Kroger understands that the holidays are about more than just buying and selling; they involve meaningful celebrations, particularly at a time when people are exploring new traditions and diverse dishes. But consumers don’t know how much Kroger actually cares about the food people put into their bodies. They only see them as a big, corporate entity. For their 2023 holiday campaign, Kroger needed to build more brand love, transforming a transactional relationship with shoppers into an emotional one that resonated with the holiday spirit. The goal was to create a genuine connection with shoppers that extended beyond just selling fresh food.

For their 2023 holiday campaign, Kroger showcased the power of food to create new traditions that bond people together. So we created a film about a childless couple who welcomed international exchange students. To comfort the homesick students, they prepared meals from the students' native countries, blending holiday traditions. Accompanied by an emotional Ed Sheeran track, "Photograph," the story went viral, moving viewers to tears. We had to act fast before the tears dried up. We replied to every single customer online who commented that our commercial made them cry with a free box of tissues. We sent thousands of individual direct messages across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, offering everyone a free box of Kroger Brand tissues to dry their eyes. And we did it all in less than a week. There were a lot of tears. But for Kroger, it was definitely a happy cry.

To take off in earned media, we knew we needed an insight that hit people right in the feels, acknowledging how hard it’s become to make holiday magic, and how people are adapting in response. Between COVID and inflation, our shoppers took a hard look at how they celebrated in 2023, throwing out whatever caused them anxiety. This stressful one-two punch, and their response to it, was the core of our insight: living up to past holiday traditions has become so stressful and unattainable that people would rather create their own.

Our PR strategy was to make people feel truly seen, surrounding them with a multifaceted approach to increase visibility, generate buzz, and create a lasting impact on our shoppers so we could position Kroger as a liberating force to help our shoppers make the holidays that fit them, maximizing cultural relevance and the emotional connection to our brand.

To ensure that there were nothing but dry eyes in the house, we rallied the entire social media team to dive into the replies, mentions, reposts and DMs reacting to our spot on Kroger socials. The team searched (both manually and with our social listening tools) for any permutations of comments mentioning crying, tears, sobbing, sad emojis, the classic “whos cutting onions?” and many many more ways to say that our spot moved them to tears.

As we identified relevant responses, we acknowledged them in a public reply from the Kroger brand handle, letting them know to check their DMs, where a gift card for Kroger brand tissues awaited.

As DMs were opened and gift cards were redeemed, we also saw reactive content from our reactive moment (it was a true tissue-ception) from users who were excited to be acknowledged in such a heartfelt way.

Our campaign took off, building the emotional bond with Kroger that we needed while still growing their business:

Over 9 million organic views on TikTok.

Hundreds of video reactions.

+1 million likes on social media

157 million impressions, including earned media

Propelled Kroger to #1 in Brand Love for the category, beating competitors like Target, Amazon and Whole Foods.

Exceeded benchmarks for emotional intensity by 2 fold

Beat Kroger Instagram benchmark by 155% and Facebook by 102%