Kimberly-Clark Fuels Consumer Insights and Innovation with Data Collaboration

The Challenge

Kimberly-Clark and its trusted brands are an indispensable part of life for more than a quarter of the world’s population. Fueled by ingenuity, creativity, and an understanding of people’s most essential needs for more than 150 years, Kimberly-Clark has created products that help individuals experience more of what’s important to them.

But emerging factors threatened the value of underlying consumer insights and signals that have been the fuel for this innovation. Global data privacy regulations, including GDPR and CPRA, the declining support of third-party cookies, and the lack of access to direct retail data about new shopper behaviors and preferences all created rising barriers to truly understanding and addressing consumer needs.

These challenges arose at the same time that cloud technologies promised even more power to build predictive models with machine learning, handle huge data sets with scalable storage, and build and execute large analytic queries that were previously out of reach of local servers.

The Solution

Instead of relying on the limitations of off-the-shelf solutions, Kimberly-Clark chose a flexible data architecture that could adapt to consumer shifts, market disruptions, and increasing operational access throughout the organization.

Kimberly-Clark selected Google Cloud as its cloud foundation, centered on Big Query and its supporting tools and libraries to power the central cloud data warehouse.

LiveRamp’s data collaboration platform was deployed on top of Google Cloud to create a consumer data workspace focused on privacy-conscious data connectivity, audience modeling, media measurement, and data collaboration using LiveRamp’s identity frameworks. LiveRamp’s data protections were instrumental for enabling detailed access to rich layers of transactional data from retail partners.

Mindshare and LiveRamp supported Kimberly-Clark’s visionary solution through all phases of testing and rollout:

• Technology evolution to ensure that the best options were selected to create powerful identity-resolved analytics without exposing personally-identifiable consumer information, ensuring that growth would stay compliant with global privacy regulations.
• Data ecosystem buildout to shift how Kimberly-Clark collaborates with data partners in order to eliminate third-party black box audience models and place more control and transparency in the hands of Kimberly-Clark’s own internal teams. This created a newly enriched post-cookie data ecosystem supported by accurate consumer and retail transaction signals to understand product affinities and cohorts, while also enabling advanced analytics for path to purchase.
• Person-based activation and strategy to leverage both first-party and second-party insights, unlocking contextual targeting opportunities and channel performance optimization across segments.

The Results

Kimberly-Clark’s goal to consolidate and deepen consumer insights is an ongoing journey. However, post-cookie activation, audience modeling, and omnichannel measurement have proven rich with cost savings due to standardizing data workflows and identifying new ways to license data assets directly into the LiveRamp data collaboration platform for analytics, insights, and targeting.

The consolidation of data led to streamlining internal processes for modeling and reporting and uncovering efficiencies. For example, transparency and control over end-to-end data processing has yielded 30% full-time-equivalent time savings.

Most significantly, this new solution has served as a clarifying foundation for directing business transformation within Kimberly-Clark, highlighting the importance of upskilling existing talent to master the powerful data infrastructure. With this business evolution, deep and accurate consumer understanding once again fuels Kimberly-Clark innovation for generations to come.