Breaking habits to grow customers for Young’s

Business challenge

After a tough year, Young’s advertising budget had been reduced and consequently market share had been lost. They now looked to secure category leadership position by growing its customer base and ultimately driving sales.

Human Solution

Most grocery buying behaviour is unthinkingly habitual – 45% of our everyday behaviour is driven by habit. So, when challenged with growing customers in a market where our main competitor spent four times more than us, we honed the brief to one key challenge – How do we shift people’s grocery autopilot?

Our desktop research around academic theories on the disruption of habits demonstrated that habits are context specific so if the consumer environment changes, an opportunity is presented to destabilise people’s habitual behaviours. Using this research, we identified 4 key life-events where buying behaviour became destabilised and then strategically placed the Young’s range as a delicious alternative meal choice change.

Actionable Insight

The “Meal Choice Change” strategy informed Young’s media approach and enabled them to achieve a huge 29% uplift in sales YOY and brought in over hundreds of thousands of new customers, helping to establish Young’s as the number one brand in its category.

Beyond this, the approach enabled the marketing team to persuade their board to increase the advertising budget for the next year.