Reckitt Benckiser, the £12.85bn packaged goods giant behind Durex, KY, Dettol, Nurofen, and Cillit Bang, is ramping up its digital transformation strategy by signing a deal with Google Cloud to boost its data-driven customer engagement programme.
The appointment will see Google Cloud unify Reckitt’s extensive “data landscape”, building new capabilities around consumer identification, journeys, and behaviours. In addition, it will enable the household products company to manage data and analytics, measurement and attribution, and automated martech activation across all of its channels, including web, social, in-store, and more.
Over the course of this year, Reckitt’s multiple data sources will be combined to better power consumer segmentation and marketing campaign measurement. ~
Once digitised in Google Cloud, Reckitt will use Google’s machine learning capabilities to evaluate return on investment and plan future campaigns more effectively. The company will also run its own machine learning and auto-machine learning models, in an effort to generate insights to optimise media spend.
It also plans to create more natural digital journeys as consumers go from awareness to purchase to advocacy.
Reckitt is currently testing use cases on data in the UK, US, Brazil, and India. Its new digital hubs across the world aim to drive consistency and further efficiencies with its marketing teams, while also enabling quick scale-up of these capabilities prioritised for the top 50 brand-market combinations the hygiene business holds.
The company uses a raft of agencies in the UK and Europe, including Havas, Isobar, McCann, Zenith and Dentsu.
The programme will be led by Fabrice Beaulieu, who goes by the impressive title of Reckitt Benckiser executive vice president of group marketing as well as executive vice president of category development organisation hygiene.
Beaulieu said: “In our journey to create a cleaner, healthier world, this close collaboration with Google Cloud is a very important milestone for our brands. Only by utilising data will we be able to better serve consumers and shoppers and create meaningful experiences for them.”
His colleague Saqib Mehmood, SVP of digital transformation and CIO of hygiene at RB, added: “We hear every day that data is the new fuel for enabling business growth. However, in today’s digital world, where billions of data points are created every second, finding the right solution for your business can be more complex than anticipated.”
Earlier this month, it was announced that Reckitt was one of a number of major brands to have joined forces with academia and the third sector to launch a global challenge to find new ways to prevent a repetition of the coronavirus pandemic through the innovative use of data.
The Trinity Challenge provides a £10m prize fund for breakthrough solutions to ensure one billion more people are better protected against health emergencies. The funding will be made available to teams to support and scale their innovations across areas including economics, behavioural sciences, and epidemiology.
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