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IGA Hometown Holidays returns with a new platform - 11/9/2007

Author: IGA News

National Consumer Sweepstakes Announced

CHICAGO, IL - IGA today announced it will hold the seventh annual IGA Hometown Holidays marketing event in participating stores Nov. 18 through Dec. 1. During the two-week timeframe, IGA supermarkets across the will offer customers valuable savings on brand-name sponsor products, as well as the opportunity to enter a national sweepstakes drawing for 10 prizes of $2007 as a “thank you” for shopping IGA in 2007.

The sweepstakes concept is a new element for the IGA Hometown Holidays event, which for the past six years has been focused around a nationwide recipe contest. During those events IGA retailers across the country offered IGA customers the opportunity to submit their favorite holiday recipes to win a chance to compete in the cook-off finals in Chicago.

According to Debra Bounds, IGA marketing specialist, the decision to modify the Hometown Holidays marketing platform was made with the retailers’ busy schedules and consumers’ needs in mind. “We all know that the holiday retail sales season is the busiest of the year, and consequently, we’ve found that our retailers and their employees simply don’t have the time to publicize and market a national cooking contest,” Bounds says. “We’ve simplified the Hometown Holidays concept by providing a sales incentive in the form of 10 substantial cash rewards that allows our retailers to thank their customers for their loyal patronage.”

Here’s how it works:

  • At the conclusion of the marketing event, IGA retailers pick one winner from all entries they receive
  • The entry is then sent to IGA and combined with the entries from each participating IGA store
  • 10 winners are then chosen from all of the nationwide entries
  • Those 10 winners will each receive $2007

According to Bounds, the IGA Recipe Challenge will return in spring of 2008 as a tie in to IGA’s premiere marketing event, Hometown Family Meals. “Over the past several years the Recipe Challenge has became a highly anticipated event in the cook-off circuit,” Bounds contends. “For that reason we didn’t want to do away with the challenge entirely, however we thought it made more sense to incorporate it into a merchandising period during which retailers would have more time to devote to the development of the program.”

IGA Hometown Holidays is the final marketing event in the 2007 IGA Family, Friends & Food marketing program, which is being sponsored by the following IGA Red Oval manufacturing partners: Anheuser – Busch, Inc., Campbell Soup Company, The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola Hydration Business Unit, ConAgra Foods, Inc., Georgia-Pacific Corporation, The Hershey Company, Kraft Foods, Nabisco, Minute Maid, Nestlé USA, The J.M. Smucker Company, and Unilever.

IGA is the world's largest voluntary supermarket network with aggregate worldwide retail sales of more than $21 billion per year. The Alliance includes more than 4,000 Hometown Proud Supermarkets worldwide, supported by 36 distribution companies and more than 55 major manufacturers, vendors and suppliers encompassing everything from grocery to equipment items. IGA has operations in 44 of the United States and more than 40 countries, commonwealths and territories on all six inhabited continents.