Case Studies - Yorkshire Gold Tea
Client: Yorkshire Tea
Campaign: Yorkshire Gold - Roaming Tactical Supermarket Sampling Campaign (Waitrose)
Location: 10 cities / areas including - Newcastle, Harrogate, Peterborough, Harpenden, Windsor, Kensington, Camden, Putney, Clapham and Islington.
Brief:
To increase sales and promote brand awareness of Yorkshire Gold Tea and Yorkshire Tea Cake Range, available to purchase from Waitrose, through the execution of a roaming, tactical product sampling campaign in the busy areas and walkways around each of the selected Waitrose stores, across the UK.
Campaign Description:
A team of five high calibre promotional sampling staff distributed hot product samples of Yorkshire Gold alongside sample pieces of cake. Once the receipients were enjoying their free food samples they were informed about Yorkshire Tea's ethical sourcing policies, given a small sample pack of tea to take away, an informational leaflets - and verbal encouragement to make a purchase from the local Waitrose store.
A fully branded sampling vehicle (a converted ice cream van, able to serve hot tea, affectionately called "Little Urn") was situated as close to each high footfall Waitrose as possible within each location to offer hot tea and cakes, while a second team was working from a secondary support vehicle distributing hot samples of Yorkshire Gold using mobile jet packs.The mobile "jet packs" are like giant wearable thermos flasks and enable our teams to roam around the target locations, pro-actovely approaching customers with all types of drinks.
Branding:
- The staff wore branded Yorkshire Tea uniforms comprising of branded jackets and T shirts, which made them look like part of a well co-ordinated team, enhancing their impact across the activity locations and raising the level of acceptance of the promotional product samples.
- The roaming jet packs serving the hot tea on busy pedestrian walkways were also branded with the Yorkshire Gold logos which, along with the unique nature of the equipment and enthusiastic promotion staff made the activity really stand out across each location.
- Little Urn was also present and serving hot tea samples and pieces of cake across all locations, which also stood out from the norm. The van was parked up on the busiest high street locations, close to the local Waitrose (typically less than circa 50 meters from the store) - without having to pay for ANY expensive event space costs.
Locations:
- The roaming tactical nature of the sampling worked incredibly well in allowing the promotional sampling teams to target the core audience of affluent professionals throughout each day.
- In order to maximise the potential audience reach, the teams split their shifts to cover the following mix of sampling locations:
- 07.00-10.00 Commuter links and busy walkways in front of the supermarket
- 10.00-11.30 Office to office sampling to businesses close to the stores
- 11.30-14.30 Sampling on the main retail area close to store entrance
- 14.30-16.00 Office to office sampling to businesses close to the stores
- 16.00-19.00 Sampling on the main retail area close to store entrance
Results:
- A total of 30,000 samples were handed out alongside all important brand communication, to the exact core audience groups that the client wanted to reach.
- A huge amount of positive brand endorsement was achived. Circa 90% of all people offered a sample would be keen to try either a sample of the tea or cake (or both). All people sampled were very keen on the tea (Yorkshire Gold) and were pleased to be given a dry sample pack of the Gold tea bags.
- All recipients were given a piece of print material, a verbal explanation of the quality leaves that make the Yorkshire Gold and encouragement to purchase a box from the local Waitrose store.
- Client was extremely pleased with our ability to deliver a low cost peice of targeted product sampling activity,with a national, wide scale targeted audience reach - and continues to use Link Communication across a wide range of promotional sampling campaigns.