Pushy about Ooshies: Kids are pumping up Woolies’ sales

What subject matter could be common to a kids’ weekend birthday party and discussion among pointy-headed financial analysts or grandparents at the bridge club?

It is Ooshie effect - the latest Woolworths collectables campaign. These kinda creepy little plastic figures based on pop culture and movie characters and gifted to shoppers after a minimum spend, have been forecast to add up to 4 percentage points of outperformance of Woolworths’ supermarket business over arch rival Coles during July and August.

In absolute dollar terms the Woolworths sales boost over the six weeks could run to $100 million, according to some experts.

Exactly how much this campaign will translate into sales dollars for Woolworths will be revealed next week when it provides an update on July and August sales alongside its annual result.

But it represents a juicy sugar hit for Woolworths sales for the six-week duration.

There is a storied history of our supermarket giants using collectable promotions to pull in shoppers, including a 2020 Ooshie campaign, and the Stikeez suction sticking fruit and vegetables with legs that Coles promoted after its enormous success in 2018 with its Little Shop collectables (which were plastic replicas of supermarket items).

During its Little Shop campaign Coles reported a quarterly sales rise of 5.1 per cent - a huge spike on the 1.8 per cent, 0.9 per cent, 1.3 per cent and 0.3 per cent growth in the previous four quarters.

The latest Ooshies promo appears wildly successful and the industry feedback also suggests there has been a marked change in supermarket sales performance between Woolworths and Coles since the commencement of the Ooshies campaign in mid-July, according to Citi retail analyst Adrian Lemme.

Woolworths has also said it will run out of Ooshies by the end of this week, and the analysts noted a recent surge in Google searches for the collectables.

Not all supermarket collectable campaigns go viral or trigger the equivalent of prepubescent hunger games.

Firstly, the campaign leverages the phenomenal pull of kid pester power. Even in a cost of living crisis parents will succumb to a persistently begging child to shop at a particular supermarket.

The second piece of genius is allowing eligibility to be tied to a minimum spend (in the case of the latest Ooshie campaign it’s $30).

Thus, the shopper basket sizes will be boosted in order to qualify for the plastic figurines.

And then there is the fact that the actual Ooshie is hidden behind wrapping, so the child gets the additional sugar hit of anticipation - and the potential letdown of receiving an Ooshie already in their collection.