ORLANDO – Storytelling is what connects customers to brands and helps them understand why and what to buy. Stacey Grier, CMO of The Clorox Company, wants to figure out how to use new media to tell stories in new and different ways that help the company and its brands breakthrough to a bigger audience.
Grier, who spoke with Beet.TV at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, has a creative agency background that influences that view. For now, she says storytelling mostly plays a role in Clorox’s TV strategy.
“[TV] is still a reach vehicle and a great place to tell a story, particularly a purpose-driven story,” says Grier. “There is something unique about the passive nature people will watch that content, and the ability to tell them a beautiful story.”
TV, however, is just one part of Clorox’s overall mixed media platform, and a supplementary one at that. The media mix is just over 50 percent digital, and linear TV is one piece of the remaining 50 percent. “What we try to do is tell stories through the entire ecosystem as opposed to use media vehicles for just one thing,” says Grier.
At the core of Clorox’s strategy now is first-party data. According to Grier, the company has been “on a hunt” to get first-party data through a value exchange. One way Clorox has done that is by building a recommendation engine for Hidden Valley Ranch. The brand offers customers recipes or platforms to create their own recipes. Depending on what they choose, they’ll be served a second recipe personalized to complement that first recipe. It’s not unlike Netflix’s content recommendation engine, and Grier says the company has seen a 40 percent lift in sales from customers who were served a second recipe.
“We made a commitment to gathering first-party data,” says Grier. “We know that if you put people at the center, and you’re able to understand their goals and needs and can exceed their expectations, you’re going to win.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
