New World enabled kids to grow their own Little Garden

Little Garden: A value-oriented loyalty campaign

An effective loyalty campaign not only aims to increase footfall and traffic, but also helps grocery retailers bond with customers over common values. Consumers today care about healthy diets and the origin of their products, for the good of their children and the whole family. So, for New World, it is essential that customers know the importance of freshness and healthy food in its supermarkets. With the support of our Little Garden concept, New World was able to promote the message and bring families closer together over gardening and cooking.

New World’s Little Garden resonated with shoppers’ rising environmental awareness. Our giveaways during this loyalty campaign were fully compostable mini-seedling pots that enabled kids to learn about gardening and growing fruits and vegetables. Their ease of collectability and their dual benefits of education and entertainment contributed to the seedling pots being perceived as high-value rewards.

How New World planted its seed for success

With every NZ$40 spent, New World rewarded shoppers with one free seedling kit. In total, there were 24 seedling kits with different vegetables, spices or herbs for shoppers to collect from all over New Zealand. Some of the favorites included radish and pepper.

The addition of a little watering can plus a fenced garden, where Little Gardeners could store their pots, further increased the playability. The merch enhanced shoppers’ experience and aimed for a sales uplift for New World.

Not long after the first seedling kits went over the counter, the Little Garden craze took off. While the in-store display raised further awareness about the concept, enthusiasm quickly sprouted on social media as well; soon, New World shoppers had created a community over gardening with their loved ones. This positive experience with New World supermarkets helped nurture emotional loyalty with shoppers.

Little gardeners became big explorers

Gardening is a great activity that can be practiced by anyone, requiring little time and space. Particularly for kids, it has many benefits. It stimulates their senses while they experiment with seedlings, soil and, later in the process, plants. With the Little Garden loyalty campaign, kids were also given an opportunity to learn more about gardening, varieties of plants and methods of food preparation. They learned how living things need different environments and habitats to prevail. Besides that, Little Garden gave kids an opportunity to ask questions and communicate with their parents about a new activity while simultaneously discovering the importance of healthy eating.

At the same time, engaged parents could encourage their children to reflect on this experience. Reading the instructions and following them step-by-step could lead to discussions, stimulating kids to use newly learned vocabulary and develop language skills. Moreover, by asking their children about their next steps to make sure the plants would grow, parents could appeal to kids’ memory and boost their power of deduction.

With patience, kids could track the growth of their own plants while maintaining habits such as watering to take care of them. On this journey, New World enabled children to get closer to nature and learn about the value of our environment. With their own eyes, children could follow how a tiny seedling becomes something fresh and healthy that ultimately lands on their plate. Little Garden thus invited kids to engage in cooking while emphasizing fresh and natural products.

About New World’s ‘little’ journey

The environmentally friendly and educational nature of Little Garden was a hit all over New Zealand in 2016. It was so successful that in 2017, a year after Little Garden first arrived in stores, New World launched Little Garden 2. With that, New World and UNGA collaborated for the second time on back-to-back loyalty campaigns, after Little Shop 1 in 2013 and Little Shop 2 in 2014.