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- [00:01]
Fergus O'Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carroll in Chicago. We're going to be recording the show live in Toronto on February 20th at Rethink's offices. It's a Thursday evening from 6 to 8pm you can get tickets on our website under the Live tour tab@onstrategyshowcase.com we would love to see you there. This is the second episode in our B2B series with LinkedIn, and I'm really excited about it for a couple of reasons. Procell is the B2B division of Duracell Batteries, and this is the first big push that they've had in paid media and it took a lot of convincing to be able to get the organization behind the entire initiative. And like all campaigns, it's a journey, but it is paying off dividends as they look at using a different lens through which to communicate their Messages. A new B2B lens. They also during this entire conversation, actually, I kept wanting to ask, why doesn't a battery manufact design an indicator in the battery that signals when it's about to run out so you don't actually have to wait for anything for the battery to die before you have to replace it? And they mentioned that off camera or off microphone, they mentioned that they do have this SAS platform which is brilliant. It's called procell Insight. I don't know if it exists anywhere else, I'm not really sure. But what it does, it's actually an app that is able to geotarget the devices and the batteries or the appliances that the batter, wherever they are in your building. Let's say you're a hospital or you're a hotel, wherever they are in your building, if a battery's about to fail, it sends a signal so you can get down to its location and replace it before it fails. Which is amazing, right? So no downtime for any devices, which increases customer satisfaction, et cetera. So that's really cool. This campaign ran in 2023 and one aspect of it I was totally blown away by is they've actually taken the charact that they use in their spots. There's two characters which are battery changer characters, and they've created action figures out of these guys. So when you buy batteries or when you send a message to a procurement manager, you can send them one of these action figures in a little blister pack like you might see in a store, and it's just a phenomenal thing and they've been able to use it in trade Shows, et cetera, lots of applications for it, but a great idea to create a little action figure as a sort of a design distinctive brand asset moving forward as part of messaging this campaign. So really great ideas here. So we're joined by Keith Browning, director of brand marketing at LinkedIn, and ironically, you guys have just launched your own B2B campaign for LinkedIn ads. Right? So not only are you the sponsor of this series, but you're also out there testing the waters yourself. What's the focus of the new LinkedIn ads campaign?
- [03:06]
Keith Browning
Yeah, so during qualitative research for the campaign, we uncovered a crucial pain point for B2B marketers, which is that a significant portion of their ad dollars each quarter are wasted due to inaccurate targeting. And it's kind of one of those, you know, inconvenient fruits of B2B, I'd say. You know, ad waste is a universally known but actually rarely talked about phenomenon. So, you know, when you think about that pain point for B2B marketers, and then you add in the fact that our professional audience on LinkedIn and of course, our ability to help you reach them is the number one loyalty driver for us, something kind of clicked, you know, so we. We implied what I would regard as a simple but powerful strategy that that sort of connected that customer or category tension of ad waste to our superior targeting.
- [03:58]
Fergus O'Carroll
It's interesting, when I look at the executions in your campaign, it reminds me that I would label them as being branded performance. Do you think that you have separate brand and performance marketing elements, or do you look at it as being a hybrid?
- [04:14]
Keith Browning
Well, it's funny that you picked up on that because up until very recently, we used to actually think of them as quite distinct. So we used to have kind of a brand campaign that my team led, and then we had kind of separate performance campaigns, and they were very, very distinct in the sense that, you know, we even use different agencies to create this stuff. So in years gone by, we thought of them as very distinct. But as I said, you know, you picked up right there with this campaign. We developed it together. So it was kind of a what we describe as a full funnel campaign from the beginning with the same. The same brief, the same agency, you know, same overarching concept for both.
- [04:55]
Fergus O'Carroll
Is there anything you can offer our listeners here in terms of if they're thinking of doing a LinkedIn ads campaign?
- [05:02]
Keith Browning
Yeah, absolutely. So I think for those that want to try LinkedIn ads, we're very, very happy to offer your listeners a $100 ad credit for the next campaign. So they can come check it out, try it for themselves. And to avail of that offer, all you have to do is go to LinkedIn.com that's LinkedIn.com onstrategy. And of course, terms and conditions apply.
