How Kimberly-Clark streamlines production to save time and budget.

If you're marketing a global brand, you already know the relentless challenges around speed, volume and budget. We spoke to Pip Gagg, Head of Marketing for Baby & Child Care at Kimberly-Clark, about how her team is solving that equation.

With brands such as Kleenex and Huggies, Kimberly-Clark is a trusted part of the lives of almost a quarter of the world's population. And as a growing global FMCG business, it faces pressure from every direction.

"We're in a market where there's never been so much pressure on pricing," says Pip. "This pressure is coming from our customers, but also impacts our budgets." Kimberly-Clark's answer, she explains, is to premiumise and focus on quality, in the product itself and in how the brands are positioned.

With products for everyone from teenagers to parents to older consumers, the team has to produce a wide variety of content for very different audiences. "How our audiences engage with us is constantly evolving, and they're quite demanding in where and how they want to receive content from us," says Pip. "Not only do we need a wide array of content, but we also need to be mindful of the different platforms where we engage with the range of consumers that we deal with."

It's a challenge every enterprise brand will recognise: you need high volumes of best-practice content to stay top of mind, without compromising on quality.

"Back in the day, I remember seeing a plan that just had TV, whereas now, if I was to have a plan for social alone, it could have ten or more assets for the exact same creative. We need to get the economies of scale, but in a cost effective way."

Filling the gap between in-house and agency resources

Kimberly-Clark has a fairly traditional marketing services structure, one that will be familiar to a lot of brands: a strong global marketing team providing campaign and platform support, local marketing teams who develop local campaigns and roll out global ones, key creative agencies delivering major strategic thinking and hero campaigns, and some in-house resource covering design, copywriting and basic production.

The missing piece was a way to produce best-practice assets efficiently for every platform and channel. "We had more demand for content than we were able to supply resource-wise using our external agencies and in-house teams, but also from a budget perspective," explains Pip. "That's when we really leaned on Genero to understand how they can fill that gap, and to make sure we're staying ahead and meeting the different needs of our consumers."

What that looks like in practice

Genero's creative delivery system combines a global creative network of 130k+ production companies, directors, editors, animators, photographers, designers and other creatives; a purpose-built, end-to-end production platform delivering an efficient workflow from briefing to content delivery; and an expert team of client service specialists in each major advertising region.

The partnership

Since 2019, Kimberly-Clark has run more than 70 briefs across seven brands in three regions, with more regions on the way. Pip sees the benefits in three areas.

Scaling digital content production efficiently. "While the need for content has been increasing, budgets have been shrinking. So what we're able to do with Genero is create a number of different bespoke creatives for all our required platforms, and address the different format needs of our media plans."

Guidance and expertise. "We're limited with our internal resources, so having someone to help us manage the production process is invaluable. We're not production houses, we don't know all those details. So leaning on the specialist knowledge that Genero provides is incredibly helpful."

Access to a global network of professional creatives. "The way we win with our consumers is making sure we have creative that cuts through. Having a network of diverse different thinking, we've been able to bring new ways of looking at things that we've had challenges with in the past. There's power in numbers."

If your team is facing the same gap between content demand and production capacity, we'd be happy to show you how it works. Get in touch.