Company: Danone (Global)
Company background: Danone is a global-leading food & beverage company built on three businesses: Essential Dairy and Plant-Based Products, Waters and Specialised Nutrition. We aim to inspire healthier and more sustainable eating and drinking practices, in line with our vision - Danone, One Planet. One Health - which reflects a strong belief that the health of people and the health of the planet are interconnected. It takes pride in being a global leader in having a unique health-focused portfolio that allows it to be a key player in the food revolution.
Contact: Steven Gradidge
Title: Global Social Media Lead
Related URLs: https://www.danone.com/
Kudos Category: The Accelerator
1. Please describe your company and your initiative.
Danone is dedicated to bringing health through food to as many people as possible. It became the first listed company to adopt the “Entreprise à Mission” model created by French law in 2019 – lawfully enshrining its social and environmental objectives into its overall purpose.
Furthermore, a total of 17 Danone entities have now earned B Corp™ Certification and as a result, over 30% of Danone’s global sales are now covered by B Corp™ certification - marking significant progress towards the ambition to become one of the first certified multinationals.
2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome?
Danone’s three businesses (Specialized Nutrition, Waters and Essential Dairy & Plant-Based Products), as different as they are from a product perspective, shared very similar challenges – a complex ecosystem of departments and third-party partners trying to keep apace with the demands of the modern marketing environment. The purpose of the Danone-Khoros partnership was to facilitate the vision where content activation was faster, more efficient and social marketing performance could be more easily analysed. A future which all internal stakeholders were empowered through the democratization of data through a single-unified management platform. However, as you can imagine in a global business this was quite the challenge. With technology typically outsourced (on the side of an agency partner), this partnership was a major milestone in Danone taking a long-term vision of its technology needs and requirements for the future.
Why
The social media content creation process is by nature a non-linear process - complex feedback loops, multiple stakeholders existing along the creation path. However, creating and executing content that resonates at the ‘speed of culture’ is now paramount. Danone’s existing workflows and processes were not able to operate at a speed the future (and consumers) demanded of it. The company was under no illusion that new processes were required, but they had to be developed through the harmonization of technology and users across the ecosystem - Marketing Directors, Brand and Media Managers, Legal and regulatory teams, Community Managers and of course, the ecosystem of third-party agencies (e.g. Media, Creative). With no apologies for hyperbole, Khoros would fundamentally change Danone’s daily ways of working for stakeholders across the world.
How:
Danone invested significant resource in running an RFP to support its marketing, brand and communications teams, both global and local, to find a social marketing technology partner. This RFP was developed using advanced bespoke evaluation criteria by a project team of subject matter experts – the criteria, validated by both global and local stakeholders across the world, was designed to ensure the entire social media ecosystem of stakeholders had a voice within the process of choosing a technology partner. It was no means a top-down pushed initiative, but one built to include as many local considerations as possible.
When:
The RFP was sponsored by the Danone Group Chief-Digital-Offer who considered the process as a key initiative in the company’s digital transformation roadmap, as was installing a best-in-class Social Media Marketing partner.
3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results.
Following on from a successful and validated pilot phase, Danone scaled out its deployment of Khoros Marketing across all three businesses in January 2020. Working with the Khoros Success teams the enablement process was optimised by a number of shrewd learnings and insights, increasing the number of platform users by 162%. Not only this, but onboarding time per market reduced by 50% (vs. the previous process). To date Danone has:
- 300+ active users trained
- 250+ social channels
- 25+ markets
For certain countries where there have been proactive efforts in insourcing output, Khoros has been the foundation of process creation and ways of working development. We currently have three countries (Brazil, Spain and Germany) where all three Danone businesses rely on Khoros for their daily operations, and this is expected to increase in the future.
Anecdotally, Khoros’ footprint within Danone is so truly global that there is never a moment in the working day when Khoros is not being used by one of its team. One Planet, One Health.
Deployment of Khoros is helping with the challenges of scheduling inconsistencies, maintaining a global label taxonomy, enforced content approval paths in regulated industries, and on-demand content performance metrics – delivering a higher level of operational acumen needed (and wanted!) for such a large organization.
