Meeting our goal to know 100 million consumers
By Eric Schwartz, Chief Marketing Officer
To better serve the evolving needs of our consumers, we need to know more about them — who they are, what they value and where they shop, while also being respectful of their privacy. As a North Star, we set an ambitious goal to know 100 million consumers. Today I’m proud to say we’ve met (and surpassed) this goal, enabling better insights so we can meet consumers when they are most receptive, no matter where they are in their journey.
To achieve this, we implemented a centralized cloud-based database that allows us to store, enrich and activate our first-party data in a way that’s compliant with individual privacy requirements. Our database allows us to federate our first-party data to marketers, insights and analytics leads to derive insights, identify personalization signals, and drive strategy accordingly. Combine this with our new digital asset management tool, which houses a library of content to be used across the consumer journey, and we can pair our data with communication that speaks to each person. Just think: When we know someone is a new parent or new homeowner, for example, we can deliver media with a message around baby messes or home cleaning tips, and share it at a time when they’re most receptive. Ultimately, these technological enhancements help us better personalize paid media and owned channel activations, which is contributing to greater efficiencies and higher engagement.
An example of how we put this to work is our Clorox brand’s new approach to authentically connecting with consumers during cold and flu season. By employing advanced AI algorithms, we continuously monitor signals from various sources such as social media, consumer reviews, and market trends to gauge consumer sentiments and anticipate emerging needs. This allows us to identify key pain points or tensions that consumers experience during this period, whether it’s concerns about hygiene, health or specific cleaning needs.
Using this data-driven insight, virtual simulations and predictive analytics, we can anticipate consumer reception to our products, enabling us to prioritize the most promising concepts for further development and execution. From there, we’re able to pinpoint the most effective channels and timing to reach consumers during cold and flu season when they are most receptive to messaging about hygiene and cleaning products. This allows us to tailor our marketing efforts for maximum impact, whether it’s through targeted digital advertising, influencer partnerships or strategic placement in retail environments.
This approach is not limited to a single product segment. We’ve been testing and learning across our portfolio. Our Burt’s Bees team was able to understand what its most loyal consumers wanted and then find people with similar characteristics online to serve them with media we knew would resonate. Or take our Kingsford brand, which uses data and insights to personalize its website based on the experience level of the visitor. From beginner grillers to novices, this allowed the brand to serve up relevant tips, recipes, product ideas and more.
This work was enabled by our $500 million investment in transformative technologies and processes over a five-year period. This investment, which began in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022, includes enterprisewide improvements to our digital tools and infrastructure. Our goal is to equip every area of our business with integrated, clean data that can be scaled across systems and functions while sharpening internal capabilities and processes to make smarter decisions faster and delight consumers and customers. Now in its third year, this investment continues to gain momentum in creating important business efficiencies in the areas of supply chain, digital commerce, brand building and more.
So, what’s next? Just as our consumers evolve and grow, so do we. We’ll be continually “meeting” consumers who may be new to our categories or brands or nurturing our existing consumers to get to know them even better. We’ll bring in new data to enrich our consumer understanding and leverage our data in different places. Through it all, we’ll put consumers and their needs at the center and find new ways for our brands to help them be well and thrive.