Brand Voice Breakdown: Lidl

When I get the time, I like to pick a brand and pull apart their brand voice to see what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and whether it’s working.

(Got a brand you want to see me break down? Let me know!)

This month, we’re kicking things off by looking at a brand that is quietly smashing the brand voice game at the moment: Lidl.

But I didn’t choose them just because I love their brand voice (although I do) but because developing a new brand voice has had a huge impact on their business in the UK.

Let’s dive in.

A LIDL BIT OF BACKSTORY:

The UK grocery market is extremely competitive, forcing retailers to always be on the look-out for new and innovative ways to stand out from their competition.

However, Lidl, a German discount store, faced a unique problem. They didn’t just need to start standing out from their competition, they needed to even be considered a competitor in the first place.

Despite the fact that their products in the UK were consistently rated as better quality than the big name brands, UK consumers didn’t think of Lidl as a supermarket that sold quality products.

Instead, it was seen as a cheap, European supermarket for low-income families. (Source.)

In fact, some surveys found Lidl to be one of the most hated brands in the UK (for more on this, check out Brand Culture by Jonathan E. Schroeder, Miriam Salzer-Mörling and Søren Askegaard).

There was even an instance of people protesting the construction of Lidl as they felt it dragged the tone of their town down.

And their brand voice wasn’t doing anything to dispell these ideas.

Look at this evaluation of their old brand voice from their Brand Strategy Report:

ENTER THEIR NEW BRAND VOICE…

Lidl realised that something needed to change.

They didn’t like what was being said, so they changed the conversation.

Feeling the effects of the recession, ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and all of the other supermarket heavyweights were battling it out to be seen as the cheapest place to shop.

Floods of supermarket ads focused on price and ended with slogans that focused on savings (‘Every little helps’, ‘Save money. Live better’, etc…).

Lidl decided to zig while everybody else zagged.

Everybody already knew LIDL was cheap, but they didn’t know that it also sold quality produce. This presented them with a genuine opportunity to say something different and to turn a negative into a positive.

So, instead of doubling down on their low prices and joining the race to the bottom with vanilla, bland, forgettable voices that focused on price, they developed a bold voice that was at once amusing, brave, honest and human.

Their voice pointed out that inexpensive didn’t have to equate with crappy products, and that saving money on your shop doesn’t have to mean sacrificing on quality.

A BRAND VOICE ROOTED IN AUDIENCE INSIGHT…

By switching up their brand voice, Lidl also shifted their positioning. They weren’t just a budget brand anymore, they were now a challenger brand with the big supermarkets in its sights.

This meant that they didn’t need to blend in, play by the rules or go along with the status quo.

They could get creative, be bold and develop a distinctive voice. 

But they had to make sure that their new voice chimed with their current customers and their soon-to-be customers, otherwise they’d be in trouble.

As such, it was important to build a voice around what they knew about Lidl shoppers.

As Cubaka, Lidl’s social media agency, point out:

In doing so, they developed a distinctive brand voice, that simultaneously appealed, in equal measure, to people looking for a cheaper weekly shop and to people who are fed up of buying overpriced quinoa, avocados and baklava from Waitrose.

(Or, of course, both.)

Their new brand voice meant that they weren’t just holding on to all of the budget-focused customers they had before, but they’re also pinching customers from the big supermarkets who want quality products without the hefty prices.

THE BRAND VOICE IN ACTION:

The application of the new brand voice to the #LIDLsurprises campaign was instrumental in this shift of perception and positioning.

Not only was this campaign fun and tongue-in-cheek, but it very quietly and cleverly turned the brand’s negative image on its head and uses it to its advantage.

The #LIDLsurprises allows LIDL customers to openly acknowledge the fact that LIDL food used to be seen as a bit shit.

In fact, it actively encouraged that level of honesty.

Check out their #LidlSurprises TV campaign which used the objections of “real people” to demonstrate the quality, freshness and origin on the products and then highlighted the price.

(Even if the “real people” are stooges, the ads and brand voice are no less effective.

The new, quietly confident brand voice continued across quite a lot of their marketing, at least in the campaign’s initial period.

They even used a lot of the #LidlSurprises tweets in store to promote products. (On top of that, this tactic creates a genuine dialogue between the business and its customers.)

The brand voice articulated a simple but incredibly effective message: ‘Our products are surprisingly good – why not try them? And because of the price, you’ve pretty much got nothing to lose.’

In short, LIDL’s brand voice removed all the perceived risk of shopping there: the shop wasn’t going to be expensive and you were going to leave with bags full of quality produce.

In actual fact, it practically challenged people to try shopping there and be surprised.

On top of that, the brave, confident and witty aspects of their brand voice also allowed them to take shots at other supermarkets in a fun way, again drawing attention to their unbeatable one-two punch of quality and price without being off-puttingly brash, in-your-face or braggadocious. (How often do you get a chance to use that word?)

Check these ads out.

