Nutrilon_Capture_every_7_days_of_Chinese_mom

Nutrilon: Capture every 7 days of Chinese mom

Jamo Woo and Icy Han

Warc Prize for Asian Strategy

Entrant, 2014

Nutrilon: Capture every 7 days of Chinese mom

Jamo Woo and Icy Han

Campaign details

Brand owner: Danone

Lead agency: NIM Digital

Brand: Nutrilon

Country: China

Industry Baby food

Channels used: Internet - display, Internet - general, Internet - search, Mobile and apps, Social media

Media budget: 5 - 10 million

Executive summary

The competition in the infant-milk-powder market in China is fierce, especially in e-commerce, so to stand out among floods of

competitors and drive sales, leading imported brand Nutrilon decided to conduct a cost-effective digital marketing strategy via

precisely understanding the length of the consumers' decision period.

Nutrilon adopted innovative integrated research methodology: digital behaviour monitoring + cross-media online survey +

digital behaviour tracking + social listening. Afterwards, Nutrilon found out that there exist 'seven golden days' for consumers:

before making a final purchase, mums spend an average of seven days collecting and verifying information about an infant

milk formula across all the media categories.

Nutrilon adopted an always-on media strategy covering the whole process of consumers' awareness, engagement and action

in order to ensure brand exposure at the right time and right place. Programmatic buy, baby verticals and e-commerce on both

PC and mobile were allocated high percentages of media expense, as they could drive high coverage and affinity.

As a result, Nutrilon successfully gained incremental market share and brand preference after only half a year's media-strategy

implementation.

The traditional consumer decision journey is disrupted by an unsequenced path to purchase; however, there is always a way

to capture your target consumers, just like how Nutrilon captured Chinese mums with precise perception of their seven golden

days.

Market background and cultural context

Title: Nutrilon: Capture every 7 days of Chinese mom

Author(s): Jamo Woo and Icy Han

Source: Warc Prize for Asian Strategy

Issue: Entrant, 2014

Downloaded from warc.com

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Being the leading infant milk formula (IMF) brand in Netherlands, Nutrilon was officially launched in China in March 2013

through its flagship Tmall Nutrilon e-commerce store. Great success was achieved. With a unique business model focused on

e-commerce, Nutrilon earned substantial good word of mouth and rapidly gained 6.1% real market share.

International brands outperformed the others on awareness and familiarity in the super-premium IMF market. Among wholly

imported brands, Friso was leading. Nutrilon was catching up with Illuma and continued to close the gap with Friso.

While rumour of inauthenticity in April 2013 had a negative influence on consumers, Nutrilon is slowly recovering now.

However, a whey-protein concentrate (WPC) scandal occurred in August 2013, which affected Nutricia's business.

Objectives

Business objective

To gain Chinese mums' trust on official Nutrilon with a unique trustworthy communication model.

l Gain 3% value market shares on e-commerce;


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l Recruit new users.

Digital marketing objective

To drive brand awareness and preference of official Nutrilon to be the first brand of choice for Chinese mums.

Media objective

To maximize branding on targeting coverage in a cost-efficiency model to drive brand awareness and preference:

l Traffic to the website: number of cookies, CPK (cost per cookie);

l CPM, CPC, CTR, CPA, ROI etc.

Challenges to overcome

l How to maximize the coverage while using the efficient-targeting strategy;

l How to measure the effectiveness for the business of digital investment.

Insight and strategic thinking

In cooperation with IPSOS, we used innovative integrated research methodology, which included digital behaviour monitoring,

a cross-media online survey, digital behaviour tracking and social listening.

Our target audience are pregnant women or mums with babies aged 0–12 months. They are seekers of an imported IMF brand

who have not made their choice yet.

From our comprehensive research, we had a precise understanding of our target audience's media behaviour and

consumption attitude, which enabled us to make a smart media strategy and marketing plans.

1. There exist 'seven golden days' for consumers to evaluate IMF brands before their final purchase, therefore and always-on

communication model was suggested.

