Growth hacking and creative marketing ideas for the supermarkets industry
Lidl has worked hard over the years to convince shoppers that its low-price products are also top quality. Its #LidlSuprises campaign famously involved blind taste-testing the public to prove that it can compete with higher-end rivals.
Sergio Lopez
Tesco has typically focused on offering good value to customers. However, this has resulted in the supermarket not always being associated with high quality food. Tesco aimed to challenge this misconception back honing in on the emotional role that food plays in all our lives. The campaign involved a number of ad spots, each focusing on an individual (and the people who enjoy their food). For example, ‘David’s Hot or Not Chicken Curry’ and ‘Lisa’s Big Greek Stew’.
Sergio Lopez
Iceland’s ‘Rang-tan’ advert was banned from television. This was due to the film having been originally created by Greenpeace, meaning that the approval body Clearcast was forced to deem it as “an advertisement inserted by or on behalf of a body whose objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature”. The campaign was part of Iceland’s pledge to remove palm oil from its products.
Sergio Lopez
Growth Hacking is a discipline that, although it is proliferating among companies, has its origins in the world of startups.
The first startups were faced with a pressing need to grow without being able to make large investments. It was in this situation, when creative growth techniques began to emerge that would later make up the practice of Growth Hacking.
In short, Growth Hacking is a discipline that seeks the greatest business growth through the least possible expense.
Therefore, a good Growth Hacker must move between the technical-analytical and the restless-creative. You must know enough about business but also have enough scope to be able to think and act outside the standard parameters.
A Growth Hacker analyzes the business model together with its component parts and how they interact with each other. Through this analysis, it recognizes those areas of the business whose optimization will report a greater increase in profit assuming a minimum economic cost. It then goes on to a continuous experimentation phase in which it executes small actions with which it tries to achieve such optimization.
While it may sound very technical, Growth Hacking is actually a gentle and easy discipline to apply once it´s understood.
One of the characteristics of Growth Hacking is that it can be applied to any sector, including supermarkets. It must be said, however, that this discipline encompasses both marketing strategies and product strategies and business strategies: that is why the actions go beyond simple marketing actions.
To apply this discipline, the first thing we must do is set a growth goal. This objective, following the SMART philosophy, must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and temporary. An example of them could be “We want to increase the average ticket by 7% in a total of 3 months. As we can see, we have realistically specified what we want to achieve, we have established an increase percentage and a time limit to achieve it and we have also taken into account the metrics to measure its results.
Once the growth objective has been established, we must select the driver that we will operate. The driver, as its name indicates, is the strategy that will give us the best results through the least possible effort.
If we continue with the related example:
All the experiments that we carry out must be recorded and we must also monitor and analyze them.
Finally, the last and most important step will be to record all the learnings. We must keep a record of all the actions we carry out together with the results and data obtained and the lessons learned. This will allow us to create a database that after a while we will be able to analyze and detect patterns thanks to which we will be able to discover what works and what does not.
For more information on the most effective drivers and experiments for growing supermarket businesses, just sign up with Hypertry. There you can also request personalized consulting if necessary.
