Greggs Didn't Need a Million Quid to Win the Internet — And Neither Do You

Here's an uncomfortable truth for the marketing industry: the best campaigns of the last few years weren't great because of the money behind them. They were great because of the nerve behind them.

And nerve, thankfully, is free.

The Greggs Playbook: Say Yes to the Joke

When a feisty Twitter/X account compared a Greggs sausage roll to a shot of a certain other pastry, the internet waited to see if the bakery chain would lawyer up. Instead, Greggs responded with a wink, and the story ran for days. Later, their 'Greggs shower gel' and advent calendar stunts turned a budget bakery into a national conversation piece.

The lesson isn't 'get famous'. It's this: big brands win by being human and quick. A small business can be more human and quicker than any corporate social team, because you're not waiting three days for legal sign-off.

Your £100 version: reply to every comment, every review, every daft local mention — with personality. Cost: £0. Time: an hour a week.

Aldi: The Art of the Cheeky Nod

Aldi has built an entire social identity on playful jabs at premium competitors — recreating famous ads with supermarket own-brand charm, leaning into the 'Aldi vs Lidl' banter, responding to customer memes within hours. The production values? Often deliberately rubbish. That's the point.

The strategy underneath: don't compete on polish, compete on personality. Your DIY equivalent is a phone-shot video of your product, warts and all, with a caption that sounds like an actual person wrote it. A £25 ring light and a £50 phone tripod setup gets you technically better equipped than half of what Aldi posts.

Innocent: Consistency Beats Genius

Innocent's tone of voice — the daft labels, the big knit hats on bottles — isn't a one-off campaign. It's a commitment, applied relentlessly across every touchpoint for two decades. That consistency is what makes it feel like a brand rather than a business.

Most small businesses have no tone of voice at all, or three different ones across their website, Instagram and invoices. Pick a personality — warm, dry, cheeky, plain-speaking — and apply it everywhere. Cost: a couple of hours and a one-page document. £0.

What Actually Transfers to a Small Budget

Strip the big campaigns down and you find three transferable ingredients:

1. A strong opinion. Aldi knows it's the budget option and owns it. What's yours? 'We're not the cheapest, we're the one who actually turns up on time' is a position. Own it.

2. Speed. The big brands win on social because they respond fast. You can respond faster. A local news hook — a viral moment, a bit of weather, a Strictly result — is yours to jump on while agencies are still scheduling a meeting about it.

3. Repetition. Greggs didn't do one funny tweet; they've done thousands. The boring secret of every 'viral' brand is that they showed up daily for years first.

The £100 Campaign, Made Real

Here's what a genuinely small-budget version of all this looks like:

• £0: A tone of voice document — one page, three rules, pinned above your desk.
• £30: A month of boosted posts, only on content that's already working.
• £20: A simple prop or product giveaway for a local competition or raffle prize (great for community goodwill).
• £50: A small print run of something genuinely funny or useful — a witty bookmark, a sticker, a 'how to choose a [your trade]' postcard — that people actually want to keep.

Total: £100. Total resemblance to a corporate campaign: closer than you'd think.

The Bit the Big Spenders Can't Buy

Here's my actual opinion, since this is an opinion piece: the one advantage small businesses have — the one no budget can replicate — is that you are a real person. When Greggs tweets like a person, it's a strategy. When you tweet like a person, it's just true.

The big brands spend millions trying to sound small and local. You already are. Stop trying to sound like Tesco, and start sounding like the version of yourself that your best customer already chats to across the counter.

That's the whole strategy. It just happens to cost 99p instead of a million.