Dive Brief:
- Mondelez announced Tuesday a partnership with Facebook to strengthen mobile-first experiences between brands and consumers by using consumer insights and messaging.
- Mondelez is an early adopter of Facebook's recently announced Audience Insights API, which uses vast consumer data into actionable insights for improving brands' marketing campaigns. The company already employed the platform for its latest Cadbury campaign in the U.K.
- Facebook and Mondelez will experiment together on the Messenger platform, including the platform's newly launched bots, to devise ways for consumers to interact with Mondelez brands and consumer services globally in real-time using Messenger threads.
Dive Insight:
"Mobile is the most profound disruption we've ever seen in business," Bonin Bough, chief media and e-commerce officer at Mondelez, said in a statement. "Messaging will have an even greater impact on how brands engage with consumers than social media has."
That's a bold statement considering the revolutionary impact social media has had on the ways food and beverage brands market to and engage with consumers today. However, other marketing experts have substantiated this sentiment, specifically in the realm of messenger, or chat, apps.
Together, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber have 2.125 billion monthly active users globally, all on mobile, according to BI Intelligence. That's compared to the same number, 2.125 billion, global users for the top four social networks — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram — combined. The difference is, the social media global user base includes millions of computer-only users. If brands want to connect with consumers strictly on mobile, messenger services offer a larger global user base.
Monetization of these apps is only just being discovered (or allowed), so the opportunity for brands to be early adopters on these potentially lucrative platforms is massive.
While messenger apps are already widely adopted (Facebook Messenger has now been downloaded more times than the primary social networking app), only 36% of smartphone owners use messaging apps, according to a 2015 study by Pew Research Center. While messenger apps have the potential for continued adoption growth, growth on major social media sites like Facebook may have largely plateaued, the Pew study concluded.
As for Mondelez, the Facebook partnership could be another step toward one of the company's primary goals: to build its e-commerce platform. If Mondelez can be one of the early adopters that successfully monetizes messenger apps for food and beverage, these apps could play a key role in its e-commerce strategy (in addition to products like Oreo Colorfilled and Mondelez's Tmall.com store with Alibaba). That could then inspire ideas for other manufacturers struggling to capitalize on the fast-growing e-commerce channel.