Ogilvy Award Case Study: Walmart Stays a Step Ahead of the Economy

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Ogilvy Award winning campaign: Extensive research helps the retailer connect with shoppers and drive sales.

Few advertising slogans seem as apropos in the current downturn as Walmart’s “Save Money. Live Better.” The retailer won a 2008 Ogilvy Award for its forward-thinking back-to-school and holiday 2007 multimedia campaign, built around this message. Walmart claimed the ARF’s Business Achievement Award for brand repositioning. To gain a better understanding of how smart research contributed to the campaign’s success, we spoke recently with Walmart’s Ramon Portilla, senior director of insights and customer strategy, communications insights, and David Guenthner, senior director of insights and customer strategy, strategic platforms insights.

The Background

As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart faced a significant challenge in late 2005. Its market penetration was already very high. Some 84% of shoppers had visited its store in the past year. Yet the company wanted to claim a greater share of consumer dollars. With Target and other competitors vying energetically for the attention of value-seeking customers, Walmart invested in expanding its marketing department and new research strategies. “That really opened up the opportunity to address some really fundamental questions,” recalls Guenthner. “Who are our customers? How do different segments of customers vary from one another? What should our message be? Should we change things dramatically? What are our core strengths? We were geared up to do that fundamental learning.”

The Goal

Walmart executives ultimately wanted to increase the chain’s share of customer spending, without relying completely on a strategy of geographic penetration, by coming up with a high-impact advertising campaign.

Research Highlights

First, Walmart began an intensive effort to understand its customers' shopping behaviors, attitudes, and emotions related to shopping. After multiple rounds of in-depth interviews and ethnographic in-store research, the learning culminated in a massive shopper segmentation study, led by Impact Consumer Research. It yielded a blueprint for how to meet the needs of multiple groups of shoppers. Then Walmart conducted a meta-analysis of more than 100 retailer ads, among them 20 from Walmart. This was focused on understanding branding, drivers of attention and motivators in the advertising space. The ARS Group tested the chain’s late 2006 and 2007 advertising and then Walmart used marketing mix modeling to determine the business impact and quantify the effect on the Walmart brand. “The work we did allowed us to understand the level of customers’ loyalty and gave us an understanding of how they viewed Walmart,” says Guenthner. “It gave us some sense of the emotional things that we were doing better on than the competition.”

“It was very clear that our core customers loved Walmart,” explains Portilla. “There was an emotional connection. We had customers telling us what we meant for them: `I don’t know how I would be able to afford all of the things I buy without Walmart. I would not be able to live through the next paycheck.’”

As a result, Walmart was able to unite all of its agencies around the mission of increasing recognition of the Walmart brand, conveying the overall message that consumers who shopped there would be able to “live better” because of its attractive prices and emphasizing the brands it sold in its stores. This mission was also perfectly aligned with Walmart’s core values and the heritage from Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder.

The next step was collaboration between Walmart’s Insights and Customer Strategy Group and The Martin Agency and MediaVest. With the understanding that customers liked the fact that Walmart “offers low prices” and “makes me feel like a smart shopper” above all, the creative team began developing a series of taglines for the campaign. Ultimately, Walmart chose “Save Money. Live Better,” based on a quote from Sam Walton: “If we work together… we’ll give the world an opportunity to see what it’s like to save and have a better life.”
To make sure that consumers connected with the campaign, Walmart developed a progressive series of copy testing tools, notes Portilla. It also did some post-analysis using marketing mix modeling. “When we were off base on that or saw creative that was veering from the message that resonated with the customer, we had check points with the agencies,” Guenthner adds. “We said, `Here are the results from the work. Here’s where we may not have been as true to the message as we might have been. We’re all reserving the right to get smarter as we go along,’” he recalls.

The Campaign

The “Save Money. Live Better” campaign included print, circular, radio, online, in-store and TV advertising. It became a part of all of the retailer’s multicultural marketing efforts. “Our advertising department did an amazing job of putting together all the agencies in one single voice,” says Portilla. “It was one single breath for everyone.”

The Result

Advertising research showed a significant year-over-year improvement in customer perception of the Walmart brand. The company looked to its own bottom line to monitor the success of the campaign, says Portilla. “We use our own trackers to make sure our own sales end up being a validation of the work,” he says. There was plenty of validation. Sales for the holidays were up 7%, while comparable store growth was up 2.5%. In contrast, comparable sales dipped at most major rivals. As Walmart’s campaign shows, smart research can mean the difference between connecting with shoppers who rely on savings and losing ground to competitors.

The ARF will accept entries for this year’s awards until the Dec. 16 deadline. The awards ceremony will be held on March 31, 2009 in New York City.
Submit Ogilvy Award Entry »

Read about another award winner from 2008:
Examining a Gem of a Campaign