Every couple of months the Insight and Planning team shares some of the highlights from Savvy’s Photo Store, including a little comment and relevant insight. This is what we’ve seen over the past couple of months.
Morrisons ran its beer festival last month. Most notably the festival featured a strong range of craft beers with profiles of origin, background and food pairing suggestions, to facilitate shoppers’ decisions and enable a perfect serve. More than half of shoppers in the Shopper Panel find supermarket beer festivals appealing, with 62% of those shoppers saying that such supermarket events have encouraged them to try new products.
Morrisons also ran its Price Crunch campaign. Brands such as Fairy, Cobra and KitKat are just some of the brands included in the price cutting scheme, which seeks to help improve shopper price perceptions.
Morrisons has also made the fruit and veg aisles more interesting by adding relevant ‘fact-files’ at the nuts and dried fruit, melon, mushrooms and herbs and spices fixtures. As well as categorising each variant, they include tips for how to use each one, helping shoppers with mealtime inspiration. For example, chestnut mushrooms are described as rich in flavour, and good sautéed and served with steak. Nutritional properties are also detailed with the melons and dried fruit, communicating benefits to those health conscious shoppers.
The ‘food pairing’ trend continued last month, particularly in Co-op as part of its ‘There’s a Beer for That’ campaign. Shelf barkers offered suggestions as to which foods to pair with which types of beers, creating the perfect drinking occasion and mealtime solution for consumers. As part of its beer festival detailed above, Morrisons also created an ‘Enjoy with Pizza’ FSDU, whilst in Sainsbury’s Malbec was advertised at the steak fixture to drive shoppers to the drinks aisle, and Waitrose similarly created a bridge between these aisles with bottle neck collars on wines.
Last month the Halloween activity in-store centred largely around providing tips and inspiration for shoppers, an ongoing theme of recent months. Morrisons adapted its Bright Ideas campaign to provide Halloween food and drink inspiration, complete with ingredients lists and recipes. The home cocktail trend also continued for the occasion, with retailers ramping up drinks inspiration, largely online, with ‘spooky’ recipes. Sainsbury’s used this idea to inspire shoppers in the run up to Christmas, with a Christmas Cocktails station similar to that they had in Summer.
In-store activity in November has been shaped by Christmas, with retailer involvement in full swing as the countdown continues. As with every year, many brands have revamped their packaging and launched seasonal limited edition variants.
Coca-Cola has brought back its Christmas Truck campaign, with a themed FSDU in store, limited edition pack design and a collaboration with Tesco offering the chance to win a visit from the truck.
Now in its seventh year, the Christmas truck tour kicked off in Glasgow on 11 November, stopping at 42 locations nationwide in the build up to Christmas, with its final stop in Lakeside, Essex. At each stop this year, consumers can snap and project their festive selfies across the side of the truck while enjoying a drink. Each truck stop also includes a recycling call-to-action, encouraging consumers to recycle bottles and cans. The list of stops can be found here.