🧐This Week
📆 In this week’s ZAG:
- How Bloom & Wild Drove 20M deliveries with challenger marketing
- Surreal, the cereal challenger gets celebrity endorsements… kind of.
- Twitter’s rebrand to X has seen a 48% drop in awareness
💐 Bloom & Wild
⭐️ How did Bloom & Wild invent a whole new category, drive 20M deliveries & 100,000 5-star reviews?
10 years in, Bloom & Wild have completely reinvented how we think about flowers and also gifting; they are a true depiction of what it means to go from a challenger brand to a true rival brand.
So how did they do it?
Let’s break it down:
✅ Ideas-led and Data-led
- Bloom & Wild’s unique approach to integrating their data team within the marketing team means they can drive insights and lead product development in a unique way.
- One thing you see quite often within challenger brands is this ability to ensure marketing is an innovation function, and Bloom & Wild have truly embodied this, creating a two-way street between creativity and data-led decisions.
- A great example of this is the ability to spot the cost of living trend in the data and be one of the first in the category to launch a bouquet for less than £20 which increased conversions.
✅ It’s not customer service, it’s customer delight
- Everything they do is focused on “delighting the customer”
- Phone and web teams are trained to respond to customer queries by doing “what they think is the right thing to do” instead of following a script. Inherently this creates a culture that is customer-centric and makes great customer service scaleable.
- From the unboxing experience to the length of time flowers last, they think of everything. In practice, that means making loads of small tweaks to the initial product offering. For example, they noticed customers wanted the flowers to last longer, so they started including two sachets of flower food in every box. Simple yet effective experiences that are driven by a passion to delight the customer.
- They don’t wait for things to go wrong - so on Mother’s Day, if they think your flower delivery will be late, they will just send another one out regardless if the first one arrives on time or not.
- This creates a memorable moment for the customer on the receiving end and improves LTV long-term.
✅ Convention doesn’t suit challengers
- It’s tempting to chase after every new opportunity as a challenger brand constantly searching for new innovation but it’s equally easy to destroy everything you’ve built with a misstep.
- So when the rest of D2C decided that bricks and mortar was the next frontier, Bloom & Wild tried it, but really quickly realized that approach was not actually right for them. The ability to control the brand and provide that “delightful” experience just wasn’t something they could control with their retail partners so they went against the grain and pulled back from retail.
- Another notable example was when they decided to buck the trend of red roses for Valentine’s Day. Armed with some consumer data powered by Attest, they tested their assumption that red roses were cliched and launched the “No Red Roses” Campaign, which led to a 4x increase in sales.
- We recently got the chance to sit down with Bloom & Wild’s Chief Customer Officer Charlotte Langley who gave us a unique insight into exactly what marketing strategies they’ve used to become one of the most successful D2C businesses in recent years.
📻 Tune in to hear the full episode below:
❤️ “Surreal” the cereal the Rock loves... Kind of.
🥣 SURREAL is a challenger in the cereal space which we’ve been following for a while now.
They’ve come into the market with a healthy alternative to your traditional cereal. High in protein, low in sugar, and now, Dwayne Johnson, Serena Williams, and Ronaldo’s favorite cereal. At least…that’s technically correct…Instead of enlisting A-list celebs and paying for the endorsement, they found normal Londoners who shared their namesake with the aforementioned celebrities and created a campaign around them.
As you can imagine, however, that stunt got them in a tiny bit of hot milk water. But like any true challenger, they’ve doubled down on the noise the ad created and now made a “legally compliant” variant. Give it a watch here: A LEGALLY SOUND ADVERT
🆇 Twitter’s Rebrand to X has seen a 48% drop in awareness
🐥 Our latest #RivalSpark research looks at Twitter and its recent shift to 'X' - measuring where the network currently stands and how big the impact of the name change was on the embattled platform.
Using Attest, we surveyed a working-age sample of the US / UK population, asking them if they used a variety of social platforms, including specifically 'Twitter' and 'X'.
The data show that while awareness of Twitter is in line with other omnipresent social platforms - showing almost uniform awareness, 49% of the population were unaware of 'X' despite the news of the rebrand. Check out our full breakdown here 👈
🔑Recommended Reads
🪐 WTF is the Metaverse? Find Out From the People Building It.
Metaverse Monday helps you stay in the know about the industry that's changing everything.
Get first-hand knowledge from the AR/VR industry's real players – founders, investors, and builders.
Read by thought leaders from Google, a16z, Nvidia + more!
