Case study

Decades-old, family-run Chatsumino Sato modernises their tea-making marketing in Japan with sponsored ads

Chatsumino

A consistent business purpose has always driven the family-run tea-making company Chatsumino Sato, which was established in 1946 in Japan. According to CEO Motoomi Nakane and business director Yuya Nakane, that mission is, quite simply, to “make tea that enriches people’s lives”.

But as the company’s growth story demonstrates, traditional values can still be embraced in a modernised marketing world.

“As a small business, our brand name wasn’t well-known,” explained the CEO. “We realised that despite using top-quality ingredients, customers may not take notice of us.” So in 2021, Nakane decided to refresh the decades-old company’s marketing strategy by enhancing their use of Amazon Ads solutions.


Watch how Chatsumino Sato is modernising tea making traditions in Japan with sponsored ads

Optimising their storefront on the Amazon store

Before driving traffic with ads, the brand ensured their product listings, descriptions and Store were optimised with meaningful content in ways that reflected Chatsumino Sato’s brand values. For example, they ensured that relevant keywords such as “safety” and “commitment” were prevalent in the company’s Store on Amazon to highlight their focus on environmental sustainability and food safety.

Running ads on autopilot with Sponsored Products

As a next step, Chatsumino Sato delved into using Sponsored Products ads. Specifically, they chose automatic keyword and product targeting for their ads with broad match, and used dynamic bidding – up and down. The team also made sure to regularly fine-tune their campaign every two days.

The team found this approach effective – particularly for new products – because it helped them secure visibility without guesswork, and allowed performance insights to inform the effective bidding strategy and keywords to then target manually.

Broadening customer touchpoints for Prime Day and new product launches

Building on these initial steps, the Chatsumino Sato team decided to widen the company’s reach by adopting additional ad solutions.

Specifically, Chatsumino Sato launched their first Sponsored Brands campaign shortly before Prime Day 2022 to help highlight their Lightning Deals. They then used Sponsored Display to remarket their newly launched red-bean tea to relevant audiences and help inspire repeat purchases.

The approach was a clear success, as the team saw sales attributed to advertising increase by 2x year over year.1 With Sponsored Display, Chatsumino Sato saw 90% of sales attributed to advertising come from new-to-brand customers.2

According to Nakane, the company’s work with Amazon Ads has been especially effective at “enriching two-way communication between us and our customers”. He added, “By better understanding our customers’ needs and wants, we’ve been able to innovate and inspire our business as a whole.”

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1 Advertiser-provided data, JP, Nov 2021–Nov 2022
2 Advertiser-provided data, JP, July 2023

Results are reflective of campaigns for one advertiser, Chatsumino Sato, and are not indicative of future outcomes.