This case study based on a fictional Consumer Packaged Goods company helps analysts become more familiar with the power of publicly available analysis tools such as Google Trends, Union Metrics’s TweetReach, and Facebook Audience Insights.
Summary
After years of market-leading performance, Hygieia Brands needs an innovation to continue its impressive record of year-over-year growth. Caitlin Doyle, Director of Digital Marketing for the company’s Dairy Products category, is the darling of the marketing team and has a long history of using data to drive new product decisions. As an analyst at Doyle’s digital media agency, can you use online tools to uncover an insight that points to what Doyle should do next?
Key characters
Hygieia Brands: U.S.-based consumer packaged goods company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, that manufactures a wide variety of high-quality, health-forward food and beverage products. Hygieia Brands owns, produces, and distributes brands of cheese, butter, clotted cream, and pudding from production facilities around the world.
Paramount Pudding: Market-leading pudding brand with a long-established brand position highlighted by delicious taste and superior quality because of its all-natural ingredients.
Caitlin Doyle: Director of Digital Marketing for Hygieia Brands whose primary responsibility is promoting the company’s Dairy Products through digital advertising, including Paramount Pudding.
Maura Janes: Chief Marketing Officer of Hygieia Brands and boss and mentor to Doyle.
Havas: Creative agency that recently won the Paramount Pudding account based on a pitch that demonstrated the ability to “think outside the box” and infuse new ideas into Paramount Pudding’s marketing. Havas is responsible for creating and producing the brand’s digital advertising.
R/GA: Digital media agency that’s held the Paramount Pudding account for several years and has extensive experience working with digital publishers and platforms. A highly analytical agency, R/GA is adept at using data to inform its digital media recommendations and track media performance.
Facebook, Google, Twitter: Paramount Pudding’s primary digital marketing partners that place the brand’s digital advertising on their owned and operated properties, as well as their extensive ad networks, which can reach 99 percent of U.S. consumers.
What’s next for Hygieia Brands’ Dairy Products?
Caitlin Doyle was in a good position. For the last five years, she oversaw the digital marketing of Hygieia Brands’ Dairy Products category. She managed a range of ready-to-eat products, including cheese produced in Europe, butter from Ireland, clotted cream from the UK, and Paramount Pudding, the company’s largest and most well-known consumer brand, produced in Hygieia’s production facility near Stowe, Vermont. All of the products in her category carried the Paramount name, which had become synonymous with all-natural ingredients and great taste.
Doyle ascended the Hygieia Brands marketing organization quickly and her performance as Director of Digital Marketing validated her rise. Her product category consistently delivered growth rates above market levels and outperformed every other Hygieia Brands product category for the last four years. Paramount Pudding, the darling of Doyle’s category, developed a large and dedicated consumer following. The brand’s use of all-natural ingredients, a hallmark of Hygieia Brands’ products, made it distinct from competing pudding brands whose low-price point products featured synthetic flavorings and copious amounts of sweeteners, keeping costs low and making it easy to secure ingredients. But it was Paramount Pudding’s taste, which consumers consistently rated higher than its competitors, that made it the market leader.
Doyle introduced significant innovation to her product category over the past five years. From sourcing new products (it was Doyle who convinced her boss, Hygieia Brands’ Chief Marketing Officer, Maura Janes, that a market could be created for high-quality clotted cream in the U.S.) to product extensions in her category (savory compound butters) to packaging innovations (100-calorie single-serve Paramount Pudding cups), she demonstrated a willingness to take calculated risks. Data had played a critical role in each of these decisions, as Doyle encouraged her partners to invest time and resources in the collection and analysis of measured consumer behaviors. Her favorite mantra – “What does the data say?” – was so repeated so often during meetings that her partners knew they needed to bring insights to every meeting.
Today, however, Doyle needed a new insight. Consumers had increasingly focused on healthy food for years. While this trend severely affected the dairy food category in general, Hygieia’s high ingredient and production standards allowed its products to weather the shift in consumer choice. Paramount Pudding, however, wasn’t entirely immune to this pressure as consumers began to explore substitute products. Paramount Pudding’s sales were still expected to be strong during the year-end holiday season, when consumers typically allowed themselves to indulge, but sales during the rest of the year were projected to slide. Paramount’s growth was critical to the entire Dairy Product category. And, more importantly, Doyle knew her product category was expected to carry Hygieia’s overall growth.
Doyle hastily organized a meeting of her key digital partners to onboard Havas, the creative agency she had recently selected after a long review. She asked R/GA, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to bring their best ideas for breathing new sales life into the Dairy Products category. New products, cross-product promotions, and product extensions were all possibilities. The only requirement for her partners, which they knew to expect, was to come armed with data insights to substantiate their ideas.
Your assignment
Put yourself in the position of a marketing analyst for R/GA. Consider online self-service tools from Hygieia’s digital platform partners – Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Use the tools to analyze consumer trends in the dairy products category and develop a recommendation that will allow Hyiegia to reinvigorate the category.
Start with Google Trends to identify patterns in consumer interest that may be valuable for Hygieia Brands and inform Doyle’s next move. Use TweetReach to sample consumer sentiment on Twitter to bring color to color interests. Use Facebook Audience Insights to validate the demographic details of target consumers.
Your write-up must clearly express a recommendation for Hygieia’s next innovation and the data (and data sources) you used to arrive at that recommendation. To ensure your ideas are concise, limit your write-up (excluding any graphs, charts, or screenshots you choose to include in an attached appendix) to a single side of one sheet of paper and write in the format of a memorandum addressed to Doyle.