- [05:24]
Fergus O'Carroll
So Here is episode two in our B2B series. It's Procell with Steve Pilcher, who's Duracell Global Brand Director out of Geneva, and Neil Godber, Executive Strategy Director at VML UK out of London. Enjoy. So excited to have this team on here. Neil is a regular here on the show, so it's great to have Neil. Thanks for being here.
- [05:51]
Neil Godber
Great to be here. Thanks for having me back.
- [05:53]
Fergus O'Carroll
And it is. Steve is with. What do I say? Do I say Duracell or do I say procell? Steve, how do I describe where you're from? I think it's. It's the parent. Is. Is Duracell right?
- [06:05]
Steve Pilcher
That's right. And thanks very much, Fergus, for having me on. Very excited to be here. And indeed, the. The brand is procell, the company is the Duracell company, and it's. I've been working for Duracell for the last 15 years, actually, just to give a little bit of background. And for most of that time, the focus has been very much on retail and Duracell. And to be honest, the professional side of the business has not been. Up until, I would say, I mean, we're 100 years old, and up until 2016, there wasn't a great focus put on the B2B part of the business. It was a, you know, it was a sales organization very much on the periphery of the company. And that all changed in 2019. Well, 2016, actually. So 2016, we got divested from Procter and Gamble and we became part of the Berkshire Hathaway Company, and they saw a huge value in the professional side of the business, and this became a big bet for the company to grow. So since then, we've had a lot of focus on it. And as a marketeer, it was great and really exciting to move from the retail side of the business and Duracell into the professional side and procell.
- [07:21]
Fergus O'Carroll
So why not name everything? Duracell.
- [07:25]
Steve Pilcher
Yes, that's a great question. And it's one that we. We debated long and hard, to be honest. And, you know, if you think about it, both brands, Procell and Duracell, we sell batteries. And it's the. It's the same type of batteries. It's the AA's, the. That you'll find in your home. But for the professional side of the business, we want it to be really distinct and separate that out because professionals, they use different devices and it's not a case of one size fits all and you can put any battery in those devices. So we really wanted to develop our professional brand and we developed batteries that are really designed to last longer in professional devices. So if you go into a hotel, for example, that's going to be things like door locks, soap dispensers, flush valves, et cetera. If you go into a hospital, that's going to be medical devices and they operate differently to the devices that you find in your home, the remote controls and the wireless mouse and what have you. So we created batteries that really work longer in professional devices and we want it to be clear through having a different brand to not get confused with the retail batteries and not have professionals think that, you know, actually we've just relabeled a retail general purpose battery and, you know, and called it professional.
- [08:49]
Fergus O'Carroll
The implication is that there is, there is a desire in Pro, like there is in many categories, for there to be this sense that there is a commercial higher performing battery that's used for higher performance situations.
- [09:03]
Steve Pilcher
Yeah. So it's not so much about professional devices being more demanding or needing a higher performance, it's about them needing a different performance. So we've got extremely high end retail batteries and consumers in their home, we'll have a mixture of low drain devices and then very, very high drain devices. It's just that professional devices work differently. So we've designed the batteries with the specific professional devices in mind and we actually have two different tiers depending on the device that you're using it. And we work really closely with our OEM partners and we test and develop the batteries with the specific devices in mind so that they do last longer.
- [09:46]
Fergus O'Carroll
So Neil, who does it compete against or whom does it compete against and how are they messaged?
- [09:53]
Neil Godber
Procell. The main competition that procell faces in many ways is similar to who you might face in retail. So the really major brands, the ones that dominate top of mind, the ones that stand out, the ones that have the strongest equity are primarily Energizer, which is a, we will all know, a gigantic brand, certainly in North America and Ray Ofac. But what you find in this context is that they have effectively a sort of trade or professional variant. So in the case of Energizer it would be Energizer Industrial and in the case of Rayavac, it's Rayavac Pro. The thing for those brands, certainly versus Pro Sell, is that you are primarily buying a slight offshoot from the Energizer brand or the Ray Ofac brand. So those brands in effect capitalize from all the massive amounts of consumer sort of tv, av, digital spend that they pour on. They just buy the slight trade variant. In addition to that, what you also see is there will be some sort of small level of communication that's specific to their professional lines and there'll be some trade communication. But what you're looking at is a smaller B2B specific brand in Pro Cell trying to take share away from huge established consumer brands that have a trade variant.
