Teh Kotak Brand Exploratory: Qualitative Research
Hello welcome back to my Medium! After a long journey of searching for the brand inventory, finally we got to move into the brand exploratory phase. According to Keller on Strategic Brand Management Book, “Although the supply-side view revealed by the brand inventory is useful, actual consumer perceptions, of course, may not necessarily reflect those the marketer intended. Thus, the second step of the brand audit is to provide detailed information about what consumers actually think of the brand by means of the brand exploratory. The brand exploratory is research directed to understanding what consumers think and feel about the brand and act toward it in order to better understand sources of brand equity as well as any possible barriers”.
Based on the statement above, it is important to dig through company archives to uncover reports that may have been buried, and perhaps even long forgotten, but that contain insights and answers to a number of important questions or suggest new questions that may still need to be posed. To strengthen my analysis it is also useful to interview internal personnel to gain an understanding of their beliefs about consumer perceptions for the brand and competitive brands.
The internal personnel that I will interview are the brand team of Teh Kotak itself, because they know all about the crafting of Teh Kotak brand. The brand team that I had interviewed with are two people, Mas Kemal and Mba Cindy. I need a diversity of opinion that typically emerges from these internal interviews that serve several functions, increasing the likelihood that useful insights or ideas will be generated, as well as pointing out any inconsistencies or misconceptions that may exist for the brand.
Although these preliminary activities are useful, additional research is often required to better understand how customers shop for and use different brands and what they think and feel about them. To allow marketers to cover a broad range of issues and to pursue some in greater depth, the brand exploratory often employs qualitative research techniques as a first step, followed by more focused and definitive survey-based quantitative research.
Special to this page, I am going to conduct brand exploratory research through the quantitative method. But before exploring, as you know that I already conduct brand inventory before, so I have to propose one of the problems faced by Teh Kotak. The main problem that is faced by Teh Kotak is the low engagement rate of their Instagram account, meanwhile Mas Kemal stated that Teh Kotak mainly use Instagram for their advertising and promotion activities. Next thing I will analyze is their campaign conducted in other social media such as Tiktok, for a benchmarking I use the biggest competitor social media as a comparison and to enhance my analysis I will also rely on the analytics and statistical information.
I don’t analyze the ratings and reviews from the online marketplace such as Shopee, JD.ID, Tokopedia etc, because these platforms are not meant to make an engagement for the customer, so there will be less insight generated from this platform, and the purchase from the marketplace have been influenced by many factors to buy, and remember that Teh Kotak is a low-involvement products, so people mostly but it because it is their habitual things.
Let’s analyze! The low of engagement rate is being proven by IGBlade one of Instagram data analytics platform, I found out that @idtehkotak don’t have a good engagement rate, the similar accounts as Teh Kotak have 3.72% engagement on average and Teh Kotak have only 0.26% , the average likes is also gain 156.8, meanwhile another similar account are able to gain 2.2K and the average comments only 7.8.
I am doing the comparison between @idtehkotak Instagram analytics with their biggest competitor @pucukharumid where they could be in the rank #1 of the brand top index and how is their engagement on Instagram. We could see that their competitor has an engagement rate above the average, they have an A+ grades meanwhile Teh Kotak only obtains E as their current grades. I analyze deeper about their Instagram post, the one who is posting more consistently is Teh Kotak, but for the content and visual, Teh Pucuk wins. The color palette that Teh Pucuk uses is very consistent and has a great visual style as well.
Market of RTD tea in general include Teh Kotak , targeting younger audiences with age 15–40, with teenage as its core. As the market is currently saturated with hundreds of RTD brands, it seems strong players are hard to beat. The communication in advertising became generic with the quality, nature, and good taste as their key communication. To enter the clutter, and understand the consumer well. Teh Kotak has been trying to use different ways of communication to tap younger audiences by using online platforms such as Instagram.
According to Statista, the highest share of Instagram users in Indonesia, 36.3 percent, were between the ages of 18 to 24 years old and followed by 32.4% of user ages of 25 to 34. As of this date, there were approximately 77.19 million Instagram users in Indonesia, of which 51.8 percent were female and 48.2 percent male. Looking from the data it is wise enough of Teh Kotak to use Instagram as their main platform to conduct advertising and promotion because the majority of Instagram users is matched with the audiences they try to reach.
