strategy platform: repositioning Walmart from functional to emotional brand

Client: Walmart

Challenge: Brand Strategy

My role: Project Lead, Strategy Director

Agency: BAMM

Tools: Ethnographic Research, Affinity Mapping, Workshop, Storytelling, Creative Direction

September 2023

New York, New York 

Sources of Walmart's love  

Challenge 

Walmart is synonymous with low prices, but this model is imperfect: margins are low, and up-and-coming competitors pose a threat. To address this fundamental challenge, Publicis, Walmart’s main agency, launched the personalization-driven 'Welcome to Your Walmart' campaign. What exactly transforms a Walmart into your Walmart? My team built an extensive ethnographic research program to uncover this.

My role: Leading a team of two junior strategists and a videographer, my role was to help Publicis and Walmart understand what Your Walmart actually means, e.g., the personal relevance of the brand to customers. We named this initiative 'Love Cases'.

Welcome to Your Walmart—building emotional connections with a multicultural focus

The goal of this project was to identify brand love cases that are emotional yet unique to Walmart. Three campaigns featuring authentic and unique stories made it to national TV, all true to the brand.

The love-case campaign emphasizes how Walmart helps the story’s heroes connect with their grandkids, be the best dads possible, and guide their children as they grow up.

To make these campaigns successful, we tapped into the most observation-driven, non-invasive type of research: ethnography. Utilizing ethnographic tools:

• We explored the role Walmart plays in helping individuals build and foster meaningful moments in their lives.

• We examined how exactly Walmart assists people in achieving this.

Additionally, this ethnographic deep-dive was one of the first in-depth explorations conducted for Walmart’s brand team. During the workshop, Casey Schlaybaugh, the VP of Walmart's brand, said, “It feels so luxurious to immerse ourselves in the world of our customers."

It was a pleasure to both inform one of Walmart's most strategically important advertising campaigns and educate Walmart’s C-suite on the lives of their customers.

ETHNOGRAPHIC DEEP DIVE: uncovering the Unknown

Open-ended questions (e.g., finding areas in people's lives where Walmart plays an emotional role) require open-ended tools.

To foster emotionally open conversations, we recruited pairs of friends, as people are more likely to be open with someone they know well, even in a research setting. We focused and designed the discussion guide around the following areas:

• Identity and Values Exploration - to define who they are and what is important to them;

• At-Store/Online Shopping Behavior - to examine how they shop both in-store and online;

• Passion Points Exploration - to investigate their interests and what they are passionate about;

• Sofa Session (Self-moderated friend-to-friend interviews) - to understand friendship pair relationship dynamics;

• Walmart/Walmart.com Store Visit - to observe Walmart-specific habits.

• Walmart Visit Follow-Up - to gather feedback and insights post-visit: how their Walmart purchases were used in their lives.

The more we learned about the respondents and their relationships with each other, the better we were able to identify the expressive and emotionally involved individuals who could provide good stories.

After narrowing down from 36 participants to 18 Walmart brand enthusiasts, we conducted a deeper exploration of their world during the second stage of the interview: a face-to-face ethnographic immersion.

Face-to-face immersion: photojournalism meets Research

To truly meet people, one must immerse oneself in their world and see it through their lens.

A team consisting of a researcher and a photojournalist was dispatched to meet various individuals in person: a pair of Atlanta Braves fans, an LGBTQ couple in Florida who just became second-time parents, a family with pet lizards, a first-time grandmother, and a church community leader, to name a few.

We collected 100+ love cases from all around the country, then mapped them - what united all of them. Six sources of love emerged:

• Walmart energizes you to explore your creative side

• Walmart inspires you to gift your love

• Walmart simplifies life

• Walmart fuels life-stage transitions

• Walmart builds pride in communities

• Walmart brings the joy of wellness to all

The framing of love cases through the lens of sources of love was defined by me and my team. This approach responds to the creatives' demand: to understand and express 'the why' behind Walmart fans’ love for the brand.

For each of the themes/sources of love, we edited an immersion movie. Here is what it looks like for the theme #2: Walmart inspires you to gift your love.

Results

The role of research is not to dictate actions to creatives but to detect opportunities for engaging storytelling. Our solution? An immersive workshop and curated exhibition.

The results of the project informed all aspects of the communication strategy at Walmart.

This case was also presented as one of the best-in-class ethnographic research projects at the Quirks Conference in Chicago.