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In 2019, Imperial Brands' Next Generation Products division was running CRM the way most multi-brand global companies do: multiple software providers across brands, each market on its own platform, and data that did not match from one system to another. Segmentation was hard to scale. Personalization did not travel across markets. Performance results were difficult to read because no two reports came from the same source.
The cost was not always visible in a single quarter. It showed up in everything that was hard to do: launching a brand consistently across markets, comparing performance from one country to another, migrating learnings from one team to the next, knowing whether a campaign was actually working.
The deeper problem was structural. A marketing operation built on fragmented tools cannot scale, because every new brand, every new market, and every new campaign adds complexity rather than capability. The team could see that without a different operating model, the next ten years would just compound the same problem at a larger scale.
By 2019, the team had reached its conclusion: what they needed was a different way of working.
The team chose Optimove as the platform consolidation point and committed to a multi-year migration. The early years, 2019 through 2022, were spent integrating brands, migrating data, closing instances that did not fit, and opening ones that did. By 2023, the foundation was in place: 18 stable Optimove instances, consistent across brands, ready to scale.
That foundation was the prerequisite for everything that came next. Over the following two years, the team built the operating model that made the foundation actually pay off, a structure for how CRM would work across markets, brands, and time.
That structure is built on five principles. Each one solves part of what the original fragmented operation could not. Together, they answer a question every global marketing leader eventually has to answer: how do you build something that keeps working as the business keeps changing?
The original fragmented system was an invitation to chase capabilities. Each brand could buy its own newest feature. Each market could pick its own tactic. The result was scattered investment with no compounding value.
Imperial Brands did the opposite. From 2019 to 2022, the team focused entirely on integration: connecting markets, migrating data, closing instances that did not fit, and standardizing how data flowed in.
Only in 2023, with the foundation in place, did the team move to advanced capabilities, including a refreshed customer model, real-time triggers, and the omnichannel project now underway. Each depends on the standardization that came first.
Foundations take years. The work of integration and migration is unglamorous, and without it nothing advanced holds up. Optimove's role here was as the platform consolidation point that could hold the brands together while the foundation was built. The patience of the partnership made the patience of the work possible.
The fragmented operation forced every market to reinvent the basics. Every team built its own templates. Every market wrote its own journeys. The work was duplicated and the quality was inconsistent.
Imperial Brands' answer was to standardize globally and localize locally: master templates that hold across markets, standardized automated journeys that work the same way for every brand, and brand-consistent assets that any market can use. Localization is layered on top of that global base, through translation, regional regulatory adjustments, and market-specific offers.
The reframe matters: standardization is usually treated as a restriction, but Imperial Brands treats it as an enabler that lets local marketing move quickly and consistently. Without it, every market would reinvent the basics. With it, every market starts from a stable platform.
Optimove is the system where the standards live. The templates, the journey logic, and the assets all sit in one place that every market can access, which is what makes the standardization real rather than aspirational.
In the original operation, there was no central governance because there was no central operation: each brand and market made its own decisions, and the result was inconsistency nobody could fix.
Building a global operation made governance possible, and it raised a real question about how that governance should work. JP, the team's CRM lead, put it in one line:
“We are there to support and help the markets. We are not there to be the goalkeepers or the police.”
That reframe is the heart of how Imperial Brands runs CRM governance. The central team owns data consistency, brand integrity, and the standards that hold the operation together. Its posture toward the markets is enablement: teams reach out for help and get it, without a sign-off process standing in the way.
This sounds soft, but it is operationally rigorous. Data has to be consistent, brand voice has to be coherent, and storylines have to align across instances. The governance is real. What changes is the relationship between the central team and the markets: the team shows up as a service provider, setting standards and helping markets meet them.
The Optimove platform supports this by giving the central team visibility across all 18 instances, so it can see where standards are holding and where they are drifting. The platform makes governance possible without making it bureaucratic.
A CRM platform is only as valuable as the relationship around it. Most companies treat the vendor relationship casually, with quarterly check-ins, occasional escalations, and an annual renewal conversation. Imperial Brands runs the partnership with discipline.
The structure includes quarterly business reviews with Optimove leadership, weekly working meetings with the customer success team, agile sprint planning where deliverables are scoped and prioritized, executive business reviews for strategic alignment, and ongoing engagement with Optimove's Professional Services as a strategic consultant.
The cadence is the lesson. The value of a CRM platform is proportional to the investment a company makes in the partnership around it, and Imperial Brands invests heavily. Weekly meetings and sprint work mean priorities are shared, blockers surface quickly, and the roadmap gets built together rather than handed down.
This is a discipline Imperial Brands chose to bring to the relationship, enabled by Optimove's willingness to operate as a long-term partner with dedicated success and professional services teams, not as a vendor delivering software.
The fragmented operation had no operating model: every team ran its own version of activation, its own version of segmentation, its own version of analysis, and none of it added up.
Imperial Brands' answer was a five-pillar operating model that any team in any market can use: Activate, Standardize, Segment, Optimize, Analyze.
Activate. Execute the plan across markets and brands, making sure every journey launches in every instance where it should.
Standardize. Maintain consistency across templates, assets, and messaging, regardless of which market or brand is using them.
Segment. Build the right audience for the right message. Run pilots in priority markets, learn what works, then scale to the rest.
Optimize. A/B test, form hypotheses, and try new approaches. Treat the marketing operation as something that keeps improving through experimentation.
Analyze. Look at the data, read the reports, and turn the patterns into next steps. Without analysis, none of the other pillars matter. JP was direct about this:
“You can do everything in terms of activation, standardization, segmentation, and optimization, but if you don't spend time to look at insights, the needle doesn't move.”
The five pillars work together. None should be skipped, though in practice the one most often skipped is the last, and it's the one that determines whether the rest of the work delivered value.
Optimove supports each pillar with platform capabilities: campaign orchestration for activation, templates and journey libraries for standardization, segmentation and targeting tools for the third pillar, A/B testing and Mission Control for optimization, and reporting and analytics for analysis. The platform is built to operate on these pillars; the discipline of using them all is Imperial Brands' contribution.
The business keeps changing: regulations shift, products evolve, new markets open, old ones close, and consumer behavior moves.
What Imperial Brands and Optimove have built together is a structure built to keep evolving as the business does. The foundations support new capabilities. The standardization supports new brands. The governance supports new markets. The partnership supports new ideas. The five pillars support new tactics.
The work underway now is a good illustration. The customer model is being refreshed for an omnichannel reality, and the next project is unifying the customer view across Imperial's own platforms and the retailers where their products are sold. These are hard problems, and they're answerable because the structure is already in place.
In six years, Imperial Brands turned a fragmented operation into a marketing capability built to keep evolving.
For any marketer building a global CRM operation, the lesson worth taking is the discipline itself, sustained across years rather than concentrated in one decision: build the foundations, standardize to enable, treat governance as a service, run the partnership with structure, operate on the five pillars.
See how Optimove can help you unify fragmented CRM operations, standardize execution across markets, and build a foundation for long-term growth. Request a demo.
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