Dive Brief:
- Nestle opened a new "digital command center" housed in Salesforce’s lower Manhattan office space.
- Salesforce employees will run the office, which will primarily focus on monitoring and managing online data—such as social media mentions and email campaigns—and offline data—such as media buying—for eight of Nestle’s water brands, including Perrier, Poland Spring and Pure Life.
- Nestle Waters North America’s CMO Antonio Sciuto told Adweek that the center had four purposes: find and listen to consumers; analyze available data about Nestle products and brands; engage with consumers; and use the data analytics to improve marketing programs.
Dive Insight:
This is the latest in a move among food and beverage manufacturers to bring more marketing initiatives in-house and to take more control and responsibility over branding and marketing ideation, implementation, analysis and strategy. Traditionally, manufacturers hand those tasks over to agencies.
But manufacturers are realizing the benefit in being more closely involved with online and offline marketing initiatives. In some cases, they are also realizing the profits.
In May, PepsiCo unveiled a content creation studio that other parties can use to generate revenue that can supplement PepsiCo’s own marketing spend for its brands. Later that month, Mondelez also announced it would be expanding its in-house marketing efforts to shift away from the more traditional advertising that consumers respond less to today.
Directly engaging with consumers has become increasingly important to brands, even as far as enabling consumers to vote on which products are added or removed from a brand’s portfolio. In this case, Nestle is pushing for data analytics as a way to identify and strategize the best approaches for target demographics.
A recent Netbase report revealed how different social media behavior can be based on the brand or product category, and data analytics can help brands develop better consumer engagement strategies.