It’s a smart marketer. Lidl’s Bosse’s Milk carpe diem campaign just won Gold at Cannes Lions and showed that Lidl, at least, knows how to have a relationship with its customers.
German discount supermarket, Lidl, gave Australia’s big three chains – Coles, Woolies and Aldi – rather a lot of disquiet last week by trademarking 500 brand names here. And while Lidl itself insists that it has no current plans to mess with the status quo here, there were also rumours that it has been investigating logistics and distribution options in Australia. Lidl has, however, just launched in the US.
And while Australia obsessed over Lidl’s international scale of operations and foreign market know-how, its popularity (ranked more likeable in Britain than Twitter among 18-24 year olds), its very low prices and who would be most affected by Lidl’s arrival here, Lidl’s attention was in Cannes, where it was showing the world its marketing clout by winning a Gold Lion in Direct/Strategy/Retention at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – the marketing industry’s “Olympics”.
The campaign was built around a packaging idea by Lidl’s Swedish advertising agency, Ingo.
It was triggered by a Facebook post by an ordinary Swede, Bosse Elfgren. Bosse had asked Lidl Sweden why he should drink German milk, believing that Lidl’s milk is imported from Germany.
Lidl replied by renaming all of its Angens milk, Bosse’s Milk. The company had all of the cartons redesigned, adding Bosse’s avatar and question as well as Lidl’s personal reply, explaining that their Angens private label has been 100% Swedish since 2010.
Lidl then supported the idea with a TV commercial, a full page advertisement in newspapers, billboards and an aerial ad – Lidl flew an airplane over Bosse’s house with a banderol that read, “Bosse, we DO have Swedish milk!”
Watch the Bosse’s Milk case study video here:
