OBS winner of Aller Best Q2

Name: Feed Oslo
Price range: $

Med to essensielle grep gikk Obs til å være en kjent, godt likt og valgt dagligvare blant kvinner!

- It starts with a paradox, says Sindre Hellkås, strategic customer manager at Aller Media.

- Obs was alone among the large grocery chains with a negative gender gap in purchasing behavior. The competitors all had a surplus of women, and were therefore already converting well in a target group where Obs actually has an equally strong position, says Hellkås.

The reason was not that women had a worse impression of Obs. Women actually rated Obs slightly better than men, both in terms of impression and quality. But Obs failed to convert the good impression among women into sales.

Why is this a problem? Yes, because women do far more grocery shopping than men and have the greatest influence on what is purchased for the household.

Sindre Hellkås, stategisk kundeansvarlig i Aller Media og Hilde Karlsen Talmo, merkevaresjef i Obs.

Goal

Since Obs was already known and liked among women, the goal was to reduce the gender gap and get more women to shop and become satisfied customers at Obs.

Strategy

1. Distribute the content outside Aller Media's own universe.

2. Give Obs a new voice: Women's magazine journalism instead of advertising.

Grip 1: New location

Aller Media has Norway's strongest position on women, but Aller alone could not provide coverage on a national scale. Therefore, we recommended something unconventional to Obs - to spread the same content further through editor-controlled media outside Aller Media.

- Our hypothesis was simple: Content can also be coverage-generating, not just knowledge-building. Spreading the same content across Norwegian, editor-controlled media provides national coverage without blowing budgets, says Hellkås.

With Amedia on board, coverage increased from 54 to 76 percent.

Grip 2: New voice

A regular advertising campaign would increase awareness, which we already had enough of. So instead of classic promotional stories, we used elements from women's magazine journalism that women already spend time on.

Research shows that this type of emotional communication is almost twice as likely to drive growth in actual sales, compared to purely rational advertising.

A women's universe for Obs

The solution was five specially designed content stories, written by Caroline Berge at Aller Media, who has a background as a journalist in KK. Instead of writing classic content stories with a focus on individual products, each story was written in a female friend's voice in a way that keeps the reader engaged. In addition, our eminent photographer Thomas Rasmus Skaug took the photos to ensure editorial quality.

The five issues were built around themes that are typically sold at large: Easter, May 17, back to school, Christmas and party costumes. Same voice, same universe, every time.

- The stories differ from how normal content stories are written, and are completely outside of what Coop or Obs usually do. It's tough for them to take the chance to do something new, says Sindre Hellkås.

"The Friends' Voice has been a new way of communicating for us, and we have really seen the value of talking about our selection in this way. The pictures and recipes from Aller were so good that we have used them in our own channels."

- Hilde Karlsen Talmo, brand manager at Obs.

Results of editorial standard

A total of 275,000 readers spent a total of over 5,000 hours in Obs's women's universe with us and Amedia.
Reading time was two to three times above the normal benchmark, and dropout was down to the same level as editorial content.
The sales data from Coop shows a positive ROI.
Etter kampanjeperioden er det langt flere kvinner som sier at de handler hos Obs, og at de kommer til å gjøre det fremover.
Obs went from being "known - liked - not chosen" to "known - liked - chosen" among women.

"The collaboration with Aller has given us something valuable: real closeness to the women. Throughout the year, we have managed to make Obs relevant to them – not just once, but over and over again." - Anne Cecilie Hauan Hauge, Media Manager, WAL.