When you need direct engagement with your audience, there’s only one place your campaign can live – social media. So, we turned to Aldi’s social community to turn the sportswear industry on its head. With one single post, we asked our fans on social to name our new range and once they said it, we could legally brand our sportswear ads with their posts and comments that acted as ‘Aldidas’ logos. No other platform could give us the immediate response we needed or could remove the legal liability from ourselves and Aldi.

When it comes to groceries, Aldi is famous for offering alternatives to the big brands. Their products look the same and taste the same, the only thing they don’t do is cost the same. And that was the insight for our Like Brands Only Cheaper campaign, which was one of the most famous and successful retail campaigns of all time. The Like Brands campaign made British people fall in love with Aldi’s lookalike products, and fall in love with Aldi, helping it grow to the 4th biggest supermarket in the UK.

British people often talk about Aldi’s lookalike products. They make YouTube reviews about them. Write social posts about them. They even make TV documentaries about them. So, we knew we could rely on Aldi fans to name our sportswear for us on social. Because they’re ‘in on the joke’ too.

In the UK, Aldi is the Robin Hood of supermarkets. They borrow from the brands and give savings back to the people, and their low-cost lookalike products are loved by their millions of customers, but they’re not loved by the wealthy brands they borrow from. They often take Aldi to court, sue them, or send cease and desist letters.

Regardless, Aldi always fight for what is right for customers. They’ve done brilliantly at saving customers money on the food they eat, but what about the clothes they wear? Sportswear is a brand-dominated sector where the big brands control the high prices, so that felt like a good place to start. Only problem is, people don’t want to wear clothes from a budget supermarket. So, here’s the brief: make Aldi’s low-cost sportswear just as desirable and hyped as the big brands, and make it sell out.

Aldi is a German brand, founded by two brothers, with a logo that has three stripes. So, the name for their sportswear was obvious, right? Wrong. We legally couldn’t say it. So, we turned to Aldi’s social community to turn the sportswear industry on its head. We found a legal loophole in the trademark act of 1994 that meant if somebody else said it, Aldi wasn’t liable for any lawsuits.

So, with one single post, we asked their fans on social to name it for us. The Aldi products they love often look the same and sound the same as the big brands, so when they saw our cool, sporty clothes with three stripes, they knew exactly what to call it – Aldidas. Once they said it, we could legally brand our sportswear ads with their posts and comments that acted as ‘Aldidas’ logos.

Aldi isn’t your ordinary supermarket, it’s a democratiser of groceries. So, when they decided to democratise the sportswear market too, we had to make sure we channelled their challenger brand mentality and strategy that has made them so successful with food: being the Robin Hood of supermarkets. So, in true Aldi fashion, we were going to approach sportswear by borrowing from the brands and giving back to the people.

The people we were targeting weren’t just Aldi fans though, we needed to reach a younger audience who wear big sportswear brands. We already knew they were paying more because sportswear prices have increased over 22% since 2021 - we just needed them to consider Aldi instead. They’re always on social, so to stop them scrolling, we started treating them like influencers, making them the faces of Aldi’s campaign and the solution to our legal problem.

Legally, we couldn’t use the name we wanted for Aldi’s sportswear range. So, four days prior to the launch, we uploaded a single post to X that asked their followers to name Aldi’s sportswear range instead. Once we had their replies that said ‘Aldidas’, we put them on our sportswear ads and uploaded the ads to Instagram, Facebook, and X to raise awareness of Aldi’s new clothing line and the upcoming launch date.

We partnered with influencers to model the sportswear to further increase our reach and reacted to the replies from Aldi’s social community to gain more traction. The social campaign was 8 days in total, but the PR grew so much in the following weeks, Aldi were approached by Yeovil Town Football Club to become their official sportswear sponsor, where their branded kit was broadcasted to over 80 countries.

Aldidas didn’t break the law, it broke the internet. We increased our followers on Facebook, X and Instagram by over 200,000. We couldn’t say the name, but thankfully everyone else did that for us, with over 11M impressions and over 880k engagements across social. It broke the mainstream too, with popular podcast hosts questioning ‘can Aldi really do that?’ We can, and we did, and all that buzz added up to over £1M in earned media across 50 plus publications.

Aldidas sportswear sold out in under 4 hours in-store and online, generating over £3M in sales and making it one of Aldi’s most successful product launches ever. We avoided the wrong side of the law, to do the right thing for customers – which was to save them up to 70% on sportswear. And the best bit? We never once said Aldidas.