How social listening informed one of Walmart’s biggest merch drops to date

The phrase “Get that bag” is not usually a reference to the plastic vessel that holds a rotisserie chicken. But sometimes it is.

In the last year, Walmart’s marketing team discovered through social listening that its rotisserie chicken had amassed a fandom, with 15,000 organic social mentions, Kim Tunick, group director and head of brand experiences and partnerships at Walmart, told us. It included posts of people holding the bag as a purse—which led the brand’s social team to go to the merchandising side of the house with a proposition.

“Our teams came together and kind of had a silly moment that was really just a break in an average day,” Tunick told us. “[We] said, ‘People talk about how the rotisserie chicken that they love comes in this bag, and that they joke that it’s their purse, and they bring it around, and they just eat it straight from the bag. What if we made one?’”

The resulting product, a fabric purse shaped and printed to look like it contains a chicken, was priced at $5.97, the same as an actual rotisserie chicken at the retailer, to help make it “sticky and memorable,” Tunick said; it sold out in 90 minutes online on September 1. According to Tunick, people were lined up at the brand’s campus store before 7am on the day of the drop to get their hands on the limited-edition bag.

The rotisserie-themed merch marked a new strategy for the retailer that so far, seems to have paid off.

“We certainly seem to take ourselves quite seriously when it comes to our traditional marketing,” Tunick said. “But hopefully you can see that we don’t believe we always need to be so serious.”

In the bag

When designing the purse, Tunick said her team sent the brand’s production partners the exact specs from the packaging for both the traditional and lemon-pepper chickens with the directions to mimic the looks exactly. They added a strap to the bag for extra functionality.

Tunick cautioned that the bag is “not meant to actually carry a chicken or anything like that,” despite its appearance.

In addition to the bags, Walmart also created charms of the rotisserie-chicken bags, hot sauce bottles, and lemon-pepper seasoning. Creating product replicas and merch based on social demand were two firsts for Walmart, Tunick said, but perhaps mark the start of a new strategy for the brand.

“We’ve looked many a time at this,” she said. “We’ve felt we need something that’s really rooted [in Walmart] and there’s a fandom for it…And this really was the first thing we saw where we were like, ‘This is it.’”

Walmart initially released 5,000 purses to create a feeling of scarcity, and it teased the release on owned social channels and via product seeding to influencers, Tunick said. After the first round sold out, Walmart released a follow-up drop where she said demand was even higher. The purses have started showing up on secondhand sites like eBay, where they are sometimes listed at more than seven times the original price.

To celebrate the drop IRL, Walmart outfitted its Spark Shop at its Bentonville, Arkansas, campus with orange lighting and glowing purse hangers to re-create the feel of a rotisserie warmer, Tunick said. It was yet another way to generate buzz and helped encourage visiting customers to create UGC, she said.

Overall, Tunick said the purse marked a new way for Walmart to show it’s listening to its customers while exploring a new, more whimsical approach to marketing. The hope was not to create something that “goes on your desk and and maybe gets thrown away at some point,” she said, but rather to make something that was “kitschy [and] memorable, yet functional” that customers might actually want to use.

In the wake of the purse’s success, Tunick said her team is continuing to cook up some new product ideas based on consumer insights. “Social listening,” she said, “of course, is going to be what leads us there.”