When Yin Woon Rani became CEO of MilkPEP in late 2019, milk marketing was responsible for driving about 1.7 gallons of milk sold at retail value per marketing dollar spent. By 2022, that figure had increased to 3.8 gallons.
While the campaign is still ongoing, MilkPEP and Gale’s experience offers five takeaways—with five choreographed pivots—that can be useful to brands looking to embrace the best of both brand and performance marketing, and become quick and nimble marketers.
Strategize with a clean sheet of paper
Pivot: Year-over-year planning to zero-based planning.
Past campaign performance can serve as a helpful starting point for strategic discussions: Did it work last year? If so, let’s do more of it this year. But that approach can also be restricting, forcing otherwise ambitious marketers to think in “year-over-year” terms, Rani told Adweek.
“We took a zero-based attitude,” said Rani, who joined MilkPEP just before the pandemic. “The blank page is freeing because it allows us to think about what the audience needs to see and what is motivating them.”
The “zero-based” method, though intuitively simple, represented a major pivot for MilkPEP: New ideas and decisions were justified for each new cycle based on demonstrable performance and audience need, as opposed to the more common method of using a previous year’s media mix or marketing strategy as the jumping-off point, then adjusting up or down.
This meant shifting from a program that skewed toward linear TV and print to one dominated by social media, programmatic and outdoor advertising.
“We let things earn their way onto the plan and fall out of the plan with no biases,” said Rani, who joined MilkPEP after more than two decades of marketing experience, particularly in CPG. “The most important thing is whether something works. Not whether we did it last year or didn’t do it last year.”
Understand the job your product performs
Pivot: Mass market to target market.
In the 1990s, “Got Milk?” targeted everyone. That was sort of the point. But this time, MilkPEP and Gale wanted to appeal to a specific customer. To better understand milk’s true target audience, they turned to an obvious opportunity that had been overlooked: athletics.
“No one really knows what Selenium does,” Simms joked. “But when you put milk’s nutrients in consumer language, you start to uncover the superpower of milk. Yes, everyone knows it’s good for your teeth and bones, but that’s very limiting.”
With a shift in market focus, milk producers suddenly found themselves competing against sports drink and bottled water brands that had been crowding out their milk cartons in refrigerated cases for years. To Rani and Simms, however, this was an opportunity to reframe milk as the “original sports drink” that has been “fueling athletes for centuries,” a messaging strategy that allowed them to pit milk’s benefits head-to-head against the competition.
“Milk doesn’t have an awareness problem; it has a bit of an attitude problem,” Rani said. “This was an opportunity to make people think about the category differently and to reconsider something that, frankly, was taken for granted.”
