Checkers Little Shop is back yet again...at a critically important time of the year

Literally the last thing their competitors would have wanted was for Checkers to fire up their highly-successful Little Shop collectables at the start of the festive season trade.

Which is exactly what Checkers have done, but this time they've added a nice little twist to the dagger that has been plunged deep into the hearts of the other grocery brands by making the 44 brand new collectables, available exclusively to Xtra Saving members till early November (which is when they'll hit the market with their Black Friday deals).

With every R200 worth of groceries purchased, tired parents will be handed one mini shop product that will be redistributed to their annoying brood in a flash. This collection also offers some new entertaining innovations that will keep kids happy for about a minute.

Rubbing the Jacobs mini will give them that real coffee smell, the Tango fruit a citrus aroma, and the air fryer will display the cooking temperature. Stickers to decorate the Scania truck and Checkers Hyper Sixty60 are included, and the minis also come with QR codes that customers can scan to shop on Sixty60 or learn more about Little Shop products. 

Now...before you go and wonder if these kinds of kid-focused promotional strategies work; the answer, according to research conducted in Australia on Pester Power, is a resounding yes.

They work not only by increasing the likelihood that parents will shop more regularly at Checkers over the period of the campaign, they also have a positive influence on average basket size per shop, the particular brands that are chosen during each shop...and perhaps most importantly...they temporarily reduce the amount of available market share normally enjoyed by their competitors over the time of the promotion.

If timed right, one supermarket brand can influence the rate of sell-through of a particular branded product at a competing supermarket with these kinds of promotional tactics; affecting their financial performance at critical times of the trading cycle. When the margins for error are as thin as they are in this category, this can be disastrous for other players.

The last time we saw Little Shop was July 2022, so Checkers have been keeping this nugget locked-and-loaded for some time waiting for the right moment to unleash its fury.

Not that we are in any way suggesting that this is the intention with the Checkers Little Shop initiative, but the possibility of this happening as a possible consequence would have obviously formed a critical part of futures wheel-type planning exercises throughout the year.

Checkers however continues to redefine what winning supermarket marketing looks like