Gloria Decoste of Nestlé: How To Build and Optimize Your Content Supply Chain

“All of us need to collectively own ecommerce.” — Gloria DeCoste, Director of Omnichannel Marketing, Nestlé

How do you get product content to retailers seamlessly when you have thousands of SKUs, 300 channels, and more than 2,000 brands across nine different divisions? 

For Nestlé, the answer was simple: Build a content supply chain. However, standing up the digital version of a factory line was more difficult in practice, requiring internal change management, education, and next-level cross-functional collaboration. 

Gloria DeCoste, director of omnichannel marketing at Nestlé, joined a recent episode of the “Unpacking the Digital Shelf” podcast, “Streamlining and Optimizing the Content Supply Chain,” to share how Nestle embraced this shift, including tips for how other brands can build their own content supply chain and make it an essential part of their digital shelf strategies. 

Rethinking the Digital Shelf 

Every big organizational change has to start with a mindset shift. For Nestlé, that meant reframing how it thought about the digital shelf.  

“We would think about the digital shelf of the past as just getting assets to the retailer, checking the box of what a retailer needs,” DeCoste says. “Today, we really think about assets and content more like our supply chain.”

DeCoste explains that in a physical supply chain, organizations focus on getting their substrates ordered and materials ready for transport. It would then load these products onto a truck and send them directly to a retailer. Brands can adopt a similar step-by-step process to get product content on the digital shelf.

“As we think about ecommerce, we're trying to think about our information and assets as going to the retailers with that much discipline so that we are getting things to the retailers the first time, right on time, and in full,” DeCoste says.

Building an Optimized Content Supply Chain

Standing up a content supply chain has required lots of process change, buy-in, and collaboration at Nestlé. 

The goal of Nestlé’s content supply chain is to get each product’s DNA — what DeCoste calls the “universal truth” of that product — onto retailers’ websites. 

Working backward from the package date, Nestlé’s content supply chain process relies on multiple stakeholders across different teams hitting critical deadlines. It starts with the brand team and then involves support functions, “from master data to product information to labels, to designers of packaging,” DeCoste says. 

Toward the end of the process, account teams and customer teams come in and add special information. “We call that topping off data for a specific retailer,” she adds.

“All of these teams touch it and help that [SKU] come to life, adding in that DNA along the way,” DeCoste explains. 

Effectively Managing the Product Content Life Cycle 

Once product content goes out into the world, DeCoste’s team’s work isn’t done. It’s just beginning. It’s difficult to capture attention on a digital shelf that’s basically infinite. 

Consumer needs and behavior also constantly evolve, so brands must manage their digital shelf more dynamically. 

“The way that you have to win on the digital shelf is really different from a physical shelf,” DeCoste says.

On the digital shelf, a brand may face millions of shelf resets based on the keywords for which they index on a retailer’s website. Responding to consumers’ search patterns requires teams to be agile and embrace automation to present the right content to the right user at the right time. Nestlé’s team currently manages more than 300 channels, with specialists dedicated to each retailer. 

“If it's a difference of a team manually getting information and assets to a retailer versus setting up a channel where it can be automated, we are on the side of automation,” DeCoste says. 

Automation also has helped the team streamline decision-making and quickly get the answers it needs from important stakeholders to keep product content flowing. 

Bringing technology, people, and processes together in this way has allowed Nestlé to achieve what’s often elusive for most brands: making ecommerce everyone’s responsibility. 

Owning Ecommerce Together 

DeCoste’s work anchors on believing that “all of us need to own ecommerce collectively.”

“We believe in decentralizing some of the work so that all of our teams understand what it takes to be in, and win in, ecommerce.” — Gloria DeCoste, Director of Omnichannel Marketing, Nestlé

With that guiding philosophy, Nestlé has focused on creating a collaborative culture where everybody learns together to drive digital shelf success. 

“I'm proud of Nestlé for this because the teams have done such a fantastic job at Nestlé of leaning into ecommerce, being curious about ecommerce, and being open to understanding how ecommerce plays in their world, even though they might not have ecommerce directly in their title,” DeCoste says.

DeCoste has focused on providing tactical examples to leaders and stakeholders to advance Nestlé’s digital shelf strategy. She finds this approach often builds buy-in and deeper engagement.

“You’ve got to understand how it works at a high level, but without some of those hands-on, keyboard tactical examples to show, we don't move as fast,” she says.

Nestlé proves even the biggest consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands can be nimble. Its content supply chain has allowed the company to increase its agility, be more responsive to shifting market dynamics, and deliver compelling product content to consumers at the right moment. 

DeCoste often refers to her team’s work as birthing new SKUs and sending them out into the world. With Nestlé’s optimized content supply chain, these SKUs are successfully finding their way through the digital shelf. 

To hear more of DeCoste’s tips for building a content supply chain, listen to the full episode.