2015 highly commended: Tu by Sainsbury's, Branded Content - Case Study

Christmas 2014, some may say the most brutal grocery retail battle for over a decade. For Sainsbury’s, delivering incremental revenue growth from new areas beyond grocery would be vital. And with an unlikely - yet spectacular - performance in novelty knitwear, they managed to do just that.

But how did they turn a quiet side bet into a roaring mainstream success? (A success that became Sainsbury’s lead story in its post-Christmas trading statement to the city).

Sainsbury's embarked on a social content strategy to engineer a genuine pop-culture moment, with a bunch of Dancing Dads, in a video viewed 28 million times and shared by over half a million. A pop-culture moment that drove sale units of Christmas Jumpers up 116% YOY, resulting in cash sales up by 120% to £4.2m. Quite an achievement.

This certainly isn’t a normal way to sell knitwear. But there aren’t normally the same constraints to deal with – like being a potential distraction in the midst of a bigger marketing battle; little budget; no search presence and no ecommerce solution.

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(Please note: parts of this case study may have been redacted for confidentiality purposes.)