Royal Philips is a global Fortune 500 corporation, headquartered in the Netherlands. Although most often known as a consumer electronics company and the creator of the video recorder, CD format and LCD panel, today Royal Philips is a company with three main businesses – consumer lifestyle, healthcare, and lighting.
Confused buyers
Philips’ two core businesses, healthcare and lighting, have very similar B2B marketing challenges and opportunities. The use of traditional media channels – such as television, print media or tradeshows – no longer worked effectively to reach the buyers in these industries. Furthermore, the company’s niche product history versus modern broadened industry messaging confused potential buyers.
Strategies focused on social channels were believed to prove far more effective in delivering qualified, and more importantly, educated potential buyers to the sales teams as compared to traditional marketing activities.
It was into this situation that Damien Cummings arrived as CMO of the ASEAN Group of Philips. He had joined the business after stints with Samsung and Dell in Singapore. In his prior experience, he had been instrumental in steering the businesses towards using more socially-oriented marketing tactics. Cummings brought a similar model to the forefront of marketing at Philips ASEAN, which required a pivot of how the marketing function operated and communicated the company’s messages.
What solution was applied?
One of the philosophical underpinnings of Philips’ new digital strategy was the belief that there are core external influencers who are critical to the business. Philips identified three key groups of influencers with whom to engage, based on their titles and positions. These groups were identified as media, influencers, advocates (MIA).
At the core of this strategy was the concept of developing a digital command centre. The Philips Asia Digital Command Centre (PADCC) is a facility dedicated to monitoring and participating in social dialogue about the company, its products, and the categories its products are relevant to. The PADCC is strategically staffed by members of agency partners including OBVIAM, Fleishman Hillard, Ogilvy and Mather, Carat and Havas.
A three-tiered content strategy was developed, which focused on producing different types of content:
Tier 1 – long-form documentary-like videos that focused in depth on issues associated with these business areas.
Tier 2 – short-form content such as short videos and slide presentations.
Tier 3 – snippets, from very short types of content as responses or to engender responses/debate, to ongoing audience-targeted posts, most exemplified by tweets, Facebook posts and blog articles.
The technology stack allowing the PADCC to perform social monitoring, content creation, engagement and analysis included Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Traackr. An inhouse video production group created long-form video content as well as short video clips.
Philips worked with OBVIAM, a full-service social media marketing agency, who established a set of keywords that pinpointed the influencer conversation online. These keywords were implemented in Traackr’s search capabilities to discover influencers in over fifteen topic areas across consumer lifestyle, healthcare, and lighting industries. In Traackr, the influencers were ranked within ‘MIA’ groups, which allowed the Philips team to take priority on who to monitor, opportunities to engage and which content to share.
The Traackr platform provided daily email summaries that highlighted insights on how to best engage with the influencer groups. Philips used these daily highlight emails to supply information to key executives within the company on the social activity of their influencers for each topic area in the target industries.
Success
The PADCC’s desired goal number of influencers was 1000. However, the project generated a combined database of close to 3000 influencers. Of these, the Philips team was able to categorise those influencers into various levels of engagement.
Results from social monitoring reports show increased overall conversation relating to Philips, higher number of mentions and activity relating to Philips products and expertise, and increased mentions among the high-value target audience of medical experts.
Upon reviewing the results and strategically narrowing its influencers, an influencer outreach programme is currently targeting around 45 high-value influencers deemed vital to Philips’ marketing plan.
By 2016, Philips plans to move all marketing strategy in southeast Asia to a purely digital model and subsequently transition the rest of the global organisation towards this model.
Speaking about the programme, Cummings says: “We expect the PADCC to be ‘net neutral’ in terms of its impact on the company’s marketing spend, and will reduce cost over the long term.”
