Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase





2022 | |

Finding Light in a Dark Space Through Marketplace Intelligence

Advertiser: Abbott Malaysia
Brand: Abbott Nutrition
Creative Agency: N/A
Credits: Fuziatul Syafawani Fatkhurrozi - iProspect Malaysia, Performance Marketing Specialist Filip Adamski - iProspect Malaysia, Digital Director Sophia Ting - iProspect Malaysia, Account Manager Cyrus Yeoh - iProspect Malaysia, Account Director Carissa Morais - iProspect Malaysia, Account Manager Megat Iskandar Shahriman - iProspect Malaysia, Account Executive

Objective & Challenge
Most brands on ECommerce Marketplaces face the biggest challenge of having little to no visibility into performance and benchmarks of their Shop in Shop versus the competitions in their category. Abbott, the leader in infant and adult nutrition struggles with the same challenge of limited view on comparing their own brands with competitors’ product availability, prices, promotions, ratings & reviews, content, and search rankings for Shopee and Lazada. The Marketplace platforms are strict on not sharing these category and its players insights on the traffic and performance of the flagship stores with their brand partners. This leaves Abbott with the task of looking for external tools and technology solutions to help them plan their presence and eCommerce Marketplace strategy better.

Insight & Strategy
Due to COVID19 pandemic, purchasing behaviours have shifted and users turned to ecommerce channels and marketplaces for their daily shopping with over 46% increase in online shopping behaviour, that has sustained throughout the last 2 years of sporadic lockdowns. Lots of brands in the same category started to increase their investment in paid media to grow their digital stores traffic and build awareness about their ecommerce presence to capture conversion that has now shifted online. Digital advertising space overnight become overwhelmed with ads promoting key marketplace events and brand promotions. However, increasing paid media investment at its own did not result in proportional growth in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). Increased competition from retailers resulted in declining conversion rates and price wars. In order to understand ecommerce ecosystem holistically, brands needed intelligence on key marketplaces itself. Pricing strategies, competitors, stocks availability, promotions, reviews management, search engine optimisation, UX and UI design, conversion rates became key differentiators when competing in the marketplace space and brands needed to expand beyond paid media only strategy. However it can be very difficult getting the right data from marketplaces to increase store performance.

Execution
In the time when all brands advertising and media focus shifted to ecommerce and marketplaces, we had to get ahead of competition and look at the ecosystem holistically not only from media point of view. Implementing our proprietary Marketplace Intelligence tool helped us scale up our Digital Commerce Performance. With this intelligence tool, we were able to analyse and optimise our store discovery and conversion across 6 key areas: 1. Search Rank Tracking 2. Product Page Quality Score 3. Keyword Research 4. A/B testing 5. Competitor Store Intelligence 6. Competitor Product Intelligence We have gained valuable insight into our own, competitors’ and retailers’ performance and pricing strategies. We were able to make decision on how to optimize our Shops both onsite and offsite for better performance and differentiate from competitors and retailers. Leveraging valuable first, second and third party data using various helped us in creating and implementing 360 degree marketplace strategy across owned, earned and paid media that helped us win in always on and tactical campaigns.

Effectiveness
Across both marketplace and all brands: 1. We achieved 3 digit growth in total shop visits H1 2021 vs the same period previous year. 2. Both official Marketplace brand stores’ revenue grew double digit in H1 2021, while we managed to maintain similar levels of paid media expenditure. 3. All other perforce metrics and performance indicators (avg. basket size, ROAS, traffic, etc) improved in the first half of 2021 vs the same period previous year, making H1 2021 the performing period for ecommerce to date. 4. Our success was also confirmed when comparing our performance vs key competitors. Our Brands managed to be listed in top 3 positions during all key sales campaigns across Formula Milk and Groceries category.