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Part
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Brand Trust Building
Introduction
Some successful strategies brands have used to gain customer's trust are transparent marketing campaign, user-generated content, and combining digital self-service with a human-to-human interaction.
Findings
#1 — Transparent Marketing Campaign:
- The 2016 Label Insight Food Revolution Study found that transparency is a critical issue to gain customer trust for food brands in the US and it is indicated by nearly all respondents (91%) reported it is important to get transparency about what is their food and how it is made.
- The bakery-cafe chain company Panera Bread differentiated its brands from the public perspective and it took a progressive step by launching a marketing campaign "Food As It Should Be" in 2015.
- The campaign makes a big promise at the moment which is stopping using artificial ingredients by the end of 2016.
- The campaign ensures transparency on the menu that lists calories, ingredients, nutritional information for every item, animal welfare and positive impact report for the customer.
- To promote its transparency message, Panera utilizes TV ads and video ads, print, out-of-home, in-store point-of-purchase, digital, social and public relations, through online and offline media.
- The result of the Panera's campaign lead to the engagement with 1.5 million views on the brand’s YouTube channels as well as a strong financial result with 2016 total revenue increased 3% and earnings rose to 8%, better than the analysts' prediction.
#2 — User-Generated Content (UGC) Strategy:
- A survey from Olamic reveals that 65% of US respondents are interested to explore the information from UGC before shopping and 53% will be more likely to buy a product after seeing a positive user-generated image of the product online.
- The wearable gadget brand Amazfit tried to gain trust from US customers by employing UGC marketing strategy.
- The company adopted automation platform Stackla to build a community page for customers to shares their story with Amazfit products and generate dynamic social UGC from their customers and send to all subscribed emails every day.
- In the moment of Mother's Day, the company launched a Mom's of Amazfit campaign to share lessons how mothers are using Amazfit fitness trackers and stories from their customers and influencers.
- This UGC strategy is able to double page views of the company's website, increase sales by 29%, and grow their online audience by 7%.
#3 — Combining Digital Self-Service with Human-to-Human Interaction:
- A survey from customer engagement and analytics software company Calabrio reports that 74% of customers are more loyal to a business that gives the option to speak to a human.
- The leading US turkey brand Butterball has been successfully building multi-channel assistance from customer hot line, online channel, to Alexa voice assistant.
- By employing more than 50 experts from various background, the company receives more than 100,000 questions answered each season.
- The company consistently improves its largest Turkey producers in the US and its consistent combined marketing effort has resulted in the increasing market share from 25% of American Turkey in 2012 to more than 30% in 2016.
Research Strategy
We commenced our research by scouring credible avenues of information such as Harvard Business Review, MIT Business Review, and AdWeek. However, this research strategy proved futile because the reports published by these resources did not include any mention of branding strategies that were supported by some sort of success metrics. Most of them were explanatory concepts of branding and marketing to be implemented by companies.
We shifted gears and could locate some examples such as Panera Bread, Amazfit, and Butterball that depicted successful strategies brands are using to gain/retain customer trust. We concluded the research by gathering all indicators associated with the company's performance resulted from the strategy. Our research team found several cases from Marketing Daily, Stackla, and AdWeek that reported the effect on the financial performance as a result of the strategy implemented by these three brands namely, Panera Bread, Amazfit, and Butterball. To further enrich the findings, we have also included some statistics to establish the importance of adopting the recommended strategies. We cited some surveys and studies from companies such as Label Insight and Stackla to reinforce our research further.