British American Tobacco – a company with 120 years of history - has been running operations mostly in the B2B trade space. The rise of new product categories along with digital consumer revolution in recent years has created the opportunity for marketing teams to build direct relations with BAT products consumers supported by extensive use of digital technologies. These engagements are taking place in both digital and physical space, providing experiences for consumers in social interactions, delivering content, running e-commerce operations, providing consumer support, as well as operating digitalized physical retail activities.
The Consumer Platform Team, a part of Digital Business Solution Marketing department based in BAT Tech Hub in Warsaw, is providing BAT end-market marketing organizations with D2C technology products and services for building experiences, managing communication channels, and maintaining proper management of end consumer relations. We design, build, and run solutions used in almost 50 countries of the world, working together with local teams on development of platform-based digital consumer products. The Consumer Platform provides integrated content, e-commerce, CRM, social and marketing automation technology foundation building blocks for multiple end market solutions. The technological and geographical extent of the platform has allowed us to participate in most of the changes taking place in modern marketing and ecommerce world.
We see multiple trends, emerging in various markets, depending on geography and culture. We see a lot of traction within the quick commerce capabilities (which are very local itself), commerce marketplaces, digitally augmented retail, or even smart devices. The diversity and volatility of trends – being extremely challenging to lead, and even as exciting just to follow – motivates us to focus on enabling those to be created in Consumer Platform space by taking the decentralized approach. On the other hand, general challenges remain mostly the same, and they benefit from being resolved in unified way allowing for extensions – like data management, systems stability or compliance – which we’re happy to resolve with global Platform capabilities.
As we continue to build and extend the Consumer Platform to provide wider and better support for multiple initiatives worldwide, it becomes clear that – with ultimately limited central resources and organizational shift to enable market driven technology deployments – focus must be concentrated on the areas providing the most usability and common functionality provided with economies of scale, while enabling the digital ecosystem to be extended easily. Those values – that could be summarized as Consumer Data, Platform Composability and Local Market Enablement – define the way we evolve the Platform. It happens so that some of those values are a part of bigger, globally visible trends – for instance as they’re being reported by Gartner in their Technology Trends for 2022: Data Fabric, Composable Applications, Total Experience or Privacy-Enhancing Computation (https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/top-technology-trends)
We recognize Consumer Data as the most important value of ecosystem – operating in regulated and compliance-demanding industry, we must put highest level of care and attention to consumer data aspect, through consumer age verification, or following specific local regulations for industry, both of them typically reaching beyond usual consumer data legislation. With the Consumer Data remaining the core of both operational Platform data fabric services, as well as integrated analytical capabilities, we provide the collection and operational availability of the consumer data records to end market applications in a form respecting given consents and regulations. Privacy is being additionally enhanced by advanced computational methods: we operate on aggregated, anonymized first party data in providing experiences to our consumers. Doing the heavy lifting around consumer data in the Platform allows end markets to concentrate on actual value delivery in the experiences they manage based on data. As long as the expectations of consumers in different geographies might differ, and the marketing activity will vary respectively – understanding and acting upon the data collected remains the key capability.
It’s worth mentioning that working for geographically large organization we also experience diversified expectations and requirements for digital marketing coming from multiple markets. That diversity in e-commerce space very often manifests in necessity of integrating local solutions supporting digital operations – ranging from specific local payment gateways, through different logistics operators, data service providers, age verification methods and consumer communication channels – while retaining the control over the core of the functionality and data being operated. In the Platform Composability spirit, we provide methods of extending main platform components or integrating additional / alternative ones by the local markets – ranging from enabling local integrations to platform core, providing process and functionality composition environment based on APIs, as well as enabling local partners to develop and support modules of Platform specific to given market. The Consumer Data Fabric, extended by Platform Composability approach, allows markets to concentrate on delivering actual differentiating value, while leveraging the shared functionalities in the backoffice – or providing them locally, as it often happens with likes of loyalty programs or demand-side platforms.
One of the most important changes taking place in the marketing area is decentralization of effort connected with technology deployment – we enable the end markets IT and Marketing organizations capabilities to utilize Platform tools provided at their own digital products delivery – at the same time moving the center of gravity from base development to driving configurability and adoption of solutions, be it content management, commerce operations or consumer service. Relying on generally available tools with market footprint allowing for proper operations teams availability, equipped with consumable APIs to enable building the application experiences in the end markets – we can have center teams concentrated on enabling new features and evolving the platform service offering. Local Market Enablement takes different forms, with some markets taking parts of experience-related development, others concentrating on maximizing reuse of existing blueprints and capabilities, and yet others – extending the platform capabilities with modules built locally, with benefit to whole Consumer Platform community.
We do believe that great consumer experiences come on one hand from good understanding the data consumers decide to trust us and provide us with voluntarily by interacting with us (as zero-party data), but also from properly executed local strategies supported with content and interactions designed with respect to local market expectations; both of those values being supported by the model we created around Consumer Platform values: Consumer Data Fabric, Platform Modularity and Local Market Enablement
Norbert Franke
Head of Consumer Platform
DBS Marketing Technology Delivery
British American Tobacco
