Insight
Anmum is the maternity milk category leader in Hong Kong, but as an Infant Milk Powder (IMF) newcomer, the brand faced a significant challenge in seeking product awareness and creating purchase intent and advocacy from mums. The IMF category is an extremely competitive and mature market, meaning consumers are inundated with choice and this particular product landscape is cluttered with many rival brands bombarding mums with IMF advertising on a daily basis. This makes it hard for Anmum to cut through and be heard. The combination of these two factors meant Anmum lacked a credible voice at this critical juncture of brand preference and purchase. As one of these newer entrants to market, Anmum needed an intelligent and convincing way to gain rapid market share and create conversations amongst mums to ultimately drive sampling conversions and future purchases.
Strategy
Mums take on a significant role in raising their babies and pay attention to every detail that might affect their baby’s health and growth. They are typically guarded over babycare products and put everything under extreme scrutiny before any purchase, as they want to know the exact ingredients and benefits of what they are feeding their babies. They actively seek out, challenge and collect information on baby health by voraciously consuming content to become subject experts. Due to the ease and abundance of information that sits in the digital domain, this is the first port-of-call as mums comb through related current affairs, visit brand websites to check out official claims, consider KOL blogs and interact with peer-to-peer product reviews from relevant online portals too. 80% of mums will actively use a search engine to discover information and over 50% say the internet is crucial for babycare. They also place great value in friends’ advice and are equally quick to share helpful information with other mums but only when they are 100% convinced of a product’s quality. Over 50% of mums trust a product’s advertised benefits as long as they see other positive reviews from peers and other consumers.
Anmum realised they needed to better understand mums to have a right to talk to them and decided to offer a real value benefit to mums. Rather than taking a topline guess at what they thought mums cared about, the brand launched a two-way social listening project to have an unbiased and honest conversation on social media to best identify what mums actually cared about. Anmum discovered that mums weren’t just discussing health benefits but also taste. A pleasant tasting formula provided a positive feeding experience for both mum and baby. Through this insight the “Taste Worth Sharing” campaign idea was developed.
Execution
A strategic content partnership with Yahoo! (HK’s most visited portal) allowed Anmum to use the entire spectrum of digital to ensure exposure in any and all places mums used to research babycare information. As well as an array of desktop and mobile display executions in prominent, high-traffic Yahoo! environments (creating awareness of brand offering and competitive differentiator), a close working relationship with Yahoo!’s editorial team meant creating content in line with what mums wanted answers to, led by insights from the social listening project. Fueling the partnership with unique, valuable, bespoke and on-brand content that only came from Anmum gave mums a reason to believe in them. Smart content units delivered a dynamic carousel of this content but only surfaced what mums were engaging with. Anything delivering particularly strong interest and engagement was used as a blueprint for creating further content. As the first category advertiser to execute Yahoo!’s native ad, Anmum supercharged this by sourcing testimonials from real mums in a previous campaign to make all messaging more credible. A UGC competition asking mums to share photos of their babies promoted further interaction and photos were turned into competition banners to further encourage entries. Yahoo’s Right Media performance buy meant Anmum generated cost-effective submissions among the correct audience and retargeting technology incentivized photo entries as well as generating sampling among mums who visited the brand website but hadn’t yet trialed product. Yahoo! search presence meant that MediaCom could offer more Anmum information to mums looking for babycare tips too.
Results
The campaign was a huge success for Anmum as “Taste Worth Sharing” generated 5,187 sample requests which exceeded client benchmark expectations by 21%. This also represented a 225% compared to the previous campaign. Cost per Sample also dropped down from over $2,800 to $250 - a decrease of over 1,000%. The Yahoo! content partnership approach delivered on objectives to drive product trial.
Overall brand buzz experienced a 112% increase and Anmum Hong Kong’s Facebook fans count grew by 30% while social SOV escalated by 188%. There was also a surge in web traffic as an additional 300,000 mums visited Anmum’s brand website. The Yahoo! content partnership drove awareness among an audience that had either limited or no exposure previously to the brand.
Anmum also collected 1,480 photo submissions with mums sharing pictures of their Little Emperors and acting as advocates for other mums. This submission number overdelivered on campaign KPIs by 147%.
Crucially there was a clear increase in sales too. Post-campaign sales metrics reflected an average monthly IMF Offtake increase of 65% and an enormous 158% monthly average increase in sales revenue all of which suggests that both mums and babies were happy to talk about a taste worth sharing.