Shiseido Japan boosts overall owned media account performance by 244%
The Challenge
Since opening Japan’s first Western-style pharmacy in 1872, Shiseido has expanded to 120 countries worldwide. “Beauty innovations for a better world” is the cosmetics company’s mission statement — one that has helped power it to set new standards and achieve several industry firsts.
Sprinklr’s sales and customer success functionalities are amazing. They make sure they understand our organizational structure and our reality. They are flexible, prompt, and super reliable. They consistently share best practices to help us meet our goals, and they always go beyond my expectations.”
Assistant Brand Manager, Makeup Digital Marketing Strategy Group, Shiseido Japan
Shiseido’s success in the home market depends on creating high-quality products and services that align with the diverse demands of today’s consumers, who want a holistic and inclusive beauty experience. To maintain its competitive edge in such a dynamic market, Shiseido must stay on top of customer demands and closely watch competitors in the industry. The company recently took a close look at its existing marketing structure and doubled down on scalable, proactive marketing strategies.
In 2021, it hired Yuya Chiba to lead the newly-formed digital marketing strategy team. As assistant brand manager for Shiseido’s makeup digital marketing strategy group, Chiba was tasked with revamping the company’s marketing strategy across the makeup department’s brands, such as MAQuillAGE, Snow Beauty, INTEGRATE and MAJOLICA MAJORCA.
“My mission was to transform the independent organizational structure of the makeup marketing department into a data-driven and agile organization by setting a new operational scheme, culture and mindset," he explains.
To do so, he had wanted to implement changes in the way the team operates at the grassroots level and foster a data-driven mindset and culture. He looked for a technology solution that would help the company to:
- Establish efficient workflows for social reporting and implement an effective feedback loop across brands.
- Take quick action to incorporate consumer feedback, market trends, and competitive insights into its social content.
- Systematically accumulate learnings and best practices and collaborate better with stakeholders across brands.
The Solution
Shiseido implemented Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform and immediately put it to work as the engine that drove organizational transformation for the makeup department’s marketing team.
Getting real-time, actionable data from social campaigns
Prior to launching Sprinklr, Chiba says, the makeup department’s marketing teams worked with agencies. They monitored social media performance by reading reports the agencies provided — or by manually checking each social account. This hindered them from taking the quick action based on those results.
“There was no chance to share learnings across the teams due to each team functioning independently,” says Chiba. He took to defining the digital KPIs derived from brand KGI across all makeup brands and expanded the channels they tracked to include all owned social media channels and websites. They also increased the frequency of social reporting from twice yearly to monthly.
Still, to get a full view of social performance, Chiba had to create reports manually.
"I checked Instagram Insights, X, formerly Twitter Analytics and then Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics. It was all very manual and time consuming,” he says. It took a long time to gather insights from social campaigns and put them into action.
With Sprinklr, all owned media accounts are now monitored from the Sprinklr platform. Sprinklr Social enables makeup department teams to easily measure social performance, pulling real-time data to a customized dashboard and producing automated, shareable reports.
“Since we started using Sprinklr, our review process has improved dramatically,” says Chiba. "Now, no one needs to manually create reports because everything is right there in Sprinklr’s real-time dashboard. You can see everything.”
"Now, we are able to take action based on our performance in a very timely manner,” says Chiba. His teams can now evaluate the previous week's social performance, discuss why something worked or didn’t work, and determine what to do next based on those insights.
Shifting to a data-driven culture
Chiba also leveraged Sprinklr to set a new data-driven approach to social campaigns.
“The way we came up with the activities or ideas on social media prior to Sprinklr was based on educated guesses,” explains Chiba. “In internal discussions, you might hear something like, ‘This idea could go viral’ or ‘This activity will generate social media buzz,’ but this was mostly based on team members’ past experiences — not data.”
The result, Chiba says, was that social content did not often achieve desired outcomes.
Today, a growing number of Shiseido Japan’s makeup department’s social campaigns start and end by utilizing Sprinklr. When a team is planning a campaign, they validate the idea and check its potential for becoming viral by checking past trends or similar campaigns. When a campaign ends, the team analyzes its performance against well-defined KPIs and monitors social media response to the campaign. Insights is translated into learnings, and the team adjusts its approach for the next campaign, if necessary.
Partnering with Sprinklr to create customized dashboards
For the Shiseido Japan makeup department, it is important to understand how people react to and talk about the brand on social media. They want information about purchase intent, brand loyalty, and organic share of voice (SOV), all of which can be drawn from social conversations — and especially user-generated content (UGC).
“Shiseido Japan’s makeup department uses a lot of custom metrics,” explains Chiba. “Each team has different definitions of these KPIs and being able to actually create metrics that match the custom KPIs and appear within the dashboard — instead of having to calculate them on our own — has been great.”
The ability to customize Sprinklr’s Social Listening dashboard to pull in specific data sets has been important to Chiba and his team. While Sprinklr’s default metrics were helpful, Chiba and his team can now customize their dashboard even further to learn, in detail, not just how social campaigns are performing, but how the brand is being talked about in organic social conversations. They also have a clearer understanding of what motivates people to post organic UGC.
Chiba’s team partnered closely with Sprinklr’s customer success team to create what they call a buzz influencer and UGC dashboard. The idea is to identify influencers whose posts are going viral organically — and to identify the context of that buzz. Chiba’s team uses this information to develop marketing activities that generate social buzz. The dashboard also helps them to predict sales of a particular products
An integration with Google Analytics integration provides Chiba’s team with additional context to analyze and understand the performance of social content — and to recreate the high engagement rate in future posts.
The Outcome
Chiba has successfully transformed Shiseido Japan’s makeup department to be laser-focused on data. Today, the department’s social listening and social campaigns are powered by Sprinklr.
This data-driven approach has enabled the makeup department to better connect and engage with consumers with consistent, relatable content. Social Listening insights ensure the makeup department can track and even predict the virality of content. The Shiseido Japan makeup department has also created revenue through digital and social.
- One unified platform as well as automated reporting across teams has helped Shiseido Japan makeup department to plan effective, data-driven social campaigns, resulting in a 244% increase in overall owned media account performance in 2022.
- How the makeup brands are being talked on social media (UGC) in 2022 is up 406% over the previous year.
- A data-driven and test-and-learn mindset and culture has been developed across marketing teams at the makeup department
Chiba credits the makeup department’s success to a strong partnership with Sprinklr.
“Sprinklr’s sales and customer success functionalities are amazing,” he says. “They make sure they understand our organizational structure and our reality. They are flexible, prompt, and super reliable. They consistently share best practices to help us meet our goals, and they always go beyond my expectations.”
The makeup department’s success with Sprinklr was well received within Shiseido Japan. As a result, the operational model Chiba’s team developed in partnership with the Sprinklr account team has been shared and implemented across four additional departments at the company.