Yonks ago, I popped in to see my mum, and she just so happened to be making soup at the time. It was a vegetable soup and she offered me a taste. She wanted me to test it as she thought it was ‘a bit bland’. It was.
She could add more salt or pepper to it, but we felt that it needed something different. The spice/herb rack was in front of us. I looked through it, dismissing paprika, cardamom, rosemary, thyme … then turmeric caught my eye. I opened the small jar, took a sniff, and said; ‘yup, we’ll try a bit of this’.
It was a complete guess as to whether it would work or not.
While my mum was faffing about, looking for a teaspoon, I grabbed a large tablespoon, poured turmeric onto it, and chucked it into the soup. She was pissed off that I might’ve ruined it, but we stirred the stuff in, then went to taste it… and it worked: the turmeric jazzed up the soup, giving it a rich, warm, slightly earthy taste. It now gets thrown into every soup that either my mum or I make.
And that’s what the wonderfully simple ‘Little Twists’ campaign, from Sainsbury’s, is all about: suggesting one item that might just jazz up a fairly ordinary meal.
There’s no hard sell – they’re not asking you to go into Sainsbury’s and do a full shop. In fact, they’re not even asking you to get the suggested items (horseradish, chorizo, anchovies) from Sainsbury’s: you could just as easily get them elsewhere, but…the fact that Sainsbury’s suggested this ‘little twist’ makes you more inclined to get the item from there than another supermarket.
In this sense, it almost acts as an offline lead generation campaign – a small yet enticing offer, to get people into the store, then, once they’re there, it’s highly likely they’ll get a few more bits n bobs (maybe they’re running out of milk or washing up liquid, or need coffee): there’s the ‘upsell’.
Oh, and there’s the word of mouth too. If that suggested ‘little twist’ works, it’ll get passed around: ‘You know what works? Tried it last night… just a little dollop of horseradish in mac n cheese…mmmm. It was one of those Sainsbury’s tips’.
It’s not a hugely creative campaign; it’s just simple, effective, talks how people talk, and it works. Well done, Sainsbury’s – good stuff.