In the seven golden days, mums will collect and verify information about IMF across all the media. As mums' purchase decision

can happen at any time in this period, we suggested Nutrilon applying an always-on model that built long-term effective

communication with mums, to ensure brand exposure at the right time.


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2. Mid-pregnant mums (four to seven months) are a key target audience for brands to influence, so precise result-oriented

media strategy is better.

With the development of pregnancy, mums' time spent online grows significantly: their usage of all kinds of media sites

increases. Moreover, they will pay much more attention to IMF.

3. Mobile use rises, so cross-screen media touch is important.

With a dramatic decline of PC usage after mums get pregnant, mobile becomes increasingly important in their daily digital life.

Social apps QQ, Weibo and WeChat are their most used mobile apps, and more than half of mums have used Baby Care app.

Brand contact information, discussion about products and final purchase can all be done via mobile, so we advised Nutrilon to

enhance its mobile consumer touchpoints.


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4. E-commerce is both the sales landing point and brand exposure point.

Most mums had their primary choice of domain; however their choice of target functional subsite is much more diversified.

With high visit rate and stay time, Taobao becomes the most popular among mums, especially pregnant mums. These mums

spend a lot of time on window shopping and price comparison on e-commerce sites.

Specific products keywords are most used for search on e-commerce site, implying consumers have already made the product

decision before going on the site.

Therefore, we suggested leveraging e-commerce sites to achieve higher brand exposure, brand awareness and purchase

rate.

5. Mums are information seekers, and they usually go to search engines and Q&A platforms of baby vertical sites for true

word of mouth and verification.


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Good word of mouth carries a lot of weight in brand selection, particularly peer-to-peer recommendations from baby forums

and Weibo and recommendations from parenting editors.

We suggested mixing always-on and by-campaign marketing to maximize good word of mouth.

Mums go to various kinds of websites to seek IMF information. Baby vertical sites are the top source for target audience to

gather IMF information.

At the evaluation stage, consumers are normally guided to the Q&A pages of baby verticals after searching for IMF-related

keywords on Baidu. Q&A pages enjoy the highest penetration rate among all the subsites of baby verticals.

Therefore, we advised enhancing content implantation and developing innovative media cooperation with baby vertical sites to


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increase brand exposure.

Using a search engine is gradually becoming the follow-up action after consumers see initial information (including IMF

knowledge) from various sites. Mums usually use a search engine to do in-depth evaluation of IMF brands and help them

make purchase decisions. Therefore, Baidu is a critical channel in mums' evaluation stage as well.

Furthermore, the search engine plays the most important role throughout the consumer decision journey. Baidu is the most

active site at all stages for mums in terms of both visit frequency and stay time, and Baidu is a most effective channel to drive

brand awareness among mums.

Baidu has internally built a healthy ecosystem where mums usually search and learn IMF information across different Baidu

subsites. Both the Baidu search portal and Baidu subsites are important in mums' digital life and have a strong connection with

each other. Therefore, we recommended implementing an 'omni-solution' on Baidu rather than the Baidu search portal only.

In summary, Nutrilon's strategy was to precisely capture the seven golden days of key target audience to effectively drive the

brand preference and sales.


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Implementation, including creative and media development

With all the key findings drew from research, we adopted an always-on communication model that covered the whole process

of consumers' awareness, engagement and action in order to ensure brand exposure at the right time and place.

Awareness: audience-centric buying approach + supplementary on-target media buy

Considering mums' diversified site-visiting pattern, we recommended and audience-centric buying approach (buy people

instead of place) that delivered better cost efficiency of on-target reach. We adopted real-time bidding targeting techniques on

both PC and mobile to ensure brand exposure at every stage of the consumer journey.

In terms of search, we went beyond keyword bidding and adopted audience-centric buying as well.

In addition, we implemented smart buying tactics at channels with high coverage and affinity (mobile app and e-commerce) to

supplement what the above might miss.

