Background

For years, the Australian supermarket category has been dominated by a price war—with Coles racing to edge out the competition. So instead, we decided to create a non-price point differentiator: a virtual AR dancing game featuring our products, with levels that were unlocked by buying our products.

Describe the creative idea

Introducing Coles Little Shop 2: The Game. A first of it's kind augmented reality dancing game, where you play as one of 30 branded characters that can only be unlocked if you spend over $30 in-store at a Coles Supermarket.

Describe the strategy

Using 3D object recognition and AR technology, customers could scan physical miniature Coles collectibles—earned by spending $30 in-store—with the Little Shop app, unlocking a new character and new dancing level. Each level was a mini-game that let players dance with their characters and Little Shop miniature products. They could then share their high scores and video content directly to social media—creating thousands of unique ads for Coles products—as well as keep track of their unlocked collectibles in the virtual Coles catalogue.

Describe the execution

In an increasingly bitter price war amongst supermarkets, the Little Shop App created an incentive for customers to keep coming into Coles—by replacing in-game purchases, with in-store purchases. Through our use of AR and object recognition, we gamified our own catalogue, leveraging Australia's newest favourite characters to keep top products top of mind. And in a market that's constantly vying for media space, we turned our players into content generators who produced and shared over 65,000 unique ads with their friends.

List the results

Australians loved getting down as well as heading down to their local Coles supermarkets with: - 9 million products unlock in-game, - Over 3.5 million minutes played, - 350,000 downloads - Over 65,000 unique videos shared onto social media. We also reached #1 in the Free Games category of the App Store.