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Inside-out or outside-in? A new confident path forward for sustainability on Tescoplc.com

Together with the teams at Tesco, we launched a new sustainability section on Tescoplc.com. It was the culmination of months of work. 

George Butler 27 July 2022

The display of different Tescoplc website's section on a mobile device

We started with Discovery

 

We started with our Discovery phase where we sought to understand the problem in more detail. 

 

As we did our user research and stakeholder consultation a picture emerged that understated Tesco’s leadership position in sustainability. 

 

Rightly the team at Tesco wanted to make real progress against their deep commitments versus fixating on one minor detail that hid the mountain of work to do. 

 

However, this communications vacuum that had formed was being filled by small incremental announcements that, without the big picture, unwittingly presented a tactical approach that did not grasp the big issues. We called this the inside-out narrative. 

 

Coming out of discovery we agreed the business challenge was to amplify Tesco’s leadership position, but to do so within the context of the task ahead that we all need to do. 

 

A clear strategy

 

Our strategy was to flip the narrative. 

 

We had to get specialist and generalist audiences to realise Tesco’s leadership position by understanding its progress within the context of the range of challenges we all face, from food waste to climate change. We called the strategy ‘outside-in’.

 

Structure and content

 

Once we agreed on this direction we set to work on content and architecture. We answered questions like how should we structure the section based on our outside-in strategy? How do we structure an outside-in page? We used content templates to structure and agree on the content.

 

Experience design 

 

We then did a deep dive into our audiences and developed an experience that took generalists along the narrative. We also understood through analytics, surveys and heat maps exactly what specialist audiences were looking for within the section. 

 

Development, content upload, QA and launch

 

From this point we developed new modules to deliver the experience and managed content entry and quality assurance all in time for a drop-dead launch two days before their annual report was published.

 

A month after the launch we have seen a step change in key metrics agreed during Discovery, based on before and after survey results. 

 

“Bringing to life Tesco’s sustainability story was such an exciting challenge, we’re a business full of people that genuinely care about making a positive difference. Attempting to do that justice was a big task.

 

The team at RY were invaluable throughout, offering guidance, insight, and support whenever it was needed. Together we’ve delivered a genuine step-change which showcases the great work happening behind the scenes to serve our customers, communities and planet a little better every day.”

A person browsing Tesco website on an Ipad