Colgate-Palmolive seeks a Global Ecommerce Marketing Director (New York, NY)

Those days are gone.

Modern consumers have never been more cynical nor more empowered: At any given time there are between 50 and 200 different versions of Google’s core algorithm in the wild, handling more than 11 billion queries per month. Twitter serves up nearly 350 billion tweets per day, and there are nearly 1 billion Facebook users generating content for their friends and family. Worldwide, $73 billion was spent on Internet advertising last year, and cutting through the clutter is murder.

As Colgate-Palmolive’s new Global eCommerce Marketing Director, this is what you’re dealing with. If you can handle that, then read on …

This is our second ecommerce search for Colgate-Palmolive, one of the world’s most respected CPG companies. Our first search is ongoing, and you can read about it here. The Global eCommerce Marketing Director will report to Colgate’s VP of Global Advertising & Digital and will be responsible for helping Colgate-Palmolive’s brand managers around the world build brand equity online as well as motivate, incentivize, and reward purchase behavior.

Doing this will be a tall order given the size, scope, and dynamism of the client’s business: Colgate-Palmolive’s global revenues are $17 billion, and the firm manages a portfolio of well-known of brands in more than 200 countries and territories. Around the world, both digital marketing and ecommerce are evolving very quickly, and Colgate sees huge variations in different regions.

Initially, you will be part of the Global Digital team within the Global Marketing Organization, yet this will be an individual contributor role. You’ll need to be a self-starter who can create a vision and gain buy-in from others to accomplish what has never been done before.

You’ll work with people from all backgrounds, geographies, and business functions, so you must be smart and “relatable.” Meaning, you’ll need deep consumer marketing experience to complement your world-class digital marketing and ecommerce background. Take a look at how “the Next Elon Musk” (aka Jeff Bezos) manages this conversation with Charlie Rose. In terms of intelligence, approachability, and teachable point of view, this is what I’m looking for …

Moreover, it’s essential that you understand all areas of digital including mobile, social, and search since you will be one of Colgate-Palmolive’s internal experts on these things. This is not just about developing a direct-to-consumer online retail piece for Colgate-Palmolive …

It’s about helping Colgate-Palmolive sell more products in brand-friendly ways that are consistent with how the customer wants to relate to them. If that’s direct to consumer, so be it. But more likely Colgate-Palmolive will be building its business through its valued channel partners such as Amazon, Target.com, Walmart.com, Kroger.com, and Tesco in the UK.

In fairly short order, Colgate-Palmolive would expect you to 1.) Understand what the company has done previously, and 2.) Formulate a global strategy for how CP will market its products through ecommerce going forward. (How cool is that?) Such a strategy might involve addressing the following questions …

1. Objectives: What are Colgate’s overall ecommerce goals, and which channel partners are involved? What types of online marketing will help accomplish Colgate’s goals?
2. Audience: For each partner and product, who are CP’s customers, and what are their pain points, motivators to purchase, and other hot buttons?
3. Content plan: How can your understanding of customer needs inform a relevant mix of Colgate’s content, topics, media, and desired outcomes?
4. Promotion: What’s the plan to get CP’s content to end-users as well as influencers for genuine sharing to new and relevant audiences?
5. Engagement: What’s the plan for growing Colgate-Palmolive’s network an increasing engagement among its target audience? How should brand managers be listening, participating, and rewarding these communities?
6. Measurement: What’s working? What’s not? How do we know? What insights should be captured to refine future digital marketing efforts?

My own experience with Colgate-Palmolive has been extremely positive, and these people have an analytical bias to the way they make decisions. You’ll need outstanding analytical skills and strong experience interpreting test results and drawing analytically rigorous conclusions.

That’s what’s so interesting about this position: You’ll need to be creative enough to understand how Colgate-Palmolive’s brand managers can engage their consumers via storytelling that doesn’t fit into traditional CPG marketing formats, yet logically, you’ll need to understand what’s working and what’s not.

• Is your product category being discussed? What questions do people have? What are their concerns? What opportunities are being revealed?
• Is your brand being discussed, and what are people saying? Who is saying it and where? What is the sentiment? How can Colgate-Palmolive leverage that information to build sales and improve its brand image?
• What topics seem relevant to our customers? Is it productive for the brand to take a position on any of these topics?
• On which social channels or websites are there active discussions and communities of interest relevant to Colgate-Palmolive’s interest?
• Who are the influencers participating in key discussions and in what channels?
• Are Colgate-Palmolive’s competitors being discussed? What does that mean for Colgate-Palmolive’s sales both online and off? Are Colgate-Palmolive’s competitors active participants on the social web? To what end?

You’ll need to understand key performance indicators such as search visibility, social mentions, webpage links, citations in blogs and other online media, social shares and links, blog in social content subscribers, fans, friends, followers, as well as comments and other measures of engagement. And you’ll need to understand what outcomes are most relevant to each brand, such as downloads, online event participation, inquiries, sales, referrals, and other proxies of brand advocacy.

Overall, the name of the game will be elevating brand perception and driving sales and customer engagement through better content. If you can demonstrate what’s working in an academically sound way, you’ll find that getting traction at Colgate-Palmolive will come very easily.

But you’ll need to be your own social media strategist as well as your own analyst.

Again: This position calls for a self-starter with a strong commercial background. You must have a strong leadership presence in order to build strong relationships and influence a cross functional, international team. The client is not interested in consultants or people with a consulting background. We’re looking for an A-player with 12 to 15 years a solid marketing and digital marketing background and ecommerce experience making it happen in a fast-moving consumer marketing environment.