"Walking the talk"

How Nestlé’s Digital Acceleration Team drives innovation and influences the company’s thousands of brands.

 

Why should there be dedicated digital teams such as your Digital Acceleration Team within an organisation? Shouldn’t everyone be well-versed in digital in 2014?

Should digital be stand-alone or integrated into all aspects of marketing? Yes and yes! This question is timeless in marketing. The reality is that ebb and flow against the stimulation/integration tension depending on context. Stimulation is paramount if you are moving too slow or a step or two behind your targets or technology realities. After all, it takes real momentum – even “sparks” - to prime change in large organisations. The Digital Acceleration Team at Nestlé headquarters is one of those sparks, so much so that smaller digital acceleration teams have formed across the globe, stimulating multiple markets and their digital growth. At the same time, we also must obsess with integrating these new realities in the core mix. For example, a big part of my job is to ensure digital is central to all corners of our Brand Building the Nestlé Way framework and programme. Leadership is about constantly revising where stimulation ends and integration begins.

You started at Nestlé in 2011, not long after Nestlé’s Facebook page hit the headlines. To what extent was your appointment and the work you’re currently involved in a way of answering that kind of negative attention?

Let’s diplomatically call that a “teachable moment.” To put this in perspective, back in 2010, Greenpeace raised hard and important issues about our supply chain practices related to palm oil found in a number of our products. They used all the digital and social media best practices we’re celebrating today to raise awareness around the issue, and honestly, they did it pretty effectively. We made it worse by doing what big companies often try to do. We tried to control the conversation, and we were even a bit condescending and out of touch in how we managed the reaction. We paid a price. At the same time, the experience brought to the table urgently important questions: how do we properly engage with consumers and other stakeholders in a conversational context, how do we manage our brands in a highly transparent environment, how do we properly listen to the conversations to inform the best and most respectful form of engagement? And how do we reckon with “spurned media”, or earned media gone negative? The creation of my position was one outcome, but there were many other positive developments that flowed from this incident. For example, we resolved and laid out a roadmap to be an industry leader in leveraging digital and social media to build brands and please consumers. We created a real discipline in listening. In digital, every challenge is also an opportunity.

Pete Blackshaw

Pete Blackshaw is global head of digital marketing and social media for Nestlé, S.A. Before Nestlé, Pete was the chief marketing officer of NM Incite, a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey. He is the author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World (Doubleday). An Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) “Great Minds” award winner, he recently served as chairman of the board of the National Council of Better Business Bureaus and co-founded the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).