OVERVIEW AND CHALLENGES
Amazon Business (AB) helps millions of business customers worldwide—ranging from large enterprises to small nonprofits—reshape their procurement processes with advanced digital purchasing capabilities, cost savings, greater productivity, and insightful analytics.
Despite AB’s differentiated abilities to support business buyers, it had an identity problem: It wasn’t top of mind as a preferred strategic partner for business purchasing needs. While many consumers are very familiar with Amazon as a brand, business customers had significantly less awareness of AB and its value as a strategic partner. Amazon Business created an omnichannel brand awareness campaign to become top of mind as the business buying solution amongst both large and small organizations across industries.
OBJECTIVES
This inclusive campaign was specifically developed to show AB as a brand that is accessible to businesses of all sizes, across sectors. The campaign highlighted the endless realm of possibilities for business owners and buyers—that even the smallest entrepreneurs can chase their dreams and grow their business.
RESULTS
OVERVIEW
Buy smarter. Dream bigger is AB’s first large-scale mass advertising campaign to increase awareness and consideration of Amazon Business (AB). AB executed persistent (20+ weeks in market), story-telling (e.g., TV or online video format), and multi-channel (e.g., out-of-home, audio, display) campaign to influence AB awareness and consideration.
GOALS
The primary goal was to drive meaningful impact on awareness and consideration of AB across both large and small businesses, among procurement decision makers, sourcing pros, and individual users so that their organizations will purchase from AB, ultimately leading to positive downstream results on usage and revenue. Our campaign theme, “Buy smarter. Dream bigger.” highlights how AB can help businesses of any size buy supplies and stay focused on the larger mission—growing the business and achieving their dreams.
EXECUTION
To increase awareness of Amazon Business and digital purchasing tools, AB launched an entirely new product category term to tech analysts and to the business marketplace: “smart business buying” (SBB). SBB uses machine learning to automate purchasing processes like providing product recommendations and streamlining purchasing approvals. The campaign positioned smart business buying as a strategic extension of customer purchasing teams.
KEY FEATURES
The campaign involved over 100 customized assets—including three video advertisements targeting 3 different customer segments, 10 targeted banner ad concepts, offline (OOH, radio, podcast), digital (social, video, display) and thought leadership execution via conferences and earned news coverage. The campaign’s assets featured bold, warm colors to subvert the traditional hues seen in classic B2B marketing. The individuals used in the campaign showcased diverse business decision makers – varied ages, genders and races—to illustrate AB’s support of business owners of all types achieving their dreams.
The videos diverge away from the typical stock imagery of B2B advertising, leaning into modernity, accessibility, relatability, and humor. The three videos focused on unique business procurement scenarios, needs, and solutions for organizations of all sizes, across industries. For example, one video featured the fictitious PetTech company where talking animals’ disastrous purchasing attempts are narrowly averted thanks to smart business buying’s instituted spending limits & guardrails.
CAMPAIGN SUMMARY
Our first plan of action was to create a benchmark for our target audience to determine accurate measurement for consideration of AB before the campaign started and after it ended. This was conducted by utilizing internal/external measurement systems, data models, surveys and focus groups. External measurement was conducted by 3rd party research companies. One of the key challenges faced during the campaign was to develop a wholistic measurement system to ensure the entire landscape of “brand consideration” was accurately depicted. We overcame this challenge by partnering across Amazon to understand the measurement processes other brands had in place and we secured a sole resource devoted to measuring & understanding brand awareness metrics and systems for the campaign. KPIs were evaluated based on awareness and consideration movement in basis points for potential customers, as well as site traffic, CTRs, customer and sales outreach conversions, earned media, and video views.
This campaign was a massive success and showed tangible growth in awareness while establishing Amazon Business as a strategic, reliable and preferred purchasing partner. Baseline measurements were taken in spring 2022—prior to launch of the campaign in July 2022—and were used to calculate the below results:
Specific goals & results for this campaign to drive success included:
