Knives out Our love affair with supermarket promos
Steve Kilgallon and Keith Lynch explore why we obsess over supermarket promotions and what they make us do.
For weeks, we went wild for Smeg knives. One over-enthusiastic Foodstuffs executive called it the ‘‘Summer of Smeg’’.
It was a giveaway promotion run by New World supermarkets. And despite there being one million knives and another
50,000 knife blocks, they ran out. New Zealand has a welldocumented passion for supermarket freebies. When Countdown organised swap meets for keen collectors of its coveted Disney Dominoes, they descended into unseemly scuffles. A 10-year-old had his glasses dislodged.
Countdown’s Dreamworks Heroes cards were banned from the playground of a Dunedin school. Scalpers offered a complete set of New World’s Little Garden on Trade Me for
$115.
So why do we so love a supermarket giveaway? And perhaps more importantly, why do supermarkets love them?
How they work, and why
Supermarkets understand what keeps their customers in store longer and makes them buy more.
They pump out fresh bread smells to make us feel hungrier. They put fresh food upfront for its visual impact and to deliver a subliminal message that supermarkets are healthy. Milk is placed at the end, and popular items in the middle of rows to ensure we visit every aisle.
Bright lights, no clocks and music with a slow beat have the casino-style effect of encouraging us to dawdle.
They use similar tactics with their promotions.
It starts with the buy-in: for the Smeg knives promotion, customers picked up a little booklet, and for every $20 spent at the till, they were given a little black sticker to put in their book. Twenty-five stickers, and they received their first reward: an eight-centimetre vegetable knife valued at $59.90.
The stickers are tactile, visual, shareable – much better than a digital app (and easier to develop), says marketing expert Ben Goodale.
They were also a classic play on our innate drive to collect. Each sticker represented a physical trigger for a mini hit of the success chemical, dopamine. They also gave customers an attainable target, which meant success was always within reach.
‘‘The neuroscience literature tells us that if we receive a reward or a gift, special pathways in the brain are activated that not only make us feel good for getting the gift, they can also activate us to pursue more of that feeling,’’ Megan Phillips, a senior lecturer in marketing at AUT who specialises in retailing, explains.
New World offered six different knives and, to complete the set, a knife block, which required 40 stickers and $50.
Once people had collected two or three knives, many would pass a tipping point in which an effect called ‘‘set completion’’ drives them to pursue a full collection, Phillips says.
‘‘Your subconscious justifies to you the aim to get the full set. I experienced it myself – I wasn’t really interested in it, then I got three knives and I wanted the whole set and the block.’’ She didn’t make it.
The knives were never on general sale in New Zealand (which gave them scarcity value, an extra appeal) – but all the advertising material included their recommended retail price. It was a signal to customers that here was something valuable to be coveted.
‘‘Typically, the higher the price, the more positive people feel towards it, the more attracted they are to it,’’ says Phillips.
These promotions are also carefully framed to be seen by shoppers as a ‘‘gain’’: they are spending the money anyway, and they don’t have to do