How Coty, Diageo & Whirlpool Connect the Dots For Immersive Experiences
Whether it's on physical retail shelves or the infinite scroll of the endless aisle, no longer is it sufficient for consumers to find satisfaction in just a product 一 now, they’re looking for an experience.
For consumer goods manufacturers, leveraging data and analytics in the development of the right immersive and distinct experiences is just the first step; properly disseminating these insights across the enterprise to unlock their potential is just as critical.
At Whirlpool, this means transforming home utilities through a diverse portfolio of brands like KitchenAid, Maytag and others, while also delivering an effective customer experience.
“We think about it as the kitchen experience and the laundry experience,” Priya Srinivas, VP and CIO for Whirlpool North America, said at the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Summit last week. “How do you really therefore develop internal capabilities to be able to show up in the right places at the right time with the right information? That is really the transition that we're trying to do.”
Sunny Yurasek, senior director of data and analytics at Diageo, agreed, noting the spirits company is diversifying the types of alcoholic beverages they offer, having acquired over 25 brands in the past few years alone. This, she says, is part of a careful process of analyzing customer demand based on their age, region, time frame and current trends.
“The company is constantly engaging and finding the right influencer,” Yurasek said. “George Clooney for Casamigos, Aviation Gin from Ryan Reynolds … really understanding who are the consumers that are entering the space. We're not all going to have the same profile.”
Understanding Vehicles
Part of designing the customer experience, as Coty BI director Kavita Thekkakara puts it, is understanding the various vehicles that drive the modern retail experience, including influencers, brick-and-mortar retail, and the digital marketplace, and then trying to connect the dots with the data.
“How do we convey this journey of this consumer across these?” Thekkakara said. “Individually [it’s] easy to measure, but not so easy to get the holistic consumer experience.”
Through these vehicles, vast amounts of data is collected, and unlocking insights from them are challenges for all organizations, especially larger, global orgs. Coty is taking steps to develop more of a formal vehicle when it comes to organic data sharing between brands, regions, and departments, including through a global data board.
By analyzing this data from various sources through various lenses, Coty is able to better identify the impact on their business.
“Ultimately, it comes to what we're really trying to track from a business question and really looking at short and long term impact. So what we try to do is really look at [is] if there's a data gap, what does that dad scarcity really mean?” Thekkakara said. “Will it skew our understanding of the business? And with that kind of mindset, we go in and try to determine … is there an issue with compliance? Is there an issue with cookie tracking? … And then go back to this idea of consumer journey to say, OK, is this actually going to help us or is this more of a nice to have?’”
Future Outlook and Measurements
When looking towards their KPIs, panelists noted that although their companies have seen the same level of output, the input required in sustaining this success has increased based both on myriad new technologies and the expectations of new and returning customers.
“We have such a portfolio of everything in terms of services, consumer goods, etc. We're really trying to anchor it up and say, ‘What is the customer lifetime value?’ And then how do you bring it together? Is it just within the brand or is it across the brands? How do you keep that ongoing experience going?” Srinivas said. “So that's been one of the big shifts, but even as we develop that, OK, what is the calculation behind it? Is it going to work for all the brands? And is that applicable? Those are some of the things that we're trying.”
In looking at the buzzy topics of artificial intelligence and augmented reality, the technologies are still underutilized and hold great potential. While the beauty industry has already experimented with these ideas in the demonstration of make-up, nail polish and other products, the technology’s emergence as a whole has taken retailers by surprise, Thekkakara said.
And while she expressed optimism about how AI will be used in the future to identify and analyze data, she tempered this by expressing the need to exercise caution when experimenting, concerned it may identify false patterns and mislead with hallucinations.
“There's a question of trust, and we want to make sure that we can figure out the model … but I think we're optimistically cautious,” she said.
