Week 5: Case Study

For this post, I’ll be looking at how Coles, a supermarket retailer operating in Australia, has been using social media, especially to communicate with their customers.

Social Media

The social media that Coles is most active on is Facebook. Here, the company has two accounts, on for Coles and another for recipes. The main account's page is focused on posting a wide range of content including information about new offerings in store, product recalls, sales, information about charities Coles involved with, as well as contests and giveaways. It also has some recipes, although Coles also has another page dedicated to them. Their main Facebook also links to a part of their website for online customer service, however any issues or queries customers have don’t appear to be addressed on the Facebook page itself.

Google+ is another area of social media Coles is using. This appears to be basically an ‘edited’ version of the company’s Facebook page, showing some of the more important posts and not updating as frequently. On this service, just like with Facebook, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of interaction with and between customers.

Coles also has accounts on Twitter. One is the main Coles profile, which generally serves the same purpose and tweets the (exact) same posts as Facebook. There is also an account for Coles Online, the company’s online store. The tweets from this account are usually to let users know about any technical issues the system may be experiencing which would affect them, however, there are also tweets about sales available through the store or competitions the company is running. However, both accounts also answer a lot of customer queries, in a casual yet professional way, and it does a lot to both help those people and humanise the company.

Another area where Coles is quite active is on YouTube. Here, they have a range of content available, including cooking technique tutorials, videos from and about competitions they have run, reports about the company from the media, and advertisements, both current ones and 'classic' old ones for the nostalgic user. Here, the company is putting then platform to good use, providing their subscribers with a wide range of content and most are sure to find something that interests them.

Another website that Coles is using well is Pinterest. Mainly this is used as another platform to share their recipes, however it worked especially effectively here. Coles is able to sort those recipes into various categories by pinning them to different boards. It also places the focus on pictures of the food, rather than the written recipe, making exploring the board very visually appealing. Coles has also has created some original content for this platform, rewarding those which track them on this social media tool instead of spamming them with posts the have already seen on other sites.  A great example of this which I especially enjoyed is the pictures of the carved fruit.

Coles also has a blog on their website. This contains longer posts than their other social media platforms, allowing for those who are interested to learn more about the subject to do so. The blog includes a wide range of post subjects, although they are mainly about new products. They also include posts about various charities the company is involved with, cooking or food tips and posts about their supplier farmers. The blog has a good mix of posts that have already featured in other places as well as ones exclusive to the blog.

McKinsey Value Levers

Coles is using their social media to help achieve two of their organisation functions, marketing and sales, as well as customer service. Of the value levers which fall under marketing and sales, the one that Coles is implementing the most effectively is ‘use social technologies for marketing communication/interaction’, however, they do really need to work on their interaction in most platforms. The company is almost certainly also trying to leverage ‘generate and foster sale leads’, and ‘derive customer insights’, and they have a great opportunity and the ability to do these effectively.

Coles is also beginning to utilise the ‘provide customer care via social technologies’ lever in customer service. However, Coles still has a lot of work to do in this area on certain platforms, as well as generally fostering more connection and interactions with their customers.

Do you know of any retail companies using social media and other social technologies more effectively than Coles? Let me know in the comments.