Being Digital at Clorox
By Navin Kunde, Business Networks Leader – R&D
At Clorox, we understand the transformative power of technology. It’s changing our consumers’ lives and how brands interact with consumers. It’s also changing how people work in the 21st century.
R&D makes digital connections
We in the R&D Open Innovation department help connect Clorox employees to the external ideas and capabilities they need to succeed. Many of those are digital.
We do this in lots of ways, including a recent week-long celebration of digital we held at our Pleasanton, California, campus (and webcast to all Clorox employees globally).
The purpose of R&D Digital Week? To drive digital awareness and inspiration among Clorox employees around three digital themes prominent inside and outside Clorox:
- Digital-enabled products
- Digital processes and big data
- eCommerce
We showcased some of the coolest ways Clorox teams have used technology to achieve business objectives. We also gave employees a taste of future technology we think will become essential.
This wasn’t a display of digital for digital’s sake. Rather, it was designed to educate employees about technical offerings that have already helped other Clorox businesses succeed. We want all Clorox people to understand the digital resources available to them and many of the ways technology can help them achieve results.
The Brita Infinity pitcher brings Internet of Things technology into Clorox products.
Being Digital vs. Doing Digital
At Clorox, everything we do is rooted in consumer value. Where technology can help us make everyday life better for our consumers, we know when and how to use it.
Here are three cool ways Clorox is being digital, and which we shared at R&D Digital Week:
Digital-enabled products
The Brita® Infinity® pitcher with Amazon replenishment is a Wi-Fi enabled smart pitcher that knows when it needs a new filter — and enables just-in-time delivery to the consumer. This pitcher addresses an important and unmet consumer need, ensuring people have a filter on-hand when it’s time for replacement. Better still, the auto replacement trigger is based on filter use rather than time.
Digital Process and Big Data
Global Insights had four different booths showcasing how it’s using digital to make its processes better, faster and cheaper. One of these showcased how our brands used Virtual Shopping to gain insights on shelf layouts. Clorox brands are always looking to optimize how our products appear on store shelves, especially as we add innovative new products to our portfolio. With technology, we can test how people “really” shop multiple new shelf layouts in minutes rather than days. The ultimate goal is to deploy new shelf designs that make Clorox products easier to find.
eCommerce
Clorox has been building its eCommerce capabilities for a decade now, and eCom is one of the fastest growing areas of our business. In fact, we have a goal to reach $500 million in online sales by 2020. Doing that, however, requires us to understand these sites’ algorithms and how to place well on the digital shelf.
So it was no surprise that the eCommerce booth was the most popular at the R&D Digital Faire. It had something for everyone – from eCommerce 101 for newbies to information and insights about how to partner with online giants and future-looking topics such as the evolution of shopping with Voice, Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence.
Clorox employees learn about new capabilities at R&D Digital Week.
To the 500+ Clorox employees who participated in R&D Digital Week, the message was loud and clear: Digital is threaded through the fabric of Clorox. It’s simply how we do business.