Success in eCommerce: Reckitt relies on customer-centric strategies

With the rise of eCommerce, it’s now one of the most challenging, yet opportune times for marketers. There’s booming data about what our customer want, how and where they buy, and what impacts them throughout the buying journey.

Brands need to find ways to utilize the best insights. They need to tailor content that resonates with their audiences and use the right tools to reach  the right customer.

Reckitt Benckiser (Reckitt), the parent company of leading health and hygiene brands, including Dettol, Durex, Move Free, Strepsils, Vanish, Woolite and more, has found success with its data and content-driven strategies that put customers at the heart of what it does.

Leveraging valuable insights from data

Anchoring its growth strategies to consumer demand, Reckitt analyses big data. They intend to learn insights about its target consumers which allows serve the creation of strategies to maximise outcomes.

One notable success was Reckitt Hong Kong’s “Customer Review eCommerce campaign”. Recognised at the Asia eCommerce Awards 2023, the campaign illustrated Reckitt’s capability to turn shopper profile data into actionable insights that reshaped its advertising strategies.

With the insights garnered, Reckitt identified a potential group of young consumers. Those possess less experience with household cleaning, and built content that increased their confidence in its household hygiene brands. For example, Dettol, Vanish, and Woolite.

Creating content that resonates with the target audience

Consumers are becoming more selective, and only content that speaks to their hearts and needs matters. Reckitt embraced this change and redefined its content strategy to create content that talks to and resonates with target consumers.

In the “Customer Review eCommerce campaign”, Reckitt incorporated genuine user reviews and adopted a social commerce approach to feature honest user feedback, ratings, and product usage tips. This strategy, centred around authenticity, achieved higher engagement and generated a more profound impact, and thus confidence, among customer.

Reaching the targeted consumers precisely and effectively

To make the redesigned content more influential, hitting the target audience through proper channels at the appropriate time is crucial. In the following, we take one award-winning campaign as an example. Reckitt expanded its ad targeting to include interest filters that engaged light and younger user segments and excluded current regular online purchasers.

This precise targeting strategy helped the brand effectively drive a significant fivefold increase in return on advertising spend in just one month. Eventually, gaining recognition with a bronze in the “Best eCommerce Campaign – Content Marketing” category. Further, they got shortlisted in the category “Best Use of Analytics and Data Insights” at the Asia eCommerce Awards 2023.

Staying consumer-centric to achieve greater success

Excellent marketing always puts consumers first. To continue leading the market, Reckitt seeks new opportunities to break through and succeed while staying consumer-centric.

In Reckitt Hong Kong’s recent collaboration with HKTVmall, the leading online shopping platform in Hong Kong, the team faced challenges. Those emerged due to the censorship of intimate wellness product thumbnails. Consumers were required to confirm they were 18 years or above to access these products. Despite the limitations, the team sustained a positive spirit throughout the collaboration and sought out different opportunities to help.

Reckitt swiftly leveraged HKTVmall’s thematic campaign – “Mom’s Testimonial”. This was directed to tactfully broaden Durex’s product exposure through its extensive MTR OOH advertisements across the city. Together with exclusive online offers and in-app advertising that extended the product’s reach among the target audience.

This demonstrated Reckitt’s unique ability to establish strong strategic partnerships with key customers such as HKTVmall, But also to overcome challenges such as limited product exposure, and still reach quantifiable goals.

Reckitt’s strategy was successful in building shared success through the effective and smart use of both parties’ resources. This includes the advertising opportunities in the thematic campaign and Durex’s unique offers for consumers. Together these drove up to 50% month-on-month growth in sales and over 40% month-on-month growth in the number of orders on HKTVmall. There was also a 10% uplift in sales and a more than 24% increase in basket size, thanks to these offers.

This is again a stellar example of how Reckitt has turned challenges into opportunities through swift responses to market change; and engaged targeted consumers through redefined strategies and partnerships.

2023 was a year full of learnings, breakthroughs, collaborations, and successes. Reckitt is set to leverage this streak in 2023 and chart a course towards new frontiers of innovation in 2024.

In pursuit of this goal, the company is determined to strengthen its partnership with HKTVmall and actively seek new collaborations that deliver mutually beneficial outcomes and, most importantly, more engaging consumer experiences.