Have you herd? Here’s how Ella’s Kitchen leveraged peer influence amongst parents to increase care programme signups, leading to 102% more signups compared to the test average.
Ella’s Kitchen is a leader in children’s food, on a mission to help little ones fall in love with good food. The team works within a short category age window (because all children must grow up!) and so begins the constant cycle of reaching and acquiring new parents.
Trust plays an important role for new parents, and peer influence can be the difference between success and failure for businesses in this category. Ella’s Kitchen already understood parents’ influence among their peer groups and developed a programme to help and educate parents during the early stages of parenthood: The “Ella’s Friends” programme.
Despite Ella’s Kitchen being among the most loved child food brands, the category is highly competitive. To add to the challenge, supermarkets have entered the category to take advantage of the cost-of-living crisis. Ella’s Kitchen knew they needed to do something different to reach new parents and nurture the existing ones.
"We realised early on that if we want to grow, we can't keep doing the same things and expecting different results." ~Angie Turner - Runs “Making Friends”, Ella's Kitchen.
A sunny day in the park
Imagine you are a new parent sitting in the park one afternoon with your other parent friends. Like you, all the other parents have Ella’s Kitchen food pouches.
Then, one day, the trendsetter in the group, Alex, pulls out a pouch from another, cheaper brand.
“What’s that like?” asks one parent.
“I was worried the quality wouldn’t be as good,” chimed another.
Next week in the park, another parent in your group feeds little Annie the new brand.
By the next time they meet, the group have all switched.
This scenario shows how one early adopter can cause a stampede within their herd, leading to groups switching brands.
Understanding this interplay in human behaviour, Ella’s Kitchen was keen to harness the power of this offline influence to help them reduce the costs of acquiring and nurturing parents.
Herdify: Ella's Kitchen's shepherd
Ella’s Kitchen appointed Herdify to help increase signups to their “Ella’s Friends” care programme, improving adoption and supporting the sales growth of their products.
Ella’s Kitchen struggled to hit its CPA targets on Meta, so they decided this would be the channel for the first rollout.
Herdify conducted a three-month GDPR-compliant A/B test alongside Ella’s media agency, Goodstuff. Herdify leveraged existing data from the “Friends” programme and ran it through their Behavioural Segmentation Engine.
Herdify’s insights dashboard outputted audience targets every month that Ella’s Kitchen media team could then add into the Meta ad console. Ella’s media agency aimed to improve their ad targeting by reaching areas where these “herds” were most susceptible to Ella’s Kitchen’s message.
The results? In Herdify-identified communities, “Ella’s Friends” were 6.3% cheaper to acquire, and targeted advertising led to 102% more signups compared to the test average.
"I think the transparency you've shown in these results and, frankly, the level of detail you've gone into is fantastic. It feels like it's head and shoulders above some of the others I've seen recently." ~ Alex Spencer, Senior Brand Manager, Ella's Kitchen.
Herdify is a behavioural science-powered insights platform that media planners use to inform media targeting for both above-the-line and below-the-line channels. By tapping into humans’ offline social influence and herd mentality, you can increase brand awareness, reduce CPAs and increase LTV.
Click here to find out more about Ella’s Kitchen’s community test by seeing the blog post.
