Woolworth's Marketing: A Case Study of Summer Food Range Campaign

This case study provides an in-depth analysis of Woolworths' marketing campaign, focusing on their summer food range and its impact on the Australian market. The report identifies the target market based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics, and examines the communication strategies employed to promote the healthy food range. It also evaluates the effectiveness of the campaign in terms of awareness, brand attitude, and purchase intention, utilizing the Rossiter-Percy Grid to assess customer attitudes. The study concludes that Woolworths' marketing efforts positively influenced customer perception and brand image, contributing to their market leadership in the Australian retail industry. Desklib provides access to similar solved assignments and past papers for students.

Running Head: MARKETING 1
Case Study: Analysis of Woolworth’s
Marketing Campaign

MARKETING 2
Introduction
Woolworths is a multinational Australian retail and supermarket store which was founded in
1924. The company is known as the largest supermarket in the Australian market and with its
huge product offering, company targets numerous customer segments and with regards to this,
organization has acquired leading position in the Australian retailing industry. Woolworths’
primary competitor is Coles, a subsidiary of Wesfarmers Limited and both these companies have
formed duopoly market conditions. Both the companies have acquired more than 80% market
share of the Australian market and in this market share, Coles’ share is one third of the total
market share while Woolworths has acquired rest. In order to maintain the acquired position,
organization regularly introduces new products and services for retaining its existing and
potential customers along with targeting other customer segments. In this manner, organization
has been able to manage their acquired position in the target market (Bailey, 2017).
Recently, organization comes up with a new idea of introducing summer food range for Aussies
as summers in Australia comes up with various diseases due to which Aussies adopts various
measures for preventing them with those diseases. In relation to this, Woolworths has recently
launches a digitally-led and multichannel marketing campaign to support their summer food
range (Media Update, 2017). This campaign has been designed to match up with the target
audience’s demands and wants. Advertisement and promotion is considered as one of the best
measure to spread awareness amongst the target audience and it is also helpful in enhancing the
demand for the promoted products. This creates positive impact over organizational market share
in the market and also helps to increase their brand image amongst the target audience (Bailey,
2016).
In this report, problems, opportunities and issues faced by the organization while promoting their
summer food range will be discussed along with discussing the mediums of promotion used by
the organization to promote their food range. In the last part of the report, merits and demerits of
the advertisement campaign will be discussed with the objective of determining its effectiveness
(Ryan, 2014).

MARKETING 3
Target Market
When any company launches its new products and services in the market, it needs to come with a
marketing campaign that assists the organization to attract its customers. The advertising
campaign targets a particular market segment. Target market is the group of customers with the
serviceable areas of business that it has determined to focus its promotional initiatives towards. It
includes the subset of a larger market population for specific product and service. In the chosen
contemporary advertising campaign, Woolworths is targeting a larger group of customers who
will be motivated to purchase its healthy summer food range. Before determining the customers,
it has conducted a market research to analyse the needs and demands of customers in the market.
Here, Woolworths is targeting different customers by considering different characteristics of
market segmentation like demographic characteristics, geographic characteristics, psychographic
characteristics and behavioral characteristics (Montaguti, Neslin and Valentini, 2015).
By using the theory of market segmentation, Targeted customers of chosen advertising campaign
are discussed below:
Demographic
Using demographic characteristics, Woolworths is targeting the customers on the basis of their
gender, age group and income level. It focuses on both males and females of the age group of 25
to 50 years. The campaign aims to deliver the message that “it is a call to action so that people
can live a healthier and better life. Considering this, it can be stated that company has designed
this campaign to meet the needs and demands of lower and middle income level people. It has
analyzed that youth generation and women are very much concerned towards healthy food. Thus,
this marketing campaign of summer healthy food is focused on students and women segment.
Moreover, the marketers consider that youth is the major group that is actively using internet and
social media networking sites (Dietrich, Rundle-Thiele and Kubacki, 2017). So, it has launched
multi-channel and digitally led marketing to support its healthy summer food products. It has
created the attractive content for different social media networking sites such as Twitter,
Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.

