N.X: Taking eCommerce opportunities

The way consumers today communicate with brands (and vice versa) has been radically changed in recent years by digital technologies. The number of purchase and information channels is constantly increasing. “Ratings & Reviews” enable unprecedented transparency about the perceived quality of products, their characteristics and, above all, prices. Online shopping is therefore indispensable for many people, especially in markets such as China, for example. Already today, more than every second purchase decision for our products is made online – and the trend is rising.

The marketing of our products via eCommerce platforms is therefore an important growth engine for Beiersdorf across all brands and has corresponding priority. “Having established a solid connection with our consumers over the past 100 years via physical locations of our retail partners, eCommerce will enable us to get closer to consumers and to achieve a large part of our growth in the coming years,” said Sigmar Werz, Global Head of Digital Brand Commerce at Beiersdorf. “Be it via large online platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba or JD.com or our own eShops. We are already growing about 7x faster in eCommerce than with our traditional business”.  

In order to establish our brands as “Visible / Shoppable / Lovable”, the NIVEA digital department (N.X) produces relevant content that makes the entire consumer journey – from getting to know one of our skin care products to buying it – a “seamless” experience. (For more on N.X, click here.)

“We strive to make our products available to everyone and everywhere,” says Werz. No market or category is excluded. The online business will continue to grow explosively during the course of this year and we must have the ambition to take advantage of the resulting global opportunities. “In doing so, we must strive for more than we thought possible from our traditional business,” says Werz. “But that's not all: As a mass market brand, we have long been selling our products through retail outlets. Now we can use eCommerce to reach consumers directly through our own websites or specific marketplaces such as TMall.com or Amazon to engage them with specific offers and build strong consumer relationships”. NIVEA recently launched a D2C Shop with eBay, the third most popular shopping app of all Germans, making it the first major beauty brand to open its own shop there. Testing this new channel not only gives us access to millions of new potential consumers who want to get closer to NIVEA. As new channels are introduced, the N.X team also continuously generates knowledge regarding the mechanics of each platform: How does the algorithm work? What possibilities are there for branding? What are the consumer preferences? “We use these insights and information,” explains Werz, “to further optimize the consumer experience along all eCommerce touch points”.

You can learn more about eCommerce at Beiersdorf from Sigmar Werz in this video:

Since 2014, Catarina has been responsible for Beiersdorf's digital corporate presence, from social media and our corporate blog to the global corporate websites. As a communications strategist with a focus on digital, she also works on lots of buzzwords such as #digitalstorytelling, #influencerrelations and the #digitalization at Beiersdorf. Prior to that, she has been responsible since 2008 for various financial, HR and scientific communications topics as well as global brands PR.