Developing a global digital strategy
How does a global company take advantage of digital
technology? Johnson & Johnson’s vice president of digital
strategy, Gail Horwood, explains.
I
joined J&J Consumer Companies about
four years ago to start its Digital Center of Excellence. Our role
initially was to build capabilities and develop strategy that served
multiple brands in multiple regions, so I did a landscape overview to
help develop the approach. What I saw was that we had hundreds of
different websites and digital platforms that we were operating upon
globally. If you want to get a message across globally on your owned
assets, you need to do that in the same way across the world.
So
we made a strategic decision to agree to build certain types of
things, with a website on a shared platform at the center. We work
both internally and with external vendors globally to build that and
we love the open-source model. As we develop modules that suit our
businesses, they can be shared, and it’s very exciting for our
internal developers because it’s a new way of working.
In
the past, the model might have been that our biggest brands had the
most budget and developed the most robust platforms. And smaller
brands had less robust digital footprints because they had to build
that on their own power. Yet when you share a platform, any brand
small or large can benefit from improvements. What this has enabled
us to do is to bring the same power that one of our biggest, most
iconic brands has to one small brand in a very particular region or
market. And that, of course, enables us to innovate very quickly and
iterate.
J&J
has historically been very decentralized. One of the things I was
able to do in the consumer sector was bring all that work together.
The more we bring our cross-functional partners and projects
together, the more we’ll make true impact for the business. It’s
great to execute on a regional and local basis—and it’s really at
the heart of our business strategy—but I believe digital brings
opportunities to streamline and leverage certain capabilities that
are really common across the businesses.
Real-time marketing
Social
media is an example of something that truly requires a global and
local strategy, because social makes any communication global.
Setting a global communication strategy requires some pretty
foundational things: content management, digital asset management,
new production models that help us create and then leverage and
syndicate content globally.
For
example, we recently participated in a real-time social-media
campaign for the 2014 FIFA World Cup for our Listerine consumer
brand. For the first time ever, J&J built two newsrooms, and we
responded to action in the matches in real-time with brand messaging.
We had to set up the appropriate processes, governance, a risk
matrix, channels, and work very closely with our cross-functional
team, as well as with regulatory compliance, legal, and marketing.
And
you see the results of your work immediately and how consumers
respond to it. We’ve had some great success with that. But the real
lesson is that real-time marketing is as much about the preplanning
and the preparation as it is about enabling people to act in real
time.
In
big companies like ours, creating a TV spot or a few pieces of copy a
year would be quite typical. When you’re developing real-time
social-media campaigns, you might have 200 pieces of copy in a month.
Taking advantage of that required a new business model, a new way of
thinking about it. It also required thinking about tolerance and
risk.
Tolerance is about asking, “What is a reasonable threshold
for when we need to take action?” when something unexpected
happens. It gave us the confidence to say, “You know what? We knew
something like that could happen. It did, and we’ve already decided
how we’re going to manage against that.”
I
think it’s very important that social media be managed, at least in
part, internally in an organization. As strong as our agency partners
are, and they’ve been terrific creative partners, nobody knows our
business and our business requirements as well as we do.
Serving consumers better
Evolving
our model has been a learning journey. The challenge for us is not
that the model is wrong; it’s that the landscape has changed. The
model doesn’t fit the new landscape, so we’ve had a lot of
success through these active learning projects.
Understanding
the consumer journey and what we’re building for whom and when is
very important. So I’ve set up a group that has product-development
expertise. They translate business requirements into technical
specifications. They maintain the responsibility for not just
building and overseeing the build of digital products, but also
ensuring that they’re measured and optimized. We treat them as
platforms rather than projects.
A
big shift in our organization has been to manage those over time and
to iterate and build upon them as opposed to consider them a discrete
project that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you put an
app into the app store, you’re potentially finished with it, but
the consumer is expecting updates, improvements, messaging. And
that’s something that we’ve built into our organization that
didn’t necessarily exist in our former model.
The
other thing we’ve done is develop benchmarks. The number one
question I’m asked by our business leaders is, “What is the ROI
of digital?” If you’re developing across multiple platforms and
multiple regions, the way you’re looking at the world and consumer
behavior is very different. So what digital analytics and a
standardized approach—rather than a custom and bespoke approach
market by market—has brought us is true consumer insights. And
we’re able to watch trends develop in consumer behaviors, see them
change and develop.
We
started very much as a strategy organization and we built common
platforms that serve multiple brands in multiple regions. That didn’t
mean anyone used them. So a lot of what we’ve been doing is around
training, talent development, identifying talent that can staff these
organizations, so we can really take what we’ve built and truly
embed it in the business and in business practice. We’re trying to
teach our businesses to leverage these new insights in ways that they
hadn’t thought of.
About the authors
Gail
Horwood has
been the vice president of worldwide digital strategy at Johnson &
Johnson since September 2010. This essay is an edited transcript of
an interview conducted by McKinsey Publishing’s Simon
London.
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