Whirlpool Reaches 5x More Shoppers with Personalized Experiences Everywhere

The Challenge

For more than 100 years, Whirlpool has been the home appliance company turning everyday chores into acts of love. From washers that scrub out soccer stains to legendary KitchenAid stand mixers, Whirlpool’s iconic products – and brands like KitchenAid, Maytag, JennAir, and Amana – help customers care for their homes and families.

When KitchenAid decided to expand its direct-to-consumer business in 2019, the team knew Whirlpool’s rich first-party data could unlock high-intent audiences and more personalized customer experiences. But they needed to connect shopper data and fill in information gaps across internal teams, including sales and customer support, and Whirlpool’s ecosystem of brands. They also needed to activate and reach new incremental audiences without directing business away from KitchenAid’s retail partners. 

Kellie Jones, Director, KitchenAid Small Appliances D2C & Digital Marketing, Whirlpool Corporation, couldn’t find a solution fast enough. “If we’re not making this move now, we’re going to fall behind,” Jones said about Whirlpool’s data transformation during the RampUp 2025 session CLTV Ready: How to Initiate Business Impact Today and Drive Growth Tomorrow.

Looking ahead, the team wanted to leverage Whirlpool’s connected customer insights to enhance shopper experiences beyond marketing – from researching product options well before the point of purchase to learning how to use products, purchasing accessories, and requesting service.

The Solution

Whirlpool needed a partner that could expand the team’s addressable audience reach while providing clear insights for incremental segmentation and customer personalization. Greater addressability would reveal new target audiences and how shoppers prefer to interact with brands, be it email, social, SMS, or other channels. Incrementality would allow KitchenAid to target customers who aren’t already buying through valued retail partners. Whirlpool sought a partner that could connect its siloed first-party data and evolve with its brands’ needs.   

Securing executive buy-in and stakeholder alignment was the critical first step to achieve these goals. Whirlpool’s team decided to use the KitchenAid brand as its first use case for cleaning and connecting its first-party data and then activating new audiences. They specifically wanted to test building lookalike audiences of current customers to attract new shoppers with relatable content. If successful, the pilot would catalyze future investments in the quality of Whirlpool’s data. 

Whirlpool chose LiveRamp to connect its organization’s data with RampID, the most durable, interoperable identifier for connecting the ecosystem. LiveRamp’s connectivity solutions not only connected KitchenAid’s data across internal silos, but enabled the team to grow and scale its insights with third-party data partners like Circana. With deeper, clearer customer insights, KitchenAid unlocked a complete view of their customers and could deliver the engaging personalization that every shopper expects. 

“We want a partner that can help us learn more about our consumers’ shopping habits and their spending behaviors, and tap into that to convince them to shop more with us,” Jones said. “LiveRamp has been a huge resource – the power comes with the network.”

By tapping into the world’s most powerful data collaboration network, Whirlpool’s partnership with LiveRamp enabled the team to enrich KitchenAid’s customer data, leading to more accurate audience activation, segmentation, and targeting, and fundamentally transforming their approach to measurement and optimization.

The Results

KitchenAid’s direct-to-consumer team presented a successful data collaboration pilot to Whirlpool’s leadership. KitchenAid achieved an unprecedented 5x greater reach to addressable audiences after connecting its first-party data and removed more than 200,000 duplicated audiences. The results led to more efficient media spend, better qualified audiences, reduced acquisition costs, and the necessary stakeholder buy-in for business growth. 

Boosting audience incrementality became essential to driving precise targeting and more effective ad spend in less time. Now that the team can reach their exact customers wherever they are with the right message, they’re exploring new ways to measure click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend. The LiveRamp Clean Room is empowering Whirlpool to move beyond simplistic mixed media models for deeper measurement everywhere it matters, such as within the cloud and across channels.

“LiveRamp is helping us take ownership of our data,” Jones said, adding she’s excited about the experience LiveRamp and Whirlpool are creating together. “They’re not only helping us implement and execute, but to optimize and think differently about the customer experience and why they’d want to come back again and again. We’re really excited about what we’ve seen so far.”

Since LiveRamp and KitchenAid’s successful pilot, Whirlpool plans to extend data collaboration use cases across its brands and businesses – discovering new ways to delight customers with excellent service and innovative new products, empowering them to provide better care to the people who matter most.