Case Study – How we turned shoppers’ dread into desire
Nine years ago
Christmas shopping is many people’s worst nightmare – the crowds, the queues, the last minute scramble for gifts for family and friends. Just when you think you have it covered, you suddenly remember you have to do it all again for Christmas dinner.
Making sure you have a ham, a turkey and perhaps some seafood – as well as all the trimmings – right when the shops are full of frantic Christmas shoppers with the very same agenda is not a pleasant proposition. The thought of pushing a trolley around a supermarket in the days leading up to Christmas has been known to cause pre-traumatic stress disorder!
When we were briefed to create a Christmas campaign for Birkenhead Point’s Ground Floor fresh food precinct, we instinctively knew that we needed to cut through the Christmas clutter and think differently to meet the client’s objectives – to increase market share, drive sales to supermarket and specialty food stores, and build on and engage the online audience in the lead up to Christmas.
Through research and experience, we identified that in order to meet these goals we would need to change the way people feel about shopping for food at Christmas.
Understanding that brands that aim to make emotional connections with their audience achieve more success than those that only connect on a rational level, we developed a clear strategy with love and desire at its very heart.
We decided to showcase the beautiful fresh food and produce available at Birkenhead Point’s specialty food stores and supermarkets as objects of desire with the headline, Fall in love with food this Christmas.
We created still life portraits of their stunning range of fresh, seasonal produce and seafood to inspire the target audience to embrace fresh, festive fare during the holiday season.
By showing food in its purest form, we created stunning images that also encouraged shoppers to celebrate with simplicity.
As part of this campaign, we also developed a Christmas Planner for the month of December to help shoppers reduce their feelings of dread by getting organised in the frantic lead up to Christmas, while at the same time promoting centre retailers. This beautifully printed piece (and its online counterpart) also included a simple recipe for a pavlova laden with summer fruits, as well as useful tips for buying and storing seafood.
By offering shoppers useful information and a handy organisation tool to help reduce the craziness of the holiday season, it allowed them to more easily ‘fall in love with food’ and to relax and enjoy the festivities.
Executing this campaign was also a labour of love and very much a collaborative team effort. From hand picking the beautiful fruits and vegetables from Birkenhead Point’s specialty stores and supermarkets, making the pavlova, and shopping for plates and vessels to casting the gorgeous Larry the Lobster, everyone at Holy Cow! fell in love with this wonderful project in one way or another.
The photoshoot itself was a day to remember and the ‘talent’ was a natural! In some shots, the produce seemed to style itself – you just can’t improve on Mother Nature!
We gently upheld Birkenhead Point’s visual identity by hand-painting a reclaimed timber board in their signature colour as the background for each campaign image. This subtle colour allowed the subject matter to take centre stage, whilst simultaneously reinforcing the centre’s distinct branding.
As well as the Christmas Planner which was distributed to the local trade area and available online, local press advertising and electronic direct mail were also utilised. Key campaign images were also used on the centre’s website and as social media content, driving shoppers to the centre in the lead up to Christmas. In centre, we designed large format ceiling posters and point of sale posters for display throughout the fresh food area to remind shoppers of the romance of food.
This campaign resulted in sales increase from the previous year at Birkenhead Point’s fresh food precinct. The online engagement during this campaign was also significant and additional anecdotal evidence surrounding the campaign’s exposure at centre level tells us that Birkenhead Point did in fact help to change the way people feel about shopping for food at Christmas.