Are Grocery Stores Culturally Relevant?
How often do you think of grocery store marketing? Or actually, how often do you even think about grocery stores? Like, not just which grocery store you want/need to go to for the groceries for the week, but as something more, something cool? I would say maybe only stores like Erewhon or Trader Joe’s have much say in culture, possibly Costco and H-Mart as well. Grocery stores are just there, and they are either someplace the internet obsesses all over, are just another spot to get food. Seafood City, it seemed, thought they were falling into the less fun category.
Yes, I know grocery stores are a necessity to buy food, but that doesn’t mean they are more seen as an afterthought than a cultural institution.
So in order to spice up their rep, the Filipino Grocer started hosting late-night dance parties inside the actual stores throughout the US. As crazy as it sounds, it intrigued enough people to become a hit and garner views across socials. Videos were blazing everywhere, showing the crowds, song choices, even human-sized labubus busting it out at these “late-night madness” parties inside the chain stores.
Calculated Madness or Just Madness?
What does the chain stand to gain from having people flood the stores after hours with no intent of buying groceries? The even itself is free so they aren’t looking to make any money off admissions but use the party as a marketing ploy or gateway to expose people to the store or get them back in the store. They have been selling merch based on the late-night theme and they do keep the food courts open to sell food if the specific location has a dining area. The extra hours staying open, creating a madhouse of a dance floor aren’t just to sell more skewers and hats though. It’s to build that connection.
Any grocery store where you danced the night away is certainly going to leave a lasting impression on you. If you have good memories, you are more likely to shop at the store and even go out of your way to return and shop there again. You also get the added content from everyone posting about the events at the store, which blasts the brand to multitudes of new customers who then see the Seafood City brand as something cool. The parties essentially create a content machine.
On top of all that, the grocer has made a decisively smart move in how they make people get tickets for the event. Though the events are free, they still require tickets just for numbers tracking. However, to acquire the tickets, you need to get them through the Seafood City app. Though opinions are mixed on making consumers download more apps, the loyalty and LTV numbers are there to prove that, in most cases, it is worthwhile to increase app downloads.
How much is too much?
The one big caution I would have about this tactic is how often they are hosted. The initial events inevitably will have been the most viral, since the concept and idea were so new and bizarre. The ones after will probably keep drawing interest as more people continue to hear about the events and want to check them out. There will eventually be a threshold of how many the chain can continuously host week after week before the novelty starts to fade, and it becomes a competitor for more proper nightlife venues. The fun and staying power in this will be in having these events be more sparse going forward. It seems as of now, Seafood City seems keen on running the events dry, or at least running a lot more of them. They definitely need to play cautiously and not destroy the fun of the event.
If they can keep up the fun and not overexhaust the light-party fiends, they might be sitting on a gold mine.