logic layer used across all reports and stakeholders
• Speed: Copilot-assisted exploration (summaries, suggested questions, faster insights) for common KPI needs
• Actionability: Insights that map cleanly to campaign levers (targeting, offers, channel focus)

Solution overview

We built a DaaS market intelligence platform that captures insights across multiple levels (geo + time + entity hierarchy) and delivers them through a reporting layer designed for marketer workflows. On top of the dashboards, we added Microsoft Fabric Copilot to reduce friction in exploration—helping teams find the “why” behind performance changes faster and standardizing how insights are consumed.

1. Data foundation and scalable analytics (OneLake → Fabric Warehouse)

We established a reliable pipeline into a scalable analytics layer so reporting wouldn’t collapse under volume or complexity. OneLake provided durable storage for raw and curated datasets, while Fabric Warehouse powered fast aggregations and repeatable analysis across the entity hierarchy and geographic levels.

2. Market intelligence model built for multi-level analysis

We structured the data so teams could answer questions across different slices—brands, SKUs, categories, stores, baskets, and consumers—while preserving drilldowns across geography (national → postal code) and time periods. This “analysis-ready” model removed the need for constant manual reshaping and reduced metric inconsistency.

3. Copilot on top: Microsoft Fabric Copilot for faster self-serve exploration

Instead of a standalone NLP Q&A layer, we added Fabric Copilot as a practical acceleration layer on top of reporting. Copilot helps business users explore trends faster, generate summaries, surface follow-up questions, and reduce the “where do I look?” problem—without changing the underlying KPI definitions. The goal isn’t to replace analysts; it’s to cut turnaround time on common questions and speed up hypothesis testing.

4. Decision layer in Power BI for campaign optimization

We operationalized the insights in Power BI with dashboards and views designed for marketing workflows: segment and cohort performance, purchase behavior patterns, basket-level visibility, and geo-time comparisons. This made it easy to turn insights into campaign adjustments—targeting, offer strategies, and channel prioritization.

Implementation playbook

We delivered this platform with a practical build sequence: stabilize the data layer first, then standardize KPI logic, then operationalize reporting, and finally layer Copilot for faster exploration. That order matters—Copilot is only valuable when the underlying metric definitions are consistent and trusted.

• Phase 1: Discovery + KPI mapping — define core KPIs, dimensions, drilldown logic, and governance
• Phase 2: Data foundation — build scalable storage/warehouse and curated datasets
• Phase 3: Reporting + adoption — dashboards, performance views, training, and usage patterns
• Phase 4: Copilot enablement — prompt patterns, guardrails, and “approved questions” for repeatable exploration
• Phase 5: Ongoing support and enhancements

Impact

• Performance and transactional analysis across segments and customer cohorts
• Faster KPI discovery with Copilot-assisted exploration—less dependence on ad-hoc analyst cycles
• Improved marketing optimization using consumer and purchase behavior insights
• Repeatable market intelligence coverage across geo layers and time windows

Technology stack

• OneLake — scalable storage layer
• Fabric Warehouse — analytics warehouse for high-volume aggregations
• Power BI — dashboards + consumption layer for business teams
• Microsoft Fabric (Copilot) — Copilot-assisted insight exploration on top of reporting