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Welcome back to another episode of a Brand Less Ordinary podcast, where we talk about all things branding, marketing, and how to do business in a less ordinary way. So you might wonder why today we're going to talk about Aldi. Well, I want to start with a confession first.
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probably says more about me than it does about Aldi, but I find shopping in Aldi quite stressful. But every single week without fail, I go and do my shopping in Aldi. And probably like a lot of people, it's the till thing that is the stressful bit. There's only like three open at any given time. The cashiers move like lightning. And what I find myself doing when I'm doing a shop that actually needs a trolley, so I have to go through a till,
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rather than the self-service is I start to panic that I'm gonna be the person that when I get to the till, because I'm gonna be at the back of a queue, that's when they're gonna open a new till and I'm gonna have to move to the front of that new till and unpack my shopping so fast because they're gonna get there and they're going to be waiting for me and want to start putting all of the shopping through. So what I tend to do is I wait until I see a space at the back of a till
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So as soon as I get to it, I can start loading some things on. And then if they do announce new till is opening, I'm just like, oh no, no, I've already started unpacking my things on here. So I let somebody else go to it. And that kind of slows down all of the anxiety that I have over the till thing. But it still feels like when you get to the front that you have got to pack your bags really, really fast. And I still tend to do that thing where I just load it all into the trolley in complete random chaos order.
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and then I go to the packing shelf on the side and kind of pack it there so I feel much better about the whole thing. And yet even though this is a really stressful part of my week going and doing my shopping in Aldi, I still do it every single week. Now don't have a massive amount of choice about where I shop because in our little town we do only have Aldi or Lidl. My husband actually prefers Aldi.
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I secretly prefer Lidl because of the bakery and I love the chocolate hazelnut croissants. But I do go to Aldi because now we have all these things that we just automatically buy. know exactly what I'm doing and I can get around there quite quickly. But in my kind of stressful moments of going around Aldi and the boring thing that is just food shopping in general, it's made me realise that Aldi is a really, really interesting brand. And you might wonder why we're talking about Aldi on a branding podcast because it is just a
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fairly generic budget supermarket, but there are some really interesting things that they do. Aldi have two very kind of distinct and opposite ways of being interesting. And I think both of those things can teach us something about how we build businesses and how we show up online. So firstly, Aldi does not care about your experience.
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Now that's not to say they don't care about whether you like shopping from them, they don't care whether you, the quality of everything that you buy is good or anything like that, but their priority is not based on your experience whilst in the shop. If you compare Aldi to one of the more high-end supermarkets, let's say M &S, Waitrose, somewhere like that, those places, they've got flowers right at the entrance, the lighting is all warm, there's probably music that somebody has chosen specifically for a reason.
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You've got a cafe usually, and of course you're always going to find Percy Pigs at the checkout, which is both manipulative and genius. But those shops understand that the experience is the product, which is also why their products are priced much higher as well. You're not just buying your groceries, you're buying the feeling of buying nice groceries and you're buying into like that kind of version of yourself that's got a trolley full of things.
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that feel more expensive. It's like aspirational grocery shopping, which kind of sounds ridiculous, but that is absolutely what they're going for. And it does work for a certain part of the population. Aldi, however, have made a completely different decision. They've decided that none of that matters so much to their person. Now in Aldi, they do still have the flowers by the door, but it's not kind of made into this like major.
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flower shopping experience. I'm not sure I've ever actually seen anybody go around Aldi with flowers in their trolley. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to help people spend less and get in and out quickly, not have to download an app to be able to do it. They don't have any loyalty cards. There's no cafe. And obviously they've got this whole thing of it being really fast at the tills. That is a feature, not just a kind of bad thing that they've designed.
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The of sparse layout. don't have loads of like point of sales stuff like in other supermarkets. The middle aisle that's just full of like random stuff, whether it's wetsuits or surfboards, or whether it's a lawnmower. Anything that you think of has probably been in that middle aisle of Aldi at some point. It is chaotic, but even that chaos has become part of kind of the personality of the shop at this point.
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And that is quite rare because most businesses are trying to not have all of that chaos. They're trying to provide this great experience for people. So they go away and say, Oh, I really enjoyed shopping with them, or I really enjoyed my buying experience today. And I feel like a lot of people at Aldi come out thinking, Oh God, that part was so stressful as it always is every single week. But Aldi aren't trying to provide that.
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premium experience within their shops. And I think that a lot of businesses, what they tend to do is they're trying to be all the things to everybody. They're trying to be budget friendly, but they're also trying to be premium. They're trying to be casual, but they're also trying to be professional. They're trying to be fun and friendly, but also a bit elevated. And what tends to happen is you lose all the kind of
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quirks and things that people remember about you or the reason that somebody goes to you because you're just trying to be as good as everybody else in all the different areas. Aldi just went, no, you're to get three tills, you're going to fling all the stuff into your trolley and then you're going to go over to there and pack it separately. So you're almost doing your packing twice. And whilst you're here, have a wetsuit. And it works.
