Do-it-yourself @Christmas

The two major home improvement (DIY) retailers have positioned themselves to get a slice of the festive spending.  B&Q launched their Christmas advertisement on 7 November, and Homebase followed on 19 November.

B&Q's movie seems there to show that the firm not only sells trees, lights and decorations, but a range of toys also.  The ad itself is pretty unremarkable: what is more interesting is their campaign to get digital engagement via something called The Big Switch On.  The company is encouraging customers to decorate their trees and to film the moment when the lights are lit.

These bits of film are then uploaded to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, using the hashtag #ChrismasUnleashed.  B&Q have a long running campaign using the term unleashed.
B&Q then add the location of these uploads to a UK map.  This mirrors the Waitrose campaign to get customers singing; in both cases the companies promise that the best results will appear in later TV advertising.



At the time of writing (25 November) this imaginative idea hasn't exactly gone viral.  The map shows a few dots around London and one in the Bournemouth area.  But it is early days and the plan seems to be to make December 6 be the big switch on day.  B&Q's 46,000 Twitter followers seem muted.  In fact the #ChrismasUnleashed hashtag seems to be being used by other retailers and as a generic term by the Twitterati.  Both here and on Facebook (B&Q has over 125,000 likes) the moderators are dilligently promoting the Big Switch On: however, on Facebook at least these posts are often being hijacked by disgruntled customers complaining about poor service or faulty products.  The Christmas TV ad has to date performed miserably on YouTube with just 12,000 viewings.

Homebase launched their TV ad less than a week ago (19 November) but are already showing viewing figures ten times those recorded by their competitor.  Homebase have created their own cute canine character, Homebase Harriet, with a dedicated social media presence on Twitter. In doing this they are following John Lewis's lead creating a virtual identity for Monty the Penguin.  Harriet has her own TV commercial which has gained an impressive 140,000 viewings in less than a week. To date Harriet has failed to get anything like the social media traction shown by Monty, with just 71 followers to Monty's 33,000.



In summary, two similar brands, both promising to transform fairly mundane TV advertising campaigns with promising sounding social media strategies.

The Upstarts: Lidl, Aldi and #LittleSurprises

For supermarkets the Christmas season represents a chance to boost sales and profits at a time when normal rules are suspended.  According to market researchers Kantar, all of the top 5 UK supermarkets (with the exception of Asda) are losing market share.  While gains have been made by Waitrose and small multiple stores, the biggest gainers are Lidl (up 18% in the latest quarter) and Aldi (27% higher in the same period).

Jools Holland in the 2014 Aldi advertisement
Picture from MarketingMagazine

Both these stores are well established challengers to Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons.  Each of these have now rolled out impressive-sounding TV advertising campaigns for 2014.  It is important to remember, though, that the biggest spender in 2013 was Tesco, who actually lost sales during the festive period.

Lidl's campaign for the end of 2014 is part of a much larger one, based around the theme of 'Lidl surprises'.  The overall campaign (not just the Christmas part) is costing the company  £20 million (according to The Grocer) - this looks impressive except when set against Tesco's spend last year of £25 million.  Lidl, like other supermarkets this year, intend to get more value out of their advertising by linking it to social media and other channels.

The 'surprises' theme in the Lidl advertisement comes over in the reaction of the 'ordinary people' from Hertfordshire who are seen tucking into a Christmas meal prepared from Lidl groceries.  There is surprise at being served lobster at the start, and stollen for dessert. Most of all, the diners are surprised to discover the provenance of the food: they had believed that it was from Waitrose or Marks & Spencer (both named in the film).  This should come as no surprise as Lidl had named these as targets in the pre-publicity.

On social media Lidl has been promoting the campaign, and has succeeded in getting the advertisement seen nearly 300,000 times to date.  Of course this is a small figure alongside the 12 million views that Sainsbury's has achieved.  Lidl is far less active on Twitter than all its competitors with a mere 16,500 followers.  Here there seems to be a great deal of confusion, with the official Twitter feed using numerous hashtags including #LidlChristmas, #Lidler and #LidlSurprises.  The social media channels are very effective at getting over the 'surprising' new Christmas goodies in store.

