Tesco Unpacked - Your Year With Tesco (animated) and ‘unpacked’
Design Team Lead / Creative Direction - Sam Fuller
UI / Animation Lead - Vera Marin
UX Design - Andy Young
Animation - Anthony Eamens
Product Manager - Ben Sprackman
This project utilises the vast amount of customer data gained through the Clubcard Loyalty scheme, to further surface the value of shopping with Tesco to their most loyal customers, 18m and counting. Through an animated ‘round up of your year with Tesco’ with some irreverent and amusing personalised content and interactions that also crucially communicate the wider messages of the company ‘strategic pillars’: Customer, Community and Planet.
Using the customer data to further highlight how their seemingly small contributions add up to some pretty amazing stats on community charity donations, healthier and more sustainable shopping and eating choices, all the way up to how their shopping habits and feedback are helping to reduce plastic and national food waste, among other environmental good news stories.
Background
The previous year my team and I began exploring the animated EOY Unpacked concept as part of our work on Personalisation of Loyalty but it was not prioritised.
At the beginning of 2021 I noticed the concept being put forward again, but this time as a project for an outside agency.
Thankfully this time one of our main OKRs for the year was set to focus on Surfacing Clubcard Value. (to the customer)
I identified a potential cost saving for the business and a huge opportunity for the team by ensuring the project was brought in-house, enabling the team and I to put the customer first, hit our OKR of Surfacing Value and drive the strategy based on that and the vast amount of associated data we knew from our discovery work was required for this to work.
Key Challenges
External agency vs in house execution: The Proposition and Marketing teams wanted to run the project with an external agency, incurring additional expense, and crucially, removing the direct customer focus and direct connection that would naturally come from running it with the UX Design team.
Project not on the Product roadmap: Due to the project being driven by Proposition and Marketing teams, it was not on the Product team roadmap for the quarters/year.
New Brand Direction: Had to scramble to include the new brand direction post initial concepts, mercifully the new direction centred on animation and sound.
Multiple data sources needed to complete the picture: The concept required combining data from customer purchase history, loyalty voucher and coupon redemption, food waste and charitable donations from in-store and national store comparison to name but a few.
API and Engineering team’s resource diverted suddenly: As ever in large organisations, uncontrollable/unknown factors can suddenly necessitate big changes in resource allocation.
The Approach
Relentless Collaboration.
Firstly I needed to convince the Proposition and Marketing teams to bring the project in house for my Loyalty & Support team to run.
The team and I had always worked hard to establish and maintain strong collaborative relationships with all our stakeholders across the business. This really paid off now as they were very open to hearing our proposal. We demonstrated the value, cost saving and most importantly the direct connection we had to the customer, something an outside agency working separately would always be ‘one step removed’ from. It was agreed we would run the project ourselves.
Key Actions:
Driving the strategy: Connected the initiative to a key OKR for the year, applied a lean approach using the 80/20 policy (teams encouraged to use 20% of their time on alternative learning and development tasks) so made things happen with what was feasible for the quarter in terms of capabilities and the time/resources available. This enabled Unpacked to be retrospectively included on the Product Q1 Roadmap. Convinced API, Engineering, and various data teams across the business to allocate some resource for the MVP.
Enabler & Facilitator: Leveraged a strong, collaborative relationship with the Brand team, helping them to roll out out the new brand direction with Unpacked as its showcase.
Empowering teams: Ensured ALL the relevant Data teams were connected and collaborating (some of them for the first time ever) and the API/Engineering teams, to maintain the holistic/strategic view of the project and its needs.
Resilience, Adaptability, Influence and Negotiation: When resource was pulled, found alternative ways to surface some of the data via our Analytics platform and utilised strong relationships with exec level stakeholders to ensure allocation of alternative/additional resource where possible.
Additional Principles for the approach:
Putting the customer first
Responding to unmet needs
Driving the strategy
Defining a quality product
Influence and negotiate
Team builder and developer
Leading team through turmoil
Aligning to a Delivery Focus
Enabling delivery of impactful outcomes
Ensure Tech is front and centre
Empowering the team & making leaders
Video of the Tesco Loyalty showcase 'Tesco Unpacked'
Outcomes / Results / Impact
Ensured we (UXDR and Product) were in a strong position to positively intervene on behalf of the customer and the business.
Team overcame many last min changes and challenges, worked hard but efficiently and supportively to hit our first test deadline.
Against all the odds and at the expense of my hair colour, 1st test rolled out 1.5m people on time.
Strategy and scope defined and lead by UX Design & Research.
Now in its 3rd year - going from strength to strength, improving in scope, reach and impact.
Customers gave a CSAT score of 4.5/5 and 94.7% said they would like to receive a similar experience next year.
Unexpected bonus, Unpacked revealed a national subculture of Meal Deal fans who swap combos, deals and general love for Meal Deals online, some even get tattoos…