When Sainsbury’s had a massive faux-pas and displayed an internal poster instructing their staff to try and get more money out of the customers, their new brand voice meant Lidl could reply with a rapid, tongue-firmly-in-cheek response (that also blew up on social media).

Zing!

Likewise, when Morrisons ran a campaign promising to match Lidl’s prices, Lidl ran this tongue-in-cheek ad in return…

Double zing!

Not only are these ads perfectly in line with their new brand voice, but they match the way their customers think too. Their customers like back-and-forth banter and wry humour and Lidl have evolved their brand voice to be almost perfectly aligned with their customers. (And that’s no small feat.)

(In fact, it feels like Lidl is quickly becoming a very British institution, which is very impressive for a German brand.)

THE RESULTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES… 

According to their social media agency, their new brand voice has helped increase audience size by over 800%, elevate Lidl to ‘most positively discussed supermarket’ on Twitter, and has won more than a few awards along the way.

In the first year of the new brand voice, awareness of Lidl grew by 80%, over half a million more customers started shopping with them (and existing customers spent an extra quid every time).

Plus, Lidl’s market-share increased by a third.

Not bad, eh?

Fast-forward to 2018 and we can see that Lidl have moved their focus away from the Lidl Surprises campaign and are now focusing on ‘Big on Quality, Lidl on Price’.

The brand voice remains very similar — witty, honest, brave, confident, etc… — but they no longer need to challenge perceptions on quality quite so much. Their brand voice has single-handedly turned the public’s perception right around.

However, as Lidl has outgunned and outplayed the big name supermarkets year after year, an interesting development has occurred: Aldi are also using very similar messaging, branding and a very similar brand voices.

And both are German, cut-price supermarkets, which presents a large problem.

CAN LIDL’S BRAND VOICE CONTINUE TO STAND OUT WHEN A COMPETITOR SOUNDS SIMILAR, LOOKS SIMILAR AND SELLS SIMILAR PRODUCTS?

It’s still up in the air at the moment.

Certainly, Lidl needs to find a way to use their voice to stand out from Aldi in a notable way or they need to evolve their voice again to be different from Aldi.

After all, Aldi now has a larger market-share than Lidl and both supermarkets have now lost that ‘challenger brand’ status that allowed them to grow so rapidly for the past half-a-decade or so.

However, for the moment, Lidl still slightly pip Aldi for customer experience for one reason: consistency.

As we’ve seen, having a distinctive, customer-grabbing voice has worked wonders for Lidl.

But having a voice that gets customers in the door isn’t enough.

Your voice has to carry through from your marketing all the way through the customer experience in store, otherwise, it feels inauthentic.

At the moment, Aldi aren’t quite doing that. They’ve got little pieces of copy around the store that match their everyday brand voice, but it doesn’t feel particularly distinctive or on-brand.

Compare Aldi’s ‘Make Mine a Pint’ to Lidl’s use of customer tweets in store:

Which is more memorable, endearing and effective?

And while I imagine that your everyday shopper doesn’t wander the aisles laughing and pointing out the witty copy to their increasingly fed-up partner, it has played an undeniable part in building a strong, appealing brand image, especially compared to every other supermarket (even, to a lesser extent, to Aldi).

However, developing a voice that’s noticeably different from your competition is Brand Voice 101.

Can Lidl continue to use the same voice if it’s too similar to Aldi, especially as Aldi have a larger market share?

We’ll see. If I was a gambling man, I’d put a tenner of seeing Lidl’s brand voice continue to be humorous, bold and honest over the next few years, perhaps doubling down on the brave and humorous aspects, while Aldi’s will veer towards a safer, less distinctive middle-ground to try and mop up some Tesco/Asda deserters.

WHAT LESS CAN YOU LEARN FROM LIDL’S BRAND VOICE SUCCESS?

💬 Develop your brand voice with your audience in mind.

Being authentic to your brand is very important, but it’s even more important to make sure that your new voice is going to chime with your customers (and soon-to-be customers).

Get to know your customers, how they speak, how they like to be spoken to, the kind of humour they like, the kind of humour they dislike and develop a voice that matches up (but doesn’t mimic) that.

💬 By not standing out, you’re blending in.

Lidl managed to grow incredibly quickly because they stood out from the crowd. Their voice was bold, funny and unlike anything, any of the other supermarkets was saying.

If your voice sounds like your competition — or is just not particularly distinctive — you risk losing customers to a competitor that is more distinctive and makes a better connection with them.

💬 If you can, use your underdog status as part of your brand voice.

Perhaps because I’m a Spurs fan or I’ve seen Rocky more times than I can count, but I love it when a brand develop scrappy, bold brand voices.

Pairing your underdog status with a witty brand voice is a great way to challenge preconceptions, raise engagement and highlight what makes your brand great.

Pssst. If you’re interested in starting to develop a distinctive voice for your brand, I’ve put together a FREE brand voice development course based on the same process I use to help 7-and-8 figure brands build customer-grabbing voices. 

Why not check it out? 👇