Reality Check: How Aldi owns the entry points that matter to win

“If you’re the kind of marketer that thinks in terms of brand archetypes or marketing horoscopes (as I like to call them), brand purpose and fluffy flim flam, that’s not going to help. Marketing has to be rooted in hard economics and business sense”.

It’s been over two years since Les Binet urged marketers to start thinking more like economists. Of course, this is easier said than done. At Everyday People, we’ve spent years creating award winning research that shows how the marketing industry often exhibits a tenuous grasp of what really matters out there in the real world, and in the boardroom.

Despite the critical economic challenges that brands face, the cultural preoccupations of marketers (i.e. individualism, creative expression and purpose) continue to crowd out the many realities of mainstream culture (i.e. making ends meet and doing the best for your family). Many marketers continue to rely on frameworks that peddle myths, wishful thinking and vanity metrics rather than doing the harder and often less fashionable work of engaging with everyday culture.

Brands focusing on ‘social’ media are making us more antisocial

As we enter 2025, financial headwinds are only getting stronger. The full effects of a ‘painful’ autumn budget are now being crystalised, with many businesses needing to raise prices to cover tax and wage increases.

In the real world, there is no clear demarcation between ‘economics’ and ‘culture’, because culture costs money. So how do brands succeed in an era where mainstream culture is dominated by everyone feeling the pinch? Our Signal framework captures holistic cultural insight by bringing together all the key beliefs that marketers have about building successful brands. We focus on four key areas:

1. Fitness – often neglected attributes like quality and reliability
2. Social intelligence – fame and social norms
3. Category entry points – the importance of building rich and diverse memory structures
4. Values entry points – aligning brands with people’s values and worldviews

Applying this framework empowers marketers to focus on the things that really matter. Let’s look at how this works for a category that almost everyone uses – supermarkets.

At the time Les Binet called for marketers to think like economists, Aldi became the fourth biggest supermarket in the UK. For many, the reasons may seem obvious (fame and saving money). But unfortunately, the obvious isn’t fashionable in marketing. Our Signal framework has measured all the key drivers of consideration in the category (economic and cultural).

When Les Binet talks about ‘flim flam’, he could be referring to many of the value entry points measured in our model. No matter how unpalatable it is to hear, things like ‘behaving in a socially responsible way’ (while crucial for social justice), are not key drivers in the UK supermarket category.

Aldi has taken its position in the top tier of supermarkets by owning the things that really matter to people in everyday culture.

It’s not competing with Tesco on associations with the main grocery shop, but people know where to go when they need to save money, and they know that other people know this too. Aldi is appealing to two fundamentals of decision making in the category, which are often neglected in an industry obsessed with individualism and post-materialist values – economic necessity and the power of social intelligence.

By focusing on signalling and real world cultural understanding, our framework warns against the danger of hot housing the intermediate and somewhat esoteric metrics that have come to obsess marketers e.g. attention and emotion.

We have just come out of the creative arms race of Christmas advertising, where supermarkets and Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot featured prominently. The campaign’s success is not just a creative success, it’s a product of Aldi’s holistic understanding of everyday economics and real world culture.