What does espresso have to do with running clubs? More than you’d think.
Turns out, people who run at 6 am need something to get them out the door, and Nespresso wants to be that thing.
But rather than building its own run clubs, Nespresso has been looking to embed itself in communities where coffee is already part of the ritual. This spring, that meant partnering with golf brand Malbon at the Masters to host a morning run club for attendees called “Rise and Run.”
Nespresso also has a coffee line built around wellness, with nutrient-enriched espressos and vitamin-fortified coffees.
“Instead of getting people to join our community, we like to ask where espresso has a natural role to play and give them the opportunity to pull us into their existing communities,” said Jessica Padula, VP of marketing and sustainability for Nespresso USA.
It’s a philosophy that extends beyond activations.
A few years ago, for example, Reddit told Nespresso that its users were actively asking for the brand to participate in their conversations about topics like troubleshooting machines and Nespresso coffee flavors.
Reddit’s unfiltered (coffee pun!) culture can be a daunting place for advertisers that are used to controlling the narrative. But Padula took this as a sign that showing up doesn’t have to mean taking over.
“No brand is perfect,” she said. “But if we can have a dialogue with people and meet them where they are, that’s a great opportunity.”
Padula spoke with AdExchanger (over coffee, of course) during Cannes Lions in June.
AdExchanger: After Reddit told you its community actually wants Nespresso there, what did you do with that information?
JESSICA PADULA: That was the first time we went beyond paid with Reddit. We did an AMA and, in some ways, that was the beginning of our whole community strategy. But you have to be willing to truly go there. Ask me anything means ask me anything.
We had our coffee ambassador – each market has a dedicated coffee expert – do the AMA, so it was a real person, not just the brand, and he got all types of questions. Some of it was really detailed stuff about taste notes and coffee origins, and then you had other people asking things like, “Why does the button blink?” And the answer’s pretty simple: The machine is just heating up! But from that we saw that people are really curious about the product and how it works.
Product innovation sits inside marketing at Nespresso USA, which is pretty unusual. Why does that structure make sense for you?
Our brand is our product, which I know may sound silly or obvious, but if you understand your consumer first, you can take input at the market level and transform it into global innovation. Our product marketers are more like brand managers, because they’re invested in the commercial success of the product and how the product gets communicated.
For example, Christina Tosi [the founder and co-owner of Milk Bar] is a true Nespresso fan and she actually came to us and pitched the idea for a “latte bomb,” which is a little cookie that sits at the bottom of your glass. You brew Nespresso over it and it turns into this, like, flavor explosion.
That became a product, but if marketing hadn’t been directly involved in the process, it easily could’ve just ended up as a PR stunt.
Nespresso is essentially an OG direct-to-consumer brand. You own the customer relationship in a way most CPG brands don’t, because people have to come back to you for capsules. How are you making the most of that first-party data asset?
We need people to keep coming back, so we have to make the experience sticky. By the same token, people are giving us their data, so we’d better give them value in return.
Our machines are Bluetooth connected, so we can see how your coffee brews and what coffees you’re brewing. That data is really valuable to us, because we can use it to personalize the experience when we communicate with you.
We now have a CDP – we use Segment – and that allows us to thread the needle between email and SMS and, hopefully in the very near future, to connect what’s happening in your machine with your in-app experience. We’re trying to help the consumer feel seen and understood so that their coffee experience feels unique to them.
How do you manage the relationship between your media agencies and your creative agencies?
I was getting so sick of the debate a couple of years ago about whether brands should brief their media agency first or their creative agency. Like, which is more important. We think they should work hand in hand.
The turning point for us was when we hired Croud as our full-funnel digital media agency a couple of years ago. Part of their pitch is that creative drives at least 50% of the success of media, so they wanted to be embedded with creative from Day One.
We created a flywheel that connects creative agency KPIs to media agency KPIs, and they’re incentivized together. Our creative agency needs to understand media performance data and not be precious about the work.
Because it’s not just about award-winning creative; it’s about work that performs. Otherwise, we’re just screaming into a void.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Jessica Padula, click here.
