Effie Case Study: Walgreens Makes the Best of Intentions

A case study from the 2011 Effie awards competition, which for the first time featured a "Shopper Marketing" category recognizing the best efforts to increase retail sales by influencing behavior along the path to purchase.Title: Walgreens "Arm Yourself for the Ones You Love" ProgramClient: WalgreensAgency: Arc Worldwide/Starcom USAContributing Agencies: Downtown Partners, Digitas, Gilmore GroupEffie Award: Shopper Marketing-Retail (Silver)Somehow, Walgreens was able to make an entire arm fit like a glove into its marketing strategy.The drugstore chain's 2009 "Arm Yourself for the Ones You Love" program was hugely successful in its own right. But the campaign also worked on a broader level, helping Walgreens' to position itself as a trustworthy and convenient source of health care for the communities it serves. "Since we're literally in the neighborhood, we can be in the first line of primary care," chief marketing officer Kim Feil explains.Walgreens has offered flu shots in stores for some years, and in 2008 set a personal record by administering roughly 1.2 million vaccinations. Although the service does generate revenue (at $24.95 or so per shot), it's also a means of driving store traffic and front-end sales, and perhaps more importantly is integral to the company's efforts to be recognized as a full-fledged health resource rather than just a purveyor of health-related products.After undertaking a training program to get all 17,000-odd pharmacists certified to administer vaccinations, Walgreens set a goal to dispense five million flu shots in 2009. The objective was "aggressive, but reasonable," given national vaccination trends and the chain's new-found ability to offer the service on a widespread basis, Feil says.The retailer worked with Chicago-based Arc Worldwide, its retail agency of record, to develop a plan that would achieve the ambitious goal. Using "desk research" that profiled consumers who obtain flu shots, and qualitative studies that ascertained why others didn't, they identified a large population of "Intender Moms" who want to get vaccinated each fall but aren't able to make time amidst "the three dozen other things they need to do" as the school season begins, says Leslie Meredith, executive vice president-account director at Arc.The "big idea" that was created involved positioning flu shots not as a self-centered act but as "the best thing she could do for her family. If she's healthy, she can take better care of them," Meredith says. With that concept established, Walgreens then could be pitched as the ideal place to get vaccinated quickly and conveniently.The "Arm Yourself" tagline, therefore, was a literal call to action, and also spawned the visual that would serve as centerpiece in marketing creative: vaccinated consumers flexing their arms to show off a heart-shaped bandage inscribed with the name of a loved one benefitting from their action. (Each shot recipient ultimately received a similar sticker to personalize.)That imagery was employed throughout a massive, multi-million dollar campaign that stretched from TV to the shelf edge to spread the message as widely as possible. In addition to ad spots (from Downtown Partners, Chicago), the TV plan entailed appearances by pharmacists on national cable networks such as CNN and MSNBC to administer shots on-air and discuss their benefits; that schedule included a segment on the popular Dr. Oz Show, where host Mehmet Oz endorsed the Walgreens program.The media plan also encompassed radio spots, regional print ads that sometimes depicted "Armed" local celebrities, digital and social media efforts to fuel viral activity, and out-of-home advertising at bus stops, airports, hospitals and other high-traffic or highly relevant locations. The P-O-P package included storefront A-boards, stanchion signs, endcap headers, counter mats and shelf talkers.To drive front-end sales, stores distributed booklets delivering roughly $31 in coupons for flu-related products from both national and store brands.The program not only surpassed its lofty goal by 400,000 shots, it did so in five weeks, allowing Walgreens to reallocate several months of media inventory to other efforts (and, thereby, improve ROI by reducing the campaign's total cost). Unaided consumer awareness of Walgreens as a destination for flu shots rose 22 percentage points and as a "provider of health services that are easy to access" 11 points to 56% (the highest among any retailer tested). The campaign also earned the "Super Reggie" (and other accolades) this spring as the best campaign of 2009-2010 in the Promotion Marketing Association's annual awards competition.Overall success benefitted from strong in-store execution, which was due in large part to a development timeline that started one year out, providing ample opportunity to obtain feedback from all involved parties and "get everyone organized," Feil says. It also helped that store operators "just liked the program," she adds.They liked it even more in 2010, when Walgreens added a corresponding "Get It Before You Get It" campaign that enlisted support from national cough & cold brands for a stronger front-end sales push, Feil says. Meanwhile, Dr. Oz was enlisted to be the primary "arm" used in creative for the flu-shot campaign, which sparked more vaccinations than the prior year while again attracting new shoppers and boosting front-end sales.Walgreens has another program ready for 2011, says Feil, declining to provide details. The marketplace "will have to wait to see how we've upped the ante one more time," she says.For the official Effie case study and other materials related to this campaign, please visit www.effie.org/ideas_that_work. For information about the Effie competition, visit www.effie.org.

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