The new ‘Pop to Co-op’ campaign reframes everyday shopping missions as small but meaningful life moments, according to Samuel Walker, marketing director of the convenience retailer.
He explains how Co-op is using customer insight to connect brand-building with short-term commercial impact. From driving frequency and footfall, to creating longer-term value for its member-owned business.
This latest campaign “feels like it’s come from customers”, shares Walker, it’s even influenced by the way Co-op’s members talk about the brand.
“They often refer to popping to Co-op. When we thought about it, that’s how we refer to it as well – customers popping into Co-op. It just really encapsulates that role,” he explains.
Co-op’s latest campaign is therefore built around the frequent moments that shape everyday convenience shopping: from a quick lunch, to feeding the kids, or making the most of a barbecue or picnic.
“It bridges the more retail-focused missions and needs language that represents how customers really talk about how they use us; how they want to shop; what they’ve got going on in their lives. That gives us a great way into really dramatising that role we can play for them.”
Northern attitude
As a member-owned company, the focus of any campaign has to be “really customer focused”. This may mean going back through consumer research or speaking to customers repeatedly to ensure Co-op is delivering every day. That may be “the right price, the right quality, the right ease and convenience”, says Walker.
“Strategically that’s clearly where we are in trying to serve customers, be customer-centric, and do a better job for them day-to-day. ‘Pop to Co-op’ is a really natural fit because it points directly back into that.”
He adds: “We’re straight talking, we’re honest. There’s that Northernness that comes in, so making sure that [the campaign] really felt like us.”
With a “big shiny TV campaign”, out-of-home material and CRM opportunities, ‘Pop to Co-op’ has multiple touch points to convey promotions, pricing, quality, convenience and even quick delivery. It is also designed to bridge the gap between “pop to Co-op for the match” messaging with longer term reasons to consider the brand.
“The beauty of the platform is it just stretches and lets us talk across all of those things really consistently,” notes Walker.
Quick pace and quick wins
For Walker, the campaign’s next phase is about striking the right balance between brand-building and short-term activation. Co-op is tracking a “really balanced set of KPIs”, spanning sales, transactions and frequency, as well as brand perceptions, digital performance, CRM effectiveness and in-channel measures.
“We’re absolutely looking at it in that full funnel sense,” he says, with measurement running “from econometrics and brand tracking right down into some of the channel KPIs”.
While some gains will come quickly, Walker says the bigger prize is building a platform that can grow with customers over time. “It’s definitely about that mix of quick wins and the impact that takes a bit longer to build,” he says. “You can’t just go and pile everything into a very tactical execution. You’ve got to have a view of where are you going to go and build over time.”
Walker recently admitted on LinkedIn that this latest campaign was “developed in a fraction of the ideal critical path”. The speed and creativity behind ‘Pop to Co-op’ reflects the reality of retail marketing.
“That is absolutely the beauty of retail marketing — having to balance the two,” he says. Retail, he adds, has always demanded “incredible pace” because it is so closely tied to customer behaviour, whether that once meant producing press ads “at four hours’ notice” or now means responding to daily shifts in performance media.
But pace, Walker argues, cannot come at the expense of getting the thinking right. Co-op knew it needed to refresh how it talked about its food brand. It was wary of “jumping straight into that very tempting, very quick response” and ending up with work that would need to be changed again.
“Retailers and marketing teams always get bored of their work and their ideas long before their customers do,” he says, making consistency and longevity crucial.
Once the creative direction was clear, the focus shifted to being “as efficient and quick and speedy as we can in getting it ready to go to market”.
That meant getting the wider business aligned on launch timings, making deliberate decisions about where to “parallel track” work that might normally happen sequentially, and building what Walker calls “much more of a bias towards action”. Rather than letting every question trigger a lengthy review cycle, the team moved faster while continuing to use customer feedback to refine the work.
The result, he says, is a platform Co-op can now build from with greater confidence. “We know that customers respond to it really well,” Walker says, adding that the campaign gives the retailer “a great way of talking with customers about their different needs” and makes future activity easier to roll out across channels, missions and messages.
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