Spark

Supporting Spark's brand-led transformation

TRA has been Spark’s strategic insights partner since 2015. During that time, Spark has transformed its brand and vision, lifting from a traditional telco to a much wider digital services provider, all while moving to Agile. Core to our relationship is ongoing brand tracking - Market Monitors that feed into brand and communications planning, optimisation and evaluation.

Beyond this, Spark leverages the full spectrum of TRA’s capabilities, including qualitative and quantitative research, data curation, and cultural expertise. We take a collaborative approach to this partnership, working closely with the entire Spark brand portfolio and their supporting agencies.

“Their collaborative, agile approach helps keep insights relevant an accessible and a highly strategic team is valued across our business.” - Hannah Bay, Domain Chapter Lead, Brand, Spark New Zealand

The Warehouse Group

Enabling a group strategy for New Zealand’s largest retailer. 

In 2019, TRA started working with New Zealand’s largest retailing group – The Warehouse Group. The Group encompasses The Warehouse, The Warehouse Stationery, Noel, Leeming, Torpedo7 and e-commerce site, The Market.  

The Warehouse Group are focused on enabling a customer-centric mindset, and they needed foundational tools to support this. Working with cross-functional teams, we established a tracking programme that captures total brand experience. Enhanced by powerful, simple storytelling, and cultural and category context, customer insight is accessible, well understood and actionable.  

“The tracking programme is much more than a monitor. It’s a business tool that lays the foundational brand jobs to do that guide our priorities and serves as critical lead indicators across the business” - Keryn McKenzie, Chapter Area Lead – Insights, Data Science & Services, The Warehouse Group

Lion

Lion needed to identify the next big thing for their largest brand Steinlager. It had been 10 years since the launch of Steinlager Pure, so ensuring continued brand relevance was key. Through two separate waves of customer co-creation sessions involving the Lion team and Steinlager's target market, an opportunity space emerged for a Japanese-style beer - Steinlager Tokyo Dry.

There was a chance to stand out in the market through packaging, and by communicating to a new beer drinking audience in a way that was not only relevant to, but which differentiated from more traditional green bottle lagers. TRA ran a strategy workshop to set a go to market strategy for the new Steinlager Tokyo Dry offering. The business results from the launch of Tokyo Dry have been outstanding, with $4.9m sales in the first year putting the Steinlager brand back in growth. Tokyo Dry became Lion's fastest new product to reach 1 million litres of sales in over a decade, achieving this in only 10 weeks.

Red Bull

How can a global brand activate local insight?

Two years ago, Red Bull New Zealand’s brand tracking data was provided from a source offshore, without localised insight. Working with TRA, Red Bull shifted their local programme from a data feed to strategic tool, with insights delivered during interactive Springboard planning workshops – helping Red Bull’s team gain clarity on the unique local market and consumers.

“TRA have fundamentally changed how the team understand, interact and use insight” - Sophie Ericksen, Marketing Director at Red Bull.

Paymark

Paymark's core business model was under threat from disruption. There was a need to future-proof the organisation by becoming more customer-centric to help build relationships and achieve commercial objectives.

We worked with Paymark to build a data-driven customer segmentation that blended a range of techniques including big data analytics, third party data enrichment, quantitative and qualitative research. The outcome was the largest and most accurate segmentation of the New Zealand retail market, enabling Paymark to become a truly customer obsessed organisation. As a result, Paymark have seen a 40% reduction in customer churn.

EECA

How do you solve a problem like climate change? A cornerstone objective for the New Zealand government is to reduce carbon emissions and by ratifying the Paris Climate Change agreement, the New Zealand Government committed to having an emissions reduction target and regularly updating it.
 
EECA, NZ’s government agency responsible for promoting energy efficiency and conservation needed to understand the problem through strategic insights – to get to know the barriers and levers and to identify where to focus, what could be achieved and how to go about it. They partnered with TRA to develop insight and strategy to pull together many angles on the problem into a very clear pathway forward. We took a holistic approach employing semiotics, systems thinking, unstructured and structured data, ethnography and cultural analysis. 
 
We would love to say we have solved the problem of climate change, but of course we have not. However, we have solved the problem of where and how to focus resources to achieve significant reduction in carbon emissions. Furthermore, by using multiple data sources we have given confidence, inspiration and direction to the EECA team.

Joylab

In 2016 we partnered with Joylab to transform an existing hospitality location in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour into what is known today as The Lula Inn. Joylab commissioned TRA to develop a strategy on how to transform the location into a commercially successful bar and eatery.

Through a mixture of methodologies including cultural scraping, focus groups and co-creation, TRA were able to uncover the industry trends driving relevance with the core audience, determine elements that would make the location a success and ultimately develop a comprehensive proposition for Joylab. TRA formed the creative concept of a “beautiful collision” and the idea of a garden lounge at the water’s edge; this single-minded idea was the backbone of the location’s redevelopment, and is still evident throughout the establishment today.

In The Lula Inn’s first year of launch, they managed to increase revenue by 27% from the previous baseline, and since launch, has managed to maintain revenue growth by an average of 13% year on year.

Auckland Transport

Increasing pressure on Auckland's roading infrastructure has seen Auckland Transport investigate new ways to reduce the number of peak hour single car journeys. Auckland Transport commissioned TRA to develop a strategy to get Aucklanders using cycling and walking as a mode of transport, as opposed to reaching for the car keys.

The insights gained by TRA enabled Auckland Transport to develop a new marketing strategy that focuses on removing mental barriers to walking and cycling and normalising behaviour. Since then Auckland Transport have seen a 41% increase in cycling in Auckland, with 52,800 new cyclists in 2018 alone.