Remember when you’d see a commercial for a product on television? And then go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy it? (Okay, okay, we know that still happens—sometimes.) But the path to purchase for many retail transactions these days starts and ends online, so it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always that way.
In her 30+ years in the CPG industry, Brigitte King, global chief digital officer at Colgate-Palmolive, has had a front row seat for that shift, and shifted her own career to mirror it.
King started at Colgate-Palmolive as a global trainee in the early 1990s, learning the ropes of marketing, finance, and market research before eventually joining L’Oréal in 1995, working in traditional brand marketing. When she joined hair care brand John Frieda in 2002, she started building out its first website (which, she admits, dates herself a bit), learning about things like coding and wireframes, and eventually pivoted her career to digital marketing, and much farther down the road, re-joined Colgate-Palmolive in 2020.
Colgate was founded in 1806, and merged with soap company Palmolive-Peet in 1928. It’s home to—you guessed it—Colgate and Palmolive, as well as soap and personal care brands Softsoap, Speed Stick, and Irish Spring, as well as skin care brands Elta MD and PCA Skin, and many others. Since the company is a few centuries old, King’s focus has been driving its digital transformation.
“CPGs have been probably later to the data [and] digital analytics transformation party,” King said. “Colgate has really leaned in.”
Bright future: When she joined Colgate for the second time, the company had just started mapping out its digital strategy, which included plans for goals to achieve by 2025. She said she’s found that “people, tech, and process” has been the “magic trifecta,” in this strategy, which is geared at ensuring the company’s longevity and relevance.
“There’s a lot of disruption in CPG, and there’s a lot of really big, powerful brands and big legacy brands that have a lot of credibility and equity and awareness levels, but that doesn’t mean they’re fit to compete for the future,” she said. “Digital transformations are about making sure you’re future-proofing the capabilities of your organization, of your people to do the right thing for the brands to grow in the long term.”
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The company started by conducting digital upskilling efforts that consisted of training courses for everyone from executives to managers, King noted, which the company said has led to e-commerce growth as well as improved areas like first-party data collection, personalization, and social media strategies. The initiative was ultimately “teaching what it is to do marketing beyond classic TV commercials,” she said, especially as 65% of the company’s ad spend is now in digital.
It’s all clicking: A significant part of its digital strategy has been growing its e-commerce business, which now accounts for 15% of the company’s sales, King noted. And while that strategy can differ between a drugstore toothpaste brand and a prestige skin care brand, it’s largely focused on creating a frictionless experience from, for example, a social campaign to the product landing pages to sales conversion.
“That is the beauty of marketing today, in a digital age: You’re looking to basically master all the touch points, make sure you understand your consumer journey decisioning tree, and make sure that you can also reflect that in your marketing activations,” she said.
That has sometimes meant diving into the basics, like improving product detail pages and the experience on DTC sites; zeroing in on different channels, including last-mile delivery partners like Instacart; and also benchmarking its performance against the category, market by market.
“The way I look at it, if our categories are behind the growth rate of that category in that country, then we’re behind, and we need to do something about it,” she said.
What’s next: With 2025 rapidly approaching, King has now turned the page to focus on establishing 2030 goals, starting first with “What are the forces of change happening right now?” Her planning has been influenced by an experience at Cannes Lions, where she said she met her first “bonafide, real influencer” (it was Jonathan Allen, aka MrBallen). She was struck by how his focus on monetization and measurement of brand partnerships and, on a larger scale, how important influencers will continue to be going forward to maintain Colgate-Palmolive’s relevance.
“You still have to reach new consumers in order to create growth,” she said. “It’s not going to be the way it was done in the past.”