How Bayer Consumer Health Delivers Best-in-class Data-driven Marketing

“I am obsessed with consumers,” says Patricia Corsi, Chief Marketing and IT Officer at Bayer Consumer Health. A paragon of marketing, brand, and consumer insights, having spent more than two decades shaping iconic consumer brands — prior to joining Bayer, Corsi held the role of SVP/CMO at Heineken Company, Mexico and VP of Marketing for Unilever UK and Ireland. Among her many accolades are Adweek’s Top 30 CMOs in 2021 and this year’s finalist for the WFA (World Federation of Advertising) Market of the Year awards.

Bayer Consumer Health is part of Bayer AG, the global healthcare leader with over $50 billion in revenue in 2021. Corsi believes creating a successful marketing campaign often requires taking people outside their comfort zone. As a result, she’s helped many Bayer brands disrupt the consumer healthcare field and break through the white noise of an oversaturated marketing world.

In an interview with Martechvibe, Corsi dives into the company’s digital transformation efforts and data-driven marketing strategies. With a focus on adding value to the business and reaching the right audience efficiently, Bayer Consumer Health has scaled its precision marketing to more than half of its digital spend. Corsi emphasises the importance of customer-centricity in building long-term strategic partnerships that benefit both the brand and its customers. She also discusses the company’s commitment to sustainability and achieving 100% recyclable or reusable packaging by 2030. She highlights the emerging technologies that will significantly impact the consumer healthcare industry in the near future, including AI, machine learning and automation.

Excerpts from the interview;

Bayer Consumer Health has made significant investments in digital and data-driven marketing initiatives in recent years. Can you tell us how you measure the success of such tech investments?

I’m proud to say that Bayer Consumer Health is best in class in data-driven marketing within our industry. We focus our digital transformation effort and investment on adding the BEST value to the business. We are implementing an integrated full-funnel precision marketing strategy to reach the right people efficiently with the right content at scale that builds the brand and drives sales. With this strategy, we achieve higher profitable growth through marketing effectiveness, such as higher ROI and engagement rate (ex: CTR and VTR) and efficiency through lower cost per completed view.

We continue to scale our precision marketing to more than half of our digital spend and improve our data-driven marketing programs with AI, machine learning and automation. These are globally recognised as first movers and industry leaders by reputable partners such as Google, where we work together for machine learning of search categories to predict Cold and Flu sessions and activate high-value audiences with AI value-based bidding to drive higher conversion.

How do you track changing consumer behaviour and sentiment, and how does your team use data to inform your marketing efforts?

I am obsessed with consumers; as a team, we must have the ability and agility to understand and empathise with the diverse set of consumers we serve to be able to cater to and deliver against their self-care needs. Digitalising our consumer insights and understanding is the centre of our efforts – we have in-house tools that allow us to immediately connect with consumers and track trends and key competitive information at our fingertips. The opportunity to use technology to decrease the distance between our offices, consumers, and customers is exciting and one we are betting on.

What advice would you give marketing leaders to build a customer-centric culture within the organisation?

Customer-centricity is one of our Bayer Consumer Health key focus areas to be the best! We cannot win alone; we need to find a common purpose with our partner/customer, ensuring our partnership is mutually beneficial. Creating transparent and long-term strategic alliances needs to be built upon trust and respect, which can be done by openly sharing priorities, performance, opportunities and challenges from both ways. It is also essential to create an environment of courage and curiosity, where test-and-learn is incentivised and looking for solutions within a larger pool of partners beyond yourself.

We have witnessed a greater level of customer delivery when we all focus on solving the problem at hand, using technology as an accelerator.

How can brands authentically show their commitment to sustainability, and how can it impact consumer relationships?

Fifty per cent of the world’s population has no access to essential health services because they are either unavailable or unaffordable. At Bayer Consumer Health, we are committed to addressing humanity’s most pressing challenges: inequality and climate change, to fulfil our vision of Health for All, Hunger for None.

The challenge on sustainability is not a small one, especially in health, where in cases extra packaging/plastic was developed in the past to provide protection for the product and/or child safety.

Nevertheless, we are adapting our product portfolio to meet underserved communities’ unique medical, pricing, packaging, and distribution needs to widen access to self-care. We created a solution for low-income consumers (LIC) with affordable prices, such as our biggest brands, Aspirin and Redoxon, which are available in sachets that you can find in mom-and-pop stores. Our goal is to create more strategic products designed with LICs in mind!

We are committed to achieving 100% recyclable or reusable packaging by 2030. Our team applied Sustainability by Design thinking for the new Bepanthen range, light-weighted with less plastic and wide-neck bottles to encourage more practical and hygienic refilling. We introduced a refill pouch, which equals 80% less plastic than the refill bottle and 42% less CO2 equivalent emissions than the original bottle.

Sustainability is an essential part not only of our business but of our lives, and we can all make a difference.

What are the emerging technologies that you believe will have a big impact on the consumer healthcare industry in the near future?

AI, machine learning and automation are changing the way consumers take care of their health and the way we do business. Bayer is advancing our digital transformation with these technologies to deliver breakthrough innovation to drive further growth and add value to the business. If we want to win, we need to step up, raise our bar in these subjects, and stay true to our purpose – Science for Better Life.

At Bayer, we use AI, machine learning and automation that is already embedded across our business streams:

• How we innovate – We developed precision health solutions with our partner by leveraging AI as a digital risk assessment tool for cardiovascular disease with HUMA, aiming to reach 100 million people.
• How we produce – We implemented an AI Forecasting Tool to drive higher accuracy.
• How we sell – By transforming HCPs’ (health care providers) engagement into a personalised, omnichannel, and data-driven approach to increase coverage, touchpoint frequency, and engagement effectiveness, leading to higher prescriptions and recommendations for Bayer brands.
• How we market – By scaling a full-funnel precision marketing strategy improved with AI and machine learning.
• How we optimise –  Our resources use process automation; this saves more than 10K hours every quarter for our product supply team.

These efforts will not only help us stay ahead of the competition today but will accelerate our business in transforming everyday health.