The Campaign

Price war is fierce in the Japanese supermarket industry and Walmart-SEIYU was struggling to build the low-price awareness. The way Japanese supermarkets communicate low price is by selecting items to discount and communicating this everyday, but if the customer isn’t interested in the discounted product, low price image won’t be built, let alone drive sales. To drive store traffic and sales through increased awareness of low price that’s different from competitors, SEIYU ran the SAGERIKU campaign where they asked the customers to vote products they want discounted, via twitter and cut prices on top 100 products in all branches.

Success of the Campaign

This SAGERIKU campaign was featured in 5 TV news programs as a news piece as well as in a special feature in two national papers. In total, this resulted in a media exposure to the value of 500millionJPY and set record for the awareness that SEIYU is a supermarket with low price. The sales of the discounted products soared from the same month last year making this a campaign that made SEIYU happy with sales increase and customers happy with low prices on their products of choice.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

It kicked off with a twitter banner and transit ad to notify that request account is open along with the TVCF with the message, ”SEIYU is a supermarket that decides discounts based on your requests.” Allowing users to communicate with each other on the SEIYU twitter account led to a sense of community to collectively make the discounts a reality. After 3 weeks, SEIYU ran a TVCF to announce that the discounts are available at all branches nationwide which spread the notion, “SEIYU does reduce prices with customer requests” and boost awareness of “low-price supermarket who listens to customers.”