
‘On a plate’
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets
Issue 2 | July 2008
Agency
Proximity London
Creative Team
Nicola Rogers - Art Director;Reuben Turner - Copywriter
Production Team
Communisis
Other Credits
Duncan Stewart;Annie Hingston;Claire Moore;(Account Team)
Date
September 2005 - Ongoing
Background
Online shopping is a relatively loyalty-free category. Unrestricted by the proximity of a local store, customers are free to shop where they want. They are often driven by price and incentives, or only order bulky and functional items. As a retailer whose brand is built on inspiring food, Sainsbury's knew it had to change the rules of this game if it was to compete effectively. Sainsbury's home grocery shopping service had recently been relaunched to make the whole experience easier and more inspiring for the consumer. Every aspect of Sainsbury's shopping now deliverered the new brand thought - 'Try Something New Today'. Proximity London’s brief was to leverage the new brand to create an emotional, rather than a purely functional or price-led, relationship with Sainsbury's online, and so to reduce attrition in the face of competitor offers.
Idea
Proximity developed a step-by-step direct mail campaign that takes customers from their first online shop, overcoming any barriers they encounter until they've shopped five times. The creative is tailored to suit each of the different stages in the customer journey. Through analysis of Nectar card data, Proximity tracked individual behaviour to help build an overall picture of customer shopping habits when combined with in-store sales data. This aided segmentation of customers and targeting of messages based on actual behaviour. Each postcard not only promotes a generic benefit - shopping online - but also the unique benefits of Sainsbury's online.
Every creative element of the campaign delivers the overall brand message - 'Try something new today' - tempting the recipient with a new recipe and positioning online shopping as an exciting, inspiring way to shop for food, rather than a simply functional, convenient process. The use of personalisation throughout delivers a sense of intimacy - Sainsbury's treats you like a person rather than a statistic - in order to create an emotional connection, in a market dominated by purely functional or financial messages. The creative mixes photography, illustration and playful, everyday language to suggest that shopping online can actually be fun. Because it's not about the trolley. It's about the food.
Results
Response rates for some pieces were as high as 49.25% - more than four times response targets, with a CPR of £1.66, and an average order value of £86.89. Ongoing testing indicates that it works without incentives too - showing that it's the brand that counts rather than just money-off coupons.
Target Audience
Anyone who had registered to shop online with Sainsbury’s. This includes those who had registered but not yet shopped, those who had shopped but since lapsed, and those who had only shopped a small number of times.
Size
20,000 per month, ongoing
Our Thoughts
This is one of those campaigns that looks a bit average at first glance but which becomes more and more impressive the more closely you look at it. The brief must have been a tough ‘un. ‘Thou shalt stay within the overall guidelines of “Try something new today”; thou shalt drive people online for the first time; thou shalt get them to return and shop at sainsburys.com at least five times…’. Only a complete brand team, working well together, could have pulled it off.