Founded in 2015, Amazin’Graze is a startup originating from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The company is an online retailer of healthy, handmade snacks. It differentiates itself through offering products that are both unique and innovative in terms of flavour profiles. Amazin’Graze’s mission is to change the way people snack on a daily basis, raising awareness of the importance of healthy eating.

In 2016 this year, the company expanded operations to Singapore and Hong Kong. As this is a fairly recent expansion, the company has struggled with achieving a strong brand presence and establishing market share in these two new markets. The bulk of its customer base remains to be centralised in Malaysia. Our project thus aims to focus on a social media strategy specific to Singapore.

This leads us to our research question:

How can Amazin’Graze utilise social media to create a strong, differentiated brand identity and increase engagement with target audiences in order to boost sales and gain more market share?

Current Context: The rise of unhealthy snacking habits in Singapore

A 2015 Labour Market report by the Ministry of Manpower revealed that Singapore holds the top position for having the longest average working hours in the world. In addition, more than half of Singapore workers reported higher stress levels over the last six months. In Singapore alone, more than three in five workers have gained weight since starting work. Additionally, research has also shown that snacking has positive effect on mental health and cognitive performances. 

Hence, the issue of unhealthy workplace snacking is a rising trend that needs to be addressed in Singapore. This presents Amazin’Graze with a huge opportunity to tap on unhealthy eating trends to further promote its mission and beliefs.

Analysis of current social media strategies:

We observed Amazin’Graze’s social media activity for a three-month duration from July 2016 to October 2016. As Amazin’Graze solely utilizes two main social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, our analysis will be based on both platforms. However, we will focus our analysis on the company’s Facebook insight metrics.

Themes:

We identigied four recurring themese – Women, Health, Community and Engagement – that are central to the company’s social media posts. The focus on these four content themes remains consistent across both Facebook and Instagram posts, which is essential in building a strong social media and brand identity.

The three posts in which received the most user engagement were:

1. Video posts that shared dynamic and short healthy recipes
2. Posts related to Amazin’Graze’s story and founding
3. Giveaway posts

Given the higher user engagement of such content, Amazin’Graze should capitalise on themes to boost its brand identity and create more tailored content to better encourage user engagement. Moreover, we suggest improving cross-platform promotion given the strong utilisation of both social media platforms and content consistency. 

Facebook page insights:

Our analysis of Amazin’Graze’s Facebook page insights is based on:

Reach: The number of people who viewed a post

Impressions: The number of times one’s content or post is displayed

Engagement: The number of interactions people have with the content (Likes, Comments, Shares)

The company currently engages in paid Facebook advertising.Based on the data retrieved,  it is clear that paid advertising significantly boosts the presence and user traffic to each generated Facebook post.

We observed that effectiveness must be measure in terms of unique user engagement. This is because engagement reflects whether or not Amazin’Graze’s target audience is both receptive and interested in the nature of the content of each Facebook post. An increase in unique user engagement will also translate to attracting a larger pool of untapped target audiences.

Despite high visibility of each post on Facebook, the content of each post has failed to engage users. This reflects a lack of interest users have with existing content, which ultimately translates to weakened brand perception and presence. Thus, our social media strategies will be tailored to boost user engagement on Amazin’Graze’s social media platforms. 

Web Traffic:

Based on current web traffic metrics, we observe that Amazin’Graze currently holds the highest average daily visitors to its web store in comparison to Boxgreen and Madereal.

When daily visitors are segmented based on location, 65% of Amazin’Graze’s daily visitors come from Malaysia. In comparison, 77.7% of Boxgreen’s webstore visitors come from Singapore. This stresses the need for more targeted social media strategies based on location. As such, our proposals will be specifically tailored to the Singapore market so as to effectively differentiate Amazin’Graze from competitors and boost market share in Singapore.

Current challenges

1.Amazin’Graze perceived as as Malaysian Brand

Amazin’Graze has an extremely Malaysian centric feed. In the few posts that aimed to address the Singaporean and Hong Kong communities, content was largely ambiguous. 

