Helping a brand grow big & strong: How Little Dish uses Attest to drive category growth

Little Dish is on a mission to power toddlerhood through fresh and easy nutrition that helps little ones grow, play and develop. When your target audience is parents of children aged 1-3, you can often find that food sold to those parents in the supermarkets is older than the child itself. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Using refrigeration space in supermarkets in the UK and the US, Little Dish are seeing success in bringing a fresher option to the market. 

Pioneering a whole sector, and battling the behaviour changes that are crucial to growth, Little Dish needed a consumer insights tool that helped them understand and benchmark their own growth, at a speed that keeps up with the digital analysis tools they were used to. We spoke to Little Dish’s Marketing Manager, Clem Elphinstone, about their use of Attest to track brand health metrics, understand competitors in the landscape and quantify the success of their digital campaigns. Read on to discover how Little Dish used Attest to measure the growth of their brand and their sector. 

Complimenting a social-first strategy

Little Dish’s marketing strategy skews towards digital because of the nature of their audience: 

We know the power of social media for us when our demographic is parents with young children; they’re very active on social, especially Facebook and Instagram. We use various digital analysis tools; sprout social, Google Analytics, Hotjar and so on. However, Attest was introduced so we could begin understanding our market penetration and brand awareness. 

Performance marketing metrics are crucial to a brand like Little Dish, who’s biggest campaigns in 2019 were predominantly run through social media. But traditional performance marketing tools can’t report on the wider consumer market and brand health. 

Because of the lack of refrigeration in baby aisles we find that the fresh baby and food sector is relatively small and unknown. Because the sector is small, we knew that our awareness and penetration as a brand was going to be small. But as we begin to change behaviours with our campaigns we start to see parents getting more educated about fresh and nutritional food. The change is more apparent in the US, but the UK market is gaining traction.

We came to Attest because it’s a very user-friendly platform to allow us to measure our awareness over time and quantify campaign effectiveness by looking at penetration within the baby and toddler category.

The turn around times in particular are super. If you’re using an agency to run your consumer surveys you wouldn’t get your data through for at least a week, whereas with Attest the longest we’ve had to wait is 24 hours. We once got 1000 responses within 3 hours, it’s really lovely to work with really short timelines.

Applying the same timelines to tracking brand metrics as you do to digital analytics, without giving up the simplicity of an end-to-end digital platform, means testing and exploring doesn’t slow you down. And speed is just one way in which Attest matched Little Dish’s digital-first expectations. 

Flex to bespoke needs

Attest was first introduced to Little Dish to serve as a brand tracking solution; to measure brand awareness over time and, in particular, around key campaigns to enable them to understand the effectiveness of that activation. Brand awareness and purchase intent data also allow Little Dish to benchmark these figures against their biggest competitors, and understand their relative growth within the category over time. Fully bespoke, fully flexible surveys are crucial to helping Little Dish gather personalised insights for their emerging sector. 

You have full autonomy over how and when you set up surveys; Attest allows us to do things exactly how and when we want, it’s incredibly easy and flexible.

We don’t have set timelines around our tracking, for instance every month or quarter. It happens to work out at about every 2-3 months, but it’s scheduled around our campaign spikes (both before and after). The timings aren’t set in stone, and it’s great to use a tool that can be fluid around our campaign timelines.

With Attest you can run research no more and no less often than your brand needs. Every brand is unique, the times you run your campaigns are unique, and the questions you want to ask are unique. Attest flexes to all of that, and puts the power to craft your own research in your hands. 

Using the results

For a consumer insights tool to be as quick and flexible as performance marketing analytics, the results need to be rapidly understood and actioned. 

In terms of results, we’ve used them for benchmarking and understanding both where we are and where we should be aiming to be. We can comparatively use the results across waves to understand how the metrics are moving (even in comparison to our competitors).

It’s just me who drafts and sends the surveys, but there are several stakeholders who login to Attest to look at the survey data; including the Head of Marketing and our MD. In-platform they can cut the data so easily; we segment the data a fair bit in our analysis, so it’s been really powerful for us that we’ve been able to use the tool itself to cut the data in any way we like. I’m a bit of a data geek, so I love being able to interrogate the data and understand demographic and answer-based skews.

Next steps

Attest has helped Little Dish track their penetration in a small but growing sector, identifying which campaigns are effective in driving awareness and using the results to optimise their marketing. With little existing research available, Clem and her team have mapped their industry in two global markets by keeping track of competitors and their own brand health metrics over time.

Because of Attest, Little Dish has a much more in-depth understanding of our campaign effectiveness and can better learn how to best drive brand awareness and growth – easily and with agility.

If your own brand is looking for a brand tracking tool that works fast enough to keep up with performance marketing analytics, flexes to your bespoke timelines and offers powerful in-platform analysis, get in touch with Attest today.