“Isolation is not possible anymore,” Domitille Doat, Chief Data Officer of Danone, shared at Adweek NexTech during our fireside chat, The Future of Customer Experience. This sentence stood out, and not just because of the times we live in. It rings true because the customer experience is not created by one company or touch point alone.
You may see an ad for a company you like while you’re scrolling through a publication you subscribe to. How it got there takes trusted data collaboration among many companies. The intense need for trust has only intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when consumers are engaging brands and consuming content in new ways that are difficult to predict.
In order to “win in recovery,” as moderator Warren Jenson, President of LiveRamp, put it, brands must be bold. They must use this time of constraint to innovate, especially with something as crucial as their data strategies.
Data partnerships are crucial
Data partnerships were once thought of as nice to have or strictly the purview of brands, with limited first-party data and deep analytics resources. This is no longer the case. “The brands that are going to survive will master this,” Domitille shared when discussing the impossibility of building a single view of the consumer alone. Companies need to form data partnerships to collaborate in order to stay competitive.
Further to this point, internal partnerships are also crucial to success. At Danone, as in many other organizations, certain teams were often siloed from one another and unable to share insights. Now, media, data, and retailer teams are working together as more consumers are buying food online. For CPGs in particular, customer acquisition and loyalty hinges on consistent quality and availability: “The name of the game is time to deliver,” Domitille said.
“Traffic is the new money”
Understanding where customers are coming from and why they are engaging has always been valuable. This intel is especially prized now when every dollar has to stretch farther. “Traffic is the new money,” Domitille said in response to how Danone positions itself to win as the recession continues. “If I don’t know that this penny is reaching a person that is correctly identified and has agreed to be reached, that is an issue.”
The brands that have prioritized building a single view of the customer and an identity infrastructure to reach those audiences to improve the customer experience are poised to win. Those who haven’t may find it increasingly challenging to understand and reach the audiences that matter to them.
For more on building a data foundation that prioritizes the customer and enables collaboration, watch the full Adweek NexTech session below: