Sasko Flour puts 'mobile' into mix

Johannesburg, 18 Mar 2008

Sasko Flour has adopted mobile marketing as part of strategy to build direct relationships with customers.

Sasko Flour brand manager Lisanne Bower says this includes SMS campaigns around a TV show, creating a mobile Web site where recipes and tips are available to consumers, and SMS competitions accompanying in-store promotions.

"The attraction of mobile marketing for Sasko Flour lies in its ability to reach a large number of people across age, cultural and LSM groups," says Bower. "Being the first flour producing brand in the market to utilise the technology also gives us a competitive advantage," she says.

Mo-B director Candice Goodman says Sasko Flour began its mobile strategy through an SMS campaign linked to the TV show Mara and Friends with Idols judge, Mara Louw.

"Mo-B specialises in building relationships through the mobile phone, mobile entertainment and integrating TV and mobile marketing strategies." For the campaign, Sasko had Louw chat to celebrities in her kitchen. Viewers were then invited to SMS to request a recipe booklet that was then posted to them.

"Over 20 000 people responded and once they had the chance to try some of the recipes, we followed this up with an SMS campaign asking respondents what their favourite recipes were. The response was overwhelmingly positive," she says.

The top 10 recipes were then put onto Sasko Flour's mobi site, www.saskoflour.mobi.

Getting personal

Goodman says mobile marketing has proved to be a powerful weapon in Sasko Flour's marketing strategy. "The two things that have stood out... have been the high response rates and the emotive replies..." she says. This included a 25% response rate on customers' favourite recipes and a 21% response rate from consumers commenting on Sasko Flour's packaging.

Bower says the communication through to people's cellphones also created more of a personal touch with people being greeted by name. The personal communication resulted in some evocative responses, she adds.

"The responses showed that we were reaching a wide range of people, including those working in bakeries or home industry stores, which are key target markets for us. Furthermore, the unsubscribe rate was extremely low, with only a handful of people choosing to unsubscribe from the communications.

Power of mobile

Multimedia Solutions operations director Riaan Groenewald says the Sasko Flour campaigns show the power of using mobile marketing to build direct relationship with customers, as well as using it to complement other marketing initiatives.

"The key to Sasko Flour's strategy was integrating mobile with TV, direct mailing in the form of the recipe book, using that to make people aware of its mobi site and communicating regularly via SMS and MMS," he says.

Additional functionality has been added to the Sasko Flour Web site and mobi site, including a free SMS facility so that consumers can have the list of ingredients to their favourite recipes SMSed to them.

"Sasko Flour's use of mobile technology is a classic example of how a company has used the consumer's most treasured possession - the cellphone - to strengthen their relationship with their clients. Importantly, the strategy made interacting with the company entertaining and beneficial for the consumer, which is reflected in the high response rates," he says. "It can now build on this initial success and grow their base, offering additional innovative solutions through the mobile channel."