WBA names global insights leader

Walgreens Boots Alliance is adding an industry thought leader to its roster of executives. Cecilia Wu will be joining the company Aug. 28 as vice president of global insights. 

Wu joins WBA from Walmart, where she spent a decade working on data-driven customer engagement efforts, most recently as vice president of customer science, and played a key role in the retailer’s omnichannel retail development. At WBA, she will head up the company’s U.S.- and U.K.-based global insights organization across its Walgreens, Boots and Alliance Healthcare divisions. She will report to Vineet Mehra, WBA global chief marketing officer and Walgreens chief customer officer. 

“As we continue along our journey of mass personalization at WBA, we are transforming our business to become a customer-obsessed, fully-digitalized organization that delivers extraordinary experiences to enrich our customers’ lives,” Mehra said. “With the momentum of the company’s digital transformation building, I am excited for Cecilia to join WBA and deliver on our mass personalization efforts with her depth and breadth of proven experience in predictive analytics, leveraging global customer data and driving transformative change. Cecilia and team will help us greatly with our customer-led strategy and activation to enable world-class, customer-centric decisions.”

WBA said that it is adding Wu to the team as it accelerates its digital transformation, building a differentiated omnichannel healthcare and retail offerings. Additionally, as consumer behavior changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, WBA has been increasingly reliant on its insights team to offer a unified view of its customers to inform the shopping experience and journey. Most recently, WBA announced a partnership with Adobe and Microsoft, which will connect WBA shopper data with Microsoft’s cloud-based platform and Adobe’s Customer Experience Management offerings.  The company also is undertaking mass personalization efforts to drive business performance, which it said led to a 95-basis-point increase in retail performance in the third quarter of 2020. 

“I’m excited to join Walgreens Boots Alliance at such a critical time with COVID-19 changing customer behaviors externally and WBA modernizing and digitalizing its Marketing function internally to help meet our customers’ needs,” Wu said. “I can’t wait to hit the ground running with such a talented global marketing team directly supporting the company’s digitalization and development agenda.”