Cry, drink wine and clean the house

A bottle of wine. Next to it, a box of tissues with one already pulled up and waiting. Next to that, a bottle of cleaning spray and a sponge.

That was the cover picture of a category in a grocery app. The category was called “Hooray, it’s the weekend!,” and I still think it is the most honest picture a shop has ever published.

A shelf for Saturday

Most shelves are organized by what a thing is. Wine stands with wine, bleach with bleach. It is tidy, and it has nothing to do with how a Friday evening works. Nobody opens a grocery app thinking “I need something from household chemicals.”

So we built a category around the occasion instead. “Hooray, it’s the weekend!” was a selection of what you actually need for one. Some of it for fun. Some of it for cleaning the house.

This is an old idea with decent evidence behind it. In the trade’s own definition a category is a shared need, not a type of product.¹ And in 2019 a group of researchers tested it properly, with two field experiments, one study in virtual reality and one in a lab. When products were grouped by what the shopper was trying to do, people put more items in the basket and spent more. The effect was strongest for shoppers who had come in without a particular goal,² which is everybody who has ever opened a grocery app on a Friday.

What a weekend is

The category needed a cover. The safe choice was obvious, and you can switch to it in the picture above. Something festive. Balloons, popcorn, the weekend as an advert sees it.

The trouble is that nobody’s weekend looks like that, and there is data. Most of it is American, because the Americans keep the most thorough diary of how a whole country spends its day.³

Read from left to right, it is not a party. People sleep an extra hour. They do 40% more housework than on a working day. In one set of more than a hundred thousand breathalyser tests, the average Saturday reading is 0.080%, which happens to be the exact drink-drive limit in the United States.⁴ And somewhere in there they cry, by one count between 6 and 64 times a year depending on who they are.⁵ I cannot prove it happens on Sunday evening. I have had Sunday evenings.

So the honest picture of a weekend has three objects in it. Something to drink. Something to cry into. Something to clean the house with, because you promised yourself on Monday.

1.8 seconds

A cover does not get long. A streaming service once measured how its viewers choose what to watch, and found that the artwork takes 82% of their attention and each title gets about 1.8 seconds before the thumb moves on.⁶ I had no reason to think a grocery shopper is more patient with a category than a viewer is with a film. The same people found that pictures with expressive faces win, and pictures with more than three people in them lose. We had no faces at all. We had a tissue with a personality.

You can try it on yourself. Go back to the phone at the top and press the glance button.

In 1.8 seconds, balloons say “this is a category.” Wine next to a tissue box says “these people know me”. The first is information. The second is the only kind of advertising I have ever sent to a friend voluntarily.

Hooray

The products were picked the way the best shelves usually are: our category manager and I sat with a list of what people actually bought on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, and argued. Mostly about the wine.

Then we made the category behave like a weekend. It appeared at the top of the catalog on Friday afternoon and stepped back on Monday morning, so it was there exactly when the mood was. The cover went out in the Friday push notification, and the notification said nothing clever. The picture did the talking.

It traveled, because people recognized their own weekend in it and passed it on to the people they spend those weekends with. By the second weekend it was one of the most opened categories in the app on Saturdays, and the support team started getting messages that were not complaints, which in grocery delivery is its own small miracle.

What I keep from it is how little we made up. There was no exaggeration in that picture and no punchline. Three ordinary products from our own catalog, standing next to each other in the order in which they tend to be needed.

Cry, drink wine and clean the house. Hooray, it’s the weekend.