Digital innovation is helping brands deliver better consumer experiences in everything from convenience and game play to representation and portrayal of the people in programmatic ads.
At a recent Brand Innovators European livecast on Digital Innovation, experts from Boots UK, Reckitt and Electronic Arts discussed how they are using digital innovation to help solve problems.
Boots UK has transformed its sales mechanism to make it easy for customers to access medication no matter where they are.
“For us, the distribution of products and services is becoming increasingly more important. Boots is the No. 1 retailer in the UK of health and beauty,” said Paula Bobbett, ecommerce director at Boots UK. “Over the pandemic, we tripled our volume effectively and so the supply chain has become more important than ever, the convenience and immediacy. We put a huge amount of investment in the supply chain both through automation and technology, but also using our stores for warehousing to effectively pick up products.”
Diversity and inclusion should be a key driver for an effective digital innovation. In fact, many of the transformations needed for brands in their DE&I efforts can often be approached through digital innovation.
“When we think about driving effectiveness in our creative, our communications, and our digital strategies, we can no longer ignore diverse representation and positive portrayal because they are beginning to be more and more linked with comms performance,” said R. Efrain Ayala, global diversity & inclusion director of marketing at Reckitt. “When we think about our modern day consumers, they’re paying attention to these things. They can sniff out a stereotype much faster than any of us as marketeers so we really need to be quite polished in terms of how we deliver this.”
Electronic Arts has used digital innovation to create layered systems that the deliver leading customer experiences.
“When you are building these systems, you don’t see a single thing appear on screen for a very long time,” said Rob Bullough, director of global brand marketing at Electronic Arts.
“Building that underlying system, which takes a while, and then seeing it on screen, everything that you did in that first foundational layering finally pays off. It’s like, oh gosh, now we can go and build massive pressure in this channel because of all that work that we did.”
