Trader Joe's Social Media Campaign

Editor's Notes

• #3: “I think we should be traders on the culinary seas,” said Joe Coulombe, the original founder of Trader Joe’s. In 1958, a small chain of convenience stores was opened in California. They were called Pronto Markets. In 1967, Mr. Coulombe implemented the concept of bringing unusual products to a market with the first official Trader Joe’s opening in Pasadena, California. Trader Joe’s packages innovative, hard-to-find, great-tasting foods under the “Trader Joe’s” label, which as a result cuts costs and saves customers money. The concept of value is ingrained in the Trader Joe’s strategy. They purchase direct from suppliers whenever possible and, bargain hard to get the best price. When products don’t sell, they go away. They purchase in volume and contract early to get great prices. Trader Joe’s also does not charge their suppliers fees for putting an item on the shelf. The Trader Joe’s model focuses around five ‘P’s’ including: price/ promotion, product, process, place and people. The store offers everyday low prices, has no specials or promotions, minimal advertising, a newsletter called the Fearless Flyer. For products, they offer primarily private label (80%+), high quality gourmet, organic and liquor and a constantly changing range. The store offers fun products such as ‘make your own six-pack of beer’ and ‘wicked sticky pecan buns’. The company has a strong company culture, and well paid, friendly staff. I do not normally shop at Trader Joe’s as their Brooklyn location is not near me, however for this project I made a trip there on a Saturday. I was thrilled to see the store was full of energy, happy employees, bright lighting and creative artwork for signage with fun names. Every department is better than the next, produce, baked goods, prepared foods, etc. We shopped around the store finding amazing items to buy including: snacks such as fig and olive crackers and prepared foods I could make an easy dinner such as tempura shrimp or chicken tacos. We got in line and it was a fairly quick checkout. In line, I quickly chatted with the manager on duty and asked her two most favorite things about working at Trader Joes. She replied, “The crew, and I love handling difficult customers.” This gave me insights into the people orientation and focus at the store. I then discovered she was a Purdue graduate for undergrad. I will be going back to the store more often.
• #4: Social media are unique because of relationship building (Lipschultz, 2015). The ultimate goal in most media and advertising is to convert people into completing a sale of products or services (Lipschultz, 2015). The basis of social media is informal conversation – so prospects are involved in a dialogue and not subjected to a stream of sales pitches (Miller, 2013). Grocers need to have dialogue with their shoppers, asking their opinions about the in-store experience and how it can be improved (Karolefski, 2015). Also, Trader Joe’s can create an online community of people who feel loyalty with the store. They can solicit product reviews and recommendations which can be promoted cross channel. Through social media conversation, Trader Joe’s could make public perceptions of the brand even stronger. They need to work at this, as the store fell this year from number one to number three for America’s favorite grocery store survey of more than 10,000 consumers conducted by Market Force Information (Market Force Information, 2016). Wegmans received the top ranking and Publix came in second in the survey. Trader Joe’s tries to provide as much information as possible to their customers. There is literature about all of the products at the stores' checkout areas with information including: listings of all types of food, such as sodium-free foods, fat-free foods and kosher foods. Each brochure is divided by category bakery, beverages, breakfast foods, candy, coffee, and tea, cookies, dairy, dried fruit, fresh, fresh juice, frozen, groceries, refrigerated and snacks. (Coriolis Research, 2006). As the store implements this, they should take advantage of social media, where, ‘people use computer mediated communication to garner information about the world around them’ (Lipschultz, 2015). There is also the ‘cost of ignoring social media’ with the argument being that businesses must be present in order to be listening and engaging in five areas: customer service, reputation management, crowdsourcing and engagement to build loyalty, collaboration and recruitment of job candidates (MacLean, 2013). Trader Joe’s also greatly values customer feedback- customers provide the company with valuable information and suggestions that often are incorporated into marketing strategies (Coriolis Research, 2006). Trader Joe’s could also implement some of the foundations which Mr. David Edelman founded: including customer care, risk management and analytics (Lipschultz, 2015). Analytics of social media can also lead to innovation ideas and the opportunity to approach social media as a ‘business intelligence platform with consumer opinions and shared experiences’ (Macy and Thompson, 2011). Social media fit nicely into the marketing shift toward creating valuable consumer services – people want to share positive experiences with their social network connections (Lipschultz, 2015). IBM Commerce Director Jay Henderson said, “social networks have a huge indirect influence on shopping decisions by building brand and product awareness” (Lipschultz, 2015). There are other reasons why Trader Joe’s should be on social media including: the company can garner deeper customer insights, shared experiences and opinions, and showing community support through online presecens.
