Blending Emotion and Science to Create Better Commerce Experiences

One of the most important experiences in someone’s lifetime is the moment they have a baby. From that magical (or stressful) moment on, the decisions that new parents face are relentless. In the first year, our research shows that a new parent is faced with 1,750 new decisions. Some of the hardest is which brands to choose for everything from formula to shampoo to baby food. Even once a new parent picks a brand, they have a lot of different varieties to choose from.

To help parents through these early decisions and beyond, we've taken a “consumer first” approach to digital advertising. This sounds cliche, but the details behind our approach say a lot about what it takes to create a truly effective commerce experience today. To make it work, we've adopted an approach that embraces data and emotion, innovation, and best practices. It's a lot more robust than many people might expect from a brand that was first developed in 1911. It’s also the only way brands can meet the expectations of today’s new parents and tomorrow’s consumers.

Combining Seemingly Disparate Elements to Hit the Right Balance

Selecting the right product and ensuring that their baby is healthy and happy is both stressful and extremely rewarding. Baby products, it turns out, are very emotional purchases. But it’s not all emotion. There's a lot of research that goes behind the decision to use a certain product — from understanding ingredients to knowing how a baby will react to it. It turns out that science is just as important a factor when it comes to baby products.

With these two opposing — and very important — purchase elements, our advertising process has to be extremely considered to get the balance just right.

Our performance marketing team works in lock step with our data and insights teams. We use insights to inform all of our decisions before, during and after every campaign. Insights drive our creative design, we test creatives, and we test media placements, continually. Our goal is to provide information in a way that's approachable and friendly. It doesn’t always work, but our focus on testing helps us learn quickly so that we can be agile.

Embracing Innovation to Meet Expectations

At the same time, more parents than ever are researching and shopping online. Now that Gen Z is aging into parenthood, we must be prepared to interact with truly digital-native buyers. Our research shows that people are looking for more out of their shopping experiences — something new, exciting, or better than the last time they made a purchase.

To give parents that positive experience, we’ve focused on making the purchase process as frictionless as possible. This isn’t an obvious problem to solve. One approach that we tested was to provide interactivity directly in our digital creatives. With our partner SeenThis, we created a streaming banner with a chatbot and another one with a quiz that helped parents find the right product and purchase it quickly and easily. With a fun interactive format, the banner delivered a new experience that was also very useful. It has proven to be very effective and has encouraged us to test more tech innovations. Streaming technology also provides a more sustainable technology than traditional ad serving, which is important to our brand.

Right now, we’re building out an augmented reality (AR) feature that would work on a shopper's mobile phone when they're at the shelf. By hovering over our products, parents will be able to get a fun new experience and learn more about each product.

We’re not just focused on making the purchase process frictionless. Speaking of Gen Z, our research shows that many young parents today get their information on TikTok and other video-first platforms, which requires entirely new approaches to content. There’s still a lot of misinformation on these platforms. First and foremost, we want to make sure that we’re informing and educating. We want to help people make smart decisions and build trust.

Prepared for the Future of Commerce

All of our work is great, but it’s meaningless if the world changes tomorrow. It’s important to stay agile. Retail media networks (RMNs) are only in the very earliest stages of their growth. We’re thrilled with the ability to use data and insights to directly inform our campaigns with our RMN partners, but we know that space will change rapidly and we’re always ready to shift. We're the first to raise our hands to test new capabilities and learn more.

Similarly, we’re not just focused on data that we get from our campaign testing and media buys. We continually survey parents so that we get insights directly from our customers. It can be easy to hyperfocus on the data that’s easiest to gather, but this might hurt our balance. We know that even though there’s a lot more data floating around today, the emotional element of our product is just as important.

I hope that as commerce continues to evolve, every company in the advertising ecosystem embraces that balance between science and emotion. It can be tempting to lean into the data — after all, it’s right in front of us. Artificial intelligence makes it even easier to rely on technology to find the answers. However, we’re all in the business of reaching real people, and people change. They’re messy and have opinions and feelings that aren’t always easy to predict. With a heavy dose of testing and asking questions, we can make sure that we’re successful in providing that ultimate consumer experience, whatever it may be.

Grant Marcus is team lead omnichannel marketing, Reckitt, home to the world's most loved and trusted hygiene, health and nutrition brands.