Unilever reaches 2.5 billion consumers every day, supplying a range of nutrition, hygiene and personal care products across more than 190 countries. The company generated sales of €52 billion in 2019, with its sustainable living brands growing 69% faster than the rest of the business and delivering 75% of the company’s growth in 2018. Additionally, more than half of the company’s footprint is now in the developing and emerging markets.

To meet the needs of this growing area, Unilever launched its Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) to help more than one billion people take action to improve their health and wellbeing by 2020. The program is also committed to halving the environmental impact of its products by 2030, reflecting Unilever’s wider corporate focus on sustainability.

For each new product launch, Unilever did not have enough information to accurately profile its customers and identify the best channel to reach those audience groups.

To reveal these insights, Unilever needed to merge its customer, marketing and product-related information with third-party data from the Alibaba Group.

Unilever required an intelligent solution to achieve this large-scale data consolidation, manage its ongoing digital analytics requirements, and continue to meet its future business goals.

Alibaba Cloud provided Unilever with a cloud-based digital asset creation and management solution. This extended the volume and variety of the company’s available digital assets, consolidating it with the information from the Alibaba Group.

Alibaba Cloud also helped Unilever automate its end-to-end data flow processes, allowing the company to seamlessly select audience groups and trigger marketing activities across different channels.

As a result, Unilever can now optimize product launches, helping the company make the best digital-driven decisions for its business and its customers.

Alibaba Cloud’s Dataphin PaaS platform created Unilever’s digital assets, helped the company manage those assets and provided a wealth of augmented audience insights.

To achieve this, a range of Dataphin’s extensive digital management services were used. Its integration service, for example, helped Unilever seamlessly unify its digital assets with those from the Alibaba Group. The Dataphin distilling service also helped Unilever create rich audience profiles, which the company matched to its campaign strategies across a range of online and offline channels.

Our AnalyticDB data warehousing service provided Unilever with a real-time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) capability, which allowed the company to crunch petabytes of data with high concurrency and low latency to provide actionable insights.

To further help Unilever make informed, digital-driven decisions, our Quick BI intelligent business analysis suite provided a range of online real-time digital analysis tools, including digital visualization. This democratized Unilever’s extensive wealth of information, allowing its stakeholders to perform digital analytics, explore and report on its mass digital assets.

The resulting insights were then fed into the Alimama advertising platform from the Alibaba Group, providing Unilever with a seamless connection to a leading marketing technology platform.

Aided by Alibaba Cloud’s comprehensive suite of business intelligence solutions, a solid digital foundation sits at the heart of Unilever’s work, continuing to create value from its USLP program, driving growth and trust, eliminating costs and reducing risk for its business. Unilever is going to replicate China’s practices with Alibaba Cloud to create a digital driven performance marketing successful model in Thailand.