← The Commerce Collective Podcast
The Commerce Collective Podcast
How Clorox is building toward 1:1, personalized marketing in a multi-retailer world
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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to Flywheel's Commerce Collective podcast. I am Emma Irwin, your host, and today we are talking about one of marketing's favorite words and one of its trickiest challenges, personalization. More specifically, we're getting into what consumers actually want out of personalized experiences, where brands still get it wrong and how to think about personalization in a way that feels more useful and a bit less performative. As a reminder, if you're listening to this episode, you can also catch the video on YouTube and Spotify. I'm also getting creative, clearly, with how I first show up on the screen with these. So if I can't convince you with the content, which I should be able to convince you with the content. That's why you're here. Let's be real. But maybe I can convince you with my acting. Okay, let's get into it.
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I'm Tiffany Tan, and I lead our E. Comm. Growth acceleration team at the Clorox company. And in very simplest terms, my job is really to help Clorox enterprise with two things. The first is identifying and reckoning with some of the biggest obstacles standing in our way to drive faster growth. And the second is looking at the biggest opportunities that we can be leaning into. So, day to day, what that means is the team and I work very hand in hand with our brands, our retailer, our agency partners, to really test ideas, scale those winners quickly, and basically help Clorox stay curious and agile as consumer behavior changes.
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B
Exciting. And I'm sure, no, no day is quite the same as another day when all of that is under your remit.
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A
Exactly. It's definitely a lot of fun.
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B
Okay. And then, of course, I need to know, because this is a big Clorox household here. What is your favorite Clorox product?
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A
I was talking with my family this morning, and we're just getting over a cold here. So I will say, this week, my favorite product is Clorox Disinfecting Wipes. Because basically, my family's been spending a solid week wiping down every surface, every remote control, every light switch, just to try to help keep those germs at bay.
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B
Well, you stole my thunder, because that is my favorite product.
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A
Oh, fantastic.
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B
Beautiful. Okay, Tiffany, one last. One last fun question before we get into what we're actually talking about in this episode. But I'm kind of curious, in your time at Clorox, like, is there any specific Clorox campaign that has been the most memorable for you? Or just, like, a campaign that's absolutely your favorite over the other ones?
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A
I think probably One of my favorites is our recent Clorox Feels Good campaign. And one of the reasons I love this work is because it really taps into something that people don't always talk about, which is that cleaning isn't just functional. The cleaning process itself actually feels good. I don't know if you're like me, Emma. It sounds like you're a Clorox household, but I actually like cleaning. I know this may sound surprising to you and maybe some of your listeners, but we actually did this research report, and it shows that the emotional outcomes that come from cleaning for the first time is actually on par with the functional ones. So the report found some interesting findings. Like wiping a kitchen counter actually produced a higher feel good neural response than getting a massage. Oh, my goodness. I know. Cleaning a toilet, as an example, triggered a neural response equivalent to playing video games or listening to your favorite song. Or you'll probably like this one. Petting a puppy actually felt only 5% better than cleaning the toilet. So in this campaign, clean literally feels good. And this campaign brought it to life in a very real way.
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B
I love that. When I was a freshman in college and like, living in the dorms, I always, of course, had my Clorox wipes, but I would do these like, crazy cleaning stints where I'd like, stay up into the night and listen only to Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden, because it was like a rock band song that I grew up with playing on the Wii. And so I like that was. Those were some of my favorite nights. It's 2am I'm just Clorox wiping my little five, 10 foot space and rolling from there.
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A
I love it. And you are not alone when you like to clean to kind of certain songs or loud music. It's actually a quite a common finding that we find with a lot of our consumers. So you're certainly not alone.
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B
Okay, so today we're going to talk all about personalization and marketing or what you might hear us call throughout the episode as like one to one marketing as well from the Clorox point of view, obviously. And I think, like, we're at a day and age where shoppers expect that advertising from brands is really relevant to them. And we're also at a point where, like, creating personalized marketing experiences is more possible than ever before thanks to access to more and more data. Yet doing that all at scale is actually everything is extremely complicated. It's not as easy as it sounds. So my question for you there after all of that briefing is like, how are you thinking about reaching Clorox shoppers, or soon to be Clorox shoppers in meaningful ways and in the right moments.
