This post was created in partnership with Fetch
Key takeaways Brands need to balance short-term sales and long-term growth. Research has found that customers introduced to a brand through a reward are more likely to make repeat purchases and spend more. Brands and marketers may need to use data differently when targeting new consumers vs. loyal long-term customers.
Brands work hard to capture attention and drive sales in a short-attention-span world, but is the long game of customer loyalty getting left behind?
During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions group chat co-hosted with Fetch, industry leaders discussed new research and success stories that make the case for deploying media dollars to support both short-term sales and long-term, sustainable growth.
(L-R) Bain & Company’s Lesley Butler, Keurig Dr Pepper’s Ben Sylvan, Fetch’s Robin WheelerFrom campaigns to customer optimization
Robin Wheeler, chief revenue officer of Fetch, opened the session with a prediction that the future of growth will be less about campaigns and more about customer optimization, which she defined as “being able to really understand that customer in a way that you can change their behavior.”
Taking this approach may require teams to get buy-in. Ben Sylvan, SVP of connected media at Keurig Dr Pepper, shared that he spent about a year focusing on short-term sales to showcase the power of advertising and gain executives’ trust.
“We built a repeatable framework for how we measure every one of our campaigns, really anchored on incremental return on ad spend,” he explained. With a proven track record, he was able to shift into conversations around the long-term value of these consumers.
“You need to get people anchored in how you’re measuring media, what the next steps are, and build a maturity model,” said Sylvan.
Emmy Brown Berlind, SVP and general manager of loyalty at Sephora, has found success by combining strategies that drive short-term sales with activities that are associated with customer lifetime value. For example, Sephora’s big savings events use discounts to drive short-term conversion, but they’ve started layering in gamified challenges to keep members of their Beauty Insider loyalty program engaged.
“All the challenge tasks are actually based in customer lifetime value actions, that if you take those actions, we know that you’re going to be a higher value client for us in the future,” said Berlind.
(L-R) Sephora’s Emmy Berlind, Haleon’s Kelly Kavanagh, WPP Media’s JiYoung KimA new era of measurement
Successfully balancing short-term sales and long-term customer growth could mean using data differently, said JiYoung Kim, chief transformation officer, U.S. at WPP Media.
“A lot of our clients from media agencies used to come from sales or merchandising, so it takes a certain level of comfort with marketing and media to even have the conversation of how to balance short term vs. long term,” Kim explained. “It takes comfort with data to explain how we can separate current buyers vs. net new.”
For Laura Knebusch, CMO of Georgia-Pacific (which includes brands like Brawny, Sparkle, Angel Soft, Quilted Northern, Dixie, and Vanity Fair), that meant bringing in marketing mix modeling internally.
“We can do it now twice a year vs. every other year, and the future is to make it AI-enabled, so that we can start to predict and look forward,” Knebusch said. “Without it, I have no other way to look across everything that I’m investing in.”
Lesley Butler, partner at Bain & Company, also acknowledged a new era of measurement with two major shifts happening. The first shift: getting more holistic. “The capabilities are there to be able to get more holistic, so that I can really see the full picture. It requires marketing and sales coming together a lot more to think about their budgets,” she explained. The second shift that Buter sees: becoming more predictive.
Bringing teams under one umbrella to share data can also be helpful and more productive, as it was for Kelly Kavanagh, senior director of integrated marketing and media for Haleon.
“I was running integrated marketing and media, and earned, social, and performance marketing were in a separate team. Now it all sits in one team together, with the same individuals as before,” she said.
(L-R) ADWEEK’s Zoë Ruderman, Georgia-Pacific’s Laura KnebuschExploring loyalty levels
The discussion turned toward how to keep loyal customers happy while also catering to a newer fan base.
“Loyalty means people who buy our products a lot, and we inform all of our media based on how often they buy,” said Sylvan. But competing in the beverage space requires deploying major fans who have a psychological connection to the brand. This group, he explained, is more likely to talk about the brand on social and amplify messaging, which can be valuable for long-term success.
Berlind agreed, noting that it’s a key priority to make those customers who qualify for Rouges—the top tier of the Beauty Insider loyalty program—feel special.
“We’re trying to launch new things, evolve the program in a way that keeps things exciting and makes them feel like it’s worth it,” Berlind said. At the same time, finding ways to introduce newer customers and lower-tier loyalty program members to products and encourage them to continue purchasing is equally important.
As the session came to a close, Wheeler left the panel with this memorable takeaway: “The goal isn’t to get the next sale, it’s to get the next 10.”
Featured Conversation Leaders
Emmy Brown Berlind, SVP, General Manager, Loyalty, Sephora Lesley Butler, Partner, Bain & Company Kelly Kavanagh, Senior Director, Integrated Marketing and Media, Haleon JiYoung Kim, Chief Transformation Officer, U.S., WPP Media Laura Knebusch, CMO, Georgia-Pacific Zoë Ruderman, Chief Content Officer, ADWEEK Ben Sylvan, SVP, Connected Media, Keurig Dr Pepper Robin Wheeler, Chief Revenue Officer, Fetch