The problem it solves
A marketing team’s knowledge is scattered: reports in shared folders, presentations in email, analyses in different tools, decisions in the heads of whoever was there. When someone changes roles, or a client comes back after a year, you start from scratch. A knowledge base keeps you from losing what you have already paid to learn.
What goes in it
- Research — market, consumer and competitor research, in-house or purchased.
- Analyses — SWOT, positioning, journey, scenarios.
- Data — sales, panel, CRM, campaign performance.
- Materials — briefs, presentations, brand guidelines.
- Decisions — what was decided, why, on what evidence, what was ruled out.
How to build it so it stays useful
1. One per client, or per brand
Information from different clients must stay separate. When you need to look at it together, every piece of information must say where it comes from.
2. Every document with a source, a date and a nature
A panel figure, an internal analysis and an opinion picked up on social media don’t carry the same weight. Recording the nature and date of every piece of material lets you weigh them.
3. Updated without effort
If keeping it up to date takes separate work, nobody does it. Material should go in as you work: saving an analysis should be enough.
4. Decisions, not just documents
Six months from now, the most valuable question will be “why did we decide that?”. Recording decisions along with their reasons is the part most often forgotten.
5. Searchable in plain language
With search by meaning (embeddings) and a RAG, the knowledge base answers questions: you don’t need to remember where a file lives.
