Challenge

Pick n Pay tasked the DENTSU CREATIVE SA team with helping them regain the Fresh Produce market share. The aim was to build ongoing trust and awareness in the broader offering and grow the Fresh category market share (which includes all fresh produce, butchery, bakery and dairy products) at twice the rate of overall PnP growth.

Solution

Over 12 years, DENTSU CREATIVE SA has established a broad portfolio of content solutions for Pick n Pay. This all started with Fresh Living, their editorially-driven customer magazine, and then expanded across category-led and special occasion print supplements (both ATL and BTL), social content, mailers, web series and more. As Fresh is such a critical category for Pick n Pay, all of these projects have a part to play in driving awareness and establishing authority, and when curated to align with ATL activity, combine to form a 360-degree ecosystem and provide a cohesive narrative across all platforms.

With this holistic approach, the brand showed up with one look and feel, creating a previously absent immediate brand identity. Through the reuse of print collateral across platforms, PnP enjoyed economies of scale, realised from a ‘create once, use often’ campaign:

• Fresh Living – The Fresh focus was amplified to highlight range and quality, provide recipe inspiration and weave in local provenance stories.
• Tabloids and print supplements – Editorially driven product and price offers were styled and designed to mirror Fresh Living.
• POS – The ATL agency utilised images from Fresh Living and Fresh Ideas supplements throughout stores.
• Social content – Recipes and products brought to life through ‘snackable’ videos.
• Supper Sorted – PnP’s weekly recipe-focused mailer.
• Digital Campaigns – Seasonally driven content.
• Targeted emailers – A range of weekly Fresh mailers.

Result

The Pick n Pay Fresh campaign – launched in winter 2018 – was a multi-platform, through-the-line, content-led campaign aimed at Core and Core Upper shoppers (those who spend between R1 000 and R1 500 per month). With a 12-year track record of tangible customer engagement via the pages of (then) free customer magazine, Fresh Living, and consequent sales uplift (Fresh Living readers spend significantly more per shop than non-readers), Pick n Pay tasked the Fresh Living team, led by award-winning editor and celebrity chef Justine Drake, with helping them regain Fresh Produce market share. Over and above continuing to provide solution-driven content, we were tasked with significantly raising awareness of PnP’s price-sensitive Fresh-category offers, showcasing the improved quality and increased product range, and driving home PnP’s ‘Fresh Promise’. With up to 470 842 copies claimed each month and an estimated 2.133 million readers per issue, South African supermarket Pick n Pay’s customer magazine Fresh Living had the highest circulation and readership figures across all South African food and lifestyle categories for customer and consumer titles. Fresh messaging was incorporated into the pages of Fresh Living and a themed, content-led ATL brand-extension supplement, Fresh Ideas, with a 2 million-plus print run was launched to tie in with the Fresh trade plan. Furthermore, a monthly Fresh emailer was created and sent to a database of up to 320 000 of Pick n Pay’s Smart Shopper loyalty-card holders. The Fresh message continued in weekly Supper Sorted mailers, which reached 30 000 deeply engaged, opt-in customers and ran on Pick n Pay’s Facebook feed, with its subset of 1.9 million fans.