In this quantitative research, I used a netnography method to understand social interaction in contemporary digital communication context. We can see people’s interactions towards their network. That’s why it’s called ‘netnography’, ‘net’ stands for network. Netnography also means ethnography over the internet, this is useful because the internet could generate so much information and the spread is so much higher, it could be our primary data to explore further about the customer perception towards our brand. The data collection of Teh Kotak’s customer perception will be considered naturalistic because the interactions are not planned and not being made up, so we can know what’s on the customer’s mind. Rich in contextual events, we can’t be oversimplified. The brand response can be either negative or positive, and every comment leads to one context, we have to see the root cause of the problem by looking at what context they are not satisfied with the brand. From identifying the root causes of the problem it can help us to know from which touchpoints should we improve the brand.
There are several techniques in conducting netnography, we could do an interview to the customer and collect the data directly, or we can also capture and record and then we collect the data and look at the words that appear most frequently or participate in the conversation and seem to be involved in the interaction. I will only analyze their Instagram activities in the timeframe from the beginning of 2020 until now, because every year, Teh Kotak has different marketing efforts tailored to what is trending and relevant to younger audiences and also based on the evaluation of their marketing activities in the previous year. So I think it is very relevant to analyze their marketing effort only from this year, to increase the engagement rate and suggestion for their marketing program on its effectiveness and efficiency.
The image that I attached above are sourced from Instagram, I try to search for the customer owned touchpoint by looking the post from the hashtag #TehKotak, by looking at the hashtag that isn’t connected with something with the brand initiated touchpoints, and we can see the form of free expression in either positive and negative way, and honest brand experience. The positive brand experiences that are spreaded massively to the online mass media can be considered as a brand advocacy and shows how much people are satisfied with Teh Kotak, because people won’t be promoting the product that they didn’t like, right?
From the data above I can interpret that people love the taste of Teh Kotak, some of them even promote Teh Kotak for its sweetness and freshness. The coding of these evidence is the product taste and quality. The implications of this evidence is that Teh Kotak should always maintain their product quality because it indirectly enriches Teh Kotak’s brand equity.
I conducted further research by looking at comments from the voluntary customer post about Teh Kotak, and surprisingly I see that many people are satisfied and loyal to Teh Kotak products. They also attract wider audiences and generate even more brand advocacy because the people they follow have the same interest and taste for Teh Kotak brand and it directly improves the positive online sentiment for Teh Kotak. I see a great potential from these micro influencers to engage more with people more personally to gain more engagement from the targeted audiences.
The sentiment showed how people perceive the Teh Kotak brand, and fortunately the brand itself receives so much love and positive mentions looking at the analytics from Brand24. Teh Kotak is also doing their brand tracking research by considering several factors. Teh Kotak brand tracking is usually done by measuring their brand awareness, ads awareness, ads perception, BUMO (Brand Used Most Often) rate and channel to purchase. Teh Kotak usually conducts their Brand Tracking / U&A (Usage and Attitude) once every 2–3 years, unlike the other big brands that could conduct that test once every year.
Based on the JakPat, Teh Kotak is one of the products that is used most often, it shows that they have quite strong brand loyalty. Actually, it is very reasonable considering that Teh Kotak is the pioneer of RTD tea box and this brand has been made for a long time with very qualified credentials, but when it comes to the awareness, they are ranked #4. So this is in line with my research that I already mentioned above, that competitors’ social media the way they craft the content and advertise is better than Teh Kotak, everything is super connected and strengthens the major problem that I think needs to be prioritizely solved.
Teh Kotak have their own websites, Instagram, Twitter, and also Youtube. We can all agree that one of the strongest brand communication channels of Teh Kotak is currently their 2 uniques campaign on Youtube which I already mentioned, that could be classified as their kind of ATL brand communications which is a great strategy to implement when they want to target teenagers as their core audience. SES is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person’s work experience and of an individual’s or family’s economic and social position in relation to others. This classification could help us determine the strategy and direction of movement of a brand.
They meant to tap younger audiences, by using ATL brand communication. What is ATL brand communication anyway? “ATL” stands for “Above The Line”, meaning that the advertising is going to be deployed around a wider target audience, using different kinds of media such as television (TVC), radio, or billboards. ATL is most applicable when a product is directed for a broader spectrum of consumers.
ATL brand communication used “music” as a platform to enter the younger segmen as we see music as a universal and safe way. For this year campaign was using Arsy Widianto , featuring hits once popular song titled ‘Cerita Cinta’, twisted became “Cerita Rasa‘’ through ATL ada TVC Placement di TV Terrestrial, Pay TV, ataupun special build in di TV and even TVC Placement in TV Cable.
