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Group Danone: Not Digital Marketing, But Marketing in a Digital Era

This article is more than 9 years old.

During research for the just-released Forbes Insights report on digital marketing, The Race is On, we had an opportunity to speak with Michael Aidan, head of digital & VP digital brand platforms at Group Danone S.A. While certain of his comments appear in the main report, below we offer an extended Q&A.

What is your role at Danone?

I work with the various divisions, geographies and functions to help them better leverage the digital opportunity for their business. It can be about content, tools or organization.

What does “digital marketing” mean to Danone?

The basics of understanding a consumer and developing and conveying the right offer at the right time has not changed. So it’s not digital marketing, it’s marketing in a digital era.

And what this means is greater precision. As recently as just a few years ago, we were living in an average world -- what is the average person thinking? And then [we were] selling to everyone as though they were all the same.

Think about it: we survey a group of customers. And then we advertise to the average person watching TV or using other media. Then we go out to the average retailer. And the average shopper. And we hope that our average profiles match up with all these other averages – which of course, if we’re very good at surveying, they may, on average.

But now, with technology, we can isolate what each and every person wants and develop the individual offer or message. So we are going from something average to something very specific.

In what ways are you interacting with individuals?

We can, through their chosen media – through YouTube, Facebook fan pages, Google or whatever – reach out to them with a targeted message. And in certain cases we can translate this interaction into a transaction.

But there’s something else going on that is very important to understand. We used to advertise to a captive audience through TV or radio. If someone wanted to see “that” game or “that” program, we would pay to access that group of viewers and they would have to see or hear or see our message.

Today, especially online, most of the time people can choose whether to see our ads or not. We therefore need to make our stories more emotionally engaging than ever before. We need to engage consumers emotionally. We need to give consumers a reason to listen to our message. This is about seduction – not repetition.

So content becomes much more important. Here, our Roller Babies campaign, which started with a YouTube video, made the Guinness book of records as one of the most viewed advertisements in the history of the Internet. Customers watched that and then showed it to their friends and it went viral incredibly quickly.

When advertising with digital, people opt to see your ad. If they watch it to the end that means something. But if they share it with their friends, they want to share that emotion that means something even more valuable.

And we built on that with applications where people could interact with our content, adding their own faces to the video or turning their friends into babies. We worked with a small Swedish firm that created as system to identify 72 points on your face, match that with 3,500 baby faces and recreate the baby you could have been. That image could now, through our applications, be shared with their friends.

And we created the Making Of… video. Including user-created content, the Roller Babies campaign and its follow-ons Baby Inside and Baby & Me have generated hundreds of millions of views. (The latest installment is The Amazing Baby & Me 2.)

So what’s interesting in the digital era, we have this technology that can do so much more, but to make it effective, we have to be more creative and emotionally bonding than traditional advertising.

How does this change your overall approach?

This is a very different way of approaching consumers and retailers. So there must be a transformation in mindset and practice.

The main change, companies have to tear down their silos. The big news with digital is that at the center of your business are these individual consumers and the data they generate. And this customer data exists throughout the organization – in sales and marketing, in quality services, in logistics or supply-chain. So as to better understand consumer behavior and needs, you need to make sure that functions work hand in hand. They must have access to the same data as all the others. If that doesn’t exist, you will end up with ad hoc projects that are never optimal and that never benefit from one another.

How are you getting it done?

The digital transformation team which I am heading covers all divisions, all functions, all regions and all digital expertise. Everyone on the team also has a “day job” if you will, working in their division or region. But they also work with me to define what the future of digital should look like and how we can engage the organization worldwide into this transformation.

When your team arrives, are you greeted with groans or with welcoming?

We are working hand in hand with the business leaders – and they understand the opportunity. So actually, the looks we get are not “deer in the headlights” but more “we’re glad to see you – how can you help?”

What sorts of initiatives are you working on at the moment?

You mean what do I do for a living? I get a laugh from my children when I say I do digital because they’re so much more digitally savvy than I am. But in my work, we are trying to define what digital transformation means, concretely, for a Danone country, a Danone brand or a member of the Danone digital community. And we’re thinking that to better understand consumers and better serve their needs, we need to listen to them better. And for that we need the right tools and processes.

For example?

One thing I can share is that we’ve learned we need to be better at reaching out to customers. For example, we used to define customers by sex, age, gender, urban, etc. But now we can define groups of people by their passion; by their level of interest in a given area.

That’s media, but it’s also through all of today’s touch points: website, social media, mobile. And to me this is an important change. We used to convey every single message in a 30 second commercial. Today, digital enables us to tell parts of the story to certain targets, different parts of the story to others. It’s not repeating everything through every touch point, but it’s customizing the message to make it relevant to the occasion or experience.

And there’s storytelling. That used to mean having a nice website or doing a nice Facebook fan page. But today we want to take that one step further. What subgroups are out there and what kind of messages can we develop for them? What sorts of added services or content?

A good example is Evian. With Evian, we are the sponsors of the US Open, of Wimbledon and Maria Sharapova. But at the same time we also get interest from pediatricians and parents who want to know about the benefits of our water or from hydro-geologists wanting to know how we protect our environment. Now if we push all the information we have to everyone, we’re not going to get a good reaction. Instead, we send targeted content, addressing the interests of each sub group.

And the last bit – how do we convert all of this to sales? There it has to be the right technology and the right partners. A good example here, working with a small startup, we developed something called a “smart drop”. That’s a magnet that you put on our [refrigerator] and when you need more Evian, you tap on it and the order is placed and arrives at your door either directly from us or through retailers in the UK like Ocado.

So as you can see, we are trying to define the various stages, figure out what tools and processes would be useful in each case – and then we are working to fill in the gaps.

What is the role of IT in all of this?

It’s good that you ask. I am not a tech expert. But what I know is technology in this instance is moving from reporting and control systems, the back end of the bus, to value-creation, the front end of the bus. We are now in the era where marketing and technology need to partner, closely. [Accordingly], I have a person from information systems in my group. And we are constantly sharing with one another what each other needs to do to enable the other to do what they need to do. And it is evolving rapidly. But it must be a close partnership. That to me is the future of marketing in a digital era, a close partnership between marketing, IT and the rest of the organization.