Danone uses DPS app to train highly dispersed marketing organization

Groupe Danone is a world leader in the food industry, with revenues exceeding €20 billion annually, four major divisions, and well-known brands such as Dannon, Activia, and Evian. Danone started in Europe, but today, 62% of its 100,000 employees work in emerging markets. The company is a leader in marketing innovation, with campaigns such as the widely popular EvianBabies.

With broad global reach and hundreds of specialized local brands, Danone relies on marketers and their agencies in regions around the world to promote brand affinity and sales. With an increasing focus on delivering marketing campaigns leveraging a variety of digital vehicles, the company was challenged with finding engaging ways to train and enable employees and partners to communicate in this new landscape. Existing training methods that included marketing textbooks and PowerPoint presentations were difficult to share across brands, agencies, and countries due to language issues, large file sizes that could clog email inboxes, and other barriers. They were also difficult to keep up-to-date.

“We’ve been doing what every big corporation has been doing—handing out big books that told people how to do marketing, but were more suitable as foot rests. The time had come to move to modern, engaging ways of learning.”

— Michael Aidan
VP Digital Brand Platforms, Danone

Walking the walk

Aidan recognized that an app would be the ideal vehicle for training and communicating with Danone’s dispersed marketing staff and their agencies. An app could be easily tailored for marketers in specific countries and regions, with continuous additions of fresh content, techniques, and tools.

The team began looking for a mobile content solution that would allow Danone to create and iterate on an app in-house, without the expense and time-consuming coordination of working with outsourced designers and software developers. They chose Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) for its ease of use and ability to easily update content in a mobile app.

“We needed a digital publishing solution without technological barriers that our in-house staff could use. Adobe DPS is now the platform we rely on to foster a whole new way of marketing at Danone.”

Think digitally, act locally

Danone, in collaboration with Adobe, created the new Danone I-Brands app in just a few weeks. Danone worked with their agencies around the world to gather great cases of marketing in a digital era and then transformed that content into an engaging, interactive learning tool that presents marketing case studies, videos, marketing contacts, and messaging in a dynamic, immersive format.

Danone I-Brands provides inspiration as well as resources and techniques to make digital marketing succeed locally. The analytics capabilities within DPS enable the team to view what marketers are consuming in the app so they can better optimize the content for greater business impact.

Future forward

Feedback within Danone for the app has been extremely enthusiastic, especially because marketers and their agency counterparts can engage on the spot with compelling videos, interactive content, and tools—all on their preferred devices, rather than having to travel or go through a printed textbook. Having established a platform to train marketers on new digital marketing best practices, Groupe Danone is on the path to successfully delivering digital campaigns on all fronts.

“Adobe Digital Publishing Suite has helped us further our digital marketing initiatives through inspirational, useful training. I’m very enthusiastic about our mission, and I am pleased that I am contributing to our digital marketing training,” says Aidan. “It is a fantastic opportunity to help a company reinvent itself. We’re seeing changes—things are taking shape already in digital marketing. Adobe has been a great partner for us in providing both a superb digital publishing platform and helping adapt it to our needs.”
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