If you’re from the United States or an Asian/European country, you probably have heard of Tesco, a multinational supermarket corporation from Britain. In 1999, Tesco decided to break into the South Korean market with the help of Korea’s largest conglomerate, the Samsung Group. Together, they made ‘Home Plus’ as they call it, into the second-largest supermarket chain in terms of the number of stores. However, it was still lagging behind the native Korean chain, e-Mart. Instead of hoping to catch up to e-Mart’s number of brick-and-mortar stores, Tesco approached their conflict in a creative way by ‘bringing the store to the consumer’.

Tesco Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea

Tesco’s video states ‘South Korea is a unique market’, but how? Korea is a highly technologically-advanced country and consumers are flooded with advertisements, both offline and online, every day. Additionally, most people work and commute for much longer times than in North America, which gives marketers a very small time span to engage with consumers. This is how Tesco worked around it:

Tesco aced adapting to a unique culture with their “Change Waiting Time into Shopping Time” concept. They recognized the dissatisfaction of the Korean people and made grocery shopping effortless, fast, and efficient through the use of QR codes and the digital space. Now, the normally frustrating wait for the subway can be used productively to run a mandatory errand (everyone needs groceries!).

On top of this, Tesco released a smartphone app for an even more inclusive shopping experience. The app is simplistically designed and user-friendly (‘홈플러스’ on the iPhone) yet is powerful enough to allow users to browse through an entire ‘digital supermarket’. Now, consumers can shop not just at subway stations but wherever they are.

This ingenious campaign has successfully made the originally British corporation into the second largest retailer in Korea.