The Ads Awareness was high, and the campaign was considered successful and generated likeability. The last campaigns were considered unique and the brand was also awarded as one of the most successful ‘Ads Leaderboard’ by Youtube. This campaign has an ultimate sentence, that is “Karena setiap cerita pasti punya rasa, sama seperti rasa Teh Kotak yang punya banyak cerita untuk kamu”.
Aside from the awareness, through this ATL brand communications they have an objective to increase the sales of products, because it is Teh Kotak’s biggest marketing investment, there are so many parameter when TVC is released and quite hard to measure, so in order to make it more strategic, the materials that will be conveyed are measured in the before and after the TVC released.
Teh Kotak also makes an event and experiences by using the current media that are currently happening, TikTok. They conduct a giveaway for 3 winners by creating a challenge to make a video with Teh Kotak brand effect that they created on TikTok. Follow the dance moves of the reference video that already been provided by Teh Kotak, download the video and upload it in their Instagram account, followed by the hashtag #CeritaRasaTikTok.
Are you wondering why they asked them to upload their video on Instagram instead of their TikTok account itself? Because based on the Teh Kotak programmatic advertising they found out that their main target audience, younger generation use Instagram frequently rather than Tiktok, even though that TikTok is also rising because of the interactive and fun making video features.
I see the customer perception through the comment made by audiences on Tiktok, and I made several interpretations through this marketing effort. First, many of the audiences respond very supportive about the good taste and the packaging consistency of their product, that lead again about the product taste and quality, and the implication of quality control maintenance. Second, I saw people commenting about the dances and songs that don’t blend, and people didn’t like the people that are promoting Teh Kotak, it can lead to a negative sentiment, so next time Teh Kotak will be more careful in reposting a people with an self-branding or image of a person, is it fit with the brand? Will people love it or hate it? So they should be more careful in using the public figures because they could potentially lose even more engagement in the future.
The followers of @idtehkotak on Tiktok is 34.9K, and according to Analisa.io, we can see that their engagement rate is 0.21%. In general, Tiktok’s audience is more reactive than Instagram’s. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub , profiles on tiktok have the following average of 10K — 100K usually have an engagement rate in the amount of 8.43%. We can conclude that the campaign itself hasn’t been effective enough to improve the engagement rate, which is common in the low-involvement product. Teh Kotak is a low involvement product. We could identify the influencing factors of low involvement products. First, from the nature of the product Teh Kotak is inexpensive and non-durable. Second, because the product has a low price, consumers didn’t invest less time and effort in making a purchase decision. Third, low involvement products targeted a mass consumer and most of whom are cost-conscious, middle class consumers.
Therefore, this is very important for brands to check the impact of influencers on their community before setting up a partnership as part of a campaign and then to measure the effectiveness of their collaboration. Many users of TikTok want to keep things real even if they have a sponsor, and they work a lot on their personal story, so they get more sympathy and engagement. So for the implications, Teh Kotak could consider more of an emotional marketing through story approach for their brand communications in order to enhance their engagement and response.
Third, I saw a lot of comment of a collaboration request between Teh Kotak brand with TXT, most of them are coming to the Teh Kotak social media, because they see an advertisement on the video clip made by TXT, plus Nu Green Tea is having a collaboration with NCT and their brand performance increase significantly, I got this information from Mas Kemal, and for the further evidence, I attached the photos below, shown that the engagement rate for Nu Green Tea is very high, it is about 6,5 times higher than the similar accounts, the average likes is also 6,4 times higher, and the average comment is 4,2 times higher also. Great choices of brand ambassadors since the Korean Wave hitting Indonesia so hard, the NCT fans love to buy products that are associated with their idol. I attached one of the examples of their competitor marketing effort, there’s a talented person, Haechan is about to drink Nu Green Tea, this is a part of enjoyment shot, and brand introduction through talent/idol, and Nu Green Tea act as a ‘hero’ in the advertisement. Of course in using this famous talent, there’s a big investment that must be borne by the company. Not all of the companies are able to do that, we must be wise and see the capabilities of Teh Kotak and search for opportunities that could be used and match it with the company resources that are available. So from these interpretations we conclude that the coding is the selection of public figures, marketing campaign approach, and quality control maintenance.
