3 Digital Marketing Takeaways From Clorox iConnect
By Ellen Liu, Senior Director – Brand Engagement
Scale — huge plants, millions of dollars spent on TV advertising — once gave our consumer goods industry an edge. But that’s so 20th century.
Today, speed is the new scale. Through digital technology, we’re revolutionizing our business and helping transform people’s lives.
Learning the latest and greatest — in our own backyard
To stay relevant to consumers, we need to constantly be learning and experimenting. That’s why for the past six years we’ve gathered our marketers for our annual Clorox iConnect conference, a dynamic one-day forum in San Francisco.
Clorox CMO Eric Reynolds takes the stage at iConnect 2018.
The magic of iConnect is its power to spark innovation from Clorox marketers by exposing them to the latest and greatest external thinking across all industries. This includes keynote presentations, candid on-stage conversations, thought-provoking panel breakouts and case studies from across the digital spectrum: executives at leading digital platforms, innovative startups and peer companies.
At the iConnect Expo, our people also experienced for themselves the technologies, products and services that are impacting consumers’ lives and behavior so they can look for ways to make our brands even better.
Clorox employees try out the latest digital technology at iConnect 2018.
Clorox is fortunate to be located in the San Francisco Bay Area, a hub for just this kind of innovative thinking. We think it gives us a competitive advantage.
Technology transformation core to our strategy
Technology transformation is a key pillar of Clorox’s 2020 Strategy.
We believe brand marketing should be purpose-driven, human-centered and tech-enabled because that’s what great brands are, at their core. Technology allows us to efficiently connect humans to brands by creating digitally enabled consumer experiences. But technology for its own sake, or devoid of humanity and absent brand purpose, is ineffective.
iConnect reinforces our commitment to excelling as marketers in a borderless, on-demand digital age.
Clorox employees play with the latest digital technology at iConnect 2018.
Want to know what we learned at iConnect 2018? Here are three themes that emerged:
No. 1: Brand marketing should be purpose-driven, human-centered and tech-enabled
Great brands at their core are purpose-driven and human-centered. Technology is a terrific tool for connecting humans to brands. But technology for its own sake, or devoid of humanity and absent brand ideas, is ineffective. At Clorox, we use technology to get even closer to our purpose and consumers.
No. 2: The future of commerce is omni-channel and technology-enabled
eCommerce continues to grow at double-digit rates. By 2022, it will account for 1 in every 5 dollars spent. But today’s online transactions underestimate how the consumer ecommerce experience — the “digital shelf” — influences sales. To succeed in a world where shoppers expect anything, anywhere, anytime, we must continue to build new digital capabilities like how we draw actionable insights from the ever-growing amount of data available to us.
No. 3: A growth culture mindset is necessary to win
At Clorox, a growth culture mindset means adopting agile processes, creating smaller and more efficient project teams and collaborating cross-functionally in a way that all sides come out ahead. This approach frees teams to create outstanding product and consumer experiences much more quickly. And we all know the consumer experience is king in today’s marketplace.