Marketing strategy for a startup defining a new market category. Collaboration with Bloom delivered an annual growth rate of over 300%.

Background

Sumally Pocket is a service of Sumally Co., Ltd., a leading provider of "courier trunk rooms” (a service that puts important but unused items in a special box, sends them by courier, and has them stored). In 2017, when Bloom&Co. began offering marketing support, the "home delivery storage room" service was not common.  The challenge was to develop marketing strategies to create/develop the market and grow the business through new user acquisition.

Process

Bloom&Co. started marketing support for Sumally Pocket in 2017.Initially, the team began by understanding customers who were heavy users of the service. Our hypothesis was that current users would be limited to tech-savvy consumers; however, many of the customers were not early adopters of new technology. Moreover, many people were already using the service so extensively that they couldn’t imagine life without it. In addition, the Sumally Pocket “courier trunk room (a service that puts important but unused items in a special box and sends them by courier for storage)” was not as common as it is now. Though user satisfaction  was high, the major challenge was how to convey and disseminate the benefit to new segments of users. Consequently, we created multiple brand concepts and conducted several rounds of interviews and concept testing to refine the marketing strategy. We also identified areas for improvement of the service and defined target segments with relevant messaging for marketing activities across touchpoints (landing page, PR etc).Following the customer research process, the leading concept for outbound marketing communications became clear and the conversion rate on the website improved. Following a large-scale financing in 2019, TV commercials were selected as a key touch point given the attributes of the target audience and the required attitude/behavior change. Reflecting the strategic insights from existing in-depth research, we created a TV commercial that creatively incorporated multiple messages and elements found to be important to drive attitude and behavioral change. In Spring 2019, Sumally Pocket’s first TV commercial launched.

Result

Following the launch of the TV commercial in 2019, the CPA for performance marketing decreased as the understanding of the service deepened. In addition, there was a rapid increase in organic search volume, with the total acquisition cost continuing to improve steadily. As a result of the development of brand assets, the impact has continued even after the TV commercials concluded. Sumally Pocket achieved growth of over 250% compared to the previous period, and has continued to grow consistently. Following the campaign success and by continuing to reach and provide value to many new customers, the company raised new funds and conducted further mass marketing leveraging the same creative assets. As of May 2020, Sumally pocket continued to enjoy an average annual growth rate of 300%.