- [11:11]
Fergus O'Carroll
So it's. When you say a trade variant, they're branded as Energizer Industrial. So they're attaching themselves to the mothership in the commercial applications.
- [11:22]
Neil Godber
Yeah, very much. So, Very much.
- [11:25]
Fergus O'Carroll
I mean, when I think about batteries, I think about something that I think might be sort of low consideration. That's something that's relatively low price point. Am I wrong about that, Steve? I mean, when you look at the target that you're considering, who are they and am I wrong about how they think about it?
- [11:45]
Steve Pilcher
So let's start with the targets. So we segment the market by industry vertical. So you name the industry, they're going to be using batteries the same way as in retail, we've got around about a 95% penetration. So too in professional. So whether that's hospitality, security, medical education, you know, you name it. And within the organization, you've got a couple of targets. You've got procurement, the ones who are actually buying them, and then you've got the end users in the facilities who are actually managing the operations and managing the people that are doing the battery replacements themselves. And then depending on the industry that you're in, some of the devices will be common across. But there's a lot of specialist devices by industry, so door locks in hotels or infusion pumps in a hospital, for example. Now, the importance of batteries depends a little bit on the target. So for procurement, you're right that it's fairly uninteresting and uninvolved. And a little bit like in retail, we find, you know, batteries are often the forgotten item. The same, the same comes when it comes to a professional as well. And these procurement managers, they're often buying lots and lots of industrial supplies for the hotel, for the hospital, whatever it is. And batteries represents a pretty small amount of that. So part of the challenge for us is like, how do you create some disruption and make batteries get them to remember batteries and actually put it on that shopping list.
- [13:22]
Fergus O'Carroll
Neil, let's talk about the target and the problem that the business was facing. What was the sort of the challenge that you were. That was the ask of you and the agency.
- [13:34]
Neil Godber
Yeah. So if you like, in very basic business and behavior terms, procell is a smaller brand. It also has much lower levels of awareness and it has lower levels of consideration and it has less, let's call it brand equity, which is not surprising because it's up against these kind of huge, big dogs, huge consumer facing brands. So first off the task is how are we going to, if you like, grow awareness, grow consideration and ultimately grow penetration and share of market within B2 batteries in North America? Secondly, and what we haven't said so far is, but unsurprising because Procell is a B2B brand and it's built, if you like, for professional devices, it comes at a fairly considerable price premium as well. So not only do we need to compete with much bigger brands, but we also need to sell the fact that this is a specialist proposition and one that in reality, if you look at just price per cell, so price per product is significantly more expensive. Now you talked about the audience. So when we started to dig into the audience and start to say, well, how come we, you know, how are we going to take this task on? Because it's not insignificant and what we couldn't do was just, if you like, out muscle or outspend. We dug into the sorts of challenges that we faced and we noticed at least three sort of challenges that we were up against. Number one, we called it the challenge of being uninteresting. So we know that procurement, they bought batteries primarily on a balance of trust divided by price. So it's almost that old adage of, you know, nobody got fired for buying, buying an IBM, so they know that they have to buy something that they've heard of. And if you like, awareness breeds familiarity, which breeds trust. But they also want that at a low price because fundamentally they're trying to get what they need, but they're trying to get it at a low price. Now, as a lesser known, weaker, smaller brand, that clearly puts Pro Sell at a huge, huge disadvantage because they don't have awareness, therefore they don't have familiarity and therefore they don't have trust. So that's a big hurdle we've got to get over. The second point, as Steve said, is the challenge of, let's call it insignificance. In reality, batteries, if you look at all the sort of office sundries or the sorts of things that they need to buy kind of supplies to keep their company going, whether that be a stadium, whether that be a hotel, that be a hospital or wherever it is. The reality is our category in batteries represents less than 1% of that basket. So they don't really look at batteries and think, fantastic. I can say, you know, I can save a load of money. This is great. I'm going to. I'm. I'm going to hit my targets. So what you find is they don't really think about batteries. Isn't the only time they really think of them is when they run out of power. And so that's a tough gig, isn't it? Because the reality is, if you're pro cell, that puts our specialist proposition as almost a disadvantage because they're not really interested in batteries and they don't really think that they're significant. So if we try to go overboard talking to them about all the whys and wherefores and the technical specs and why pro sells better and so on and so forth, that if anything, is almost likely to confuse or just turn them off. And then the last challenge that we had to try and grapple with is what we call just broadly being irrelevant. And we said earlier, the only time they really think about batteries is when they run out. So how can we start to get a foothold in how we can engage this audience? So you have to recognize that to this audience, you've got to try and tap into something that they care about more. And we know that that isn't batteries. So that's really tough because we can't just. However much you dress up the creativity, you're trying to talk about a message that they just don't really care about. So if you like, recognizing the fact that we're kind of irrelevant means that we, to find a solution and to find a way of engaging them, we had to try and tap into something that they care about. And what we found, unsurprisingly, is that if you're into procurement or efficiency, should we say that, if you like, they're very interested in keen, in things like productivity, and they're very keen in wastage and where you can cut out wastage across the business. So from our perspective, one of the challenges became how do you start to link something that is kind of small and a bit of an irrelevance with something that's big and they care about, like business productivity and wastage.
