Background and Objective

METRO is a leading international retail group originating from Germany. To date, the group has 97 stores in 60 cities of China, serving over 16M members.

In China, Chinese New Year (CNY) is a peak season for retail and supermarket industry as people need to buy gifts when visiting relatives or buy high-quality food ingredients to treat families and relatives who visit home. Hence, it is a key opportunity to achieve annual business goals (new member recruitment and sales growth).

Strategy and Execution

During CNY 2020, we helped them launch an integrated marketing campaign called “Treasure Hunting at METRO”. The campaign had two objectives. 1) To engage and convert potential target customers; 2) To position them as a “value-for-money” one-stop-shop destination which sells high-quality products.

To achieve the objective, we helped them: 

  • Partner with Michelin star chefs

We invited Michelin celebrity Chefs to promote METRO products through various activities: CNY dinner menu design using METRO’s products, CNY dinner food shopping in a METRO store, and Michelin dinner cooking and tasting on-site at a Metro store, among others.

  • Partner with a cooking platform

We collaborated with professional cooking platform Daydaycook, by placing METRO products in Daydaycook’s offline cooking courses to enable METRO target customers to experience METRO’s products offline.

  • Partner with a luxury eCommerce platform

To cater to the Chinese CNY gifting tradition, we selected gifting products and displayed on top luxury EC platform SECOO to drive online sales.

  • Launch new social media activation

In social media platforms, we used KOLs, KOCs and METRO employees to expand METRO target customers’ attention to METRO from CNY food material to all categories via a “treasure hunting” activity. This included creating an H5 (mobile) treasure map to guide target customers to uncover hero products.

  • Multi-media buy

We engaged target customers with treasure hunting campaigns at large scale through video, news feeds, and programmatic media buy.

Campaign Highlights

To amplify “METRO CNY Dinner by Star Chef”, we implemented omnichannel activation based on the media consumption of potential METRO target customers:

  • Livestreaming: food shopping with a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) and Michelin star chef. We partnered with a top lifestyle KOL Patty to live stream how Michelin chef Jackson choose food ingredients in Metro, where they shared product knowledge

  • Offline event with livestreaming: We hosted a Michelin CNY dinner event at a METRO store, featuring a live performance of Chef Jackson as he prepared the menu he has created for our customers. That was a great way to let our target customers experience our high-quality and value-for-money products. The CNY dinner was also amplified via Livestream by top KOLs.

  • Partner with a lifestyle TV show: Based on the CNY dinner menu designed by the Michelin chef, we worked with SiTV’s popular TV show,” Go! Househusband” to encourage the target audience to purchase METRO food ingredients to cook their CNY dinner.

  • Partner with a cooking platform: We collaborated with professional cooking platform Daydaycook, by placing METRO products in its offline cooking courses to enable the tangible brand experience. We also used KOLs to promote METRO TMALL products during live streaming in cooking courses to trigger instant purchase among users.

  • Partner with Toutiao Topics: We leveraged Toutiao KOLs to raise awareness of “CNY Dinner” and aroused tremendous brand buzz via co-op with Toutiao’s hot topic.

Results

The viewership of “METRO CNY Dinner” from Livestream, TV program and Toutiao hot topic exceeded 274 M with an engagement of over 66K.

With the promotion of “Treasure Hunting” campaign, many potential target customers got more familiar with METRO’s key categories (e.g. Salmon).

Sales & ROI also reached a historical high during METRO’s 23+ years appearance in China.

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