Marico drives global digital transformation

With a market capitalization of $7.8 billion, the brand touches the lives of one in every three Indians through its portfolio of iconic brands in the beauty and wellness space. Its products can be found in more than 25 countries across Asia, Africa and the Americas. For unlocking long term profitable growth, Digital has been identified as one of the pillars in Marico’s 4D framework — along with Diversification, Diversity and Distribution.

Since 2019, Juhi Singh, head of the company’s global digital center of excellence and international ecommerce, has led the effort to build strong digital and analytical capabilities that enable real-time, data-driven decision making to power Digital at Marico. 

Singh knew that a best-in-class social listening solution would help mitigate potential risk to the brand while enabling innovation and trendspotting. These capabilities are key growth drivers in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) and FMCG industries. 

Singh wanted a technology solution that would enable Marico to monitor social channels, news, media, blogs, ecommerce reviews and more for relevant topics and trends — and produce insights that drive the business forward. The solution would help:   

• Track trends in brand, category, and competition conversations 
• Monitor Marico’s online reputation and mitigate risk  
• Assess influencer marketing campaign performance and identify trends for innovation as well as moment marketing 
• Enable corporate brand equity, employer equity, and sustainability  

There are three key use cases that have been driving significant business results. 

Developing a digital measurement framework 
Marico leadership wanted to gain a clearer view and better understanding of each brand’s performance on digital channels. With appxroximately 100 brands globally, there was a growing need to standardize KPIs and success metrics for digital campaigns as well as to objectively evaluate the quality of their digital content.   

Singh worked with Sprinklr to develop a holistic digital measurement framework called DQ (Digital Quotient*), which not only assesses performance across multiple channels —ecommerce, social, paid, influencer, organic and direct-to-consumer — but also helps brand teams make data-driven decisions. Marico’s DQ aims to optimize performance analysis and competitive benchmarking across 1,250 data points. 

Powered by AI, Sprinklr Social Listening provides all metrics required to calculate Marico’s social DQ, influencer DQ, and reviews and ratings analyses. Today, brand team decisions around social content and influencer selection are driven by data. They are able to understand and take action on key customer concerns related to packaging, product and delivery by monitoring reviews and ratings in real-time and working closely with ecommerce partners to solve any issues detected.  

Three years in, DQ has become a way of life for Marico: Apart from driving business results for brands on digital, DQ is regularly presented to Marico's board and is an integral part of the CEO’s and CMO’s KPIs. Marico leadership looks at DQ scores as an indicator of their organization’s digital maturity.  

There’s a more fun outcome, too. 

“Building out our DQ has also created a healthy competition between our brands and functional teams,” says Singh. “Everyone vies for the highest DQ in the company, so it has also had the effect of bringing our teams together.”   

Staying ahead of the curve with new trend-spotting methodology Another goal for Marico leadership was to identify and capitalize on consumer trends early. Historically, trendspotting was an arduous process taking anywhere from three to six months. With Sprinklr, Marico’s digital transformation team developed a live dashboard that combines Social Listening and Benchmarking data with search trends from Google, YouTube and Amazon over a rolling seven-day period. In the last three years, this tool has helped Marico successfully launch multiple new categories, innovations, formats, region specific products and more. Some brands also use Sprinklr data to spot content trends for their target group, which helps drive higher brand engagement.  

Simplifying online response management and risk mitigation while reducing SLAs
Sprinklr helps Marico manage crisis and reputational risks by identifying all emerging issues as well as responding to customers faster.  In 2021, Marico was responding to fewer than 50 percent of messages with an SLA of 21 hours and 30 minutes. After implementing Sprinklr, the digital transformation team, in partnership with the Consumer Quality Assurance (CQA), PR and Brand Teams, significantly improved both metrics:  

• Response rate has increased by 98% 
• Response time / SLA has come down by 82% 

Today, the team leverages Smart Responses from Sprinklr Service, which uses AI to suggest templated responses to the most common questions. This enables the care team to respond at scale, sometimes to the tune of ​​200,000 consumers per hour. 

On an ongoing basis, the CQA and manufacturing teams use Sprinklr data to identify & resolve packaging or product issues raised by consumers, in order to ensure quality. 

With teams distributed across multiple geographies all working from Sprinklr’s unified platform, successes from one country can be easily borrowed and repeated in another.  
 
Overall, Marico reports that Sprinklr has enabled key outcomes across the company, including:  

• Consumer centricity: anchoring on a data-driven AI framework, Sprinklr has helped the Marico team to redesign their overall product and marketing strategy from a customer-centric perspective. Moreover, their processes have become more agile, enabling them to respond quickly to changing customer expectations.  
• Transparency and openness: Sprinklr has helped promote transparency and openness with dashboards that assess and share team performance across the company.   
• Excellence: Sprinklr helps Marico spot product or content issues and drive continuous improvement in delivering consumer delight, better net sentiment, and higher engagements. 
• Innovation: trend-spotting algorithm helps surface emerging trends, enable quick launches, and beat the competition with disruptive products that customers love and need.  
• Bias for action: The live alerts and dashboards enable quicker actions – reducing SLAs, mitigating potential crises, product/packaging changes, content and topicality. 

 
In addition, Marico’s proprietary DQ moved up by 22 Index points, a 54% improvement. Its custom net sentiment metric, which has been established to be a driver of ecommerce sales, improved by 33% for Marico India, 27% for Marico Bangladesh and 60% for Marico Vietnam, along with business surge in three key geographies for Marico. Marico’s response rate to consumers has improved by more than 95%, and its first response time has gone from more than 48 hours to less than one hour. The brand has tracked a marked increase in mentions across social channels, up by 92%, and an 82% improvement in engagement. It has also increased its average Ecommerce ratings for its global brands by 100%