Case study
GROOVE helps skin-care brand AMBiQUE increase year-on-year sales by 422% in Japan
Bringing high-quality Japanese brands and products to customers around the world has been a top goal for the SOLIA Corporation. Through their research, they noticed a gap in the cosmetics industry: Organic skin-care brands were not reaching out to men. SOLIA wanted to change that and created AMBiQUE, a company dedicated to creating and selling organic skin-care products for men. Initially, SOLIA wanted to sell AMBiQUE products in the Amazon store as a part of their brand awareness strategy, but sales were not as high as they wanted. The company had concerns about the long-term success of their new brand, so they enlisted partner GROOVE, Inc., in April 2021 to help re-imagine their Amazon selling strategy.
GROOVE provides consulting services for ad management and businesses on Amazon. When kicking off the partnership with AMBiQUE, GROOVE identified Amazon categories that could help the brand increase their awareness with customers and promote sales growth. Adding to the advertising strategy, GROOVE estimated AMBiQUE’s market size and total addressable market, brand share and projected product sales. Getting an accurate view of an advertiser’s products in their respective market is critical for brands, according to Masayuki Suzuki, head of consulting division at GROOVE, Inc. “Understanding advertisers’ strengths and competitive edge, formulating appropriate marketing strategies and following market trends will pave the way for advertisers’ business success,” said Suzuki.
AMBiQUE Store header image
Increasing and maintaining sales for seasonal products
GROOVE’s strategies also looked at AMBiQUE’s products that had seasonal appeal. For instance, the brand’s hair-removal creams sold best during their peak season of June through August. Knowing this, GROOVE calculated the time frame when sales began to grow for these seasonal products, such as AMBiQUE’s hair-removal creams, by using search frequency rankings in their brand analysis. GROOVE focused on launching Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to help the products appear in high search placements before peak season began. Aiming to acquire new customers, GROOVE closely monitored the ratio of new customers through brand metrics and increased new-to-brand customers from 80% to over 90% in six months.1 As a result, ad-attributed sales increased, which helped lead to an increase in growth of AMBiQUE products within the category.
GROOVE believes that the images featured on product detail pages contribute significantly to the purchase rate when acquiring new customers. Therefore, before peak season, they optimised their product detail pages to ensure they were highly informative. In response to new buyers’ concerns about skin damage, GROOVE illustrated the brand’s gentleness on skin by displaying images in context that showed models using the products. Since many new purchasers were also using hair-removal cream for the first time, they created instructional videos of how to use the product and promoted the links through Sponsored Brands video.
After their peak season had ended, GROOVE initiated remarketing tactics to customers who had purchased products from AMBiQUE by using display ads through Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP. These efforts resulted in continued purchases from customers acquired during peak season, using Brand Metrics to confirm the increase in the repeat purchases.
– Megumi Ogawa, e-commerce division manager, SOLIAGROOVE, Inc., is a reliable partner that not only can improve advertising operations, but also provides advice on overall brand strategies from market competition research. They stay up-to-date with the latest market competition research and give detailed strategy-making advice based on that research. Their proposals have helped our brand grow in highly competitive markets, and have contributed to an increase in sales and brand awareness. At the same time, this means we are able to concentrate on enhancing our brand image and improving our products, and we are able to optimise our approach through the “brand building” that was our initial aim. I am convinced that by continuing to partner with GROOVE, we can achieve even greater results.
Seeing sales increase in the hair-removal category
As a result of AMBiQUE’s enhanced advertising strategy with help from GROOVE, their sales increased by 422% year over year within their hair-removal products.2 Brand awareness also improved, which led to consistent sales during the off-season, which also included products that previously had a strong degree of seasonality.
1–2 Source: GROOVE, Japan, 2023.