Conquering the ‘Last Mile’ for Consumer Packaged Goods

How can a brand stand out?

This has been the perennial problem that every brand has been vying to solve, since the dawn of advertising. But that’s where traditional advertising’s reach usually ends, either at the awareness or the consideration stage. A consumer may well know about your brand, and may even love your brand, but in order to cross into the crucial purchase stage, brands need to be able to conquer that ‘last mile’.

How can a brand sell?

A brand has to maximise existing opportunities and make the transition to purchase as convenient, necessary and seamless as possible, by first understanding its shoppers. Shopper Marketing interprets the needs of shoppers, which stores they can be influenced in, and opportune moments for making purchases. Successful purchases come from applying these insights along the path to purchase action — the ‘last mile’ that every other form of advertising primes.

This ‘last mile’ is particularly important for consumer packaged goods (CPG), because the vast majority of CPG purchases still occur in brick-and-mortar stores. Here’s the problem though — most CPG brands don’t have dedicated brand locations. Instead, they’re spread across various retailers at many different locations. For example, think of Wall’s ice cream. The brand does not have a standalone flagship store, but instead distributes its products amongst various convenience stores and supermarkets such as 7/11. Most of us will pass through such stores without even knowing that Wall’s ice cream is sold there, even if you are a fan of it or may have been inclined to purchase.

Wall’s x Waze Ads

To address the issue, Wall’s teamed up with Waze Ads and managed to drive unprecedented sales results! A part of Waze, the free, real-time social navigation and mobility app that leverages its community as its most important asset, Waze Ads works by tapping into a large and highly-engaged audience to move consumers along the path to purchase in real-time.

The beauty of this loyal community of users, is that they are already on-the-go when they are using the app. This means that closing the literal gap between them and the point of purchase becomes so much easier — chances are, there are several opportunities for it right on their path, which they would have never known about!

Increasing Visibility

As we’ve established, CPG brands need a little help with awareness of real-time availability, and Waze Ads has two different formats to help with this. Firstly, it provides CPG brands with a branded pin, a strong point of visibility for users. These pins can even be co-branded with its parent retailer, and present a banner with promotions and details, when tapped upon. Secondly, CPG brands and their retailers float up to the top of a search bar according to the proximity of the search, through the promoted search function.

Tapping on driver insights

Waze doesn’t just increase visibility: it has a keen understanding of the driving patterns and behaviours of its users, which we know is invaluable in Shopper Marketing. For the Wall’s campaign in Indonesia, Waze had an accurate insight into the chaotic amount of traffic at the end of the Ramadan month of fasting. Nearly 30 million Indonesians flood the roads every year, travelling back to their families to celebrate the festive period. This gives us a larger captive audience to engage while on the roads, but it also means that there is a need to cut through the noise, especially when drivers are overwhelmed with frustration at the gridlocked traffic. Through Waze Ads, Wall’s was able to step in to lend a much-needed dose of cheer and joy to weary travellers, and remind them to take a break and enjoy a Wall’s ice cream while on the road.

The Results

Wall’s campaign with Waze Ads was tremendously successful, with tangible results. The brand saw a 3.3% increase in sales as compared to its last festive campaign, got over 25,000 store leads from Waze Ads in just over 2 weeks, and secured 87,400 engagements on Waze!

And just how did Wall’s and Waze Ads make these travellers smile?

See for yourself in the video below!