Ricola has been a household name since 1930. Its cough drops and breath mints have been on store shelves for nearly 100 years and when you hear their name, you probably immediately remember the “Riiiicolaaaaa” jingle that played on living room TVs throughout the 90s.
Despite being known around the globe, Ricola operated as a family business with a heavy focus on a brick-and-mortar retail model. The company was looking to expand to ecommerce and came to Whitebox for our team’s expertise in growing Amazon businesses and gaining control of brands in the modern marketplace.
The Whitebox team used Omnifi Insights for data to identify key opportunities for growth in Ricola’s newest sales channel.
Ricola is an established CPG brand that previously had limited ecommerce experience and needed a plan to reach consumers who don’t exclusively purchase goods in physical stores. Ricola brought the household name. Whitebox brought the direct-to-consumer expertise.
To get started, Whitebox executed a channel cleanup to gain control of resellers, protect the integrity of the Ricola brand and increase revenue. The team optimized Ricola’s Amazon listings, established brand ownership to create new A+ and Storefront content, merged duplicate ASINs and narrowed the catalog to include the most profitable SKUs.
Using Whitebox’s proprietary Omnifi Insights technology, the team accessed trending reports to identify which products were losing the Buy Box to resellers. From there, Whitebox compared Ricola’s trending keywords with competitors’ keywords to identify “the top strategic terms that would increase new user acquisition” that increased Ricola’s search ranking. Whitebox strategically and aggressively bid on these high-performing keywords to improve Ricola’s visibility. Once listings were optimized, the focus shifted to paid ads.
With this data, Whitebox redirected Ricola’s advertising budget to the products that have the greatest halo effect. Finally, using market basket data to see what customers purchased together, Whitebox was able to combat single-pack options sold at lower price points by offering multi-packs that created higher value for customers.
Whitebox’s ability to view top-performing keywords, products and pack sizes provided the data needed to offer insights and analysis on building multi-packs and implementing pricing automation to outpace competitors and win the Buy Box. Whitebox efficiently tested virtual product bundles before going live with multi-packs, which reduced costs and provided valuable data.
Additionally, Whitebox used Omnifi Insights to monitor various aspects of Ricola’s business (like pricing and assortments) and implement an effective advertising strategy to increase sales.
"Ricola has found Omnifi to be a really intuitive, engaging and user friendly product. What sets Whitebox apart is its ability to build meaningful insights from the platform and create value for our business. This unique partnership model gives us the competitive advantage to activate and win on Amazon and shape our strategic thinking on our overall e-commerce business."