Challenge

Philips Domestic Appliances' (DA) aims to be a digital-first marketer and boost e-commerce sales across business units in ASEAN. In the highly competitive, ever changing, and fragmented marketplace landscape, Philips DA needed to maintain their e-commerce presence and overall standing as the No.1 Brand in the region for Domestic Appliances across multiple categories.

In SEA, the number of sales events have increased from the more common events such as CNY, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Mid-Year Sales; to include monthly double-digit key sale events dubbed as 9.9 (9th Sept), 10.10, 11.11 and 12.12. These events are now a key part of driving sales revenue.

Thus, the challenge faced by the brand hails from the changing landscape of the concept of sales dictated by the different ecommerce platforms and the acceleration of audience on to multiple different platforms. In addition, the target audience for Philips DA spans a wide age and interest range, which is category-led: ranging from Floor Care – Vacuum, Air Care – Air Purifier, Garment Care – Irons and Garment Steamer, Coffee – Coffee Machines, Kitchen Appliances – Air Fryer, Rice Cooker, and Blenders.

The above creates a conundrum of when and how Philips DA should invest their marketing budget for the different sales dictated by the platform, and to ensure that their advertisements were competitive with other brands’.

Solution

Dentsu dived deep into the core audience segments to understand intent so that we could analyse the signals and behaviors unique to the lower funnel, in digital ecommerce. We partnered with Shopee and Lazada, the two main platforms for most markets in the APAC region to enthuse our online-first shoppers and ecommerce enthusiasts. With mobile adoption being exceptionally high in this region, the mobile-based consumer journey represented the biggest opportunity with highest ROI and likelihood of conversion for high-interest audiences.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, we needed a digital-first experience that suited the audience buying behavior, and catered to a seamlessly personalised path to purchase, with custom triggers and messages that minimized drop-offs during the whole journey.

We broke down the decision-making journey into four phases before and during the main sales date. Each journey had a distinctively different creative and media strategy and defined direction on personalisation. We were strategically intentional with consumer messaging as the focus was to rise above the noise but not overwhelm our potential customer. Depending on where the customer was in the funnel and how ready they were to purchase, their experience with our ads would differ; thus, leaning into personalisation.

By identifying the key media touch points and mobile journey, we were able to ensure that relevant audiences who were in different parts of their funnel journey saw the right message at the right time. These personalised creatives were crafted based on the audience phase in the journey and according to product interactions. Our sequential ad targeting, retargeting audience strategies were seamlessly integrated in this approach from the get-go. We boosted this approach with rich audience data drawn from Philips DA’s always-on awareness campaign and linked to ecommerce site search data.

This allowed the team to nurture high-intent audiences (determined by audience data from CRM and onsite search) despite a short duration of large sales which usually only lasts from 10-14 days. We also staggered start dates for each phase to work with marketplace-owned communication phasing to infuse more momentum into the campaign and enable increased urgency in a gradual ramp-up to the sales date itself.

Delivery

The main mediums to drive this storytelling was via Facebook, Criteo and Google Shopping Ads. A mix of Facebook formats were used from linked post, carousel ads, and collections ads to build the phases and take advantage of the retargeting capabilities and ability to layer on first/second party data. Criteo was leveraged as an additional programmatic lever to drive programmatic traffic and awareness while Google Shopping Ads was used as a phase 2 consideration filter to keep Philips DA top of mind.

Furthermore, creatives were developed with the phases in mind to help prime, encourage, cross-sell, and remind them of Philips DA throughout the sale period.                                    

To reduce internal cannibalisation of ongoing media efforts, consumers who have already been nurtured via other ads are targeted via phase 2 or 3 ads. Specific action datapoints such as a click, view or add to cart were used to signal which phase of the journey a consumer was already in. We also factored in a buffer at the start of each phase to ensure a sufficient pool of audience moving down to the next stage of the journey.               

Criteo and Google Shopping Ads were utilised as a ‘net’ to help capture those who have fallen off the consumer journey from Meta. This novel approach of using a programmatic partner as a safety net for audiences who clicked through to shopping sites, instead of a primary media to drive awareness, enabled us to reintegrate them into the Meta journey, and reduced leakage from the funnel. Google shopping ads were also used to ensure Philips DA had a presence and remained top of mind when consumers were researching in the relevant category.

Performance

Our ecommerce campaign saw multiple successes in terms of exceeding expected sales and maintaining Philips DA’s position as the overall market leader in terms of sales in the category.              

• Higher sales target achieved for Philips DA during the year-end sales, by up to 155% on Shopee and 212% on Lazada during Single’s Day sales
• Recognised by Shopee and Lazada as top-selling advertisers                                          
• Achieved #1 in Lazada’s Best Selling Brands, beating Dyson both in total Southeast Asia as well as in 3 countries, ID, TH and VN.                                                  
• Achieved #1 in Shopee’s Best Selling Brands for both small kitchen appliances and Home & Living (Garment care) category in the region and entered Top 5 brand in large home appliances for the first time behind strong air sales despite not having refrigerators/washing machines.

This customer-centric campaign personalised the ad experience for individuals, responding based on their reaction, while nurturing them down the funnel. The success of this campaign proves that there is no need to create hundreds of ads to trial, but to create high-intent ads rooted in the consumer’s digital journey.

Awards

• Gold for Excellence in eCommerce Marketing at Marketing Interactive’s Marketing Excellence Awards 2022
• Silver for Excellence in Personalisation Marketing at Marketing Interactive’s Marketing Excellence Awards 2022