Our work — Fazer
Fazer: Creating the MyFazer Community
Fluido helped Fazer to make their direct-to-consumer strategy come true by creating the MyFazer Community. The results can be seen both in over 60 000 community members and sales numbers.
Fazer is one of the best-known brands in Finland when it comes to delicious food, especially chocolate and baked goods. After starting their journey in a café almost 130 years ago, Fazer has grown to an international company with operations e.g. in the Nordics, the Baltic Countries, and Russia.
Fazer started their direct-to-consumer strategy in 2017 because they had a strong need to place the consumer in the center of the business and to open a dialogue with consumers.
“This DTC strategy put both retail and online stores into our focus. We wanted to increase loyalty and to have direct contact with the consumers,” Fazer’s Senior Manager, Digital & Customer Experience Leena Kivioja says.
Fazer and Fluido have been cooperating for nearly a decade, beginning when Fluido helped the Fazer Food Services business unit with their B2B CRM. The use of Salesforce has been expanding as the cooperation continues.
“We had good experiences from the B2B side, so we chose to use Fluido on the B2C side as well. Fluido has performed really well.”
Learning from the consumer
Fluido has been supporting Fazer in creating this consumer connection through the MyFazer Community — a platform and mobile app for Fazer’s customers created using Salesforce tools. The platform covers most of the different business areas of Fazer, including sweets, bakeries, cafes, and lifestyle foods. MyFazer Community allows the consumer to influence product development and offers them exclusive benefits, thus activating the consumer.
“We get to learn from the consumers’ behavior and to collect data, which can be used further in data-driven marketing,” Kivioja explains.
Adding to Kivioja’s comments, Fazer’s Senior Service Manager, Digital Solutions Sanna Vanhatalo says: “Fluido has come on board with a great attitude and understood if we had to modify our original plans. Fluido proposes different solutions for us, and we ponder these together. Often the solution comes from Fluido’s experts instead of our team. And when an emergency comes, we do not have to think about who is responsible, but we solve it together.”
“The Fluido team does everything for their customer, and they have found just the right people to be part of the Fazer team. Fluido’s people have been really excited from the beginning of the project and it could be seen from their attitude that they came to build the most valued brand in Finland,” Vanhatalo adds.
Deepening the working relationship even further, Fluido’s team has remained the same for almost the entire cooperation.
“It is a really good thing [to keep the same team]. Too often the main contact persons or team members change, and it takes time for new members to familiarize themselves with the project and processes. Even if our partner is technical, it is important to understand the processes. I am happy that Fluido’s personnel have felt comfortable to work with us,” Vanhatalo concludes.
Loyalty seen in the numbers
MyFazer Community was well-received by the consumers. With more than 60 000 members already, last year’s membership target was reached, and the target for this year is set high.
“One of the biggest outcomes is the change in attitude inside the company. A loyalty program may seem to be an abstract concept for the product development team. We have been able to show others in our company that the loyalty program has a concrete meaning. We have an easy way to give the consumer a chance to participate — it does not take long to create a questionnaire,” Kivioja points out.
She adds: “As an example, the product development team in charge of sweets wanted to create a survey on candy bags, and we had the solution right away. The outcomes have been marvelous!”
The loyalty of the community members can be seen in the sales numbers as well:
“We put our spring novelty box up for order before Christmas and it was a hit! The box was visible in the app, at our website and we sent a newsletter. MyFazer Community members spend more on average, and our presales goods sold out without any paid advertisement. On top of influencing the products, the community members get a chance to preorder before other customers,” Kivioja concludes.
Today’s connected customers expect highly personalized and quality customer experience. Deliver seamless digital customer experiences with Salesforce Experience Cloud and Fluido.
