For the love of chips – A sun-filled sales promotion for Aunt Bessie’s

Let us set the scene…

A chill wind whistles through the frozen aisle. Perished, but peckish, promiscuous purchasers are perusing. Value for money is king in this land, but you don’t want to drop your prices. You need an exciting offer to stand out and incentivise shoppers to choose your brand. This is achallenge Aunt Bessie’s knows all too well.

Give the parents what they want

This was a retailer specific campaign for ASDA, so we needed to understand these shoppers inside out to give them what they wanted. We needed a campaign that would add value to Aunt Bessie’s chip range, driving sales and also trial of some of the newer products such as vegetable chips. Setting our sights on Aunt Bessie’s key audience, families, we used customer insight and shopper profiles to discover these busy parents want to cook up something quick and easy after the school run without breaking the bank.

What on earth is a chip flop?

With household budgets squeezed more than ever, shoppers are dreaming of getting away. Family holidays are desirable but, for many families, the holiday-of-a-lifetime is an unobtainable dream. And where is the most desirable family holiday imaginable? Ask any kid and the answer is Florida, land of theme parks and endless sunshine.

“This high value, premium prize was sure to bring some well needed sunshine into the frozen category at a time when shoppers were looking forward to summer, thinking about holidays and family getaways.”

Joanne Schofield, Account Group Director

A tiered promotion will put other alluring prizes, like weekends away, within arm’s reach. But the real trick to these promotions is making the lowest tier the most coveted. Cue the arrival of hundreds of pairs of this season’s hottest fashion item: chip-flops. These fun extras had huge standout, delivered great engagement with shoppers and became the talking point of the promotion.

Chips chips everywhere

To make the chip-flops (or more importantly the chips) appear at the top of our consumer’s shopping list we have to be around every corner they turn. As they sit reading through a magazine, they see an ad featuring the infamous chip-flops. They flick through the news, the chips flops are there again. They mentally prepare themselves for the big shop. Walking through the security shrouds they see them yet again. The chip-flops. “These will embarrass the kids,” they think to themselves as they throw some chips in the trolley and get on with their shop. When they get home, while they’re waiting for their brew to brew, they go to the campaign microsite and submit their receipt. No faffing with codes necessary. Now all that’s left is to wait and see if they’ve won.

But hang on, rewind. How do we get all this sorted and feeling fresh when it has to be pitched to Asda nine months in advance? A deep understanding of your audience, industry trends and what works, that’s how. When we’re planning this campaign, we also have to work with a predetermined pricing strategy set by Asda and Aunt Bessie’s, which limits when we can launch activity, in this case: spring. Spring isn’t really the season for frozen chips though, making this all the more challenging. And to make things even more complicated…we were dealing with our biggest competitor being on a deep price cut too.

Without blowing our own trumpet

We did really well, racking up some great results for Aunt Bessie’s: