Every year on the 10th of December the Noble Prizes are awarded in The Grand City Hall of Stockholm. 1300 royal guests and the laureates are invited. However, the most famous thing about the evening is the carefully crafted menu, which is served according to a strict minute by minute schedule.
Millions of people watch the live broadcast of the Nobel dinner. And in a neighbor TV channel, at the same time, The Le Bon dinner was aired live during commercialbreaks.
This year on the same night, in the same second, the doors to another banquet opened - LE BON (a palindrome of NOBEL). It mirrored every little detail of the Nobel banquet: a 1.1 replica of the Grand City Hall, 1300 guests, 5200 plates, 50 chefs, 260 waiters etc. Finally anyone could experience the Nobel menu - which was 100 % made of ingredients from LIDL, the discount store.
Creative Execution
The guests who had booked a table at our banquet became the spokespersons and our real life proof for the high quality products. And the rest of the Swedish people were all ears:
Swedes usually follows every detail of the Nobel Prize award banquet. This year they were inclined to follow Lidl's dinner as well. We had teasers, print ads, banners, TVC's - all leading up to the night. And like Nobel our banquet was live broadcasted in the parallell TV-channel. We mirrored the happenings and served our food in the exact same second. The guests tweets and instagrams were full of pictures of the great food and the people who saw them thought at first sight that they were at the Nobel banquet.
On the busiest week before Christmas people chose to go to a dinner event hosted by a low price store. 1300 tickets were booked in less than 4 hours.
Overall sales increase (compared to same period last year)
+ 6,71%
Observation
70%, highest ever
Ad liking
61%, highest ever
The overall impression
63,6 % rated the event 10 of 10
Quality dimension
83 % have a more positive view of Lidls product after the event
Purchase intention
76,8 % are more likely to shop at Lidl after the event
Frequency
67,8% will shop more often at Lidl after the event
Brand likeability
83,1% have a more positive view of the Lidl brand after the event
A traditional ad wouldn't convince the sceptic Swedes about the quality of Lidls lowprice food, so we chose an event where no one could ignore their high quality. An arena where the products would be measured against the highest of standards.
A hi-jack of the Nobel banquet. The dinner of dinners.
1300 people were invited to LeBon through the Lidl Facebook, and got first hand experience of the quality of the food from Lidl, in the nicest of environments. The Nobel banquet dinner, but not for royalties - for the people. They got a once in a life time experience.
People in Sweden are very skeptical to low prize food, Swedes generally think that low prize equals bad quality. And Lidl have had a difficult time establishing in Sweden. Traditional advertising didn't work. So Lidl have to do extraordinary communication in order to convince the Swedes - They have to prove the quality of their food in a way it cannot be misunderstood or missed. The real life proof. Le Bon is an example of this new plattform and strategy. Lidl became profitable, and have been profitable since this thinking been in use.