Why Neutrogena tapped into weather conditions to sell more products
Skincare brand Neutrogena knows that its customers buy different products based on how the weather impacts their skin but it has now taken that insight to its media strategy in Taiwan.
The Johnson & Johnson-owned business sought the help of Verizon Media to sell more of its moisturiser range against the growing competition in Taiwan. By analysing search data, they realised that people looked for moisturiser more in October, when the weather was still warm.
The brand optimised its strategy based on this, as well as looking at data across interests, such as fashion and beauty, helping to drive improvement on results across its key metrics. According to Verizon Media, compared to the anticipated pre-launch performance, the campaign achieved 23% more impressions, 209% more clicks and achieved a 19% reduction in CPM. It also recorded a CTR as high as 0.13% and said that 52% of clicks were attributed to the Fashion & Shopping segment.
Winnie Lin, senior brand activation manager at Johnson & Johnson, says positive results are down to clear strategy and agile execution.
“Our 4C communication (Capture, Convince, Convert, and Commit) strategy is a clear guide to have different approaches for upper-funnel and lower-funnel marketing. Moisture products rely on weather condition heavily. Originally, we assumed the weather would be getting cold in October, however, the temperature remains high in early October as the cold front was late than expected."
"Agile execution helps us develop UV resistance communication message, in this way, we not only could keep a high momentum throughout the campaign but also convert those sunblock audiences to a moisture one."
She continues: "Most importantly, the spirit of effective marketing is to communicate with the right target audience at the right time with the right message, and this campaign carried out with tailor-made creatives considering the weather condition and marketing funnel.”
The campaign used different stages and data to reflect changes to the way people were buying, which helped push people from the early stages of consideration closer to a purchase decision. At the consideration stage, the brand lured people in by using celebrity Ella Chen in the creative.
Neutrogena then created a sequence to communicate a different message with the audience during different moments. Lin explains: “To better enhance the performance and increase the relevance with the audience, we delivered the creative of ‘local,’ ‘heat’ and ‘aggressor’ in the different month and adding the search retargeting data of previous creatives to the next. This targeting logic allowed us to align the data with creative to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right moments.”
While the targeting across the campaign was relatively sophisticated, Lin says it didn’t feel too complicated a task, due to the way the brand worked with its tech partner. She says having multiple sources of data feed into one media partner meant the brand could concentrate on creative and impact.
“In this case, we didn’t suffer too many technical issues. For one thing, Verizon Media has huge data, covering users’ behaviour from exploring to conversion, so by leveraging powerful DSP, it saves us lots of efforts to collect and screen variable data source. Furthermore, since the programmatic solution and e-commerce store are both Verizon Media platforms, campaign data and shopping data are fully integrated into their backend system; therefore, we can focus more on strategy and creative level,” she adds.
Matching data and creativity is what Lim takes as the key lesson from the case study on this campaign, saying that the two together provided much better results. She also said she was positive about the impact that weather can add to the effectiveness of results and would be looking further into how targeting capabilities around weather can impact future campaigns.