Accenture builds digital marketing platform for Unilever

Accenture 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 new platform - which is based on the Salesforce Platform - enables Unilever marketers to share knowledge, best practices and creative assets across the network.

The new digital marketing platform has four main pieces of functionality:

• Providing marketers with access to the latest Unilever knowledge, people and tools
• The possibility to participate in discussions and share best practice examples across the business
• Enabling each Unilever brand team to create a central hub per brand including materials and presentations
• A forum to support collaboration between central and local teams and between Unilever marketers and their agencies.

"The new applications boost collaboration amongst our marketers globally, helping them to easily find information and conversations that they should be a part of" says Marc Mathieu, SVP Marketing at Unilever. "It also frees up time for our team to create more magic - that is, to engage with consumers and create more effective marketing". The tool was built by Accenture's software-as-a-service (Saas) implementation team.

Lightning speed

The new tool has been erected in lightning speed. In three months’ time the combined Unilever - Accenture project team has gone from a blank piece of paper to rolling out the first release of the platform. The quick execution was for a large part possible due to the leverage of Salesforce technology already used within Unilever. "This is nothing short of an impressive marketing and technology transformation for Unilever" says Mark McClennon, CIO Consumer at the human nutrition manufacturer.

The secret behind the fast realization according to Bernie Segal, Managing Director van Accenture Interactive, lies in the application of agile: "We built a rich application whilst at the same time we kept it very simple so the applications are very familiar, achieving rapid adoption. This allowed us to deliver the digital marketing platform in an agile manner".