The Arla Digital Transformation Journey

Baggrund

Ever-changing consumer demands require new ways of working for businesses regardless of whether they sell robots, gadgets or milk.

So, how do you bring a 138-year-old dairy cooperative into the digital era, which fundamentally requires rethinking a radical different business model with new technology as the focal point?

For consumers and small businesses, it is relatively easy to adapt to a more digital approach to workflows, communication and processes, but for a large company with more than 18,000 employees worldwide, then well-established and proven processes can, in many ways, act as restricting chains.

In 2014, Arla’s management realized that radical consumer changes require radical adjustments. Arla’s products have always been an integral part of people’s lives, but Arla had no presence nor relevance in people’s increasingly digital lives.

So, if Arla were to continue being market leader a much stronger focus on digitals potential connecting consumers with brands were needed. Therefore, Arla’s Executive Board defined the vision for the digital transformation journey ahead:

"Unlocking technology's potential for Arla to be part of people's lives."

Moreover, to continuously measure progress towards the vision, the Executive Board outlined one overall KPI: 500 million digital consumer engagements achieved in 2020 - with a baseline below 50 million in 2014.

However, the digital endeavor didn’t have the best starting point. There was no digital organization established in Arla apart from a small team of webmasters. The digital maturity and digital readiness throughout the organization was close to non-existent. Furthermore, various advertising agencies had left more than 2,000 websites, microsites and social media accounts live across markets, sites that were left behind as soon as campaigns ended - making it completely impossible to manage global brands in digital channels.

At the same time, many different KPIs ruled in the organization, blurring a common direction. There were no structured approach or joint processes established to working with digital in either marketing, sales or IT. In marketing, classic campaign thinking prevailed and no assets were scaled or reused. In the sales department, eCommerce was far from part of the vocabulary. In IT, one did not think about martech solutions.

In general, the organization was in no way ready to succeed within digital marketing, so basically starting from scratch we were looking for the blueprint of how to drive digital transformation at global scale in a decentralized organization to secure continuous growth of 35 brands across 30+ markets.

Løsning

To enable the organization to deliver digital engaging brand experiences across markets we needed to provide a scalable, sustainable setup.

We identified three interdependent levers to help reach the vision: A scalable martech PLATFORM to enable us to work with digital CONTENT at scale supporting all markets powered by a scalable DATA setup.

PLATFORM @scale
Driving a digital global brand presence requires a solid and shared foundation across markets. The first step towards a global ecosystem was to create a common martech platform requiring migration of 2,000 brand websites, local and global, into one global platform and we consolidated our presence with global pages in social.

We created one shared development model, shared digital leadership forum and roadmap to set a joint direction and secure buy-in from markets. To ensure consistent analytics and unified brand tracking we integrated all brands and markets into Google Marketing Suite.

CONTENT @scale
In order to secure a more visible role in our consumers’ everyday lives, we had to change the traditional campaign thinking. We established a global content model powered by always-on toolkits and implemented Percolate as the unified content planning and publishing solution across all brands and markets. The use and reuse of global assets have increased by 400% and has freed-up local creative development spend to be reinvested in working spend increasing our digital reach.

To drive digital content efficiency and secure fast and agile delivery, we created the global digital creative inhouse agency, The Barn, with hubs in Aarhus, Stockholm and Dubai including 20+ creative production specialists. The new inhouse model is boosting our digital engagements by enabling inflight creative optimization of our campaigns and will deliver 15 million DKK in savings in development spend this year.

DATA @scale
To create a common understanding of how digital success is measured and to secure “one digital truth” we established a unified KPI framework and launched the global dashboard Arla Datazine giving all marketers in Arla easy access and simple overview to digital performance data. Datazine covers 240 brand/market combinations and handles 250,000+ data points every day.

In order to utilize a stronger connection between media and content, we have insourced our digital media buying securing the invaluable data flow and feedback loop to enable branded consumer experiences derived directly from real-time performance and insights. The insourced media buying will deliver 65 million DKK in media efficiencies the next two years.