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A
Today, I would say at a very high level. Everything that we're doing here at the Clorox company, it's really about delivering this superior consumer experience. And in order to do that, we're really focused on two core areas. The first is to know more of our consumers directly, so we're not relying on, say, assumptions or guesswork, but actually really understanding their needs and behaviors. And actually, as part of our Clorox strategy, which we call Ignite, we set a pretty ambitious goal to build a direct relationship with 100 million consumers, which we actually reached that milestone ahead of plan. But we did that by making these very deliberate investments in our first party data infrastructure, which really allowed us to kind of advance our targeting, connect to other data sources, and really do that in a very privacy, safe way. And then, of course, we augment that with other signals that we're getting from different partners and platforms. But the second focus is really about engaging all of our consumers with much more relevant messaging. Um, so we know today's world is very fragmented. A consumer might discover something on social and, and then maybe move to a retailer site or, or maybe they'll find something in store. They don't kind of move through this very linear funk funnel anymore. So the real question for us is less about kind of where we're showing up, which of course is important, but also really focusing on how we show up in a way that actually resonates with the moment that the consumer is in. And we find that when we bring these two things together, this deeper consumer understanding, knowing the consumer better, and then more relevant engagement, we're able to create these really powerful consumer experiences that just feel more compelling and ultimately are more effective for the consumer and for. For Clorox.
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B
Engaging consumers with more relevant messaging, as we were just talking about, kind of leads us seamlessly into talking about personalization. And so I know you and your team and Clorox as a whole are prioritizing personalization when it comes to your marketing efforts. When you use that phrase within the walls of Clorox, like, what does that actually mean? I know what personalization means, but, like, how is that different from just better targeting?
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A
You know, Emma, it's, it's interesting. The way we think about personalization has actually evolved over time. So at its core, for us, I would say personalization is about delivering a much more relevant consumer experience. So it's, it's, it's getting the Right context and the right content to the right person at the right time in a way that actually fits with what is going on for them in that moment. Because we know consumers are busy, they're juggling a lot, whether it's family or work or pets, budgets. And we're finding when they engage with our categories, it's usually because they're trying to solve something very real. They want to, maybe they want to clean their house or they want to put a healthy meal on the table, but they have limited time and attention. So we really want to make those interactions count and make sure that they're really relevant. So the way we've thought about personalization is maybe grounded in that. I would has certainly evolved as our approach has matured. So now we are actually thinking about personalization less as kind of binary yes or no, but more about personalization along a continuum. And we actually design our communication approach intentionally across that range. So at one end is kind of this one to all marketing, you know, very valuable talking to broader audiences. And then you kind of move down the continuum to one to many, which is kind of more high level personalization. And then as we learn more about the consumer, as signals get richer, as the context sharpens, that takes us all the way to one to one, true one to one marketing. So that might look like taking a very simplified example. Let's say we have a consumer, let's call her Emma. At a very high level, Emma might start as part of a mass audience, which is very appropriate for awareness. But let's say as we learn more about her, Emma becomes a mom with young kids. Or maybe she's a mom getting kids ready for back to school. And then we start seeing signals, additional signals of buying intent. Maybe she searched for Clorox disinfecting wipes. Maybe she starts engaging in micro behaviors like she adds them to her cart. So at that point, we know a lot about Emma at a very specific moment with a very specific need in mind. And that's, that's a moment that deserves a different experience. So that's kind of how we're looking at it. And to your very specific question, I think that's also where personalization is very different from targeting. Targeting is about deciding who to talk to. And personalization for us is about deciding what to say, when to say it and how to say it. So it actually feels relevant to her.
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I love it. Hopefully I'm not quite a mom with kids yet, because I don't know if I can handle that.
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But it's a different Emma. We'll say it's a different Emma.
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Beautiful. In writing this interview, I was kind of thinking about, like, just about everyone can be the right shopper for at least one Clorox brand. Back to the 100 million consumers number, that's a, that's a good chunk of like, if I just think of the United States, that's a good chunk of the United States of America's population. But obviously, like, you can't invest everything into every single shopper. And so I'm curious, what are some of the challenges you run into when you try to personalize your marketing at such a scale and like narrowing that huge potential universe down to the audiences that really matter?