• #5: It is important to first have market research and demographic and psychographic information in order to determine our target audiences for the campaign. For purposes of this paper, we assume this has already been done. Next, we analyze our biggest competitors including: Whole Foods, Wegmans and Publix. This was done by looking at social channels of the competition, as well as by using a website call Fanpage Karma. Publix has the most Facebook followers with 2.6 million. Their Twitter account has 214,000 followers and Instagram is growing with 58,000. Among all the competitors, Publix is having the highest level of conversations. Their content attempts to engage customers through asking them questions about food preferences. They are also handling customer complaints about staff shortages and product recalls. Publix has the highest level of engagement on Pinterest. One of the boards with the most pins is Publix Aprons’ – simple, delicious recipes for the family. Whole Foods has a large social media audience with 2.1 million Facebook followers, 4.8 million Twitter followers and 1.5 million Instagram followers. They utilize user generated content primarily on Instagram, asking customers what recipes they want to see. As a result, they have the highest engagement rate and number of comments on Instagram. Whole Foods operates central accounts in these major platforms and also encourages each of its branches to run their own social media accounts. Their Facebook page focuses on news at the store, seasonal food, sales and free samples. On Facebook, they are implementing video recipes (with a focus on vegan and gluten free), national food days (i.e. National hot dog day), and asking what recipes customers want to see. The Whole Foods Twitter account recycles some of the Facebook content and also shares customer retweets. They are also handling customer issues on Twitter. Wegmans largest social accounts are Facebook with 342,000 followers and Twitter with 138,000 followers. This store is growing the fastest on Facebook and Twitter. They are featuring store events, store openings and other fun pieces such as kids cooking classes. The Whole Foods versus Trader Joe’s competition is very important here. Whole Foods considers Trader Joe’s to be their biggest competitor, as they both attract an educated, tech savvy and health conscious customer (Watson, 2014). There are aspects that keep people shopping at both stores yet, Whole Foods focus is premium quality and a huge selection. Trader Joe’s offers a more curated assortment of great products at great prices. Whole Foods approach to marketing involves sustainability, supporting a model that benefits local farmers, third world countries and the environment. The Trader Joe’s current marketing approach focuses on an email newsletter, The Fearless Flyer which is whimsical and fun (Watson, 2014). There are three main target audiences for the campaign. It’s important to define the original Trader Joe’s target customer. Joe Coulombe decided to target the well-educated, well-traveled customer who was more likely to experiment with food and drink. The Trader Joe’s customer has a sense of humor and a taste for the offbeat. (Coriolis Research, 2006). Trader Joe’s targets singles, couples (or pairs) and small families, as the store offers small package sizes (Watson, 2014). While 46% of Trader Joe’s customers have an annual household income of over $100,000, households earning $25K-$99K account for just as many of their shoppers. According to data from Simmons National Consumer Surveys, more than 22% of Trader Joe’s shoppers have a graduate school degree while a further 28% are college graduates (Watson. 2014).
• #6: We strategically crafted this campaign to align with the customer journey and with a measurement model derived from elements of Kaushik’s (2015), ‘digital analytics ecosystem’( see Appendix A for buyer’s journey aligned with Kaushik’s ‘digital ecosystem’). The customer cycle journey involves five stages and is a cyclical process Brand Awareness/ Initial consideration, Active Evaluation, Purchase, Post Purchase and Loyalty (see Figure 1 for diagram of customer cycle). In this cyclical process, during the initial consideration stage, the social campaign will focus on brand awareness. In the Evaluation and Purchase stage the campaign will focus on brand engagement and for the post purchase and loyalty stages we will target word of mouth activity, the earned social media (Simply Measured, 2010). According to Hoffman and Fodor (2010), there are three objectives impacting how marketers evaluate ROI: brand awareness, brand engagement and word of mouth. We will use these as a framework for this campaign.
