How the Arnott’s Group strengthens brand trust by building direct relationships and listening to their consumers

Pivoting to a direct-to-consumer model is not a simple task; it involves a big cultural shift. That’s why, in 2019, Arnott’s brought in Sprinklr to help deliver a plan of action.

"The first thing we did was partner with the best and align our ambitions to agree on a joint program of success,” say McLintock. “How could we leverage the muscle Sprinklr has already built with so many businesses before us to accelerate our journey around creating a dynamic view of our consumers? Sprinklr challenged us to look at consumers in a new light and to look at segmentation using artificial intelligence.”

Starting with Sprinklr Social, Arnott’s tracked consumer interactions online across multiple social channels. These sentiments were then used to build relationships with consumers and to identify key topics that drive engagement and purchases. It was insights gleaned from consumers that led to the well-received launch of the Arnott’s gluten-free range. Such insight has also driven the launch of new product flavors.

“Take our chocolate Tim Tam, which you can find in one of every two households here,” says McLintock. “Arnott’s is constantly innovating with new flavors of Tim Tam, and now we’re letting our consumers get involved with this.”

It was Arnott’s consumers, for example, who voted on the wildly popular Dark Choc Banoffee, a flavor that launched earlier this year.

Putting the data to work

Now armed with consumer insights, The Arnott’s Group then wanted to use these insights to make better-informed business decisions. Utilizing Sprinklr Insights, head office teammates of the company’s 3,500 staff members in the Asia Pacific region are now able to view all of its social data on a single integrated display. This allows teams to interpret consumer data at scale, identify opportunities, and build marketing strategies that reflect what the data is saying.

“Sprinklr Insights has helped us to centralize and democratize our social data,” McLintock explains. “Our Digital Marketing, research and development, consumer insights, and consumer care teams across the region all use it to monitor consumer behavior in real-time. They then use that data to drive the business forward and create authentic, on-brand experiences.”

"Arnott’s can now easily see which content is positively received by its consumers, which is not, and why one particular product line may perform well while another requires further attention. We now have a clearer picture that shows what is driving sales, relative to our campaign efforts, like social posts, competitions, or digital adverts,” says McLintock. “And that’s really powerful.”

Bringing digital marketing back in-house

To bolster its reporting capabilities, Arnott’s aggregates all of its real-time, digital CX data using Sprinklr and then pushes it back out to the business in consumable, bite-size pieces. Sprinklr Marketing is then used to automate workflows, create social campaigns and drive sales with more personalized content to resonate with the consumers.

Using Sprinklr Social, Sprinklr Insights and Sprinklr Marketing has enabled Arnott’s to bring its content marketing back in-house, increase transparency over where content is displayed, and assert more control over how teams use the data. All of this has resulted in a more efficient way of working.

“Our marketing team used to consume hours on phone calls and emails with our creative agency every week to brief on social campaigns and extrapolate that out across a year,” says McLintock. “By using automations and workflows, they have gained a significant amount of time back to invest into turbo-charging consumer experiences on a more intimate level than ever before.”

Arnott’s is delighted with the results of its partnership with Sprinklr so far.

“In the last 120 days, our outbound content and engagements have grown by over 40 percent, and the amount of social media ‘likes’ we receive has increased by over 70 percent, with social ‘shares’ going over 60 percent,” says McLintock. For the first time, Arnott’s digital marketing team has started to drive growth in posts through user-generated content (UGC).

“It’s a powerful mechanism to leverage a tool that aggregates all your loyal fans’ content into one place, whilst empowering our teams to engage and share their content.” Recently, Arnott’s shared a post from a fan who got a Shapes Chicken Crimpy — a type of snack cracker — tattooed on their ankle. “That post generated over 18,000 comments, in a matter of hours!”

Collating UGC was previously a tedious and time-consuming manual task; now, it is collected by Sprinklr in a matter of minutes.

“Sprinklr has helped our CX teams become more efficient, not just by collecting, but also acknowledging and responding to fans,” says McLintock.

Arnott’s digital marketing team is now able to respond to social posts within four hours, well below the 24-hour industry benchmark, making its consumer care team much more efficient.

Identifying trends for business growth

Prior to its partnership with Sprinklr, it could take weeks for Arnott’s to understand the reason for a sudden spike in demand of a particular product. Today, teams are notified immediately when an influencer mentions Arnott’s Iced VoVos or when a celebrity chef uses Jatz Crackers in a recipe. This enables Arnott’s to uncover niche marketing opportunities in real time, to use this knowledge to reward loyal fans at the right point in their decision-making journey, and to build direct relationships with consumers.

This level of both global and local insight had never been available to Arnott’s before. McLintock is excited that Arnott’s now has all the tools it needs with Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM platform to use this data to grow and innovate the various brands within The Arnott’s Group portfolio.

“We are now more in touch with our consumers than we have ever been before. This means that we can personalize and localize our product offering and demonstrate to suppliers that there is demand for our products in new markets well before the first product hits the shelves.”