11 Sep 08

Subway - Sub of the Day

Expose the Onions

Background

Not shy to admit their highly aggressive strategy of achieving 2010 UK stores by 2010, Subway Stores have an equally aggressive approach to advertising and marketing. “When we’re on we’re on” is a rather apt statement and one that plays an important role in media planning.

Segmentation work had identified three core target audiences, the “cheap ‘n’ cheerfuls”, the “wanna be goods” and the “all about me’s”. These guys range from those who know what they like, through to the highly image conscious, but the ultimate objective for all three is to make them:

• Think - Subway offers me great food that is made fresh in front of me
• Feel - Subway is the place for me – not only is it fresh, it offers me great value too
• Act – I’m going to Subway!

For this particular campaign the Sub of the Day proposition, “a different sub, everyday for £1.99”, Subway conducted three high impact takeovers to promote the ‘Sub of the Day’. The aim was to deliver the message of good value, drive awareness and purchase intent.

The buying audience for this campaign was 18-34 year olds who agree with the following statements: “I always look for value for money”; “I do not care how others see me”; “I like to reward myself with little treats”; in essence, the cheap and cheerful segment of our audience – 8.2 million people in the UK.

Campaign Objectives – The Challenge

• From a marketing perspective, we needed to remind as many people as possible that Subway continues to offer a freshly made product at a really keen price point during the month of January, a time when people are traditionally strapped for cash.
• From a business perspective, we needed to drive same store sales by 8% vs the same period in the previous year.

The Solution - How We Made a Difference

Our strategy for this campaign was straight-forward. We needed to reach as many people as quickly as possible with our value message.

How could we achieve this? Television and Online – the two main broadcast channels available, working together to deliver a mass audience in a relatively short period of time – supported with a street fighting campaign to create cut through on the high street. The basic strategy was to encourage new users to the brand through the value offer (trial) and reward those customers who came into store by giving them a voucher booklet to encourage repeat visits (frequency).

The TV campaign was to run for a four week period on all terrestrial and satellite channels, reaching 85% of our target audience, achieving 8.5 million TV impacts during the campaign. The above the line activity was also supported by a field marketing campaign targeted to local store traffic to encourage high street visitors into their nearest store. 

The digital activity started off with an MSN Hotmail takeover during the last week of January to coincide with the heavy weight TV campaign and street promotions, resulting in Subway owning all ad placements targeted to 18-34 year olds between 9am on 28/01/08 and 9am on 29/01/08. This activity reached 2.4m unique users generating 4.8m impressions, 4.6% of whom interacted and viewed the video (222,101).

Of the 2.3m unique users reached through 9m impressions, 47% interacted with the advert and hence the Subway brand. The CTR was an impressive 0.39% delivering just under 35,000 clicks through to Subway.co.uk.

The week culminated in a 12 hour MSN.co.uk homepage event between 9am and 9pm. The Subway activity dominated the page, utilising the onions from the TV ad, video footage and product price point messaging. The homepage event reached just under 3.5m unique users with 10m impressions. An incredible 28% of impressions resulted in interaction with the video while a CTR of 1.19% was achieved delivering over 116,296 clicks!

The Results

Campaign objectives were immediately reached. Same store sales increased by 14% on average across the month compared to the same period last year, footfall was up by an average of 9% and despite the fact we were promoting a value message, average transaction value also increased by almost 8%. Interestingly, as the field marketing campaign tapered off, the introduction of the heavy weight online campaign helped to maintain the momentum. An example of how integrated media campaigns should work with old and new media working together to deliver the client’s objectives.

Given the “credit crunch” and lack of consumer confidence, this was a great success and the campaign significantly over delivered versus objectives.