Teh Kotak already sees a great opportunity in approaching a big community that consists of their targeted audiences, for example K-Pop community. Not a long time ago they created a K-Pop giveaway, the prize will be three albums of Korean boy bands. The requirement of joining this giveaway is by making a creation of the new taste of Teh kotak, the creation can be formed in a picture, creative video, or simple recipe video. Teh Kotak is seeing this opportunity by seeing the competitor Nü Tea using NCT as their brand ambassador and the big impact caused by their ambassador.
So that Teh Kotak approaches them with K-Pop but in different ways, they obviously have to be wise yet creative in their digital marketing activity in order to attract the audiences. This giveaway has an objective not only creating awareness of Teh Kotak brand, but also to build an engagement that Teh Kotak is always close to them and fun. This can be classified as a customer initiated touchpoint, because Teh Kotak planned on what the customer will do in building contact with the company. Beside that they also created an intrinsic touchpoint where the interaction happens during the process of buying or using the brand, mostly connected with customer service and it creates emotion and feeling.
This is considered as a successful campaign of Teh Kotak because it receives 686 likes and 84 comments, that are exceeding the average likes and comments compared to the similar accounts, and we can see that the K-Pop community are very enthusiastic about this giveaway. The comment mostly showed that there is a big curiosity about the digital activity made by Teh Kotak, and also the enthusiasm of their K-Pop idols being highlighted in the post. From this interpretation, the coding I could generate is the enthusiasm of the approached community, and customer engagement towards the brand. The implications of this campaign showed that there’s a positive reaction to approaching the K-Pop fans community and I am actually a K-Pop fan myself, so I can relate how happy I am if the local brand collaborates or mentions my favorite idol. I think this is a great strategy to be continued in the future, they can differentiate the campaign by these kind of approaches.
The data that I collected is already saturated, which means I can’t get any insight anymore from the sites that I explore, so I think the analysis that I stated above are considered strongly equipped by statistical data, compared from the marketing activities conducted by other brands. Of course I pick the data accordingly to the proposed problem , I only choose the content and post that are meant to be engaging. From this exploratory research, I see how important it is to make relationships with the customers to help low-involvement products. Because in engaging with the customer and approaching the customer right based on their interest and distributing the content through the media that they often used, it will create more crafted and strategic marketing effort in order to generate better return on marketing investment (ROMI). To reach millions of customers, not only take care of the digital marketing activity but the distribution on the offline channel as well.
In brief, I am going to propose three solutions that could help Teh Kotak in reaching millions of Teh Kotak by engaging more with their customers. First, Teh Kotak should be more selective in choosing public figures that will promote their brand, choose the one that could generate positive sentiment for Teh Kotak. Second, for TikTok specifically, keep things real even if they have a sponsor, and they work a lot on their personal story, so create a more personal and story-based approach in order to get more sympathy and engagement. Third, they could continue to approach more communities by adjusting to their interest to create enthusiasm and high engagement towards the brand marketing activities.
References:
- TikTok influencer Engagement Rate calculator. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://pentos.co/free-tools/user-engagement-rate/
- Analisa.io. (n.d.). Teh Kotak TikTok Analytics Profile (@idtehkotak) by Analisa.io. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://analisa.io/profile-tiktok/idtehkotak
- (n.d) Retrieved September 13, 2020, fromhttp://tehkotak.com/jasmine.php
- Putri, A. (2020, September 06). Teh Kotak Brand Audit : Brand Credentials and Point-Of-Difference. Retrieved September 13, 2020, from https://medium.com/@alya_indira/teh-kotak-brand-audit-brand-credentials-and-point-of-difference-c3c5fa52912c
- ATL. (2020, July 11). Retrieved September 13, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATL_
- Putri, A. (2020, September 21). Teh Kotak Brand Communication, POP and POD. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://medium.com/@alya_indira/teh-kotak-brand-communication-pop-and-pod-165b87be519b
- Teh Pucuk Harum (@pucukharumid) on Instagram — IGBlade analytics and insights. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://igblade.com/instagram/pucukharumid
- Teh Kotak (@idtehkotak) on Instagram — IGBlade analytics and insights. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://igblade.com/instagram/idtehkotak
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- Keller, K. L., & Swaminathan, V. (2019). Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity, Global Edition (5th ed.). Pearson.
- Putri, A. (2020, October 11). Teh Kotak: Brand Touchpoints and Issues in Brand Communication. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://medium.com/@alya_indira/teh-kotak-brand-touchpoints-and-issues-in-brand-communication-3696c69054b7
- Department, P., & 23, S. (2020, September 23). Indonesia: Share of Instagram users by age 2020. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1078350/share-of-instagram-users-by-age-indonesia/