Lidl has 750,000 Facebook fans, where is uses the same range of hashtags.  The campaign launch was somewhat overshadowed by Lidl introducing what was popularly believed to be a "ban" on the use of any language but English by staff in Lidl stores.  

Aldi, unlike most retailers in 2014, has opted to feature a celebrity: Jules Holland and his band appear at the end of commercial.  The theme of the advertisement, "everyone's coming to us" is a witty poke at the way Aldi is growing at the expense of established competitors.  The TV advertisement itself, launched on Novemer 5, is nowhere near as popular as Lidl's, gaining just 50,000 views to date, despite the celebrity endorsement.  However the company outscores its German rival on Facebook with over 800,000 fans.  It also has a far larger Twitter following.  Both high scores are probably attributable to the company's successful ways at 'incentivizing' its fans with competitions and offers.  There is just one mention of the TV campaign, though.

The success of Aldi and Lidl should not be overstated: much of it is attributable to locational effects - both firms are opening new stores steadily across the UK.  Their campaigns in broadcast media and online stress product quality over low prices.  But the market share figures speak for themselves: everyone is going to them.

Waitrose: in the Shadow of the Penguin

Heston Blumenthal: dropped from
the Christmas advertising in 2014

Waitrose is another retailer that decided not to use celebrities in its TV advertising in 2014.  At least this is how the supermarket announced the new campaign.  It is slightly misleading as celebrity chef Heston Blumental continues to work for Waitrose, but his focus is far more on cooking, with the results being posted to the firm's YouTube pages.

Waitrose is part of the John Lewis group of companies: the department store arm of the business has been making headlines with the runaway success of its 2014 campaign, featuring Monty the Penguin.  But Waitrose started its campaigning early, with the launch on October 15 of  'Donate Your Voice', where ordinary members of the public were encouraged to record their voices singing a Dolly Parton song, with the final result being a compilation of voices in a single released for charity.  This was an ambitious attempt to achieve three things: to build brand value, to gain points for Corporate and Social Responsbility (CSR) and to encourage digital engagement.

The results of Donate Your Voice were released as a short video on YouTube on 10 November.  This was shortly after the launch of a separate, dedicate TV advertisement from Waitrose, called The Gingerbread Stall.   The latter was broadcast, but has also clocked up over half a million viewings on Youtube to date.  The Voice piece, by contrast, has had 125,000 viewings.

It seems a pity that Donate Your Voice seems to have been overshadowed by both Monty the Penguin and by the Gingerbread advertisement.  The single, which had been talked up as a possible Christmas Number One has not got into the charts, while the John Lewis music (Tom Odell's Real Love) rose to number 7 in the middle of October before dropping back.  The proceeds from Real Love were earmarked for the World Wildlife Fund: three separate charities are due to benefit from the Donate Your Voice campaign.



The viewing figures comparison is misleading, as voices from the earlier campaign featured in mainstream TV commercial.  This encourages audiences to download the single.  Curiously, given the company's apparent mastery of social media, the Waitrose Facebook page does not appear to have promoted the advert at all - it linked to a 'behind-the-scenes' film about the ad, before continuing to talk about foods and recipes as normal.  Strange, as Waitrose has more than 200,000 fans on Facebook.  The lack of attention given to the advertisement was replicated on Twitter (Waitrose has 172,000 followers), where there was a token reference to the behind-the-scenes video and nothing else.  Since then more food, recipes and the celebrity chef.  No hashtag, no apparent effort to leverage the social media value of the Donate Your Voice campaign.  Business as usual.

John Lewis, by contrast, has gained maximum value from its TV commercial and built a mass of social media engagement around it.  Waitrose seem to have had some good ideas built around their core brand values of people and altruism, but hasn't followed through with them.  Their half million viewing on YouTube look impressive, excepdit when compared to the 17 million that Monty the Penguin has been able to achieve.