First, Build Your Brand Digitally—The Target and Brand Session

<Table of Contents>
▼Ⅰ Cultivating Brands with Small Steps
▼Ⅱ Avoid Pre-Defining Your Target Audience
▼Ⅲ Verifying the Volume of Potential Targets

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Ⅰ Cultivating Brands with Small Starts

CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers), Marketing Directors, and Brand Managers (hereafter referred to as "CMOs, etc.") must continuously nurture their brands.

Recently, we've received many inquiries like this:

"We want to launch the brand using digital with a small start, then grow it using an agile approach."

*Agile = Dividing development into short cycles, repeatedly preparing and testing within a fixed budget

More CMOs and others now recognize that while launching campaigns with mass advertising like TV commercials from the outset can yield significant returns in awareness and sales growth, the risk of failure is also substantial.

In contrast, digital allows for detailed target segmentation, enabling tailored advertising messages per segment. It also provides various response data from the target audience (ad clicks, landing page/site visits, purchase data, etc.), making effectiveness verification much easier.

In other words, digital advertising can be launched with a smaller budget compared to mass advertising, and its cost-effectiveness is easier to calculate. It can be considered the optimal approach for launching and nurturing a brand.

This time, we'll explore how to nurture brands in a "small start," "agile," and "sustainable" way—approaches unique to digital.

Ⅱ Don't Pre-determine Your Target Audience

What should you focus on when running digital ads aimed at growing a brand? Let's consider the example of the automatic cleaning robot mentioned in Part 1.

Initially, the primary target for the robotic vacuum cleaner was "DINKs" (Dual Income, No Kids). Suppose we then set new target candidates: "Active Moms" who value their careers and hobbies but also want to thoroughly handle household chores without cutting corners, and "Senior Couples who started keeping pets after retirement."

First, it's crucial not to over-define new target candidates from the outset when starting small with digital. Test your hypotheses by actually trialing these targets digitally. Then, observe the compatibility between the target and the brand, and continuously scale up efforts for those targets that show good fit.

Another point to note is that simply communicating the optimal product features based on the target profile yields weak advertising results. Merely appealing to product features is something competitors can also do, making differentiation difficult.

As discussed in Part 2, it's crucial not just to understand the target profile, but also to consider "how to build a relationship between the target and the brand." An approach that considers target insights and a unique relationship with the brand creates powerful differentiation from competitors.

The goal is creative development that incorporates building a relationship between the target audience and the brand – something competitors cannot easily replicate.

For example, assume the insight for the target "senior pet owners" is that they "consider their pets as family members." Rather than simply promoting it as an "automatic cleaning robot that effectively removes pet hair," communicate that it is a "brand of automatic cleaning robots that values family time, including pets." The key is first getting the target audience to think, "If it's a product from a brand that thinks this way, I might consider it."

This approach, building brand affinity based on such insights, is an area where planners and creatives primarily focused on mass advertising excel. Leverage their expertise as much as possible in the digital world too.

Profiling that compiles target demographic data and data on attitudes and values is useful for media planning. However, it is insufficient when developing communication strategies. It is necessary to explore target insights and develop unique brand messages that resonate with those insights.

Ⅲ Verifying the Volume of Potential Targets

After grasping target insights and considering the relationship with the brand and messaging, it's time to conduct test campaigns using digital video ads and display ads (banner ads) to verify whether there is sufficient volume of new potential targets.

In addition to the existing target "DINKs," we deliver ads targeting "Active Moms" and "Senior Couples with Pets," measuring click-through rates and conversion rates.

A key consideration here is the "auto-optimization" feature in digital advertising.

Recent digital ad management often offers many auto-optimization options, such as increasing delivery to segments with high click-through rates and positive responses, or delivering more creative expressions that perform well.

In the example above, this leads to an overemphasis on evaluating segments that already include the established target DINKs and the creative expressions that work well for them.

Therefore, for test campaigns like this one, aimed at exploring the volume of new potential targets, it is necessary to proceed with a "plan to manually distribute creative concepts evenly across all target segments" with the cooperation of the digital advertising operations team. Adjust to ensure distribution volume does not skew heavily toward any single segment.

Furthermore, while target profiles are useful references when considering digital ad segment delivery, the segments actually available for delivery may not perfectly match the target segments we envision.

For example, even if you intended to deliver to "Active Moms" or "Senior Couples with Pets," the actual segments might be "Women in their 20s-30s, Business Professionals" or "60+ with Interest in Pet Content (not necessarily pet owners)."

Therefore, after the test delivery, conduct more precise effectiveness verification. This can be done by utilizing DMP tags or conducting surveys among DMP ID targets to confirm whether the people who clicked on the ads (video ads, display ads, etc.) were truly "senior pet owners."

After this trial phase, verify whether "active moms" or "senior couples with pets" are sufficiently viable candidates for target expansion.

Once we gain confidence that the brand can be cultivated not only for DINKs but also as one that values time for diverse family structures, we will expand into real-world events, outdoor advertising, collaborations with the pet industry, content development, PR, and ultimately consider mass advertising like TV commercials.

Through repeated testing and verification, we will discover new targets and their insights while carefully developing brand value and messaging to grow the brand.

CMOs and others are expected to expand the target audience while analyzing data and to continuously grow the brand significantly through brand sessions.