The campaign we’ve been crying out for…

A major new campaign from Coca-Cola celebrates and recognises the community role that local retailers play but more importantly launches a timely new salvo in the battle against abuse and violence in-store.

By Antony Begley

One thing that became abundantly clear over the last four or five years in the wake of the chaotic Covid-19 pandemic is that customers have short memories. It wasn’t all that long ago when local retailers were being treated as community heroes, literally risking their health and lives to keep communities across Scotland the rest of the UK supplied with the daily essentials they needed to feed themselves and their families.

Many of you will remember customers lining up outside stores to clap for the owners and staff, just as they did every Thursday night for NHS workers. Hell, even the Scottish Government got in on the act, officially designating convenience store staff as Key Workers alongside the emergency services and NHS staff.

Scottish Grocers’ Federation (SGF) Chief Executive Pete Cheema was frequently heard referring to retailers as the “fourth emergency service” – and he was justified.

Fast forward a few years, however, and the vast majority of the respect for shopworkers that was earned or reinforced during Covid has been lost. Abuse of store staff has literally never been worse with one crime survey after another highlighting yet another ‘record level’ of recorded abuse. And all towards people just trying to do their job and provide communities with an invaluable service.

While there has been much gnashing of teeth and anguished demands that “something should be done about this,” almost literally nothing has been done about this. Yes, MSP Daniel Johnson’s Protection of Shopworkers Act promised a new dawn, but even Johnson himself admitted on-stage at an SGF event that, much to his distress, the Act hadn’t made all that much of a difference at all.

Real people

So, it’s refreshing to see Coca-Cola step into that void with a really quite powerful campaign to tell the “untold story of corner shops and the real people behind the counter” and to flag up the vital role they play in building communities across Scotland and the rest of GB.

The campaign is, on the surface, a community-engagement piece but at its heart is an equally powerful message: shopworkers are people too. They have families, they have lives, they have hobbies. They’re just like you, Mr Serial Shoplifter. They are actual, living, breathing people.

It’s a timely and brave campaign in many ways and, in some senses, it’s even a little disheartening that it gets left to big suppliers to step in and do what clearly needs done and to do what governments and the police should be doing.

For my money, it’s long been obvious that we’ve never had an effective solution to retail crime and abuse. For as long as we’ve been doing SLR – almost a quarter of a century – we’ve been writing about the ‘scourge of retail crime’. And nothing has changed. We’re trying to sort the same problem with the same solutions that have been proven not to work.

Was it Einstein that said doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of madness?

A new approach has long been needed and, in my opinion, that approach has to be based around communicating directly with shoppers, with real people, with families who use convenience stores. We have to humanise shopworkers again because – let’s be brutal – we’ve been dehumanised over the years.

Shouting abuse at a store worker happens because shopworkers aren’t really considered as actual people. They’re just the front-end faces of ‘a business’. A society where abuse of store staff or stealing from stores isn’t even considered a big deal is a society that has lost its way, that’s losing the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong.

And we won’t solve this problem with policing or legislation or even with smart tech and AI. The problem lies clearly and squarely with society. The only way we will fix it, as Tony Blair might put it, is through ‘education, education, education’.

That’s why the new Coca-Cola campaign is so welcome. It’s part of a celebration of Coca-Cola’s 125th year in GB and while it’s hardly likely to move the dial and have lots of organised criminals and drunken, drug-addled shoplifters seeing the light and mending their ways overnight, it’s a start.

It’s actually more than that. To have a brand as big and influential as Coca-Cola putting its head above the parapet and nudging consumers back in the right direction is the sort of thing that might just encourage others to get on board.

The campaign itself focuses on six ‘Bosses’ and their families, all well-known local retailers across the country who play active roles in their communities and are just decent people trying to make a living. From raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for local charities, acting as an unofficial department of the Citizens Advice Bureau, fixing church roofs, launching Women in Retail groups and running for mayor, to setting up TikTok creator stations in-aisle, the series’ protagonists have proven themselves pillars of the local community.

Sophie’s story

Among them is Sophie Williams of Premier Broadway in Oxgangs in Edinburgh, daughter of veteran retailers Linda and Dennis Williams. Sophie stars in a six-part photography and docu-series that digs into Sophie’s personal multigenerational family story, the local community and the journey the family has been on over the last 40 or so years.

This being a Coca-Cola gig, they’re not messing about. The videos are shot by multi-award-winning director Ross Bolidai and the photos are by National Portrait Gallery photographer Serena Brown. So everything is beautifully shot but feels nice and natural, rather than overworked which helps with the core ‘re-humanising’ messaging. As the official press release for the campaign poignantly puts it: “We’re pulling the curtain back on the people we see every day, but perhaps don’t really see.”

Again, this being a Coca-Cola gig, there’s a decent budget to play with, so all six Bosses get an unspecified ‘five-figure’ sum to donate to a local charity or good cause. Fair play to Coca-Cola. When they do things, they do them well.

The videos are being shared widely, including on Coca-Cola’s own customer-facing website and, just as importantly, Sophie and her fellow Bosses are having out-of-home posters dotted around their local communities. It’s simple but it’s doing something in the real world that has a chance of resonating with real customers and that just might start some conversations and some self-reflection that could ultimately lead to better behaviour.

“It’s such an uplifting campaign in so many ways and I’m so proud to be involved in it with my mum and dad,” says Sophie. “We did the video and photos back in July and it was very intense, so I’ve been itching to see it launch. It only went live yesterday but we’ve already had so much wonderful feedback from customers and other retailers and friends. I even got a message from a young female retailer in Motherwell yesterday who told me she’d seen the video, and it had totally inspired her and she thanked me because she said I’d helped pave the way for other young women in the retail trade. Things like that make it feel worthwhile.”

Sophie also has wider hopes for the campaign, as she explains: “The campaign is ostensibly a community engagement campaign and that’s brilliant. For 41 years, Premier Broadway has been more than a store, it’s been a cornerstone of our family and community. Our passion goes beyond transaction, embodying a belief that the shop does not just belong to us – but to everyone it serves.

‘Not just shopworkers’

“Additionally, however, the campaign also brings out the fact that we are people too, not just shopworkers. The six videos are really quite personal, and I think that they present us all as very human and very relatable. All six of us have interesting stories to tell, we all have lives outside of work, we all have families and private lives and hopes and fears and dreams and worries, just like everyone else. It would be nice to think that this might help some customers view us in a new light and maybe be a little kinder next time they’re in the shop.”

The whole process has also delivered a much more personal benefit for Sophie, a former theatre professional. “As part of the video, we revisited the theatre where I used to perform as a kid. I found it weirdly emotional and healing to get back on that stage and revisit my youth. I struggled for a while with the transition from theatre performer to store worker and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and where I belong. I’m at peace with it all now but doing the video brought those two lives together and just gave me some sort of closure. It was quite emotional for me.

“We’re on cloud nine at the moment and we’ll have the video and photographs forever. Hopefully I can look back on them in 40 years’ time when the store reaches its 80th birthday and see how far we’ve reached by then.”

In the meantime, let’s hope the campaign does indeed deliver a little nudge or two in the right direction for some or our less-well-behaved customers – and let’s also hope that other suppliers pick up the comms baton and get on board on a journey to a better society, where shopworkers are treated with a little more respect.