“You don’t think about having to change a child’s nappy beyond the age of 3”

Marketing Society Brave Awards- Enhancing the Customer Experience

This entry will tell you the story of Laura Rutherford and her son Brody and how, with a little help from Tesco, we found a way to genuinely help our customers with a very real problem they face every day.

It will bring to light the significant challenges Laura faced when her four year old son, who has an undiagnosed genetic syndrome, autism and epilepsy, started to outgrow the regular nappies sold in supermarkets. How due to the limitations of what the NHS incontinence service was able to offer and the sheer desperation of the situation, prompted Laura to start her own Change.org petition and a call to arms for all supermarkets to help. Tesco was the only supermarket to answer.

We’ll show how we spent 3 years, working closely with Laura and our suppliers, putting all of our trust and power in the expertise of the right people to technically make the product and those who would ultimately benefit from it.

We will demonstrate how launching a completely unique product, at an affordable price, overwhelmingly touched the lives of a very special group of people.

We launched Junior Nappies in store on 29th October and four months later we’ve been part of over 200,000 individual nappy changes. The nation has been overwhelmingly supportive our new product and we’ve helped share our success, of a little known problem, with a much wider audience.

This is our journey told through Laura’s story and has helped us realise the responsibility we have as a retailer to do the right thing for our customers and the true importance of keeping them at the heart of every single little help.

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Executive summary

This is Laura in her own words

And this is Brody (in the words of his mum)

Hello!

I’m Laura. I’m 35 years old and mummy to Brody (7) and Sydney (3).

I just want the world to be a kinder, more inclusive place than it currently is – especially for Brody.

It’s lovely to meet others who just “get it” and makes me feel less alone on this journey.

Brody is 7 years old and a happy-go-lucky, beautiful boy.

He has no primary diagnoses for his disabilities, despite lots of genetic testing, which means he has a syndrome without a name. He has Global Development Delay, Epilepsy, Autism, and Hyper-mobility syndrome. He is non-verbal, but uses a little bit of Makaton.

When he’s not in a grump, he’s a joy to be around. His happiness is infectious.

Despite all of his challenges, he just gets on with it- usually with a smile on his face.

He’s a very much loved little boy, who we are very proud of.

It started all started with and Facebook post back in 2015 asking Tesco to change their ways. Laura followed up with an email letting us know about the traction she’d already gained through her petition. Then our product ream reached out to her.

Online petition

Email from Laura

Facebook post

From humble beginnings

Creating a completely new product

This is what we learned:• 74% use regular nappies over pull-ups.• 68% prefer regular nappies over pull-ups.• 49% use 4-6 nappies a day, 26% use 6-10, 21% use 1-4 and 3% use 10 plus.• 55% receive continence products from the NHS, which means nearly half of the

respondents don’t (big market!)• 75% have to buy top up nappies• 63% refer to products as nappies and 57% said they would call the product junior nappies• 66% would place the products in the baby and toddler section• Suggestions for packaging included absorbency level, size/age/waist size, a few people

had put that it’s a product for older children with additional needs, no babyish words or images.

Laura contacted us in November 2015 and by June 2016 we had already worked collaboratively with our existing nappy suppliers and Laura to create a new product. We then panel tested each product stage through the charity group Laura works for who support people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PAMIS) and with other groups of friends who have children with additional support needs and use the product currently supplied by the NHS.

Once they were happy, we created a focus group through Laura’s network and developed a questionnaire to understand the customer use, where customers would expect to find the product merchandised and to gain their feedback on suggested names and designs – In total we had 499 responses;

Facing in to the challenges

• Low awareness off the issue• Who would be interested in the

content outside of the immediately affected community

• Getting cut through with our marketing communications during the Christmas period

• All previous content objectives were based on direct link to sales- could we even justify the spend?

• Niche market• Being gazumped by a competitor during the

development process• Small scale sales opportunity• Low awareness of new product especially if

content not picked up• Customers not understanding the sizes/

competitor products• Can we get enough stock out/ replenish stock? • Nearest competitor product is Pampers size 7 but

it was still too small as US sizing differs to the UK

Unique wetness indicator helps carers know when to change and the double tapes make it a secure fit and easier to put on a larger child.

Getting ‘Junior Nappies’ in to store

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzxjCPF_seI

Bringing the story to life through our video and social

• Over 2 million impressions paid and organic• 223% higher than benchmark for organic impressions

from people sharing the video (112,231)• Video views achieved 402% above benchmark

(26,628k) • Despite the video being over 1 minute long, it had a

58% completion rate on Instagram (benchmark- TBC)• As a business we invested £60,000 of budget to

make and promote the content with a KPI purely to drive awareness. It cost us 3p for every person who saw the video

• 35% positive sentiment and 50% neutral. • Cost of campaign 3p per impression *All Tesco benchmarks are 20% higher than industry average

The product launched in 522 of our Extra and Superstores from 28th October 2018. It cost £4.50 for a pack of 20, which is cheaper than the NHS alternative. It was also available online. We had great stock levels, great availability and a contingency plan in place should we need our suppliers to produce more quickly. Plus our customer service team were on hand to advise customers if they had trouble finding stock in their local store.

The reaction on socialHere is a snapshot of the reaction from customers and the wider. Our Facebook video has been viewed 527,000 times, we’ve had 1,600 comments and 3,700 people have gone on to share the video.

The media reactionWe created a press release (see link below) to support the video and shared it with key lifestyle titles. Pick up was initially slow but we managed to achieve headline coverage in national news titles (Mail Online, Metro, Times Online etc.) and on BBC Radio. We also achieved widespread regional coverage.

https://www.tescoplc.com/news/news-releases/2018/tesco-becomes-first-uk-supermarket-to-launch-larger-nappies-specifically-designed-for-children-with-disabilities/

Laura didn’t expect anyone like to Tesco to listen to ‘someone like her’ but we did and actually did something about it.

Product sales

Video launch

We aimed to launch the product 477 stores but increased availability to 522 stores. • Average weekly sales £3,000 /

700 units• Average of 1.4 units per store• Total sales to date £47,400

and 10,600 units (that’s over 200,000 individual changes every day for the last 4 months)

Changing customer expectation and inspiring braveryListening to the

customer

Best practice for things like video length are under 30 seconds but how can you tell such a compelling story in that time? You can’t so we decided to take however long it took to tell the story. Plus it was a risk launching a new product so close to Christmas

Taking risks on the unknown

Projected yearly sales of the product were £70,000 being a very niche product meant we had to throw the rule book out of the window and focus on awareness.

Not always chasing the big

ticket items

The launch brought to light similar challenges our customers face such as ‘Changing Places’ which is a push to have a better standard of changing facilities in disabled toilets. We as a business are looking at how we can roll this out to our stores. It also showed customers we do listen and act and that they should talk to us.

Raising the bar

The subject of nappies can be hard to sell but we’ve seen the most organic (when customers share themselves) engagement with campaigns like this and our campaign for ‘Tampon tax’.

Be brave

On paper the ROI didn’t stack up but instinctively it felt like the right thing to get behind. Helping our customers in little ways everyday is part of our DNA and something we’re continuously trying to evolve and grow in to different parts of our business

Trusting your gut

It’s set a new precedent to elevate other great CSR activity from our corporate communication out to our customers. We’ve got great stories to shout about!

The role CSR should play in our

business

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Laura didn’t want Brody to live in a world where he was treated differently. Neither

did we, so we helped her idea become a reality.

Total word count 1,236