Did a quiz help drive a 9 figure acquisition?
In September, 2020, Bayer acquired a 70% stake of vitamin brand Care/of for $225 million.
Care/of is a leading brand in the personalized nutrition space, founded in 2016 by Craig Elbert and Akash Shah.
At the core of their business model (and homepage) is a quiz:
The quiz helps customers identify what they need based on their personal health goals, diet, habits, and lifestyle.
The shopping experience goes like this:
- Take the quiz
- Get results and product tailored to your needs
- Consume vitamins daily
- Rinse and repeat every month
It’s about personalization, technology, and customer experience.
Part of their brand promise is to simplify the path to feeling better — after completing the quiz, Care/of curates and deliver the necessary combination of vitamins and supplements based on personal need.
The quiz gathers the information about the individual, and
Supplements are a $40 billion industry in the United States. Before the direct to consumer brands simplified the education and purchase process, purchasing vitamins was not a pleasurable experience. And it’s this opportunity that Care/of and others in the space have
but until recently no progress had been made to improve the struggle of identifying and shopping for vitamins. Enter Care/of and Co-founder Craig Elbert,
On Quiz and Personalization
In 2018, it was noted that more than 1.5 million people have taken Care/of’s quiz.
Care/of’s vision is to build a company that sells personalized health and wellness products. They already have gathered proprietary personal data of every person who’s taken the quiz. From there, it becomes far easier to personalize the product around the individual’s needs, but also segment their audience to know which customer needs what product.
This is a strong competitive advantage that Care/of built.
Why Is the quiz so long?
““In our beta, we initially had a short, uber-efficient on-boarding quiz as that’s what U/X logic told us. But the more we tested, the more we learned that customers are willing to put in the time to get a truly personalized recommendation,” Elbert noted.
This is interesting, and reinforces the foundation of user experience: customers are willing to share personal data if there is an equal exchange of value.
This data from the quiz is what Bayer found appealing in the acquisition.
As stated in the announcement: “The acquisition furthers Bayer’s strategic business objectives by strengthening the company’s presence in the high-growth area of personalized nutritionals. The partnership supports Bayer’s commitment to self-care and accelerates its understanding of personalized nutrition and advanced digital capabilities.””
Where the Quiz Adds Unique Value
Think about how the Care/of builds a relationship with consumers vs a traditional brick and mortar like Vitamin Shoppe or GNC. As retailers diversified revenue to both in-person and online sales, collecting just an email does not leave the DTC brands a large advantage over brick-and-mortar.
But the nuanced zero-party data gathered from the quiz is a unique advantage.
As Modern Retail writes: “When retailers were still primarily selling offline, DTC startups’ ability to collect emails and addresses for every customer put them at a huge advantage. But now, as many brick-and-mortar retailers have become better at e-commerce, some of the data that DTC startups are able to collect is no longer unique to just them.
Because Care/of asks users to take a quiz before signing up for its subscription service, it’s still able to get access to valuable data like customer behavior that incumbents still aren’t able to get access to easily.”
What You Can Replicate from Care/of’s Quiz
- Personalize with Recall
One simple yet effective way to create an awesome customer experience: use the customer’s responses to personalize their experience.
For example, capture the customer’s name. Then use it, throughout the quiz, and in the final product recommendation:
This is a feature called Recall, that is available in all Prehook plans.
- Identify Where In Customer Journey
How much convincing does the shopper need in order to convert?
What types of content would be most helpful?
Customer testimonials, scientific data, case studies?
Understanding their level of expertise and perspective can be helpful, like Care/of asks here:
- Identify Their Goals
Great marketing helps customers become the best version of themselves.
Help them achieve their goals and you are a hero.
But how do you know what challenges your customers are facing?
You have to ask!
This is particularly important for products like Care/of’s multivitamin, which can have so many use cases and applications.
Takeaway: Ask what customers their challenges and goals are. Then create segments so you send campaigns and messaging only around those issues. Improve relevance immediately!
- Give Personalized Recommendations
This is the big payoff — a product that is “made for me”.
There is something magical about seeing your name on the recommendation page (there’s that recall)–and even cooler when you have an individually packaged set of vitamins for your needs.
Note that the recommended vitamins are for bones and fitness, which were two goals I answered in the quiz.
Care/of has built their product and marketing around the customer data that’s gathered in the quiz.
It allows an unprecedented level of personalization, and a competitive advantage over other competitors who don’t have a strategy around gathering zero-party data–that is data that is directly and proactively shared by consumers.
And this data is in large part what is appealing to the Bayer in the acquisition.
Get started on learning directly from your customers with Prehook!