May 02, 2013

Accenture Builds Digital Social Platform for Unilever Global Marketing in 12 Weeks

Platform enhances agility of marketing teams

LONDON; May 2, 2013 – In just 12 weeks, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has built and implemented a new digital social platform for Unilever that will help connect its marketers, brand managers and partners in 190 countries. The implementation – which is built on the Salesforce Platform and leverages Salesforce Chatter, the enterprise social networking technology – enables Unilever marketers to share knowledge, best practices and creative assets across the network.

“The new applications boost collaboration amongst our marketers globally, helping them to easily find people, information and conversations that they should be a part of,” said Marc Mathieu, SVP Marketing, Unilever. “The platform provides our team with the tools they need to develop and build our brands in local markets, which is critical to driving our ‘Crafting Brands for Life’ strategy. It also frees up time for our team to create more magic – that is, to engage with consumers and create more effective marketing, which will be key to delivering our ambition to double the size of our business while reducing our environmental footprint and increasing our social impact.”

Unilever’s new digital social platform enhances collaboration by:

• Providing marketers with access to the latest Unilever knowledge, people and tools, and allowing them to participate in discussions and share best practice examples across the business.
• Enabling each Unilever brand team to create a central hub – essentially an individual brand showcase – where marketers and partners can join in conversations and access relevant content and assets.
• Providing a forum to support collaboration between central and local teams and between Unilever marketers and their agencies.

“These tools really help us harness the power of the brands, the power of the people in Unilever and our agency partners – that combination is very powerful for us,” said Mark McClennon, CIO Consumer, Unilever. “We’ve gone from a blank piece of paper all the way through to rolling out the first release of the platform in about three months using Salesforce technology. This is nothing short of a marketing and technology transformation for Unilever.”

“Accenture helped Unilever leverage digital technologies to quickly conceive and deliver the digital social platform to meet the needs of global and local marketers in 190 countries,” said Bernie Segal, Managing Director for Accenture Interactive. “We built rich, innovative applications to drive business value whilst at the same time, we kept it very simple so the applications are very familiar, achieving rapid adoption. We believe it is one of the most pioneering uses of Salesforce technology, delivered in an agile manner. Our market leading software-as-a-service (Saas) implementation team, drawn from our UK and global delivery network capabilities, built the digital social platform to help Unilever quickly achieve global scale.”

Accenture, the leading provider on salesforce.com’s largest transformational projects, drew upon the broad expertise of its more than 2,100 Salesforce skilled personnel, Cloud Centers of Excellence, Accenture SaaS Delivery Toolkit and Accenture Cloud Application Factory to deliver Unilever’s new digital platform.

This service is part of Accenture Commercial Services for Consumer Goods, a business service that helps companies increase sales and margins through an end-to-end offering of management consulting, technology and outsourcing that improves interactions with customers, channels and consumers through innovative analytical, multi-channel and operational capabilities.

About Accenture Interactive
Accenture Interactive helps the world’s leading brands drive superior marketing performance across the full multichannel customer experience. Working with over 4,000 Accenture professionals dedicated to serving the marketing function, Accenture Interactive offers integrated, industrialized and industry-driven marketing solutions and services across consulting, technology and outsourcing powered by analytics. Follow @AccentureSocial or visit Accenture Interactive.

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 261,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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Contacts:

Cam Granstra
Accenture
+ 312 693 5992
cameria.l.granstra@accenture.com