Insight and Idea

Walmart has become Canada’s most trusted retailer for price leadership, quality brands and one-stop shopping, but not in fresh groceries which includes meat, fish, produce and bakery.

Local fresh food is the primary shopping motivation throughout the summer months, centered around long weekends.

Walmart had a long weekend focus. A one-stop shop is the top store choice driver during long weekends and offers an important competitive advantage. Food is also the highest volume driving category during these weekends, accounting for 40% of Walmart’s total long weekend sales.

Media Execution

Walmart needed to better understand its consumer’s shopping behaviour and had a limited ability to track foot traffic as a direct function of advertising to Walmart Supercentres.

With the objectives of driving foot traffic to store and increasing basket size, Walmart needed to convert consumers shopping at competitive grocers as well as loyal Walmart Supercentre “non-fresh” shoppers.

Since in-store sales would be the measure of success, Walmart and agency Mindshare Canada partnered with technology partner Freckle and media partner Juice Mobile to track consumers at their favourite competitive grocery stores and Walmart Supercentres to determine how shopping habits play out in the summer months. Walmart and Mindshare leveraged Juice Mobile’s digital network and Freckle’s virtual beacons and distributed an immersive and dynamically triggered experience in mobile using high impact mobile units.

Innovation

A custom audience segment was created to curate a unique segment of consumers with a high affinity to Walmart Supercentres; with a layer of competitive grocery brands (Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, FreshCo, etc.). Virtual beacons were placed around all Walmart Supercentres in Canada, and all of the predetermined competitive grocery brands.

Consumers were targeted on their mobile devices with Walmart fresh creative focusing on local in-season fruits and vegetables as they became available in each region. Shopping behaviours of all consumers who were exposed to this creative on their mobile device pre-campaign were tracked, further segmenting them based on store visits after being exposed to the fresh messaging.

The Results

Through the modeling and application of new technology, the campaign generated a 24.6% incremental lift in foot traffic to Walmart Supercentres. Walmart’s loyalist (those who shopped weekly at Walmart in the data collection period) foot traffic increased by an average of 50%. Walmart’s non-loyalist foot traffic increased 400% with this same shopper returning an average of six times during a two-month period.