Melissa Katrincic is responsible for the Burt’s Bees digital marketing strategy, which includes e-commerce and international components. In this interview, she discusses how brand image fits with e-commerce and social media strategy.
eMarketer: What is the Burt’s Bees brand personality and how do you bring that to life online?
Melissa Kantrincic: The brand stands for the greater good. We care about your well-being and create products that have a benefit for your skin, but also benefit the earth and are humanitarian. We think about it in terms of three pillars—humanitarian, environment and social responsibility.
“If we’re doing something online, how can we deliver an experience that is similar to retail, where you still feel an identification with the brand?”
We really take pride in putting out information about natural personal care and how to understand it in a confusing marketplace. And we’re also looking at how to balance between online and offline sales. If we’re doing something online, how can we deliver an experience that is similar to retail, where you still feel an identification with the brand?
I spent the past nine months creating a long-term interactive strategy for the brand so consumers want to interact with us online and we want to have a true dialogue with them.
eMarketer: What’s growing the fastest in your digital media mix?
“Our focus now is how to offer a solid e-commerce experience, and how to bring that to life for our international locations.”
Ms. Katrincic: Our focus now is how to offer a solid e-commerce experience and how to bring that to life for our international locations—especially in the UK, Canada and Australia. John Haydock, senior vice president, global brand planning and activation, recently joined the team. He comes from Crutchfield and has a great sense of what the e-commerce opportunity can be. My team reports to him.
I think Burt’s Bees has a real opportunity with gifting and replenishment, in terms of our higher-end face care and acne care lines. You can really get into loyalty and repeat-buying programs.
eMarketer: How difficult is it to control the brand image and presence on e-commerce partner sites?
Ms. Katrincic: It takes some care and it’s something that we’re still working through. As the manufacturer selling direct to the consumer, it raises some potential concerns with certain online customers of ours. Quite honestly, it’s about open communication. We feel that as the brand, we have something to offer our consumers that might be a little bit different than say, a mass online retailer. That said, we’re on drugstore.com, we’re starting to sell on Amazon. We have certain SKUs at Target and Wal-Mart. BurtsBees.com is really the only online retailer that has all our product lines.
We’d like offer our affiliates an online toolkit where we can start to increase SEO for them and for us. I think we’re just scratching the surface right now.
eMarketer: What is the extent of your social media presence right now?
Ms. Katrincic: We’ve been on Facebook since March and have over 40,000 fans, but we’re still figuring out what our long-term strategy is going to be. We’re trying to offer a blend of promotional messages as well as insights into the brand. We also want to offer a sense of exclusivity.
Facebook is a great new foray for us. The fact that it’s global has, at times, proved challenging because we run online promotions in the US that sometimes are unavailable to our Canadian or UK consumers. They let us know that they’re not very happy about that, but we’re working on it.
From the brand side, we have our ECRM program, which is now focused on e-newsletters and acquisition. We want to turn it into a loyalty and brand ambassadorship program. We started a pilot with Think Passenger about three months ago and they ran a prelaunch pilot community for us supporting our acne product community.
It was a 12-week community with 350 consumers and it gave us insights into what they liked and didn’t like about the products. It was like a focus group where we tested what we’re working on before we go into a launch.
“We’re looking at loyalty holistically, so not only from the sense of our consumers who are very loyal purchasers of our products, but also the ones who are online and offline influencers.”
I think we’ll launch an online loyalty community with the right segmentation sometime in the latter half of fiscal 2010 and launch that with the right segmentation. We’re looking at loyalty holistically, so not only from the sense of our consumers who are very loyal purchasers of our products, but also the ones who are online and offline influencers, talking about natural products and living a greener lifestyle.