To sell more juice in Thailand, Minute Maid needed to get through to more convenience store shoppers. Here, Karaked Puribhat, head of integrated marketing communications at Coca-Cola Thailand, Minute Maid’s parent company, explains how looking beyond broad demographics helped Minute Maid get in front of Thai consumers who were more likely to buy its juice.
Convenience stores are an important part of Thai culture. As more young, mobile-first Thais flock to urban areas to pursue jobs and other opportunities, they buy more products like packaged juice on the go: fast-moving consumer goods sales at Thai convenience stores have grown from 10.9% in 2010 to 17% in 2017.1 And food and beverages make up more than 70% of Thai convenience store sales.
Minute Maid has always had a strong presence in the Thai juice market, but competition is still fierce. That means we have to keep looking for ways to encourage thirsty consumers to choose Minute Maid. To better reach this desirable segment of convenience store shoppers with relevant messaging, we decided to do something different and went beyond traditional demographics to serve YouTube ads to users based on their intent. Here’s how we did it, and what we found.
Finding our best audience on YouTube
Thais spend a lot of time watching videos on YouTube to relax and engage with their passions. That makes it a crucial platform for us. Until recently, we ran broad demographics-based campaigns to speak to different segments of Thai consumers and boost upper funnel metrics like brand awareness. We might’ve further segmented audiences based on interests or lifestyle behavior, but we weren’t tapping into the true power of intent. We needed to take advantage of new technology that would allow us to reach consumers — in this case, convenience store shoppers — who were already interested in our juice. So when Google proposed testing an intent-based YouTube campaign against a standard demographics-based campaign, we partnered with our agency, Starcom, to make it happen.
Over an eight-week period, we ran a demographics-based campaign aimed at 18-44-year-olds in Central Thailand and an intent-based campaign to reach our affinity audience of convenience store shoppers in Greater Bangkok. The affinity audience was determined by combining signals across Google properties to identify users who frequently visited convenience stores. Skippable TrueView ads showcasing Minute Maid’s new Pulpy beverage were shown to users in both groups. The campaign results were compared to a control area in Southern Thailand where we didn’t run any YouTube ads.
Intent-based campaign drives lower funnel results
When the campaign ended, we discovered that not only did our intent-based campaign perform better than our demographics-based one but also that YouTube in general has an impact on sales. The intent-based campaign drove a 3X (6.8%) sales lift and a 3X higher return on interest (ROI) compared to the demographics-based campaign. Meanwhile, the demographics-based campaign showed a 2% sales lift compared to the control area that had no YouTube advertising. A Brand Lift study also revealed a 17% lift in brand metrics such as ad recall and awareness for the demographics-based campaign.
By running both demographics- and intent-based campaigns, we were able to reach consumers at different stages of the purchase journey. The broad demographics-based campaign helped boost upper funnel metrics like awareness, while the intent-based campaign actually drove lower funnel results by speaking directly to convenience store shoppers. The test showed us that we needed to rethink our strategies and executions by adopting a full-funnel approach across all of our brands here at Coca-Cola, and we think this is a learning other brands can benefit from as well.