MARKETING 4
Psychographic
Under psychographic segmentation, this campaign targeted the customers on the basis of
lifestyle, interests and attitudes of customers. It can be clearly analyzed that this campaign is
totally emphasized on the population that prefers to live healthy life style. Through this,
Woolworth’s marketers showed that they choose an inspiring cast and higher energy to indicate
how easy it is to include easy, delicious ad healthy food into lifestyle. Moreover, the prices of
this company are more affordable as compared to other retailers in the country so it has focused
on middle and lower classes of society.
Behavioral
Under behavioral segmentation, the company is targeting the customers on the basis of user
status and usage of products and services of Woolworths. The chosen advertisement indicates
that company has launched this campaign to introduce its summer healthy food. Thus, it aims on
the people who regularly purchase their household items from the supermarkets and retail stores
of Woolworths. Moreover, the organization is planning to create a new customer base so that it
can increase its sales (Knox, 2015). To attract more customers, it has advertised the products on
different media channels like TV, radio etc.
Thus, the above analysis states that the major targeted market for this advertising campaign of
Woolworths is the female segment that is very much conscious towards their health in the
summer season (Cross, Belich and Rudelius, 2015). To attract these customers, the company has
used colorful campaign in the South Africa so that they can showcase their fresh food. In this
way, the company targeted this multi-channel and social media marketing campaign by focusing
on different variables like age, income, gender, attitudes, interests, lifestyles etc.
Positioning
The recent advertisement campaign introduced by the organization is to spread awareness
amongst the Aussies in terms of their new product range. Organization has introduced healthy
summer food range with the objective of helping the audience to live a healthy lifestyle in the
summers also. The main objective behind introducing healthy food range is to prevent Aussies
from the hazardous diseases which mainly spread through consuming unhealthy and inferior
quality food products (Li & Islam, 2018).

MARKETING 5
The campaign was introduced by the organization through various sources of advertisement and
promotion in order to target larger part of the target audience. The internal agency of the
organization has designed this campaign to meet the target audience’s demands along with
retaining their positive brand image amongst them. The campaign was brought up in the market
through trending promotional mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and
some of the traditional mediums like radio, television, etc. (Govender, 2017).
With regards to setting up or retaining acquired position in the target market, Woolworths always
tries to maintain their acquired brand image along with maintaining their customer base to retain
their customers’ interest within the organization as well as to build trust level amongst them.
Woolworths’ positioning strategy is always being effective as the market conditions in the
Australian retaining industry are quite intense and organization holds the leading position in that
industry. Thus, to maintain the acquired position along with retaining its competitive edge over
its competitors, they make their promotional and advertisement strategies updated.
Organization’s primary competitor is Coles and as it is far away from the organization but still,
they never leaves a single chance to acquire organizational market share and their existing
customers. With regards to this, they always tries to introduce new schemes, offers and other
attractive benefits in order to divert Woolworths’ customers’ mind-set and to gain competitive
edge. This is major reason due to which organization always tries to introduce new products and
services to retain their existing customers as well as to attract new customer segments
(O’Mahony & Lobo, 2017).
Communication Strategy
When any company launches any advertising campaign in the market, it sets some
communication objectives through which it delivers its brand messages to the targeted customers
and end customers. Communication objectives are the intended goals of the promotional and
advertising program (Pescher, Reichhart and Spann, 2014). In order to promote its summer healthy
food among targeted customers, Woolworths has set some communication objectives which are
stated below:

MARKETING 6
 The company has set the objective to create awareness about its summer healthy
products among above targeted segments through social media networking sites and
multi-channels like radio and TV.
 The company proposes to share the benefits of summer healthy food and information
about its benefits among people.
 Woolworths aims to stimulate the desire and motivate the people so that they purchase
its products and services (Naidoo, 2014).
 To increase the sales and revenues by offering a wide range of summer healthy products
all over the world.
By using above communication objectives, this company has delivered different brand messages
to its targeted customers. These are messages are such as:
 This advertising campaign is the call to action so that customers in South Africa can live
the healthier and better life.
 This ad focuses on delivering the message that it is very easy to integrate easy, healthy
and tasty food in your lifestyle (Montaguti, Neslin and Valentini, 2015).
 This campaign was to motivate the nation towards healthy and delicious food in the
summer season.
According to the theory of communication objectives, there are five types of communication
effects of this marketing campaign i.e. Category needs, Brand awareness, Brand attitude, Brand
purchase intention and Purchase facilitation.
One of the major communication effects is category needs that indicate the perception of
customer of needing something to satisfy the inconsistency between his/her desired and current
states. Before introducing this campaign, the company has analyzed the needs and demands of
customers towards healthy food in summer season. The response of customers showed that there
were differences in their current and desired states. The company was able to fulfill their
demands towards healthy food (Granot, Alejandro and Russell, 2014). Woolworths is using
effective positioning techniques and strategies to create the communication effects of brand
attitude and brand awareness that in turn assisted Woolworths with the generating customer base
and selling of summer food products. This company understands that communication effects are

