In print we trust; Coles ups ante on comms during Covid

In an era of misinformation, Coles is backing trusted environments like print and TV to tell its story.

Coles chief marketing officer Lisa Ronson. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

At a time when misinformation and mistrust over Covid-19 are eating into public confidence, Coles has recognised the importance of established publishers as a key conduit for its advertising spend.

“We have been varying our media mix for our Covid messaging quite dramatically,” Coles’ chief marketing officer (CMO) Lisa Ronson said.

“With some of these messages, because they’re so sensitive and because our customers, and all Australians, are very anxious about it, we have to use trusted media. That’s why we’ve been putting a lot of our Covid messages into press as it’s one of the most trusted advertising mediums in Australia.”

The company upweighted its research efforts during the pandemic, tracking how people are feeling and how exactly they are moving around. Along with day to day customer measurement it has sought feedback from customers through its various research panels, tapped into its online community, Coles Circle, much more frequently and hosted virtual focus groups.

‘Our vision is to be the most trusted retailer in Australia’

“Customer movements and customer sentiment has changed so dramatically from when the pandemic began to now,” Ms Ronson said.

“We need to be on the pulse of how our customers are thinking and feeling. It’s critical.”

With Coles an essential service and a “critical part of serving the community”, it has had to navigate communications around safety for customers and employees, as well as issues of supply. As a result of the research, Coles, which works with media agency OMD and creative agencies DDB Australia and Big Red, shook up its ad strategy related to its Covid communications.

TV advertisements are very much focused on what it’s doing in-store with team members and sanitisation, while press allowed for more detailed information, state by state.

Having trusted vehicles for messaging is critical for Coles, which just three years ago was among the top five most distrusted brands in Australia.

It posed a real threat to Coles and was a key focus of Coles chief executive Steven Cain, when he hired Ms Ronson into the job two-and-a-half years ago.

“Our vision is to be the most trusted retailer in Australia and to do that you need to have strong communication skills with customers and also with members,” Ms Ronson said.

“We’ve been very focused on that trust metric because we know that Net Promoter Score improves by three and half times for customers that trust Coles. Having our customers trust us is really critical.”

‘We’ve got a big role to play in sustainability. Not on our own, but together with our customers and our partners’

The strategy has been working, with the company moving to number two in the most trusted brands in the country list, according to research house Roy Morgan.

The heat is on to remain there, and Ms Ronson believes sustainability will be a key platform of messaging going forward, with research showing that since Covid, sustainability has rocketed up the list of importance for customers.

A scene from Coles’ sustainability campaign.

“Given our vision of being the most trusted retailer, and knowing how important sustainability is to our customers, it was time for us to go out and make some statements and start talking to our customers about what we’re doing with them, our farming partners and all partners to make it better for the next generation,” she said.

“We’ve got a big role to play in sustainability. Not on our own, but together with our customers and our partners.”

In July, it launched its sustainability strategy under “Together to Zero” and “Better Together” pillars with the goal of reducing its impact on the environment across climate change, waste and hunger.

While it’s too early at this stage to draw solid results from its new sustainability vision, Ms Ronson said from a qualitative point of view customers were liking the communication, tone and direction that Coles was going.

She said brands needed to at least be thinking about what they were doing in the sustainability space by assessing all of their practices to ensure they were as sustainable as possible.

“If it’s important to the customers, you should be doing something about it. Otherwise, you’re not very sustainable from a business perspective, let alone from an environmental perspective,” she said.

The former CMO of Tourism Australia, who has also held senior marketer roles at Westpac, David Jones, Telstra and Visa, said Christmas ads would typically be in the wings by now, but because of Covid they were still yet to be finalised.

Like many CMOs, Ms Ronson is sweating on what its big festive campaign may be, depending on the scenarios it can present its customers in. From depicting scenes in people’s own homes versus at a friend’s, to the number of people gathering to celebrate – which can differ from state to state – Ms Ronson admits creating a big holiday season ad has become more complex.

“Whether it be when we are shooting stills or film, we need to make sure that we’ve got that spectrum of communications and variations so that we can pivot and be relevant and tuned into what’s going on. That’s really important for us,” she said. “So has it become a little bit more complicated? Yes it has, but we try and make sure that we’ve got the right solution for the predicament that our customers find themselves in.”