• #7: We have many goals for this integrated Trader Joe’s campaign including: To achieve attendance of at least 50 single Trader Joes customers and 25 non-customers at each store event by promoting on social media To achieve attendance of at least 50 small family customers and 25 small families (non- customers) at each store event by promoting on social media To achieve attendance of at least 50 customers who are part of a pair or couple and 25 couple (non-customers) at each store event by promoting on social media Increase Monthly store sales by 1.5 - 2% (compared to two months prior and year prior) for each Trader Joe’s location holding events Increase audience size on each social media platform among each target audience ( singles, families and pairs / couples) by 1-2 % monthly To increase TJ's positive brand awareness by 2% month on month To increase brand engagement by 1-2 % across all target audiences monthly Increase word of mouth (earned media) across all target audiences on all channels by 1-2% each month To grow Trader Joe’s community signups by 500 members each month To grow Trader Joe’s product recommendations on site by 25 each month To increase Trader Joe’s CSR coverage in the media by 1-2% each quarter within the year Each store location holding the in store events to donate 1% of 6 month net profit to a local / community food bankKPIS During brand awareness: reach, share of voice, volume of mentions During brand engagement: all engagement metrics event attendee numbers in store sales (compared to at least 3 months before and prior year) measure engagement (on individual channel and cross channel) - Paid vx. organic Facebook will define engagement as Likes, comments, shares, stories and impressions, Twitter - @mentions, Retweets, hashtags and direct messages. Instagram- @mentions, comments and hashtags. Pinterest - pins, repins, likes, comments. Measure UGC across all channels and microsite. size of audiences across channels newsletter signups conversations (comments) TJ community signups inbound links / referrals to website offline: event attendee numbers benchmark against competitors wherever possible during stage 4 and 5 this is focused on post purchase experience, creating brand loyalty / evangelists it's about word of mouth - focus on earned media (we will still try to engage users) KPI here is all word of mouth metrics such as measure likes, reshares, retweets, repins, responses to comments number of product reviews / product recommendations First Friday Foodies is a six month campaign promoting in store celebrity chef demonstrations at urban locations. The recipes will feature a Trader Joe’s label product and be simple, and prepared quickly with five or less ingredients. This links to a key marketing message we will be sending with new products (making it easy and quick to prepare delicious quality recipes). We will also hold a user generated content photo competition. Consumers will submit a photo of their favorite quick recipe with Trader Joe’s ingredients (five ingredient or less) across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest and use hashtag #traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie. We will have a microsite which is the hub of the campaign. There will be newsletter signups available there as well as branded messaging. The campaign will launch the first day in October and run for six months. We will run some pre-launch messages about it end of September. The competition forms a major part of the campaign, thus it is important that all channels are utilized to raise awareness of the Trader Joe’s brand. One celebrity per month will do in store demos at our major stores in: New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, and Seattle. Video clips from each event and will serve as content. There will be one monthly winner for the photo contest. Users can submit photos across the microsite, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. Trader Joe’s will select the monthly winner. Monthly winners will win a celebrity cookbook and $100 gift certificate. At the end of the campaign, there will be a grand prize winner. This person will win a $1000 gift certificate to TJ’s. Each store location holding the in-store events will donate 1% of their six month net profit to a local / community food bank. Trader Joe’s will also hold cooking classes for underprivileged children in the communities we serve, so that they can learn easy, healthy recipes to make. CSR emphasizes stakeholders, ethical behavior, trust and cooperation (McWilliams, Siegel & Wright, 2006a). This approach has been shown to demonstrate that the returns to socially responsible behavior are captured through the reputation of the firm (McWilliams, Siegel & Wright, 2006b). All campaign mechanics are built into the competition site, the social campaign just pushes people to the site. Regarding calls to action, we want the social campaign to raise awareness of the brand. We also want to raise awareness about the photo competition through the social media campaign. The other goal is to bring existing customers and new customers into the store to purchase products. The ultimate goal is to get more customers and sales in stores and drive people to the competition site. The competition site will have an area for newsletter sign up as well as links for the new Trader Joe’s online community and product recommendations. We will make an announcement about the campaign by press release including quotes from the CEO and some of our celebrity partners such as Jamie Oliver and Rocco De Spirito. Information about the community food kitchen donation will be included as well as an initiative to teach lower income children about smart food choices through free cooking lessons. We will also include general information about Trader Joe’s, our history and our mission.