MARKETING 7
the important part of communication objective so that they focused on stimulating the purchase
intention of customers towards its products. Additionally, the marketers of Woolworths have
focused on other marketing factors like it has used creative content for social sites like Facebook,
Instagram, Youtube and Twitter. It has used colorful content and offered different challenges to
customers for taking fast responses and robust engagement of customers. This is the main
motivational factor for the community in South Africa. Thus, the communication objectives of
Woolworths were focused on creating different communication effects on targeted population
(Ngwakwe, 2014).
Rossiter-Percy Grid
Rosster-Percy Grid is a model of attitude that shows how the customers analyze the brands and
products. It shows attitudes of customers towards products based on two dimensions motivation
and involvement. Using this grid, it can be stated that the promotional campaign of company is
less transformational and highly informational. It can be stated that the packages of its summer
food products include the information about the quantity and ingredients used to prepare the
food. It is using informational dimension so that it can engage more customers and increase its
customer base. It is less transformational as the needs for nutritional and healthy food products
cannot be changed (WARC, 2006). As Woolworths is already a well-established player in
Australia and other nations so it has less risk in launching this marketing campaign among new
targeted market.
Conclusion
In the limelight of above discussion, it can be concluded that Woolworths Company is using an
effective marketing campaign that assisted it to affect the customers’ perception positively. The
company has targeted its customers by using positioning strategies. It targeted its customers by
considering their different characteristics. It is found that this organization is able to attract more
customers towards its summer healthy food because this advertising campaign was very effective
and enticing. In the future, the company should implement more effective strategies for the
promotion of its products. It will enable the organization to increase its brand image and
revenues in global retail industry.

MARKETING 8

MARKETING 9
References
Bailey, M., (2016). Marketing to the Big Middle: establishing Australian discount department
stores. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 8(3), pp.416-433.
Bailey, M., (2017). Absorptive Capacity, International Business Knowledge Transfer, and Local
Adaptation: Establishing Discount Department Stores in Australia. Australian Economic History
Review, 57(2), pp.194-216.
Cross, J.C., Belich, T.J. and Rudelius, W., (2015). How marketing managers use market segmentation:
An exploratory study. In Proceedings of the 1990 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual
Conference (pp. 531-536). Springer, Cham.
Dietrich, T., Rundle-Thiele, S. and Kubacki, K., (2017). Segmentation in Social Marketing (Vol. 1).
Singapore: Springer.
Govender, S., (2017). How social media can be used to engage and interact with consumers in the retail
industry: an analysis on Woolworths' online strategies (Doctoral dissertation, The IIE).
Granot, E., Alejandro, T.B. and Russell, L.T.M., (2014). A socio-marketing analysis of the concept of
cute and its consumer culture implications. Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(1), pp.66-87.
Knox, M., (2015). Supermarket monsters: The price of Coles and Woolworths' dominance (Vol. 6). Black
Inc..
Li, L. and Islam, S.Z., (2018). Firm and industry specific determinants of capital structure:
Evidence from the Australian market. International Review of Economics & Finance.
Media Update. (2017, November 11). Woolworths' new summer campaign does 'healthy living
your way' [online]. Retrieved from
https://www.mediaupdate.co.za/marketing/142698/woolworths-new-summer-campaign-does-
healthy-living-your-way
Montaguti, E., Neslin, S.A. and Valentini, S., (2015). Can marketing campaigns induce multichannel
buying and more profitable customers? A field experiment. Marketing science, 35(2), pp.201-217.

MARKETING 10
Naidoo, K., (2014, November 11). Instagrammers Take Over Woolworths' Summer Campaign,
Available at: https://www.elle.co.za/instagrammars-take-woolworths-summer-campaign
[11/11/2018].
Ngwakwe, C.C., (2014). Corporate social investment–good business and good revenue: The case of
woolworths holdings ltd South Africa. Risk Governance & Control: Financial Markets &
Institutions, 4(4), pp.7-15.
O’Mahony, B. and Lobo, A., (2017). The organic industry in Australia: Current and future
trends. Land Use Policy, 66, pp.331-339.
Pescher, C., Reichhart, P. and Spann, M., (2014). Consumer decision-making processes in mobile viral
marketing campaigns. Journal of interactive marketing, 28(1), pp.43-54.
Ryan, D., (2014). The best digital marketing campaigns in the World II. Kogan Page Publishers.
WARC, (2006, November 11). Rossiter-Percy grid. Retrieved from
https://www.warc.com/Content/Article/RossiterPercy_grid/88045