Philips’ Marketing Revolution: Unleashing Digital Transformation & AI
- Tom Mostert
- Jun 27, 2025
- 4 min read
June 27, 2025
In the dynamic world of health technology, Royal Philips has redefined marketing through digital innovation. From 2018 to today, Philips has transformed its Health Systems and Consumer Health divisions, blending data, AI, and smart knowledge management to boost performance and connect with customers. I will unpack Philips’ journey, spotlighting some of the useful takeaways for marketing decision makers exploring digital transformation and AI in the real world.
Marketing Transformation - A Bold Digital Leap
Philips didn’t just adapt to the digital age—it sought to rewrite the playbook. Once a sprawling company in healthcare, lifestyle, and lighting, Philips zeroed in on health technology from 2011. By 2017, when I joined Philips in a data insights capacity, it had already started transforming for the future, and marketing was one of the first functions to evolve. Philips Innovation Services led the charge, shifting to a performance-driven model powered by online data and cutting-edge tech. This wasn’t about keeping pace—it was about leading the charge in health tech engagement.
Digital transformation goes beyond tech upgrades. It’s about reimagining how you connect with customers and deliver value.
Marketing Data: Turning Numbers into Wins
Philips’ marketing makeover started with data. In 2017, the company revamped content creation—think sharper keywords, technical finesse, and relevance. Moving closer to real-time reporting via Google Data Studio dashboards, which was launched the same year, delivering monthly insights that sparked constant improvement.
The payoff?
More Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Boosted website traffic across all channels
Better engagement—fewer bounces, more conversions
Back in 2016, Philips began retooling its marketing to support digital solutions. Sales teams pivoted from traditional products to integrated offerings, leaning on data for deeper customer understanding.
Global dashboards standardized performance tracking, spotlighting wins and weak spots worldwide.
Lesson Learned: Real-time data and unified metrics are your superpower. They let you scale fast and fix what’s broken, with less guesswork needed.
Best Practice: Build dashboards that give you a global view—agility depends on visibility.
AI: Powering Smarter Marketing
AI isn’t just a buzzword at Philips—it’s a game-changer. Digital Knowledge Management had already been in place for many years, but GenAI proved to be the next leap forward. In 2023, the Global Insights team piloted DeepSights, a generative AI tool that could crunch 150 documents on ultrasound and patient monitoring in seconds, outpacing tools like ChatGPT. The result? Fast, spot-on data-driven insights. In 2025, a Google Cloud partnership brought Vertex AI to overhaul Philips’ image libraries—turning 200,000 images into 8,000 polished, brand-ready assets. Costs dropped, and consistency soared.
While AI shines in Philips’ healthcare innovations (like X-ray analysis), its marketing applications steal the show for efficiency and insight.
Key Insight: AI isn’t just for products—it can transform marketing workflows and unlock hidden value in data.
Best Practice: Start small with AI pilots, prove the value, then scale up. It’s low risk, high reward.
Digital Knowledge: Efficiency Unlocked
Ever waste hours hunting for a file? Philips fixed that. Starting in 2020, Tom Mostert, then head of marketing knowledge management, spearheaded a push to consolidate a litany of siloed legacy asset libraries into one personalized hub. AI tools like DeepSights added an additional layer that turbocharged this, answering complex questions in a flash.
The HealthSuite Digital Platform (HSDP) on AWS played a starring role too—by mid-2017, it managed 18 digital offerings, up from 4 in 2015—keeping marketing teams in sync.
Key Insight: A centralized, AI-boosted knowledge system cuts the clutter, letting teams focus on what matters.
Best Practice: Invest in platforms that streamline access—time saved is money earned.
Marketing Mix Modelling: The Quiet Powerhouse
Advanced Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) was spearheaded by a team of analysts based in India. In 2016, Philips notched a 20% media spending efficiency gain through pilots—hinting at advanced analytics like MMM, which predicts how marketing moves drive sales. It was a great fit with Philips’ obsession with data and optimization, even if it’s not shouted from the rooftops.
Data-driven tools like MMM maximize every dollar spent—don’t discount advanced analytics, even if they’re behind the scenes.
Tailored Tactics: Health Systems vs. Consumer Health
The insights team at Philips played to its strengths. In Health Systems, it fused digital solutions with AI diagnostics and HSDP to deepen hospital ties. In Consumer Health, DeepSights decoded market needs for personal health products, targeting millennials and seniors alike. Going beyond the norms, internal teams experimented with synthetic data for predictive analytics and use AI models to create digital twins of consumer archetypes.
Best Practice: Customize your digital strategy. B2B and B2C demand different flavors of data and AI, but the core principles hold.
Bumps in the Road
No journey is a perfect straight path to success. Philips still wrestles with data privacy, AI bias (a worry for 87% of healthcare informatics leaders), and global knowledge scaling. But with plans for deeper AI and platform upgrades, they are building foundations for what comes next. Transformation is a marathon, not a sprint.
Takeaway: Your Digital Roadmap will lead you from the rocky road to the digital highway.
Philips’ journey can be a goldmine for companies chasing digital success. From data-driven marketing to AI breakthroughs and knowledge hubs, they’ve cracked the code on real-world impact.
Here’s a possible blueprint:
Use real-time data to stay nimble and informed
Pilot AI to test, learn, and grow
Centralize knowledge for speed and scale
Tailor strategies to your audience
Philips proves that with grit, tech, and vision, even a 130+ year old legacy brand can master the digital age.
Sources
Comments