- [18:09]
Fergus O'Carroll
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- [19:37]
Steve Pilcher
Yeah, I think if you look, you know, the journey that we went on with procell Communication, where we started was we knew we'd got a great product, we knew we got a product that lasted longer in professional devices, but we also knew that we were priced at a, at a price, we're charging a price premium, significant price premium against these well known competitors. And I think the insight which we landed upon, which was really, really powerful, was that, hang on a minute, even though our battery might be more expensive, that cost is really not very significant in the grand scheme of things. You're spending much, much more on labor to change the batteries because these batteries are running out all the time than the cost of the batteries themselves. But the problem was it was quite a complex messaging to get across because we were essentially saying, you know, procell, we focused on professional batteries so they last longer in your devices. So that means you need to replace the devices less and that means it's going to cost you less because you're spending less money on people. It was really complicated and the first attempts that we had at bringing this to life with, with professional buyers was complicated and it was, it looked very corporate. It looked like B2B advertising, sort of standard B2B advertising looked like it could be stock imagery. And we really struggled to communicate that value equation effectively.
- [21:05]
Fergus O'Carroll
You know, it is true, Neil, when you think about it, that there are these sort of hidden costs that we don't think about because batteries don't all drain and need replacement at the same time. And if you're in a big organization like hospitality or some medical environment, they're not all going to run out Friday at 5pm they're going to be running out pretty much every five minutes in different places within the building. And somebody has to go around and change those batteries.
- [21:35]
Neil Godber
Yeah. So this is the flip. So if you think about batteries in your own home or your own home environment, most of the time what happens is you think about the battery or your child does or somebody does when it runs out of power. And what happens? So somebody comes to you with a device that's dead and you end up sort of sweating over a screwdriver with a kind of trying to take out a microscopic screw in a remote control toy or whatever it is, as you're getting shouted at. And that's obviously quite stressful.
- [22:09]
Fergus O'Carroll
Right.
- [22:10]
Neil Godber
You know, that's part and parcel of the game of changing batteries. If you take that insight and you magnify it at an industrial scale, that completely transforms how you think about the cost or the price of batteries. Because on the one hand, if all you do if you're procurement is think about the price per cell, so you look on a spreadsheet or you're in a whole wholesalers and you look and you see a big box of batteries and like lots of things do they say, you know, x cents per cell. And if you, all you do is look at it from that perspective, then procell doesn't look like an attractive proposition. You've never heard of it and it's quite expensive. If you actually look at it from the other end of the spectrum, which is to change your mindset from price per cell to cost to replace, then that completely changes the equation because the cost to replace is a combination of the price of the cell multiplied by the labor that you as procurement have to pay for to keep changing all these batteries. And when you recognize that actually the price of the cell when it comes to cost replace is a relatively small, small part of that, if you like multiple, multiple times. On top of that is the price of paying all of the labor to continually change. And that's super important, isn't it? Because that's where procell gets a massive advantage. Because as Steve says, they have been purposefully built to last longer. Therefore you change them Less often, therefore, they cost you less. And that strategic shift from thinking just about the price of the item through to what happens or what's it going to take to get. Get that thing working again, you can literally reframe value in people's minds. And then the next kind of task is then how do you do that in such a way that is going to be exciting and interesting to a B2B audience? But if you like, that strategic shift to reframe value is the one that is, if you like, worth a lot of money.
