Nami and Mandala AI

Starting out

Nami is a cosmetics and beauty brand specializing in small-portion products, like foundation, lotion, and make up.

The brand started out offering a range of skincare products in regular-sized bottles, tubes, and packets. When Nami entered the market, they had success with a few of their products selling well, but it was not easy. They found that various groups of consumers have specific needs and tastes. 

The team understood the need to cater to these market segments and niches with specialized product offerings, and to market these products in a way that resonated with those customers. They had to identify the needs and desires of customers and win their hearts.

The methods they used were intensive, slow, and unreliable. Conducting market research with surveys, studying competitors, using outside consultants and old-fashioned trial and error. 

Then they turned to Mandala AI.

Mandala AI’s data analytics take the infinite resource of online data, and refine it into valuable and actionable insights, allowing Nami to identify very specific needs in the marketplace with advanced, real-time, in-depth marketing intelligence, to guide development of products that suit those needs, and communicate the benefits and lifestyle image in the right way to the right audience.

The Challenge

The cosmetics and beauty industry is very competitive with fast changing market demands and trends. Demand for different products, styles and ingredients, customer habits, behavior and tastes can change suddenly and often.

It’s a large and broad industry, catering to many segments with countless niches. Brands need to be adaptive to changes and trends in the market, and constantly update product lines, image, offers, and marketing campaigns

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As Nami found out, the secret to growth is knowledge. The brands that thrive are those that know their customers better than anyone else.

How Nami Use Mandala AI

Up-to-date marketing intelligence guides every decision of Nami’s management. They understand their customers, know what they like, and know their tastes and their problems, thanks to a dedicated team who gather feedback and insights from customers using a suite of tools from Madala AI. 

Insights include comments and conversations about Nami’s products, competitors’ products, or consumers' lifestyles and issues. Some insights are negative, some positive, and Nami knows this is the lifeblood of product development and marketing for the brand. 

By far the most valuable source of marketing intelligence for brands is the online world. In particular, the major social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and Youtube. Nami’s target market is young women who are highly active on these platforms. Tapping into this enormous resource of priceless data comes with many challenges though, and a dependable system for filtering and analyzing insights from the billions of data points created daily, was a big challenge.

Tanwarat, a senior content creator for Nami, believes it’s essential for the brand to conduct this research and analysis in-house rather than depending on external contractors or agencies. Using Mandala AI, can save costs and, more importantly, streamline all the processes of product planning, customer service, content creation and marketing campaigns. It gives the brand agility, with fast turnaround on projects and responsiveness in their ever changing market. 

How Mandala AI Solved Nami’s Challenge

Mandala AI’s analytics tools were a perfect solution for Nami, and have helped the brand to grow continuously over the past several years. The user-friendly interface and minimal training needed means the team doesn’t waste time introducing new staff to the platform, and can collaborate smoothly in gathering data, insights, and inspiration for content as well.

Tanwarat and her team use mandala AI’s Analytics to gather social mentions (social media posts from public users which include important keywords related to the brand, products, and the industry). The system continuously monitors for these mentions, and the team also launches campaigns to gather mentions for various projects as well. As so many conversations take place on public social media pages and profiles, the team can know what’s on the minds of consumers on a day-by-day basis.

The product team can know what’s in trend, what pain points people are discussing, what solutions people are looking for, all without having to gather the data manually, launch surveys or do other time-consuming research. The data is refreshed and updated continuously, and the team knows they’re getting real-world insights from real social media users.

They also keep track of what their competitors are posting, and how customers are responding. This is especially helpful with understanding what kind of product offers generate interest and positive and negative feedback.

As content creator, Tanwarat can monitor what types of content gather traction and get engagement. When it’s time for her team to create new content, they have an endless resource of hot, high/low engagement content they can use for inspiration, to draw on and to avoid any potential mistakes. It takes the stress and uncertainty out of content creation, knowing what works and what doesn’t, for which sets of audiences, on which platforms at what time, and it’s all automated and easy for anyone to use.

The RESULTS

Nami grew to become a well-known brand in their home market and has now expanded into several other countries using a hugely successful product strategy, developed by their team, with the critical intelligence provided by Mandala AI. 

So, what is this strategy, and what role did Mandala AI’s tools play in its development? 

Nami pioneered small portion sachets as the brand’s central product offering, to the point that these cute and affordable little packets have become closely associated with the brand itself. 

In the past, cosmetic and skincare brands used small portion sachets as a way to distribute free samples of new products. The idea was that customers would try the free sample, love the product and then go and purchase the ‘normal’ sized portions (a larger bottle, tube, or pack) at a retail store or supermarket. 

Using insights from real discussions and posts on social media, delivered and analyzed by Mandala AI, the Nami team discovered these satchels were very popular and even had users commenting that they wished the products were sold in these small portions. Users also commented about other products being sold in bottles that were too big and expensive. 

It turned out that many young women like to use different products but don’t have the budget to purchase large portions, or just didn’t want to commit to buying a big container. Young women and girls like the freedom to pick and choose from the smaller packages. Plus, their lifestyles are on-the-go and they love the easy use and portability, being able to carry in a tiny handbag.

Using social media mentions and analytics from Mandala AI, the team identified the characteristics of these young women, and put together a clear customer persona, including age, occupations, lifestyles etc. The product team set to work designing small-portion sachets and the marketing team created fun and engaging social media content and ads targeted to this customer group.

It was a huge success. None of Nami’s competitors had recognized the potential of this strategy, and the brand quickly earned a loyal following. Of course, competitors soon followed and released similar offerings, but Nami had got a big head start and now had strong brand recognition and grown their market share.

There were other benefits to this strategy too. Small packets meant the brand could fit  more varieties on a store shelf, giving customers more choices, and the profit margins were higher on each piece sold. Also, by appealing to young women and girls, they were building relationships with customer groups who could become long-term customers.

Nami’s product line now includes dozens of different product lines and collections, catering to different groups, but the small portion sachets are a brand signature and are still growing in popularity. 

Nami use Mandala AI’s data analytics for new product development, to watch what their competitors are doing day by day, to get inspiration for content, and to spot any emerging trends and opportunities, as the brand continues to grow.

Collaborating is a Breeze

The Mandala AI system is designed with teams in mind. Smooth collaboration on projects and day-to-day monitoring is vital to the Nami team. Mandala AI’s Tags feature allows users to tag any mention or post, so it’s compiled into shared tag groups. 

Rather than saving or downloading files, and managing some kind of administrative system of shared files, it’s all automated within Madala AI so whoever needs to can access wherever and whenever they need. Tag groups can be shared between users and groups, which is all easily managed with a few clicks.

Grow Together

As Nami has grown and become a well-known brand with an impressive online presence in their native market, so has Mandala AI. When Mandala introduced the Cosmos feature, Tanwarat and her team were early adopters. Cosmos’ Ripples feature lets the team monitor hundreds of brands and influencers’ social media channels, the key opinion leaders and brands that form the core of their fast-moving industry. 

Ripples Playlists are curated by the user, so everyone in the team can set up their own, or share with each other. It’s the first thing the team checks in the morning when they arrive at work and gives them a window on what’s happening and what’s new. 

Because Cosmos is integrated with Analytics and allows mentions or channels to be added into Analytics campaigns with a click, Tanwarat expects Mandala AI will play an even more important role in Nami’s business as they continue to grow.