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A
You're absolutely right. There are challenges. And you know, I think we've made a lot of progress here. But of course, as in any new space, there, there are a lot of opportunities that I'm sure are not unique to us at Clorox. But yes, as you mentioned, you know, there is a huge potential audience and we need to figure out how best to determine which audience really matters to us. And that can be sometimes challenging because maybe signal quality or availability, it actually varies quite widely across the industry in that not all data is, is created equal. So might be confident in our Clorox first party data, for example. We are all working and living in an ecosystem, and sometimes that granularity of the other data signals that we're picking up, it can just vary across retailers and platforms. So I think that is certainly something that we're reckoning with. I think one of the most interesting and perhaps largest challenges for us really as an industry though, is the moment you decide to personalize. You are actually not building a single piece of creative. You're actually building tens or sometimes hundreds pieces of creative. So whether that's a different audience for a different or a different message for a different audience, or a different moment in the consumer journey, I think every one of those variations to produce those takes time. It takes briefing creative time, approvals. It can all add up pretty quickly. And that's why I think if an organization is not wired properly for a lot of that, we risk kind of seeing friction since not everything is kind of built for that level of content velocity. So at Clorox, we've spent a lot of time asking ourselves, okay, what is the right alignment that we need to have across data across our creative teams, across our retail partners and our content production engine to actually keep up with our ambition? And we've been really deliberate about making sure that we have the ways of working the tech and tools, all the processes in place to really support personalization at the company. And I think that's why a lot of the things that we're looking at and leaning into like partnerships or clean rooms or AI driven content creation, it's really starting to change the game for Clorox and everyone else in the industry for sure.
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B
Okay. It wouldn't be the Commerce Collective podcast if we didn't throw in some clean room mentions here. So obviously clean rooms have become a big part of the personalization conversation. They've really unlocked and like enabled quite, quite a bit. Without going too far into technical details, how do you think about clean rooms and, and subsequently like audiences within clean rooms as enablers of effective one to one marketing?
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Well, that's exactly how we're looking at it. We look at clean rooms much less as a piece of technology and much more as an enabler, as you say, of better personalization. And frankly, we're seeing it as really an essential tool in modern marketing because at a very basic level, these clean rooms, they give us this privacy, safe way to connect our data, which we've been building with say, retailer signals. And they're really helping us solve a tension that I think has just always been out there, which is that consumers, we know our consumers are expecting relevancy, they're expecting personalization, but they also want to ensure that their privacy is understandably respected. And so the clean rooms really let us do both. So how we've been using it is really using it to mine insights and understand how people are actually shopping. And I think the magic really happens when we can start seeing those patterns like the frequency of purchase or the cross category behavior. Are they doing a quick replenishment? Are they doing a stock up trip? So, you know, clean rooms are really starting to help us get closer to the why, why someone might need one of our brands. And it's really those rich insights that help us ultimately make smarter decisions about where to invest our dollars and how to best build those rich experiences for the consumer.
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Since we've covered so much about like what personalization actually means and some of the foundations there, I'm going to ask you, can you give us like a really tangible example of what personalized one to one marketing, connecting data, that's what it says. Connecting the data and signals together looks like in action. Like what does a more precise and relevant experience actually look like from your perspective?
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Sure. Well, let me share an example from, from our Brita brand, because it's a brand where context and need really matter a lot. And how we show up actually can be very different depending on the moment. So let's take two very Brita moments. So one is actually coming up in just a few months. It's back to college season when millions of students are going to be moving into dorms. And that's actually critical adoption moment for us. And there are two audiences really involved in that scenario. First is the student who is moving into the dorm, brand new environment, really setting up routines for the first time. And the second is the parent, often in a very different mindset from the student. They're thinking about their kids health, they want peace of mind since their kids are living away from home for the first time. So instead of running a generic message, we are really trying to tailor that experience. So for instance, parents, they may see a message that's focused on the health and safety and that peace of mind. Students, they may see a message around convenience or the taste or how to fit Brita into their new routine. So it's the same brand, it's the same product just talked about in a way that really makes sense for that moment. So that's one scenario. Contrast that with a totally different Brita scenario which might be when a local community might be notified about potential lead in their water. Now water quality, probably not something we think about every day, but when you get a letter from your municipality and you get that notice, it immediately changes how you feel about your water. You might start to worry, you probably have a lot of questions. And what we see in those moments is a huge spike in information seeking. People are searching, reading articles or trying to understand what this lead notice actually means for, for their family. We do have Brita filters that are certified to reduce 99% of lead. So how we, how we show up across that journey for that consumer is actually very tailored. So early on we might share educational content to really help reduce the fear and confusion that they may be feeling. And then as they get a little bit closer to making that decision, the message may become more solution oriented. And then if they do purchase Brita, the relationship starts moving into areas like reminders to replenish their Brita filter, for example. So I mentioned this Brita example mainly to demonstrate that we're not necessarily personalizing just for the sake of personalizing. We're actually trying to use different signals to decide how much personalization a particular moment deserves.
