Lidl is a European discount supermarket.

Brits’ knew they were cheap but everyone believed the food was inferior.

We had to overcome this prejudice and prove high quality and low prices can actually go hand in hand.

Lidl exacerbated this by pouring most of their communications budget into millions of weekly, A3 door-drop brochures.

We felt the brochures were reinforcing the customer’s misconceptions, so we suggested halving the size of the brochures and investing the savings more wisely.

Using only these savings, we created giant blind taste-tests that allowed shoppers to experience Lidl’s products without knowing where they’re from. This proved that not all inexpensive things are cheap.

A TV, Poster and Social campaign supporting these events encouraged real people to share their #LidlSurprises with others.

A month after the campaign broke, Lidl became Britain’s fastest growing supermarket. All funded by switching from an A3 brochure, to an A4 brochure.

A lot of the prejudice surrounding Lidl didn’t come from its food, it came from peoples perceptions of the brand and it’s store environment.

So we created a new environment to sell Lidl’s food. We hid the brand and put it to the test on real people. They got to try the food at our pop-up farmers’ market, and we only revealed the brand to them when they made a purchase.

For our ruse to work we had to create a convincing farmers’ market space.

We did this by extensively researching the set-up and presentation of food at other successful London markets, such as the world famous Borough Market.

The challenge we faced was that farmers’ markets are a melting pot of independent businesses, each with their own ideas of branding and presenting their food. We created convincing ‘back stories’ for our undercover stallholders and created individual brands based on these for each of the stalls.

This ensured the market wasn’t homogenized and gave it an eclectic feel, which is what our customers were expecting to find.

What they weren’t expecting however was the Lidl branded brown paper bag that revealed to the shopper where the food was actually from.

As a result brand awareness increased by 80% and Lidl’s online buzz increased by 40%. Our film even appeared on the BBC News. The campaign attracted over half a million more shoppers and those who already shopped there spent an extra £1. The percentage of people agreeing they would ‘feel comfortable shopping at Lidl’ as asked in Lidl’s tracking study, has increased from 36% to 48%. In October 2014, a month after we launched the campaign, Lidl became Britain’s fastest growing supermarket.