• #8: We know that Trader Joe’s needs to have a presence on similar platforms to our competition, thus the reason for choosing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. According to a survey done by Social Times, respondents said both Facebook and Instagram “fulfill their need for fun and discovery,” but fun was defined as encountering the unexpected on Instagram, and as humor on Facebook (Social Times, 2016). Respondents also stated they are more likely to interact with celebrity content on Instagram, so we will put the primary focus on celebrity within Instagram. We will take advantage of Facebook Live and Periscope live video on Twitter as there is a trend of users demanding more “live” and in-the-moment updates (DeMers, 2016a). Pinterest stated content related to healthy habits and eating is one of the biggest trends in 2016, including ideas related to coconut oil and zucchini (Dunbar, 2016).  In social media, reading is an important behavior, but not the only behavior. Users process photographs, charts and other visual communication such as video. These stimuli are consumed and sometimes result in reactions such as likes shares and retweets (Lipschultz, 2015). Photographs will be posted across all platforms, infographics for Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, videos for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and illustrations and other how to posts across all platforms. Phil Gomes, a thought leader from Edelman, said about social media, “There is a need to share rich content – photographs, video, audio, infographics and links – across social platforms such as FB, Twitter and Pinterest. Developing tactics can create buzz, if the content is engaging and truly employs media storytelling techniques” (Lipschultz, 2015). Also, a Hub Spot report in 2015 stated that how-to articles performed best in the food vertical as people tend to enjoy posts on recipes (Lehr, 2015). Example posts include: Calling all Trader Joe’s fans: The First Friday of every month, starting in October, we will host in-store events in major cities featuring celebrity chefs. Check out the schedule here: https://www.traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie.com Have you entered Trader Joe’s First Friday Foodie photo contest yet? Take a pic of your favorite recipe which includes a Trader Joe’s product and post here or Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram (see website for contest rules). We’ll have monthly winners and one grand prize winner. Use hashtag #traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie https://www.traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie.com
• #9: For our proposed text and messaging we will have a fun tone yet learning aspect about quick, healthy and delicious recipes to prepare. There are some brands we will look to for creative inspiration such as: Twitter and Facebook - Warby Parker for customer service, humor and design. Twitter – Oreo; simple and short text with great creative photos or videos Facebook – Coca-Cola; content with emotion, unifying and relating brand to people Instagram – Herschel – photos with cool urban / exploration feel It is important to push the photo competition to get engaging communication going, while always keeping the fun and friendly aspects. The campaign will align with simple, bright, yet creative, artistic and fun styles in our store and be similar to The Fearless Flyer Newsletter. Our art director will create branded headers for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. We will post once a week during pre-launch in September, two times a week during launch time (first two weeks) across all channels and the website. On Facebook and Twitter we will post one post per week for each audience. For Instagram and Pinterest we will post 1-2 posts a week and rotate the target audiences. We want the campaign to have a story feeling, not be so product promotional. In an Adobe 2012 survey to customers, 73% stated ads should tell a unique story, not just try to sell and 67% stated in store experiences trump online experiences 67% (Lipschultz, 2015). The competition copy – ‘Are you a trader Joe’s First Friday Foodie?’ will be used as a basis and messages will be framed in a newsletter style to correlate with our newsletter. Content will include illustrations with Trader Joe’s branding, submitted photos for the contest, infographics with how to’s for easy recipes, and video clips from in-store events. In social media, reading is an important behavior, but not the only behavior. Users process photographs, charts and other visual communication such as video. These stimuli are consumed and sometimes result in reactions such as likes shares and retweets (Lipschultz, 2015). Photographs will be posted across all platforms, infographics for Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, videos for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and illustrations and other how to posts across all platforms. Phil Gomes, a thought leader from Edelman, said about social media, “There is a need to share rich content – photographs, video, audio, infographics and links – across social platforms such as FB, Twitter and Pinterest. Developing tactics can create buzz, if the content is engaging and truly employs media storytelling techniques” (Lipschultz, 2015). Also, a Hub Spot report in 2015 stated that how to articles performed best in the food vertical as people tend to enjoy posts on recipes (Lehr, 2015). Example posts include: Calling all Trader Joe’s fans: The First Friday of every month, starting in October, we will host in-store events in major cities featuring celebrity chefs. Check out the schedule here: https://www.traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie.com Have you entered Trader Joe’s First Friday Foodie photo contest yet? Take a pic of your favorite recipe which includes a Trader Joe’s product and post here or Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram (see website for contest rules). We’ll have monthly winners and one grand prize winner. Use hashtag #traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie https://www.traderjoesfirstfridayfoodie.com
