As stated in the Snapshot of Practicum, I have three main goals for The Bouquet Candle: (1) Identify and define the target audience; (2) Create the brand concept; and (3) determine appropriate social media platforms for advertising and digital marketing, with a focus on creating a positive brand image to optimize sales.
First, I must identify and define the target audience. The Bouquet Candle is an online store, so the first identifying factor of the target audience are people who are comfortable with purchasing items online. This means that my target audience will skew a little bit younger and a little bit more educated, since they will be comfortable using the Internet. I need to discover more about who is likely to buy scented candles online. My primary estimate would be women who are old enough to be living independently, even if it’s in a shared space, with enough education to be comfortable with online purchases.
An area of research that needs to be addressed immediately is examining the online presence of major competitor’s scented candles. For example, Yankee Candle has a detailed website that offers many different types of scented products, besides candles. They are one of the oldest and most established scented candle companies, and they have an extremely effective online presence, with some very clever customer responses. According to BuzzFeed, Yankee Candle responded to a satirical twitter hashtag trend called “HipsterYankeeCandleScents” by actually taking some of the suggestions and turning them into real products. This kind of customer response is certainly a benchmark for the ideal way a company can interact with its customers. Based on this response, we can gather some demographic information about our target audience by looking at their followers on Twitter and Instagram. Based on that demographic, we can discover more about our target audience.
Second, I must work with the start-up to create the brand concept. How do we differentiate ourselves in a somewhat crowded market? There are many different scented candles that can be purchased online. Some ways that we can work to develop the brand is in packaging. How do we present the candles? Are they in a glass jar? What does the jar look like? What does the label look like? Are we trying to go for an old-fashioned, country-chic look, or are we trying to look like something more cutting-edge? Most importantly, I need to learn more about the initial scents that the start-up wants to use. Smell is a very powerful driver of human behavior. Research has discovered that smells which evoke positive emotional memories can drive purchasing. This is known as the “Proustian Memory Effect” (Bergland, 2015). When deciding what scents to use at launch, we need to do more research into this effect. The Psychology Today article which discusses this effect also cites a scholarly work that I want to read in detail and share with Ms. Park. This article is called “Proustian Products are Preferred: The Relationship Between Odor-Evoked Memory and Product Evaluation,” and was published in Chemosensory Perception. A detailed reading may give us important clues about which scents to choose at start-up. We can also look at the scents that Yankee Candle began with, as those scents should also evoke these positive purchase-inducing Proustian memories.
Third, we must establish our social media presence so that we can begin to use them for our digital marketing. As mentioned previously, examining the best practices of established candle companies can go a long way towards easing our own foray into social media. Of course, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter will provide us with the initial social media platforms. It is in these platforms that we can also take a look at companies that are working hard to create a positive social image for themselves. One good example of this is Boxed Water, a company that provides filtered water in cartons instead of plastic bottles. They have a protocol established in which they commit to planting a tree for every retweet of their pinned tweet. In addition, they use the hashtag #BetterPlanet to promote their water and their tree program. I need to brainstorm hashtags with Ms. Park, and also work on deciding what charity might be the best match for our brand. This could be a very exciting brainstorming event, and is also something that we could open up to a focus group. What charities do people associate with candles, or with scents? One idea could be something to do with helping provide access to safe light in places that are not connected to an electrical grid. This is something, though, that should definitely be done in a group brainstorming session, as there could be many worthwhile ideas out there that might be a better fit.
Once we find the perfect charity match, then it is a matter of developing the hashtags and other associations of our brand with our dedication to community service. By creating a social media presence devoted to giving back, we are following in the footsteps of other positive social businesses such as Boxed Water, and thus can take advantage of a customer base that has been primed to identify us as a good-cause brand. According to Communication Studies Theory, priming “tells us whether something is good or bad, whether it is communicated effectively, etc. The media have primed the audience about what a news program looks like, what a credible person looks like” (University of Twente, 2018). The media have primed our audience about what a good-cause brand looks like, so our duty is to examine the best practices of good-cause brands and use similar tactics across our chosen social media platforms to establish ourselves as one of those brands.
A basic timeline for this process is the following: (1) In two weeks, complete market research for other scented candle companies and sketch out a target demographic; (2) In one month, establish both packaging of candle and identify what scents are most likely to succeed immediately; (3) in six weeks, complete focus group and establish the charity that will be the best match for our company; (4) in two months, complete the development of a social media campaign that ties in our chosen charity in the most effective and established manner, keeping with priming theory.
