RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
A grocery retailer’s journey to a winning ad platform
THE CHALLENGE
Our client, a grocery retailer was grappling with consecutive months of year-on-year sales and market share decline in the discount grocery segment. To counter this trend, the company launched an aggressive event along with a multimedia marketing campaign, which included TV advertising for the first time.
This campaign proved to be successful in achieving year-on-year sales growth and slowing the market share decline.
However, while the event was a success overall, not all elements of the campaign were equally effective at building awareness and driving customer traffic to the stores. Specifically, the TV ad had minimal levels of breakthrough and brand attribution to the retailer.
The business objective was to understand why the current TV ad underperformed and evaluate three different TV concepts with the goal of improving effectiveness of mass media expenditures.
THE PLAN
The plan included two stages followed by in-market brand and ad tracking.
Phase 1 included qualitative focus groups to explore the current TV ad and deep dive into customer insights to inform the development of new TV ad concepts.
Phase 2 was a quantitative online survey to pre-test the ads developed after Phase 1 to measure potential in-market effectiveness before going to market in terms of appeal, relevance, motivation and communication.
THE OUTCOME
The qualitative research revealed that the current TV ad lacked relevance because it didn’t fit with consumer perceptions and expectations of the retailer.
The insights helped to inform new TV ad concept development and the quantitative pre-testing showed that the new concepts were likely to be successful in market.
In-market tracking that followed demonstrated above norm levels of ad recall and brand attribution, a significant improvement vs. the original ad. This new ad platform has run over the last few years with continued success.