Barely a week after heading back to school, thousands of children in Ontario received an invitation to visit their local grocery store to redeem a voucher for a free box of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and to participate in a new in-store ‘adventure.’

The invitation is the first direct mail piece to be sent out by Toronto-based National Grocers Retail, the independent grocery arm of Loblaw Companies, since it introduced its Our Kids Club program in its 47 franchised Your Independent Grocer stores in Ontario early this summer.

Hoping to create a more positive family shopping experience in its stores, ngr says Our Kids Club has already proven to be such a success that it plans to expand the program to its 70 Ontario-based Valu-Mart stores some time next year.

Advertised exclusively through advertising flyers and in-store displays, Our Kids Club has handed out approximately 10,000 official membership kits to children who have enrolled in the program. Each colorfully-designed kit, created in-house by ngr, includes a welcome letter and a `get-a-friend’ postcard, along with a variety of fun items, like pin-on buttons, temporary tattoos, and posters.

Other features of Our Kids Club include a weekly in-store ‘adventure,’ which could entail anything from a free toy or product giveaway to a tour of the butcher’s meat room; a monthly scavenger hunt in which prizes are given away; a bi-monthly newsletter; and a quarterly activity book.

Joe Magnacca, ngr’s vice-president, merchandising and marketing, says individual stores have traditionally run their own marketing events – coloring contests and mascot visits, for instance – but that ngr felt a need to build greater consistency in the messages its affiliated stores send out to customers.

‘We wanted to standardize things very quickly because we do carry a banner name and we didn’t want to lose that flavor by allowing everybody to do their own thing,’ he says.

Magnacca indicates that store owners still have a lot of flexibility in being able to choose from a wide range of pre-formatted promotions that can be spun off directly from the central database marketing program, which was developed by Marketing Database Solutions of Toronto. For example, he explains, if a store owner wants to run a birthday promotion, he or she simply has to access ngr’s Intranet site and download the appropriate customer data and collateral support material.

The greatest benefit of Our Kids Club, Magnacca says, is that ngr now has an opportunity to develop an ongoing relationship with family shoppers, the most profitable segment of its customer base.

He explains that through club sign-ups, ngr can ‘pull back’ information on home addresses, as well as initiating surveys to gather directly more ‘unusual’ information, such as kids’ favorite tv shows, sports heroes, hobbies and interests.

‘We can then mail against the information in the database,’ he says.

As for the Pop Tart direct mail offer, Magnacca says there may be more co-branded Our Kids Club efforts in the future, but only if they make sense for ngr. ‘Our family customers are obviously the target for many of our vendors,’ he says. ‘So, at times when it’s appropriate, we can pull together a joint venture to provide exceptional value to the kids and their parents.’

However, stressing ngr’s desire to maintain full control of the program, Magnacca says, ‘We’re going to allow that to happen when it’s appropriate for our business. And, it’ll be by our rules.’