Technology is crucial to a brand’s ability to adapt to the unpredictable market and the everchanging needs and values of customers. Colgate-Palmolive has announced that 40,000 employees are working on digital transformation with the goal of impacting every facet of the company. The digital transformation initiatives adopted by Colgate-Palmolive have allowed the brand to make better and more informed marketing decisions. Stan Sultala, the company’s chief financial officer, states that “50% plus of our spend is now in digital…We’re able to get much more deep into the analytics and the ROI metrics. We’re doing a much better job at personalising our content.”
The integration of digital transformation across all areas of the business allowed the company to make more valuable and effective decisions. The company has focused its digital transformation efforts in a few key areas including: E-commerce, building a digitally driven supply chain, measuring return on investment in advertising and making media decisions, new product development and innovation, determining how artificial intelligence can add value and team training around the world.
In order to survive in today’s market, brands need to be able to adapt quickly to customers’ ever-changing needs and expectations. The pandemic highlighted the importance of digital transformation, as many brands had to adapt quickly to circumstances that were out of their control in order to survive. Digital transformation allows brands to future-proof their businesses and forces them to reflect on how they currently do things, why they do them and challenges them to come up with more efficient and effective ways of doing things.
To be honest, this is a day job story. ALL brand-owning businesses will be undergoing similar journeys or transformations to be digital ready and competitive. The best businesses have always been agile and able to make fast choices to drive their brands. This piece highlights that the speed – and often scale – of real-time change is accelerating. It impacts communications, sales channels and supply chains, for example. It requires holistic solutions beyond the marketing department, making brand building an integral part of the core activities of the entire organisation. The reason we want to highlight this is because Colgate-Palmolive, by making this public, has made a visible strategic commitment. Their people and the external world know this is from the top and they mean it. Watch this space.
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