In the year and four months since its launch, total shipments have exceeded 100,000 units.
A newly released product quickly becomes the clean-up hitter and ace of the lineup, turning into the company’s flagship offering.
However, the path to this point has been anything but smooth.
For this interview, we spoke with Mr. Daiki Miura from the Sales Planning Department at Livenavi Co., Ltd., the company that sells Dr. Wandel, a dental care product for dogs.
(Mr. Miura from Live Navi Inc.)
Why was Doctor Wandel developed?
And what path did it take to become the leading dental care product for dogs in the industry?
Finally, we took our time to speak in depth with Mr. Miura, including his outlook for the future.
I am your interviewer today, Hiroaki Naganuma, Customer Success Manager at wevnal Inc., which provides the chatbot service “BOTCHAN” to Live Navi Inc.
To be honest, sales for roughly the first six months were not very good.
(This is Naganuma from the Customer Success team at wevnal)
Naganuma (hereafter, ━━): First, I’d like to ask about the background to the development of Doctor Wandel. Until now, I believe Livenavi has mainly developed skincare and supplements for people, so why did you decide to develop a product for dogs this time?
Miura (hereafter, Miura): In today’s e-commerce industry, products for people are inevitably oversaturated. While we were exploring ways to break through this kind of red-ocean situation, a number of fortunate connections led to an opportunity to jointly develop a product with veterinarian Dr. Tokunaga.
In fact, dogs’ mouths are more delicate than humans’ and problems tend to worsen more easily. And unlike humans, dogs don’t brush their own teeth. With that in mind, we developed Dr. Wandel as a product that allows owners and their dogs to take care of oral health easily and with minimal burden.
━━ Were sales strong right from the initial release?
Miura: No, to be honest, the first six months or so were not very good. In fact, when we launched Doctor Wandel, we also released a product aimed at people involved in sports, and initially the sports-related product sold better.
━━ So it’s not as though sales were strong right from the start, then.
Miura: In the beginning, even just asking the distributors, “Please carry Doctor Wandel,” was a real challenge.
When we started running ads, the budget we could allocate was not very large, and we were not able to achieve particularly strong sales figures.
Even when approaching agencies to ask, “Would you be willing to sell this for us?”, we can’t make use of our past track record, so we haven’t been able to push it very strongly.
The issue we faced with cart abandonment
━━ Around when did Dr. Wandel, which struggled to gain momentum at the time of its initial release, start to get on track?
Miura: It was around October 2019, about eight months after the product launch. With the cooperation of various agencies, we experimented with different approaches to ad operations, and the number of sales gradually started to increase. At that point, we significantly increased the advertising budget and stepped on the gas toward the year-end period in November and December.
━━ That was also around the time you decided to implement our chatbot service, “BOTCHAN,” wasn’t it?
Miura: That’s right. At first, our company’s president brought us information about BOTCHAN, and then we received an explanation about BOTCHAN from the team at wevnal.
At the time, as we were working to steadily increase our sales volume, we were concerned about the numbers for cart abandonment.
We had been hearing occasional comments from customers that “the purchase cart is hard to use.” Looking for ways to improve the CVR (purchase rate), we began considering the introduction of a chatbot.
━━ Aside from BOTCHAN, have you also considered any other companies’ chatbot services?
Miura: Yes. In fact, at the time we were also considering a chatbot from another company, separate from wevnal. However, we ultimately decided to implement BOTCHAN. The decisive factors were the pricing structure and, in addition, how easy the management dashboard is to view and use.
With our existing purchase cart, we had no way of knowing at which point customers were dropping off. With BOTCHAN, however, we can quantify exactly at which question users leave, so it becomes much easier to implement effective improvements.
In fact, once a certain amount of data had accumulated in BOTCHAN, they analyzed which questions had the highest drop-off rates and implemented improvements such as changing the order of the questions.
In the six months since introducing BOTCHAN, sales have increased tenfold.
━━ From October 2019 to June 2020, there was a period when sales temporarily slumped, but overall, if we look at the total, the sales of Doctor Wandel increased significantly, didn’t they?
Miura: In the six months from October 2019, when we introduced BOTCHAN, our sales increased by roughly a factor of ten.
Entering information in a chat format is something people are already familiar with from everyday use of other communication tools like LINE, so I believe it is easy for customers to operate as well. The total number of Dr. Wandel units shipped exceeded 100,000 in one year and four months from the start of sales.
Now it has become one of the company’s major flagship products.
(BOTCHAN installed on Dr. Wandel’s landing page)
Miura: When we first launched sales, even when we approached agencies, we hardly received any positive response.
However, recently we have increasingly been approached directly by agencies asking specifically, “May we handle Doctor Wandel?”
Looking at the sales trends, I believe our presence in the dental care market has pulled ahead of the competition by a noticeable margin.
A new product that leverages the presence of Doctor Wandel
━━ Finally, could you tell us about Dr. Wandel’s future plans and developments?
Miura: One thing I’m considering is how we can further increase the added value of Dr. Wandel. In the blue-ocean market of dental care for dogs, Dr. Wandel is a later entrant, and its price point is set slightly higher compared to competing products.
In that context, how will we differentiate ourselves? As for the product itself, we are jointly developing it with Dr. Tokunaga, a veterinarian who also lectures at a university, to create something of the highest quality.
In addition, we have now introduced a system as part of strengthening our post-purchase services that allows customers to ask Dr. Tokunaga questions directly. We are always mindful of continually providing our customers with value that exceeds the price they pay.
━━ So the idea is to further strengthen the brand power of Doctor Wandel, correct?
Miura: Beyond just digital marketing, we are also considering mass advertising such as TV, as well as combinations with offline initiatives.
Of course, there is still room to further increase our number of sales via e-commerce, but I do think we will hit a ceiling at some point.
We would also like to proactively roll out initiatives beyond web advertising.
For example, in terms of offline initiatives, partnerships with dog-related facilities are already underway.
━━ So you’re already lining up the next initiatives one after another.
Miura: Separately from expanding the sales channels for Dr. Wandel, we’ve also started moving on developing new products. I can’t help but feel a bit of pressure from the company along the lines of, “Since Dr. Wandel was a hit, the next product should do well too,” you know… (laughs).
However, in reality, this next product will be sold in a market where an existing product called “Doctor Wandel” is already available, so in that respect I believe we will need a different strategy from the one we used when we first launched Doctor Wandel.
On that point, one of the functions we would like BOTCHAN to offer in the future is, for example, the ability to recommend new products in a cross-sell format to customers who have purchased Dr. Wandel. If we could do that, it would likely make it much easier to smoothly promote sales of new products that leverage Dr. Wandel.
━━ Yes, that sounds good. Regarding the implementation of the cross-sell feature, we would very much like to move forward in close collaboration with our development department. With that, thank you for taking the time for this interview today.
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