As the company began to scale, manufacture, and ship products all over the world, it used the Shopify app Tracktor to allow its customers to track the status of their orders at any time. With Tracktor, Blenders’ service team could stop redirecting customers to external tracking sites, and encourage them to go back to blenderseyewear.com to check the status of their order and to get personalized care from Blenders.

Specific Social Strategies:

Blenders has also used other forms of digital marketing, such as digital promo codes, contests, and email marketing to drive its growth. It also partners with other brands and uses an affiliate ambassador program to sell its sunglasses.

•     Facebook Ads. User-generated content was incorporated into their Facebook Dynamic Product Ads. They were able to “social proof” - take their best customer reviews and star ratings and combine them with product photos into effective ads (see below). Blenders Eyewear also used the Facebook pixel on its website to create a Custom Audience of people who have purchased a pair of sunglasses from Blenders, and used third-party data to segment this audience of purchasers based on gender. It then targeted its ads to a lookalike audience based on this segmented Custom Audience.

•    Ambassador Program: Blenders have a robust ambassador program called the “Blenders Street

Team” using the Refersion platform. Most of the ambassadors come from their Instagram posts. Each time Blenders post about their rep program, which is roughly every two weeks, they get a  slew of new applicants who want to join up. They have a competitive incentive program as well. It starts at a 10% cash commission, with a bonus after 5 sales. Then the commission percentage goes up incrementally as they get more sales, and there are other bonuses along the way. Blenders is also working on a “rep package” with branded stickers, hats,  and shirts. The more you can make reps feel like they’re part of the company, the better they do as your affiliates. There are currently roughly 1,000 Street Team ambassadors.

•     Micro-influencers: Blenders Eyewear has relied heavily on micro-influencers, mainly photographers and graphic designers to date, for user-generated content.

•     Macro-influencers: Blenders has increasingly been leveraging macro-influencers, including

partnering with sports celebrities and college sports athletes. In September 2023, Blenders partnered with former NFL star and current college football coach Deion Sanders for a new line of“Prime” shades. According to Fisher, the launch was the biggest partnership the brand has had to date. Fisher said on Sanders: “We found our Jordan.”   The sunglasses, priced at $67 in honor of Sanders’ birth, had amassed $4.5 million from pre-orders alone.

Blenders social initiatives have shown to be effective to date. The “social proof” ads have led to an increase in click-through rates (CTRs) and a decrease in cost-per-click (CPC). With regards to customer conversions to sales metrics, their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) have also improved.

This has all resulted in fast, high growth, with total sales in the millions of dollars in 2018. Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday sales in 2017 grew by 10X, and in the first quarter of 2018, the company continued to grow revenue 900% year-over-year.

Eight years into the journey, Blenders was valued at $90M. In 2019, large, Italian eyewear company Safilo Group acquired a 70% stake in Blenders, making it easier for the company to scale and expand globally.

Your Individual Assignment: Create a PowerPoint (or other Slides programs). Use the Notes  section if you need to use text to describe in more detail what is on the slide. Or, if you like, embed audio into the slides directly (within PowerPoint or with Brainshark). Use screenshots or copy images into slides directly.

Use the following data sources to do an assessment and recommendation for Blenders Eyewear:

•    Watch this video that summarizes the Blenders Eyewear story.

•    Great video interview with Blenders CEO Chase Fisher on his journey to growth (OPTIONAL - 1-hr long).

•   Blenders website. See the Appendix for a list of free tools to get some useful metrics.

•    Any ofBlender’s social media properties (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

•    NUVI Blenders Eyewear monitor. Once you are in NUVI,  go to the Listen then Monitors area and

you should see our class Social Listening Assignment folder. This folder will contain the Blenders

Eyewear (and Warby Parker) monitors. These monitors were started on July 26, 2021 to present (it’s live). You can use the last 12 months to start analyzing the data to see long-term trends, and then focus on shorter time periods. All mentions contain the keyword “Blenders Eyewear”. NOTE: the monitors were paused from mid-Feb. 2023 through mid-Apr. 2023, and mid-Apr. 2024 through mid-May 2024. Make sure to save your analysis in your own dashboard(s). Note: many mentions may be non-English. You can cut-and- paste into Google Translate for translation.

a). What do you think about Blenders Eyewear’s recent social & digital strategies and tactics? You can use the 3C’s/2L’s framework if you like. Some things you can analyze using NUVI include:

•    What are the ‘profiles” of top social users or Blender’s influencers?

