In an ever-competitive marketplace where consumers are offered rewards for loyalty to so many different brands, creating an emotional connection with Nectar is incredibly important. So, when the time came to launch our first brand-building focussed campaign in recent years, we decided to go down an unexpected route to surprise customers and raise awareness.

The mutual benefits of connecting with customers

Nectar offers you something on top of your usual shopping – lots of people know that. But customers have become savvy about loyalty schemes and the value they provide, which means they have increased expectations of what they receive – and how. Building a strong brand connection is key to making Nectar stand out from the pack, and that our communications have real meaning. In turn, that means our customers get the most from Nectar, and become brand advocates.

Engaging customers with our bold new brand

Shopping Smarts was our first campaign in our new brand world. We wanted to make sure our members were rethinking what they knew about Nectar, and that we were helping them get the most from the scheme. This was an opportunity to cement our new, bolder, and braver brand in an impactful way.

So, what was our objective with Shopping Smarts? We wanted to encourage our slightly less engaged audience segments to revaluate what they thought they knew about Nectar – something they likely haven’t done for a long time. Chances are they knew they could collect Nectar points on their shopping, but were they clued up on all the extras, bonuses and perks of membership – and all the places they could collect and spend their points?

Our target audience

To understand our customers better, we group them into several personas, each with different priorities and interests.

For this campaign, we wanted to target two specific groups of customers: the spontaneous deal-seekers and the opportunistic fun-seekers. The first group shows an interest in loyalty schemes with a focus on making their money go further, while the latter is a younger demographic. We wanted to engage both groups with this campaign.

How do you make people sit up and take notice?

The brief was a broad one. We were open to any approach, and were presented with a number of great routes by our creative agency, Iris Worldwide. Bearing in mind the audiences we were targeting (and the Covid environment we were living in), a content approach was decided on as the right route to get our message across to these customers: they were already consuming content online, so there was a greater chance that we could reach them here, too.

As a brand, we were aware that this audience likely thought about us very little, so we needed to do something different to get them to stop and take note. So, we enlisted the help of an unexpected shopping guru: footballer, actor and presenter Vinnie Jones.

Why Vinnie?

Well, he’s appeared in a lot of TV shows our target audience was known to watch and engage with – especially on ITV, one of their most-watched channels. And with his tough-guy-turned-Hollywood-actor persona, he felt like a truly unexpected choice for Nectar – just what we wanted.

With all that, the core value we wanted to keep in mind was to stay true to Nectar, reiterating that we add value to your shopping. And so Shopping Smarts was born, with Vinnie starring as the unexpected shopping guru, armed with tips and tricks from Nectar.

The Results

  • Total circulation: 220, 015,872 across multiple channels, including ITY Player, YouTube, social and print.
  • The highest campaign recall to date within our non-three-month active base. It even came out higher than our three-month active recall, which isn’t usually the case. What does that mean? It shows that this campaign managed to make our less engaged audience notice us
  • Highest engagement level for a Nectar campaign since tracking following re-launch of the new brand
  • Beat all other recent Nectar campaigns for “love it”, “different to other ads” and “made me want to find out more about Nectar and its partners”
  • Those who recalled the ad showed much higher measurement in emotional controls like brand proximity, warmth, empathy, positivity and buzz (between 20-30 points higher)
  • Those who recalled also had much higher scores on “Nectar has a major impact on where I shop” and “helps me choose where to shop”
  • Other 10+ points improvement scores were seen in aware vs unaware – it’s fun to participate in, offers are tailored to my needs, it’s generous, makes me feel valued and gives me something to look forward to Targeted customer personas were more aware than unaware of campaign than other personas