They found a way to screw up collectables. The giant retailer — Australia’s largest — is racking up a dizzying array of fails recently.
Profit is down, dividends are down, the share price is in a slump as the next chart shows.
Worst of all, they just turned what should have been a slam dunk into a debacle.
During the most recent results season, Woolworths CEO Amanda Bardwell was grilled by an investment banker over the latest collectable program, where shoppers got a small aluminium disc and a collectable card for every $30 they spent.
The Woolworths stock price has plummeted. ·Jason Murphy
“We were running a Disney collectible and frankly, that hasn't performed at the levels that we would have expected,” lamented Bardwell.
The reasons why? There could be many, Bardwell said. But mostly a lack of novelty.
“Certainly we’ve run already a number of these Disney programs," she said.
"So I actually think it might be less about the collectable itself and more about that the fact that there is an element of fatigue as it relates to some of these types of collectables that we have run now multiple, multiple times.
"You can clearly see that across the market.”
But Woolworths will not give up on collectables, she hinted.
Why would they?
When they hit, they are a giant hit.
Like the original Coles Little Shop that started the entire craze.
Or the Ooshies from 2019.
Or the toys inside McDonald’s Happy Meals – so popular and so incredibly effective that the government actually banned them.
The Ooshies craze resulted in people listing 'rare' items on eBay in a bid to cash in on their popularity. ·eBay
According to Canstar Blue, collectables can make shoppers spend far more money at a retailer.
“Two in five Australian shoppers (40 per cent) are willing to spend more than planned on groceries – up to $74 extra or twice the required $30 minimum spend – to redeem collectables, according to a survey of more than 1,500 supermarket shoppers,” said survey company Canstar Blue.
However you should be aware that survey was done before the latest dismal round of drab little tokens.
Woolies doomed Dinsey Discs would certainly be dragging down those numbers.
What went wrong with Woolies collectables?
Not to get too technical, but the discs are bad.
You can tell that by opening a pack.
The product has all the appeal of a squashed sultana.
It does not invite play, does not hint at any ways to have fun, and certainly does not spark joy .
My kids reactions to the Disney discs: they liked tearing apart the pack, but after that the excitement evaporated immediately.
We have several unopened ones just sitting in a drawer.
Look at this next piece of marketing.
Some intern has been told to invent some ways for kids to engage with the little tokens.
The resulting content has all the spontaneity and glee of a hostage video.
Also, Disneyland?!?
Perhaps it's exciting for Disney’s major shareholders that their Los Angeles-based Theme Park has reached its 70th anniversary?
But for us?
How many Australians have ever been to a Disney Theme Park anywhere?
Few I’d say. The share of us that care about the Californian one is probably even lower.
Splashing “Disneyland 70th” all over things? It is a great way to make kids look at something else.
Of course, I bet Disney would love to get more Aussies visiting its theme parks — I expect we are a profitable segment — but does that mean you can turn a collectable into an ad for a holiday?
This is an example of company-centric thinking instead of customer-centric thinking.
It looks like a win-win to trick customers into collecting something that is just an ad.
But it’s actually a lose-lose.
The product can be an ad (they’re all ads!) but it has to be a fun ad.
The customer needs to be at the heart of what a company does.
Woolworths and Disney are not solely to blame here.
There’s a company that sits in the middle and deserves a whack.
It is called TCC Global and it is a marketing company that runs these sort of campaigns as its core business.
They say their job is “to create high-performance marketing programmes that boost sales and drive loyalty, through rewarding shoppers in powerful ways”.
Well they failed at their job with this last one!
The narrowing space for cool collectables
To be fair, running a novel collectable campaign is hard.
Companies are tying themselves in knots these days making sure the toy is not plastic.
They’ve done fabric and plants and lot of cardboard. This was an experiment in aluminium
Plastic is easy to 3D mould.
If they can’t do plastic toys, it gets tricky.
The Minecraft cubeez were a good innovation — cardboard pieces that interlocked to build a cube.
But not every media brand can adopt cubes.
What’s more - there are only so many popular entertainment brands to tie into.
Woolies and Coles need to appeal very broadly, they can’t do niche.
So now we are covering the same ground again — Disney yet again, yawn - and getting diminishing returns.
The creative geniuses at TCC Global need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something genuinely cool.
Because the failure of the last collectable doesn’t diminish a supermarket’s appetite for a succesful collectable campaign, it actually strengthens that appetite.
They need their next toy to be a huge hit. Get ready for it.
