Moonpig: moving from brand building to brand consideration
There was once a time when almost every household brand had a jingle for radio and TV. Coca-Cola taught the world to sing; Calgon helped washing machines live longer; Heinz gave new meaning to baked beans. But with advertisers now chasing a very different type of consumer, jingles have fast fallen out of fashion.
Yet, when online card retailer Moonpig re-branded late last year in a drive to lose its “gimmicky-ness” – a move that saw its cartoon pig mascot mercilessly slaughtered – the Moonpig jingle was one of the only brand identifiers to survive the cull.
“For us, it’s absolutely vital,” Moonpig’s chief marketing officer, Andre Rickerby, tells Mediatel as part of MAD//Fest’s inaugural year. “It’s our DNA really. When you’ve got something that good that everyone knows, it would be nuts getting rid of it.”
Most will recognise the jingle from the retailer’s TV ads, which propelled the brand from dot-com start-up into household name after its first TV campaign in 2006. By the next year, Moonpig was responsible for 90% of the online greetings card market in the UK and was profitable for the first time in its seven year history.
However, Rickerby’s appointment as CMO last year suggested a change in direction for the company’s advertising strategy. Rickerby joined Moonpig from online marketplace Etsy, prior to which he held senior digital marketing positions at ASOS. Appointed for his performance and growth marketing experience, it’s no surprise that Moonpig has recently been working to grow its digital footprint.
“We’ve definitely increased our budget into digital,” Rickerby says. “We’re moving money around more efficiently from channels we probably over-invested in and that didn’t really generate revenue in the past.”
“TV creative, for example, we spend quite a lot on. Can we trim some of that off and put it into digital in a bigger way? Using what you’ve got to the best of its ability is what any good marketing team should be doing.”
Rickerby argues that Moonpig’s most important advertising objective is no longer brand building, but consideration. “People know the brand, now we need to make sure people consider us first.”
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“We’ve already done a little bit of social – the performance marketing channels so to speak – but we really want to cement our place in those markets, those channels, and get into a position where we can talk across a range of channels with a single tone of voice in a more consistent way,” he says, adding that Google Shopping has also worked well as the brand has scaled.
However, according to Rickerby, it is too simplistic to suggest that Moonpig is moving budget straight out of TV and into digital advertising.
An article in the Guardian earlier this month used the latest AA/WARC adspend forecasts to suggest that “festive advertisers [are dumping] TV for online media,” as TV adspend in the UK is expected to fall by £44m in the final three months of the year while internet and mobile display is expected to grow.
Industry commentators have since argued that this interpretation of the figures was a little harsh – internet growth continuing at a time when spot spend is easing does not necessarily translate into advertisers directly moving their budgets from TV to online.
And when it comes to Moonpig, Rickerby is adamant that the brand’s investment in TV “won’t change.”
“We’re definitely keeping TV. It’s something we know works for us, econometrics says it works, we know we get good ROI off it as well,” he says. “What we’re really doing is building out a much bigger digital footprint, and in many ways, are looking to fill out the digital channels in a fuller way than we have in the past.”
Reaching everyone as a mass market brand
“Obviously, we’re mass market,” Rickerby says when asked which consumers Moonpig most wants to reach.
Although its customer base currently tends towards female, he says it’s important not to forget the appeal the brand has across all age groups and demographics. Conversion rates do drop off in the 60+ age category, but that’s to be somewhat expected from an age bracket that did not grow up in a digital world. For Moonpig, that means making sure its service is clear and easy enough for a 60 year old as it is for a 20 year old.
“We’ve also got to be very careful that we don’t forget that a lot of our audience live outside of London, and that we need to appeal to them,” Rickerby says.
“I’ve seen other brands get caught up in the media bubble and forget about the core demographic not being in London. That’s something we’re quite mindful of.”
Andre Rickerby was a speaker at MAD//Fest, a new festival – backed by Mediatel – organised to showcase the very best of marketing and innovation.