In 2022, Sainsbury’s needed to drive adoption of their SmartShop app.

Millions of customers pass through the doors of Sainsbury’s every week, a significant proportion we know very little about.

Creating digitally enabled shoppers was imperative to achieving the brands’ long-term goal of becoming better connected to customers. Opening the gateway to rich customer data so that they might know and serve them better.

SmartShop was also fundamental to Sainsbury’s ‘Save to Invest’ strategy, structurally lowering operating costs to, in turn, fuel investment in the core.

2022 was also a year defined by the cost-of-living crisis.

Inflation at a 30-year high, energy prices surging and wages just not keeping up. The year of stagflation where money had to stretch further than ever before and value in the supermarket had become a priority for everyone.

Of course, every brief needs a centre of gravity and for this, that centre was motivation.

‘Be a smart cookie' a campaign narrated by smart cookie himself, Stephen Fry uses lighthearted wordplay to bring the benefits of SmartShop to life. It translates the technical capabilities of an app into customer benefits set firmly in the world of groceries, delivered with a charm that is unmistakably Sainsbury’s. Cleverly, it models the behaviour in-situ and reframes SmartShop as an empowering tool to help customers navigate the cost-of-living crisis.

Our creative strategy recognised you can’t change behaviour based on motivation alone so alongside the creative brief came a fully connected customer experience plan. This captured what customers were thinking and doing at every stage of the journey, the barrier to SmartShop, the role of media as well as providing guidance on where the emphasis should be in terms of capability, opportunity, or motivation.