CATEGORY: BEVERAGE

Sello Rojo's data-driven launch fuels 4x retail velocity improvement

Sello Rojo

COMPANY SIZE

Early Stage

CATEGORY

Coffee & Tea

USE CASE

New product launch

RETAILERS

Sello Rojo retailers

IMPACT AT A GLANCE

2,226

community members engaged on offer

745

reviews collected for syndication with an average 4.5/5 star rating

95%

new customer acquisition

81%

of shoppers intend to repurchase the product

Sello Rojo is more than just a coffee; it is the number one coffee brand in Colombia, with a 90-year history and a strong, rich, and velvety taste. Owned by the Colombian company Grupo Nutresa, Sello Rojo brings the vibrant spirit of Colombian coffee culture to the United States, encouraging people to “live boldly” with every cup of its 100% Latin American coffee.

We sat down with Annalise Iwen, Shopper Marketing Associate for both Cameron’s Coffee and Sello Rojo, and Eduardo Merino, Director of Sales and Marketing for the multicultural markets, who is entirely dedicated to developing the Sello Rojo brand in the US. They shared how they partnered with Social Nature to expand their presence and connect with new consumers.

What challenges was Sello Rojo facing before Social Nature, and how did our platform help?

Annalise: Social Nature we’ve used in the past and what we found is it’s really great at providing brands the ability to get brand awareness to consumers in sort of a non-traditional way. They have people who are super engaged on their platform. And so really because Sello Rojo is so big in Colombia, we know it’s a good product. People aren’t just super aware of it in the US. And so giving us the ability to kind of launch it to people because once they’re aware of it, they get super excited or they didn’t even know that it was sold in the US and they’re familiar with the brand in Colombia. So it was just a great tool to sort of be able for us to do that.

Eduardo: Our life stage here in the US, we’re a very young brand, right? To Annalise’s point, we want to drive awareness and trial and in a very geo-targeted and efficient manner, and Social Nature helped us achieve that.

Sello Rojo coffee

How did Social Nature help Sello Rojo achieve positive retail results?

Eduardo: When we leveraged Social Nature, we recently gained new distribution in a very important retailer. What Social Nature helped us with was to drive awareness to that newly gained distribution, help us improve velocities. It was amazing to see just velocities improve by maybe three to four times since the inception, since the distribution gain at this retailer in February all the way through June which is very amazing to see. And on top of that too, we gained valuable consumer and category insights that are helping right now support our strategy as we go into our next planning cycle. So yeah, definitely good results from a retailer standpoint.

What were some of the key insights you gained from working with the Social Nature community?

Annalise: The insights are probably, well along with like the velocity and stuff that we gained from Social Nature, insights was probably just as valuable. Because we’re a new and smaller brand, we haven’t had the ability to test amongst a large audience of what they liked about the product, how did their product compare to the current coffee that they’re drinking, and then the purchase intent behind it. You know, it’s great that they’re trying out our product via this platform but would they want to purchase it again, so that we can try to build a plan both from a marketing and sales perspective of like “No, this is a product that people are really interested in” that we can show like different retailers and that sort of thing, to be like, “No, people want to purchase this product. They either like it just as much or even more than the current coffee that they’re drinking that’s in a similar sort of lane to Sello Rojo.” And so just having the ability to, it’s stuff that we thought was the case, but being able to put data behind when speaking to different retailers about the product is super beneficial.

How does Social Nature stand out from other shopper marketing platforms you've used?

Annalise: This one I think was really attractive to us because one, it’s really great for like a new product launch, which Cameron’s has. We have our historical set of products that do really well, but when more and more we’re pushing to get new innovation or different things like our Cold Brew Concentrate that our typical consumer base isn’t used to seeing. And so it’s a great way to just test it in the marketplace, get feedback as well as reviews. I know for Sello reviews was a huge thing for us to get directly back that we could utilize on our website, because obviously people know for CPG stuff, reviews are super important when it comes to purchase intent.

If you had to choose one thing, what would you say was the biggest impact of working with Social Nature?

Annalise: I would say the biggest impact is probably for me internally of just being able to put data points behind like this is what we’re seeing. Brand awareness is like our biggest area that we need to improve and really, honestly, writing that story of what we thought that it was but being able to like really speak to it via data points so that we can really build out a robust plan that makes sense for this specific product since we haven’t launched something like this at Cameron’s before in the US. So that was probably the most beneficial thing to me.

Eduardo: Yes, first of all, brand awareness. I was amazed to see the data points new to brand. That’s exactly what we wanted to know, right? We wanted to bring new eyeballs to our brand. so definitely Social Nature helped us drive awareness. And then more on the competitive side, one thing that helped us out as we go into strategy and planning – where do we position ourselves, how distinct could we become from a pricing standpoint to what strategic pricing decisions we need to make. So that was very helpful because it just shows us the interaction of our brand, our product with other products in the coffee segment.

Sello Rojo Tradionale in Colombia

Would you recommend Social Nature to other brands, and if so, why?

Annalise: For sure. I think it’s a lot easier to set up a campaign than it might seem. You guys make it pretty easy on us and lay out a pretty straightforward brief of like here’s the information we need. When it comes to like the questions, you have a lot of preset questions that if you’re trying to launch a new product, these are the type of insights that you typically want to gather from people. And then your actual dashboard – to follow along, everything is super easy to sort of use. I would say for sure, it’s a super beneficial tool to use for CPG brands, especially if you have any new innovations or products that you’re trying to launch, just to one, gather feedback on, but two, really get a story that you can tell different retailers that you’re trying to get distribution at of people who have directly used the product.

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