Shiseido

The rapid growth of digital and social media channels has helped the beauty industry explode, but also presented new challenges along the way. And Shiseido knows these challenges well — with so many brands in so many different markets, the company needed a unified view of the social media conversations around their brand in order to make data-driven decisions and uplevel its customer experience.

Without this central source of truth, Shiseido risked sinking valuable time into analyzing a deluge of social media mentions across incompatible, fragmented tools — and sacrificing critical insights along the way. That’s why Shiseido partners with Meltwater to turn its once-fractured social operations into a company-wide social strategy.

Meltwater Social Listening, Social Media Management, Consumer Intelligence, and Influencer Marketing

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 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 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,” says Amit. The Meltwater suite gave the company the ability to leverage consistent intelligence solutions that brought its worldwide team in sync.

Powered by AWS Compute architecture, Meltwater’s solutions scale instantly to meet Shiseido’s dynamic analytic needs, ensuring that they can handle increased demand without downtime. That high performance and low latency enhances the overall user experience, while AWS advanced security features protect data and applications against potential threats. Additionally, AWS storage solutions provide a robust foundation for Meltwater solutions, ensuring data durability and availability.

Meltwater helped Shiseido create a custom analytics dashboard using its media monitoring and social listening platform, integrating a wealth of social data and metrics into a unified, consistent tool. Meanwhile, Shiseido consolidates its social publishing and engagement with Meltwater’s social media management and analytics platform.

It also uses the AI-driven influencer marketing platform Klear, which Meltwater acquired in 2021, to manage and measure its influencer campaigns. And most recently, the beauty industry leader began using the Meltwater Consumer Intelligence suite for obtaining AI- and NLP-enabled insights.

“For us, Meltwater has been both a strategic partner in the long-term, as well as a very tactical and operational partner where they actually help us improve our campaigns and customer interactions on a daily basis,” says Amit. “Overall we've been in lock-step with them on their acquisition journey, and it's good to feel that our voices are being heard.”

Results and Benefits

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.”

The Meltwater Suite has empowered Amit and his team to understand Shiseido’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. 

A unified social media management 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.

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.

“For us, Meltwater has been both a strategic partner in the long-term, as well as a very tactical and operational partner where they actually help us improve our campaigns and customer interactions on a daily basis,” says Amit. “Overall we've been lock stepped with them on their acquisition journey, and it's good to feel that our voices are being heard.”