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And I love the element of just like actually building a relationship there as like it's, you're not just trying to sell the product you're trying to educate the people in, like, especially with water in an affected area. So that's. I like that a lot. Oh, hello again, narrator Emma here. I'm just breaking things up. Sometimes I pop in to give you a little bit more clarity on what was discussed. So now that we have this really solid understanding of personalization and how clean rooms further power personalization in your brand's marketing efforts, I'm going to move us into talking about how AI can really empower personalization at scale. And side note, we have a whole episode on this topic called How Brands Can Own the AI Search Revolution with Flywheel's Mike o', Donnell, which you should absolutely go back to and listen to here. And if you are just listening to this episode and wondering where the heck here is supposed to be, well, you now have to go back and watch the video of this episode. But back to business. One of the biggest blockers in personalized marketing has always been creative. You can build this really beautiful audience strategy, but it's hard to give different people truly different experiences. My question for Tiffany was, how do you think about the role of AI in helping Clorox scale creative and messaging without losing brand voice? And, like, overall, what excites you in this specific space?
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A
Wow. Well, there are so many exciting developments happening right now. I think what genuinely excites me about AI is that a lot of the things that we used to talk about in theory, they are actually now possible in practice. So I started my career in brand management, and for a long time, I think there always seemed to be this trade off. You could either move fast with broader creative, or you could personalize more deeply, but it was just harder to move more quickly or in a scaled way. And so what I think AI does is changes that. It removes a lot of that friction out of the system. It brings us a lot of speed. We talked about clean rooms earlier, how we can kind of generate insights faster at understand patterns sooner. Those are really important. I think it also changes how we think about our audiences. So instead of locking into these very static segments, we can kind of see these dynamic scenarios and say, okay, if someone's behavioring this way, what's the right. What's the right role for the brand right now in their life? And then, as I know Mike alluded in his interview with you, AI unlocks so much in the creative space. Now we can test and drive variations at scale that just wasn't possible before. So I think that's really exciting because we can also do that without kind of Blowing up time and cost. Having said all that though, I do feel it's important to mention though it really is all about this balance because sure, AI for us is doing a lot of that heavy lifting, but that humans need to be still very much in the loop right now. So our teams are, we're setting the strategy, we define the guardrails and we make those judgment calls and it's all supported by AI versus all necessarily led by AI at the moment. So we're still early, but it still feels like we have a lot of exciting tools to create that we were just kind of putting in the hope bucket just a short time ago that now seem a reality right now for sure.
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And I think on that like even I've seen these reports recently of like consumers recognize when a brand is doing like purely AI generated content and it all just kind of feels like robotic and it all kind of looks the same. So I like the point of making sure that there is that balance of human intervention and AI assisting the human nature of marketing in general.
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Yes, my corp Comm will also really appreciate that that's there as well. I will tell you Emma, that was important for them. Woohoo.
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B
Okay, I'm going to start to round us out for the sake of time, but of course I. We have to talk about measurement as well. Of course. So when you think about measuring these one to one marketing personalization efforts, the KPIs, like the things you report on, what are those metrics or signals that you care the most about? Like how do you know when you are creating real personalized impact?
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A
Yeah, I would say when we think about measuring one to one marketing, the first thing we are actually really careful is seeing it kind of more broadly. So we do try not to get overly fixated on a single metric. Sure the individual metrics definitely matter, but in and of itself it doesn't necessarily tell you whether our one to one marketing is changing consumer behavior, which is, which is often what we are trying to do. So what we are really looking out for is signs of incremental impact and value over time. So are we bringing new households into the brand? Are people buying more per trip? Are they coming back more often? So in the case of Brita, for instance, if someone buys Brita once and then we see them replenishing filters or moving into a script subscription, that tells us that the exposure experience that we've built has actually helped change that behavior. Another big mindset for us is that we're trying with measurement not to judge success off a singular campaign. So personalization is cumulative. So we are starting. We learn one thing from one flight, we apply it to the next, then we refine and we optimize. Okay, which signals actually matter. And we're trying to get kind of a little bit smarter each time. So we view measurement as critically important, but perhaps less anchored to a single KPI in a single moment and more as this feedback loop of various signals that tell us whether we're actually better at showing up in the right way over time.
