How Nestle Is Cozying Up to Salesforce With New Digital Lab

Nestle is adding some water to Salesforce's cloud. The food and beverage company has opened a digital lab inside the CRM giant's Manhattan office to serve its Nestle Waters North America division. The so-called consumer engagement center is aimed at improving personalized consumer digital communications for brands such as Pure Life, Poland Spring, Perrier and S. Pellegrino. The Nestle deal represents the first time Salesforce has hosted a client permanently on-site, according to Salesforce. The center will include a mix of Nestle and Salesforce employees. "Using the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Nestle Waters North America will leverage its new digital center to understand thousands of brand and topical conversations per month," the companies said in a joint statement. "Doing so will allow the company to participate in social conversations with its communities and provide branded content most relevant to its consumers, leading to deeper, more lasting relationships." Nestle has been a global client of Salesforce for many years. Nestle Waters, which is headquartered in Stamford, Conn., began working with Salesforce in June of 2015. The vendor was brought aboard under Antonio Sciuto, who became Nestle Waters' chief marketing officer in 2014 after serving as Nestle's global head of ecommerce from 2012-2014. "We both see this as an opportunity to use this space as a lab," Mr. Sciuto said in an interview. "So, to continuously define new functionalities, business cases, [and] use cases of the software that will continuously improve our ability to amplify our marketing effort and to have a better and different relationship with consumers." "It's a meeting space for them to bring their retail customers, like grocery chains, and show them what they are doing," said Stephanie Buscemi, exec VP-product and solutions marketing at Salesforce. For Salesforce, having a client on site "is a lab for us that inspires new software functionality," she added. Nestle Waters recently used Salesforce's technology to power a campaign for S. Pellegrino by Deep Focus called "Heritage," which included a series of videos about chefs. The content was deployed in different formats across the web in hopes of driving viewers to the brand website. From there people were invited to subscribe and discover recipes of chefs featured in the videos. "Based on their online behavior, we were continuously improving the understanding of their needs and customizing their journey with additional content for example by region, or by preferences always with the intent to delight them and to be a companion in their life," Mr. Sciuto said in an email. Nestle used Salesforce technology to understand the profile of the consumers that engaged with the campaign, while using data modeling to improve Nestle's media target, he added.

How Nestle Is Cozying Up to Salesforce With New Digital Lab

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