Panda Retail: Working at pace to deliver for Saudi Arabia’s leading supermarket

Insight

Panda Retail is the largest food retailer in the Middle East, with 400 stores and servicing over 400 million visitors annually. In early 2023, Panda Retail needed to communicate a different aspect of its image by promoting its strength with major suppliers in Saudi Arabia. This culminated in a major event – the Panda Annual Collaboration Event (PACE) – the first of its kind for the company.

W7Worldwide produced this event in a very rapid timescale whilst ensuring PACE delivered against a number of critical objectives: 

• Establish Panda Retail as a highly collaborative company, working in partnership with all stakeholders
• Showcase Panda Retail’s leadership in working alongside major supply chain partners
• Demonstrate Panda Retail’s support for consumers affected by inflation and the cost-of-living crisis
• Position Panda Retail as first retail grocery chain of choice for its suppliers
• Create high share of voice within the Saudi Arabian market

With less than two weeks’ notice, we brainstormed ideas to maximise the success of the event. Key to success was positioning PACE as an industry-leading event, which over 300 C-Suite guests should view as a ‘must attend’ invitation.

Methodology

We developed a twin strategic approach to PACE. Firstly, we established a tailor-made media relations programme to maximise coverage. Separately, we focused on communicating a major Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Panda Retail and Saudi Airlines Catering after the PACE event concluded to keep Panda Retail firmly in the headlines and maximise the communications efforts.

We produced a pre-event Press Release highlighting the importance of the event and the topics covered by Panda Retail’s leadership. We integrated these messages with an internal announcement to Panda Retail’s employees to ensure a seamless awareness of the event internally and externally.

Anticipating substantial media interview requests, we prepared an intensive media training programme for Panda Retail’s leadership to ensure each spokesperson undertook broadcast and print interviews confidently and professionally.

Media relations efforts during PACE ensured that journalists were fully engaged through specific media briefings in Arabic, and allowed the media to ask detailed questions on critical themes such as tackling inflation.

Overall, our efforts secured 9 live broadcast interviews with Panda Retail’s leadership during PACE, including with major outlets such as Bloomberg and Al Jazeera. Total coverage amounted to 147 stories in media outlets, generating 428,018,000 impressions.

We secured social media coverage from 5 industry influencers to further promote PACE, with a combined following of 1,940,000 people.

The campaign boldly adopted a highly integrated approach of media relations, event management, media training and outstanding content to ensure that PACE changed the game for Panda Retail and will end up becoming a major part of the client’s communications calendar in future.

Impact

51 Clippings

40,054,793 Impressions

Clippings