Mondelez Mobile Futures Program: Brand pilots and lessons learnt

Brand managers of Cadbury Dairy Milk, Favourites, Marvellous Creations, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and belVita share their experiences of working as 'intrapreneurs'


Pictured (L-R): Alex Topaloski, Proximiti, Tony Nguyen, belVita Brand Manager, Richard Weisinger, Marvellous Creations Brand Manager, Ian Robinson, Skyfii, Wayne Arthur, Skyfii, Jessica Finer, Cadbury Favourites Senior Brand Manager, Taylor Luk, Issue, Bianca Melky, Philadelphia Cream Cheese Senior Brand Manager, Stephanie Ringwood, Cadbury Dairy Milk Brand Manager, Vernon Williams, Snaploader
Pictured (L-R): Alex Topaloski, Proximiti, Tony Nguyen, belVita Brand Manager, Richard Weisinger, Marvellous Creations Brand Manager, Ian Robinson, Skyfii, Wayne Arthur, Skyfii, Jessica Finer, Cadbury Favourites Senior Brand Manager, Taylor Luk, Issue, Bianca Melky, Philadelphia Cream Cheese Senior Brand Manager, Stephanie Ringwood, Cadbury Dairy Milk Brand Manager, Vernon Williams, Snaploader

The results of the Mobile Futures Program uniting five Mondelez International brands with Australian startups are in.

Here, we look at the programs and lessons learnt for each brand.

Brand match 1: Cadbury Dairy Milk and Snaploader

Cadbury Dairy Milk partnered with image recognition app developer, Snaploader, with the objective of reigniting consumer interest in the variety of flavours across the product range, said brand manager, Stephanie Ringwood.

“Snaploader was a perfect technology to map Cadbury Dairy Milk, to bring new and different way for consumer to interact with the brand,” she said.

The two teams developed an image recognition and augmented reality app, which launched in early November and was supported by an in-store activation in 20 Woolworths supermarkets in Victoria. Offering consumers the chance to ‘win your height in chocolate’, consumers were encouraged to download Snaploader and enter the competition by taking a photo of a Cadbury Dairy Milk pack. Once in the app, they could access content including 12 augmented reality features designed to bring each flavour’s personality to life, as well as recipes.

Overall, the team had 1600 app downloads over the campaign period, including 1100 in the first week.

“From an engagement perspective, the consumer promotion part of the app was the number one most engaged tile through Snaploader,” Ringwood said. “We also had a Facebook awareness campaign in November, promoting the consumer promos as an incentive to download the app.

“We saw strong clickthrough and conversion rates well above average.”

According to Ringwood, one of the biggest barriers to success was the differences in how a large FMCG brand operates compared to a small startup. She told CMOmaking the mindset shift into taking risks and working quickly was one of the biggest lessons for her as a marketer.

This was a fresh and different approach, and it was exciting and energising to hear big ideas coming through on what our future could be

Stephanie Ringwood

“We come from such different worlds,” she said. “We have a lot of processes and it takes us long time to do different programs, and we’re very rigid and set in the way we do and think about things.

“This was a fresh and different approach, and it was exciting and energising to hear big ideas coming through on what our future could be, and no limits placed on what we could do. The challenge is how to link that back to brand and business strategy and create path to purchase. We needed to keep reminding ourselves with amazing ideas, how to fit these with the strategy.

“We had to keep that top-of-mind all the way through.”

One specific management initiative Ringwood has taken away from her experience with Snaploader is holding 15-minute standup meetings regularly to better share information across the team. Another unexpected benefit is being more connected with the other intrepreneurs in the Mondelez business, she said.

Ringwood was keen to continue looking at mobile apps and image recognition in future marketing campaigns but hinted that there are challenges and processes in working with retailers on these projects that need to be worked through.

Brand match 2: Cadbury Favourites and MyShout

Marvellous Creations partnered with gifting app, MyShout, to allow consumers to shout their friends mobile ‘vouchers’ for its chocolate bars at participating outlets. These were redeemed via their mobile device. The pilot ran in Sydney’s CBD and achieved an overall 11.7 per cent claim rate and above target clickthroughs, he said.

