Issue #25 - Little Moons on TikTok

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Anthony McGuire

Feb 1, 2021

Welcome to Good TikTok Creative!

We are Simon Andrews and Anthony McGuire, two people who have been working in marketing, advertising and media for decades.

We are very excited about TikTok as a brand new platform for creativity and think this topic is severely under-explored.

TikTok Case Study #25 = Little Moons

Simon’s Take:

We usually cover well known brands on TikTok but Little Moons is new to me until I saw them on TikTok. A great reminder of the diversity of FMCG brands and their distribution.

Getting distribution for FMCG brands is hard. Supermarkets and convenience stores have limited shelf space and want to use that space for products that sell quickly. With a new brand it's hard to get this space and often they end up with a patchwork of distribution - only available in one or two chains and then only in a certain strata of stores. So really hard to support with marketing.

But Little Moon seem to have got lots right. They are producing lots of organic content--which feels authentic. TikToks rather than ads.

And here they have taken one of the best performing videos and put some spend behind it. From the comments recognising the Tesco store we presume they are just buying the catchment area of stores carrying the brand. And clicking on the ad takes you to an add to cart functionality for Tesco and Waitrose online grocery shopping.

This scrappy little start up deserves to do well.

In an interesting coincidence we see them promoting themselves in the same week as the Grocer carries a story on whether FMCG brands and retailers should be trying TikTok. Little Moons are setting a great example to all the FMCG giants. They each have small brands that don't normally get ad support, because of this patchwork distribution.

A smart strategy would be to learn how to use hyper targeted TikTok for these small brands.

Anthony’s Take:

This upstart brand is executing the TikTok playbook brilliantly. As Simon described, a major challenge of young brands is marketing & distribution. Usually having this kind of limitation forces a brand to be more creative when they don’t have the budgets of their larger competitors. And here we see Little Moons showcase their knack for marketing.

Scroll through their TikTok profile, and you’ll see that the Little Moons marketing team really understands TikTok. They use trending songs and effects, a quick and to-the-point visual aesthetic with their storytelling, and portray themselves as young and fun. Their creative is very unpolished. It doesn’t look like they spent too much money on a production budget and you can easily replicate most of their videos at home.

The Little Moons marketing team also understands classic marketing. They make sure to display the entire product range, with different flavours catering to a range of consumers. And considering Little Moons is a food brand, they make sure to provoke the viewer into salivating over their mochi balls through zoomed-in camera shots.

As written up on their website, Little Moons has a great founding story, a super cool brand, and hopefully new traction from their marketing. While they have 40K followers on Instagram, right now they have 88K followers on TikTok, so something must be working… :)

As I’m writing this right now, I can see the Grocer literally just released an article “Mochi TikTok craze sees Little Moons sales rocket 700% at Tesco.” Seems like Little Moons has gone viral over the last week, and with 50 Million views of the #littlemoons hashtag, the brand still has plenty of room for growth!

Lessons from Studying 50 Startups on TikTok, by Li Jin

Li Jin is an angel investor and former partner at storied Silicon Valley VC Firm Andreesen Horowitz. She frequently writes about topics in the Creator Economy and recently published an article, “We studies 50+ startups on TikTok and here’s what we found.”

It’s a wonderful examination of specific tactics used by specific startups and upstart brands who have gone deep on TikTok. She summarises four main areas of startup success on TikTok:

Building user trust and buy-in
Driving awareness of new products and services
Creating buzz around a category
Getting user feedback and creating a two-way dialogue

Check out the full article here!

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If you want to dive deeper into TikTok, download Anthony’s free e-book on TikTok case studies or check out Anthony’s TikTok crash course.

Have you seen good creative on TikTok recently? Let us know and we can feature it in a future newsletter.