2010: Sainsbury’s, Marketing Communications - Case Study

Sainsbury’s convincingly persuaded customers it was responding to the credit crunch by adapting an existing successful campaign for more straitened times.

Key insights

• Sainsbury’s took its highly successful brand idea of ‘Try something new today’ and fine-tuned it for the tough economic climate by creating a memorable and effective new campaign: ‘Feed your family for a fiver’.
• This played a significant part in showing customers that it was responsive to their changing needs in tough times.
• The campaign led to strong sales uplifts and a transformation in the perception of the brand as value for money.

Summary

Sainsbury’s is the UK’s longest-standing major food retailing chain, having opened its first store in 1869. It now serves over 18.5 million customers a week and enjoys a market share of around 16 per cent. Its large stores offer around 30,000 products, including non-food products and services in many of its stores. Its TU clothing range has one million transactions per week. An internet-based home delivery shopping service is also available to nearly 90 per cent of
UK households.

Since 2005 the ‘Try something new today’ strapline had been a vital component of Sainsbury’s success. It worked by giving people simple food ideas and so earning a little extra spend from them every time they shopped. 2008 was supposed to be a year to build on ‘Try’s’ success.

But in early 2008 the credit crunch began to bite and shopping habits began to change dramatically. Encouraging people to spend more was no longer such a good idea. The resulting shift to focusing on just how shopping at Sainsbury’s could offer both quality and value through ‘Feed your family for a fiver’ was a resounding success, delivering £540 million in incremental sales revenues by the end of 2009.

No resting on past laurels

The strapline of ‘Try something new today’ had been at the heart of Sainsbury’s success since 2005. It had been created to help earn a little extra spend from customers whenever they shopped. If each of Sainsbury’s 14 million weekly shoppers spent an extra £1.14 every time they shopped, then Sainsbury’s would achieve its business goal of £2.5 billion additional sales over three years. And it worked: by January 2008 the £2.5 billion goal had been achieved ahead of schedule.

But the year ahead looked like it was going to play out quite differently to the previous three. Northern Rock had collapsed. The phrase ‘credit crunch’ had entered the language. Food inflation was rampant. Shopping budgets were being cut and shoppers were looking for ways to save money.

It was clear that 2008 was going to be a tough year for retail in general and for Sainsbury’s in particular. ‘Try’ was a brand idea that had been created under different circumstances, when people had money in their pockets and were happy to spend the odd extra pound on something they may not have tried before. ‘Try’ had driven sales by inspiring existing customers to spend a little more. Could it still work when what was needed was to help existing customers spend less? It was clear that ‘Try’ would need to adapt to changing circumstances.

By 2007 every metric showed the brand to be in excellent health. Figure 1 shows that Sainsbury’s was by then the most desirable mainstream supermarket in which to shop (when you exclude the two major rational drivers of store choice — location and price). But the brand did have one remaining problem, which didn’t hold it back in the good times, but which was likely to prove a greater problem in a downturn: poor price perception.

While prices were now in line with the competition according to the industry price index, the perception that Sainsbury’s was more expensive than its rivals was proving hard to shift. Supermarket price perceptions tend to remain remarkably static due to a strict pecking order in customers’ minds, from Marks & Spencer down to the discounters.

From past experience the company knew that tactical communications (i.e. communicating prices and deals) was a relatively weak force in shifting price perceptions and that communications would be needed at the brand level.

Getting to grips with harder times

It was imperative to begin to understand how the economic downturn would begin to change shopping behaviours.

Quantitative studies confirmed the company’s biggest fear: in one survey 13% claimed they were likely to change their store and 25% claimed they were beginning to cherry-pick offers from other stores. These changes to shopping behaviour would require the retailer to employ a number of marketing tactics (e.g. lowering more prices, increasing amounts bought from deals, pushing own-brand).

But the headline conclusion was clear: the company would need to demonstrate to any existing shoppers thinking about shopping elsewhere that Sainsbury’s could cut the cost of their family shop. But discounting created two problems: it would cost a huge amount to implement and might go unnoticed without communications to reinforce the shift. This had traditionally been a problem as pure price messages tended not to stick to a brand better known for quality messages.

So the company set itself two communications objectives:

1. Show that Sainsbury’s food is not only great quality but also great value.
2. Inspire people to ‘Try something new’ to help reduce their shopping bill.

Simple food ideas were likely to be the key to success as they had always been the most powerful component of ‘Try’. And it was important to continue inspiring people to try simple food ideas but now to make low price a fundamental component of those food ideas.

Tightening belts
In research, shoppers said that they were reviewing shopping decisions in a number of ways:

• Cutting budgets.
• Trying ‘cheaper’ stores.
• Buying more on promotion.
• Trading down from premium to standard to value ranges.
• Cutting out discretionary spend.
• Switching from branded products to own-label products.
• Cutting back on convenience foods.

Providing inspiration at the right price

More research was needed to understand how cooking habits were changing and what kind of food ideas might work in the new economic climate. What is a constant theme still applied: people were in a rut with their cooking and welcome food ideas to help them out of it. The credit crunch was a powerful force but wasn’t strong enough to reduce the power of this never-ending need.

