Issue #107 - Tesco on TikTok

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Anthony McGuire

Sep 30, 2022

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We are Simon Andrews and Anthony McGuire, two people who have been working in marketing, advertising, and media for decades.

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TikTok Case Study = Tesco

Simon’s Take:

Tesco. Unexpected item in the bagging area.

Having worked on lots of retail - including Tesco - I know how hard it is to cut through. The decision on which supermarket to use is driven by location and value. If you usually turn left to go to Sainsbury’s it’s really hard to have you turn right to go to Tesco. And the perception of value is crucial too - whether you favour Waitrose or Aldi you need to believe you are getting good value on what you buy.

Facing a hard winter, value is even more important, so ads have to work hard to land the value message, in a brand wrapper.

So seeing Tesco turn up on TikTok is interesting.

The last time we saw them was when the first Little Moons TikToks were blowing up and people were visiting Tesco to find the product.

Their new campaign is genius.

Using TikTik tropes they are recruiting a new voice for their self check outs - and invite TikTokers to audition - in a Duet.

Like all great ideas it’s dead simple, but executed well. And like all great TikToks it totally gets the grammar of the medium - and would not work anywhere else.

The winner gets 10k Clubcard points and Clubcard features in the audition, so it’s promoting the loyalty scheme too.

The video already has 10m views and the hashtag #tescovoiceofcheckout has over 22m views. It’s captured the imagination of users and lots of people are dueting - over 2000 videos already using the Tesco sound.

And the competition are paying the ultimate compliment; we have already seen Aldi, Morrisons and Co-Op duet. I guess all the brand social media managers are thinking about how to get involved.

In my other newsletter Fix I have covered in-store tech and everyone knows people don’t really like self check out - but retailers are increasing the use of it for cost reasons.

Tesco add a touch of humanity with this idea and it should prove really successful for them. It deserves to.

Anthony’s Take:

More than any other digital media platform, TikTok is a place where you do not need to take yourself too seriously. With Gen-Z culture embedded within the app and trends like dance challenges becoming massively popular on the platform, TikTok is a unique experience for users and a unique creative canvas for brands.

With humour and light-hearted content however, it’s very easy for big corporate brands to make mistakes. It’s harder to be funny than to be serious, and when the large multinational corporations that fuel the mainstream advertising industry try to ‘be hip and funny with the kids,’ failures are more common than successes.

Given that context, Tesco’s latest campaign (and their first on TikTok?) is honestly a brave experiment. Using a common eyes and lips filter you’ve been seeing on social media the last couple of years, Tesco challenges an audience to ‘audition’ for the role of being the new voice for Tesco check out counters. The video includes specific question prompts that people are supposed to answer in their own voice. You are also able to win 10,000 Clubcard points.

It’s a pretty funny premise, and honestly executed very well. Tesco seem to have successfully straddled the thine line between cheesy funny and authentically funny. Lord knows if this is actually a serious challenge - my guess is that Tesco will not be literally taking a new voice for their checkout counters. But this light absurdity encourages people to actually participate, even if just for the laughs.

The competition examples we show in the video above are all great videos and the feedback in the comments is overall positive. You can even see Aldi and other competitive brands ‘make their own entries,’ which makes the overall competition more exciting. The number of video views of the #tescovoiceofcheckout is relatively low in my opinion, but I would imagine there is definitely positive sentiment and genuine brand affinity generated by this campaign.

And wrapped up within the laughs is a sweet promotion of the Tesco Clubcard.

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