LIDL: DRIVING INCREASED SALES OF 68.8 MILLION

Lidl had historically built a shopper base with a high proportion of smaller volume, but high frequency customers – i.e. the basket shopper. Customers would often go instore to pick up the latest promotion, and while there, pick up some of their daily shop. Until 2016, the vast majority of their marketing and advertising spend focused on footfall driving promotions which encouraged and reinforced this type of behaviour. This approach was successful in driving penetration, resulting in nearly 7 in 10 Irish shoppers visiting Lidl, second only to Tesco in the market. However, with no significant plans for new stores or no changes to the line-up of products, we needed to develop new strategies to grow the Lidl business, particularly as we were at almost saturation point in terms of penetration given Lidl’s footprint. In previous years, we had invested in addressing quality mis-perceptions about Lidl which had built up good trust in the brand. However, this was still not translating into trolley shopping. In order to achieve growth from the existing large customer base, therefore, I helped devise an innovative strategy and creative approach which borrowed from the conventions of reality TV to create something extraordinary out of a very ordinary, everyday chore – grocery shopping. In addition a led a team that completely redesigned the brand identity so that all touchpoints communicated the scale of the range available instore. This was to great effect, achieving a growth rate that was 6 x times faster than the market growth rate and an estimated €68.8 million positive impact on sales over the course of the year.