Project Description
Omnichannel presence, global image
Case Study | Retail | FMCG
A global leader in several FMCG categories, keeps its brand image carefully controlled, with all content perfectly in place, on various European marketplaces. In addition, it ensures leadership in the Buy Box of these marketplaces. It also manages to maintain its dominance in the Digital Shelf, controlling search terms, categories and keywords in both paid and organic.
1. Challenge
Achieving a strong and coherent brand identity
In today’s omnichannel context, customers look at purchasing options in both the physical and online environments interchangeably, perhaps ultimately converting in another channel. This means that large companies such as Unilever need to have a strong brand identity and brand consistency.
The company started using flipflow with the challenge of achieving this brand shielding and brand consistency in terms of content, images or presence in advertising campaigns in key channels across Europe.
Maintain a constant presence in terms of brand positioning
In addition, Unilever also sought to ensure its presence in terms of positioning for each of the search keywords that can be associated with its products, at the highest granularity, in order to guarantee both leadership and an adequate volume of sales.
Ensure its total sales leadership by controlling the Buy Box
The FMCG brand’s last challenge was to maintain absolute leadership in sales in the marketplaces where it operates, controlling the Buy Box in detail both in Amazon Vendor and its authorised distributors in each country (number of products, availability and Buy Boxes won and lost).
2. Solution
Full control of Compliance and Retail Media
Unilever fully controls, through the compliance and quality module that the flipflow platform provides, the content of its products in all sales channels. Through a series of rules set by the leading group, they have created their own metascore, with which they check that their product pages are complete in terms of content, and that these are correct in terms of text (title, description, bullet points, etc.) and visual content (number of images and main image). On the other hand, they also monitor Retail Media thanks to our platform, having real-time information on sponsored products, banners and all types of advertisements to reinforce their position and draw the best advertising strategies, while keeping under control the daily actions of their competitors.
Digital Shelf monitoring across Europe
The global leader in various FMCG categories monitors with flipflow the Digital Shelf on several marketplaces across Europe. It evaluates the presence of its products in categories and search terms, measuring their ‘Share of search’ and ‘Share of Shelf’.
They have also implemented what they call ‘Search performance’. Thanks to a set of rules they have established, they try to ensure that their products are always positioned at number 1 for the keywords they are interested in. Unilever is not interested in their product appearing at number 1 for a keyword they do not control. They want it to appear well positioned for the keywords in which they are investing money, which they know are the most used by consumers and which bring in most of their Sellout. For each product, they have assigned a series of keywords to monitor and position.
With our Digital Shelf tool, they monitor both paid and organic searches for all the brands they own in each of the countries they are interested in. They also monitor the number of shelves on which the product is found. And they can do all this on a daily basis, thanks to the real-time information update provided by flipflow.
Maintain sales leadership by controlling Buy Boxes
With a simple control panel, Unilever controls at a glance its domain in the Buy Boxes of the marketplaces in which it operates in each of the European countries of interest. Thanks to the use of filters, they can see the number of products positioned, the number of times they have won the Buy Box, the number of times they have lost it and whether the product is in stock or not. And all this for each of their brands, by marketplace and country. With these measurements, they achieve exhaustive control to ensure that the sales that are generated go to their authorised distributors and maximise their 1st party sales, at the same time as avoiding conflicts and unauthorised sales.
3. Results
Unilever has managed to dominate the areas of their business in which they are interested by managing 4 simple panels in which they find all the information they need, updated in real time. On the one hand, they keep their brand image under control in every detail, with content that is perfectly in line with their brand guidelines, in all the European marketplaces where they have a presence. They also control their positioning in terms of search and categories, at brand, product and country level, improving their omnichannel sales. With all this, they have managed to exponentially improve their ROI.
Total control of brand image
Rise in average positions in search
3. Results
Unilever has managed to dominate the areas of their business in which they are interested by managing 4 simple panels in which they find all the information they need, updated in real time. On the one hand, they keep their brand image under control in every detail, with content that is perfectly in line with their brand guidelines, in all the European marketplaces where they have a presence. They also control their positioning in terms of search and categories, at brand, product and country level, improving their omnichannel sales. With all this, they have managed to exponentially improve their ROI.
Full control of brand image
Rise in average positions in search
Rise in direct sales and authorised dealers
Increased ROI of advertising campaigns
Unilever’s brand managers’ manual work hours have also decreased. With real-time monitoring of the brand image they display, they have been able to improve their presence in the market and the positions of all their products, without having to spend hundreds of hours of work reviewing their presence shop by shop and keyword by keyword on a daily basis. All this control has had a global impact on their sales and brand image, optimising their omnichannel presence, a great showcase to the world that is key to staying in the consumer’s mind day after day.
Unilever’s brand managers’ manual work hours have also decreased. With real-time monitoring of the brand image they display, they have been able to improve their presence in the market and the positions of all their products, without having to spend hundreds of hours of work reviewing their presence shop by shop and keyword by keyword on a daily basis. All this control has had a global impact on their sales and brand image, optimising their omnichannel presence, a great showcase to the world that is key to staying in the consumer’s mind day after day.
Rise in direct sales and authorised dealers
ROI of advertising campaigns
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“Flipflow allows us to react from the sales department and ensure our offer in all channels by having our assortment available and without stock-outs in any postal code in Spain. Its daily use ensures that we don’t lose sales due to stock and assortment shortages.”
“In our case we analyze the products of our categories in 45 retailers in 9 countries to have quality information that we use in competitive manufacturing trends for customers, knowing the average price per gram of many products per country and we also detect potential winner products to add to our offer.”
“We have really noticed the improved control over our recommended prices. Manually it was impossible to maintain a price corridor on so many online channels and that brought us a lot of friction. Now we detect unauthorized sales and sellers on marketplaces that cause us conflicts with our customers.”
“We can analyze our own and competitors’ price movements on a daily basis and have improved our revenue by adjusting prices on a daily basis in terms of pricing and promotional strategy.”
“This is definitely the future of retail. Flipflow gives us an improvement in the quality and structure of the information and considerable savings over traditional market research from well-known consulting firms that sell aggregate data without detail including information we don’t need.”
“Flipflow is core to us in setting prices on a daily basis for more than 60,000 SKUs and maintaining our automatic repricing system in a very competitive industry.”