Stanley Black & Decker

Throughout my career, I have worked with digital marketing and CRM related projects, mostly for large companies in different industries (including 4 Fortune 500 companies). My career has also led me to a point where I am deeply involved in global strategies around personalization, privacy, and compliance around Stanley Black & Decker end-user (the person buying our tools at our retailer partners and distributors). This is part of a larger digital transformation process that is assisting Stanley Black & Decker in its B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) business model.

Because Stanley Black & Decker is under a long-term process of digital transformation, it was never too dependent on third-party data for its end-user communication. Also, because Stanley Black & Decker does not sell directly (with few exceptions), it was able to heavily invest in zero and firstparty data collection only, starting and growing its own global end-user database. Therefore, Stanley Black & Decker can generate demand on behalf of its distributors and retailers, and have more information when developing new products, etc. This required great collaboration amongst different teams, such as CRM, digital marketing, product marketing, e-commerce, brand, data operations and analytics. With CRM and data operations leading the collection and activation of zero and first-party data, the following roadmap was key to get started, and continue to move forward with Stanley Black & Decker B2B2C mode:

 It is imperative to work closely with teams/ stakeholders to further understand how to best use the data you are collecting, and what matters the most (and when) to your end-user.  

1. Flexibility: Since Stanley Black & Decker is going through a new process of digital transformation. This means ensuring your infrastructure allows for flexibility (the ability to add or modify martech stack platforms without negatively affecting end-user data collection and activation). Companies must also have a robust place to store all the zero and firstparty data collected so you can view over time, segment it, trigger automated customized journeys, etc. It can be a data warehouse, data lake, or CDP, the most important part is to be flexible and easily scalable when it comes to connecting sources of data into it.

2. Agility: It was crucial to have enduser data readily available so Stanley Black & Decker can enhance end-user experience it is digital channels that, collect more data that can be further used for activation, creating an on-going end-user data growth loop. To achieve Agility, it is key to have governance over how end-user data is collected. Ensuring the data is properly collected and stored can greatly decrease the time spent between collecting and using the data for message customization and personalization. Fewer data ingestion processes are needed when the data comes clean and properly formatted, and it can be quickly used where it matters the most. Many teams should be stewards of good data collection practices, this is not restricted to IP or Data Operations only.

3. Scalability: This is flexibility’s sibling. Any other platforms that used to engage and deliver digital experiences (such as communication, content delivery, etc.), should also be flexible and scalable - connected to the robust end-user database through which it can turbocharge experimentation using relevant, fresh zero and first-party data. The martech stack should be really composable and both flexibility and scalability are key.

4. Visibility: It is critical to track how all these efforts are performing vis-àvis your business goals. Visibility is about ensuring the appropriate teams can easily check the important key performance indicators (KPIs). Another advantage of the flexibility and Agility foundations is that they also make relevant data report ready and can be easily sent out (automatically) to any data visualization platform that works with APIs.

Other approaches that have also greatly helped our teams at Stanley Black & Decker:

It is imperative to work closely with teams/stakeholders to further understand how to best use the data you are collecting, and what matters the most (and when) to your end-user. This will require an experimental mind frame across multiple teams: teams work together to create a hypothesis, test, and analyze (and use) its results and insights, many times over. Curious collaborators are the best throughout this process!

Only collect data that will be used to provide or improve your customer digital experience. Privacy policies are like covenants where companies commit to collect only data it will use to improve the customer experience. No data should ever be collected for data collection’s sake only.