Brand manager, Richard Weisinger, said he chose MyShout on pitch day because of its focus on delighting and surprising the consumer.

“This felt like a good fit with Marvellous Creations,” he said. “Then during speed dating, we quickly went into immersion mode, which showed good partnership and collaboration.”

The Marvellous Creations pilot was split into two phases: First, it utilised Facebook to drive awareness of the trial offer and secondly, worked to encourage consumers to shout each other chocolate. The ultimate objective was getting more consumers to try out the Marvellous Creations range, Weisinger said.

The big thing is not to let perfection get in the way of learning

Richard Weisinger, Marvellous Creations

Weisenger said one of the best initial lessons MyShout gave him was help to change the brand’s behaviour and get to market faster.

“The big thing is not to let perfection get in the way of learning," he told CMO “The journey is the goal. It was a less structured, more informal way of working.

“I’m getting more of an appreciation as a marketer that we need to do things differently.”

Weisenger said the initiative also helped cement the importance of connecting with people across the business and adapt in order to collaborative in the most effective way.

“It was about being able to ‘pivot’, and adapting your way of working depending on the person you are communicating with,” he added.

Brand Match 3: Cadbury Favourites and SkyFii

For Cadbury Favourites, the objective behind its work with Wi-Fi hotspot provider, SkyFii, was aimed at reminding consumers of the number of occasions its chocolates were appropriate for, said brand manager, Jessica Finer.

“The average purchase is 1.7 times per year, so it was about reminding customers at the point of purchase all the occasions we’re appropriate for,” she said.

SkyFii has built a Wi-Fi hotspot networking and analytics platform aimed at helping brands better understand consumer behaviour via intelligence off their real-time mobile usage and habits. The pilot project utilised SkyFii’s existing Wi-Fi infrastructure in retail locations and was broken into two phases. The first phase, which has just been delivered, delivered a promotion for Favourites Christmas large packs, measuring shopping patterns to identify the right time to connect with consumers, drive them in-store and measure subsequent conversion rates.

While there is some way to go before collecting all the results, Finer said initial clickthrough from the EDM was over 20 per cent, a higher-than-average result for the brand.

It was also about to view conversion rates through Wi-Fi into BigW and saw 10 to 16 per cent across those two groups.

“Those are really encouraging results so far,” she said. “The next step is digging deeper into the insight behind those people around demographics, patterns and what sort of content people are looking at via Wi-Fi as well.”

SkyFii sales director, Ian Robinson, admitted there had been challenges getting something to market, a learning that will inform how the pair work together in the new year.

“We have recorded good conversion rates in tracking consumers into store off the back of pushing content, but importantly, we’re starting to dig deeper into info on consumers to learn more about what they are and their interests,” he said. “In next phase, use more of that info to drive a deeper campaign next time around.”

There also needs to be more exclusive content to get the full benefit of the tracking, SkyFii managing director, Wayne Arthur, said. In addition, the results are also helping to prove and disprove the theories the Favourites team has on who their target consumer is.

“We’re bringing insight into who that consumer is, not just that they purchase in a particular location,” Arthur said. “It’s about knowing more about why they buy.”

Go to market, get the learnings and test as you go is a big learning for me

Jessica Finer, Favourites

For example, initial insights support a secondary audience much wider than the Favourites team’s target audience of women around 35 years of age.

From an operational perspective, Finer said the pilot helped changed the pace of how she worked by making her focus on getting something to market quickly.

“So often, we hold ourselves up with trying to tweak something here and there and worrying about perfection rather than test and learning,” she commented. “Go to market, get the learnings and test as you go is a big learning for me. Try and take the learnings from that.”

Brand Match 4: BelVita and Proximiti

The objective behind belVita’s partnership with location-based services player, Proximiti, was about continuing to drive awareness around the product as a breakfast food.