2. Perception of Granola as a Breakfast Meal

Results from our primary research showed that 71% of our sample felt that Granola was more of a breakfast meal instead of a snack. The company similarly stated their difficulties in changing people’s perception of granola.

3. Low Market Share Due to Low Brand Awareness

Our primary research revealed that Amazin’Graze has low brand awareness.

Objectives

1.Branding

Brand awareness

We hope to increase Amazin’Graze’s brand awareness through the strategies proposed which aim to differentiate the products that Amazin’Graze offers by emphasising the availability of healthy snacks with fun and local flavours such as Gula Melaka.

Targeted and localized branding based on geographical location

With the visible lack of organization of their Facebook page, there is a need for the creation of separate Facebook pages for each specific country that Amazin’Graze operates in.

Brand synergy: Establish a strong, differentiated overarching brand image

The message to consumers should still be uniform and consistent across all of the Facebook pages, ensuring a consistent brand image in each market. 

2. Changing consumer perceptions and behaviour towards healthy snacks

We hope to change consumer perceptions by differentiating Amazin’Graze’s products as snacks that are versatile and can be eaten at all times of the day.

3. Increase engagement with target audience to drive sales

Despite having high traffic to the web store, Amazin’Graze faces difficulties in translating them to sales. The proposed strategies aim to not only increase engagement but to increase sales for the company

Target Audience

B2C

Our first group of target audience consists of young, working females age 26-35. The target audience’s motivations would include wanting a great tasting snack that is healthy, convenient, fun and social.

B2B

The second group of target audience are that of corporate and cafes that share similar values. The corporate and business motivations would include wanting snacks that are tasty and are great complements to the existing food selections.

Message Strategy

In efforts to directly target each specific audience, we have three main messages with the aim to directly address their concerns and overcome the challenges.

Female target audience: Amazin’Graze is a healthier alternative without compromising in taste.

Corporate Businesses: Amazin’Graze is aligned with their businesses’ social responsibility efforts within the organization.

Cafes: Amazin’Graze offers products that would complement and value add to the food that they serve at the cafes.

To sum it up, the main message that Amazin’Graze would like to spread is that Healthy eating does not have to compromise on taste, convenience and friends.

Methodology in finding targeted consumers

Amazin’Graze currently utilises Google analytics to find their targeted audience. We felt that Facebook analytics could further enhance their search especially since one of our proposed strategies would encompass the use of Facebook as a platform. Functions such as Facebook graph search, audience insights and interest suggestions on Facebook would ease the search process of target audience.

Proposed Social Media Platforms

Amazin’Graze is currently on Facebook and Instagram, but we propose expanding our current social media platforms by branching out to Youtube. We identified 3 reasons as to why we chose these 3 platforms:

1. Emphasis on visual elements
2. Ability to harness a brand community through video content
3. Seamless Advertising

Proposed Strategies

• MissIndependent Youtube Video Campaign

Overview

Miss Independent is a youtube video campaign that mainly targets Amazin’Graze’s main consumer group, the female working population between the age of 26 and 35. The video campaign will feature short stories about the different types of female characters we see in Singapore and how they have integrated Amazin’Graze products into their lives.

Objectives

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Increase consumer engagement
3. Strengthen brand image

• Amazin’Grecipies Instagram Campaign

Overview

The case study on Oreo’s Snack Hack inspired the idea behind ‘Amazin’Grecipes’, an Instagram campaign that will feature a series of dynamic, engaging content that showcases quick, simple meal preparations and recipes incorporating Amazin’Graze’s products.

Objectives

1. Increase engagement with target audience
2. Help existing and non-existing customers visualise the appeal and usability of Amazin’Graze products
3. Help overcome the negative perceptions towards health foods as being poor in taste & appeal.   

By: Amanda Tan Shu Hui, Isabel Audrey Lim Pinxiu, Celestine Chun Wei Ting