Kroger: Eat. Laugh. Love.
The Challenge
Kroger, a leading grocery retailer with thousands of stores, top market share, and record-breaking sales, saw an opportunity to increase their success by elevating their own store brand into one that drove customer preference and loyalty. Rather than choosing competing brands, they wanted to motivate customers to make a connection with Kroger’s brand that gave the company a unique advantage over their competitors.
Creating Connections
Lubin Lawrence found that Kroger's Fundamental Human Value was connections, with the driving force behind where a parent decides to shop and what they decide to buy being the desire to keep their family happy and healthy. But Kroger was a multi-faceted business, and so to answer the needs of each different segment of service, we identified the Desired Target Experience by each key grocery department. Our findings built the Kroger Brand Platform that translated how the emotional linked to unique services and positioning Kroger could offer.
Working with Lubin Lawrence's brand platform, Kroger created new brand advertising, a loyalty program, and promotions of family health to drive parents to shop at their stores. Inside stores, Kroger used the brand platform to transform the shopping experience, the product, and the packaging to create preference for and ultimately purchase of Kroger’s brand products.
Their bakery was transformed to create a feeling of warmth. With friendly, available service, warm lighting and wood and brick décor, and visible ovens and trays that displayed the bread openly so that the aroma wafted through and out of the bakery, customers felt at home.
Products were reformulated to provide parents with an easy and convenient yet wholesome and healthy solution to feeding and pleasing their family. Kroger’s packaged bread was redone to include no high fructose corn syrup, allowing parents to give both delicious and healthy food to their families.
Packaging was redesigned on over 5000 products to communicate “Family Connections” and convey nutritional information that delivered on parents’ desire to be both happy and healthy. This renovation allowed the Kroger brand to win at the shelf.
Eat. Laugh. Love.
The Eat. Laugh. Love. campaign gave parents convenient and healthy dinner inspiration. It provided a recipe for a family dinner and offered savings on the ingredients. A “Dinner Inspiration Station” was also set up in stores to allow customers to sample the recipe for themselves, so they know not only is the meal healthy but also will make their families happy, all while saving them time and money.
The Results
The Connections platform launched in 2011 in 1500 stores, leading to a sales increase of 40%.