“People still don’t know where to find belVita, geolocation seemed natural fit and in a way that was engaging,” brand manager, Tony Nguyen, said.

The pilot saw the pair geotargeting consumers with specific offers for its products in specific locations where they could purchase products. The first phase was on 14 October nears Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, where consumers were sent an offer for a free coffee and sample of the belVita biscuits. The offers chalked up a clickthrough rate of 32 per cent, while redemption of the sample offer reached 43 per cent.

The partners are now looking at scaling the location-based engagement through retailer partnerships and as well as amplify the ‘morning wins’ campaign in wider media.

If we can try and learn things quickly and experiment, there’s no such thing as failure; you can just learnt and evolve rapidly to create something better

Tony Nguyen, belVita

Nguyen said the pilot was a valuable lesson in speed and agility of getting to market.

“Professionally and personally, I have always built in my head the notion of creating a grand campaign, making it perfect and lining things up in a row… As we spent the five days in immersion - and we did some reversed immersion by bringing the Proximiti guys into our Ringwood innovation centre - we saw this technology is quite broad and there are a number of things we could trial.

“If we can try and learn things quickly and experiment, there’s no such thing as failure; you can just learnt and evolve rapidly to create something better.

“I’ve become more fearless and more willing to give things a go.”

Proximiti managing director, Alex Topaloski, added it was important to understand each other’s strengths and how to leverage both into new operating model.

“If you get that right, stand to have benefits of agility and speed of startup and also amazing resources and brands of a Mondelez,” he said. “Ninety days is great timeframe to learn how to scale.”

Brand Match 5: Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Issue

Philadelphia Cream Cheese senior brand manager, Bianca Melky, said the challenge it was out to meet was inspiring consumers to “pick a Philly occasion” against an ever-increasing array of product and content choices.

The brand partnered with Issue to produce digital magazines for mobile and tablet readers which featured articles on sharing ideas on using the product through what it called “shoppable stories”.

“A big challenge we have is that digital is this awesome new space where consumers are increasing going first for inspiration, so how do we play in that space in a way that is economical and timely,” Melky said. “And that is what Issue allowed us to do – it allows us to democratise content and publish it really efficiently and at low cost.”

The first issue was in market 23 days after partnering with the startup and done in partnership with Smudge Publishing. According to Melky, the issue reached more than 75,000 consumers in three weeks. The pair have since produced a second edition.

One lesson from the consumer front was ensuring content was timely and relevant, Melky said.

“You can’t underestimate value of great content. It’s the cornerstone of everything we are doing,” she said. “We took great executional learnings from issue 1 to 2, but we underestimated the timely nature of coming out. Issue 1 came out a week before father’s day and was very timely. Issue w was more general and around Spring, and we found that was less of a hook for consumers to latch onto and get an immediate call to action.

“So importance of great and timely content is something we learned.”

You can’t underestimate value of great content. It’s the cornerstone of everything we are doing

Bianca Melky

The brand also extended its content to include bloggers, and implemented an ability for consumers to view issues directly through Facebook.

“Realising the situation and making changes very quickly was very important,” Melky said.

Operationally, Melky said it was important to understand how the two organisations could fit their respective priorities and business strategies together to deliver beneficial outcomes for both side.

“A big learning for me was whenever you enter a new relationship, enter it full force, be honest,”she said. “Sharing upfront allows you to get to unified point a lot quicker, got us to a quicker result.

More of our coverage of the Mondelez Mobile Futures program

Pictured (L-R): Alex Topaloski, Proximiti, Tony Nguyen, belVita Brand Manager, Richard Weisinger, Marvellous Creations Brand Manager, Ian Robinson, Skyfii, Wayne Arthur, Skyfii, Jessica Finer, Cadbury Favourites Senior Brand Manager, Taylor Luk, Issue, Bianca Melky, Philadelphia Cream Cheese Senior Brand Manager, Stephanie Ringwood, Cadbury Dairy Milk Brand Manager, Vernon Williams, Snaploader

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