Tesco Unpacked - Your Year With Tesco (animated) and ‘unpacked’
Design Team Lead / Creative Direction - Sam Fuller
UI / Animation Lead - Vera Marin
UX Design - Andy Young
Animation - Anthony Eamens
Product Manager - Ben Sprackman
This project utilises the vast amount of customer data gained through the Clubcard Loyalty scheme, to further surface the value of shopping with Tesco to their most loyal customers, 18m and counting. Through an animated ‘round up of your year with Tesco’ with some irreverent and amusing personalised content and interactions that also crucially communicate the wider messages of the company ‘strategic pillars’: Customer, Community and Planet.
Using the customer data to further highlight how their seemingly small contributions add up to some pretty amazing stats on community charity donations, healthier and more sustainable shopping and eating choices, all the way up to how their shopping habits and feedback are helping to reduce plastic and national food waste, among other environmental good news stories.
Background
The previous year, my team had explored the animated EOY Unpacked concept as part of our broader work on Loyalty personalisation - but it hadn't been prioritised.
When the idea resurfaced at the start of 2021, it was being scoped as an external agency project.
With Surfacing Clubcard Value set as a key OKR for the year, I saw an opportunity: bring the project in-house, deliver it at lower cost, and, crucially, ensure it was led by the team closest to the customer data and the customers themselves. An outside agency would always be one step removed from both.
Key Challenges
External agency vs in house execution: The Proposition and Marketing teams wanted to run the project with an external agency, incurring additional expense, and crucially, removing the direct customer focus and direct connection that would naturally come from running it with the UX Design team.
Project not on the Product roadmap: Due to the project being driven by Proposition and Marketing teams, it was not on the Product team roadmap for the quarters/year.
New Brand Direction: Had to scramble to include the new brand direction post initial concepts, mercifully the new direction centred on animation and sound.
Multiple data sources needed to complete the picture: The concept required combining data from customer purchase history, loyalty voucher and coupon redemption, food waste and charitable donations from in-store and national store comparison to name but a few.
API and Engineering team’s resource diverted suddenly: As ever in large organisations, uncontrollable/unknown factors can suddenly necessitate big changes in resource allocation.
The Approach
Relentless Collaboration.
Firstly I needed to convince the Proposition and Marketing teams to bring the project in house for my Loyalty & Support team to run.
The team and I had always worked hard to establish and maintain strong collaborative relationships with all our stakeholders across the business. This really paid off now as they were very open to hearing our proposal. We demonstrated the value, cost saving and most importantly the direct connection we had to the customer, something an outside agency working separately would always be ‘one step removed’ from. It was agreed we would run the project ourselves.
Key Actions:
Driving the strategy: Connected the initiative directly to the team's key OKR for the year. Applied a lean, 80/20 approach to make it viable within existing capacity -working with what was feasible for the quarter rather than waiting for ideal conditions. This enabled Unpacked to be included retrospectively on the Product Q1 roadmap, with buy-in from API, Engineering and the relevant data teams secured for the MVP.
Enabler & Facilitator: Leveraged a strong, collaborative relationship with the Brand team, helping them to roll out out the new brand direction with Unpacked as its showcase.
Empowering teams: Ensured ALL the relevant Data teams were connected and collaborating (some of them for the first time ever) and the API/Engineering teams, to maintain the holistic/strategic view of the project and its needs.
Resilience, Adaptability, Influence and Negotiation: When resource was pulled, found alternative ways to surface some of the data via our Analytics platform and utilised strong relationships with exec level stakeholders to ensure allocation of alternative/additional resource where possible.
Additional Principles for the approach:
Putting the customer first
Responding to unmet needs
Driving the strategy
Defining a quality product
Influence and negotiate
Team builder and developer
Leading team through turmoil
Aligning to a Delivery Focus
Enabling delivery of impactful outcomes
Ensure Tech is front and centre
Empowering the team & making leaders
Video of the Tesco Loyalty showcase 'Tesco Unpacked'
Outcomes / Results / Impact
Customers loved it.
The first rollout reached 1.5 million users on time, despite significant last-minute changes to engineering resource and data availability. A CSAT score of 4.5 out of 5, and 94.7% of recipients saying they'd like to receive it again - figures that made the case for Unpacked's continuation more clearly than any internal proposal could have.
It grew.
Now in its third year, the experience has expanded in scope, reach and ambition with each iteration, a direct result of the strategy being led by the UX and research team rather than handed to an external agency.
It shaped the brand.
Unpacked became a showcase for the new Tesco brand direction, giving the wider business a live, customer-facing demonstration of what the evolved identity could feel like in motion.
And it revealed something unexpected.
The data surfaced a national subculture of devoted Meal Deal fans - people who swap combinations and deals online, and apparently sometimes even commemorate their loyalty with tattoos… It's a detail that says something real about what happens when you give customers a mirror: you find out who they actually are.
The wider impact
was less visible but arguably more significant: UX and Design Research had demonstrated, through a commercially successful project, that the team closest to the customer should lead the strategy.
Unpacked started as an idea that nearly went to an agency. It ended as a recurring product feature with a 94.7% return rate.
