Change is a constant with consumers today, whether that be how they spend their time or how they discover and purchase their favorite products. Real-time shifts in technology and cultural norms are making it more difficult for brands to know if they’re reaching the right audience, on the right channel and at the right time.
While most brands still generally understand who their current customers are, how can a brand break through the noise to find new customers they haven’t yet reached?
To help Nescafe answer this question, the brand worked with Amazon Ads to combine buy, browse and streaming signals to create passion-point insights. These insights would then become the foundation of newly minted audience personas—generalized profiles of Nescafe’s current and potential audience—that the brand could ultimately use to reach more coffee enthusiasts who are relevant to Nescafe.
Finding (and defining) an audience
Nescafe is an established, well-loved global brand for instant coffee. When preparing for its next product launch, called the Gold Roastery, the goal was to build brand equity in the premium instant coffee market. To do this, the coffee brand needed a better understanding of the interests of the “premium shopper,” or consumers who might be interested in higher-end goods and services.
Using Amazon Ads’ proprietary first-party insights, Nescafe analyzed consumer trends within a peer set of premium brands in the coffee category and compared them to non-premium instant coffee buyers to see what could be learned.
Using insights to inform audience personas
What was discovered, from a demographic standpoint, was that not only were the “super premium coffee fans” a sizable audience of 35-40 million customers; but, they were also younger adults, more often male and heavy mobile-based shoppers.
Another insight that emerged was that a large portion of the super-premium coffee fan audience demonstrated an “Entertainment Junkie” persona, with 66% of the super-premium audience overlapping with Amazon streaming audiences—compared to just 13% of non-premium coffee buyers. This particular insight helped identify that ad formats like Fire TV would be a relevant way to deliver brand messaging.
Lastly, insights about the super-premium audience found these consumers showed earth-friendly attitudes.The audience also over-indexed with electric vehicle ownership and seeking tropical lifestyles. These passion points aligned with the Nescafe’s Gold Roastery product attributes, which is created from certified beans grown in a sustainable way and stored in packaging that’s 100% recyclable and plastic free.
Combined, these insights helped Nescafe start planning a strategic and customer-centric campaign based on passion points vs. general interests and shopping habits of their potential customers.
Bringing it all together
By identifying the consumers it wanted to reach, Nescafe was poised to collaborate with Amazon Ads to action its new product launch campaign based on how super-premium coffee fans engage with the world around them.
The campaign launched in April 2021 and ran for two months, and revealed that using Amazon Ads insights to reach potential customers could pay off. Post campaign, the results from third-party measurement vendor, IRI, showed a 23% lift in clickthrough rates relative to benchmark, and a 5.9% incremental lift in offline sales as a result of ad exposure to Nescafe’s campaign, per the vendor’s offline regional A/B test.
Creating a successful ad campaign like Nescafe did for its Gold Roastery launch is a testament to the value of using first-party consumer insights to better understand your customers. Together with Amazon Ads, Nescafe was able to fulfill its biggest campaign goal—to drive growth by reaching existing or new customers where they are.
Learn more about how Amazon Ads and brands are using insights to define the next chapter of their business.