•    Is there much engagement (e.g., sharing, replies, likes)?

•    What type of content is being posted and shared?

•    What is the sentiment regarding social content?

•    Where are mentions originating from?

•    Have you noticed a change with engagement since the more recent push with macro-influencers? For example compare Oct. 2021-22 vs Oct. 2022-23 vs Oct. 23-24.

Also, create at least 1 dashboard that does a “comparison” across segments (e.g., male vs. female mentions; influencers vs non-influencers engagement; Twitter vs TikTok engagement, etc.). Include your name in the title of the dashboard (e.g., your_name Gender Sentiment Comparison).

b). Using NUVI, what do people think of the Blenders’ products or customer experience in general? What specific product features or experiences are people talking about favorably and unfavorably? There is also a  Warby  Parker  monitor  (started  on  July  26,  2021  to  present)  that  you  can  use  as  a  comparison. NOTE: the monitors were paused from mid-Feb. 2023 through mid-Apr. 2023, and mid-Apr. 2024 through mid-May 2024.

c). One of the company’s main business goals at this point is to scale effectively and expand outside of San Diego, including outside of California and internationally. Is there evidence of Blenders growing their brand, and more importantly their sales, outside of San Diego? Hint – use the World Deck map visualizations in your NUVI monitor. You can also use any of the other NUVI data sources.

d). Come up with a social/digital campaign idea to build awareness, and  engagement and ultimately drive sales of Blender’s snow products. Think about the use of an influencer(s) as part of the campaign (identify potential candidates in NUVI and leverage them in your campaign), and a description of how the campaign would work. Briefly, how would you measure the “ROI” of your campaign? Think about social,4 sentiment, digital, and business metrics.

Submit your PowerPoint to the NUVI Social Listening Assignment folder. Have Fun!

Tips for this assignment:

Keep in mind the purpose of this assignment is for you to get a feel for using a social listening platform to scale the listening and learning aspect of the vast unstructured data that exists today. In reality, companies are using platforms such as NUVI in dedicated digital and data science teams that include months of cleaning and training the data and models to gain insights.

•    It’s worth spending a few minutes reviewing the Metrics and Rules sheet to get a sense of all the metrics/segments you can create from the data.

•    You might start with the 12-month time period, and see if there are changes in patterns if you contrast this with the most recent 6 months, 3 months, etc. Please note that there may be tens of thousands of mentions being analyzed in real-time, so you might experience slightly more delays when looking at 12 months' worth of data versus 3 months.

•    Segments are very important as they allow you to filter the data. For example, if you want to see if there are differences in behaviors or attitudes by gender or location, you can create segments that are “male Blenders Eyewear users” and “female Blenders Eyewear users”. Or, create a “Blenders Eyewear Influencer” segment to just focus on that segment. In other words, start at a high level and then create segments to gain insights into the questions being asked.

•    If you click on the Segments filter in Explore, there is also a search box for text.

•    This is raw data that hasn’t been calibrated. So, the sentiment analysis, which uses

AI/machine learning, will never be 100% accurate since it doesn’t take into account context, jargon, sarcasm, etc. For example, the term “recall” should have a negative connotation with car brands, but perhaps a positive one in a healthcare/wellness setting. So, be aware of this and you may point this out in your analysis if you like.

•    In Explore, you can compare and contrast 2 monitors. This is a good way to do comparisons in the same timeline.

•    I would probably start with the Explore module to get an understanding of some of the high- level patterns you are seeing, and then create segments to filter, which you can then also use in the Explore section.

•    The Mentions and Engagements modules/filters are important since they give you a sense of the amount of likes, replies,  and sharing.  Ideally,  companies would want the sharing of mentions as that indicates higher reach and community engagement.

•    I’m looking for specific examples from the data (e.g., influencers) when you do your analysis and when you come up with your campaign.

•    Ultimately, when working with a lot of data and then presenting the insights, it’s all about “storytelling”. I’m looking for the connection between the analysis you do, the examples you provide to back your claims, and the major themes you find (to answer the questions).

•    If you have a specific question about the assignment or tool, you can email me. There is also an online help chat within NUVI to answer your questions.