- [24:20]
Fergus O'Carroll
So that reframe is price to buy to cost to replace. So walk us through, Neil, the ideas here. What were some of those early stage ideas? And then we want to talk about what you guys ended up doing. Doing creatively.
- [24:35]
Neil Godber
You're putting me in a terrible position, Fergus. I'm going to reveal all the bad stuff that we never showed Steve. That was the danger of doing this podcast with Steve.
- [24:43]
Fergus O'Carroll
He won't be able to see it. So it'll just be a description.
- [24:46]
Neil Godber
Yeah. So I think when we got the early ideas back, it's fair to say that the creatives often just focused on low price and things like that, and they just weren't hitting the brief.
- [25:03]
Fergus O'Carroll
Low price meaning what?
- [25:05]
Neil Godber
Oh, just, you know, this is going to cost you less.
- [25:08]
Fergus O'Carroll
Oh, right, right. Okay.
- [25:09]
Neil Godber
I just can.
- [25:10]
Steve Pilcher
Overall.
- [25:10]
Neil Godber
Yeah, yeah, overall, Overall. And then we had other ideas that they were very clever, actually. It was a. It was a junior team who are super cool, and they looked at the sort of media that that chief procurement officers might use and they said, oh, Excel is a kind of medium that they use quite a lot. Could we smuggle adverts into the Chief procurement officer via Excel and create these kind of patterns and themes out of Excel? Which was kind of cool.
- [25:42]
Fergus O'Carroll
What do you mean by Excel?
- [25:44]
Neil Godber
So, as in they figured that anyone in finance would use Microsoft Excel as a kind of format.
- [25:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
Okay.
- [25:51]
Neil Godber
It was mad. So they said, look, we've seen this kind of. I think it was like slightly obscure Japanese art form of kind of like, you know, it's almost kind of binary stuff being produced on Excel. Could we almost create images of low prices, but can we draft it in the medium of Excel? So they kind of looked weird and cool, but they were certainly a very scenic way around it. And then a team came back and they said, look, there's a thing here, isn't there, around wasted labor and can we bring to life, personify that wasted labor as a battery changer? So let's create a guy or a couple of Guys, as we ended up in the campaign, who were the hapless, slightly comedic janitors who we can call battery changers? And can we show the terrible, disruptive, wasteful effects that they have across different businesses? We live in an age of distinctive brand assets where to try and join up the dots along lots of different splintered communications challenges. If you can find yourself a personification or representation of the thing that either you're for or you're against, that can be a really powerful, repeatable sort of tool mnemonic that we could use to symbolize the benefit of this brand. And so by personifying, if you like, the waste or the thing that you're trying to get away from, as these two hapless battery changes, we all felt was a kind of hopefully was going to be a surefire hit. So that ultimately is where we landed on.
- [27:33]
Fergus O'Carroll
So for the listener, I want to describe the spots. The first spot, we open up in an office, a corner office, where this guy is coming in and talking to his boss, and we're led to believe that the boss is probably the head of procurement. At the same time, our team characters, our two battery charger characters, are up on a ladder trying to change the battery in the clock above her credenza. And some sort of comedic commotion happens there. The spot closes with replace less, save more. The second spot opens up in a hospital hallway where you're seeing our two characters and you're seeing a bunch of doctors walking up and down the down the hallway. Now our battery characters are crouched over, walking alongside the doctors, trying to change the battery in the doctor's beepers as they're still walking up and down the corridors. And again, the tagline plays at the end of that one other spot that's not gonna be played here is another spot where you've got three urinals and on the left side and on the right side are our two characters and in the middle is somebody else. And we see that the R2 battery charger characters are passing batteries back and forth between themselves right in front of the guy in the middle, and they're changing the battery chargers or the batteries in the actual urinals. And again, it closes with the same replace less, save more tag.
- [29:02]
Keith Browning
We could save money if we switch to long lasting pro cell batteries, then we won't have to pay for a full time battery changer.
- [29:07]
Fergus O'Carroll
Wait, back up. We pay for a full time battery changer?
- [29:12]
Keith Browning
We do, ma'am.
- [29:30]
Neil Godber
Hey.
