A healthy tomorrow for kids

An urgent need to drive footfall

The main demographic of Coles was singles and young couples. The retailer was not very attractive to young families from a price perspective, so Coles wanted to do something about its image to attract more families to its stores. What's more, Coles wanted to become the destination for fresh foods in Australia. It aimed to take back its fair share in the new categories. Thus, a few months later, the Fresh Stikeez concept – including the Rainbow Challenge – was born. The Fresh Stikeez campaign shows how a retailer can use a spend-and-redeem promotion to change its brand image and maximize its sales.

Making parents’ lives easier

As every parent knows, it can be hard to get your children to eat healthy food. Kids can be very picky eaters, and they often want to eat a minimal range of foods. However, the range of fun characters in the Stikeez campaign turned all sorts of fruit & veg into child-friendly options that were enjoyable and good to eat. So rather than just encouraging customers to spend multiples of AUD 30 to get a free Stikeez, the campaign promoted the actual consumption of whole fruit & veg rainbow.

Joining forces

Coles partnered with the Healthy Food Association to support its healthy eating message, which went into schools to educate children about making good food choices. The retailer also teamed up with the newspaper trade: if readers bought a paper containing a full-page special about the campaign, they received a voucher for a free Stikeez. In addition to running Fresh Stikeez throughout its 820 Coles supermarkets, the retailer extended the campaign to its 685 Coles Express stores.

Coles Fresh ambassador and celebrity chef, Curtis Stone, helped create the Rainbow Challenge by developing easy-to-prepare recipes for kids to make with their parents to help complete the challenge.

Going all out to boost fresh

Coles went all-out to promote the Stikeez campaign through TV, radio, outdoor, and press advertisements, and online and social media. Based on a weekly questionnaire with 40,000 respondents, awareness was already at over 90% by the first week of the Stikeez Fresh campaign. Kids were quick to collect and swap Stikeez in schools, and the campaign exploded on social media. To keep the momentum going, Coles paced the campaign carefully by starting with an introductory phase to let customers meet the characters and then later bringing in special characters (glow-in-the-dark, glitter, and gold)

But then a fresh new character emerged who became a fantastic story in his own right.

Increased spend amongst all family groups

By the end of the 6-week campaign in spring 2019, Coles had established itself as a family-friendly store with a great fresh fruit & veg section in consumers' minds. With 96% unprompted awareness, and a significant increase of over 5% in fresh food sales, Coles improved kids' eating habits and established a sustainable place in the market. In addition, fresh Stikeez helped Coles achieve a significant increase in average spending among all family groups, driven by the rise in transactions and basket size.