In today’s fast paced advertising world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for small brands to stand out. Online brands face strong competition, weak image and a general perception of unreliability. In the USA, the VAB have identified a clear trend of D2C (direct-to-consumer, sometimes called “pure players” in Europe) brands moving ad dollars into TV advertising, collectively spending over $2.5 billion on TV advertising in 2017. This trend is now coming to Europe, where online players are significantly investing in television, as it is driving strong ROI for them. In France alone, pure players invested €781,4 million in television in 2018. This week’s egtabite features one such successful TV campaign for an online shop which wanted to boost its brand awareness, Greenweez.

Pure player and bio specialist

Greenweez is a small start-up, specialising in the sale of organic products, in the nutrition, beauty and hygiene sectors. For 10 years, it has been a number one brand on the French market. However, despite this and its acquisition by Carrefour in 2016, Greenweez’s reputation was still dramatically low.

This D2C player, which has sold more than 3 million products since 2008 and has experienced a two-figure annual growth, found itself in a problematic situation, regardless of the fact that organic nutrition is a growing trend (+14% in volume growth according to Kantar Worldpanel) and that responsible food consumption became the number one priority amongst French people. Even though it had a strong brand equity among its consumers, Greenweez still lacked recognition among the general public and was struggling to increase its brand awareness

Camille Cordonier, Greenweez Marketing Director, confirmes: “When I took my position in Greenweez in the summer of 2018, one of the first actions was to measure our notoriety via a barometer set up with YouGov in October. With a rate of 8%, we had the highest notoriety for online sales, but we were far behind specialized physical retailers”.

Objectives

Greenweez aimed at differentiating itself from the traditional players and obtaining a certain credibility in the world of competitive organic nutrition as well as loyalty amongst its consumers.

Apart from gaining notoriety, refreshing its brand identity and retaining a two-figure annual growth, the main objective of Greenweez was to reach the general public, educate them about organic nutrition and effectively offer them an incentive for consumption.

“Our first battle is to exist in the minds of our consumers, and our second is to teach them to identify good organic products”, continued Cordonier. In addition, Greenweez’s ambition was to become the go-to website for French consumers with regards to responsible food consumption.

Strategy

In order to accelerate its growth and build a strong, unique identity, this pure player turned to television in order to reach out to a wider audience and touch new target groups as opposed to their usual consumers which tend to belong to the category “women aged 25-49 and young mothers”. Cordonier decided to promote the new brand image with a refreshed logo and a new slogan: ”Happy, healthy life!” with a television campaign launched in March 2019.

On the branding side, there was a general overhaul of their visual identity, conducted by the Curius creative agency. The new brand identity is embodied in a new logo, a specific vocabulary around the word “weez”, and a redesigned website. The trademark of Greenweez, the bee, has been completely revised, with a new face and personality that makes her come to life. Even the brand name (ee in weez) leaves a trace of an emblematic bee, instantly associating all their products with organic nutrition.

To communicate about this new brand image, and to meet the goals explained above, Greenweez knew they had to use the most powerful mass-media to drive awareness and sales. Two 30 second spots ran across the French TV market for two weeks. They respectively featured the new type of consumer that Greenweez wanted to attract: a middle-aged man and a young woman. The tone is fresh, happy and light, the message is simple: the reason they are jumping around so happily, is because they could purchase quality organic products online, which will be delivered straight to their home. The spot shows products on the website, as well as a very simple visual, made famous by Zalando in 2011, to explain the concept of online shopping: a delivery man rings and brings the package straight to their doorstep.Simple and efficient.

Results

The results of the campaign are once again proof that television is one of the most powerful media to work on both sides of the purchase funnel: it works on brand building as well on sales impact. From March to mid-April 2019, Greenweez has tripled their site traffic and doubled the recruitment of new consumers.

“We are targeting women aged 25 to 49, young mothers in particular, because they have the responsibility to pass on their healthy habits and buying bio nutrition to their children, which creates a halo effect”, stated Cordonier.

Moreover, the TV campaign resulted in numerous press releases and social media shares, with more than 2 million people reached.

It is worth nothing that the TV campaign was complemented with an online video component during the second week of broadcast. Even if the results were better that second week, Camille Cordonier explains how she understood that TV does all the heavy lifting. “The way I see it, TV can be in fact less expensive than an online campaign. It’s a bit counter-intuitive [for an e-commerce like us] but it turns out to be absolutely true when you try to reach a larger audience and then you can track the results in real time thanks to direct-response TV. At equal reach, TV offers a better click-through and conversion rate, in fact, when you compare the GRP to YouTube’s CPM. I think that online video could probably offer better results on targeted audiences, or maybe in complement to the TV campaign to reach younger audiences that we get less on linear TV. Indeed for now, TV is more regulated than online video and therefore allows for less call to action”.

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