How Beiersdorf Boosted Employee Engagement with Digital Signage

Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Beiersdorf AG is a global skincare company with a history spanning over 140 years. The company is internationally recognized as the one of the biggest brands in modern beauty and skincare, serving consumers in over 150 countries worldwide.

Beiersdorf’s successful brand portfolio is anchored by global icons such as NIVEA - the world's number one skincare brand - alongside dermatological brands like Eucerin and Aquaphor, and the luxury brand La Prairie. With a workforce of over 22,700 employees globally and generating over €9.85 billion in sales in 2024, the scale of Beiersdorf requires a communication strategy that is unified, agile, and effective.

The Challenge: Slow and Unflexible Messaging

For Jeannette Bohnet, a Specialist in Corporate Branding within Corporate Communications, the need for a modern solution was driven by an outdated system. She noted that for two decades, her team was responsible for creating assets related to employee engagement and strategic topics. The former process relied heavily on physical media:

"Before we had ScreenCloud, we had poster displays in the elevators. We had to have posters produced for the poster displays... The process was sometimes very time-consuming and also relatively inflexible."

This manual workflow required designers to create content, contractors to print posters, and caretakers (Hausmeister) to install them. This created a cumbersome system where simple messages took days to deploy, and worst of all, any necessary adjustments meant repeating the entire, expensive cycle: "Part of it was also that we often had to make graphic adjustments afterwards."

The Solution: Agility and Content Control

Beiersdorf’s Corporate Branding team identified digital signage as the solution and ultimately selected ScreenCloud to power their internal displays. The primary factor in their decision was the platform’s capacity for granular content management and distribution.

"We decided on ScreenCloud because we have the possibility to create different playlists and channels, and thus can excellently select content and also implement more complex content display requests internally."

The implementation itself was remarkably smooth, according to Bohnet: "The implementation of ScreenCloud was absolutely seamless. We had excellent service from ScreenCloud, which supported us throughout the entire phase of Shared Services."

The Results: Increased Engagement and Information Flow

The move to a digital system immediately solved the flexibility issues and unlocked significant communication advantages. The time-consuming, multi-step poster process was replaced by instant updates, allowing the Corporate Communications team to target the global workforce with speed and precision.

The benefits observed were directly tied to improving the employee experience:

"With ScreenCloud, we were able to improve our employee communication. We have been able to increase our flow of information and we reach our employees quicker and better with our main content."

Ultimately, the digital transformation achieved the core goal of the project: increasing connection and involvement across the organization. Bohnet confirmed the platform’s decisive impact: "ScreenCloud decisively contributed to increasing employee engagement, because our employees feel better informed and are more aware of what is happening within the organization."

For global, decentralized organizations like Beiersdorf, digital signage transforms internal messaging from a bottleneck into a strategic asset, ensuring that every employee, from the headquarters in Hamburg to affiliates worldwide, is quickly and consistently connected to the company’s strategic goals and culture.

Find out more about corporate digital signage with ScreenCloud