Despite what the news media says about Aldi’s meteoric rise, there are still people who don’t get what the quirky, cheaper supermarket is about.

BMF managed to convert 661,000 of them last year with its Supermarket Switch Challenge that recruited a friend or family member of an Aldi sceptic to convert them. That campaign has been Aldi’s most effective to date.

But now it has a competitor, a warrior in the tackle the seemingly un-switchable Aldi sceptics – The Unconvincible. These Australian grocery shoppers have the most extreme negative attitudes towards Aldi. They’re the kind of people who say, “I’d never shop at ALDI,” and are quite good at giving apparently rational reasons why.

BMF’s job was to show that when you scratch the surface, these reasons don’t stack up.

Aldi marketing director, Sam Viney, explained, “Tackling the misconceptions and doubts about Aldi proved very effective. So we went at it again, going deeper and challenging the ultimate sceptics. After all, if we can persuade our most hardened critics, I am sure we will convince even more Australians to shop at Aldi.”

“It was actually quite tricky finding people who are such staunch rejecters of Aldi. We did a call-out on Facebook, did street casting and ran focus groups, but most people were simply too easy to convert. In the end, we found four Unconvincibles, each with their own idiosyncratic reasons for never shopping at Aldi. While these barriers were deal-breakers for them, they actually reflect the more widely-held misconceptions about Aldi among Australian shoppers,” BMF head of planning, Hugh Munro, commented.

“Unscripted ads are great fun to make, especially with characters as vocal as this. Their awkward pauses and the offhand comments give the campaign an authenticity other retailers won’t go near. For Aldi to let its fiercest critics call them out on national TV – never knowing whether they’d be be able to switch them or not – is a real statement,” noted BMF group account director, Toby Hussey.

The new campaign is integrated across the path to purchase: from TV and catalogue to digital, print, and point of sale.

Credits:

Agency: BMF

Executive creative director: Cam Blackley

Creative director: Alex Derwin

Copywriter: Jonty Bell

Art Director: Ben Pearce

Executive planning director: Christina Aventi

Head of planning: Hugh Munro

Managing director: Steve McArdle

Group account director: Toby Hussey

Account director: Hayley Basham

Account manager: Harriet Cockill

Agency Producers: Jenny Lee-Archer & Esta Lau

Production company: Will O’Rourke

Director: The Glue Society’s Jonathon Kneebone

Managing director/executive producer: Michael Ritchie

Executive producer/head of projects: Josh Mullens

Producer: Serena Paull

DoP: Rob Marsh

Post Production company: The Glue Society Studios

Editor: The Glue Society’s Luke Crethar

Post producer: Scott Stirling

Colourist: Christine Trodd

Online operator: Heather Galvin

Sound: Rumble Studios

Client:

Marketing Director: Sam Viney