Pearson’s Candy Case Study

Goat Consulting is proud to serve our client, Pearson’s Candy, for selling on Amazon. Pearson’s Candy has a rich heritage of making delicious confections that make everyday moments a little sweeter since 1909. The Goat Consulting team grew up eating Pearson’s brands like Salted Nut Roll, Mint Patties, Bun, and Nut Goodies; and now helping Pearson’s Candy continue to reach their customers on Amazon is a true privilege. It hits close to home with Pearson’s Candy being headquartered in Minnesota where Goat Consulting also is located. We are proud every time we see the iconic Pearson’s billboard, see the logo at a Minnesota Twins game, or sponsoring a Twin Cities race. With support of Goat Consulting, Pearson’s Candy has been able to provide an amazing shopping experience for customers on Amazon, share what makes Pearson’s Candy special through product listing merchandising, reach new customers through Amazon Ads, and make actionable insights through managerial strategy reporting.

pearsons candy goat consulting

Pearson’s Candy Heritage - St. Paul, Minnesota

Amazon Account Set Up and Food Operational Considerations

Selling Candy (and food related products) require additional considerations than general merchandise products. Pearson’s Candy makes it a priority that all customers receive high quality, fresh, and consistent products at every purchase. Fresh candy means more happy customers and more sales and less risk for Pearson’s Candy. Goat Consulting helped achieve these requirements through ensuring accurate account set up and ensuring compliance with Amazon’s policies for selling food. This was accomplished through Brand Registry enrollment, Amazon FBA training, and meltable policy compliance, and SKU tracking by expiration date.

  • Brand Registry - Brand Registry helps sellers build and protect their brand on Amazon by providing sellers with a suite of tools to showcase their brand on Amazon and protect listings. We ensured that Pearson’s Candy went through the correct brand registry process that tied their Amazon listings to their account.

  • Amazon FBA Training - For sellers that have never sent in an Amazon FBA shipment, it can be a confusing process. Goat Consulting successfully trained in the Pearson’s Candy team to utilize the Fulfillment by Amazon service. Pearson’s Candy committing to FBA provides the best-in-class shipping experience for online shoppers. FBA allows Pearson’s Candy to focus on what they are really great at, which is making delicious candy.

  • Meltable Policy Compliance - An important consideration for Pearson’s Candy is complying with the Amazon Meltable policy. This FBA policy states the acceptable temperature range for products in Amazon warehouses. Given the chocolate-based products Pearson’s Candy sells, it is vital that we comply with the Amazon Meltable policy, not just from an Amazon compliance perspective, but we want to ensure that customers receive a consistent high quality candy.

  • SKU tracking by Expiration Date - An extra measure to ensure candy freshness for customers is that we developed a SKU and offer based tracking system to send in FBA inventory in batches.

Product Listing Merchandising

Pearson’s Candy has a long history of manufacturing and selling delicious candy, Goat Consulting helped spread that message through product listing merchandising. Pearson’s Candy is available across the country at convenience stores, grocery stores, and anywhere candy is sold. A combination of Amazon allowing any seller to create an Amazon listing prior to Brand Registry, and Pearson’s Candy being widely available created a situation where there were duplicate and one-off product listings created by third party sellers. Pearson’s Candy wanted to own the customer experience from the search results to purchase, so we cleaned up the listings and offers and merchandised the product listings using best practices to best showcase the Pearson’s Candy product line. This allowed us to share the brand message through copywriting, A+ enhanced brand content, storefront, and subscribe and save.

  • Product Listing Analysis - Goat Consulting scraped the Amazon marketplace to identify all the product listings that were sold by third party sellers. Using the listing merge tool, we were able to cut down the number of duplicate product listings. This created a more seamless shopping experience for customers, so now when customers want to buy a 24 count Salted Nut Roll, they can easily find the 24 count Salted Nut Roll from the Amazon search results.

  • Product Listing Copywriting - The title, bullet point and product description is the area on product listings that allows sellers to showcase product specifications, value propositions for each product, and brand voice and messaging. Each Pearson’s Candy listing is clear about the box size, individual candy bar size, and number of candy bars in each box. We are able to help Pearson’s Candy share the key product features and brand benefits for their products.

  • A+ Enhanced Brand Content - A+ enhanced brand content is the image rich product description section on listings. In partnership with Pearson’s Candy, Goat Consulting used product and lifestyle images to show the different product offerings available from Pearson’s Candy and explain the history behind the 110+ years of history of candy making. These images show the different situations where customers love eating the candy from an on-the-go snack at work, outdoor activities like camping, hiking, fishing, to sharing a treat with a grandfather and grandson.

