Jennifer Sepull, CIO and VP of IT Services and Mukund Kaushik, VP of IT Services, Global Marketing
Kimberly Clark is paving the way to delivering the seamless experience for their consumers in a digital world. Their brands have been around for 100 years and are personal to the consumer. In fact, one-quarter of the world uses their products. Therefore they need to be sensitive and focus on having one-on-one relationships with their consumers.
KC is finding disruption everywhere; but it wants to be where the disruption is happening. This is leading to a focus on going digital in all departments (omni-channel) and looking at things like security and analytics.
To brave this new world, IT was brought in to be part of the marketing team. The partnership is key in digital business to help drive revenue and market share. The partnership began understanding marketing’s and IT’s strength. Marketing knows brand, how to engage and the consumer. IT knows how to make it happen and make it a nimble and joyous experience.
The digital transformation journey began by making sure the brand IQ and the digital IQ correlated. Started with training IT on how to build a solid brand. Then training on how to build digital into the brand without being channel specific.
Through the intersection of the two functions, magic happens and contention happens. They start with a global standard framework and then give freedom to region and geographies to manage autonomously. The flexible framework is ideal for global marketing as different geographies have different digital requirements. For instance, in Africa there is a focus on mobile; whereas Korea has a major emphasis on ecommerce.
Their model for engaging with the consumer with 1:1 marketing involved learning about them, sharing/interacting with them and then leading to purchase. The inflection point is where ecommerce, content (including how to reach a consumer) and data come together to support the 1:1 marketing.
- Establish a content platform. Since they didn’t know how they would interact, they needed a flexible way of delivering content. The content must be relevant, timely, useful and personalized. The goal is to deliver the right content on the right device in the right channel at the right time.
- Data Analytics—the fuel for innovation. KC is in the process of developing a closed-loop, data-driven marketing enabler to create seamless consumer experiences. They wanted a data supply chain that interprets all data. Pulling data from all sources to create a 360 degree view of the consumer.
- Commerce—influencing the consumer from anywhere including mobile, friends, social and multichannel. There needed to be more options beyond the store. They needed a dual approach to enable able the old retailer model while preparing for the new digital age. For KC consumers, there products are often purchased on a regular basis so the product needed to be purchased easily from everywhere.
A great example is the Huggies video. This is an example of universal content that touches an emotional side. Then they added the 3D printing to tie to the technology/digital side.