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B
And if you'll just indulge in like, four minutes of quicker, rapid clarifier questions, but we'll start off easy. The Clorox product that you think is the most underrated.
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A
Clorox liquid bleach. And that's because I think people underestimate the uses that it has. I think a lot of people just think it's just disinfecting or it's just whitening laundry. But it's been used in disaster relief. Fun fact, if you put a tiny splash of Clorox liquid bleach in a flower vase, it actually helps your blooms last longer. So it can be used for a wide range of uses that I don't think everyone actually realizes.
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It's a.
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It's really an amazing product.
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I love that. And then I'm curious, are you a stock up once a month shopper or like, buy it when you're. You're almost out kind of shopper?
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I think it depends on the category. So I subscribe to a lot of staples, but otherwise I'm probably more of buy when I'm almost out.
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Where do you think consumers will be buying most of their products?
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I would say in. In two words, probably. It really is commerce anywhere, and that is really recognizing that commerce will happen everywhere, depending on what the consumer is experiencing in that moment, what their need is, what the specific experience that they're having. So it can happen on social, it can happen in store, it can happen online. I'm reluctant to say it's going to be a single channel. And I really think a lot of us in the industry, we really should embrace this notion of commerce anywhere and be prepared for the really the omnichannel life that. That we all are living today and certainly will continue to do in the next five years.
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Would you rather have perfect insight into who is buying or perfect insight into why they're buying?
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Definitely why they are buying. I think that's where the consumer insight lives.
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B
What's more important, precision of the efforts or scale of the efforts?
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Oh, gosh. Do I have to choose? I love that AI is letting us bring that precision and scale together. So I think at this moment I'm going to say scale because I'm really recognizing as we're trying to talk to a bunch of different audiences and people in different moments, we want to be able to do that much more efficiently, much more effectively. And I think scale has actually really been the key inhibitor over time. I think we have always been able to be very precise, precise, but there were trade offs with that. Now I think the opportunity that tech and the tools are affording us to really go at scale is really where the magic happens for sure.
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B
And I also think like on the precision side, there is a threshold of how precise you can get with the marketing without consumers then being like, okay, are you in my phone with me? Are you watching me and are you watching what I'm doing? It feels like we are too close at the moment.
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That's absolutely right. I think that's also why there, there has to be this, this reckon of a continuum. And do you need to know every single thing about a consumer or actually do you know enough that, that you can kind of still show up relevantly? I, yeah, I completely agree for sure.
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B
Okay, finish the sentence. In the next few years, the brands that win at one to one marketing will be the ones that blank really
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remain rooted in the consumer and what the consumer needs and what is relevant for the consumers in that moment.
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What's more exciting to you personally right now? AI or advancements in measurement?
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I would say AI, but I think that's kind of my unfair way of saying both because I actually think AI is going to be the engine behind a lot of the future measurement advances.
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B
Okay, and then the last one, do you know I put the note in there of like the dude selling ad space on his toilet seat. Are you familiar with him? And that Clorox bought. Okay, what are your thoughts on the Clorox ad from the guy who's selling ad space on his toilet seat? I must know.
- [26:39]
A
Honestly, this was, this was just really a fun one for us. I think it was funny and unexpected and I think what made it really land was the fact it showed up in a piece of content that people were already enjoying instead of interrupting them. So I think it just felt really culturally relevant for us. Very self aware and well timed. And what's interesting about this is when you look at how people reacted to this, we could actually tell that it landed because we saw comments like, okay, Clorox, we didn't know you were so with it, or I'm definitely buying Clorox after this. So that kind of reaction really told us that people weren't just laughing, they were almost cheering the brand on. So I think it. It is actually probably a signal for where marketing is. Is. Is. Is today and. And in the future. And I mean, it's a toilet, so. So that's naturally fun.
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B
And as you said, cleaning the toilet, I mean, that boosts your. Like, endorphins isn't the right word, but the. That makes you happy. It can make you happy. There you go. Absolutely.
- [27:39]
A
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
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B
I think with that, that is everything that I have for you. Thank you so much for your time. This was fun. Hopefully this was fun for you.
- [27:48]
A
Thank you, Emma. It was so much fun.
- [27:50]
B
And that is our episode for today. Huge thank you to Tiffany for joining us and sharing such a thoughtful perspectives on personalization, consumer expectations, and where brands should focus next. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.