Unlike continental Europe where it is well established, Aldi was perceived as a new and strange addition to the UK grocery market.

The UK preserves Christmas traditions beyond any other season and buying of both gifts and food is loaded with emotional influences that matter much less during the rest of the year.

The Christmas Turkey is one such tradition and people are very risk averse – very reluctant to risk getting inferior quality or, worse still, no turkey at all. Perceived quality of food and drinks also matters much more at Christmas because so many households receive visitors and are very cognisant of gaining their positive verdict and compliments.

Although increasingly successful year-round, these cultural ‘norms’ favour premium and established brands making Christmas a more challenging trading period for Aldi.

We knew our loyal customers’ Christmas shopping behaviour took place over many weeks. The insight challenge, therefore, was how to get close enough to their magical Christmas shopping moments over such an extended period of time.

The Creative Research Idea was to:

‘Live’ with our customers throughout their entire Christmas shopping season - 9 full weeks.

We considered traditional qualitative methodologies and reconvening scenarios, but nothing really got close enough, for long enough.

We decided to use a newly developed mobile app, which had previously only been used for studies or 1-2 weeks duration. It meant respondents had our research tool with them at all times and could undertake tasks naturally in their own time and report on them when convenient in whatever format was most suitable or preferable to them.

Aldi already knew plenty about customers’ attitudes and behaviours. What demanded fresh insight was how these evolved over long run up to Christmas. Aldi needed a way to get intimately acquainted with customers decision-making over a long period of time.

We employed our ‘Truth App’ - a mobile app that means consumers carry our research tool with them at all times – to track 20 families’ shopping lives over 9 weeks up to Christmas 2017.

We also needed to understand how these findings represented the UK population, so we commissioned a weekly omnibus survey of 1000 shoppers.

The responses; video diaries, photos, surveys, ratings, reviews and discussions, plus quantitative validation, were vividly revealing.

By mid-November we had a major breakthrough: Aldi’s main-shoppers (families with children) were feeling far more emotionally engaged and, crucially, doing their Christmas shopping much earlier than everyone else.

Aldi’s main most loyal shoppers were:

- Saving money for Christmas year-round

- Spending far more than average at Christmas

- Budgeting for and purchasing gifts months in advance

- Emotionally, far more engaged with Christmas, far earlier

By contrast, Aldi’s Christmas marketing and merchandising was too low key and too late. This needed to change - fast.

Research revealed that shoppers had mainly decided where they would do their big shop prior to December - and a crucial factor was Turkey prices. Aldi’s cultural obsession with market-leading prices meant delaying their ‘reveal’ until fresh turkeys arrived in store (19th Dec). This delay actually encouraged ‘planners and budgeters’ to shop elsewhere. Consequently, Aldi made the critical but unprecedented decision to publish 2017’s date over a week earlier than planned.

Aldi also realised it needed to do more to help shoppers plan and budget on gifting. This insight drove ‘live’ re-planning of 2017’s gift sale dates and provided detailed inspiration and guidance for 2018’s gift buying and merchandising dates.

Further insights prompted Aldi to create a set of budgeting and planning ‘tools’ to help Aldi shoppers ‘get prepared’ for 2018. Customers perceived lack of ‘Christmas Spirit’ in-store was also addressed – entailing extensive integrated POS for 2018’s campaign.