The Rise of Commerce Media: What it Is and How to Leverage it as a CPG Brand
A Recap of Chicory and Primal Kitchen’s Fireside Chat at P2PI Live 2022
The CPG advertising landscape has shifted dramatically within the past few years, impacted by the emergence of retail media networks, stricter privacy regulations, rising grocery prices and rapidly evolving consumer behaviors. Amid these conditions, it’s more important than ever to have a strong, future-proofed advertising strategy.
To achieve this, CPG brands need to embrace commerce media, an emerging category of digital advertising that’s transforming the way the industry approaches ecommerce. Commerce media drives purchases and boosts lower-funnel KPIs using commerce data or contextual information to inform targeting. With its focus on driving purchases, commerce media targets high-intent shoppers, yielding strong engagement and boosting audience size.
To better understand how brands are leveraging commerce media to drive growth, Chicory Co-Founder and CEO Yuni Sameshima sat down to chat with Primal Kitchen’s Senior Omnichannel Marketing Manager Kelly Meredith at P2PI Live. A comprehensive recap of their conversation is below, highlighting key takeaways and quotes. Quotes were edited for brevity.
Chicory Co-Founder and CEO Yuni Sameshima and Primal Kitchen’s Senior Omnichannel Marketing Manager Kelly Meredith at P2PI Live.
What does commerce media look like for Primal Kitchen?
Primal Kitchen’s commerce media strategy includes contextual commerce: reaching high-intent shoppers through highly-relevant content. Specifically, Primal Kitchen leverages recipes and influencers to help shoppers find meal inspiration and to drive brand awareness.
“We're trying to go beyond the “Learn More,” “Find in Store” and couponing tactics. We're a premium brand, so we don't want to discount our products. That’s why we're finding ways to deliver engaging, relevant content instead. We do that through recipe content and influencers.”
What are the most effective commerce media tactics for CPG brands?
According to the Primal Kitchen team, the best commerce media tactics today are those that drive brand equity. Brand equity is your brand’s value, as seen through the eyes of consumers. The greater brand equity you have, the more likely your brand is to acquire and retain customers. For a young CPG brand like Primal Kitchen, driving brand equity is critical to long-term growth. That’s why Primal Kitchen works with Chicory to reach 110 million high-intent shoppers each month via highly-relevant recipe content.
“We want you to buy our product for the ingredients, for the quality, for the inspiration, for the desire to bring the best to your table…but I can't just deliver something (an advertising program) that has zero brand equity. I need to have a recipe — that inspiration, that visual, that content — that will get people to purchase.”
What are the tools that Primal Kitchen is utilizing to get its branding out there?
Primal Kitchen is a nimble team that is able to respond quickly to trends and evolving consumer preferences. They use this strength to drive brand awareness and equity. The recent butter board trend, for example, is one trend that the Primal Kitchen team quickly leveraged to share how Primal Kitchen products can be used to create a butter board that fits the preferences of its shoppers.
“We’re constantly evolving and creating content to stay relevant….that's why I just love working with the Chicory team. We want to be very relevant with our content and show up in recipes that are trending.”
Primal Kitchen is a brand with specific attributes popular in wellness communities. How does Primal Kitchen showcase those?
Primal Kitchen has a two-pronged approach to sharing its brand attributes. First and foremost, the brand uses digital advertising (specifically, contextual in-recipe advertisements) to reach its key audience — shoppers who are interested in vegan, vegetarian, organic, keto or paleo goods. Second, Primal Kitchen dedicates a good amount of focus and budget to nailing its product packaging.
“We have attributes, like “certified keto,” “certified paleo,” and “paleo-friendly,” which are very important to us to share, so I'm looking at different tactics where I can bring those to life, both in-store and out-of-store. Recipes have been a huge strategy for us because they help us target shoppers looking for vegan, keto, paleo or organic inspiration. Outside of digital recipes, we focus and spend a lot on packaging to include those attributes on our physical products too.”
Why is collapsing the funnel important in commerce media?
As a seven-year-old brand, Primal Kitchen has to compete with brands and budgets that are sometimes several times larger than its own. Meredith said that this requires her team to simultaneously focus on driving awareness and sales. As such, they lean toward advertising tactics that accomplish both and deliver the highest return on investment. Sponsored search, connected TV (CTV), and shoppable recipes are go-to's for Meredith’s team.