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Then when you get outside, you've unpacked your stuff into your trolley. There is no little trolley park near to where you parked your car. You've got to take it all the way back around to the door of Aldi again. And people do it every single week without even thinking twice about it because that is just what you do when you're there. So here then is where it gets a bit interesting with the Aldi brand. Everything I just described, the efficiency, the no frills thing,
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the attitude of we're not here to make you feel in any way special energy. You'd assume then that that comes through in how they show up online, right? Very straightforward. Here's the product, here's the price, done. No fancy marketing or anything like that. And yet somehow their brand is not like that. Aldi social media, and if you have not seen it, you're obviously under a rock, totally unhinged. And I mean that as a compliment.
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You've got things like Kevin the carrot that comes out at Christmas, but then somehow has managed to turn into more than just a Christmas thing. We actually bought my daughter a Kevin the carrot bunny, perhaps it was a cross between a bunny and a carrot that was at Easter and it's huge. It's as big as her. So what started just as a Christmas campaign has now leaked into being just a whole part of their brand and
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A lot of brands do really well by having these kind of characters that pop up a lot and people just kind of anchor onto those and then they'll buy everything that is released that relates to that particular character. Somehow now people are emotionally invested in a carrot. How stupid does that sound? Just like Duolingo, people being emotionally invested in a green owl. Sounds ridiculous, but it absolutely works in the marketing world.
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And it's their wider social media presence though that is the thing that people have come to know and love about Aldi more so than just the cheap shopping. The way they respond to people posting online, so it's not necessarily just what they post, it's also that they go off and post and engage with other people in memorable ways. The way they respond to people to comments on their page or to other people's posts, the things that they actually post themselves,
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It is just chaos, it's funny, and they completely commit to this kind of we don't really care attitude. There's no like skirting around what they think. There's no, okay, great, we take your feedback seriously, thank you very much, really boring, dull, forgettable. It is just complete personality all the way through. And that kind of opposite way of being in their two different presences,
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their shop presence and their online presence is just fascinating to me as somebody that is really into branding. So in the shop, no personality really. The shop does not have the same personality that Aldi has online. It just is all about efficiency and low prices. And yet online, full chaos, full character. There's nothing like inconsistent and chaotic about it in the sense that it doesn't all make sense. It is just that they figured out
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how to be random energy that people just love to look through. It's like watching a soap opera unfold online. And it's like they've managed to figure out what belongs in which different compartment of theirs, whether it's their physical stores or their online presence. And they've just then gone all in on both of those different personalities. It's like they have two different complete personalities. They've gone all in on both separately, and yet it's the same brand. Fascinating.
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So I mentioned earlier, M &S, and I don't feel like we can talk about Aldi's online social media presence without talking about M &S, but I mentioned earlier that with M &S and Aldi, they could not be further apart. And yet the best example of Aldi's online personality is the way they handle the Colin versus Cuthbert situation. Don't tell me you have missed it. Obviously you haven't because M &S and Aldi have been at each other's throats
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for ages now. You've got Colin the Caterpillar, chocolate caterpillar cake, been around for decades. Aldi also sell a very similar caterpillar cake, Cuthbert. M &S decided that that was trademark infringement, took legal action. But the thing is, Aldi didn't just go, oh my God, I'm so sorry, and take it lying down and just remove Cuthbert from the shelves. It turned into this full on war. And that is just what everybody remembers now.
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These two brands are not competing over the same customers whatsoever. Like I said, their experiences in store are so totally different. The person that does their weekly shop at M &S is not Aldi's person. They're not going after the same human being and trying to get them through the doors to do their weekly shopping, and they don't need to be. And the person that does their weekly shop in Aldi is probably not gonna go and do their weekly shop in M &S.
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possibly due to price or just, you know, they don't need that kind of fancy experience. They just want to get in and out quickly. So they've both correctly identified their own audience and they serve them really well in the store. Everybody wins. So nobody is stealing anybody's customers except apparently they're both fighting over who gets to sell somebody a caterpillar cake, which is one very, very specific product.
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And it's so weird when you think about it. You've not got an overlap between M &S person and Aldi person in terms of anything else really apart from when it comes to caterpillar cakes. So when M &S came for Cuthbert, did Aldi issue a statement? Did they go quiet? Did they handle it with corporate dignity? Absolutely not. They posted about it as much as they possibly could.
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They leaned in completely. They got other major brands involved because everybody then started coming to comment on it. They talked about Cuthbert going to court, made it into this whole storyline and they milked every single second of the kind of PR moment with absolutely no shame, absolute commitment to being, you know, defending their position on this cake. And people followed it like they follow
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EastEnders, you know, they tuned in all the time to see what the update was over a caterpillar cake. And that is what Aldi's social media team absolutely do the best. They understand exactly who they are. They can see what their audience finds funny, what gets the most engagement, and they just go for it. There's none of this like second guessing. There's none of this overthinking. There's none of this, oh my God, is this too much? Are we going to get hated?
