As a budget supermarket, we know our customers often use special occasions, like public holidays, as an excuse to spend a little extra to treat themselves, shopping elsewhere and trading up for more named-brand beers and snacks.

This is exactly why our usual low-price but great quality messages don’t cut through those holiday moments and for the British May Day holiday our focus needed to shift.

We wanted a fresh new approach that positioned us with the brands we so often copy, in a social space that we’d previously performed well in, with the aim of gaining as much reach and engagement as possible. That way, Aldi stays top of mind and that might translate to increased sales over the public holiday period.

Knowing our customers trade up for special occasions, we knew we had to switch up our messaging to appeal to the masses. Our normal low-price USP wasn’t going to cut it.

When people are looking to splurge on quality, named products, how do you position yourselves with the brands you often imitate while keeping a cheeky, social-first tone of voice?

You don’t talk over the big brands, you get the big brands to talk about

So, in the midst of one of the biggest and busiest retail periods of the year, we decided we were going to do absolutely nothing. Zilch. Nada. Aldi were going to go out of office and use our well-loved and well-followed twitter account to put out a call to brands across the channel for someone to cover our social shift – and every big brand jumped at the chance.

We knew exactly who we were speaking to, because they were our own customers. Primarily young families and couples who like to save money. But they often trade up and trade out of Aldi, and treat themselves to named-brand products for the Public Holiday.

So now, all that was left to figure out was how we reached them. We couldn’t compete with the budgets of the big brands. They splurge out on expensive TV commercials and campaigns. So, we turned to twitter. And our social strategy was simple: instead of trying to talk over the big brands, we’ll get the big brands to talk about Aldi.

Getting the most desired brands to talk about Aldi will keep us top of mind on the run up to the Public Holiday. And as a result, that should increase sales on our own label beers and snacks.

Our campaign had a simple goal – to take some of the market share from the big brands – so the execution needed to be just as simple. Starting the week before the bank holiday weekend, we kicked it off with just one tweet asking brands to cover for us while we were out of office.

It didn’t take long before the replies started and when they did, our reactive team jumped on it, replying to every single brand and quote retweeting their response with some classic Aldi humour.

What resulted was a feed covered in some of the world’s biggest brands such as Heinz and Krispy Kreme wanting a bit of the action – and DMs full of social teams providing tweets for us to use come Monday. And then we scheduled their tweets to be sent from our twitter account while we were away on vacation.

This whole campaign was centred around big brands as we know our customers turn to them to trade up, so one of our biggest results was how many brands got involved to talk about Aldi – and it was a lot. Over 40 household brands jumped onboard including Microsoft, KFC, and Heinz. Including two of our biggest supermarket rivals – Co-Op and Morrisons. And all that brand chatter clearly worked, with over 140,000 engagements and a reach of 5.1 million in just two days.

The campaign transcended twitter and gained earned media in the press, all from a media spend of absolutely nothing. But our biggest and most important result? In a period where Aldi lose market share to the big brands, we got the big brands to talk about Aldi – and it paid off. Our sales increased by 15%, which was our best public holiday performance on record.