Reckitt scales multi-brand content operations across 200 markets

A multinational consumer goods company with products sold in 200 countries worldwide, Reckitt is responsible for 84 brands and 700 websites.  As part of its digital transformation journey, the company had already embraced headless technology and microservices, but was looking to migrate from a homegrown CMS to gain more flexibility and freedom, and to leverage unified content across all of their sites. “What we had was sufficient, but we couldn’t expand beyond the layer we were at,” Paweł Płoneczka, IT&D Senior Manager Websites, said. 

To support a diverse variety of brands, each with their own identity and digital presence, Reckitt was looking for a comprehensive solution that would allow them to approach content structure with flexibility and agility, and make ideas for brand identity a reality with ease. With hundreds of websites to migrate, the business also wanted to be able to scale without the solution becoming prohibitively expensive.

Performance was also a key goal for Reckitt. “Organic SEO traffic is all about getting those milliseconds down,” Płoneczka said. “If your website loads faster, you get favored by the search engines, and you get more organic traffic. Our aspirational marketing goal is always, 50% faster — half the price.”

During a POC with Contentstack, Reckitt was immediately struck by the scale that could be achieved with Contentstack and the composable features on offer. “There was great flexibility of features,” Płoneczka said. “For example we loved the GraphQL source plugin, which was immediately beneficial. It means we didn’t have to write API communications from scratch, we could just plug and play into the existing code base.” 

After a successful POC, Reckitt started a phased migration of its websites by standardizing through a content center of excellence. By shifting to a product approach across all brands instead of working project to project, the business has more structure and governance over all of its websites. Having full control over the content model and front-end implementation has had a direct impact on quality and accessibility. 

“The governance model really proves itself,” Płoneczka said. “Occasionally we’ve seen external vendors make mistakes, and in the past we haven’t been able to prevent that without manually checking each website, which is impossible at scale.

Since deploying Contentstack, the digital experience at Reckitt has evolved dramatically. Unified content across all the websites means it’s easier to upgrade and introduce new features and content, with updates to the content model reflected across all existing websites. The Reckitt team can now provide a white-labeled approach for all of its brands, which can then be customized further to transform the digital experience both internally and externally. 

“We don’t have to think about managing a CMS operationally, we can just use it,” Płoneczka said. “That means we have more time to talk to brands and come up with technical solutions that fulfill their goals, measuring whether something will have global impact, and focusing on more strategic objectives.”

Managing global changes can now be done at the click of a button and Reckitt has been able to speed up migration stages significantly faster than with their previous tech.“We are working on GA4 at the moment, and with our legacy tech stack this would take more than a year to migrate every single website with all of their different implementations,” Płoneczka said. “With Contentstack, we’re 95% done already, and we know we can just hit a button and be live. We couldn’t have done that before, so it’s made managing the websites at scale so much simpler.” 

Reckitt has already achieved many of its digital transformation goals by leveraging composable architecture, but what’s next? The company is working on using taxonomy to greater effect to improve the content editing experience, and reducing manual effort by automating content model updates within the platform. 

Key wins for Reckitt include:

• Optimized time to deliver: Reckitt has already migrated between 15-20% of its websites, and counting! Updates and new features can now be completed in a fraction of the time, and at scale.  
• Reduced costs: As a result of the standardized approach, both maintenance and migration costs have fallen since Reckitt deployed Contentstack’s Composable DXP in place of its previous tech stack. 
• 40% increased performance score: Thanks to streamlined accessibility and optimized back-end systems, Reckitt has seen a 40% increase in its SEO and performance scores.