“People might be seeing us for the first time at the shelf, so I have to make my shopper marketing work harder, ensuring that I’m driving both awareness and sales. A lot of what I’m doing is pairing programs across the marketing funnel. I had a campaign where I was doing direct out-of-home with CTV and also doing a shopper media execution. Bringing all of those things together, we had the ability to drive awareness, tell that Primal Kitchen story in a commercial and have powers (KPIs/outcomes) tied to it.”
How does the Primal Kitchen advertising team decide to allocate its advertising budget?
Primal Kitchen’s advertising strategy and budget is determined by its products. Instead of starting with a specific media tactic or strategy, the Primal Kitchen team first evaluates what advertising is required — and what will work best — for each product. Meredith noted that much of this is retailer-dependent (determined by where Primal Kitchen has distribution for a new item).
“How we allocate is really based on how we innovate. We innovated about 30 new products in the last three years. So, our allocation strategy is built around our new products. It might be a new item launch at one retailer or a national rollout, one year from now. I really have to be nimble depending on where we have distribution for a new item. That’s why I love and leverage the vendor community.”
As a small company today, does Primal Kitchen have any unique perspectives on the industry or the future?
Meredith shared that younger, leaner brands have more freedom to innovate and fail, so she recommends a test-and-learn approach. Test-and-learn advertising encourages marketers to make hypotheses about a campaign, evaluate its actual performance, then update the strategy accordingly. This can be done manually or via a test-and-learn advertising platform.
“I would just encourage folks to do test-and-learns. Taking advantage of those, we've seen great success. It's okay to fail. And for smaller brands, you don't have to be a big brand. We’re not restricted by JBPs (joint business plans), or certain payment requirements like bigger brands are. So we have the freedom and ability to test and discover what works.”
BONUS: Additional Perspectives from Primal Kitchen
(Summarized using key quotes from the Q&A with audience members)
“We're actually going to make all of our marketing shoppable.”
“We're just constantly innovating with our products, and making recipes and content really sexy, approachable and relevant.”
“We are just finishing transitioning the packaging of our 80 SKUs so that our ingredients are now at the forefront. So, you'll see a giant avocado now front-and-center on our buffalo sauce, for example, making our brand more recognizable.”
“We're going after four different cohorts to make sure that we're very relevant. In the CPG industry, people usually target shoppers 25 to 54 with kids. We're moving away from that. Instead, we have what we call a “never-settler” audience. We also have a “male life enthusiast” cohort and a “griller enthusiast” cohort. Fitting the products to those right cohorts, and focusing on personalization, has been a way that we're building our brand and making it more relevant.”
“We are constantly doing whatever we can to reach and engage with our communities, including followers of Mark’s blog, which he started 16 years ago. But we have more than just the Primal Kitchen websites and blog — we have almost over 800,000 Instagram subscribers. So. we're constantly doing things, like partnerships or social media giveaways, to build our database of people that we can talk to.”
Overview of Primal Kitchen and Kelly Meredith
Primal Kitchen is a seven-year-old brand founded back in February 2015 by Mark Sisson, a former endurance athlete. He started Primal Kitchen with a simple mission: change the way the world eats. Primal Kitchen now has about 80 SKUs across nine different categories.
Kelly Meredith joined the company three years ago when Primal Kitchen was evolving from a direct-to-consumer business into a retail business. Meredith came on board to fulfill Primal Kitchen's emerging need for shopper marketing, as Primal Kitchen’s senior omnichannel marketing manager. Prior to Primal Kitchen, Meredith spent 18 years in the shopper marketing industry, managing agency relationships with CPG brands, like Healthy Choice, Campbell’s Soup, Dr. Pepper and Pillsbury.
Looking to dive deeper into some of the themes covered in this fireside chat? Join the 100,000+ people who subscribe to the Chicory newsletter to be the first to receive Chicory interviews, consumer insights and industry reports. Or, reach out at hello@chicory.co to learn more about how CPG brands and grocery retailers are leveraging Chicory’s in-recipe commerce media solutions for growth.