Having more than 30 brands in the portfolio, with no practice sharing on web and platform development, most of the web based projects in digital were created by each brand in isolation. Spending time building each project from the ground - up, resource spent wasn’t optimized, statistical data was heavily fragmented and consumer data, collected by each project, wasn’t shared between different brands. That’s when the concept of owned IPaaS (Integration platform as a service) was born to solve business challenges – taking inspiration from SaaS solutions available on the international market, while keeping in mind regulations on consumer data storage, currently in effect on the Russian scene.

MVP version of the project was built with a budget of $70k, allowing agile approach to creation of consumer-focused promotions with various degrees of customization available as a part of the platform “from the box”.

Market intelligence forecast outlined the opportunity to reduce costs for campaign development by 24% and time-to-market by 35% with implementation of the single platform. These savings would pay back costs of the MVP platform development in 6 months. Another benefit offered to project stakeholders was an opportunity for brand teams to focus on their key responsibility – campaign strategy – rather than bother with technical implementation.

Key features of the new platform:

Key features of the platform:

- IPaaS (Integration platform as a service approach)

- Safe and scalable solution, fitting FMCG business needs.

- Agile consumer data gathering

- Consumer-centric multi-channel communication platform (web, email, SMS, chat-bots, APPs, etc)

Key outcomes:

- Average cost for a single campaign has been reduced by 25%.

- Average time to market has been reduced by 35%.

Apart from direct results (optimization of costs and time-to-market for promos), the platform provides smart consumer data gathering for data-driven marketing campaigns, valuable audience insights and cross category / brand best practice sharing within the corporation.

Unified platform opens us a way for consumer-centric approach (web, email, SMS, chat-bots, APPs, etc) through building connected user journey based on common data source.

More than 10 mln people experienced our new solution and we’re looking into:

a) expanding it to other countries

b) expanding functionality by adding new features like adding voice of consumer opportunities i.e. gathering all consumer feedback, reviews and requests in one place.

Key elements of business activity were integrated into a unified service – either as internal modules or as 3rd party solutions connected via API. The setup is customized for each particular campaign through a user-friendly interface.

Platform components include:

- Unified back-end;

- Single sign-on and centralized data storage system;

- Real-time reporting module;

- Website templates;

- Prize drawing engine;

- Purchase validation module.

- Cashback module;

- A/B testing module

At the moment the platform is up and running for two years, with 60+ campaigns already launched. New modules are constantly being added.