One change that was noticed was that people were getting a little less experimental with their cooking. They seemed to respond better to ideas which were twists on old favourites (things they knew their kids would definitely like) rather than some of the more unusual ideas that Sainsbury’s had been offering so far.

But the most revealing aspect of this research was discovering that while people tended to know exactly what they spent on their big food shop, they were often rather inaccurate about what they spent on any individual home-cooked meal. When people were asked how much they spent on an average weekday family meal, after some initial head-scratching they tended to guess at between £6 and £12. The gap between what people guessed they spent (£6-12) and what the retailer knew they could spend on the ingredients at Sainsbury’s (£4-5) opened up a fantastic opportunity for the new communications to exploit this gap between the perception and reality of Sainsbury’s value.

The result was a simple, memorable idea: ‘Feed your family for a fiver’. This led to the creation of 30 family meals with Sainsbury’s products based on strict rules:

• All meals would cost under £5.
• All ingredients would be at their standard everyday low prices and not on promotion.
• Meals would need to be substantial enough for a hungry family of four.
• Meals would need to centre around a good portion of protein.
• Meals would need to include a range of items from ‘Sainsbury’s basics’ to ‘Taste the difference’ to show that Sainsbury’s offers value across the store.
• Meals would need a ‘twist’ to maintain the inspiration expected of ‘Try’s’ food ideas.

Cross-channel communication

‘Feed your family for a fiver’ was a fully integrated campaign from sofa to store that, since its launch in March 2008, received two major periods of advertising support (March-October 2008 and June-July 2009), with lower level support at other times (January-February 2009). The elements included:

1. Internal communications. The idea was launched first to Sainsbury’s 150,000 colleagues via internal communications. A competition for colleagues to submit their own ‘Fiver’ ideas was run and free samples were distributed.
2. Free tip cards in store. As with all ‘Try’ communications, ‘tip cards’ showing products and cooking instructions were displayed in store (Figure 2).
3. In-store point-of-sale (POS). POS was used to theme the store and help shoppers locate ingredients.
4. Magazine advertising. Weekly press advertising featured the meal ideas, with some executions featuring five meal ideas to help shoppers plan a week’s meals.
5. Television advertising. Four 30” TV executions were created, each featuring Jamie Oliver challenging a shopper with the idea that he could help them feed their family for a fiver at Sainsbury’s (‘Meatballs’ ‘Bacon pasta’, ‘Salmon fishcakes’, ‘Lamb burgers’).

The taste of success

The results surpassed expectations.

1. Instant buzz

Tracking and qualitative research showed high levels of buzz the instant the campaign launched, with the idea being spontaneously and accurately played back by respondents, many of whom were clearly beginning to reassess their views of Sainsbury’s prices as a result.

2. TV breakthrough

Recognition of the TV executions in the campaign were among the highest ever seen for the company’s advertising, with the execution for ‘Lamb burgers’ achieving the best recognition score for any Jamie Oliver TV ad tracked so far.

3. Memorable advertising

The ‘Feed your family for a fiver’ element proved to be exceptionally memorable in the advertising, with spontaneous recall hitting 47% at the height of the TV support behind the campaign.

In addition, prompted recognition of the slogan ‘Feed your family for a fiver’ built rapidly, and by August 2009 this stood at 89%, virtually identical to that of Tesco’s ‘Every Little Helps’ at 91% — a slogan 15 years older and with an advertising spend advantage to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds (£340 million in advertising support from 2005-2009 alone). And ‘Fiver’s’ branded recognition of 72% was by this time well in excess of the 59% achieved by ‘Every Little Helps’ (Figure 3).

4. Significant shifts in perceptions

Brand image tracking showed perceptions of Sainsbury’s having ‘fair prices’ improving significantly during the campaign period. The image shifts were both greater than ever seen before on this measure but also greater than that for any other brand measure (Figure 4). At the same time, there were dramatic downward shifts in perceptions that prices at Sainsbury’s were ‘quite a bit higher’ than other supermarkets over the campaign period. Finally, there were a number of notable correlations between the Fiver idea and key brand measures such as ‘has fair prices’ (a key objective since this is a measure that impacts overall sales), ‘heard good things about’ and ‘would recommend to others’.

5. Working its magic on sales figures

All ingredients featured in the meal ideas saw strong sales uplifts, whether featured in advertising or only on tip cards, with especially high uplifts for the key ‘protein’ at the heart of each meal as shown in Table 1.

Remarkable return on investment

The OHAL’s econometric model showed that the £6.9 million campaign delivered £203 million in sales and a profit of £31.6 million. Rather pleasingly, this equates to a return on investment of just under a Fiver: £4.60. In October 2009 Sainsbury’s was voted ‘Supermarket of the year’ at the Retail Industry Awards. The strength of the business and the agility shown in adapting the brand to the economic climate was cited as the primary reason for this accolade.