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Although direct-to-consumer (DTC) is no longer considered the marketing panacea it once was, the sales channel can still be useful to CPG marketers as part of an omnichannel strategy, especially during the height of the pandemic. This is the case with Mondelēz and its signature cookie, Oreo.
“We approach DTC as a tool to build closer relationships with consumers and learn from them. This allows us to test new products, marketing strategies, engagement tactics and pricing models,” Kamila DeMaria, DTC director and general manager at Mondelēz, said in an email.
To strengthen its capabilities, Oreo selected Goodness, a digital commerce agency, as its DTC agency partner this year. This partnership evolved from Goodness’ previous work to migrate Oreo from Adobe’s Magento e-commerce platform to Shopify to improve efficiency and user experience.
“Shopify and the tools it provides allow brands like Oreo to act like digital native brands and compete at that level,” said Ethan Martin, Director of Strategy at Goodness. “That’s what the Oreo team has been striving for and what Mondelēz hopes to unlock across its entire portfolio.”
Integration of DTC and assets
Goodness’s work was two-fold. The goal is to build a new e-commerce system that can scale across Mondelēz’s portfolio and be efficient enough to outweigh the high costs of direct-to-consumer delivery, as well as opening up new opportunities for the brand’s OreoID customization platform.
“(With OreoID) we had the opportunity to optimize, to make something more modern, fun, slick, cool, feel more like a dashboard, and actually try to significantly reduce customer service calls and significantly increase conversion rates at every step. said Donald Fierros, Chief Operating Officer of Goodness.
This work also allows Oreo to sell retail packs and limited-edition flavors through its e-commerce store for the first time, opening up the ability to better integrate brand campaigns and the potential for a deeper partnership with Goodness.
“There was an opportunity in the match between the DTC and Oreo equity sides, which have different skill sets and goals at Goodness,” Fierros said.
data experiment
Since joining as an agency partner in the second quarter of this year, Goodness has been working to connect internal systems to enable Oreo to deploy fully personalized communications that improve DTC engagement and conversions. Nearly half a year into its relationship with Oreo, Goodness is iterating on OreoID and working to connect advertising, media and CRM data to its e-commerce site. And despite its existing goodwill, Oreo sees itself as a data innovator in the space.
“The beauty of Oreo is that it has a huge pillar of retail sales, which is the core of its business,” Martin said. “It gives us a real space to experiment and leverage DTC platforms in ways that digital brands can’t.”
Building and experimenting with a more connected data infrastructure through DTC will be key to Oreo’s business asset side requirements for how to capture zero and first-party data across all consumer touchpoints. Whatever Google’s plans for third-party cookies, these imperatives will likely remain in place.
“Building direct relationships with consumers through a powerful exchange of value is at the core of Oreo’s marketing transformation agenda,” said Hamish Stacy, senior manager and head of consumer data at Oreo in the U.S., in an email. “This lays the foundation for developing sustainable competitive advantage when applied to mass resonance across paid and owned ecosystems.”
This data will also be key to training the company’s generative AI infrastructure, Stacy explained. Last September, Mondelēz International announced the launch of a new platform, backed by Accenture and Publicis Groupe, to better leverage emerging technologies.
Understanding Transformations
Data collection is important for marketers. Identifying the value of data, understanding what is collected, and generating insights is a more complex proposition. Goodness is helping the Mondelēz data team ensure data flows in one direction, into the same funnel and into the same storage.
“Then we don’t have to rely on these big third-party tools to make sense of our data. We can make sense of the data ourselves, and so can the team at Mondelēz,” Fierros said.
CRM is increasingly becoming a focus for Oreo, as it has been for the marketing industry as a whole. Goodness is helping Oreo think about what first-party data it can gain by asking customers about their favorite products, limited editions, and campaigns. The agency is also supporting Oreo’s efforts to determine what zero-party data online platforms can collect, such as what content themes best drive web traffic. If done right, all this data can help inform your media strategy.
“Our conversion metric doesn’t necessarily have to be sales. It will depend on challenges such as catalog growth or data enrichment,” Fierros said. “There are a few North Star indicators we are pushing, but we need to continually look at how we contribute to ensure each North Star indicator is being tracked in a consistent way.”
For Oreo, building and operating a more robust data infrastructure will help support the ambitious goals for acquisition, activation and analytics that Goodness can help achieve, Oreo’s Stacy explained.
“To achieve our ambitions, we rely heavily on the expertise of our agency ecosystem partners and their ability to collaborate with one another and continually challenge, disrupt and rebuild the way we work,” the executive said.