- [29:32]
Fergus O'Carroll
Morning.
- [29:33]
Neil Godber
Morning.
- [29:33]
Fergus O'Carroll
It.
- [29:37]
Steve Pilcher
So I think the initial work that we saw, to be honest, it looked Very corporate. It looked like something that was expected from a B2B brand. And it was delivering on the message and it was, you know, rationally, it was there, but it just wasn't cutting through. And actually conversations that went up to our CEO was just give me something that's more disruptive. Let's take what we've learned in retail. Let's take what we know about how well humor works in advertising in general, and let's take all those learnings that we've got on B2B marketing, which is that, you know, counter to what we maybe thought before, which is B2B is very rational. It's all claims and it's all like, you know, prove to me, you know, your superiority. Actually, B2B buyers are also humans and they're also, you know, they find emotion and humor very appealing. So it was actually quite early on after that feedback that the whole battery changer campaign was. Was presented. And I mean, I've spent 15 years of. In Duracell creative reviews where we've gone, you know, we've reviewed work and we've gone round after round. And I have to say, this was one of the. Where Neil and the team pitched the work. And it was one of those, yeah, we're buying that. Let's go. Let's move forward. Not. Here's a few things I like. Here's what I don't. Can you go in and fix this? It was really. We love this work. Let's go.
- [31:19]
Fergus O'Carroll
Talk about the 3D miniature figures you created of the guys that were featured in the TV spots.
- [31:26]
Neil Godber
So given that we know that you're paying extra for these guys, these battery changes we created almost like, you know, like mini sort of Star wars figures. Like, they're about that size. And we said, every time you're buying a pack of batteries, we then attached this appendage, which was a little battery changer, man. Just so it was like absolutely concrete. You know, buying these cheap batteries, you are having to buy additional labor. So we sent that out to the audience again just to kind of have a bit of a laugh.
- [31:55]
Fergus O'Carroll
So that's. And I love this idea. So just to describe it, Listener. It's like an action figure that you'd buy at a toy store.
- [32:01]
Neil Godber
Character. I've got one on my desk. Yeah.
- [32:04]
Fergus O'Carroll
I mean, it's amazing looking. And you people can see it on our. On our website, on this episode's page. But are you saying that. So that was when they bought Pro Sell or. Or were you saying that you're going to need this, which is that extra labor, as you said. Tell me.
- [32:19]
Neil Godber
Yeah, we wanted to make the point that. So one of the early concepts that the creatives came up with was it was a shot. It was a scene in a shop. You know, there's like, whatever they're called, the little conveyor belts where you put your products and you scan them out.
- [32:32]
Fergus O'Carroll
Oh, right, the grocery store. Right. Yep.
- [32:34]
Neil Godber
Yeah, yeah. And as you're scanning, it's like. And one of the bibs is some batteries. And then you see these boots come into shot. And then it's a whole man that gets. That rolls along the conveyor belts, and they kind of scan him out. And it's the big point. It's just really funny. So it was there to make the point that when you're buying these batteries, you don't know it, but you also are going to have to pay for the cost of the labor.
- [32:57]
Fergus O'Carroll
That's actually a produced spot.
- [32:59]
Neil Godber
Oh, no, that was an early thought.
- [33:01]
Fergus O'Carroll
Oh, okay. I hadn't seen that one. That's what I was thinking. That's a great idea.
- [33:05]
Neil Godber
Yeah, that'll be next year, maybe.
- [33:06]
Fergus O'Carroll
But you should have done that one, Steve.
- [33:08]
Neil Godber
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:10]
Steve Pilcher
So we didn't have that spot exactly. But what we did, we did have a lot of assets which were showing this, you know, this. This pack where it's like here we used to do on Duracell. And a lot of the battery companies did the same thing. You would have your. Your batteries and then a gift with it. Right. So it was kind of playing on that. It's like, here's the batteries that you paid for. But, oh, boy, you've also paid for this labor on top. And that was really disruptive. In a bunch of static formats, we had it in some digital banners. We even bought this guy to trade shows. So with our sales teams, we'd go to trade shows across North America, and we have this giant build out of that action figure pack. And, you know, it was really disruptive because people are like, what's this all about? You got batteries there, but who's this guy? And then the battery change would actually start speaking to attendees at the trade show as they were walking past and grab them, get them into our booth.