• #10: As far as measurement we will use the Kaushik model as a framework for our plan. The tools we will use are: Hootsuite and Brandwatch – We will use Hootsuite as the main business dashboard, making it easy to monitor virtually every piece of analytic data. Hootsuite compares performance and economic value for all social media accounts in one dashboard and can determine the most effective social networks. The activity of users on our social media can be analyzed thus revealing changes over time and we can instantly compare the % of decrease or increase for each metric by days/weeks/months. We can build a cross channel dashboard measuring: 1. Conversation / mention rate (comments per post, including posts with keywords, brand mentions and hashtags)  2. Amplification rate (retweets / shares / repins per post 3. Applause rate (favorites per post) 4. Economic value (value per visitor).  5. Audience size and growth (Kaushik, 2011). We will try to customize this report to benchmark recent efforts as well as, measuring growth rate and engagement rate monthly across channels. This platform will also be used in conjunction with Brandwatch for social listening and determining social engagement opportunities. The two platforms together will be used for cross channel analysis on these parameters. Meltwater for measuring brand sentiment and PR efforts Google Analytics for measuring which content resonates with audience. We will calculate ROI with Google Analytics by: 1. Setting conversion goals such as newsletter sign-up, retweet, mention, comment (includes response and mention), favorite (includes likes) 2. Tracking conversions 3. Assign monetary value to each conversion (i.e. newsletter signup worth $2.00, retweet worth, $1.50, mention worth $1.00, reply worth .50, and a like (including favorites) worth .25. 4. Measure total benefits by channel 5. Determine total costs per channel 6. Use data from steps 4 and 5 to calculate the ROI per social media channel. Also by tracking inbound links to our microsite, we can determine what links are driving people to the site. This is important as far as what works well in the campaign. Google Insights, Google Trends to measure brand search volume. Perhaps more than any other marketing metric, the number of people searching for Trader Joe’s brand on Google serves as a catch-all metric for market awareness. Use Google Insights to examine whether or not searches for Trader Joe’s and Trader Joe’s products are increasing over time, and the same for competitors Klout the online influence gauge that combines several data points (followers, retweets, clicks on links, etc.) to compile an influence tracking metric which is more revealing than follower counts. Facebook Insights & Twitter Analytics to review on individual channel level: Number of posts, number of comments, number of retweets / shares, number of favorites / likes, number comments per post, number of retweets / shares per post, favorite clicks, likes per post. Similar Web for competitive intelligence analysis and tracking incoming / outgoing traffic to and from the website versus competitors. We will determine audience interests and look at web wanderings of Trader Joe’s customers versus competitors. The topics and websites users are looking at will be revealed. A social traffic share report can give a head to head comparison how we are doing versus competitors at macro levels, in particular social channels (Kaushik, 2015b). From here we can identify strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities for SWOT analysis & make decisions about our strategy Metrics in a separate monthly report (See Appendix D) Custom report including Average platform growth Any major issues needing resolution Facebook (from Facebook Insights): total likes, total comments, total shares, average likes per post, average comments per post, average shares per post, average social interactions per post, total reach – average paid and organic; compare last two months to current month. Benchmark against competitors if possible. Noteworthy posts for all platforms – posts with high engagement for unpaid and paid. What stood out about them? Posts that didn’t do as well on all platforms. What was wrong with them? How could they be better? Twitter – Average favorites, average retweets, average replies, total impressions, average number social interactions per post (compare last two months to current month), total reach paid and organic. Benchmark against competitors if possible. Things of note – do people like the celebrity posts, the photo posts, infographics etc.? What competitors are doing on social media well and why? Do we need to adjust our strategy? SWOT analysis. We will try to track the number of store visitors and compare sales over these months to two previous years. We will also measure campaign website visits, number of photo submissions (UGC) on each platform, and on-post engagements (in particular shares and comments).
• #11: We look forward to working with Trader Joe’s on this project. The company does an outstanding job with segmenting and focusing on target markets already, and this campaign will amplify brand awareness, brand engagement and word of mouth. Also, with the in-store events which our customers love and element of giving back to our local communities, we expect this to be a successful campaign with business outcomes including an increase in our customer base and in-store purchases with an overall very positive business impact.