Accenture Builds Digital Social Platform for Unilever Global Marketing in 12 Weeks
In just 12 weeks, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has built and implemented a new
digital social platform for Unilever that will help connect its
marketers, brand managers and partners in 190 countries. The
implementation – which is built on the Salesforce Platform and leverages
Salesforce Chatter, the enterprise social networking technology –
enables Unilever marketers to share knowledge, best practices and
creative assets across the network.
“The new applications boost collaboration amongst our marketers
globally, helping them to easily find people, information and
conversations that they should be a part of,” said Marc Mathieu, SVP
Marketing, Unilever. “The platform provides our team with the tools they
need to develop and build our brands in local markets, which is critical
to driving our ‘Crafting Brands for Life’ strategy. It also frees up
time for our team to create more magic – that is, to engage with
consumers and create more effective marketing, which will be key to
delivering our ambition to double the size of our business while
reducing our environmental footprint and increasing our social impact.”
Unilever’s new digital social platform enhances collaboration by:
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Providing marketers with access to the latest Unilever knowledge,
people and tools, and allowing them to participate in discussions and
share best practice examples across the business.
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Enabling each Unilever brand team to create a central hub –
essentially an individual brand showcase – where marketers and
partners can join in conversations and access relevant content and
assets.
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Providing a forum to support collaboration between central and local
teams and between Unilever marketers and their agencies.
“These tools really help us harness the power of the brands, the power
of the people in Unilever and our agency partners – that combination is
very powerful for us,” said Mark McClennon, CIO Consumer, Unilever.
“We’ve gone from a blank piece of paper all the way through to rolling
out the first release of the platform in about three months using
Salesforce technology. This is nothing short of a marketing and
technology transformation for Unilever.”
“Accenture helped Unilever leverage digital technologies to quickly
conceive and deliver the digital social platform to meet the needs of
global and local marketers in 190 countries,” said Bernie Segal,
Managing Director for Accenture Interactive. “We built rich, innovative
applications to drive business value whilst at the same time, we kept it
very simple so the applications are very familiar, achieving rapid
adoption. We believe it is one of the most pioneering uses of Salesforce
technology, delivered in an agile manner. Our market leading
software-as-a-service (Saas) implementation team, drawn from our UK and
global delivery network capabilities, built the digital social platform
to help Unilever quickly achieve global scale.”
Accenture, the leading provider on salesforce.com’s
largest transformational projects, drew upon the broad expertise of its
more than 2,100 Salesforce
skilled personnel, Cloud Centers of Excellence, Accenture SaaS Delivery
Toolkit and Accenture Cloud Application Factory to deliver Unilever’s
new digital platform.
This service is part of Accenture Commercial Services for Consumer
Goods, a business service that helps companies increase sales and
margins through an end-to-end offering of management consulting,
technology and outsourcing that improves interactions with customers,
channels and consumers through innovative analytical, multi-channel and
operational capabilities.
About Accenture Interactive
Accenture Interactive helps the world’s leading brands drive superior
marketing performance across the full multichannel customer experience.
Working with over 4,000 Accenture professionals dedicated to serving the
marketing function, Accenture Interactive offers integrated,
industrialized and industry-driven marketing solutions and services
across consulting, technology and outsourcing powered by analytics.
Follow @AccentureSocial or visit Accenture Interactive.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company, with approximately 261,000 people serving clients
in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience,
comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies,
Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance
businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of
US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page
is www.accenture.com.