Zoom, a brand of candy from a multinational firm, enjoyed a reasonable popularity in urban China, but like many other FMCG brands, was struggling to find its feet on the web. As many brands did, it commenced operation of a flagship store on Mall (the b2c eCommerce store of Alibaba - in contrast to Taobao, which is the c2c part of eCommerce behemoth) but failed to find much traction with the consumers. The targeting was demographics based, and the response was limited. Zoom was also struggling with the pain points of a fragmented digital market place, lack of transparency and scarcity of information on the return of investment. The management of Zoom was disillusioned, as they came with the impression that digital marketing will result in greater clarity and focused, data-based decisions making, but the experience so far belied that expectation.
When Zoom came to Illuminera, the company developed a clear methodology for segmentation and targeting, based on Alibaba’s data-based tools of Strategy Center and Brand Databank.
Identification of the core target group
This was achieved by looking at the category consumption data from the Strategy Center. The starting point of this was to look at the current buyers of Zoom. The data indicated that there are two main targets which are currently consuming the Zoom candy - the young, married couples (who are buying for the kids) and the young couples with no kids and unmarried young adults (who are buying for themselves and share with friends).
This basic definition of the target group was further sharpened through studying the purchase preference for these groups as also their hobbies and lifestyles (as reflected through their interactions with other product categories). For example, one of the core audience groups, who buy for kids, has interests such as reading, going to the cinema, and prefer some specific snack flavors. With more detailed descriptions and constraints added on, the target group was narrowed down for in-site (within the Alibaba platform of TMall) advertisement targeting.
Analysis of the digital campaign
The brand had invested significantly in advertising on the OTV platforms (online TV). The Brand Databank allows linking the IDs of the consumers who were exposed to the Zoom OTV advertising to their behavior within TMall, thus giving us the ability to measure the effectiveness of the OTV advertising. Using the Alibaba AIPL framework (awareness, interest, purchase and loyalty) and interactions (browse, search, add-to-cart, bookmark, purchase), it emerged that the campaign performance in terms of progression on the AIPL ladder and conversion behavior for the exposed group was no different from that of a control group of unexposed consumers.
The discovery of poor conversion inefficiency triggered further investigations of the OTV campaign audience. By comparing the OTV audience with the core brand target audience (For Kid & For Fun), it emerged that the offline audience for the OTV campaign was too broad and not well tuned with the core target audience.
Development of the new targeted creatives
Given the fact that the target group was found to be quite diverse, it was felt that the online communication for the audience should be varied depending on the profile, rather than bombarding everyone with the same creative. Four new creatives were developed, each based on the finer understanding of the specific target groups:
One directed at “For Kids” group, i.e. married couples with children and have specific snack flavor preference
One directed at “For Fun” group, i.e. unmarried or married couple without children and who favor snack brands from multi-national companies.
Two other target groups were identified by looking at the other marketing investments made by the brand.
One directed at Weibo (a Twitter-like social media platform) fans of a movie which Zoom cooperated with
One directed at brand lover and candy category lover (as identified by their behavior on Weibo).
Needs and relevant benefits for each target group were identified, based on which banner elements and expressions were varied. For example, the banner prepared for “For Kids” group focused on a scenario where parents spend leisure time with children, enjoying Zoom, while the banner shown to “For Fun” group emphasized the classic Zoom brand positioning of fun, fresh and creative.
Results of the New targeted campaign
A new targeted campaign was launched, directed at the fine-tuned target group, and with specific, customized creatives. As a result, of the fine-tuned campaign, both the targeted groups and a benchmark group (which was not optimized or sharpened.) had a better performance compared with the past campaigns, However, the targeted groups generated IPL (interest, purchase, and loyalty) progression three times that of the natural conversion while the benchmark group only generated twice as much..
On the whole, the project demonstrated that the return on investment of digital spending can be significantly enhanced both through sharper targeting and through more customized and varied messaging.
