Case Study: High-Quality Content Drives Real Revenue

CHALLENGE: Increase online sales of Breville’s marquee home espresso maker. Breville, a high-end countertop appliance maker, relies heavily on retail partners like Best Buy, Amazon, Macy’s, Williams-Sonoma, and Bed Bath & Beyond for their online sales. Competition in online stores can be even more difficult than on a traditional box store shelf. With this in mind, Breville needed a way to increase visibility to push sales on the sites of its biggest online channel partners. http://www.vimeo.com/4442952 SOLUTION: Tippingpoint Labs delivered a channel-branded, product-level page with engaging content. Breville turned to Tippingpoint Labs to create a product page for its 800ESXL Die-Cast Espresso Machine. As a test case, the page would be syndicated to Best Buy, one of its top resellers. Breville actually hosted the page on its servers, but branded it with Best Buy’s logo. Tippingpoint Labs repurposed a high-definition video of the espresso machine in action from among videos they had created for Breville’s own site the previous month. They selected the video that tested best with viewers on Breville.tv. In order to impact sales over the next month, Breville supplied the new page to Best Buy’s web team for integration into their site.

“We wanted to try this as a low-risk experiment on the product level, which we had never done before. Because we were using existing content that we knew was effective elsewhere, we knew we could afford to try something that might have a good payoff at a low cost.” —Rob Sheard, Breville marketing executive BENEFIT: The Breville 800ESXL sold 15 times more units on BestBuy.com than it had in the previous month. Because the syndicated page was value-added content for customers, Best Buy included the link on their site. With the page hosted on its own server, Breville was able to monitor the traffic directly and therefore measure the impact on sales. Before this experiment, one E-tailer far outstripped the other online stores in selling this product, month after month. For the first time, the espresso machine sold more units on Best Buy than through the E-tailer – nearly six times more units. The new syndicated page was the only difference in marketing strategies for the month. Best Buy viewed the success as a win-win and immediately requested similar pages for the rest of the Breville product line. In essence, this gave the appliance manufacturer free space on BestBuy.com to spotlight their products and content.

“This proved that we were overlooking marketing at the product level.  The results proved that giving our partners more access to great content benefits us both.” —Rob Sheard, Breville marketing executive BONUS BENEFITS The syndicated video model worked so well that Breville and Tippingpoint Labs have been approached by other resellers to provide syndicated content. With further repurposing and syndicating, these videos will yield an even greater ROI for Breville. Case Study: High-Quality Content Drives Real Revenue

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."