  • Storefront - Pearson’s Candy sells a variety of delicious candy brands including Salted Nut Rolls, Mint Patties, Bun, and Nut Goodies. The Storefront on Amazon is the place where Pearson’s Candy is able to showcase and share what is special about each brand in the portfolio. Goat Consulting launch the Pearson’s Candy brand store with a unique page for each brand that includes links to each product listing, an about page to share the tradition and ingredients information, and a home page to create a holistic perspective. The Storefront was modeled after Pearson’s Candy’s own website to create a uniform and brand recognizable shopping experience for customers.

  • Subscribe and Save - Try a Pearson’s candy bar and you will see why there are so many repeat customers. Goat Consulting ensured enrollment of listings to the Amazon Subscribe & Save program that provides a discount to customers that opt into repeat deliveries. This is a win-win because customers automatically get delicious candy delivered and Pearson’s Candy gets recurring revenue from those customers.

Amazon Case Study Pearsons

Pearson’s Candy - Salted Nut Roll

Reach New Customers Through Amazon Ads

The Amazon Ads platform has allowed Goat Consulting and Pearson’s Candy to reach new and returning customers and increase sales. Goat Consulting set up Amazon Ads campaigns using a mix of Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display all in an effort to reach customers at each stage of the shopping cycle including building awareness, driving consideration & purchase, and building loyalty. These campaigns are continually improved upon with our optimization efforts to ensure we are meeting goals and objectives.

  • Sponsored Products - Sponsored Product style campaigns display in the search results page in line with organic search results. This allows us to reach customers in both the awareness (showing potential new customers our offering) and consideration.

  • Sponsored Brands - Sponsored Brands displays a banner image served on the search results page. We have been able to drive traffic to the Amazon Storefront to help customers understand what makes Pearson’s Candy special and showcase the different brands and options available.

  • Sponsored Display - Sponsored Display ads allow us to serve ads at unique stages of the shopping experience including remarketing to customers that have purchased the product, or audiences with lifestyle, interests, and purchasing habits that would be interested in Pearson’s Candy

Actionable Insights Through Managerial Reporting

Amazon provides a wide array of data and metrics available to Amazon sellers. The important thing is knowing what the key drivers are to make actionable decisions. Goat Consulting and Pearson’s Candy continue to collaborate on the key performance metrics and drivers to the business. Goat Consulting provides Pearson’s Candy with managerial reporting to be accountable for our efforts and make objective based decisions.

  • KPIs - Goat Consulting reports to Pearson’s key performance indicators such as sales, advertising, and storefront data. These metrics guide decisions on where to allocate additional resources or indicate historical trends to help plan for the future

  • Categorization by Brand - Amazon provides ASIN level reporting. However, for a company like Pearson’s Candy, they require more in-depth categorization. Goat Consulting categorizes each ASIN into its prospective brand to be able to see trends and sales diversification based on the different product brand categorization.

  • Geographic Sales - At Pearson’s request, Goat Consulting created a combination of a visualizer tool and non-customer identifiable zip code order information, to help visually display the national reach of sales. This helps Pearson’s Candy pair their off-Amazon marketing efforts to be able to see the effects on Amazon sales.

  • Amazon Attribution - Amazon Attribution is a great program offered by Amazon that allows sellers to measure marketing efforts outside of Amazon to impression, clicks, conversion metrics to Amazon product listings. Goat Consulting shares charts and graphs with the ability to dig down into channels and sources of traffic to help Pearson’s Candy understand the effectiveness of outside of Amazon marketing translates to sales on Amazon

A Word From Client

”Goat Consulting helped Pearson’s Candy get started with the Amazon FBA platform, supporting us along the way as we grow and evolve within the Amazon environment. The Goat Consulting team is always quick to help support our needs and willing to dig into topics from strategic planning to tactical execution. We are glad to have Goat Consulting as a partner and look forward to continuing to grow our business on Amazon.”

Conclusion

Pearson’s Candy has a long history of providing amazing tasting candy to customers. Pearson’s Candy has been around long before Amazon was an idea in the mind of Jeff Bezos, but Pearson’s Candy understands the importance of reaching customers where they shop and connecting with a new generation of customers that can enjoy their products. Goat Consulting is proud to assist in those efforts and help accomplish Pearson’s Candy’s goals and provide an amazing shopping experience for customers on Amazon, share what makes Pearson’s Candy special through product listing merchandising, reach new customers through Amazon Ads, and make actionable insights through managerial strategy reporting. Goat Consulting hopes to be continuing to help Pearson’s Candy reach new and old customers on Amazon for the next 100 years.