Shiseido

Known around the world for leading beauty brands like NARS, Clé de Peau Beauté, and Shiseido, the company had a constant deluge of social media mentions and conversations that it struggled to monitor and extract insights from in a unified manner. “We were interested in acquiring a partner that would span the multitude of countries we operate in, be able to scan billions of conversations that are happening on a daily basis, in the languages and platforms of our customer's needs,” explains Amit Naik, SVP, Global Head of Analytics at Shiseido. The Meltwater suite gave the company the ability to leverage consistent intelligence solutions that brought its worldwide team.

Creating globally consistent KPI frameworks for a world of brands

When Amit Naik first took the reins as Shiseido’s Global Head of Analytics in 2016, more than a dozen of the company’s brands — operating across 20 markets and in multiple languages — managed their social media listening, marketing, and management efforts using a variety of standalone, incompatible tools. Shiseido used the Meltwater suite to unify and continue to build the company’s global social media capabilities.

“We really had no consistent way of evaluating what that brand meant in multiple regions,” says Amit. Meltwater helped Shiseido create a custom analytics dashboard using Explore, its media monitoring and social listening platform. Integrating a wealth of social data and metrics into a unified, consistent tool, let Amit and his team understand the company’s global presence at a glance. With an overarching evaluation and tracking framework in place, they can easily customize their dashboards and benchmarks for the nuances of each brand’s regional markets. 

Meanwhile, Shiseido consolidates its social publishing and engagement with Engage, Meltwater’s social media management and analytics platform. A unified interface gives team members a place where they can interact with Shiseido’s community on different social media platforms. That and other features like content scheduling, publishing, and easy reporting build the engagement capacity of Shiseido’s leading brands like NARS Cosmetics — which boasts nearly 10 million followers across its English-language YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok accounts alone. With an all-in-one platform, the company can offer the kind of integrated, multi-channel brand experiences modern consumers have come to expect.

Today, Shiseido leverages the Meltwater suite across all of its brands and markets. “We were able to create a globally consistent KPI framework that then made the shift from return on marketing objectives, all the way linking it to return on investment. It's an evolutionary journey and Meltwater has been part of it with us.”

Unlocking competitive intelligence

To have a truly holistic understanding of its presence worldwide, Shiseido also needs a comprehensive look at how it's performing against competitors. The company uses Explore to monitor its numerous competitors in multiple markets and develop benchmarks to evaluate its own brands’ outputs. “If we have a campaign that did really well, but it's not up to mark with a competitive benchmark, it's good for us to know and then course-correct,” Amit explains. 

As the beauty industry continues to trend toward super-personalized, hyper-responsive marketing, Meltwater empowers Shiseido to stay ahead of the curve. Amit and his team use sentiment tracking and word clouds to classify and understand consumer conversations and segment audiences based on their interests and affinities. “​​We have moved away from the vanity metrics of followers to where we’re really looking at engagement and content resonation,” he says. “Those are meaningful improvements that we don’t think we could have done alone.”

With the ability to tap into and understand a firehose of conversations about the company’s brands and competitors, it can craft social media and marketing messaging that speaks to the zeitgeist and is backed by proven audience resonance data. Plus, real-time social listening helps the company identify and get a head start on budding trends, benefitting marketing and product development teams alike.

Once consumed with the task of wrangling vast, disparate data sets, Shiseido brands now easily access the valuable information within. “For me, the entire research journey that Meltwater facilitates is really the favorite part. It helps me go from data to insights to action,” says Amit.

Collaborating in growth and capability-building

Shiseido hasn’t just benefited from the evolution of the Meltwater suite over the years; the beauty brand has also collaborated in plotting the course as a member of Meltwater’s advisory board. Meltwater’s 2017 acquisition of Klarity, an Asian market social media analytics platform, helped Shiseido make inroads into the Chinese market. It also uses the AI-driven influencer marketing platform Klear, which Meltwater acquired in 2021, to manage and measure its influencer campaigns.

Already well-attuned to the continued convergence of PR, social media, and marketing, Meltwater ensures that Shiseido is also well-positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Most recently the beauty industry leader began using Linkfluence, part of Meltwater since 2021, for obtaining AI- and NLP-enabled insights. Using Meltwater’s suite of solutions ensures that Shiseido’s social and customer experience strategies can remain integrated and scalable as they continue to evolve along with the beauty industry.