When you think of Clorox you probably think about bleach and consumer products. However, from a business operations and marketing perspective, you might be surprised to discover that Colox itself is undergoing a multi-year transformation with the goal of becoming a digital company.

Recently, at Salesforce Live, Doug Milliken, VP Digital Experience Transformation at The Clorox Company, described their digital journey:

We were doing digital, but we have to go to being digital. In the past, we’ve been doing digital marketing or doing e-commerce and we realized we really need to be digital, meaning the company needs to be organized around and operating in a digital way end-to-end.

Digital is About Changing the Way We Do Business

That led us to realize is that for us digital is not just a channel and a technology, digital fundamentally is about changing the way that we do business. Digital for us is about changing the way that every function in the company operates, leveraging the possibilities of digital technology.

We have efforts across the whole value chain of the company, how we do R&D, how we do product supply, how we do marketing and sales, and a program that’s funded and built into our three-year long-range plan across every sector of the company to digitize and change how we work.

Goal of Digitizing is to Improve the Consumer Experience

We then decided we have to have a North Star, why are we doing that and to what end are we digitizing the company? For us, that end is to improve the consumer experience. Digital transformation is changing how we work across the whole company in service of improving our consumers’ experience.

What this is about at the core is about becoming more radically consumer-centric and human-centered. Companies like Clorox,  most CPG companies, we are very consumer oriented, but we’ve typically been very brand-centric. We’re very organized and our thinking is very much around our brands.

What is the Goal of the Consumer?

Our brands are critical and they’re the unit of value for Clorox, but we’re trying to put the consumer much more at the center. Who is the exact consumer or the persona who we’re designing around and what is her goal?

If we take one of our brands, Renew Life, it’s a probiotic, that consumers goal is not to buy Renew Life, her goal might be to enhance her wellness. What is the consumer’s goal, what is her journey to that goal and what are the pain points or difficulties along those journeys that we can help with?

Becoming a Helpful Part of the Consumer Journey

We’re trying to shift our mindset from how do we sell our brand or product to how can our brand help the consumer along this journey. That includes products but it could include other things too. It’s about their whole end-to-end experience and moving from being product and brand centered thinking to think about an end-to-end experience along a journey to a goal. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

I think in the next three to five years this is going to really come to fruition. What we’re going to be able to do for our consumer, to move them along their journey, to enable them to reach their goal and our ability to help them and our ability to grow our business while we’re helping them do that is really exciting.