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Just yes, let's do this and let's go all in on it and just give our audience what they want. And reminder, this is the brand that gives you just three tills and absolutely kind of zero experience in store and makes you pack your shopping over on the shelf over there. So I guess it is still the same energy. They're kind of got this like, we don't really care energy what you think about us. We're going to do our thing.
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But yet they go so far in on the social media stuff and the experience in store is just like, no, no, no frills, nothing. So it's the same brand, two completely different expressions of it, both completely intentional and they do both brilliantly. So yes, let's go back to the fact then that I'm talking about supermarkets on a branding podcast. So other than the fact that I wanted to let you know just how much I kind of hate the whole till situation at Aldi,
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I wanted to obviously talk about the fact that there are two things that are worth you learning from and taking into maybe your own kind of marketing thoughts, business efforts, things like that. Firstly, it's about knowing your person. Aldi knows completely who they are for and who they are not for. And because they know that, they don't waste their energy or their money trying to convince the wrong person or trying to make their store something that it doesn't need to be. They're not trying to out...
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M &S, M &S, they don't need to do that because their person already gets it and they're winning awards. Why should they need to? And when you know your person that specifically, and it's not just about what they do for a living or their age or how much money they even have, but it's what they actually want from you as a business, you have to think about what you want them to feel.
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What do you genuinely not need to overcompensate for? What do you genuinely not need to care about so that you can care about the other things that actually make a difference? And then you can make every decision from that place. You can stop trying to care about all the things and stop trying to be all the things to all the people and just be the thing that you actually are and then do that really, really well. That is what will make you then into a memorable brand.
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And then of course, the second thing is about personality and commitment to something. And because Aldi isn't just like, although they're a smaller supermarket than the, you know, the kind of the big major supermarkets, they're not kind of this just small unknown business. They're still a massive international supermarket chain, just because their stores aren't as big as like one of the major Tesco extra stores with escalators and cafes and everything like that and clothes departments.
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They're still a major, major supermarket chain. And yet they still show up online like a person with opinions and a sense of humor. Rather than showing up like this kind of corporate committee, just because they're a big business, they don't have this sort of, we're too big, too professional, too serious for that excuse. That doesn't work with them. They want to be that brand that everyone wants to follow because they love what they're talking about.
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And if you're a small business, one person, or maybe you've got a tiny team or whatever, then you've got even less of an excuse because you are a person. You're not a big brand committee either. You've got opinions, you find things funny, and you have preference, just like me and my little bakery preference, that you're probably not talking about because you think you just need to be professional and not say things like that. You are allowed to have a personality in business. You're allowed to commit to it and you're allowed to go all in.
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on something that then you discover that your audience really loves about you. And then when somebody accidentally hands you something that you can kind of run with and becomes your sort of Colin versus Cuthbert PR moment, or just a funny angle on something, something that will actually get you some engagement or get you remembered, you are allowed to run with it and have some fun with it. Because remember that Aldi, half of their marketing revolves around a carrot.
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And then there's the caterpillar that they were willing to go to court for. They're doing just fine and you would be just fine as well if you had something that you could anchor onto and talk regularly about that your audience would actually remember. So are you Team Aldi or not? I'm obviously Team Aldi, mostly by default because of where I live, Team Little in my heart because of the bakery, but genuinely Team Aldi as a brand because I think there is something absolutely brilliant about what they do.
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and equally brilliant in what they're not doing within store that you kind of just don't really notice if you're too busy panicking about the fact that till two is about to open and you're going to need to unload your shopping really fast. They know who they're for. They don't apologize for who they are. They don't apologize for what they do. And online, they are just fully weirdly completely themselves. And look how many brands flock to
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also commenting on their stuff because they also know how brilliant they are and they've seen Aldi showing up in that way and they have started to do the same thing too. And that's the goal, isn't it? You want people to be flocking to you because they absolutely love what you do and secretly they're a little bit jealous of what you've been able to create. If you're sitting there thinking, I genuinely just don't know who I'm for, what I'm about, what I could actually commit to.
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then I've got lots of ways that I could help you. know, I've got brand SOS calls, we can spend the day together figuring out exactly what would make your brand weirdly wonderful so that everybody would love you. And obviously I've just got lots of content that you could go and consume as well. So make sure that you're following me over on Instagram or that you're in my Facebook group, Business The Less Ordinary Way. I'll make sure I put links to those down below. And I would love to help you figure all of that out. And in the meantime, I will have another episode for you next week.
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where we will talk about all things less ordinary and how to build a brilliant brand that actually stands out and gets you remembered. I will see you back here for the next episode. See you then.