enterprises take up less than 3% of the overall sales. Digital planning varies among different enterprises. Some focus on structural transition, on the shift from bureaucracy to Amoebic Organization featuring “big platform, small fighting units”; some emphasize reform of internal and external procedure. We have seen the proposals of DT transition procedures submitted by many consulting firms. Here, we focus on marketing and strategic transition. According to the standard of “industrial products — consumption goods”, “traditional enterprises — IT companies”, we classify the samples into four categories and select one leading enterprise from each type to introduce their digital marketing planning strategies (Figure 1.9).
Figure 1.9. Digital layout of leaders.
Source: KMG Research.
SEPHORA: SEPHORA is LVMH’s traditional beauty brand and a typical fast-moving consumer good (FMCG); it works very hard to promote its brand on a number of social platforms to create good customer stickiness.
Volvo: The traditional business-to-business (B2B) enterprise Volvo has changed its traditional way of business model, from a B2B enterprise to an experience-driven B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) player.
Amazon: Amazon, an e-commerce website, has made constant efforts to transform digitally in the industrial chain, continuously improving the customer experience through digital tools.
HourlyNerd: HourlyNerd, an emerging service platform for business consulting, which enables enterprises to have access to low-cost consulting services by digital approach, is the representative of the B2B Internet.
1.3.1 Traditional B2C player: SEPHORA
As a beauty brand under LVMH and ranked as the number one luxury goods conglomerate in the world, SEPHORA with strong powerhouse of innovations is a world-leading company.
In order to continuously provide customers with the best purchasing and user experience, SEPHORA has launched its own social platform Beautyboard. Similar to Facebook, users can share their own pictures on the platform and tag the products they use in the lower part of the photo. These tags are directly linked to the official website of SEPHORA, which sets up a bridge between the social and business platforms. The tagging function draws inspiration from NICE — a hot picture social media (Figures 1.10 and 1.11).
In addition to its own social platform, SEPHORA maintains high activity on major social websites and is capable of covering many social channels. It has a presence on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Google Plus.
Relying on data analysis technology, SEPHORA has launched new websites and, meanwhile, constantly improves mobile and web experience in the following ways:
Figure 1.10. The beauty board of Sephora.
Source: Sephora.
Figure 1.11. Sephora’s social platform spread.
Source: Sephora.
• building its own in-house digital team and merging traditional business units and digital departments;
• adding a chatting room themed on beauty and skin care on the website, in which members can have Q&A anonymously while a Q&A engine with a secure private environment is provided;
• increasing investment in video websites;
• using subscription text messages on the mobile end to promote information to consumers. Consumers can also use Apple’s Passbook (an app on App Store for managing membership card) to view the balance of their membership cards. After supporting Passbook, its app has had several million downloads. In this way, consumers can improve the online–offline combination of the purchase experience;
• adding four major service sectors to get customers accustomed to their life with SEPHORA, in order to maintain customer loyalty to the brand.
Digital marketing has brought SEPHORA nearly 5 million Facebook fans and 900,000 Twitter followers, is among the top 4 in App Store weekly downloads, has 9.3 million page views on average, has 80.3% share of keyword searches in Google’s total searches and is the first to provide O2O user experience.
1.3.2 Traditional B2B player: Volvo
The sales network of Volvo consists of about 2,300 local distributors among over 100 countries. From 1927 to date, in order to catch up with the times, Volvo has rightly identified the importance of digital technologies and digital marketing to the changing business models. Like traditional B2B enterprises, Volvo in the past put its marketing efforts on how to maintain good relations with channel partners and end clients, but now they expect to have direct contact with end users — drivers by digital transformation. This model is called the B2B+B2C mode (Figure 1.12).
Providing new digital services and building a dynamic digital functionality at the global level are the two main directions of Volvo’s digital marketing strategy.
▪ Digital services: Volvo has established a comprehensive social media channel to directly communicate with customers through the Internet. With Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as the main platforms for brand communication, it also has an independent customer service portal (Figure 1.13).
Figure 1.12. Volvo’s digital transformation strategy.
Source: M. Tannou and G. Westerman, Volvo: From B2B to B2B+B2C Company.
At the mobile end, Volvo has developed two unique functions: remote control system and calling service. Users can have access to both tools by cell phone.
▪ Remote Control: Volvo clients can remotely control the function of the car via mobile phones, such as starting the air conditioner, controlling the door lock, checking the dashboard, locating the car and so on. This significantly betters the user experience.
▪ Volvo Calling Service: Volvo provides emergency services on motorways through a local call center and Volvo customers can access the Volvo call center directly via the first aid button on the car or the mobile app. Through the GPS in the car, the call center can provide a full selection of package services: reaching the distributor nearby, calling a trailer or giving out an alarm. Once a traffic accident occurs, the calling service is initiated automatically.
Figure 1.13. Volvo’s social media engagement.
Source: Volvo.
Laying emphasis on value-added service also increases the stickiness and loyalty of the clients of Volvo and creates more opportunities
