The annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase the professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of their organization. This prestigious award recognizes leaders and pioneers who have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across their people, processes, information and technology.
Marketing has a significant opportunity to lead and to maximize the demand for an organization's products and services by adopting innovative processes and technologies. This transformational opportunity starts with an exploration of digital commerce and marketing processes that facilitate the presentation of products and services using predictive and robotic technology. Using newly available tools to engage customers and understand the voice of the customer, marketing can deliver an engaging and satisfying customer experience.
Ventana Research selected Shiseido Group for the 14th Annual Digital Leadership Award for marketing and its investment to ensure the most complete set of customer data across the journey of interactions in channels of engagement.
Shiseido is a global skincare, cosmetics and personal care company comprising dozens of brands sold in over 120 countries and regions around the world. After nearly 150 years in business, Shiseido underwent a rapid digital transformation journey. Shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach, Shiseido aims to drive personalized customer experiences to its millions of customers across the globe, while always respecting their privacy and compliance requirements. With the implementation of Reltio Connected Customer 360, Shiseido was able to build a solid foundation to address the ever-changing needs of its customers. This also helped promote data literacy across the workforce to better navigate a new digital world with confidence and make more data-driven decisions throughout multiple divisions of the organization, including marketing and sales.
Shiseido was able to architect a unified and connected ecosystem across geographies, brands and businesses. Before the technology implementation, all of Shiseido’s data was siloed and in disparate locations. This digital transformation was imperative to collect customer data and turn it into key knowledge to drive engaging, relevant and hyper-personalized customer experiences. It also helped leverage the insight-ready data to maximize the value of its AI/ML investments, and fundamentally changed how Shiseido manages and approaches data. They have a solid foundation of customer data and enriched profiles with thousands of attributes that were historically it collected data in silos. Now, Shiseido collects data from all the various sources — online, in-store, mobile apps, retail partners, etc. — thereby improving its quality data of customer demographics and creating better experiences through the customer journey.
This technology shift has had a significant impact on Shiseido. It has been able to track global and regional growth in terms of customer knowledge and revenue. It built CRM programs and gained a better understanding of its customer demographic. It has been able to build direct-to-consumer relationships and better retail partners, saved on marketing spend and improved product development. Shiseido chose Reltio because it’s a cloud-native solution vs. on-premises. Its product capabilities, like the abilities to simplify compliance, quickly onboard data sources to create and enrich 360 customer profiles, accelerate time-to-value etc., all contribute to Shiseido’s success in delivering valuable insight for its customers.
Shiseido was able to further invest in ecommerce and omnichannel acceleration, data and analytics, digital marketing and education as part of the digital transformation of its entire workforce. Marketing, customer experience/service and product development are some of the areas that have benefited. Collecting data from all sources and having improved customer knowledge has allowed Shiseido to create journeys and data rich profiles to better personalize and better market its offerings. The organization is able to better predict its customers’ needs and desires, and through that, they also better serve them effectively on the channel of their choice i.e., email, SMS, social, etc. When COVID-19 hit, Shiseido was able to quickly shift its business to meet the surge in demand through ecommerce channels, operate 24/7 in real-time, add, change or remove customer profile attributes without downtime, and scale to support thousands of users.
Marketing applications and technology is a software category in need of innovation and optimization. Reltio addresses the challenges of providing data across customer journey and for commerce. Organizations with challenges in having consistent customer data will appreciate the ability to ensure consistency across the needs of buyers and sellers.
Organizations looking to maximize the value of its business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how marketing can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Reltio can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Omer Iqbal at Shiseido Group, for your leadership.
Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance on how to utilize processes and applications to maximize the return on marketing investments. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and to enable business resilience and marketing readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.