After joining Nestlé in 2010, Antonio Sciuto led the brand’s digital transformation journey in 2012 as its Global Head of eCommerce. He now serves as the CMO and eBusiness leader for Nestlé Waters North America, driving multiple areas of the business.

“I oversee the Consumer Acceleration Team that is focused on five functional areas: Innovation, Consumer Insight, Media & Communication, Strategy and Business Development and eBusiness,” says Sciuto.

“The eBusiness is a newly created unit to manage end-to-end the online space with five teams with complementary roles: Digital & Social Media, Search and Customer acquisition, Consumer Journey, eCommerce at eRetailers and eCommerce Direct to Consumer.”

Sciuto’s eBusiness team supports 15 brands across four product categories, including Nestlé’s Still and Sparkling waters, Fruit beverages (with San Pellegrino Fruit Beverage) and Tea.

A graduate of Bocconi University in Milan, Sciuto began his career at Procter & Gamble, where he spent nine years in marketing and sales roles.

Today, the Nestlé Waters CMO talks to Marketing Land about the role social and digital platforms play within his brand’s customer journey.

Antonio Sciuto

CMO & eBusiness Leader @ Nestlé Waters

Takeaways:

1. Relentlessly focus on the consumer journey by managing digital operations end-to-end by integrating digital, social media and eCommerce into an eBusiness organization unit.

2. Accelerate a shift to digital media versus traditional media in accordance with the opportunity of each brand’s consumer targets’ media consumption.

3. Adopt a “learning by doing” approach.

4. Accelerate the speed to market and don’t worry too much about perfection, but rather, place emphasis on speed.

Amy Gesenhues: How does Nestlé Waters define the customer journey?

Antonio Sciuto: Today people expect a seamless experience from brands across all touch-points, online and offline. This approach transcends multi-channel retailing, evolving into a consumer journey that aims to connect the web, mobile, and brick-and-mortar channels into a personalized experience.

The starting point to win in the consumer journey will always be to develop a deep understanding of the consumer while complementing more deliberate traditional market research with the use of more frequent, real-time social media listening and analysis.

Amy Gesenhues: How do you use social to reach your audience and, in turn, create loyal customers?

Antonio Sciuto: At Nestlé Waters North America, we listen [to] our consumers on social platforms to understand: conversation topics, share of conversation by social platform, tone, consumer sentiment, roles and consumer engagement rules by media touch-point.

This understanding is enabling us to define the right opportunities to engage consumers with content and the right calls to action by online and offline touch-points. Our whole consumer journey is managed by leveraging… marketing cloud solutions, powered by Salesforce.com, that allow us to listen, analyze, and engage consumer[s] by automating consumer interactions.

Our mission is to build communities around our brands and content based on the real needs of our audience, offering them a truly personalized omni-channel experience to deepen their engagement with our brands. Success to be measured in market share and loyalty to our brands.

Amy Gesenhues: How many social channels does Nestlé Waters own?

Antonio Sciuto: The answer is different depending on the brand. Channels are selected for each brand based on the brand’s target consumer and that consumer’s media consumption on a particular channel.

Of NWNA’s 15 brands, all have an Owned presence on Facebook and Twitter, with most also on Instagram. Presence on Pinterest, for example, is limited to certain brands.

We have several millions of fan[s]/followers across our brand portfolio, but we don’t consider it a key indicator of success, especially in the US market. While we look at Engagement metrics, social media is playing a critical role as a Reach channel based on Paid media with advanced targeting techniques. This is consistent with the direction from the Platforms themselves.

Amy Gesenhues: How big a role does social play within Nestlé Waters’ customer journey?

Antonio Sciuto: The relevance of Social in the consumer journey is constantly increasing, not only for social listening opportunities, but most importantly for the critical role of Social in the media mix as the main media channel to establish a deeper relation with our consumers.

Amy Gesenhues: Where do you see the biggest gains on social?

Antonio Sciuto: To capture the main gains from Social, it’s helpful to distinguish Facebook from all other social platforms.

Focusing on Facebook, the main gains are related to the platform’s ability to target our audience and the richness of data that we can capture from consumer interactions on Facebook, to continuously improve our consumer understanding and level of personalization along the consumer journey.

Amy Gesenhues: Can you share an example of a recent social campaign that is performing beyond your expectations?

Antonio Sciuto: I personally love the San Pellegrino Tastemade campaign that went live in December and [is] currently exceeding our reach and viewership goals.

These programs (one for S. Pellegrino, and one for San Pellegrino Fruit Beverage) are excellent examples of how NWNA is embracing and innovating with new forms of content and distribution channels. In this case, we partnered with Tastemade: a leading content provider and video network where Tastemakers come together to discover and share recipe and food and beverages experiences.

It is also the very first brand partnership to come from Deep Focus’ new DFX model. By partnering with an established channel with this consumer relevance, we are able to reach our targeted consumer where she/he already looks-to for content, integrating our brand in meaningful, organic ways.

S. Pellegrino “Heritage” Video Campaign

San Pellegrino Fruit Beverage “Live! Eat! Sicily!” Video Campaign

These programs occur early in the Consumer Journey process, helping to build brand Consideration. Based on consumers’ behavior we are mapping and reaching consumers with several automated journeys to deepen the relation with the brands exploiting the foodie dimension.

Amy Gesenhues: What social analytics do you use to gauge the success of your brand’s customer journey?

Antonio Sciuto: We measure the success along the consumer journey based on consumer engagement rate, defined as conversion on the call to action across the different touch-points, as well as reach against our specific consumer targets.

On Social we look beyond the basic performance measures (Share of voice/conversation, and Sentiment), by measuring also our performance in managing detractors and influencers and consumer/customer acquisition.

Amy Gesenhues: As a CMO for a major consumer brand, what social marketing trends do you believe will have the biggest impact the customer journey in the coming year?

Antonio Sciuto: Predictive analytics and full fledge[d] marketing cloud software platforms are now allowing to scale creation of compelling new content engineered by data, effectively enabling the personalized consumer experience.

In this new reality the challenge for marketers will be to not over-complicate marketing and focus on what really matters: our consumer audience and a seamless online experience to build engaged communities.

Over the next years, we’re likely to see also an acceleration of the integration of the online experience driven by the development of the Internet of Things (IOT). The opportunity is to leverage these enriched touch-points to create new consumer experience.

Amy Gesenhues: How is Nestlé taking advantage of these opportunities?

Antonio Sciuto: At Nestlé Waters, for example, we developed a digitally connected cooler with demographic recognition, iBeacon, and touch screen to enable a personalized consumer experience integrating online and offline leveraging different content based on consumer target and consumption pattern during the day.

In this arena, it will be of particular interest to see the development of near-field communication (NFC): embedded chips in phones to exchange data on contact with objects that have NFC tags.

The price of these tags lowered already at 15 cents, so a large number of companies could build them into a larger number of devices, generating a massive expansion of new interactive experiences.