- [34:04]
Fergus O'Carroll
So that is a super, super idea. Yeah, it's well worth seeing. Steve, were there any other sort of highlights from the comms strategy that you used to ensure that you were getting to the right people? Because the procurement person, I believe, was your primary target.
- [34:25]
Steve Pilcher
Yeah, exactly. And that was one of the areas that we had to Be pretty choiceful, right? Because my friends in retail, they've got deeper pockets than we have in B2B. So we had to be really tight with our targeting. And so yeah, we really focused on procurement across the target industry verticals. We zeroed in on a couple of the industries like hospitality which was disproportionate focus also for the sales team. And as well we made sure that on top of the, you know, whilst we had that content going out and our, you know, our procurement target was seeing that on, you know, video media, CTV, programmatic etc. But that we, that also flowed into the trade communications as well. And actually what we found was that as a result of it we got disproportionate support with a lot of our distributor partners because whilst maybe as a brand in terms of their total portfolio, we might not be as big and mighty as others because they loved the campaign and they loved the marketing we were doing, they wanted to jump on that and support it and do things with us.
- [35:39]
Fergus O'Carroll
So for our last few minutes, let's talk about the impact on number one the brand and then number two on the business.
- [35:46]
Neil Godber
Let me start with the key performance indicators and Steve can carry on. So up front what we saw very quickly was the average engagement rate that people had with the content that we were putting out was huge versus the industry average. So that was very encouraging. Because it's a smaller brand and because it's a B2B brand, we are not afforded the same sorts of data, tools, techniques that, that if you like major league B2C brands can often get their hands on. We also have brand tracking. So the brand tracking would show that at tomorrow top of mind awareness we managed to increase by 7%. We also managed to build brand equity including things like longevity. Also in terms of value for money, we also managed to build those sorts of metrics really strongly. If you look at immediate short term behavioral change, we measured that in terms of, of submissions from the cost calculator. So we improved that or we increased that by 400 applications, which in this market that is good work. We also tracked it's declared but people who would say that they bought procell most often and we saw that over the year that went up by 14% which is a fantastic score because that's.
- [37:06]
Fergus O'Carroll
Is that for one thing that we always ask guests here because sometimes people say 14%. Is that 14% increase over your baseline or is it 14 points? Meaning is it like 14, is that 14%? 14 points of growth. Okay, that's great.
- [37:20]
Neil Godber
Yeah. Yeah, sorry, sorry. And then finally if you look at sales and you look at share of market, absolute numbers are commercially sensitive. But if you were to index where we were before we moved from 100 to 112, so we grew sales. And then lastly if you look at share of market growth. So just to benchmark where we stand versus the rest of the competition, we grew share of market at a rate of 10% per annum. So we've tried to do as much as we can to draw a line of causation from the comms to the brand or attitudes through to behavior through to sales and share of market.
- [38:00]
Steve Pilcher
One additional lead indicator which we were, were actually particularly proud of was on value for money because as we talked where we're charging a price premium and we did have this perception of procell's an expensive brand and we managed to reduce that quite Significantly by about 15 points, the value for money attribute improved. But it's true that the, you know, probably one of the biggest challenges we've had is exact attribution of the marketing plan to sales. Right. Because we don't have access to things like mmm and because of the way that the way the batteries are bought through third party distributes, it's very difficult to attribute. Exactly. Okay. This marketing campaign had this direct impact on, on sales. So this was really our, our first major push into communicating the brand with paid media. And there's, I would say there was a healthy degree of skepticism as we went into it from stakeholders within the company. And I think now the procell brand is in all of those conversations with Duracell when it comes to how are we going to support the brand with marketing and the importance of growing the brand year on year it is.
- [39:17]
Fergus O'Carroll
Steve Pilcher is Duracell global Brand Director working on the procell brand. He's in Geneva. And Neil Godber, Executive Strategy Director at VML uk, he is in London. So thank you both. Great story. I love all the work. And so people can go onto our website onstrategyshowcase.com see the work and particularly see these action figures, how they've been used in display ads and in promotions. It's a super smart idea and the films are terrific. Thank you both.
- [39:50]
Neil Godber
Thank you very much.
- [39:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
And we'll see everyone on the next episode.