Auchan multiplies influence operations. Accompanied by the French subsidiary of the Clark Influence agency, born in 2017 in Montreal, the retail brand immersed itself in influence marketing nearly a year ago. Stéphanie Jallet, director of the Auchan France brand explains the genesis of this strategy: “After defining Auchan’s new brand platform (“Auchan, with pleasure”) and its new communication territory (“The good taste of life begins here”), we had to affirm this territory throughout of our media, whether in store, in print or on digital – and in particular social networks. The influence came naturally to bring resonance to our new editorial line, and, thus, to simplify the lives of customers.” The brand thus determines commercial highlights or “nugget” products, then calls on Clark Influence to imagine an influence strategy that complements its marketing actions on the brand’s other points of contact. “The agency is very creative and allows us to think outside the box”slips the director of the Auchan France brand.
Authentic influencers with 5%+ engagement
For version 2 of its cooking robot, “Cuisio x Connect + V2”, a product designed to “help novices and amateurs as well as cooking professionals”, Auchan and Clark Influence have thus imagined the #My1001RecipesWithCuisio campaign. The principle: three content creators challenged one of their relatives to make the same cooking recipe with and without the robot (the influencer had to make it with the robot and his relative, in the traditional way). And to demonstrate, thus, that the robot cooker from Auchan is a “ally to save time in the kitchen and responds to the challenge of eating well, with original recipes”says Vincent Bronner, co-founder of Clark Influence.
“We have chosen profiles that represent “real life”, that is to say authentic and who resemble, through their family values and their balanced way of life, Auchan customers”, explains Vincent Bronner. Another quantitative criterion: seek engagement rates of more than 5%. Choice is also made to deploy the campaign on Facebook and Instagram, social networks on which Auchan is present. On Instagram, Clark Influence has called on Stéphane Loubignac (@stephane.loubignac, 167k) and Elodie (@elo_patisse, 129k) and on Facebook, the influencer Le blog de Maman Plume (75k). The campaign took place in three phases: introductory to explain the collaboration; the culinary challenge and a contest to win the robot.
The results exceed the brand’s expectations. 810,000 people reached and over 1 million impressions achieved – out of a target of 600,000. The engagement rate is 12.82%, reveals Vincent Bronner, “when the benchmarks on food rather report figures around 2.84% on Instagram”. “This operation allows us to create consideration for the product, i.e. top funnel work”analyzes Stéphanie Jallet, who welcomes a virtuous circle with “a good product, good people and good mechanics”.
The retail brand plans no less than one influence campaign per month, on average, depending on product releases or its communication plan. Clark Influence is working for Auchan on other campaigns in production, such as “#EffetWaaooh” – the promotion of the Auchan loyalty card to students on TikTok. “We always seek to fit into the reality of our consumers”concludes Stephanie Jaillet.