As e-commerce sites are the blue ocean for expanding the reach and maximizing brand awareness with cost efficiency, we

additionally allocated 10 million on TaoBao and JD for sustainable premium-format display-ad investment to enhance both

coverage expansion and advertising impact.

Engagement: on-demand content feeding + innovative format of content aggregation

By analyzing the historical data from multiple sources including internet behaviour, channel penetration, consumer preference

and brand lift, we generated the driving capability of different indexes covering affinity, interactive rate, effectiveness, TA


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percentage and visit frequency.

We created real content engagement to maximize brand preference.

On portal sites and baby vertical sites with the highest effective indices, we adopted our innovative engagement and media-

costing model cost per engagement (CPE), which means impressions are free and Nutrilon is only charged with effective

engagements.

We used CPE to measure and track consumers' engagement behaviour in the lightbox, in order to further optimize ads and

retargeting.

In addition, on the highly effective baby vertical sites Babytree, Yaolan and ci123, we implanted native ads as organic search

results, recruited KOL mums for Q&As to illustrate brand benefits and created baby-care apps for brand content placement.

Action: redirect traffic with purchase intention

For our target mums, the search engine (Baidu) works as the engine of brand decision. They seek and verify brand and

product information before final purchase, so it was crucial to impact them at this channel.

With the SEM 2.0 model based on audience search behaviour, we integrated the resources of Brand Zone, Baidu DSP,

brand/product keywords, search/non-search page and knowledge platforms to most redirect traffic to e-commerce channels for


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purchase.

In summary, our total media budget was RMB 35 million. 49% was allocated to drive awareness, 23% to engagement and 28%

to search. The detailed allocation was roughly as below:

Performance against objectives

Business performance

l Nutrilon gained 3.3% value market share on e-commerce.


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l E-commerce sales increased dramatically by 177%.

Digital marketing performance

l We increased top-of-mind brand awareness and preference by 21%.

l We increased the 'brand of first choice' share dramatically by 400% and Nutrilon's brand image as 'best of the best' was

massively enhanced.

Highlighted consumer quotations on social media and baby vertical forums:

l 'Nutrilon is my best choice of IMF.'

l 'I like Nutrilon. It's safe, premium and best for my baby.'

Media performance

We successfully maximized the on-target coverage with optimized cost efficiency.

Lessons learned

1. The traditional consumer decision journey is disrupted by a disordered consumer's path to purchase.

The consumer decision journey is transforming from the traditional interest-evaluation-buy-bond-amplify into path to purchase,

indicating that the journey is becoming disordered rather than sequenced.

Take Nutrilon's consumers as an example: their visit path was comparatively disperse, as they lingered between diverse sites

such as Baidu, baby verticals, e-commerce for the product and brand information before they completed the final purchase.


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2. Blend an always-on communication strategy with by-campaign communication strategy.

As consumers' purchase decisions can happen at any point, it is crucial to adopt an always-on communication strategy to

approach them at the right moment. Through real-time monitoring and quick response, brands can have continuous and

personalized conversations with consumers and perfectly fulfil their needs. In the ecosystem of brand marketing, search

engine, social media and e-commerce will weigh more than ever before.

A by-campaign communication strategy, the supplement of an always-on communication strategy, focuses on big to drive

brand awareness, likability and loyalty with volume. The dividing line between the two communication models is blurring: fine

content generated under an always-on model may ignite the next round of the campaign; and a good creative idea in a

campaign may also become part of the continuous communication content.


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The ratio of marketing budget allocated to always-on and by-campaign depends on the industry properties and brand

situation. For instance, a brand like Nutrilon with limited new products and news but with consumers' needs continuously

coming up could allocate the major budget to always-on.

Let's put it into a metaphor: if by-campaign is rock, always-on is the water filling the crevice between rocks. Blending rocks

with water, which means integration of all the marketing resources, will be commonly adopted in future brand marketing.

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