Brands are always looking for ways to engage consumers in order to build connections in a world in which consumers are bombarded with advertisements every second. At a recent Brand Innovators Marketing livecast on Consumer Engagement, marketers at Mondelēz and Health-Ade shared how they are engaging consumers.
Mondelēz’s mission is to bring delicious moments of joy to consumers, and these small affordable indulgences have definitely been a big thing since the pandemic began. In fact, three out of every four homes have a Mondelēz product in them. With consumers spending more time at home, the CPG giant has been looking for ways to be creative to motivate consumers and connect with them in digital channels.
“There’s some great nostalgic favorites that saw a huge resurgence during COVID,” said Steve McGowan, RVP, Omni Shopper Activation & Strategic Partnerships at Mondelēz. “Consumers were reaching for those nostalgic brands that they know and trust. Brands like, Nilla Wafers, Nutter Butter, Premium Crackers, Honeymade Grahams. Brands that have been around for a long time and have a loyal following saw a huge increase in household penetration as consumers came back to them because they knew them and trusted the brand.”
Health-Ade, known for its Kombucha products has been taking a multi-channel approach to reach consumers across social media, search, online video display and retailer media. “Plugging across all these different platforms, that’s the barrier to entry for a brand at our scale, to be omni-channel,” said Shray Joshi, Head of Digital & Growth at Health-Ade. “But where we’ve seen efficiency, where we start to win on the platforms is we switched over from being a “let’s make a piece of creative that gets thrown everywhere” to “let’s make very contextual native content.”
Joshi said that engaging these consumers is all about looking at the data and understanding the customer.
“The best part about our consumer is that they are typically that more health conscious, tech savvy, up-with-the-trends consumer. It’s all a game of matching attention and where it’s being allocated,” he said. “Typically, it used to be the growing new category that was kombucha; we were early in the space. Engagement wise, you had to do a lot of in-store learnings, but now that kombucha is a mass-market product and a lot of people understand what it is, we’ve had to switch the engagement metrics to doing “why us?” and what makes us different. That’s going to be a very different set of messaging from our top of funnel.”
