Jardine Restaurant Group: Increasing return on ad spend by more than 200% with a customer data platform on Google Cloud
About Jardine Restaurant Group
Jardine Restaurant Group (JRG) is one of the leading food and beverage groups in Asia, operating over 940 outlets under the KFC, Pizza Hut and PHD brands in Hong Kong, Macao, Myanmar, Taiwan and Vietnam. Each day, JRG’s more than 25,000 diverse employees are passionate about sharing the simple joys of food with customers. The company grows through the empowerment of people, innovation and sustainability. JRG is a member of the Jardine Matheson Group.
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Contact usJRG is the first restaurant group to build a Customer Data Platform (CDP) on Google Cloud to drive more precise ad and marketing strategies with consolidated data sets.
Google Cloud results
- Increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) by more than 200%
- Enables data-backed A/B testing for better decision making
- Granular understanding of customer preferences to run tailored marketing campaigns
- Identifying potential high contributing customers with Recommendations AI
Driving higher ROI on ad and marketing spend with data driven insights on Google Cloud
People make food consumption decisions multiple times a day, and within the food and beverage (F&B) industry, competition is rife. For F&B brands, influencing consumers through ads and campaigns with the right messaging is important to remain top of mind. However, the coming cookie-less world in advertising will disrupt and constrain the effectiveness and ROI of targeting and optimization processes especially on performance-oriented campaigns. That is why operators like Jardine Restaurant Group (JRG) are adopting new ways in their digital strategy.
With this in mind, the group became the first company in the restaurant industry in Hong Kong to build a Customer Data Platform (CDP) on Google Cloud to gain customer insights. The mission was largely a marketing driven one, to gear up beyond the cookie-less world and improve the return on investment (ROI) of its digital media spend and strengthen its direct-to-consumer strategy.
"With the rapid changes in the digital landscape, we need to give higher priority to our owned channels which can strengthen direct interaction with our customers, while leveraging data driven solutions to provide better customer experience and drive stickiness," says Matthew Chan, Chief Digital Officer at JRG. "The capabilities at Google Cloud, combined with other Google products, lays the foundation to deliver a holistic solution for our business coming challenge."
Gaining deeper customer insights with CDP
More than half of JRG’s business comes from digital channels. This means that the group has visibility on customer interactions across the different touchpoints, and how they react to the different campaigns they get served. Based on this information, JRG could provide more targeted and relevant messages to their customers.
The decision to build a CDP on Google Cloud was a given, since the group had already been using Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 (GA4), as well as Campaign Manager 360 (CM360) for marketing campaigns. Now, JRG uses first-party data from its CDP to support the campaigns they run on different Google platforms and other communication channels.
"With the rapid changes in the digital landscape, we need to give higher priority to our owned channels which can strengthen direct interaction with our customers, while leveraging data driven solutions to provide better customer experience and drive stickiness. The capabilities at Google Cloud, combined with other Google products, lays the foundation to deliver a holistic solution for our business coming challenge."
—Matthew Chan, Chief Digital Officer, Jardine Restaurant GroupAs a company that serves popular brands like KFC, Pizza Hut, and PHD, Chan says that enabling a seamless, easy and fast ordering experience is important. However, a positive experience can mean different things for different people.
"Instead of doing general targeting by categories, we can dive deeper using the suite of Google products like GA4 and CM360, together with CDP data, to get visibility of customer behavior patterns. For example, we could segment a group of customers who may have a higher intention to try a new flavor and then retarget them when we have a new product launch. Apart from that, the CDP also enables us to enhance our understanding of anonymous visitors. These are all useful information and are valuable assets to the company," Chan explains.
The integration of CM360, GA4, JRG’s marketing automation tool and its CDP, supported by BigQuery and Recommendations AI, forms the foundation of JRG’s tech stack in the customer facing category of the business, supporting its proprietary customer journey marketing automation tool.
All of JRG’s advertising data for its website and mobile app are available on CM360, while consumer browsing pattern lives on GA4. "We use BigQuery to bring together these two different sets of data for visualization, and to monitor campaign performances. At the same time, we leverage Google Cloud’s machine learning capabilities on Recommendations AI for deeper insights by pulling in data from different transactions on our website," says Chan.
200%+ return on ad spend (ROAS) uplift by optimizing audience orchestration
Being able to deliver personalized insights around customers helps drive predictive marketing and digital commerce. "The capabilities of Google Cloud CDP allow us to bring together siloed, first-party data across JRG’s different channels for more consumer-centric digital commerce. The project enables various impressive use cases that drive amazing performance and investment return," says Erica Lung, Senior Digital Project Manager at JRG.
JRG extracted different segments of customers from their CDP and blended them across the different digital media. Taking an SEM (Search Engine Marketing) use case as an example, within three weeks, the team saw significant results, with the return on related ad spend (ROAS) increasing by more than 200%. CDP helps JRG identify and profile potential high contributing customers for different market segmentation, leading the team to add more testing and media optimization use cases.
To create personalized purchasing experience, JRG uses Recommendation AI and Optimize 360 with the CDP. Sharing customers’ signals to Optimize 360 enables JRG to bring a customized recommendation experience. Customers see recommended products based on the AI suggestions instead of the menu that has been manually set. By showing the right add-on product to the right user, the brand observed a 12% increase in add-on rate and average order value (AOV) increased by more than 30%.
Part of the group’s strategy is to focus on its direct-to-consumer strategy and maximizing the lifetime value for individual customers. By being able to aggregate first-party data, JRG could understand customers’ attributes, so it can go beyond basic retargeting and run more precise communications. The marketing and e-commerce team can then leverage different touchpoints to increase the customer purchase frequency, backed by data-driven insights instead of guesswork.
"The capabilities of Google Cloud CDP allow us to bring together siloed, first-party data across JRG’s different channels for more consumer-centric digital commerce. The project enables various impressive use cases that drive amazing performance and investment return."
—Erica Lung, Senior Digital Project Manager, Jardine Restaurant GroupGoing into uncharted territory with Google Cloud
JRG’s decision to partner with Google Cloud in the development of its CDP is largely due to Google’s understanding of the advertising and marketing space and the digital landscape. "We chose to work with Google to develop our own solutions, in order to achieve further breakthroughs," says Chan.
He adds that the relationship with Google adds a lot of weight to their partnership. "From day one, I felt very strong buy-in and engagement from the Google team. They have always gone above and beyond, helping us pull resources within the Google family, including cross-border resources like mobilizing resources from Taiwan and Singapore to provide the best solutions for us."
Chan looks forward to leveraging the upcoming solutions that Google has in store, particularly in the digital media landscape, to keep JRG ahead in the industry. "With the CDP as our foundation, we will continue to optimize and drive the benefits of having first-party customer data to remain the brand of choice and stay ahead of our competitors."
"From day one, I felt very strong buy-in and engagement from the Google team. They have always gone above and beyond, helping us pull resources within the Google family, including cross-border resources like mobilizing resources from Taiwan and Singapore to provide the best solutions for us."
—Matthew Chan, Chief Digital Officer, Jardine Restaurant GroupTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Jardine Restaurant Group
Jardine Restaurant Group (JRG) is one of the leading food and beverage groups in Asia, operating over 940 outlets under the KFC, Pizza Hut and PHD brands in Hong Kong, Macao, Myanmar, Taiwan and Vietnam. Each day, JRG’s more than 25,000 diverse employees are passionate about sharing the simple joys of food with customers. The company grows through the empowerment of people, innovation and sustainability. JRG is a member of the Jardine Matheson Group.