Nestlé, Facebook & Kantar on the science behind brand and commerce's convergence

Speaking on a roundtable at The Drum’s Digital Summit, Facebook Marketing Science manager, Amit Chaubey, says the convergence is first of all driven by the change in consumer behavior through the pandemic.

“From an omnichannel study by Accenture and IPSOS (commissioned by Facebook), we found that omnichannel journeys are widely adopted across all product categories with >50% researching online before buying in-store. We've also found that social media users are more likely to be omnichannel shoppers with weekly Facebook platform users having a higher omnichannel usage than non-Facebook platform users,” he explains.

The change in consumer behavior into this convergence means brands are asking questions around whether there are synergies in consumer seeing both brand and commerce ads, and what needs to be changed in strategies to make the most of this.

In the roundtable, Kantar measurement expert Hernan Sanchez Neira, explains the methodology of the upcoming research and also the fact that this convergence is something that marketers have been waiting for, for quite some time.

“Content, media and shopping used to live in different places and in many cases managed by different teams with different goals. As a result, planning and executing harmonic plans was a difficult task,” he explains.

One important moment in an APAC marketer’s strategy is festival season, in which consumers flock to the e-commerce platforms to take advantage of the special sales. As to how brands can manage this, Nestlé eBusiness Head: Charnae L Morris, says it’s not a one-size-fits all, particularly as this trend extends to omnichannel shopping.

“We are seeing a growing trend in which ‘Mega Day’ campaigns are extending beyond Pure Players to also Click and Mortars and currently working on differentiated strategies for each sub channel as the shopper mission and behavior are very different,” she says.

During these mega sale days, a balanced strategy on brand and commerce – that is sufficiency on brand and commerce can see up to 30% increase in sales and return on ad spend based, says Amit Chaubey, based on a recent study in Thailand. There is an opportunity to increase the return on ad spend by up to 1.9 times by investing in brand and commerce together.

Brands that understand the halo effect that comes from the convergence of brand and commerce can reap the rewards of omnichannel, adds Facebook regional solutions manager, Yinren Peh, “One of the insights that really stood out to me from this study that Amit alluded to that I had the good fortune to collaborate with him on was the halo effect that brand campaigns had on commerce campaigns, but also vice versa. To that point, we saw commerce campaigns from brands selling on Lazada/Shopee end up creating a sales lift in offline retail channels like convenience, H&B, hypermarkets and more.”

To hear more about the findings of the research into this fascinating trend, and how brands can make changes to their activation and media strategies now, watch the full session on The Drum Digital Summit website.